Warm Reception for Sir Paul McCartney
The St. Petersburg audience of Paul McCartney's first and only concert in the city of White Nights went wild as their idol appeared on stage on Sunday night.
"Paul! We love you!" chanted the crowd when greeting McCartney.
"Privet, Piter! Privet, rebyata!" Sir Paul answered in Russian, which meant "Hi, St. Petersburg! Hi, guys!"
"St. Petersburg is so beautiful. And we will rock it tonight!", McCartney said.
The audience obviously loved Sir Paul so much that nobody even dared to grumble that the concert started almost 1 1/2 hours later than planned.
Admirers of The Beatles, many aged in their 50s, patiently waited for their turn to pass through metal detectors to enter Palace Square, where the concert was held.
It apparently took much more time than initially planned two hours for more than 50,000 people to pass through the detector, and Sir Paul waited until everyone got to the square. Nobody's spirits were dampened when heavy rain drenched the square. United by the common desire of seeing the living rock legend, people protected one another under their umbrellas, creating a sea of many colors under which the crowd huddled.
The first Beatles hit McCartney, who appeared in a lilac jacket and a red shirt, performed was "All My Loving."
The crowd went wild. Video screens projected images of The Beatles in the 1960s, eliciting nostalgia among the estimated 70,000 Beatles admirers at the concert.
Sir Paul could not escape nostalgia himself.
"Sometimes we don't say what we want to, to people when they are with us," he said of fellow Beatle John Lennon who was assassinated in 1980. "And then it gets too late when they pass away. That's why I wrote this song for my friend John Lennon."
His next song was dedicated to another Beatle George Harrison, who died in 2001.
TV screens provided Russian translations of McCartney's comments to the crowd, and he also tried to speak quite a lot of Russian.
"Eta pesnya ispolyayetsya vpervye v Rossii (I am performing this song in Russia for the first time)," McCartney said in Russian about a couple of songs from 1960s.
McCartney performed works from the Beatle oeuvre and also from his post-Beatle period. But it was the Beatle songs that drew the biggest and loudest response from the audience.
"Yesterday," "Let It Be,"and "Hey Jude" brought the Beatles most devoted admirers to the height of excitement.
"It was something fantastic!" said Russia's "No. 1 Beatle fan" Kolya Vasin, 59, of St. Petersburg. "It was a show of the century. And it was such wonderful music," he said.
Vasin, who also attended McCartney's concert in Red Square in Moscow last year, said the concert in St. Petersburg was better than the Moscow one.
"There was more soul in this concert," Vasin said.
He said he was also deeply impressed that McCartney had written a new song dedicated to St. Petersburg, which he sang at the concert.
"That song sounded like a prayer. It means McCartney was really moved by our city when he visited it last year," he said. Igor Malsky, 47, journalist and translator, who came to the concert, said he was very excited about it.
"I grew up on the music of the Beatles," he said. "When I first heard it I realized at once that it was my music, the music exactly for my soul."
Malsky remembered how one of his classmates was thrown out of the Pioneers Communist youth organization for listening to The Beatles.
Malsky said he came to McCartney's concert not only to pay his respects to The Beatles but also to the great music and talent of McCartney himself.
Sergei, 33, a manager, said he came to the concert "to hear the legend live."
However, McCartney's missing out two Beatles hits "Michelle" and "When I'm 64," disappointed fans. Yet again, people did not grumble.
At the end of the concert, people again chanted, "We love you, Paul!"
Most of McCartney's stay in St. Petersburg was out of the public eye. He spent most of his time at the Konstantin Palace in Strelna, where he stayed in an elite cottage with his family.
However, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on Friday, McCartney's 62nd birthday, when he arrived in St. Petersburg, that Sir Paul had a short conversation with his fans at the airport.
One young man managed to pass McCartney an old so-called "bones" record, which Soviet fans used to make from X-ray film to record banned music. The Beatles' records were not sold anywhere in Russia at that time.
McCartney visited three restaurants where he had exclusively vegetarian food. However, despite rumors that no one traveling with McCartney is allowed to eat meat, Sir Paul's team ordered fish and meat, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.
On Saturday, McCartney went to see the famed fountains of Peterhof and also met with St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, the report said.
On Monday afternoon, dozens of McCartney's fans gathered at Pulkovo airport to say goodbye to the singer. "Malo! Malo! (It's not enough!)" they chanted.
But McCartney simply waved.
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