Paul McCartney performs at AAMI Park in Melbourne. Picture: Jake Nowakowski
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Sir Paul McCartney live is a music hall legend, no matter the size of the venue
KARL QUINN
December 6 2017
Paul McCartney took his One on One tour to Australia for his first live shows there since 1993.
At the end of his two-and-a-half hour 32-song set, Sir Paul McCartney literally ran off the stage. McCartney, may I remind you, is 75. He has not eaten meat for 42 years. If there's a better advert for vegetarianism I can't remember seeing it.
He came back, too, for a one-song encore – a solo acoustic Yesterday – that became eight. Oh all right, if you insist. The big crowd at Melbourne's AAMI stadium did, and it ended, brilliantly, fittingly, with the medley that caps the Abbey Road album: Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, The End.
Roughly three hours after his first Melbourne show in 25 years had begun it was over. It's doubtful many in the crowd felt they'd been anything but thoroughly entertained.
Sir Paul was joined on stage in Melbourne by a pipe band for Mull of Kintyre.
McCartney knows how to give the people what they want, and over the years – with The Beatles, with Wings, solo, and with a variety of collaborators (Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Rihanna and Kanye) – he's given them plenty of it. In one of his name-dropping, anecdote-rich stories, he referenced George Formby, the ukulele-playing English music-hall performer who became a film star in the 1930s, and there's more than a touch of that lineage in McCartney's stage persona. He's all pumping fists, leg kicks, peace signs and goofy shuffles. Not for nothing did Smash Hits dub him Fab Macca, Thumbs Aloft back in the day.
He kicked things off with A Hard Day's Night, and immediately old and young (as in teens) leapt to their feet and sang along at top voice. The early Beatles catalogue was revisited for Can't Buy Me Love, Love Me Do, I Wanna Be Your Man (prompt for a story about sharing a cab with Mick and Keef, and spontaneously offering the song to The Rolling Stones, who scored their first number one with it).
Fab Macca, thumbs (and fingers) aloft
There was middle-period Beatles (I've Just Seen a Face, You Won't See Me, Sergeant Peppers, a dazzling For the Benefit of Mr Kite). And there was late: a blistering Helter Skelter, Birthday; a solo Blackbird, written, he told us, for the civil rights protesters in the American south; and the obligatory Hey Jude singalong to close out the main set.
The Wings songs went down well too: Let Me Roll With It, with a tacked-on Foxy Lady guitar outro, on which Sir Paul has a fair old stab at Hendrix, was great, but the pyrotechnics of Live and Let Die, turning the entire stage into a scene from a James Bond movie, were the spectacular highlight.
"We can tell from up here which songs you're enjoying," McCartney said at one point. "When we do a Beatles song it lights up from your phones like a galaxy of stars. When we do a new song it's like a black hole. But we don't care, we're going to do them anyway."
He was right, too. The more recent solo material wasn't as strong as some of that immense back catalogue – really, how could it be? – but Queenie Eye (from 2014's New album) rocked along, and his solo take on Four, Five Seconds was pretty decent (though what we wouldn't have given for a cameo from Rihanna). Valentine, a tribute to wife number three Nancy, was honest and earnest but it paled in comparison to the magnificent Maybe I'm Amazed, written for wife number one, Linda, and played almost immediately after.
That song would be a strain for a singer at the very height of their powers; for a man in his 70s, it's near impossible. Here, and on a few other tracks (You Won't See Me especially), there was a noticeable quaver to McCartney's voice. The upper register is no longer the sweet spot for him it once was.
Elsewhere, though, age seemed barely to have wearied him. In the middle register and in songs bolstered by the harmonies of his superb band – Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray on guitars (Ray occasionally switching to bass), Abe Laboriel Jr on drums and Paul Wickens on keyboards and various bits of wizardry – or by the singalong crowd, he sailed along. On the rockier songs, he showed he could still belt them out with ease.
Arguably, McCartney is simply not the best singer of some of these songs any more. But no one has more right to sing them, so roll on, I say.
If there's a more pointed criticism to be made of this show it's that everything feels thoroughly rehearsed, even the banter. If it's spontaneity you're after, you'll need to look elsewhere. But if it's beautifully crafted songs, played by an excellent band led by a charismatic rock legend, and the odd dash of spectacle – hello Scotch College Pipe Band, wheeled out for Mull of Kintyre to a rapturous response – then you'll struggle to find a better night in a music hall, of any size, than this.
Paul McCartney will perform a one-off show in Mt Smart Stadium, Auckland on Saturday December 16.
- The Age
