Live review: Paul McCartney’s Australian tour debut a stirring affair
It’s almost unfair how deeply satisfying McCartney’s concerts are. Packed with hits by the Beatles and beyond, attempting to pick faults is like searching for the corner of a sphere. | REVIEW
Something strange happens to your brain if you attend a Paul McCartney concert and close your eyes when the band is playing. You can trick yourself that The Beatles never ended and the music never stopped.
It was only a few songs into the first concert of his Australian tour on Wednesday night, however, that it became clear that McCartney was uninterested in luxuriating purely in past glories.
After introducing a song that his “old band had written a long time ago”, he heard a cheer – and he liked the sound of it.
“Let’s hear it for ‘a long time ago!’,” he said, before the band kicked into She’s a Woman – a 1964 Beatles single he hadn’t performed live since 2004.
No wonder that line drew a response: nostalgia has been a bankable commodity in the live music business for decades now.
Nostalgia is no doubt why a good portion of the capacity crowd of about 8000 people bought a ticket for his opening show at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre.
We’re still talking, writing and reading about – and listening to – his old band all these years later because we can’t get enough of what those four chefs cooked up together in their collective kitchen.
Replaying the music as it was recorded is one thing, but what’s truly absurd is how well these songs stand up and how much they shine in the live arena, so far removed from the cloistered, sometimes tense environment in which they were written.
Even stranger is the realisation that beyond 1966, the musicians were never troubled by attempting to play these songs live, particularly the multi-part compositions captured on the final few albums, awash in vocal harmonies and spiked with thorny left turns.
But the magic trick of a great concert is to give off the impression of effortlessness, even while taxing tasks are being performed.
This is what McCartney and his fellow musicians managed on Wednesday night, in their first gig in nearly 16 months, having previously played to a sea of people at Glastonbury Festival last June.
More recently, weeks of well-drilled rehearsal and finessing had led to the point where they could walk on stage and blast into a note-perfect rendition of Can’t Buy Me Love, followed by a pair of Wings tunes in Junior’s Farm and Letting Go.
At 81, and most surely closer to the end of his working life than the beginning, McCartney isn’t hiding anything. He sports silver stubble and he’s sweating from about five songs in, though he rarely pauses to wipe his brow. Too much music to share, too little time.
As a host he’s impeccable, leaning heavily on favourite anecdotes and dad jokes accumulated across his remarkable life in the public eye, but he uses them because they work, and they reliably entertain.
Late in the set, a take on the Beatles classic Get Back bustled with the energy of men in their late 20s who knew they were still onto a good thing, even as it was falling apart.
If you opened your eyes at this point, some 29 songs into a stunning 39-song setlist, you would have seen on the big screens those four young men as they were in 1969, in what would be one of their final recording sessions together.
Thanks to the footage dusted off and remastered by director Peter Jackson in recent years, for the 2021 docuseries The Beatles: Get Back, the band members were seen fooling around and having a laugh in a series of quick cuts from the many hours of material captured by the cameras.
The other song in which Jackson’s digital fingerprints were apparent was I’ve Got a Feeling, which became a ‘virtual duet’ with John Lennon, McCartney’s departed friend and co-writer.
Using footage and live audio from the famous rooftop gig in January 1969 that marked their last performance together, that big reveal was one of many powerful moments.
Plainly, it was an absolute monster of a setlist, just like on McCartney’s last Australian visit in late 2017, when he raised the bar for what stadium rock ‘n’ roll gigs can (and should) sound, look and feel like.
Just like last time, he didn’t play everything you’d want to hear – how on earth could he possibly? – but across the course of nearly three hours he gave his stupendous discography a serious workout.
His band, with whom the frontman has played for 20 years, is composed of four sidemen in guitarist Rusty Anderson, drummer Abe Laboriel Jr, keyboardist Wix Wickens and guitarist/bassist Brian Ray.
With more than 500 shows under their collective belt, the quintet is joined by a three-piece horn section on this tour. The combined effect is a faultlessly polished performance from these players, who know when to step forward and when to cool their heels.
Each musician on stage is smart enough to know never to outshine the master in the middle, but realistically, how could they? How could anyone?
With a songbook as deep as his, and a melodic sensibility unrivalled in popular music, McCartney leads his concerts with the sure-footed confidence of the bearded bloke seen in the Get Back docuseries footage.
Back then, though, he was more likely to navigate with modesty, having grown up with the three other Liverpool men as they transitioned from anonymous jobbing musos to world famous stars.
Lennon and George Harrison died; Ringo Starr continues touring, albeit at a smaller scale than the singer, songwriter and bassist, who appears mightily content to continue flying the flag for his old band’s catalogue, as well as the decades of work that have followed.
Surprises abound in the setlist, and it is beyond the scope of this review to list them here. Suffice it to say the encore was spectacular, and the final bracket of songs built to an extraordinary, unbeatable crescendo.
It’s almost unfair how deeply satisfying McCartney’s concerts are. Attempting to pick faults is like searching for the corner of a sphere.
More than at any other artist’s show, the top note heard is one of fellowship, love and fun. Even when you find yourself in times of trouble, spend a few hours in earshot of this man and his band, and everything feels all right.
Having resumed touring indoors in Adelaide after a significant break from the live circuit, McCartney and co will now move on to stadiums – those tricky venues that contain more seats, but inevitably require trade-offs, compromises and an acceptance of risk, including from the weather overhead.
If anyone’s up for a challenge, though, it is he. As a boy, he learned to love music by watching adults gathered around a piano, as his old man banged out chords to songs that got people in the mood for a melody.
When he leads a crowd through one of the all-time great singalongs each night in Hey Jude, he must feel a connection to that boy who watched and listened.
All those years ago he learned to play, learned to write, learned to sing, learned to lead a band and learned to entertain a crowd. Long may he.
Paul McCartney’s Got Back tour continues in Melbourne (Saturday), followed by Newcastle (Tuesday), Sydney (October 27 + 28), Brisbane (November 1) and Gold Coast (Nov 4).
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