Paul McCartney

Four fab decades since Paul McCartney last stood in front of an Irish audience and, from the looks of things tonight, there’s good odds that many surviving members of the original Adelphi crowd are present amongst the 36,000 throng.

From where I’m sitting, the RDS is a vast blue rinse sea of bobbing bald heads and golf umbrellas. Little wonder that he’s chosen not to include ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ on the set list. Any female wetting her knickers tonight is more likely to be suffering from incontinence than a frenzy of uncontrollable lust. This may be Rock of Ages – but they’re mostly middle-to-late.

Surprisingly, it takes Macca a woo his fans. Obviously there’s a huge welcoming cheer when he comes on and immediately blasts into ‘Hello Goodbye’, but this seems to gradually dissipate over the next half hour – a combination of initially patchy sound, his playing being slightly off-key and the inability of large swathes of the crowd to hold their arms in the air for any great length of time.

Watching him work his way through a medley of early Beatles numbers, the thought occurs that this is more like watching a superior tribute band than the real deal. And there’s something vaguely ludicrous about the sight of an overly cheerful 60-year old billionaire in jeans and a sweatshirt holding a guitar aloft and politely enquiring, “Are you ready to rock, Dublin?”

But then the band depart and, left alone on the stage, Macca turns on the kind of easy charm it takes a lifetime in showbiz to accrue. Very few performers can hold a massive crowd rapt with lengthy anecdotes about hotel masseurs or self-deprecating tales of teenage pretentiousness but, at times, he almost makes you forget that this is supposed to be a concert.

Not that there’s any absence of music. When not telling jokes and stories, he belts out classic after classic – alternating between guitar, organ, piano and ukulele. They just keep on coming, songs you’d almost forgotten you knew the words to. Eventually the sheer vastness of his canon hits you and suddenly the ticket prices don’t seem like such a rip-off after all. ‘Fool On The Hill’, ‘She’s Leaving Home’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’… the list isn’t quite endless, but the tunes are timeless.

Two hours in and there’s in no doubt that being here is a privilege, and that we’re witnessing a small part of history in the making. He’s not unaware of this himself, occasionally reminding us that some of the old Beatles songs are being played live for the first time ever on this tour – and most of them are being played live for the first time in Ireland anyway. But even the Wings numbers sound great.

I could go on, but it hardly matters. It took him a while to warm up but Macca delivered in spades – and then some. If you were there, you know how special it was. If you weren’t, give yourself a good kick in the ass.

Back in the world? More like out of this world!