Fab One meets the world’s biggest choir on a heavenly night
Sir Paul McCartney Glastonbury, Pyramid Stage ★★★★★
AND there he was, with his Hofner bass and Beatle collar jacket, rocking through Can’t Buy Me Love, Got to Get You Into My Life and Getting Better. It was the return of the Macca, Britain’s most revered rock legend headlining the nation’s most beloved festival.
On Friday night, 20-year-old Billie Eilish became the youngest person to headline Glastonbury. Last night, McCartney became the oldest, at 80. If it was viewed in terms of competition, it would really be no contest. When it comes to knowing exactly what an audience wants and delivering it with perfection, the Oldies rule. And even among rock’s veterans, nobody has a more universally loved crossgenerational back catalogue than McCartney, with the Beatles, Wings and solo. Famously a people pleaser, he was certainly committed to pleasing the festival faithful.
McCartney and his tightly drilled combo just kept knocking them out, one absolutely storming classic after another, sending waves of excitement up the packed hillside, and turning the biggest crowd of the 2022 Glastonbury festival into the world’s biggest choir. I mean, really, you haven’t heard a singalong until you’ve heard 200,000 voices doing the na na na’s on Hey Jude.
Detractors say McCartney can’t sing like he used to. Certainly his voice has thinned over the decades, grown weaker and more fragile. Nevertheless he is still singing in the same keys and hitting the right notes, using warrior skills to make up for loss of youthful vigour. He roared through the Wings classic Let Me Roll It, weaving in a wild lead solo. He paused the show for stewards to help a man in the crowd, joking “it wasn’t my solo was it?”
A harmonic master, McCartney uses his band to envelop and beef up his own lead vocal. Nevertheless, when it is really exposed on intimate songs like the beautiful 2013 ballad My Valentine and Beatles classic Blackbird and Here Today, the sense of frailty adds a tender intensity. McCartney doesn’t (like too many others of his generation and younger) use backing track trickery to create an illusion of perpetual youth. This is a vintage musician, singing his own songs, and you should really pay attention because he’s not going to be here, singing them forever. Mind you, given the rip-roaring energy of this glorious, moving and inspiring performance with some spectacular encores and surprise guest slots, McCartney doesn’t sound like a man ready to give all this up any time soon.
A huge rowd of all ages spread up Worthy Farm hillside in front of the Pyramid stage. Flags waved, flares blazed, voices were raised in song. When the Fab Four conjured hippie utopias in the Sixties, this might have been what they were singing about. The world hasn’t exactly been a vision of peace and love lately but here was the Fab One to put things right. For a couple of hours in a Somerset field, rising on harmonies and wreathed in smiles, you could almost believe “it’s getting better all the time.”