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   CLUB SANDWICH 69

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LONG LIVE LIVE

There's now a Paul Is Live live video to complement the Paul Is Live live album. We press to play Club Sandwich 69

            We've all been through it: you get home from the rock show still enthusing about how amazingly fantastically wonderful it was, then switch on the TV a few days later to catch the recorded highlights and wonder if it was filmed at the same event. Or you buy the video a few months later and wonder if it was filmed on the same planet.
            Rock concerts are like that: you have to be there. It's the one thorny problem that still has to be overcome in this high-tech age - how the magic of the rock concert can be transported to a different place and time, to the viewer at home not intoxicated by the buzz of an auditorium, to the viewer who can't appreciate the expensive splendour of the light show and sound system, to the viewer who hasn't queued for a ticket and then queued again, waiting for the arena doors to open.
            Indeed, until "virtual reality" rock concerts are invented, which can be projected directly into the viewer's eyes, it'll remain a problem.
            In rock and roll's 40 year history (stone me yes, 'Rock Around The Clock' was 1954) there's been every conceivable kind of TV/video presentation of the live concert. You'll probably have seen quite a few of Paul's: the BBC had a stab at presenting the Fabs live from the Liverpool Empire, Shea Stadium was famously filmed, Wings had their Rockshow movie. Innovatively, Paul once came up with the idea of having a story set within a concert film, portraying animated mice living under the stage, but the movie (The Bruce McMouse Show) never saw the light of a projector. Get Back, the directed-by-Richard Lester film of the 1989/90 Paul McCartney World Tour was a definite step in the right direction, though, and it did. Acknowledging that home audiences have this definite disadvantage of "not being there" the movie juxtaposed stage action with pertinent (and impertinent) footage of Other Things, from beauty and wonder to blood and guts. It stretched and refreshed the tired rock film genre and helped to compensate for that darned Missing Dimension.
            And now Paul Is Live has been assembled in similar vein, effectively combining dynamic New World Tour action with complementary offstage and library footage. And it certainly works, for though limited by that accursed "you have to be there" syndrome it combines neatly for a very rewarding 75 minutes of video. (And, as a real bonus, that infamous pre-show film, the one that caused such offence because it dared to show the sickening reality of animal abuse in an upfront manner, has been tacked onto the end of the tape. It's been re-edited especially for the purpose because the big triple-screen style doesn't lend itself to the TV small screen, but the effect remains the same.)
            To nutshell it, what's so appealing about Paul Is Live is the way that, like the album whose title it shares, it has been very tightly edited. There's absolutely no faffing about - wham, wham, wham, one song ends and another begins. You've scarcely time to catch breath or permit the brain to contemplate the signals it's been fed when another onslaught is coming your way.
            And there's one especially clever - one might even say charming - production value in Paul Is Live. In a world that can sometimes be too exact there's an obvious lack of continuity within each sequence. Continuity is the single most worrisome problem for a TV or film director - will whoever-it-is look precisely the same and be wearing precisely the same clothes from shot-to-shot, even though the scenes might have been filmed weeks or even months apart? People are employed especially to ensure that continuity is assured. Not for Paul Is Live though. Chucking convention out of the window, there's scarcely a song that hasn't been cut together from a number of obviously disparate performances. The clothes change, the hairstyles change, and it doesn't matter one tiny jot. If anything, it only serves to underline the breadth of the tour, the fact that not only did the songs and the musicians travel the world but the audiences were ecstatic from continent to continent. Take 'Let Me Roll It', for example: the colour footage was shot in Boulder, Colorado, the mono in Paris and the audience is Milanese. The colour bits of 'C'mon People' were filmed in Kansas City, the B&W in Paris, the audience bits are from Kansas City, Charlotte and Germany, and the whole thing is spliced vip with film of Paul's autograph session at the FNAC record store in Paris.
            Ironically, it's that B&W stuff from Paris that looks really good. The colour is nice enough but this mono, shot with a good old fashioned Super 8 camera, sometimes out of focus, always grainy, is really special. It looks like the sort of footage an amateur might shoot and be pretty happy about, yet its inclusion amid the professional colour footage serves, perversely, as an enhancement.
            Besides all this, there are plenty other interesting little moments to watch out for, like brief celluloid glimpses of Paul guitar duetting with Carl Perkins, and Linda in the arms of Chuck Berry (looking for all the world like they've just married), both bits of film coming from the wondrous MPL archive. 'Looking For Changes' is enhanced by footage of a bear, standing in the middle of the Champs Elysees, distributing word cards to the controversial song a la Bob Dylan's promo for 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'. (And who is that inside the bear costume? you'll probably be wondering. Well, any similarity between the anonymous grizzly one and former 10cc drummer Kevin Godley - co-director of Paul Is Live with Aubrey Powell - might be entirely...correct.)
            Though the Paul Is Live video is intended to complement the live album, there are differences between the two. The cameras were not at every show (nor, indeed, was every show recorded) so there is no corresponding footage for the Soundcheck section of the album. Instead, the video adds 'Let It Be', 'Yesterday' and 'Hey Jude'. There is film, though, of the blistering 'Kansas City', performed without prior rehearsal when the NWT visited that city, and it's as superb to watch as it is to listen to.
            Bearing in mind the limits of the genre, Paul Is Live is just about as good a reminder of the New World Tour as is possible to achieve. Granted, it may not be as good as "being there" but as a keepsake of an amazingly fantastically wonderful event it's worth every penny.

            PAUL IS LIVE the video
            
            Drive My Car
            Let Me Roll It
            Looking For Changes
            Peace In The Neighbourhood
            All My Loving
            Good Rockin' Tonight
            We Can Work It Out
            Hope Of Deliverance
            Michelle
            Biker Like An Icon
            Here, There And Everywhere
            Magical Mystery Tour
            C'mon People
            Lady Madonna
            Paperback Writer
            Penny Lane
            Live And Let Die
            Kansas City
            Let It Be
            Yesterday
            Hey Jude
            pre-concert film