Flew In From Miami Beach (Piccadilly Circus PCCD-99/100)
Sun Life Stadium, Miami, FL – April 3rd, 2010
Disc 1 (79:55): Venus And Mars / Rock Show / Jet, All My Loving, Letting Go, Got To Get You Into My Life, Highway, Let Me Roll It / Foxy Lady, The Long and Winding Road, Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five, Let ‘Em In, My Love, I’m Looking Through You, Two Of Us, Blackbird, Here Today, Dance Tonight, Mrs Vandebilt, Eleanor Rigby, Something
Disc 2 (78:56): Sing the Changes, Band on the Run, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da, Back in the U.S.S.R., I’ve Got A Feeling, Paperback Writer, A Day in the Life / Give Peace A Chance, Let It Be, Live and Let Die, Hey Jude, Day Tripper, Lady Madonna, Get Back, Yesterday, Helter Skelter, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise), The End
Another tour means more Paul McCartney releases on Piccadilly Circus. The label issued several titles from the “Good Evening Europe” trek last December, and now has several releases from the “Up And Coming” tour of the US. Flew In From Miami Beach 2010 contains a very good to excellent audience tape of the entire show. Unlike the Europe tapes, this one is very enjoyable and is worth having.
The setlist is a bit different than before. Paul likes to introduce old songs that either haven’t been played in years (or decades) or have never been played live. For “Up And Coming” he reintroduces the old Venus And Mars opening triple of “Venus And Mars,” “Rock Show” and “Jet.” The only different is that “Rock Show” is truncated.
Also new are “Letting Go” and “Let ‘Em In,” both staples of the mid-seventies tours. Both suffer from a lack of a horn section however. “Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five” from Band On The Run is another new song which had never been played live before, which Paul acknowledges on stage. Most of the rest of the set are carried over from past tours.
A review in the Orlando Sentinel states:
“Up and Coming” is an odd name for a tour by Paul McCartney, who now can accurately sing ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ in the past tense.
“But you’re as young as you feel, as the saying goes, and apparently Sir Paul, at age 67, feels younger than a lot of rock stars a fraction of his age. In front of roughly 40,000 fans on Saturday at Sun Life Stadium (let’s see the kids draw that kind of crowd), the ex-Beatle played for a solid 2 hours and 45 minutes, more impressively mining his formidable catalog than in his 2005 arena show in Tampa.
There was a little of everything: Good potential for a contact high. Beatles Rock Band images on the big video screen. AARP members storming the barricades just like in the ‘60s – only with digital cameras, not protest signs. A ukulele-powered version of “Something.”
Although he mixed newer material into the set, most notably the woozy, vaguely psychedelic “Highway,” off his experimental project, The Fireman, McCartney mostly reveled in the nostalgia. He was charming, though not overly chatty, introducing old favorites with recollections about his storied past that were well-known to virtually everyone in the audience.
He reminisced about his first trip to Miami, to perform with the Fab Four on the Ed Sullivan show. “It was like paradise,” he said. “We were kids from Liverpool and we’d never seen anything like it. And it’s still cool.”
Also still cool: That timeless Beatles music, performed by the one guy on the planet most qualified to do it. (Sorry, Ringo.) For the record, McCartney still sounds terrific, with a voice nimble enough to turn on a dime from raucous to honey sweet in a set that hit all the obvious targets (“Let It Be,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “Hey Jude,” “Get Back,” “Yesterday”) as well as a few surprises.
Although the members of McCartney’s economically constructed 4-piece band were anonymous enough not to even warrant individual introductions from their boss, the musicians tackled the songs with flexibility. It can’t be easy to translate the studio grandeur of “A Day in the Life” to a concert stage, but the group offered a capable approximation on Saturday.
McCartney hitched that song to “Give Peace a Chance,” but didn’t add too many other new wrinkles to the much-loved material. “Eleanor Rigby,” “Two of Us,” “Paperback Writer” and others were delivered faithfully to the faithful.
“Do you wanna ‘get back’?” McCartney asked the crowd before launching into the song of the same name.
Well, you came to the right place. (Paul McCartney gets back (again) in generous Miami show)
