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Sat 13 December 2025 18:00, UK
Most artists spend their lives reaching creative and commercial high points that Paul McCartney had surmounted more than once before he even hit 30.
With a mix of their unprecedented creative dynamism and the countercultural shifts in the 1960s air, The Beatles were whisked from local lads done good in Liverpool’s Merseybeat scene to global musical institute across several short years.
In the meantime, the Fab Four were thrust into the dizzying goddamn peaks of Beatlemania, ushering in the British invasion and overseeing an unfolding body of work that told music’s tumultuous tapestry across that heady decade.
What towering summit does McCartney cast his mind back to when grappling with The Beatles’ legacy? Was it first playing The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 when American conquest was in their sights? Perhaps capturing the Summer of Love’s psychedelic idyll with the seminal Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? Or does ‘Yesterday’s eternal hymn trigger the greatest satisfaction at his work entering the immortal song canon decades after he’s gone?
It’s hard to argue with the power of a live show, as embedded in McCartney’s mind as the most immediate internal relic of The Beatles’ rollercoaster. When asked by Time Out during the run-up to his Abu Dhabi gig in 2011, McCartney was quizzed on his most memorable gig, prompting an answer which highlighted a fever pitch in his career he never saw again, Fab Four or solo.
“The truth is there are so many that it’s difficult to pick a winner,” McCartney confessed. “But the one that popped was when The Beatles first played Shea Stadium in New York. That was really the first big stadium gig for music. No one had ever done that before, but we were able to draw that many people. I think there were 56,000. It was hysterical from our point of view because the fans were so crazy, we couldn’t really hear anything we were doing. It was a first, and was a forerunner of all the big stadium shows that have happened since.”
It’s typically the generally agreed moment when The Beatles had reached their cultural apex. With Help! behind them and Rubber Soul in the works, the band was standing on the cusp of their songwriting evolution and conceptual expansions, plus a subtle fatigue was already setting in; their sets drowned by creaming fans and all around hysteria. But it was Shea Stadium’s lofty vantage where McCartney was able to see how far they’d come, and sense a new chapter emerging in the Fab Four lore.
“We had such a laugh, there was nowhere to go but just to laugh hysterically, so I think that made it very memorable,” McCartney looked back with some mirth.
Concluding, “It really was crazy. You couldn’t hear a thing, it was just like playing in the middle of a billion seagulls, it was quite a noise. But there have probably been a hundred other gigs since then that I could go down the list and say – that was memorable too.”
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