How Paul McCartney delivered one of the greatest ever gigs at Glastonbury

Paul McCartney’s three-hour performance just kept giving: we stood before the life’s work of a man who soundtracked the late 20th and early 21st-century experience.

Paul McCartney performs on the Pyramid Stage stage at the Glastonbury Festival. Picture; Getty Images.

Nobody could claim that Paul McCartney’s mammoth concert at Glastonbury was perfect. The warm-up music was a weirdly subdued electronic medley of his own songs. There were cheesy graphics of his iconic violin bass guitar floating in the ether like a holy relic. The sight of an 80-year-old man croaking out a not very good piece of coy erotica called Fuh You may have caused psychological disturbance in the young. And when he told a tale of “four lads from Liverpool who formed a band and did OK for themselves”, the glibness of which McCartney has always been guilty was overwhelming.

But if you want perfection, go to see Coldplay, Ed Sheeran or any number of slick but vapid acts who have wiped out the possibility of chance and accident. Perfection is boring. McCartney’s concert was filled with the ups and downs of life itself, and that is why it was one of the greatest concerts of all time.

Truly memorable concerts bring with them something more than just music. I remember going to Iggy Pop at the Albert Hall and from the moment he came on some strange delirium gripped the entire audience and sent it into a frenzy. Seeing David Bowie perform Heroes in its entirety at the Royal Festival Hall was one of the purest dedications to an artistic idea I have witnessed. And McCartney at Glastonbury 2022 was a joyous coming together.

Paul McCartney headlines the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm, Pilton. Picture: Getty Images.

We really were in the presence of greatness. Everybody knew the songs. Everybody was happy to hear them. And after a three-year wait for Glastonbury to happen we were, by merely singing along to them, partaking in something of real value and significance. For the first hour or so it seemed like it could go horribly wrong. “We’re going to play some old songs, some new songs, and some inbetweeners,” he told us, and there were indeed far too many of the new and the in between; some were OK by other people’s standards but this is the man who wrote a chunk of the greatest songs in musical history.

A couple of lesser-known Wings numbers early in the set made the audience wonder: was this going to be McCartney’s equivalent of a jazz odyssey? He wasn’t connecting with the crowd. A long story about Jimi Hendrix’s guitar going out of tune when he played a rendition of Sgt Pepper and Eric Clapton refusing to tune it up for him didn’t land. Then something clicked.

The change came when he did the Wings song Let ‘Em In. Yes, it is an example of McCartney at his most cheery and uncool but it has a sweet sentiment, a charming melody and it felt good singing along to it alongside 100,000 or so other people before the Pyramid Stage. The next great moment was Blackbird; such a moving contribution to the civil rights era, and to witness McCartney playing its fingerpicked acoustic guitar arrangement solo proved that sometimes, the simplest musical moments can be the most powerful. From there it just seemed to get better and better.

You can point out a few obvious reasons why McCartney’s concert was so special. The interplay with his band, especially the guitarists, was fantastic. McCartney was in fine shape (apparently he stands on his head for ten minutes every day) and voice, he played brilliantly, and he seemed remarkably relaxed before such a big crowd – but then he has done this kind of thing before.

Dave Grohl and Bruce Springsteen don’t fly across the world to do a couple of songs with just anyone, so when the former added oomph to I Saw Her Standing There, the latter contributed his throaty roar to I Wanna Be Your Man and they both came on at the end to swap guitar licks on, appropriately, The End, it was incredibly exciting. But there was something more than that. We were standing before the life’s work of a man who has soundtracked the late 20th and early 21st-century experience.

There were so many hairs on end, tear inducing moments. A tribute to George Harrison by way of Something, which McCartney opened with a tiny ukulele, given to him by Harrison, before the band came in with an arrangement as epic as the song itself. The Abbey Road medley, never played live before. I’ve Got A Feeling performed as a virtual duet with John Lennon, using 1969 rooftop concert footage from the Get Back movie, revisited an important cultural moment with the aid of modern technology. And need we even mention Hey Jude and Let It Be?

This was a three-hour concert that kept on giving. It grew in importance, surprised everyone, had its lulls and ended in such an epic fashion I had to spend the next hour wandering about Glastonbury just to get over it. Throughout it all, Paul McCartney appeared to take the whole thing in his stride. To use a Macca-ism: not bad for a lad from Liverpool.

The Times