Well, that’s how it felt sitting on a plastic chair in row F, section C of Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium on Saturday night. When Mr Magic strolls on to the stage after half an hour of scrolling images from his life so far, played out on two apartment-block-sized video screens on either side of the stage, you’re already dazzled and exhausted from craning your neck upward from the floor.
Unlike Mr Magic, I’m mortal, and my neck hurts.
His signature Hofner violin bass guitar is strapped around him, and he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to. He bangs straight into his old band’s swaggering 1964 hit Can’t Buy Me Love, which would be an admirable sentiment if the audience hadn’t already paid a cool collective $35 million or so for this particular love-in.
But this is Sir Paul McCartney and nobody among the 50,000-strong crowd begrudges their ticket price, which range from $150 to $2000. As the tunes roll out from early Beatles to Wings, to solo songs and on to late Beatles, the McCartney myth grows to match the size of the two giant video screens.
Then it takes off into interstellar space, leaving us mortals back on Earth holding up our phones like rapturous Hillsongers.
Is this the same man who met a beery teenager called John Lennon after he played on the back of a truck with the Quarrymen at St Peter’s church fete in Woolton, Liverpool on July 6, 1957?
Is he the same bobble-headed moptop who went on to play at the Indra nightclub in Hamburg, then at The Cavern, then on the Ed Sullivan TV show to 73 million Americans?
Is this the same man who wrote Yesterday and Get Back, Let it Be, Hey Jude, Penny Lane, and countless other songs now embedded in the Western cultural psyche? Who dreamed up Sgt Pepper, married Linda Eastman, formed Wings and then lost his wife to cancer?
This man has lived so many public lives his real life must be a hall of mirrors. Perhaps the real McCartney really did die in a car accident in 1967, as the conspiracy people said. If he did, this bloke’s pretty good.
He still has the bravura of a teenage genius. Here he is at 81 years old, still belting out the songs and looking as cool as he did on the Abbey Road cover — taking it all in his stride.
There is something of the original Beatle — the mouth, the chin, the puppy dog eyes, now hooded, the Liverpool accent and the scouse cheek. During Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, his flamboyant drummer does a big-bloke cement bag dance.
Afterwards, McCartney quips: “Most big bands have these really amazing dancers; all we’ve got is him.” Then he introduces his brass players as “the horny boys”, which draws another laugh. He tells all the anecdotes — how George Harrison didn’t like George Martin’s tie, how Jimi Hendrix played the Sgt Pepper theme live two days after it was released, how his guitar was out of tune, and how George gave him his ukulele, which he uses to start playing his old friend’s tune Something.
Then I feel a bit sorry for McCartney. All his stories have already been told, and nothing surprising is left to tell any more, but just like his solo songs, he rolls them out anyway.
He knows what people want and is humble enough to admit it. “When we play the Beatle ballads like Hey Jude and Let it Be — the whole place lights up like the night sky,” he says, alluding to mobile phone lights in the audience.
“Then when we play a new song, it’s a black hole.”
The band play a massive 40 songs, which can only cover a sliver of the McCartney songbook. Some have never been played live before, such as Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite from Sgt Pepper or She Came in Through The Bathroom Window from Abbey Road.
The showstopper was Helter Skelter, delivered with ear-blistering guitars and a mind-altering laser light show. The stadium experience is not about intimacy; it’s about spectacle.
So you spend three hours trying to catch a glimpse of a tiny singing sparkle or the giant pixelated image floating 20 metres above your head through the bobbing heads and hair of the people in front of you. In the end, it’s the music that carries the night — not the lights or the lasers.
This will be my last stadium experience — but I said that last time McCartney came to Australia. However, he’s 81 now. Surely, this is his last tour. It would have to be. Wouldn’t it?
