I Saw Him Standing There

In the heroin rush of a few hours, they would flash before me in the flesh; like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, I had to literally stop the images and rearrange them to make sense.

Actually, I had several more images to grapple with: some weeks earlier, I8217;d travelled to Mumbai for the Rolling Stones concert and I realised comparisons would be inevitable. The audience profile was the same, the music too, give or take a few blue notes, wouldn8217;t be very different.

I couldn8217;t have been more wrong.

After the opening act of dancers and other circus-hall entertainers, the stage went dark and the canned music died. All of a sudden, in a moment of synchronicity, the lights came on, the first bars of Hello Goodbye crashed through and I saw him standing there.

For the next 150 minutes this 61-year-old rocked his audience through 36 songs, including 24 Beatles numbers. He played nonstop8212;bass, guitar, piano, ukulele8212;and never left the stage except for two encores. This wasn8217;t the penultimate night of a world tour as much as a musical tour

de force.

That was one big difference between this concert and the one at Mumbai. Sure, the Stones played full-tilt too, for two hours in muggy April heat, but there was something clinical8212;impersonal?8212;about their show. Macca rocked; he screamed, twisted, boogied, joked, chatted8230; he played his heart out.

The difference was in the emotion. And, as I looked around me and saw 60-year-old women really giving it a shake, I knew why: Macca was among his people. Age-wise, of course, but especially, roots-wise. McCartney and his fellow Beatles were essentially working-class folk from northern England. So were most in the audience, many of whom were watching their first Macca show one woman had been waiting since 1962. The facility with which they connected was something Jagger and Mumbai never could have8212;and mercifully, the Stones didn8217;t try.

These, I realised, are the people the songs were originally written for, the fans who would crowd the Cavern Club before the Fab Four became famous, who would buy the records, wait at the airports, throw their knickers8230;these were the Beatlemaniacs.

When he sang She8217;s Leaving Home, rich in typically English metaphor, every word seemed to strike a chord. When they heard the opening bars of Let It Be, it wasn8217;t a Beatles Greatest Hit, simply a song they8217;d first heard as teenagers back in 1969, probably as a single with the Granny Smith Apple logo. That8217;s what made the evening special. You could, if you closed your eyes and allowed your imagination a bit of leeway, even make believe that this was Beatlemania all over again minus the knickers.

And, of course, minus John, George and Ringo, though they were virtually omnipresent via the video screens, as was Linda. There was the John tribute, Here Today from the Tug of War album, and, to fit Ringo in, the chorus of Yellow Submarine. The loudest, longest ovation of the night was reserved for Something; ironic, because it was the only bum note, sung in upbeat tempo by a ukulele-strumming Paul. You could hear, through the twanging of the strings, the faint sounds of George turning in his grave.

But Macca redeemed himself several times over by avoiding the temptation to do newer songs, promote new albums, and sticking to his greatest hits. With the able backing of his four-man band, whose familiarity with each other belied the fact that they were on their first tour together.

As the coda to The End8212;one of the last songs the Beatles recorded8212;died away, the one thought on everyone8217;s mind was, 8216;That8217;s probably the last time we get to see him8217;. With a kid on the way, romance clearly back in his life and nothing to prove, why should he do it all over again?

The answer lies in an interview he gave while on tour. Why bother, he was asked. 8216;For the sheer f8230;.g FUN of it all.8217;

So there8217;s hope yet8230;