The UK leg of The Beatles legend’s Got Back tour kicked off last night with a lengthy setlist of hits
Sir Paul McCartney played the first of two sold-out nights at Manchester’s Co-op Live last night – and one song on the lengthy setlist came as a complete surprise to the audience. The Walton-born Beatles legend, 82, has been on his ‘Got Back’ tour since October, playing huge international gigs.
These are Sir Paul’s first gigs in the UK since his Glastonbury headline set in 2022 – and he previously said he was determined to keep an element of surprise to the shows. That was certainly the case on Saturday, December 14, when he played a massive hit that hasn’t been performed live by the star in six years.
About this weekend’s gigs, Sir Paul told the Mirror: “On the first night we can pull some surprises, but then the minute that gets on social media. It’s like the old comedians who used to complain that their jokes got told, so the next people who saw them knew the jokes.
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“I approach every show and every audience in a slightly different way depending on the location of the show, so I suppose that’s the way I change it up a little bit. You’ll see your set list published and we’ll go, ‘Right, we’re gonna change it!’ We keep trying to be ahead of the guy who’s giving the game away.
“I would like it much better if people had no idea what they were coming to see, but the only answer to that is for us to make changes occasionally. So if he said, ‘They open up with this song,’ we’ll go, ‘Let’s open up with a different song,’ just to prove them wrong.”
And Sir Paul did pull one of his intended surprises by adding festive classic Wonderful Christmastime to his setlist last night. The song hasn’t been performed live since 2018 making it a rare treat for last night’s audience.
Sir Paul’s ever-changing setlists on the ‘Got Back’ tour have included hits from The Beatles and Wings as well as The Quarrymen. After his Manchester shows, Sir Paul will take his tour onto London’s The O2.
One song that is sure to feature on every setlist is ‘Now and Then’, which was released in 2023 after a recording process that started in the late 1970s with a John Lennon demo, and ended with Ringo Starr and Sir Paul in the studio in 2022 finishing the song. It has been described as the last-ever Beatles song and it now has two Grammy nominations. Sir Paul has been including it in all his sets on the tour.
