I love the Beatles—who doesn’t?—but give that bloke Macca credit. He enjoyed a whirlwind second career after the band’s breakup. This body of work would ensure his legendary status even without the Fab Four. Below are my ten favorite Paul McCartney moments outside of the Beatles. Happy listening! If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $6 per month).Paul McCartney recreates a duet with John Lennon at Glastonbury in 2022Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary Get Back on the final days of the Beatles did more than revisit the past. It was also healing—for both fans and the surviving musicians. The healing moment for me happened when I saw McCartney dancing with Lennon right there in Abbey Road Studios. This took place at the very moment when the Beatles were allegedly rupturing in acrimony and distrust. The surviving film tells a different story.
Even at the end, these four musicians were deeply attuned to each other (that’s the right word in more than one sense), and shared happy moments of intimacy—just like a family. They had gone through extraordinary experiences together, akin to comrades in war, that no outsider could possibly understand. Such ties are almost unbreakable. So I wasn’t surprised when McCartney decided to borrow a film clip from 1970 and use it in live performance more than 50 years later. Seeing this rediscovered footage had psychically reunited him with his old mate. You can feel it in the clip below. When I first saw it, tears came to my eyes. I’m not ashamed to admit that. But I wasn’t alone. When John Lennon appears on the screen, the audience responds audibly—not applause, or cheers, but just a deep, collective sigh of beatitude. McCartney singing live in concert with a young John Lennon in 2022 is like an old couple coming together again after years of separation. It’s Yin embracing Yang. The Apollonian merges with the Dionysian. Opposites are reconciled. So if you want some positive vibes in our troubled times, here it comes. Let everybody have a good year. Let everybody see the sun shine.  Paul McCartney plays bass with an obscure Afrobeat band from MalawiThis only got eight thousand views on YouTube. How is that possible? But almost nobody in the media wrote about this, or even noticed it. But it’s an irresistible track, and testifies to McCartney’s versatility as a bassist. You might think he’d been jamming with Afrobeat bands for the last thirty years.  Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to The Honest Broker to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. A subscription gets you:
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My 10 Favorite Paul McCartney Post-Beatles Musical Moments
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