Paulie Rocks Liverpool, Accepts “Lennon and McCartney”

“It was 40 years ago today…”

Paul McCartney returned to Liverpool Sunday for a hometown concert to cap a 14-month world tour. Some 30,000 fans were expected to attend the open-air show on the city’s docks, the final date of McCartney’s Back in the World tour.

The 60-year-old former Beatle was quoted Sunday as saying the tour – which took him around the United States and across Europe from Dublin to Moscow’s Red Square – would not be his last.

“I certainly am intending to tour again. People say, ‘Is this your last tour?’ But it has never entered my head that it might be the last,” McCartney was quoted as saying by Scotland’s Sunday Herald newspaper.

“It’s like footballers – as long as you can score goals you keep playing, and for me that’s what it is,” said McCartney, whose wife Heather Mills is expecting a baby later this year. [AP]

Dude’s sounding frisky – makes me feel positively youthful, having one last kiddie at 45.

McCartney appears to be over his songwriting credit ego snit as well:

McCartney does reveal that he is no longer seeking to reverse the famous Lennon-McCartney songwriting credit, thus ending a long-running and bitter row in which he accused Yoko Ono of getting her ‘knickers in a twist’.

McCartney had reversed the credit on 20 of the 36 songs on last year’s Back In The US live album, changing it from Lennon-McCartney to Paul McCartney and John Lennon, causing reports that Yoko Ono was seeking legal advice. It was round two of a row which had first erupted when the Beatles Anthology was being assembled in the mid 1990s. Then, McCartney asked Ono if she objected to him putting his name first on Yesterday, a song he largely wrote. She did.

‘At one point, Yoko earned more from Yesterday than I did,’ McCartney said later. ‘It doesn’t compute, especially when it’s the only song that none of The Beatles had anything to do with.’ His hurt was compounded when he found a reference in a book to Hey Jude being written by John Lennon; yet, he points out, Lennon openly acknowledged in interviews that both Hey Jude and Yesterday were both written by McCartney.

….The DVD of McCartney’s current tour does not reverse the credits and the singer says he’s content now to let the matter rest. ‘I am happy with the way it is and always has been. Lennon and McCartney is still the rock’n’roll trademark I’m proud to be a part of — in the order it has always been.’ [Sunday Herald]