Paul McCartney got back to Manchester for his first show in the city in over a decade on Saturday, regaling more than 23,000 fans with a career-spanning set comprising songs from his Beatles, Wings and solo catalogues.
At the first of two sold-out shows – part of his celebrated Got Back tour and his first UK gig since 2018 – the veteran artist “duetted” with the isolated vocals of his late bandmate, John Lennon, and paid tribute to his wife, Nancy, who was in the audience along with his daughter, Stella.
“We’ve been travelling around the world; we’ve been in South America and now we’re up north again! And it’s good to be back,” the octogenarian told his audience. He chose to open with a rollicking version of The Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night”, the title track from their third album, which celebrated its 60th birthday earlier this year.
The 82-year-old showed no sign of fatigue as he drew closer to the end of his Got Back tour, having launched it on 28 April 2022 in Spokane, Washington. Sixteen stops later, he was headlining the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival, where he was joined by surprise guests Bruce Springsteen and Dave Grohl.
Since then, he has played in Australia and Europe, and embarked on two Latin American legs, including a show in Uruguay where he debuted the live performance of “Now and Then”. Billed as the final Beatles song, it was released in November 2023 with the help of AI technology, which separated Lennon’s vocals and piano playing from a recording made at his home in New York around 1977.
Outside the Co-Op Arena, up and running at full steam after its somewhat chaotic opening in May this year, fans were in high spirits despite the rain and December chill, as they spoke with reverence and joy about one of the greatest songwriters of all time.
Married couple Stefan and Steffi, from east Germany, held hands on their way to the arena as they told The Independent of how they first met at The Beatles museum in Halle 23 years ago. Saturday marked the 20th time they had seen McCartney together.
“His music is the soundtrack of our lives,” Steffi said, while Stefan recalled: “We loved seeing him play Liverpool. He’s home, everyone there loves him… You can feel it.”
Sisters Eleanor and Gillian had flown over from Drogheda, Co Louth, as a tribute to their late father, Tony Rogers. A huge Beatles fan and local hero, he had run a taxi firm in the town for 30 years until he died while undergoing surgery in Istanbul, Turkey, aged 62. Tragically, he never got to see his hero play, but his daughters came to Manchester in his honour and carried an Irish flag bearing his name and photo.
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“He was loved by everyone – his funeral took over the town,” Eleanor, who was named after Tony’s favourite Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby”, said. “He was a pillar of the community.”
McCartney also paid tribute to his loved ones during the show, including his former bandmates as he played the first song The Beatles wrote together, “In Spite Of All the Danger”, while three extra microphones were arranged on the stage. Right after that came a 23,000-strong singalong of “Love Me Do”, the first track they wrote with “fifth Beatle” George Martin. Later, there was a moving rendition of “Here Today”, his imagined conversation with Lennon written after the singer’s death in 1980.
He dedicated his performance of “My Valentine” to his wife, Nancy Shevell, whom he met in 2007. The song was included on his 2012 album, Kisses on the Bottom, and was inspired by a clandestine trip they took when they first began dating, where it “rained the entire time, but Nancy said, ‘I don’t mind!’” he told the audience.
The Got Back tour is part of a particularly prolific period for McCartney, which has included the release of the Grammy-nominated “Now and Then” – performed tonight for the first time ever in the UK – and its accompanying music video, directed by Peter Jackson.
“It’s really great,” McCartney said in the tour’s programme of how it feels playing the song live. “When you introduce a new song, even though it’s an old song, like ‘Now and Then’, the first reaction is, people aren’t quite sure what it is or what you’re doing.
“But during the run of the concerts, they get the idea. The word gets out on the internet, you know. So now the reaction is really strong… it’s particularly great because it’s a John song. And so it’s very emotional for me. I love it. I love doing it, and the audience seem to love it too.”
Along with “Now and Then”, McCartney also collaborated with Jackson for the 2021 documentary series The Beatles: Get Back, which used specialist film and audio technology and explored the making of the Fab Four’s 1970 album, Let It Be.
This year saw the release of yet another Beatles documentary – the Martin Scorsese-produced Beatles ‘64,about the arrival of Beatlemania in the US – as well as One Hand Clapping, David Litchfield’s previously lost 1974 film that followed McCartney and Wings as they worked on a potential live-in-studio album.
McCartney had earlier explained how he goes about choosing from such a staggering collection of songs: “If I see a movie and then hear one of my songs in it, I think: ‘Oh, I should do that one.’ Sometimes it will give me the impetus to actually look at that song and think of doing it.”
He continued: “One of my own Wings albums, I’ll be thinking, ‘Well, it didn’t do too well, so maybe it wasn’t that good,’ and then you find some kids are playing the hell out of it saying, ‘This is a great album,’ so it gets me back into it.”
Fans certainly seemed delighted about the setlist on Saturday, as they joined McCartney in a rousing singalong to “Something in the Way”, which he opened by playing a ukulele given to him by the late George Harrison (“a ukulele enthusiast”). He got into the festive spirit with a surprise performance of “Wonderful Christmastime”, complete with confetti “snow” and a local children’s choir.
By this point in the tour, many of the social media-savvy fans in the audience knew to anticipate the moment McCartney appears to “explode”, Spinal Tap-style, as smoke machines and pyrotechnics obscured the musician for “Live and Let Die”, Wings’s James Bond theme for the 1973 film of the same name.
Then came yet another singalong, this time to “Hey Jude”, before an encore starring the famed “duet” with Lennon on “I’ve Got a Feeling”. It’s a “nice feeling for me”, he told the crowd, “because I get to sing with John again”. McCartney was well and truly back, and his fans couldn’t have been more thrilled. “There’s only one thing left to say,” he said, closing the show. “See you next time!”
