Paul McCartney ‘blames Bruce Springsteen’ for fan expectations at live shows: ‘It’s his fault’

Paul McCartney has complained about the standard Bruce Springsteen has set for his fellow artists when it comes to lengthy performances.

The 73-year-old “Dancing In the Dark” rocker is known for his on-stage stamina, with concerts sometimes lasting up to four hours.

During a recent appearance on Conan O’Brien’s Needs a Friend podcast, McCartney, 81, bemoaned the expectations of modern-day concertgoers.

“These days, pretty much there’s the main act and there might be a warm-up act,” The Beatles star said, recalling that there were “a lot of people on the bill because nobody did long” during the Sixties.

“Now, people will do three or four hours. I blame Bruce Springsteen – I’ve told him so, I said, ‘It’s your fault,’” he said.

McCartney recalled that, during the The Beatles’ heyday, the band would do much, much shorter sets.

“You can’t now do an hour. We used to do a half hour. That was The Beatles’ thing – half an hour, and we got paid for it,” he said.

“That was it. A Beatles show, we were on and off like that. It didn’t seem strange.”

Last year, more than 100,000 people gathered to watch McCartney’s headline set at Glastonbury, ranking him among the biggest audiences a Pyramid stage act has ever drawn.

This year, 76-year-old Elton John may have gone even bigger with fans stunned at the scale of his Glastonbury audience. In a five-star review for The Independent, critic Kate Hutchinson hailed his concert as “surely the glitziest and most high-energy retirement party the world has ever seen.

“John, sat at his grand piano in what you might call a pared-back look of gold lamé suit and orange specs, gives it gusto for ‘Pinball Wizard’, ‘The Bitch Is Back’ and ‘Bennie and the Jets’ – so much so that you wonder how his voice will last two hours (it does).”

She added: “Sunday’s performance is partly a trip down memory lane. But it also feels like a subtle handing of the pop baton to the next generation, who John each introduces like he’s on his radio show, outlining how he discovered them with genuine enthusiasm.”

Meanwhile, McCartney recently hosted the National Portrait Gallery’s first major exhibition since it re-opened, with a collection of 250 previously unseen photographs from his personal archive chronicling the height of Beatlemania.