It’s twenty-four hours before Paul McCartney is due to officially start his Australian tour. He is getting ready to play a short set to 15 competition winners.

Apart from McCartney’s crew, the winners, their guests and a smattering of media the Adelaide Entertainment Centre is virtually empty. This hardly matters a jot to McCartney who performs a blistering twenty-five-minute collection of songs comprised of Beatles’ hits, highlights from his solo career and deep cuts.

Earlier in the afternoon your correspondent had the privilege of chatting to McCartney first on stage, and facilitating questions from the small audience. Relaxed and wearing a dark hoodie, you only need two minutes in McCartney’s company and you’re knocked out by the man’s warmth, candour and, of course, his catalogue. Having interviewed him previously McCartney’s warmth is always immediate.

McCartney’s Got Back tour takes him from Adelaide to shows on the east-coast, including Newcastle and the Gold Coast with major concerts also in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

It’s fitting that the Got Back tour began in Adelaide because the city looms large in the Beatles early narrative. When the group played there in 1964, 350,000 South Australian’s lined the streets for the town’s civic reception to wish them well.

“It was just great, it was fantastic,” McCartney recalls. “It was overwhelming really, because … we’d seen big crowds and we’d had all the screaming and stuff, so we weren’t kind of bowled over by that – but that many people was just insane. We were just stood there. It was just great, fantastic. It was something special.”

McCartney’s set for the exclusive fan event started with a throwback to the height of Beatle-mania, Can’t Buy Me Love. Strapping on his 1963 Hofner bass, McCartney led his band through a list that included Drive My Car, the Wings smash Let ‘Em In, his solo hit Coming Up and Come on To Me from 2018.

The following evening, he played a whopping thirty-nine songs for a show that comes in at just under three hours.

Of course, a concert in 1964 was very different to a gig in 2023. The Beatles might have played eight hours a night during their apprenticeship at the Hamburg Star Club, but at the pinnacle of their touring years their shows were relatively brief.

“The gigs were really short,” McCartney tells me. “It’s not like now. We used to have support acts. We only played for twenty minutes. But we weren’t dossing around – it was fairly knackering. Actually, thinking about it, it was twenty minutes shared very heavily with John and with George. So, I must have been doing ten minutes a night … top whack.”

On his current Got Back tour McCartney will reach into a song book that spans six decades, playing material that goes back to his pre-Fab outfit with John Lennon, the Quarrymen, as well as hits he wrote for The Beatles, Wings and for his still prolific solo career.

So how does Paul McCartney choose a set list?

“I always ask myself, ‘If I was going to the show, what would I like to hear?’”, he explains. “The set list we choose is basically built to please the audience.

“I’m not ashamed to say that. I remember when I was a kid I’d go to shows and some could be disappointing … it was like ‘there goes my pocket money’.”

The joy of seeing McCartney, 81, and his band in concert now, is that we have the technology that can fully realise the artist’s vision. After a US show at Candlestick Park in 1966, the Beatles retired from touring. That allowed them to push creative boundaries in the studio. Now, in 2023, McCartney can play material from Revolver to Abbey Road to his Bond theme song Live and Let Die and be armed with on stage sound and visuals that captures the sonic ambition of the original recordings.

“There are a few songs that are a little bit hard to do,” he grimaces. “Like, there’s a Beatles song called Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite and the bass part is quite complicated. Silly me, when I made the record, I wasn’t having to sing it. I’ve relearned it now.”

Back to the late afternoon stage and McCartney answers fan questions that reveals a consistency to his devotion to writing songs and living a creative life.

“I love it,” he says of the vocation. “That’s all there is to it. I love music. I feel very lucky to be in this profession. It’s more of a hobby for me. I always sit down with a guitar or a piano and just see what comes. If you’re lucky it’ll be a fresh idea or something nice and you think, ‘Oh I should record that’.

“Someone said to me once, ‘Do you believe in magic?’,” he continues, “And I said, ‘well, I’ve kind of got to,’ because a couple of my songs I didn’t write. I woke up one morning and then there was this tune in my head and it turned out to be Yesterday … It just arrived and I didn’t have to sit down and write it or anything.”

If you’re planning to see McCartney on this tour, pack your tissues. There’s an emotional element that tugs at the heart strings. It’s not just McCartney’s tributes to fallen comrades John Lennon and George Harrison that might get you going. It’s the fact that McCartney’s music is so deeply woven into the tapestry of his audience’s own lives and memories.

Spoiler alert. One of the most moving moments in the show is the appearance on the big screen of the late John Lennon for a virtual duet on The Beatles I’ve Got a Feeling. The idea debuted at McCartney’s Glastonbury show last year and was generated by filmmaker Peter Jackson’s cutting-edge technology used on the band’s recent Get Back documentary.

“It’s one of my favourite bits in the show now,” McCartney says. “It’s kind of magic for me, because at one point I’m just backing John up. I’m playing guitar and he’s singing in his middle bit… ‘Everybody had a good year’. And then I join him with ‘I got a feeling’. And so now there’s two of us together.

“And now I’ve got to actually really keep in with him. And that’s beautiful because that’s like it was when you played live, you know, to be conscious of the other person, and do your part right alongside him. So yeah, it’s very emotional for me. Because, it was the magic – it was my buddy, who’s been dead a long time, and here he was, back, and I’m working with him again. And even though it’s sort of mechanical trickery it feels very real.”

McCartney pauses and sighs. “So, it was great. I love it.”

Paul McCartney’s 2023 Got Back tour plays Tuesday October 24 at McDonald Jones Stadium, Newcastle, Friday October 27 and 28 at Allianz Stadium, Sydney, Wednesday November 1 at Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane, Saturday November 4 at Heritage Bank Stadium, Gold Coast. 

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