Paul McCartney – “Madrid v’s Paris” (Audiofön AF 023)
Paul’s pledge for meatfreemondays.com
Madrid, Spain, 30th May 2004 – Estadio de Madrid – Jet / Let Me Roll It / All Things Must Pass / Penny Lane / Get Back / I’ve Got A Feeling
Paris, France, 24th June, 2004 – Stade De France – Jet / Let Me Roll It / All Things Must Pass / Penny Lane / Get Back / I’ve Got A Feeling (54:03)
Starting their lives on Audiofön, moving over to HMC and now ending on Audiofön again, this set of 2004 / 2005 soundboards has been well mined and now comes to natural conclusion on this disk six tracks that were seemingly cherry picked for their sound through two nights on the 2004 Summer Tour.
The label have done the best thing and put the two rounds of material side by side on a great single disk – It’s clearly aimed at those of us who collect everything rather than the casual fan but for fans of latter day McCartney, it’s a great catch. McCartney soundboards being fewer and further between these days (Any days!) are great collectables and this set is still something nice to put on in the car or listen to while looking through the accounts – You know you know the songs, you know all the words, there are no clunkers here from the “From A Lover To A Friend” album. Nice and easy, ’specially if you’re not really investigating the rest of this tour as a standard.
Audiofön have included by way of a bonus, Paul’s excretable rap for Meat Free Monday. In case you didn’t catch his announcement, a video was released on September 18th 2014 where Paul suggests that you go to the website, look in to Vegetarianism and sign up for the news letter or pledge your support before turning it in to a ‘catchy’ rap. Lest we forget, catchy is never always a good thing but it is for a good cause however, so ..
On to the six tracks from the 2004 tour, as we know, Macca doesn’t tend to change his set list around that often and so his songs don’t change much either, there are vital language differences as to how you’d be able to tell which show was which, but for both sets “Jet” is preceded by around 50 seconds of the show’s intro music, ‘Let Me Roll It’ is furnished at the end by the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Foxey Lady’, ‘All Things Must Pass’ remains the best possible tribute to George that it could be (In Spain it’s proceeded by Paul’s Spanish tribute to his comrade, “Esto es en memoria mi amigo, George” and it’s obviously changed to French for Paris where we get some of the outro of an improvised ‘Yellow Submarine’ as news got around the internet that everyone else was doing it.) while ‘Penny Lane’ is a grand old sing along (The soundboard reflects the audiences joy here by allowing us to hear the shallow reflection of the audience singing the song back at Paul).
“Get Back” has the audience call it back louder still as they fist pump the air and take in the atmosphere of the Ex-Beatles show. Paul follows this up by introducing Brian ray to the audience who then does his best for American-Spanish relations by congratulating the recently married prince of Spain on his recent marriage. “I’ve Got A Feeling” which had been unveiled on a previous tour, sounds awesome and really brings things around to a fantastic full stop (Somewhat confusingly it’s preceded by a little in-joke by Brian or Rusty chatting to his band mates about marshmallows – If anyone knows what that refers to, do please write in!) The tracks are not professionally cut and spliced together so there are points where you’ll hear a change in atmosphere but it’s nothing that’s too jarring.
The packaging for this release as before is the cropped gazette style that Audiofön has adopted, late of HMC. There are some great promo photos from the same tour (Some of them blown up a little too large and therefore pixelated unfortunately) and text offering English written reviews of the two shows in question.
