Melbourne • Saturday, October 21, 2023

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On this day, Paul McCartney and his band were in Melbourne to perform the second show of their seven-concert Australian leg of the “Got Back” tour.

Three days later, Paul brought that astonishing show to the appropriately named Marvel Stadium in Melbourne. The previous show in Adelaide seemed like a small warm-up gig in comparison to the supersized crowd in Melbourne, as 56,000 people gathered to see Paul, who was primed and ready to rock all over again. With the final notes of the night still ringing in our ears, the Melbourne Herald were quick to call it “bloody amazing”.

Stuart Bell – Paul’s UK publicist – From Paul McCartney | News | For Whom The Bell Tells: ‘GOT BACK’ Australia Tour 2023, December 20, 2023

Hey Paul, you’ve still got it! McCartney ‘drinks in’ Melbourne, wows audience. His Saturday night Melbourne concert was full of Beatles hits, and bloody amazing.

From The Herald Sun, October 2023 – Quoted on Paul McCartney | News | For Whom The Bell Tells: ‘GOT BACK’ Australia Tour 2023, December 20, 2023

From Noise11.com, October 22, 2023:

The Beatles played six concerts in Melbourne on that one and only Australian tour of 1964, two shows each on the 15, 16 and 17th of June. The next time Paul was in Melbourne was for two Wings concerts on 13 and 14 November, 1975. There were two MCG concerts on 9 and 10 March, 1993, and two AAMI Park shows on 6 and 7 December, 2017. 21 October, 2023 at Marvel Stadium was special. It was the 13th and most likely the last time Sir Paul McCartney will ever perform in Melbourne, Australia.

With all that is going on currently in this zany world of ours it is wonderful that some of us can experience a true legend of our lifetime in the flesh. The songs of Paul McCartney are not only the soundtrack to our lives, they are the soundtrack to generations and they will be enjoyed for centuries to come. At a Paul McCartney concert, we are the privileged few who get to be in the presence of greatness for that moment of our lives. And that should not be taken for granted.

For his second date in on the seven-night Australian tour Sir Paul has upsized to the 53,000 capacity Marvel Stadium after the tour kicked-off in Adelaide with a more intimate 8,000 capacity arena.

The setlist spans from the very infancy of The Beatles with The Quarrymen’s In Spite of All The Danger’ (1958) through to the more recent ‘Egypt Station’, released 10 months after the 2017 Australian tour. What you have in-between is pure history.

When Paul performed with The Beatles in Melbourne in 1964 he was 22 years-old and the shows were 11 songs in 35 minutes. In 2023, at 80 years of age, Paul is performing nearly 40 songs over nearly three hours.

Curating a McCartney setlist must be a precession skill. He talks about putting in the ones the audience wants to hear but even on this tour that means classics like ‘Here There and Everywhere’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Back In The USSR’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘The Long and Winding Road’, ‘Fool On The Hill’, ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ ‘We Can Work It Out’ and ‘All My Loving’ don’t even fit. There is an entire other show in the songs he doesn’t do. There are 24 Beatles songs in this show alone. That in itself is more than twice as many as The Beatles performed in Melbourne in 1964.

It is great that Paul isn’t all about nostalgia. If you haven’t followed his 21st Century output, you should go back and investigate. The five 21st century songs ‘Dance Tonight’ (2007), ‘My Valentine’ (2012), ‘New’ (2013) and ‘Come On To Me’ and ‘Fuh You’ (2018) keep it relevant for Paul still consistently releases new music. “When we play a Beatles song, the room lights up with your phones but when we play new songs its like a black hole. We don’t care. We are going to play them anyway”, he said.

He was in fine form tonight, very chatty with the crowd, much chattier than on the 2017 Australian tour. His voice was also better too. In 2017 his voice took about four of five songs to settle. This time the vocal cords were there right from the start.

“Good evening Melbourne. Let me start by saying it is great to be back in Australia and we’ll have a bit of fun tonight,” he promised right up and he did not disappoint. There were “old songs, new songs and some inbetween songs,” he said. There were also lots of stories, like how he met Hendrix in the 60s and Jimi learned performed ‘Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band’ at a London show just days after The Beatles released the album. There was the story about how Jimi’s guitar was out of tune and he tried to get Eric Clapton to come up and tune it. That was all to do with a bit of Jimi’s ‘Foxey Lady’ extending out his Wings classic ‘Let Me Roll It’.

Jimi’s wasn’t the only dedication. George was honored with a ukulele rendition of ‘Something’, John with the ‘Tug of War’ dedication ‘Here Today’ as well as the incredible presentation of ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ performed as a virtual duet with John with thanks to new editing technology developed by Peter Jackson, who made the recent ‘Get Back’ documentary.

George Martin was also remembered for comforting the young Beatles on their first visit to Abbey Road studios. George had a sense of humour, Paul said, and encouraged The Beatles to also be themselves in the studio.

The pyrotechnics for ‘Live and Let Die’ were as powerful as the song and the lighting for ‘Helter Skelter’ was a show in itself.

Apart from the two Egypt Station songs, ‘Let ‘Em In’, ‘She’s A Woman’, ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ and ‘She Came In Through the Bathroom Window’ have never been performed by Paul before this 2023 Australian tour.

From The Sydney Morning Herald, October 22, 2023:

[…] The one major misstep of the night is the use of video footage of Johnny Depp, taken from the music video for 2012’s My Valentine. It caused controversy in 2022 at Glastonbury – McCartney’s last live performance before this Australian tour. The feeling at this show, at least for this critic, is the same – a curiosity about what message this ongoing support sends when the performance would have worked just as well without the clip.

With a songbook this strong, it’s hard to find much else to fault. The varied set spans McCartney’s entire career, and omissions are unavoidable with such a huge back catalogue. It’s a potent reminder of just how strange and wonderful The Beatles were – from Let It Be and Hey Jude to Helter Skelter and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, these songs are timeless, and singing them with a stadium of strangers is cathartic and magical.

Hi, about 2000 [sic – 200?] people attended the Melbourne soundcheck, we stood behind the barrier at the back of sections A & B (not right up against the stage). The entire band, including the horn section were there, while Paul sees it as a special ritual for the fans, it also serves the purpose of getting the balance of all the instruments, light, video & sound right. Paul started off playing his Les Paul guitar for the first instrumental jam to ease into it before continuing on guitar for Honey Don’t and Honey Hush. He switched to his Hofner bass for One After 909, introducing it as one of the first songs he wrote with John. The horn section was at the fore for Coming Up, slipping in the Dragnet theme as the main riff on one verse, the song accompanied by some awesome video visuals original stage from the Music video, complete with all the characters he & Linda portrayed. Then Paul switched to piano at the back of the stage for Women & Wives, Miss Ann, C’Moon (again the horn section getting a workout) and the instrumental Celebration, at one point forgetting how the middle section went. Paul headed back to the main stage. He stopped to ask how everyone was and look at some of the signs people had brought, then be strapped on his acoustic guitar for renditions of From Me To You and It’s So Easy. It was then on to the ukelele for solo rendition of Ram On/Big Barn Bed (just like the original record). Paul switched back to acoustic guitar (this time his old Epiphone Texan with the Detroit Red Wings sticker, the one he recorded Yesterday on) for a band version of Midnight Special before summoning his magic piano with the psychedelic paint scheme, only now it’s modernised and projected from a tv screen built into the piano side facing the audience so it can project the same visuals on the main screens. First up was New, complete with harpsichord tone, before finishing with Lady Madonna, an opportunity for the lighting and video crews to check their side was working properly. Paul checked that everyone was happy they’d tested everything, and told us we’d seem him again shortly, he turned to talk with the stage crew while we all shuffled off for a vegan dinner & opportunity to buy some merch without the long queues before the main show started.

User kaizersoze, October 22, 2023 – From Steve Hoffman Music Forums

Last updated on December 21, 2023

Marvel Stadium

This was the 1st and only concert played at Marvel Stadium.

Setlist for the soundcheck

Setlist for the concert