I stopped admitting I don’t like The Beatles years ago: it’s too much conversational dynamite, like causally admitting you support the death penalty or don’t believe abused dogs deserve to be re-homed.
But I have my reasons, and his name was Mr Tony*. Mr Tony was my High School music teacher who also ran a sideline in amateur dramatics. His approach to winning a classroom of self-conscious teenagers over to the power of music was to line us up next to a piano and make us sing his favourite songs for an hour, a collection Alan Partridge would call ‘the best of The Beatles’: Imagine. Hey Jude. Yesterday. All You Need is Love. As he sang them and we murmured along, Mr Tony would look sadistically over his glasses for whoever seemed the most uncomfortable and then make them sing a solo verse. We all dreaded that, and my aversion to the greatest band of all time was born.
Some decades later, and a giant singalong around a piano is more or less what Paul McCartney delivered during his historic Glastonbury headliner set – or at least by the end of it. Only rather than united by fear, everyone watching was united by… what exactly? Nostalgia, certainly. Joy, too. Then there was the unified, Twitter-led cry of: oh my God he’s 80! Eighty-years-old – that’s older than Joe Biden, by the way – and not only still with a full head of hair and a trim waistline but the energy to play a 2 hour set, most of which on his feet. The effect was of time standing still; it convinced us, on some level, that nothing ever has to change. If Paul McCartney can still do two hours and the Beatles can still be the biggest band in the world, then maybe we can hide out here safely at the edges of a darkening world. It’s the same feeling as seeing David Attenborough smile at a stick insect or the Queen, well, just walking upright.
The first hour was a brilliant, frustrating slog. “When we do a Beatles song, all your phones light up and it’s like a galaxy of stars,” Macca said at one point, pouting behind his piano. “When we do a new song, it’s like a black hole. We don’t mind, we’re going to do them anyway.” Never the biggest rebel in rock history, there was something cool about how he refused to go straight into singalong territory, making everyone work for it a bit instead. I also liked the anecdotes about Hendrix and various other memories from the 60s and 70s, which had an air of a grandfather at Christmas taking his turkey leg first and telling whatever anecdote he damn well pleases. If you’re going to be the oldest Glastonbury headliner of all time, you might as well lean into it a bit. There was even an out-of-step with the times faux pas when Johnny Depp suddenly appeared on the screen in the 2012 music video for “My Valentine”.
But when McCartney finally moved into crowd pleasing mode, starting with a lovely, tension-releasing rendition of “Blackbird”, my personal Beatles redemption moment got fully underway. A medley of “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" was an Abbey Road flex. The duet with the isolated voice of John Lennon on “I’ve Got a Feeling” was a simple and poignant use of technology that didn’t involve a single disturbing hologram. Bringing out Dave Grohl (something for the kids!) and Bruce Springsteen was a masterstroke, primarily because the two, both former Glasto headliners themselves, stood by his side with such childlike reverence, for a moment it looked like an old timer’s version of that viral clip where Dave pulls a young fan out of the audience to perform with him. Nothing quite reaffirms your status as a music God than two other, lesser musical Gods looking at you for approval.
Then we got down to it: the stuff of my personal trauma. “Let It Be”. “Live and Let Die”. “Helter Skelter”. And of course "Hey Jude', with its almost dementedly euphoric nah-nah-nah-naaah – something between a hymn and a football chant – which still seemed to be dispersing and settling into the Glastonbury air like a trail of incense long after the crowds wandered off. Despite myself, I loved every moment of it, the memories of my High School music classroom finally buried for good. Perhaps it was the feeling that what we'd just witnessed would not – could not – ever happen again. Or maybe it was Macca's double thumbs up to the camera as he departed the stage. Either way I realised: you're never too old to headline Glastonbury, and you're never too old to grow up and like The Beatles.
