Fans first as Paul McCartney gets back to Adelaide to start Australian tour
Posters and banners hung in the streets of the South Australian capital this week bear an unusually personalised message: “Welcome back to Adelaide, Paul!”
Posters and banners hung in the streets of the South Australian capital this week bear an unusually personalised message: “Welcome back to Adelaide, Paul!”
Everywhere the man in question – surname McCartney – goes, history follows, for few individuals have made such an impact on humanity in the course of their working lives.
McCartney’s Adelaide story began in 1964, when an estimated 300,000 people – about half of the city’s population – turned out to welcome The Beatles to Australia on the British rock band’s one and only tour.
Fifty-nine years later, the crowd that gathered inside the Adelaide Entertainment Centre was much more intimate than the mob that had lined the city’s main thoroughfares.
On Tuesday afternoon, 30 fans – winners of a competition run by the promoter, Frontier Touring – had the chance to ask a question of the man himself, ahead of the first concert of a national tour to begin in Adelaide on Wednesday.
Asked by a 12-year-old boy how he puts up with being famous, McCartney replied: “It’s what we asked for, and what we wanted. You can’t complain when you get it. I love it.”
Dressed in a navy hoodie and black jeans and sporting grey stubble on his face, the artist was at ease as he fielded queries from the lucky few in the crowd, many of whom wore treasured Beatles merchandise.
“I love music,” said McCartney, 81, in response to how he continues writing and recording new ideas. “I feel very lucky to be in this profession. It’s like a hobby for me. It’s a question of luck – and skill.”
With his band, he then worked through a six-song, 25-minute set for just a couple of dozen people in the first few rows of an otherwise empty arena.
Having already soundchecked, the band leader was calling songs on the fly. “We’re making this up as we go along,” he said with a shrug, flitting between bass and piano.
They started with Can’t Buy Me Love and ended with Birthday – the latter dedicated to a bloke in the front row accompanied by his daughter, who gave her old man a gift that’ll be tough to top.
The sold-out Adelaide concert for about 8000 fans will be McCartney and co’s first public performance since headlining the Glastonbury Festival in Britain last year.
The SA concert is the smallest of the seven-date tour: afterwards, the band moves on to stadiums, starting in Melbourne on Saturday and ending on the Gold Coast on November 4.
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