Paul McCartney

A history lesson. Your life-log flashing before your eyes. A good chunk of the songbook that's echoed for decades, first through your transistor radio, then through portable stereos, hi-fi systems and finally Spotify. An eternal boy who, in his own way, and with his three mates, changed the history of the last century. And, inevitably, yours too. All this, and more, across the nearly three hours in which Paul McCartney, slim figure and ever so simply cool, finally wearing his grey hair with pride, sings, plays and jokes his way lightly through his 76 years.

I don't know, we don't know, whether this global tour will be the last one for Sir Paul. His age is by now almost biblical, at least for rock standards, but the creative vein still flows happily – his latest, “Egypt Station”, is one of the best of his second millennium. And on stage, which in his understated way doesn't demand the gruelling marathon efforts of Springsteen, but is never a walk in the park either – even if the setup around him is certainly as precise as a Swiss watch and his clean living is plain to see – Paul moves with infinite nonchalance and class.

The truth is that McCartney is one of the very few geniuses still active, and in this world of fake promises and little depth, all present tense and no “historical” ambition, nor any sense of history, every now and then it's necessary to put things and people in perspective, to feed on art, to drink from the fountain of eternal youth that is imagination. There's no need to point these things out to Paul, or to celebrate them for him – he's a natural, he's the embodiment of it. But the 15,000 people at the Royal Danske Arena, Copenhagen, mostly over 50 but with plenty of young faces bringing the average down, know it, and the atmosphere is respectful and enthusiastic at once.

Preceded by a vintage dj who plays Beatles for half an hour, at 8pm you expect things to kick off but – as if the recap were never enough – with a graphic sequence of a building rising ever higher, starting from Paul's childhood home with him pictured as a boy at the window in a photomontage, the whole of Maccalife is retraced from scratch. A soundtrack that opens with a teenage “Besame Mucho” and, as more “minor” songs go by, brings in John, George and finally Ringo, and while the houses of Liverpool turn into the buildings of London, and then the architecture of the New World, the roaring Sixties become the “familiar” Seventies, Linda and the kids, and Wings, and the solo years, with all their temporal and personal references.

Forty minutes later, over the closing crescendo of “The End”, which for Paul is truly “the” bookend, the giant ledwall shows the Hofner bass, his bass, the iconic instrument of the beat era he's never once set aside. Ok, here we go: to applause, he arrives with this small but magnificent band (two guitars/backing vocals, Brian Ray and Rusty Anderson, drums/backing vocals and keyboards, Abe Laboriel Jr. and Wix, plus a horn trio on some songs) that's been backing him for twenty years and has the wonderful gift of sounding “like” the Beatles (same arrangements) but ultimately “better” than the Beatles themselves: 50 years on, digital technology allows for “those” sound effects that could never be reproduced live before, and from “Eleanor Rigby” to “Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite” anything is possible. I remember that deja-vu/hi-tech feeling on an enchanted midsummer night in 2003, with the Colosseum as a backdrop. Paul had come back to play “all the Beatles”, and that monument to Roman classicism was a comparison, a reminder, an alchemy hard to repeat. The two poles of the Empire, the ancient one and the pop one, touching. Magic moments.

The opening strum of “A Hard Day’s Night” kicks off a mega-setlist of 38 (thirty-eight!) songs, and from that moment on the interweaving of Beatles, Wings and solo albums, new one included, never lets up, while behind him images – often rare, always evocative – are edited together with taste and care. “All My Loving” is another dive into the past, the escapes from crazed fans in Richard Lester's black-and-white musical-comedy, “A Hard Day’s Night”, reminding us that the phenomenon had exploded by '64, Beatlemania was conquering London and England and soon America, and the best was yet to come.

And here, I get a first strange flash: I look at Paul, old Paul with young Paul behind him alongside the other three, and all the Beatles appear before me, still long-haired, survivors, sly grins intact, like their mates the Stones, all still out there, screw britpop. Wow. It's just a moment, but long enough to think about how different everything would have been: their music and ours and all music in general. The Fab Four mythology that time has created and preserved. And this very evening. Who knows if technology will one day give us this acid blue pill out of Alice in Wonderland too. But it really is just a moment, you're standing there twenty metres from Paul as he slips off his black jacket (“this will be the only costume change of the show,” he jokes) next to Alessandro, my eldest son, who at 23 has probably listened to more Beatles than you have, and who knows plenty of the anecdotes: you rely on Ian McDonald's “Revolution In The Mind”, every single song recounted in detail, and he says: “You know Paul's admitted he made up a fair few of those stories.” Who knows. Ale looks like he's standing in front of Jesus. Well, God, John would have said. I imagine I must have worn that same expression myself a few times. Mine, instead, is a Cheshire Cat grin, exactly that, 165 minutes of a sort of facial paralysis that will stay with me until the very end.

It's got me like this, I love it a ton but the real shiver hasn't arrived yet. There are bluesy jams, the new “Who Cares”, “I’ve Got A Feeling” and “Let Me Roll It”, the quote from Hendrix's “Foxy Lady”, from that July night in '67 when he'd played the title track of “Sgt Pepper's” – not yet released – at the Speakeasy in front of London's whole music scene, the Beatles and Clapton included (“Eric, can you tune my guitar?”). There's the pop of Wings, and the dedication to his third wife Nancy on “My Valentine”, with the video behind him of Natalie Portman and Johnny Depp mouthing the words in sign language. Love beyond the barriers of language for Paul the crooner, a sort of recent passion, another dot to connect on a map that over time has taken in everything his many-sided talent has managed to touch: from rock'n'roll to Oratorio, from pop to jazz, from experimental electronics to Pop Art.

“Maybe I’m Amazed” is always a safe harbour: the shot of today's Paul on either side, and in the centre that bearded photo of Linda, rugged in her sheepskin coat wrapping up newborn Mary, is pure visual tenderness. Now Paul is a grandfather, the McCartney saga – his daughter Stella, a trendsetting designer in the very fashion world her father had helped launch with Swinging London – is a modern-day fairy tale, tragedies included. Great loves, here it was for Linda, great song.

It could use a bit more power, more control over the half-tones, it could perhaps use younger vocal cords to carry songs that weren't easy to sing even back then. Paul's voice, a sixty-year miracle of refracting beauty, able to shift timbre from Little Richard to Buddy Holly, isn't eternal. Neither are we, nor is he. The only eternal thing here is what he's created. For me, that's enough. Respect is owed to the passing of time, which must pass. From the heart (and besides, certain shortcomings weren't really noticeable there live, hearing the clips back home is another story). And anyway, the songs are hardly torn apart into an incomprehensible growl, Paul cares, he's someone who loves his audience. They love each other, always been that way. Never been a recluse, never put on airs, and God only knows how many chances he'd have had to do so.

He's a consummate entertainer, if he had slippers on he'd be in his living room, his little gestures, faces, winks, the jokes he scatters along the way are always spot on, witty, never over the top, just humour. Like when he tells the story of the Beatles' very first recording, without Ringo and with Colin plus Duff on piano. “Cutting the record cost five pounds, each of us chipped in one, and we each got to keep it at home for a week at a time. Everyone, except Duff, held onto it for twenty years… and then sold it back to me, at a tidy profit.” With this prequel anecdote, the show takes a turn, starting over: “In Spite Of All The Danger”, a country ballad in the style of Elvis written in '58 with George, the five of them in unplugged mode, opens up into a bit of stop-and-go and crowd singalongs, and suddenly a window opens onto the world that was being born: “From Me To You”, the A-side that George Martin didn't want, only to save it later by telling them to speed it up. “Love Me Do”, much fuller-bodied than the original. Then, “Blackbird” arrives.

In the afternoon we'd travelled out to the Louisiana Museum overlooking the North Sea (with a splendid exhibition on the Moon, from the Lumiere brothers' first film to Laurie Anderson's hi-tech performances, antique illustrations and astonishing NASA images, Aldrin's suit and photos of the first footprint) listening to all the Esher Demos, finally released in the box sets celebrating the 50th anniversary of the “White Album“. The legendary material written by John and Paul and George at the Maharishi's ashram and recorded at George's house in Essex, perhaps the last moment of true unity. From India they'd written to Ringo, who'd been the first to pack up and leave: “Warm up the drum skins, we've got material for a double.” And so it had been, what times those were, a Beatles double album. That handful of songwriterly tracks you have well layered into memory, heard again – even more essential this way – underline the scale of a talent in full bloom. Unstoppable. From that treasure chest Paul will play four: “Ob-la-di-Ob-la-da”, “Back in the USSR” and “Helter Skelter” will come at the end. The other one comes now, for the most emotional moment of the evening (you don't know it yet, but it couldn't be any other way).

Paul with the acoustic comes much closer, against an electronic backdrop slowly rising. “In England we heard on the news about the Civil Rights struggles in the United States. And we wanted to send a message to those people in Arkansas, in Little Rock, who were living through their own battle.” As the stage slowly rises, the arpeggio of “Blackbird” fills the room, a huge chorus backing the fragility of that symbolic “uccello nero che canta nella notte/ prendi le tue ali rotte e impara a volare/ tutta la tua vita hai solo aspettato che questo momento arrivasse…. You've only been waiting for this moment to be free”. As if that weren't enough, Paul accepts the long, moved applause with thumbs up, and as a photo of the earth appears, he touches the rawest nerve of all. The one that's been exposed the longest.

How much did those two love and then hate each other? Remember the crescendo? The first internal rifts in the band, the 3-against-1 vote to go with the rapacious Allan Klein as manager (the only one who managed to rip off English royalty, both the Beatles and the Stones). And then the statements, the jabs, the standoffs, the split, the lawsuits, the two lives now worlds apart as they turned 70: John doing Primal Therapy and playing the revolutionary with Yoko in America, Paul living on a farm in Scotland, among sheep and hearth, with his young family. “How Do You Sleep”? “Silly Love Songs”? And Yoko, all the stories about her influence, about her supposedly wanting to split them up. Deep down, the Esher Tapes really were the beginning of the end, Paul and John would never again look each other eyeballs into eyeballs, each one helping the other write masterpieces. In the studio by then there were five of them, and it's good that Paul says today, “John was in love with Yoko, and I respected that.” Yes, today. “…even if the mood in the room was genuinely strange.” There, better.

But two years after the death of the "fraternal enemy," Paul had written "Here Today," and he introduces it by saying how you often put off telling someone you love something, and sometimes it becomes too late: "…If you were here today… well, as for me, I still remember how it was before, and I can't hold back the tears anymore… I love you…". After calling for a long wave of applause for John, Paul sings it, and the crack in his voice is perhaps not down to the falsetto.

Then it's pure Beatles-esque homage: "Lady Madonna" somewhere between vaudeville and R&B with a sax solo, and an "Eleanor Rigby" of voices, acoustic guitar and digital keyboard recreating an entire orchestra with choir. "Mr. Kite" is an explosion of psychedelia and old England, another vividly colorful tribute to John. It will be the only track from Sgt. Pepper, aside from "Reprise." Then comes the one for George, "who played the ukulele brilliantly, did you know that?", and stomping along on the little guitar's strings he hums "Something in the way she moves…" which then opens into that memorable guitar solo and a majestic finale, with George's face as a boy, then as a superstar, and finally in the '90s, marked by advancing age and illness, while the heart breaks into a thousand pieces.

We're in full Beatles territory here, Pepperland at its most classic mixed with the post-Beatles years, like the five-star Wings of "Band On The Run." Then comes the delightful twist'n'roll of "Back in the USSR," and Paul introduces it by recounting when he finally made it there, to Red Square, by then on his own. "All the top brass was there: the Minister of Defence, he must have been someone important, tells me 'I learned English listening to Beatles records.' And at the end, he shakes my hand and says 'Hello Goodbye!'… Blimey, he'd almost got it, he was this close…!"

It's a gag, but it makes you think that behind many of these songs lies an entire world. Not just in their creation and their meaning, but above all in the repercussions they've had on a planetary scale, as the Japanese husband-and-wife couple following the whole tour from the front row know well, with little flags and jap-pop outfits and a Rising Sun bandana to mark the occasion, whom Paul pays tribute to – in Japanese, of course. Because the Beatles' wave swept over all five continents, no one remained immune to it, young and old, democracies and dictatorships alike; in Russia, pirate records even circulated pressed onto X-ray plates. The first English course sold on the market in communist Russia!

That optimism, that sense of a new generation coming to power, changed History forever. Would it have happened even without them, without their r'n'r and their cheeky-but-polite nerve, without that sense of boundless possibility, limited only by imagination itself, exploding with every new album? Also on "Blackbird": Paul has only told part of the story, because when on tour in '65 they refused to play in a segregated theater, whites here, Blacks there, they broke, for the first time, a barrier that had never been crossed before, in the American South. Trailblazers here too. The Beatles weren't just a band, but a liberating idea that spread across the whole planet, a superhero-like mission that symbolized the shift from black and white to color, from the present to the future, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, in every sense.

But not only that—also songwriting at the highest level: right after, comes the touching ballad in which he sees in a dream his mother, who passed away so early, whispering to him, amid the full-blown Beatles feud, "words of wisdom," "Let It Be, let it be…". It's a delicate, precious intimacy that John and Phil Spector, the night before the tape was due, in the ultimate dirty trick, had bloated to excess with orchestration, stripping it of its inner self, which here returns to its original nature. "Live And Let Die" is the opposite, cinema and scope, oversized soundtracks, giant (real) fireworks multiplied (by the screens) to the point of blinding and stunning.

Then, the grand finale, an endless "Hey Jude," a choir in which even the seats seem to sing along, our ecstatic smile framed as an electronic-human backdrop amid a thousand other huge smiles. The encore is announced by the waving of the Danish flag in the bandleader's hand, the British one and the universal "peace" flag in the others' hands, and it's pure fun ("I Saw Her Standing There"), psychedelia ("Sgt. Pepper's Reprise," with extraordinary animation on the backdrop), proto-metal delirium ("Helter Skelter") and the ending. "THE" Ending, I mean, that Abbey Road triptych ("Golden Slumbers"/"Carry That Weight"/"The End") which closes with the line that sums it all up. "In the end, the love you take/ is equal to the love you make."

Beyond the genius, the History, the globalization, the myth and those sonic wonders, beyond everything, in the end, "the love you take is equal to the love you make." Thanx, Paul. Forever.

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11/05/2026