Paul McCartney wows fans with intimate Q&A in Perth ahead of first Australian show

 Paul McCartney begins the Australian leg of his One on One tour by sitting down with fans for a Q&A in Perth. Picture: The AustralianSource:News Corp Australia




www.abc.net.au
Paul McCartney wows fans with intimate Q&A in Perth ahead of first Australian show
By David Weber
Nov 30 2017

At the age of 75 and in the midst of the longest, most successful career in music history, Sir Paul McCartney still thinks he is a lucky man.

He did not even think he'd still be in demand in the 1970s, let alone when he was in his seventies.

"It is amazing, it's something we never expected. We thought we might last 10 years if we were lucky," he said.

"It's something that's a surprise really because we didn't realize it was going to last this long. I mean Sgt Peppers is 50 years old this year.

"We had no idea it was going to last more than 10 years."

Sir Paul was speaking in Perth, the location for the start of his first Australian tour in decades.

The Regal Theatre was the venue for a rare question and answer session for a small group of fans.

Sir Paul was asked by Meg from the Perth suburb of Waroona what kept his energy and passion alive.

He started with a joke, before explaining that his real addictions were songwriting and performing.

"Sex and drugs! No, you know what? It's just coz I love it, I've always loved it since I was about 14 when I wrote my first song, and it's a kind of magical thing because when you write a song you've got nothing and you suddenly produce like a rabbit from a hat and it feels really good," he said.

"And you get a bit addicted to that feeling. And then you perform it with an audience and you get addicted to that too."

Adelaide in '64 and how can we change the world?

PHOTO: Paul McCartney fans Matt and his son Harrison Haines in full Sgt. Peppers gear at the Perth Q&A. (ABC News: David Weber)

Sir Paul was asked by Izzy from Greenwood what it was like to arrive in Adelaide in 1964, when The Beatles were met by what some claim was the biggest crowd in the world.

"It was amazing for us, you know, 'coz the welcome was phenomenal. I mean we'd had welcomes in Europe, and all over the place. But this was like mega, you know, it was like we were royalty arriving.

"We'd seen the streets filled like when we went to Liverpool, that was pretty full. But this was like, the fullest."

Harrison Haines, aged nine, was named after The Beatles' guitarist and was dressed in full Sgt Peppers' uniform — like his father Matt.

He wanted Sir Paul to give him nothing less than advice on how to change the world.

"Go to school and just be good to people. Learn a lot about the world, and where there're issues that you think need changing, just be very strong and go and change them.

"I don't know what those will be in your case but you seem like the kind of boy who's going to do it. Just learn what's good in the world and go in search of it."

Other questions had Sir Paul reminiscing about the wide range of people he finds in his audiences.

"I've seen some lovely things at shows, remember one in Brazil, a dad, a tall guy with a beard and he's got this beautiful young girl with him and she's looking up at him and I'm doing 'Let It Be' and he's looking down and it was a real sort of beautiful family moment.

"And it was a choker because I've got to sing this thing and not cry!"

Changes in touring: less screaming girls

How had touring changed then, since those frantic, frenetic days of the 1960s, when Beatlemania was at its peak?

"When we were touring The Beatles, it was all new. No-one had seen these kinds of crazy scenes with rock'n'roll, really. There'd been a few but our thing was like, really crazy.

"It got a bit much because in the end we couldn't hear what we were doing. And that's one of the big differences now. We can go louder than the audience now so that gives us a bit of an edge.

"I'm older, the audience is older —you've got dads and sons, dads and daughters, you got all people of different ages in the family and that's very different. It really was pretty much just screaming girls, only in France when we went there, it was screaming boys.

"And we were freaked out — what?? And someone said the girls won't come, the mother won't let them come with us without a chaperone so it was all the boys and they were going crazy and the gendarmes didn't know what to make of it so they were beating them up."

One hopeful fan asked the former Beatle and Wings man to go and have a vegan meal with her ("My wife would kill me"), another inquired about his dog Martha ("she was really lovely").

Working with Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and Kanye West

As a solo artist, Paul McCartney has collaborated with a range of performers over the years, including Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Elvis Costello, and more recently, Foo Fighters, Rihanna and Kanye West.

"What happens is, people get in touch with me. I don't actually go after them, you know, oh actually, I did with Stevie because I had the song 'Ebony And Ivory' and I thought he's got to be the person we do it with," he said.

"It's a great invitation — Kanye rings up, wants to work with you. What am I going to do? 'No, tell him no!'

"It's very fresh and it's kind of exciting because it's something I haven't done before, particularly working with Kayne.

"Michael was lovely, he just rang me up and he just said, 'Do you want to make some hits?' Said, 'Yeah'. And he was great to work with, massive talent.

"And Stevie, he's a monster, a musical monster and he never stops."

Audience-pleasing set list

Regarding set lists, Sir Paul suggested he would be playing what he would want to hear if he saw himself live.

"It's basically to please the audience — and I'm not ashamed to say that because they pay good money to come to the show."

The event closed with muscular renditions of 'Drive My Car', 'Junior's Farm' and 'I've Got A Feeling' before the media were asked to leave and the rocker was left alone with his adoring fans.

Media player: "Space" to play, "M" to mute, "left" and "right" to seek.

'Magical Mystery Tour': Inside Beatles' Psychedelic Album Odyssey

www.rollingstone.com
'Magical Mystery Tour': Inside Beatles' Psychedelic Album Odyssey
The movie was a flop, but the album was full of historic singles and inspired experiments
By Douglas Wolk
Nov 27, 2017


Photo of Beatles – John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney – pose for group shot on bus during filming of 'Magical Mystery Tour.' Getty

The year leading up to the release of the Magical Mystery Tour album in November 1967 was turbulent but fantastically fertile for the Beatles – they were working on its songs more or less simultaneously with the ones that ended up on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. With touring no longer a question, they had the luxury of fine-tuning their songs at length in the studio; the same band that had recorded its first album in a single day was now tinkering with individual recordings for weeks on end. 

If Sgt. Pepper was a blueprint for the Beatles' new utopianism – a culture of vivid sensory experience, for which they could be the entertainers and court jesters – the Magical Mystery Tour project was an attempt to literally take that idea into the world. Paul McCartney's concept was that the Beatles would drive around the British countryside with their friends, film the result and shape that into a movie over which they would have total creative control. But like a lot of Sixties attempts to turn utopian theory into practice, the movie fell on its nose: The Beatles simply weren’t filmmakers. 

"You gotta do everything with a point or an aim, but we tried this one without anything – with no point and no aim," McCartney admitted the day after it premiered. The Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, on the other hand, did what the movie was supposed to do – despite being a grab bag of the group's 1967 singles and songs recorded specifically for the film, it holds together surprisingly well as an addendum to Pepper, giving us an image of the psychedelic Beatles refining their enhanced perceptions into individual pop songs so potent that they changed the whole landscape of music.

The songs that would end up on Magical Mystery Tour began taking shape in late 1966, well before McCartney was struck by his cinematic vision. From November 24th, 1966, to mid-January 1967, the Beatles worked extensively on a pair of new songs, intended for what would become Sgt. Pepper: John Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever" and McCartney’s "Penny Lane," both reminiscences of the Liverpool of their childhood. By the end of January, though, EMI was demanding a new Beatles single – there hadn't been one since "Yellow Submarine" the previous August, an impossibly long gap in those days. George Martin wasn't happy about pulling "Penny Lane" and “"Strawberry Fields Forever" off the album-in-progress, but there wasn't much else in the can. Released on February 17th, the single was a worldwide hit, and a statement of purpose for the rest of the Beatles' recordings that year: reflective, druggy, a little nostalgic, and more inventively orchestrated and arranged than anything else around.

That spring, with Sgt. Pepper all but complete, McCartney visited California, hanging out with members of the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas. Along the way, he got the idea for an hour-long movie that would document a free-form bus trip, a sort of British equivalent of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' adventures in their bus, Further. McCartney drew a diagram of how the Magical Mystery Tour film would be structured, and wrote a theme song for it, which the Beatles recorded over a series of sessions in late April and early May.

The next song they tackled was Lennon's "Baby, You're a Rich Man," a scathing portrait of a social arriviste that may or may not have been intended as a jab at manager Brian Epstein. Relations between the Beatles and Epstein had become slightly strained. When he turned up in the studio to announce that he’d booked them to debut a new song on the first-ever live global-satellite-transmitted TV special, Our World, they were nonplussed – he hadn't asked them first if they were interested. Lennon agreed to come up with a song for the show, then promptly forgot about it; when he was reminded that the show was a couple of weeks away, as engineer Geoff Emerick recalled later, Lennon groaned, "Oh, God, is it that close? Well, then, I suppose I'd better write something."

Our World aired on June 25th, 1967, three weeks and change after Sgt. Pepper had been released. The song Lennon had grudgingly slapped together to fulfill his obligation was another triumph: "All You Need Is Love," the signature anthem of the Summer of Love. The Beatles performed it live on the air (with the help of a prerecorded backing track), accompanied by an enormous crowd of their cohorts, including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, on whose "We Love You" Lennon and McCartney had sung a month earlier. When "All You Need Is Love" was rush-released as a single, the flip side was "Baby, You're a Rich Man."

That's about all they managed to do together over the month and a half following the Our World broadcast. Their relative lack of productivity wasn’t a sign of the internal unrest that would soon surface; they were still very much a unit, and did everything by consensus. "If three of us wanted to make a film, for instance, and the fourth didn't think it was a good idea, we'd forget about it," McCartney said at the time. In late July, Lennon, George Harrison and McCartney traveled to Greece with the idea of buying an island and building a commune and a recording studio there.

The reason for the artistic slowdown was simple: It was a beautiful summer – there were parties to go to and drugs to take, and Ringo Starr's wife, Maureen, was very pregnant. Among those parties was a big bash at Epstein's house; he'd asked the band to arrive early so they could discuss something important. But, as Harrison later recalled, "Everybody was just wacko. We were in our psychedelic motorcars with our permed hair, and we were permanently stoned ... so we never had the meeting." 

The bandmates did do a little work, convening in late August to run through McCartney's old-timey number “"Your Mother Should Know." They also had an audience with the Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who would become a hugely important figure in their lives over the next year. 

On August 27th, Brian Epstein was found dead of an accidental prescription-drug overdose. The Beatles had been drifting away from him for a while – his management contract with them was close to expiring, and it wasn't clear whether they were going to renew it – but he'd directed the band's business for close to six years, and had helped to transform the Beatles from a scruffy beat combo to an all-conquering cultural force.

"We loved him, and he was one of us," Lennon said at the time. Epstein really had been a crucial part of their organization – the person whose business acumen gave them the freedom to concentrate on their music. The Beatles' creative chemistry thrived on their differences as artists, but it was their business problems that would ultimately tear them apart a few years later. As Harrison later put it, "We didn't know anything about our personal business and finances; he had taken care of everything, and it was chaos after that."

A few days after Epstein’s death, the Beatles had reconvened to continue with Magical Mystery Tour, and not to look for a new manager. Between September 5th and 8th, they laid down three particularly tripped-out songs: Harrison's blurry "Blue Jay Way" (inspired by his early-August trip to Los Angeles); the instrumental jam "Flying," which was co-credited to all four Beatles; and most famously Lennon's "I Am the Walrus," a free-associative vision produced under the influence of Lucy in the sky with diamonds. "The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend, the second line on another acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko," Lennon later said.

The Beatles set out on their celebrated tour of the West Country on September 11th, 1967. Getty

All three tracks were intended for the movie, which started principal photography the next week, without a script or anything more than a few stoned concepts. From September 11th to 15th, the psychedelic bus drove around the West Country, occasionally stopping to shoot whatever seemed like a good idea at the time. The Beatles ducked into EMI’s studios on the evening of the 16th to rerecord "Your Mother Should Know," which they'd begun work on days before Epstein's death; the next week, they shot more material for Magical Mystery Tour, including the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band at a strip club, performing a song called "Death Cab for Cutie" (the song would later give rise to the rock band of the same name). As first-time directors, the Beatles figured it would probably take a week or so to edit their 10 hours of footage down to something usable.

It eventually took 11 weeks. The problem was partly that everyone had their own ideas about what should and shouldn't be in the movie, and partly that they'd neglected to get some important material on film and had to go back to shoot it. Still, the band made it down to Abbey Road for a handful of sessions between September 25th and October 25th, completing the spacey trio of songs it had started in early September, and recording McCartney's "The Fool on the Hill" and "Hello Goodbye" (the latter released on November 24th backed with "I Am the Walrus").

The Magical Mystery Tour movie was finally broadcast on BBC television on December 26th, 1967, and became the first Beatles project to be an outright flop. (It didn't help that the BBC aired it in black-and-white rather than color.) The reviews were savage. "They thought we were stepping out of our roles, you know," Lennon groused a few months later. "They like to keep us in the cardboard suits they designed for us. Whatever image they have for themselves, they're disappointed if we don't fulfill that. And we never do, so there's always a lot of disappointment."

As an LP, Magical Mystery Tour was an unqualified triumph, sitting atop the American charts for eight weeks and eventually going sextuple-platinum. It extended and refined the Beatles' version of psychedelia: a vision of the world that was essentially colorful, reflective and loving, but encompassed bad trips as well as good ones. 

WIN tickets to see Paul McCartney and a chance to meet him one-on-one

www.newstalkzb.co.nz
WIN tickets to see Paul McCartney and a chance to meet him one-on-one
Section Competitions
Publish Date Tuesday, 28 November 2017




Paul McCartney… and the One on One Tour… Live at Mt Smart Stadium… December 16.

You could be meeting the man himself… Paul McCartney… One on One… at his sound check!

Be listening to the Mike Hosking Breakfast to win.  Every day next week, Mike will take a caller to air and ask a trivia question… it could be related to Sir Paul or something in the news.

If you answer correctly, you’ll win that day’s double tickets and go into the draw at the end of the week to have your GA tickets upgraded to the Hot Sound tickets including the sound-check and a Meet & Greet with Sir Paul.  And if our grand prize ‘upgrade’ winner is from out of Auckland, we’ll throw in flights and a nights’ accommodation

N.B. The daily prize consists of tickets only.

The Beatles… Wings… McCartney solo.  Meet the Legend at the One on One Tour.

Paul McCartney returns to New Zealand… proudly supported by Newstalk ZB.






www.thebreeze.co.nz
Paul McCartney Live in New Zealand

The Breeze is proud to support the return of two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, 21-time Grammy Award winner and recipient of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Sir Paul McCartney will bring his acclaimed long-running ‘One On One Tour’ to New Zealand this December. Returning to NZ for the first time in 24 years, this is a show you won’t want to miss!

One show only:
Saturday 16th December 2017,
Mount Smart Stadium,
Auckland

Tickets go on sale 1pm Tuesday 4th July through ticketmaster.co.nz

Don’t miss out!

Inside Paul McCartney’s pizza party

pagesix.com
Inside Paul McCartney’s pizza party
By Page Six Team 
November 27, 2017

Paul McCartney 
Getty Images

There was quite the group of friends at Lucali on Friday evening.

We’re told that Paul McCartney dined at the celebrated Brooklyn pizzeria with a large table of pals including Steve Buscemi and McCartney’s wife, Nancy Shevell.

Red-sauce sources say that the group drank expensive bottles of wine with a table full of pies.

McCartney complimented owner Mark Iacono on his playlist — but then, what does McCartney know about music?






ny.eater.com
Korean Gastropub With Bulgogi Pizza Roll Opens in East Village
Plus, another London hotspot comes to NYC — and more intel
by Stefanie Tuder and Serena Dai  
Nov 27, 2017

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Celebs really love Lucali
Just days after soccer star David Beckham and his son visited Brooklyn pizzeria Lucali, music legend Paul McCartney hosted a pizza party there. In attendance were other celebs like actor Steve Buscemi, drinking lots of wine and downing pies.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Perth fans get a chance to chat to Beatles legend Paul McCartney

thewest.com.au
Perth fans get a chance to chat to Beatles legend Paul McCartney
Simon Collins, Music Editor
Thursday, 23 November 2017


With the stroke of a pen, rock legend Paul McCartney made Sue Thompson’s day in Perth in 1993.Picture: Mogens Johansen/The West Australian

Beatles legend Paul McCartney will answer questions from fans at an intimate Q&A session in Perth on Thursday, November 30.
While the venue is yet to be revealed, fans are invited to record a video of themselves asking the music icon the question they have always wanted to ask.
They then have to upload the video to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram with @FrontierTouring and @PaulMcCartney plus #AskPaulAUNZ in the caption.
The post needs to be set to “public”.
McCartney will perform nearly three hours’ worth of his greatest moments from the past 50 years of music — described as “dozens of songs that have formed the soundtracks of our lives” — at nib Stadium on December 2.
The competition closes on Monday, November 27, at 2pm Perth time.
Winners and their guests must be in Perth during the day of the Q&A.
Frontier Touring will notify winners of the location and timing of the special event.


Paul McCartney.Picture: Mark J. Terrill/AP

Paul McCartney Cover Story on ‘The Big Issue’

Paul McCartney – A Letter To My Younger Self

The ex-Beatle talks candidly about going on dates as a kid, his mother’s death, and strange dreams
ISSUE 987




beatlesblogger.com
Paul McCartney Cover Story on ‘The Big Issue’
by beatlesblogger
Posted on November 24, 2017

The  Big Issue is a fortnightly, independent magazine that is sold on the streets of Australian capital citiesby homeless, marginalised and disadvantaged people. It is very good reading and contains some high-quality journalism. The idea is you give them $7 bucks, they give you a great magazine, and they get to keep $3.50. Everybody wins.

This month, on the eve of his Australian tour, their cover story features Paul McCartney: 

Edition 550 Paul McCartney

Issue 550 of The Big Issue contains a very personal ‘Letter to My Younger Self’ where Paul reflects on his teenage years, the music, the girls and an amazing dream he shared with John Lennon.

The magazine also invites three Beatle tragics – Yon from the band Tripod, Davey Lane from You Am I, and former Big Issue editor, Alan Attwood – to write about thePaul McCartney song that most inspired and impacted them.

So, if you are out and about and spy one of the sellers on the streets, why not grab yourself a copy.

Beatles legend Paul McCartney ready to rock Perth

thewest.com.au
Beatles legend Paul McCartney ready to rock Perth
Simon Collins, Music Editor
Thursday, 23 November 2017

The last time he was in Perth, Sir Paul McCartney serenaded local dolphins with some Frank Sinatra.
The Beatles legend, late wife Linda and their children went swimming in the Mandurah Estuary in 1993, when his first Australian solo tour kicked off at Subiaco Oval.
Chatting this week from New York, where he’s making an album with top producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Beck), McCartney recalls taking a one-man sailboat out on the water and soon being joined by a pod of dolphins.
“That was a big thrill,” the 75-year-old Liverpudlian says. “I thought ‘You know, I heard they were intelligent creatures so I’ve got to communicate’.
“So what do I do? I sing Strangers in the Night,” McCartney laughs before breaking into the Ol’ Blue Eyes chestnut. “For some unknown reason I decided that was the song dolphins would like.”
The animal lover and famed vegetarian has no doubts about which songs his human fans would like to hear when he starts only his fourth Australian visit at nib Stadium on December 2.
“If you come to see me, you’re going to want to see me do some Beatles songs,” McCartney says.
The One on One tour will be his third to WA, following 1993 and Wings’ tour of 1975 when Linda took him horseriding. Perth missed out on the Fab Four’s fabled Australasian invasion of 1964.
Kicking off in April last year, a mere six months after his previous Out There tour wrapped in late 2015, One on One features a set list loaded with Beatles favourites.
Most notably, McCartney and his long-serving touring band play A Hard Day’s Night, a song he hadn’t performed since 1965, mainly because John Lennon sang lead vocals on the original.
“I used to shy away from John’s or George’s or Ringo’s songs,” he says. “But, more recently, I thought ‘It’s a great song’. We co-wrote it and I have great memories of writing the song, so I think it gives me the right to sing it.”
The same goes for Sgt. Pepper’s track Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! and early duet Love Me Do. “They’re great songs to do, so I do ’em.”
McCartney says that performing Beatles classics often conjures memories of writing and recording with his old mates. “My mind wanders off and it’s either in the studios with the Beatles or it’s wondering what I’m going to eat later.”


Paul McCartney.Picture: MJ KIM/MPL Communications

He’s half-joking. But Macca is serious about giving bang for your buck at his gigs — on this tour he’s averaging 39 songs per show.
“People pay good money to come to these concerts,” he says. “I step back from myself and imagine I’m going to my concert — what would I like to hear him do? What would I hate if he left it out?”
Some songs pick themselves, such as Hey Jude. But at over seven minutes long, he could play three or four other songs in the time it takes to belt out the 1968 ballad.
“That’s true,” McCartney chuckles. “Well, you can always go to the toilet in the middle of it. That’s what it was originally designed for, to give DJs a break.”
In addition to playing Beatles, Wings and solo hits, the evergreen pop maestro has reached all the way back to 1958 to revive In Spite of All the Danger, a song by Fab forerunners the Quarrymen.
“I thought it would be good to try the very first song that we ever recorded and bring the show through to the most recent we recorded,” says McCartney, referring to the handful of tunes from 2013 album New.
“I still remember all those years ago recording it (In Spite of All the Danger) in a little studio in Liverpool, it’s a great memory and it’s interesting for people ... you get to see the development of the music when you play things like that.”
The greatest partnership in pop music began 60 years ago when, thanks to a mutual friend, McCartney met Lennon at the St Peter’s Church Hall fete.
“John was a great guy, you know,” McCartney says. “You feel very lucky that we got together because the two of us were very good for each other. You know, each of us had the bit that the other one didn’t have, so when you came to write a song we got quite good at it, quite quickly.
“I definitely feel very lucky to have bumped into him — and George and Ringo. Fate pulls these four guys together from Liverpool and they go on to rule the world.”
McCartney’s next album should be unveiled mid-next year. As always, love is a central theme, while he has also penned a not-so-veiled dig at Donald Trump and climate change deniers.
The purest of pop songwriters says there’s still something magical about “goofing around” on a guitar or at a piano to create a song out of thin air. “You feel very proud of yourself that you’ve done it,” he says.
While creating music has barely changed for the English icon, touring is a far less taxing proposition than the hard days and nights of screaming fans and Beatlemania.
“I think people think of the road as it used to be, which is Greyhound buses and terrible hotels and no sleep and partying all night,” McCartney says. “It’s much more relaxed now.
“I’ll do a gig and then I’ll have the next day off to rest up and rest the voice. You get a bit of a chance to see where it is you’re playing ... have a bike ride or a swim at the beach.”
Maybe reconnect with Mandurah’s Sinatra-lovin’ dolphins?
“They won’t remember me,” Macca laughs, “but they’ll remember Strangers in the Night.”
Paul McCartney plays nib Stadium on December 2. Tickets from Ticketmaster.

Paul McCartney was named in the FIFA-Gate trial

www.dobleamarilla.com.ar
¡INSÓLITO!
Paul McCartney fue nombrado en el juicio del FIFA-Gate
Doble Amarilla
LUNES 20 DE NOVIEMBRE DE 2017



Inverosímil, pero el FIFA Gate sigue dando detalles y "perlitas" que quedaran en la historia. Ahora, en medio del testimonio del empleado de "Full Play", Santiago Peña, apareció el nombre de Paul McCartney. 

El motivo es que Juan Ángel Napout, además del fútbol, parece ser muy apasionado de la música. Así como Alejandro Burzaco ya había mencionado que le había pedido entradas para Elton Jhon.

Ahora, Peña, reveló que "Full Play" le pagó $10175, 88 pesos a Napout en entradas a un concierto de Sir Paul.

La fiscalía quiso saber que significaba el pago de "Entradas PM" y ese monto. Peña reveló, para sorpresa de los presentes que "Entradas es como se dice tickets en español y PM es Paul McCartney". Al parecer, a Napout le fascinan los cuatro de Liverpool. 







www.reuters.com
Witness in U.S. FIFA trial describes off-books payments to soccer officials
Mica Rosenberg, Brendan Pierson
November 20 2017

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A government witness in the U.S. corruption trial related to soccer’s world-governing body FIFA testified on Monday about millions of dollars paid to former soccer officials in exchange for broadcasting and sponsorship rights for international tournaments, all logged in a secret spreadsheet.

The witness, Santiago Pena, said he was a financial manager at the Argentina-headquartered sports marketing firm Full Play from 2009 to 2015 and kept an Excel file which he presented in court. It detailed payments made to what he said were eight soccer officials from the South American soccer governing body CONMEBOL

Each of the officials was given a code name in the spreadsheet of different car brands, Pena testified in Brooklyn federal court.

“Honda” was Juan Angel Napout, former president of Paraguay’s soccer federation, and “Fiat” was Manuel Burga, former president of Peru’s soccer federation, Pena said. The two men are among the defendants in the trial, along with Jose Maria Marin, former president of Brazil’s soccer federation. All three have pleaded not guilty.

Pena said the payments were kept off the books of the company and were paid out over time, to “get influence and get loyalty from the presidents.”


FILE PHOTO: Former head of Paraguayan Football Association and former president of the South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL) Juan Angel Napout, arrives for opening arguments of the FIFA bribery trial at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse in New York, U.S., November 13, 2017. REUTERS/Darren Ornitz

The payments included cash, wire transfers and, in the case of Napout, Paul McCartney tickets and a rental house in Uruguay worth tens of thousands of dollars, Pena said.

They also included a commitment of $750,000 to former president of the Venezuelan soccer federation Rafael Esquivel, code-named “Benz,” for “Q2022.” Pena said that stood for the 2022 World Cup tournament in Qatar, but that he did not know the purpose of those payments. Esquivel has pleaded guilty to U.S. corruption charges.

He said he was instructed about the amounts and details of the payments by his bosses - the owners of Full Play, Argentine nationals Hugo Jinkis and his son Mariano. The two are among the 42 people and entities charged by the United States in the probe.

In the afternoon, under cross-examination by Napout’s lawyer, Silvia Pinera, Pena said he had no direct knowledge of any payments to Napout and never spoke to him directly about bribe payments.

Pinera’s cross-examination is expected to continue on Tuesday, followed by cross-examination by Burga’s and Marin’s lawyers.

Reporting by Mica Rosenberg and Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman