The opening night of the final leg of McCartney's Got Back tour was an exuberant tribute to his former bandmates and a reminder of his towering cultural presence
The opening night of the final leg of McCartney's Got Back tour was an exuberant tribute to his former bandmates and a reminder of his towering cultural presence, the latest in an apparently endless line of documentaries on the Fab Four, arrived on Disney+ last month. It contains a treasure trove of previously unseen footage from the band’s first trip to America, sixty years ago, where their appearance oncemented them as global superstars.
Six decades later, and both men have been proved right. Now 82, McCartney is probably the 20th century’s most influential living cultural figure. And on Saturday night at Manchester’s new Co-op Live arena, at the first of the final run of shows in McCartney’stour, which began in April 2022, it was very good fun, too. When he and his five-piece band opened by ripping into “A Hard Day’s Night” with gusto, it set the tone for a joyous two-and-a-half hours to follow.
The show was an exuberant journey through the McCartney catalogue. That meant solo tracks, from the clunky and the classic , to the disarmingly moving and endearingly kitsch .material, providing McCartney with a rock outlet.
At the heart of proceedings, though, were The Beatles. Every era of the band was represented, including the first song he ever recorded with John Lennon and George Harrison – the 1958 skiffle track “In Spite of All the Danger”. From there, there was everything from the chirpy pop of “Love Me Do” to the psychedelic strangeness of “Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!”. The more McCartney dwelled on his old friends’ absence, the more present they felt.
That was a rare misstep, though. Every other Beatles song served as a stirring reminder of why the group are scorched so indelibly into the world’s cultural consciousness. McCartney tore through the likes of “Let It Be”, “Helter Skelter”, “Hey Jude” and thesuite with palpable emotion, his eyes still twinkling after all these years. A McCartney concert in 2024 feels like a kind of cultural monument – but it is also, just as in 1964, a good laugh.
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