Paul McCartney review – a dizzying, bittersweet, life-encompassing journey through time | Paul McCartney

By contrast, the most recent release McCartney plays is 2023’s 1970s-era John Lennon demo Now and Then. Unveiled just over a year ago, its recording featured input from all four Fabs across the decades. Tonight, it once again reasserts a sense of unity lost circa 1969-70. If McCartney were not the de facto keeper of the Beatles flame, you do wonder whether Lennon or Harrison would have shored up the band’s group identity quite as hard as he has done.

Tonight’s three-hour set is all bonhomie and bittersweetness, folding the McCartney Beatles canon into rather a lot of Wings songs and a smattering of solo material, with a few fond diversions. Something – a Beatles song written by George Harrison – begins on a ukulele Harrison gave McCartney. One of Wings’s greatest tunes, the heartfelt Let Me Roll It – inspired by a Harrison lyric, its electric blues riff amped right up tonight – ends with a fulsome gnash through some of Foxy Lady in tribute to Jimi Hendrix.

At no point during this wide-ranging set do you get a sense of an artist wrestling with his legacy, striving to assert any kind of authoritative narrative stamp. It’s just all here – a dizzying range from magnificent to mass market (Wonderful Christmastime, complete with children’s choir) and back again. Here is McCartney the balladeer, the perky everyman, the sonic aggressor (Helter Skelter) and the weird music hall oompah merchant (Ob-La-di Ob-La-Da, which gains from the ska inflections of the Music City Horns, a skanking trio of brass players).

We’re reminded of how far some things have come. McCartney’s introduction to a lovely rendition of Blackbird recounts the Beatles’ Liverpudlian incredulity at being expected to play for a segregated audience in Jacksonville, Florida in 1964 (they refused, forcing the authorities to back down). Wings’s Let ’Em In is all about inclusivity, not postcode lotteries.

We’re reminded of how far there is to go as well, and how a kind of resilient, wise forbearance is key in order not to give in to despair. That’s Let It Be, a late-set reminder of exactly how beautifully McCartney resonated with the Beatles’ tumultuous times – an attribute most often handed to Lennon. (Not only that; as of 2022, McCartney was still sufficiently evolved to pull off a yoga headstand.)

Between songs, he swings between waspish scouse wit and Fab Macca, the milkman-whistling, relatable superstar. Near the end, he calls the behaviour of one fan, holding up a sign that says 135, the number of times he has seen the tour, “a little bit extreme”.

At the very heart of proceedings, McCartney relates how young men in Liverpool in the 1960s were culturally unable to tell each other how much they cared for one another. This set has all manner of sky-high points – Get Back, Hey Jude, the Beatles’ early anti-materialist anthem Can’t Buy Me Love – but it’s during Here Today, the song McCartney wrote after the death of John Lennon, that unexpectedly seals the deal tonight. As the set wears on, McCartney’s voice does show signs of time passing. But its cracks and quavers, as he mourns the loss of the most significant significant other of his life, are more affecting than all the fake snow, pyro or confetti put together.