Drammen • Tuesday, September 26, 1989

About

The 1st concert of the Paul McCartney world tour, in front of an audience of 5000. From the “New World Tour” tour book, remembering the 1989/90 tour:

OSLO – It’s always a bit frightening, the first night — and that was the first night for 13 years. On with the light brown corduroys definitely. For everyone. But the people are what it really comes down to. They come in and there are all these shining faces! You start to feel, That’s all right then.

In rehearsal it’s, Wo-oh-oh, are we going to sound bad? Are they going to show up? Well, I remember getting very nervous before the NME Pollwinners concert with The Beatles in about 1963. So nervous I was thinking, Oh man, I’m not sure I want to do this for a living.

In fact, you’re always on the brink of giving up. For an easy life you’d just choose recording. I mean, friends say, What! You’re going out on tour again? A look of dismay comes over their faces. How long for? They know you’ve got a nice house, a nice life, they can’t see why you want to do it.

But you write in isolation, you record in isolation, you release a record in isolation, watch it go up and down the charts in isolation, listen to it on the radio in isolation. A gig is the other way of doing it, the other pay-off.

I think what crushes a lot of performers is they think they’re facing a hall full of critics. Quite early in the tour we had one incident that stuck in my mind. The first three or four rows weren’t reacting much. That was because they were full of journalists, but we didn’t know that until afterwards. And, of course, the band needs those front rows to be jumping up and down and screaming.

When that happens the band can get a bit nasty. So we’re all going, OK then, I see. Right, the next number is … We were getting really pissed off and starting to throw the show away. Then there was a little break for some reason and one of the roadies comes on and whispers to me, It’s going down great at the back! Oops. That was a lesson.

It was OK after that. We played to the back. We couldn’t see them, we couldn’t even hear them, but we played to them. I’ve kind of learned from that never to turn against an audience. There’s bound to be someone out there who’s loved you for 20 years and that’s who you’ve got to play to.

Last updated on August 13, 2019

Drammenshallen

This was the 1st and only concert played at Drammenshallen.

Setlist for the concert