A week has passed since Paul McCartney’s 80th birthday, and on Saturday he will play to a huge crowd at the Glastonbury festival. The great surge of reminiscence and celebration these two events have triggered – not least online, where millions of pictures, playlists and personal tributes have been shared – has felt like a rerouting of some of the feelings the public were encouraged to project on to the Queen’s platinum jubilee.
But instead of flags, pageantry and a final connection to the second world war, McCartney’s big week has been all about rather different touchstones: the popular culture that he and the Beatles helped create in the 1960s, the fact that their music has endured, and the sense of optimism and empathy that has run through almost all his work, both with and without his three former colleagues. In times as uncertain and acrimonious as ours, these things inevitably mean a lot.
