Paul McCartney brought the Beatles back to life in Manchester ...Middle East

Beatles ’64, the latest in an apparently endless line of documentaries on the Fab Four, arrived on Disney+ last month. It contains a treasure trove of previously unseen footage from the band’s first trip to America, sixty years ago, where their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show cemented them as global superstars. In one such clip an interviewer asks a fresh-faced Paul McCartney a prescient question; “what place do you think this story of The Beatles is going to have in the history of Western culture?” McCartney scoffs. “You must be kidding. It’s not culture. It’s a good laugh.”

Six decades later, and both men have been proved right. Now 82, McCartney is probably the 20th century’s most influential living cultural figure. And on Saturday night at Manchester’s new Co-op Live arena, at the first of the final run of shows in McCartney’s Got Back tour, which began in April 2022, it was very good fun, too. When he and his five-piece band opened by ripping into “A Hard Day’s Night” with gusto, it set the tone for a joyous two-and-a-half hours to follow.

The show was an exuberant journey through the McCartney catalogue. That meant solo tracks, from the clunky (“Come on to Me”) and the classic (“Maybe I’m Amazed”), to the disarmingly moving (“My Valentine”) and endearingly kitsch (“Wonderful Christmastime” featured fake snow drifting from the rafters, dancing elves and a children’s choir).

There was also plenty of Wings material, providing McCartney with a rock outlet. He suffixed the irresistibly bluesy “Let Me Roll It” by jamming on Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” before swaggering through a towering, groove-driven “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five”. One of the night’s biggest singalongs was reserved for “Band on the Run”, which still sounded fresh 50 years after its release.

At the heart of proceedings, though, were The Beatles. Every era of the band was represented, including the first song he ever recorded with John Lennon and George Harrison – the 1958 skiffle track “In Spite of All the Danger”. From there, there was everything from the chirpy pop of “Love Me Do” to the psychedelic strangeness of “Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!”. The more McCartney dwelled on his old friends’ absence, the more present they felt. The 20,000 strong crowd were in rapt silence for an acoustic “Here Today”, a love letter to Lennon that McCartney admitted he wrote to circumvent the unspoken code among working-class men of their generation that precluded them talking about feelings.

McCartney played Harrison’s old ukulele on “Sometime”, and later, during the encore, reprised the “duet” with Lennon on “I’ve Got a Feeling”, which he debuted at his last UK show, when he headlined Glastonbury in 2022. That evocation of Lennon’s ghost was simple and striking, but more discomfiting was the inclusion of “Now and Then”, the “final” Beatles song that was finished and released last year with the help of artificial intelligence – its accompanying visuals featuring a grinning Lennon and Harrison flailing around unsettlingly alongside present-day McCartney and Ringo Starr were anything but reassuring.

That was a rare misstep, though. Every other Beatles song served as a stirring reminder of why the group are scorched so indelibly into the world’s cultural consciousness. McCartney tore through the likes of “Let It Be”, “Helter Skelter”, “Hey Jude” and the Abbey Road suite with palpable emotion, his eyes still twinkling after all these years. A McCartney concert in 2024 feels like a kind of cultural monument – but it is also, just as in 1964, a good laugh.

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