An evening with an air of spontaneity, without the adulation, but a few hits and a sing-a-long.
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Date: 10 July 2007
An evening with an air of spontaneity, without the adulation, but a few hits and a sing-a-long.
The last time Paul McCartney played at the ICA was at some point in the Seventies with Wings. He called his return here a 'party' on several occasions and the evening had the air of something spontaneous and informal about it, as if yes, what could be more natural for all concerned than hanging out with one of the architects of 20th century popular music while he plucked a few songs out on his guitar?
An evening stripped of reverence then - or at least frenzied adulation. Bar a few cries of adoring, endless love from some of the more devout members of the audience it was intimate this was a night defined by shared intimacy, shared familiarity. Dressed casually, McCartney chatted easily with the crowd ("I watched that film Munich by Steven Spielberg last night. It was pretty good"), even as he unfurled a collection of songs stretching from his new album Memory Almost Full back through Wings' hits like Jet to Beatles classics such as Hey Jude and Get Back.
Up close you glimpse one of the secrets of real success - make it look easy. McCartney breezes through his set even as, expertly, he orchestrates the mood in the room through moments of solemnity - Let It Be dedicated to a long time monitor engineer who died recently - to the collective euphoria of a mass sing-a-long to Hey Jude.
Best moment? Here Today, McCartney's moving tribute to John Lennon. "We just did a gig in a record shop in LA and I was singing that song and I was just about holding it together emotionally and then I saw this woman weeping and I just lost it man." As with that LA show the singer, suspended briefly in reverie, seemed genuinely sorrowful. If he had 'lost it' it's likely that much of the audience would have done so as well. Not for the first time that evening, the distance between artist and audience seemed to dissolve to nothingness.
Ekow Eshun