The Glastonbury gig
Saturday June 25, Paul McCartney was headlining the Glastonbury Festival from the Pyramid stage. The previous concerts went out live on BBC HD, but Paul’s concert was broadcast with a one hour delay between performance and TV screening. We don’t know why, but speculations are that perhaps some editing was performed to improve upon Paul’s vocals. The entire show was televised with one exception, the song “In Spite of All The Danger”. The song was also cut from the radio broadcast, which itself was cut short and didn’t include the encores.
But all is well again after the show has been made available via the BBC iPlayer (sound and vision, only accessible from within Great Britain) and BBC Sounds (sound). The sound of the concert can be enjoyed globally, you just have to register at BBC Sounds first. It will be available for one month only. The good news is that “In Spite of All The Danger” is back in the set, and we do believe the sound has been improved as well, as Paul’s vocals were a little low in the first hour of the broadcast.
The concert, which was guested by Dave Grohl and Bruce Springsteen, has been almost universally praised by the media.
Here’s the set list, as posted by Mary McCartney, who covered the concert on SoMe for dad.
Between “Junior’s Farm” and “Letting Go”, the audience surprised Paul by singing “Happy Birthday” for him. Note that the word “College” is used to describe the segment of “You Never Give Me Your Money” that was performed, Paul started it with the lines, “Out of college, money spent”. “Golden Slumbers” also incorporated “Carry That Weight” and “The End”. Paul gave a shout out to Quarry Men drummer Colin Hanton when introducing “In Spite of All The Danger”, which the drummer played on at the Liverpool recording. And the city of Liverpool itself was also called out and got audience applause. During “Fuh You”, the music video was shown in the background, with images from the place where John and Paul really met for the first time.
Dave Grohl participated in “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Band On The Run”, Springsteen performed his own “Glory Days” and The Beatles’ “I Wanna Be Your Man”, and they both traded licks at the guitar duel at The End.
Wouldn’t have had time to do anything to the vocals even with the hour delay. BBC wanted to put it out on their main channel, so it had to fit in with regular programming. No real mystery. They did the same with Diana Ross on Sunday – now she could really have done with some help in the tuning stakes! Hope the mix has improved, it wasn’t great throughout.
Really had a laugh at Paul conducting the guitar licks during The End once Dave came out and started to rip up an extended riffathon. Paul stopped him and pointed out two measures a piece and what the order of paying was. Great fun.
Improved sound quality, but more important: great show! Paul and his amazing band were in good shape. 500 shows in a row. Chappeau Sir Paul. He sounded good too. No worries.
Indulge me in a little ibt of “what if”..It was exactly the same set he’s been playing on his Got Back tour in the U.S., so I can see the reason for him sticking to what they’ve rehearsed up. However, in view of the fact that Glastonbury was going to be broadcast live(ish) to his home audience, and that it would be judged accordingly, I do think he could have/should have ditched Junior’s Farm, Letting Go, Come On To Me, Let Me Roll It, My Valentine, Fuh You, New and Mr Kite.
Replace those with All My Loving, A Hard Day’s Night, From Me To You, C Moon, Jet, My Love, Listen To What The Man Said and Mull Of Kintyre and you’ve got a heck of show.
The set has broadly been well received here. A lot of that is to do with the on-going dawning realisation in some quarters that, yeah, McCartney hasn’t actually been entirely wasting his time these last forty or fifty years; some of it is to do with people realising that he is genuinely pretty old now; and some of it is to do with people seeing a man that old doing what he was able to do with a festival crowd on Saturday night. I’m not sure it mattered too much which songs he did or didn’t do. I think you’d be surprised how few people would have recognised even All My Loving. And certainly I don’t think C Moon would have rung any bells for most people watching (unlike Let ‘Em In, ironically). And the fact is that he can’t do justice to most of these songs anyway. To me it makes perfect sense to do Egypt Station material, because that album genuinely did reach some new listeners. And I think it was smart to let the world know that he wrote My Valentine (it was also one of the better performances). I would agree that Mr Kite didn’t really work though. And if he was going to have guests on, he could have had fun getting Grohl and Springsteen to duet on Say, Say, Say, or something like that.
Happy to see him do material from Egypt Station but why pick two of the worst songs
This guy at this age performing an entire set is amazing. Yes, some of it was challenging for him vocally, but who could even imagine back in the 60s he would still be so viable.and entertaining as a performer in 2022! It’s easy now for me to see why he was the major driving force was in getting the Beatles’ music made and recorded. Paul’s love of entertaining us is a treasure.
I haven’t seen Macca live since 2003, though I have bought all the live releases. I agree with Shad that to a certain extent it didn’t really matter what he played since it felt like a state occasion, but in my opinion the faster / rockier songs hid his voice better, and showcased the band more. I would have recommended ditching the solo acoustic songs. Why choose New, one of the weakest songs off one of his weakest albums? Especially when there were no selections from Flaming Pie or McCartney III? Probably too much whimsy too.
I would have suggested including Jet, Drive my Car, Birthday (I was certain that would appear), Flaming Pie, The World Tonight, Hi Hi Hi, etc, etc. Hence I disagree with Tony because I was really delighted to her Junior’s Farm and Letting Go and didn’t realise they were on his current tour list.
The really incredible thing is to go through the set list and realise how many key albums and singles were omitted. He could have 3 set lists of that length and all would be significant songs…
Will I ever see him live again? Not sure – I hope he tours the UK again because he can’t go on forever…
Don’t get me wrong – I loved seeing him do Junior’s Farm and Letting Go! My girlfriend, however, was getting bored by the sixth song, “too many songs no-one knows”.
Anyway, it was an utterly amazing show, and I am so happy that it was received so well by (almost) everyone.
Bah humbug! Stop these crappy shows and get in the studio while you still have a bit of a voice. Keep producing great albums and leave the nostalgia to the tribute bands!