This Monday, December 9, Paul McCartney, 82, celebrates the first of the two concerts he has offered in Madrid since 2016. It will be at the WiZink Center, the scene of the only Spanish dates on his tour Got Back. With an average price of 130 euros, tickets for the 17,000 spectators that the venue houses have been sold out for months. Among them, there is a ticket for 900 euros: a special pass that gives access to the sound check that the musician organizes hours before and to a VIP seat, as EL PAÍS music journalist Carlos Marcos explains in the guide with the details of the concerts.
This entry is called Hot Sound Packages and includes a t-shirt, tour poster and VIP seat. “But the highlight is the sound test, in the same venue as the recital and a few hours before, which ends up being a concert of about 60 minutes,” says Marcos, with a repertoire “almost totally different from what the entire pavilion will later enjoy.” ”.
The sound check begins with about five minutes of the group improvising, with McCartney playing guitar instead of bass. “And then he downloads rock and roll classics that marked him, like Blue Suede Shoes o Matchbox (both by Carl Perkins), songs lost in his solo career, that song that the Beatles lent to the Rolling Stones, I Wanna Be Your Man, or American songbook classics like Midnight Special, who recorded everything from Lead Belly to Creedence Clearwater Revival. McCartney changes almost the entire program in each city. It is a whim that the British musician indulges in, which the wealthy and privileged enjoy,” says the music journalist in his article. A whim, furthermore, different from the one that can later be enjoyed at the concert, where 65% of what will be played belongs to the largest catalog in the history of pop, that of The Beatles.
Here you can read the complete article by Carlos Marcos about the keys to his musical show, which according to what has been seen in other concerts of Got Back goes on for three hours: Paul McCartney in Spain: why this concert changes lives