Paul McCartney review – a dizzying, bittersweet, life-encompassing journey through time
Towards the end of Come on to Me – a song about sexual chemistry from the near-end of the Paul McCartney solo catalogue – the 82-year-young musician whips off his blue jacket, displaying its elegant patterned lining. The reaction is wildly appreciative, if not quite the one that once met this former teenybopper idol at the screaming height of Beatlemania. “That is the biggest wardrobe change of the evening,” he quips. (Swapping his Höfner bass for an electric guitar several times doesn’t count.)
Welcome, then, to the eras tour – no, not that one, another one; one where costume changes are in inverse proportion to the number of lifetimes and cultural disruptions it spans. The McCartney timeline goes deep; inextricable from world events. The mood tonight is one of witnessing history, with clots of multigenerational fans luxuriating in the songs that moved tectonic plates and carved glaciers, shaping everything that came after.
The Quarrymen – the Beatles-to-be – recorded In Spite of All the Danger in 1958 when Elvis Presley was in the army, the peace symbol was adopted by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and BOAC began ferrying air travellers across the Atlantic. The ingredients of the Beatles’ catalogue were all there: confidence in their material, vulnerable romance, not to mention George Harrison’s contribution.
Tonight, on the 2024 leg of McCartney’s Got Back world tour (it began in 2022, with a memorable pit stop at the Glastonbury festival), it feels like a time capsule opened in an unimaginably different future, where the pace of change, fast then, now approaches greased quantum velocity.
Source: Kitty Empire/theguardian.com
