Credit: Far Out / Paul McCartney / Wings
Sat 5 September 2026 20:00, UK
Paul McCartney has written so many stone-cold classics that no night would be long enough for him to sing everything you wanted to hear.
He already performs marathon concerts as it is, and, as the perennial people pleaser that he has always been, he tries to cram in as much of what everybody in the audience wants to hear night after night. Though any calls to can ‘Hey Jude’ and all of the “na-na-na-nas” from his live shows forever seem to fall on deaf ears, McCartney has mentioned a few times over the years about something he’s noticed at shows by his fellow 1960s-survivor, Bob Dylan: “I get it if he doesn’t want to do ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Maybe he’s fed up with that. But I would like to hear it”
Sparking debate about the obligation between an artist and their audience, it’s clear that McCartney considers what his audience wants to hear to be of equal, or maybe even greater, importance to what he wants to play. But he might just have found some kind of halfway house between the positions of playing just to please the fans and playing purely for his own benefit.
In a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, McCartney lifted the curtain a little on his song-selection process ahead of a run of dates, revealing, “What I do is, each tour or each concert we’re going to do, I will go back into the catalogue and think, ‘Wait a minute, we could do that one’, and there are a few little hidden gems… It’s like a little treasure trove, you know? You can think of songs like ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’. You think, ‘You know, that could go live’.”
And, sure enough, McCartney debuted the song, as a duet with Neil Young, at the Desert Trip Festival in California on October 8th, 2016. But it’s not just with The Beatles that he has an extraordinary back-catalogue. Alan Partridge might even have been onto something when he referred to McCartney’s other group as “the band The Beatles could have been”.
And so, similarly, the ex-Beatle mentioned songs from later in his career that could also be brought to life on stage, saying, “I can think of Wings things. People keep requesting ‘Uncle Albert’. It’d be great to do, but it’s just a little bit of a challenge to learn, ’cause these are not 12-bars. But once you get them, and once you do them right, they kind of feel like 12-bars. That’s the trick”.
An unlikely number one in 1971, ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ is not actually a Wings song, coming instead from that liminal time period Paul and Linda spent between bands, but sonically it shares almost all of its DNA with the music that Wings would go on to make. With all those sweeping strings, constant time-signature changes, nonsense noises and vocals, studio effects and environmental recording appearing in the song, it’s no wonder that McCartney has never attempted to bring it to the stage in the half-decade since recording it.
Further reading: From The Vault
But if he can do it for ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’, ‘Penny Lane’, the explosive ‘Live and Let Die’ and ‘Mrs Vandebilt’ (which only received its live debut in 2008), then he could surely do something similar with ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’.
And, if or when he finally does decide to live a little and sing the song in concert, there’s no doubt that every audience member present will feel their heads across the sky, and their feet up off the ground.
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