Album: Paul McCartney

Back in the world, Parlophone

Thursday 20 March 2003 20:00 EST
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Though comprised of performances recorded at last year's shows in America, Mexico and Japan, this live double has a different running order from that of its Back in the US sister album, reflecting the set list for the European dates. This, of course, is Macca's greatest hits show, the one about which there was all that brouhaha about re-crediting Lennon-McCartney songs as "composed by Paul McCartney & John Lennon". Accordingly, it's replete with punchy versions of Beatles classics such as "Hello Goodbye", "Getting Better" and "I Saw Her Standing There", slightly laboured versions of more downbeat material like "She's Leaving Home" and "Eleanor Rigby", and rather more from his Wings and solo albums than one might desire. The highlights, unsurprisingly, are all Beatles: the exuberant opener "Hello Goodbye", the wistful accordion and harmony of "Here, There And Everywhere", and McCartney urging on the Mexican audience during the coda of "Hey Jude". Alongside the radiant charm of the Beatles cuts, Wings "classics" such as "Live and Let Die" and "Band on the Run" are exposed as overblown Seventies prog-pop schlock – the kind of thing big stars get to do in the studio when there's no other ego of comparable size to tell them that a cod-reggae middle eight really sucks. I doubt McCartney's current band has the spunk to gainsay him, judging by the guitarist Rusty Anderson's sleeve note, in which he describes playing with Paul as "like loitering in the vortex of a recurring supernova as the energy saturates the collective consciousness, gets recycled back to us and mutates into the next wave exchange."

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