Paul McCartney, Manchester review: The last great Sixties showman is nothing short of breathtaking

The rising storm of strings from “A Day in the Life” reach their skull-burst crescendo, the Hofner bass on the stage-back screen explodes into fireworks and Paul McCartney steps onto the Co-Op Arena stage for the first of four UK shows to a reception worthy of a homecoming emperor. There’s something fundamentally historic about sharing a room – even a giant black box with nightmarish toilet facilities – with the world’s most important living musician. Particularly since the cracks in his voice, noted by many watching his momentous 2022 Glastonbury headline set at home, had suggested that this 82-year-old titan of pop might only have a limited number of convincing “oooh”s, “beep-beep yeah!”s and “bedah-bedah-AAAAAH!”s left in him.

Nah. As the chord of legend on “A Hard Day’s Night” – the sound of the starting gun on the modern rock era – timewarps us instantly to 1964, Macca’s voice is in fine, if mildly crackly fettle and the early period Beatles tunes peppering the first hour of the set (a souped-up “Drive My Car”; Macca’s Motown masterpiece “Got to Get You into My Life”) sound as fresh as ’66. There’s more Sixties folk thrill in the two-and-a-half minutes of his acoustic “I’ve Just Seen a Face” than the entirety of Bob Dylan’s last tour and, sat bawling at the piano as visual effects bring old family snapshots to life on the screens, he still carries the majestic, feral yelps of “Maybe I’m Amazed” wonderfully, for all the song’s antiquity. Want to feel old? “That baby in my coat,” McCartney says, “she’s got four kids of her own now.”

Faced nightly with arenas full of Pepper clones and “Thank You Paul” signs, McCartney is well aware of his archivistic duties as pretty much sole keeper of the most sacred catalogue in rock history. In front of screens that transform into virtual Cavern Clubs and regularly fill with Fab footage old and AI-generated, he delivers a set (largely unchanged from Glasto 2022, but it wasn’t broke) drawn almost entirely from The Beatles and Wings canons, carefully curated to scrape off much of the cheese. Wings come in for some artful, bluesy and anthemic revisionism: “Junior’s Farm” and “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five” are all glam and grit, “Let Me Roll It” is full of Eagles pomp and Hendrix shredding (right down to a “Foxy Lady” coda) and “Jet” is, frankly, hench. Bar the marching band malarkey of “Let ’Em In”, it’s like “Silly Love Songs” never happened.

And when it comes to The Beatles, Macca enters full flashback mode. “We’re going back in time,” he says as his band gather close around him on accordions and ramshackle stand-up drumkits to resurrect The Beatles’ first recorded song “In Spite of All the Danger” – a pony trek skiffle tune with a brush of Beatles magic to it – and their first single “Love Me Do”, played jug band style. Rising on a video tower for a breathtaking “Blackbird”, he reveals that he received a text today from a woman who was at The Beatles’ legendary show in Jacksonville, Florida in 1964 when they refused to play to a segregated audience and broke barriers with Beatlemania: “We were all Beatles fans,” the message read, “we were all just screaming.” As has become Macca gig tradition, he brings out one of George Harrison’s personal ukeleles to play the opening of “Something” that then billows into phenomenal, full-blooded life. He even gets the arena to recreate a Beatles scream; for a few brief moments, we are Shea Stadium.

At another crucial moment, we’re on the Apple rooftop too. As unveiled at Glastonbury, McCartney repeats his tear-jerking turn on “I’ve Got a Feeling” with the isolated video vocal of John Lennon, as close to a reunion of the finest songwriting partnership of all time as we’re ever going to get. Even the corny composite clips of the aged Paul and Ringo with young Johns and Georges that accompany the band’s graciously grandiose new single “Now and Then” are touching, even if they make the song feel like it should be called “Uncanny Valley Forever”.

For someone with such a rich post-Wings solo catalogue, the few selections tonight feel a bit clunky and indulgent. “Come on to Me” is one of Macca’s more Viagra-fuelled pomp rockers, “My Valentine” a soppy piece not helped by having videos of Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman earnestly signing the lyrics, and his Lennon tribute “Here Today” exposes the weaknesses both in McCartney’s voice and the song itself. In this quarter, a touch more of 1989’s Flowers in the Dirt wouldn’t go amiss.

But these are minuscule quibbles when the man has the greatest closing hour of music at his disposal of any singer alive. When he finally starts ladling on the cheese for “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Wonderful Christmastime”, complete with indoor snowstorms, a child’s choir and a trio of “horny elves” on percussion, the Co-Op Arena laps it up like Fab-pop fondue. “Live and Let Die” blows the entire show budget inside three minutes of flames, fireworks and pulse-pumping drama. “Get Back” comes accompanied by a montage of what must be every smile in all 8,000 hours of Peter Jackson’s similarly titled series. “Let It Be” remains the ultimate roof-lifting gospel number. And “Hey Jude” is the singalong of that, this and every forthcoming century.

The set ends with the closing section of the Abbey Road medley, from a stunning “Golden Slumbers” to a stirring “Carry That Weight”, and the realisation that McCartney could play an entirely different three hours of music here tomorrow night and it’ll still be one of the best gigs of your life. While his peers are packing up, powering down or simply fading away, Paul McCartney is looking ever more like the last great Sixties showman. And they don’t come greater.