ON Sir Paul McCartney’s official Facebook page there’s a video clip of his concert earlier this month at the River Plate Stadium, Buenos Aires. 

McCartney and his band are playing for the first time the moving ballad, Now and Then, which had painstakingly evolved from a solo demo that John Lennon had made in the late Seventies, and which was finally released, to acclaim, around a year ago.

On stage, McCartney and his band are flanked and towered over by giant screens showing footage of the Beatles in their heyday: in the studio, in concert, waving to cheering crowds at an airport. The emotions were too much for many fans at the River Plate, who were moved to tears. “I was there yesterday, when he played this song a group of white birds flew over the stadium”, one fan wrote on the Facebook page. “It was magical”.

The occasion was of course all the more affecting because Lennon’s birthday would have been on October 9. “Happy Birthday John,” McCartney posted on the page. “Thanks for being there”.

McCartney’s Got Back tour opened in Montevideo, Uruguay, on the first of October, with two dates at the River Plate on the fifth and sixth. Other dates in South America are following before the tour shifts to Europe: it visits Paris and Madrid before arriving at Liverpool’s Co-op Live stadium on December 14 and 15 and then London’s O2 on December 18 and 19. For anyone fortunate enough to have secured tickets for any of these shows, it will indeed be a merry Christmas.

McCartney, 82, is one of a number of rock stars who are still touring, still recording. The music journalist and broadcaster David Hepworth alights on them in his latest book, Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why Rock Stars Never Retire.

The book, Hepworth explains, is about “how some of them managed to keep on working longer than the rest of us for the simple reason that they wanted to, and the more important reason that we wanted them to. It turned out they would be addicted to providing what we turned out to be addicted to consuming. They liked to feel young and we liked to feel that they still were. This was a two-way street. The pull was every but as important as the push”. He goes on to quote an old saying: being a musician is not a job, it’s an incurable disease”.

Certainly, McCartney’s Got Back tour has been attracting rave reviews from fans and critics alike.

“Reviewing the Santiago show for the Australian website, Noise11, Karen Freedman wrote: “Even after seeing Paul McCartney many, many times, I am still amazed by his youthful energy. Playing for nearly three hours, he just doesn’t stop! Switching from his Hofner bass, to electric guitar, to piano to acoustic guitar and back again, he delighted the 40,000 plus crowd, who lapped up every word Paul sang and said, sometimes in broken Spanish. In unison, they’d chant Olé Olé Olé in between the beloved tunes McCartney has created over his 60-year career”.

'A waterfall of Beatles': Harry Benson's memories of 1964

It was, she added, a joy to witness him perform Now And Then: “Complete with a new video in the background, and Paul on vocals, it was mucho emotional”.

During the soundtrack for that show, incidentally, McCartney spotted a young Chilean couple, Yamil Alamo and Leonora Pereira, dressed as 1970s versions of himself and his late wife Linda McCartney. They were holding a sign that read: “Paul: Give us a handshake and we’ll get married”. 

According to NME, he invited them on stage, and Alamo knelt down and proposed. “This was a very special moment for us because for many years we have tried to meet him and today is the day! I don’t have words to describe the experience,” Alamo said later.

Jonah Krueger, writing about the Uruguay concert for the Consequence of Sound website, described how McCartney “ripped through a whopping 37 songs, including hits like A Hard Day’s Night, Blackbird, Jet, Get Back, Let It Be, Live and Let Die, and Hey Jude before closing out with an encore that boasted the latter half of the famous Abbey Road medley.

“Notably, he didn’t pull out any cuts from his most recent album, McCartney III. In fact, he only played two solo songs from the 21st century, New, from 2013’s New and Dance Tonight from 2007’s Memory Almost Full.”.

The setlist from the Uruguay show also included In Spite of All the Danger, one of the first songs recorded (in July 1958) by The Quarrymen, as well as such Beatles classics as A Hard Day’s Night, Love Me Do, Blackbird, Lady Madonna, Something and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.

Beatles to release 'last song', written by John Lennon 40 years ago

Interest in all things Beatles and McCartney has never quite waned despite changing tastes and trends in modern music.

Peter Jackson’s groundbreaking documentary series, Get Back, which was put together from 60 hours of footage shot in January 1969 and more than 150 hours of audio, has become one of the greatest rock documentaries ever. It also contains the entirety of the rooftop concert in London’s Savile Row – the Beatles’ last live performance as a group.

Now Disney+ has announced that Beatles ’64, an new documentary from producer Martin Scorsese and director David Tedeschi, will stream exclusively on Disney+ starting on November 29.  In the words of the Beatles website, “The film captures the electrifying moment of The Beatles’ first visit to America. Featuring never-before-seen footage of the band and the legions of young fans who helped fuel their ascendance, the film gives a rare glimpse into when The Beatles became the most influential and beloved band of all time”.

McCartney, Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr arrived in New York City’s Kennedy Airport on February 7, 1964, to be greeted by thousands of fans. The group’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show was enthralled more than 73 million viewers, the most watched television event of its time.

The film includes rare footage filmed by the documentary film-makers Albert and David Maysles.

That epic time in the Beatles’ history was also reflected by McCartney’s bestselling book, 1964: Eyes of the Storm, a collection of photographs he took between December 1963 and Miami the following February. Exhibitions of the pictures have so far attracted more than a quarter of a million visitors to prominent venues in London, Virginia, Tokyo and Brooklyn.

Sixty years after he shot those images, McCartney has never forgotten the life-changing nature of that first journey to America. “By the end of February 1964”, he writes in the introduction to his book, “after our visit to America and three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, we finally had to admit that we would not, as we had originally feared, just fizzle out as many groups do. We were in the vanguard of something more momentous, a revolution in the culture, especially as it affected the youth. This was something we may have felt in some primal, unconscious way, but that is a realm that would be taken up later by rock critics and historians, even well into the twenty-first century...”

There is no disputing McCartney's pivotal role in popular culture of the last seven decades. Little wonder that hundreds of thousands of people, even those far too young to have experienced Beatlemania at first hand, are desperate to see him play in concert while they still can.