Beatle Sings Beatles

Two nights ago I went to a Paul McCartney concert in Cologne. I know! My son had two tickets and the friend he was going with was sick, so he called me and asked if I would like to go with him. I dropped everything, jumped in my car and drove the many hundreds of kilometers to Cologne. Miraculously, my son and I found each other outside the Kölnarena where Paul McCartney was performing, despite all the crowds, found a place to have a meal and then proceeded to our seats, which, I have to say, were excellent.

Paul and the band walked out casually onto the stage shortly after 8 p.m. There was no announcement, no hype, no drum roll or loud intro music, no “Please welcome to the stage…” The entire audience, I think, rose and applauded, whistled, shouted, cheered, waved their home-made banners. I caught hold of my son’s arm and babbled excitedly, “It’s him, it’s actually him! It’s Paul McCartney! Look!” And my son exclaimed, “I know, I know!” just as thrilled.

The band launched straight into an old Beatles number and sang about three songs before Paul stopped for a couple of minutes and spoke a few sentences of greeting. They continued with Beatles hits, Wings hits and a few of Paul’s more modern songs. Every so often, Paul stopped playing and spoke to the audience for a minute, never too long, always funny, jokey, friendly. It felt as if we knew him and had always known him, that we felt comfortable with him and he with us, and not too many words had to be exchanged, we all knew where he was coming from. When he referred to his friend John, everyone cheered, and when he spoke of his friend George, we all cheered again. We all knew who he meant. He played a song with George’s ukulele and changed guitars frequently.

Paul has been doing this for about 50 years, and is the ultimate professional performer. Despite his age, he looked as fit as the proverbial fiddle, as well as smart, cool and great-looking. The continuously changing backdrops and film collages were beautiful and clearly very thoughtfully and professionally designed. He and the band gave a stunning three-hour rock concert performance. The main set was around two and a quarter hours, during which time I did not see any of them drink anything. There were no water bottles on stage, and nobody swigged any drinks between songs. Unlike the audience, including ourselves, who were singing themselves hoarse, and those of us lucky enough to have a seat where you could stand up, bopping or jogging along to the beat. I actually had to go to the bar at one point to fetch another couple of large glasses of water. He gave two encores, and I can tell you one thing – even if the entire performance had only been half as long, we would still have got our money’s worth.

I had to keep mentally pinching myself and reminding myself of what was actually happening. This was not just someone singing all those old Beatles songs – which I have to say have not aged at all and sounded like classic rock – this was the actual Beatle himself singing them! And not just a Beatle, but the Beatle who had written the songs he was singing! All those old songs I had grown up with in the 1960s, here was their creator, the guy who had sung them back then – his was one of the voices I had heard on my parents’ radio when I was little. And it had taken me all this time, all these decades, to get to see him singing them in the flesh, here, right in front of me.

I was a little too young to have been involved in Beatlemania. Of course you heard about it, years after it had happened, but by the time I started to take note of music, the Beatles had already split up, had long hair and were famous for being weird. I was in my final year of university when John Lennon was shot. Paul McCartney had formed a new group called Wings, whose music I didn’t like at the time, while I was still a teenager at school and Ringo Starr had had a hit that I did like. All the memories of all the friends who were Beatles fans (mostly people from Liverpool), the old faded Beatles songbook music sitting around in cupboards, the occasional memorabilia, the old black and white films – this was all stuff from a long, long time ago. My parents were too old to be Beatles fans and we were too young. It was something that had always eluded me a little bit. My husband, 13 years older than me, had been the right age at the right time and used to tell me about the Beatles. They pioneered a new type of music, he told me. Up to then, nobody had thought of using those discordant guitar chords. The Beatles did that and invented a new kind of music.

And this pioneer, this inventor, was the guy on the stage in front of me giving a brilliant, thoroughly modern, and highly entertaining performance.

I can remember the first time I heard a Beatles record on my parents’ radio. It was “All My Loving” and it must have been in about 1967, after it had already been a hit. My parents always had the radio tuned to the British station Radio 2, which played music for grownups rather than teenagers. So to hear a Beatles hit like “All My Loving” was very unusual. It wasn’t music, my mother said. Pop music was people shouting through their noses, she said. I didn’t really know what that meant. But the lid had thus been put on pop music, which at the time, often consisted of the Beatles and their like, because your parents told you it was rubbish, bad, nonsense. Hits like “She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” just served to support this view because the title made no sense and the word “yeah” was not a proper word. By the time I became interested in pop music, other bands were around, and the Beatles were old hat. Six, seven years ago – that’s a long time for a 12-year old. And in our heads, the Beatles belonged to the pop music that was bad for you.

At elementary school, when it rained during playtime, the older ones among us had to gather in the school assembly hall and were taught Scottish dancing by the dinner-lady (whose duty it was to look after the children during breaks) from Newcastle. So it was that the entire school eventually became adept at the Gay Gordons and the like. But one time I can remember that she put on a record of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” by the Beatles, and I thought for a long time that it was a children’s song. I had no idea it was a Beatles pop music hit. Paul sang that one too the other night, and the whole audience sang along.

Paul also sang “All My Loving” in Cologne and it was beautiful, haunting and romantic. Instantly, it transported me right back to that moment when I was about 8 years old, sitting at the kitchen table with the little maroon portable radio next to me,  the tinny mono sound of the Beatles’ voices and music emanating from it. Perhaps that’s why my mother thought pop music was people shouting through their noses – because transistor radios back then didn’t have stereo sound. I bet she wouldn’t have thought Paul was shouting through his nose if she’d seen him the other night on stage in Cologne.

Thank you, Paul. I really feel as if this concert has been one of the highlights of my life.