Ah, England in the summer time… Tonight has been the hottest day of the year so far. It’s also the day the national football team have been dumped unceremoniously out of the World Cup and I’m here in the centre of London watching another icon of ‘66 reprise his glory years, singing the songs that changed the world.

For that’s what we’re all here for. Hard to remember now but there was a time when Macca fought shy of his status as a member of the most succesful band of all time. Live, Wings hardly ever played any of his previous work and when he started touring again in the 90s Beatles tracks were only dropped in sparingly, as titbits for the fans.

Now they dominate the set. How could they not? Paul turned 68 last week. There won’t be many more chances to catch to see a living breathing Beatle in the flesh. And in his dotage he seems resigned to his role as a piece of living breathing history. To warm us up the preshow tape is cover versions of Fab hits, All My Loving is accompanied by scenes from Hard Day’s Night of the four laughing, running, inventing what a pop group is about.

Yet this being Paul McCartney the brilliance will always come served with a side dish of embarrasment. He greets us by asking ‘are we gonna have some rockin’ fun tonight?’He introduces one song in Jamiaican patois, and then at the end of every song raises his arms in the air in some sort of Macca victory salute. It’s hard not to wince a little. He knows he’s good and he’s always found it very hard to hide it. It’s why those attempts at coming over as the average joe are always so toe-curling, why he came up with the whole wacky thumbs aloft persona.

But then if I was able to dash off effortless-sounding pop at the drop of a hat maybe I would find it hard to hide my smugness. Unlike other legends the McCartney back catalogue is so extensive that forgotten corners of it can be still excavated and produce gems. Middling album tracks like I’m Looking Through You and I’ve Got A Feeling are dusted down. Even Let ‘Em In and Ob-La-Di Ob La-Da, the song that so enfuriated his old bandmates, sound great tonight. Granny friendly? Of course. In fact there’s a granny adjacent to me dancing to it. And sons, mums, twenty somethings and foreign students a-plenty.

Time and again this evening my thoughts were dragged back to the prediction Derek Taylor made on the Beatles For Sale sleeve that the kids of 2000 would still be listening to them. If anything Taylor was hedging his bets, for it’s now clear that theirs is a body of work that will resonate with us for as long as our species survives. In that context to see these songs performed by their author in the city where he wrote them was an absolute privilege.