Waiting for Paul McCartney to phone is a nail-biting experience. Whole days pass. Timetables are agreed, then rescheduled, then cancelled altogether. As the most successful pop musician in history, and still one of the most famous men on the planet, the former Beatle clearly operates by his own rules.
And he can afford to. With a personal fortune reportedly worth £800 million, even half an hour of his interview time is more precious than gold.
Still remarkably busy at 69, when many performers might consider retiring, McCartney is currently criss-crossing the US with his latest stadium mega-tour, subtitled On the Run after his 1973 Wings album,Band on the Run.
Two days after we speak, he launches the tour with a marathon 2½-hour set in front of a Las Vegas crowd that includes Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon and George Harrison’s widow Olivia. Even now, 40 years after they disbanded, the long shadow of the Beatles is never far away.
Next month, McCartney will play two gigantic concerts at New York’s Yankee Stadium. Other dates follow across July and August, punctuated by extended breaks. This is unusual for a major rock tour, where every day between shows is a financial drain. But as McCartney explains when we finally speak, this stop-start schedule allows him to maximise time with his seven-year-old daughter Beatrice, in accordance with the terms of his acrimonious divorce from Heather Mills in 2008.
“Nowadays, because of the way I am after the divorce, it’s a custody thing,” McCartney says. “I have my little girl half the time. So what we do is, I tour in the periods when I don’t have her. It’s not a full-on tour, which actually is brilliant. We play gigs in the downtime and it means we’re very hungry to play. Usually if you’re on tour you are like: where are we today? Is this St Louis or Cincinnati? You can get very bored with it. So this actually works out fine.”
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