Imagine

 After a week of silence and withdrawal, my heart heavy, sadness for our country was punctuated by a tiny sliver of distraction: news that Paul McCartney is in Australia, that he would be playing in Sydney, and that tickets were still available. I found this out on Wednesday last week, by Thursday I had decided to go with a friend, whose fiftieth birthday is only three days before mine, so I had her birthday present sorted too. We were off to Sydney: for me, this would be the first stadium concert I have attended.

The Allianz stadium was full, on a cool, still night, slightly cloudy and full-mooned. My friend’s brother joined us as he lives in Sydney. The concert started with some Beatles favourites, interspersed with new songs, which as Paul McCartney said in one of his chats with the audience, don’t light up the stadium with their camera lights as the old favorites do, but he doesn’t care. Aged 81, he sang, played six different guitar-family instruments including a ukulele; and played the piano accompaniment for the whole period of almost three hours, only drinking a few sips of water during this time. He shared anecdotes about what it had been like starting out, played us the first demo song that the original band every played (you could hear the blues influence); and peppered his anecdotes with compliments to his friends and fellow band members. He seemed unaffected by the fame and adulation.

The show included two large camera screens flanking the stage so we could see the band members better, and another screen behind them provided footage of images like the yellow submarine and some fantastical animations, as well as excerpts from the recent documentary about the Beatles that I would really like to see and footage of marching bands and crowds, including flashes of the LGBTI rainbow flag that was mirrored in the band coming out with the Australian and LGBTI flags for real after the encore. His drummer looked like an American rapper, with gold earrings in both ears, and he danced a solo in one of the songs with his flossing and exuberant dancing. I captured a bit of that on video.

I liked Paul McCartney’s story about how he tries to avoid reading the signs that some people bring to hold up at the concerts as they are distracting, but couldn’t resist some of them such as the Japanese man dressed in a white Japanese outfit with red headband containing kanji script, who regularly comes to the concerts with a sign that reads ‘Japanese lesson’ and a word in Japanese which apparently means ‘Fantastic!

He encouraged the crowd to sing along, and ended the concert with some moving footage of John Lennon singing in a concert, while Paul McCartney sang with him in real life.

It was a lovely Beatles and modern-day interlude. McCartney made many people feel happy that night. I feel a bit less flat, as I look towards my work’s Healing Day on Friday.