What Paul Plays Live: The Setlist Explained

The Shape of a Modern McCartney Show

Paul McCartney's Got Back tour ran from April 2022 to November 2025, and a typical show lasted around two and a half hours with more than 30 songs, no support act and no interval. When the 2025 North American leg opened at the Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert on 29 September 2025, it started with 'Help!', a song Paul had not performed live in 35 years, and it closed, like every Got Back show, with the Abbey Road medley.

The structure of the show has barely changed in two decades. It opens with a run of rockers, drops into a middle acoustic section where Paul plays alone, builds through the big Beatles and Wings singles, peaks with 'Live and Let Die' and its pyrotechnics, sings the crowd through 'Hey Jude', and then comes back for an encore that ends with 'Golden Slumbers', 'Carry That Weight' and 'The End'. The fixed arc lets the production (lights, screen films, pyro cues) be locked in, while the songs at the edges rotate.

Paul does rotate songs between tours and occasionally between nights, so treat any setlist as representative rather than fixed. The notes below come from published opening-night setlists and the fan-compiled database at setlist.fm. For news of any future dates, our McCartney tour tracker only lists shows once they have been officially announced.

The Opening Run: Rockers and Wings Deep Cuts

On the 2022 to 2024 legs the show opened with 'Can't Buy Me Love'. In 2025 it opened with 'Help!', followed by 'Coming Up' from McCartney II and 'Got to Get You Into My Life' from Revolver. That opening quarter mixes Beatles songs with Wings material that casual fans may not know, such as 'Letting Go' from Venus and Mars, during which the three-piece horn section often plays from the crowd.

'Let Me Roll It' from Band on the Run is a fixture, usually followed by a short instrumental burst of Jimi Hendrix's 'Foxy Lady' as Paul tells the story of seeing Hendrix open with 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' at the Saville Theatre in London on 4 June 1967, three days after the album came out. 'Let 'Em In', 'My Valentine' (written for his wife Nancy Shevell and released on Kisses on the Bottom in 2012), 'Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five' and 'Maybe I'm Amazed' round out the first section.

'Maybe I'm Amazed' is the hardest vocal of the night, a song written in his late twenties that Paul still takes on at the piano in his eighties, and fans tend to judge a show's vocal form by how it goes.

The Acoustic Middle: From the Quarrymen to Here Today

The middle of the show is the part long-time fans talk about most. The band gathers at the front of the stage for 'I've Just Seen a Face', then 'In Spite of All the Danger', the song the Quarrymen recorded in 1958 at a small studio in Liverpool, credited to McCartney and Harrison. 'Love Me Do' and 'Dance Tonight', the mandolin song from Memory Almost Full (2007), follow.

Then Paul plays 'Blackbird' alone on a platform that rises above the stage, and follows it with 'Here Today', his 1982 song to John Lennon from Tug of War. Since late 2024 this section has also included 'Now and Then', the final Beatles song released in November 2023, played with film of the band on the screens. For many in the audience, those three songs in a row are the emotional centre of the night.

After that comes the tribute to George Harrison. Paul starts 'Something' alone on a ukulele, a nod to George's love of the instrument, before the full band and a screen montage of George take over. It is one of the most consistently moving moments of any McCartney show.

The Home Stretch: Band on the Run to Hey Jude

The last third of the main set is built from songs almost everyone knows: 'Lady Madonna', 'Jet', 'Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!' (a John song Paul has sung on recent tours), 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da', 'Band on the Run', 'Get Back', 'Let It Be' and 'Live and Let Die'. The last of these comes with pyrotechnics loud enough that Paul makes a show of covering his ears afterward, which is part of the routine.

'Hey Jude' closes the main set, with the audience singing the long coda while Paul splits them into sections: men, women, everybody. It has been the main-set closer for decades and it would be hard to imagine a McCartney show without it.

Some of these songs have been in every McCartney tour set since 1989, when he first built a solo show around Beatles material: 'Let It Be', 'Hey Jude' and 'Get Back' were all in the setlists of The Paul McCartney World Tour, the tour that reached the Maracanã in Rio on 21 April 1990. That tells you something about how settled the core of the show is, and why the rotating songs at the edges matter so much to regular concertgoers.

The Encore: A Duet With John and the Abbey Road Finale

The encore became famous on the Got Back tour for one reason. During 'I've Got a Feeling', John Lennon's vocal and image from the 1969 rooftop concert appear on the screens, isolated from the original audio using the technology Peter Jackson's team developed for The Beatles: Get Back, so that Paul and John sing the song together. It was introduced in 2022 and it has stayed ever since.

The encore usually also includes a hard rocker, typically 'Helter Skelter', and it always ends with the Abbey Road medley: 'Golden Slumbers', 'Carry That Weight' and 'The End', complete with the guitar trade-off section. As an ending, it is hard to beat, and Paul has used it to close his shows for most of the last twenty years.

Guests sometimes join in. At Glastonbury on 25 June 2022, a week after Paul turned 80, Dave Grohl and Bruce Springsteen joined him on stage, and Ringo Starr joined him at The O2 in London on 19 December 2024, the final night of that year's leg. You cannot plan for those nights, but they happen more often than you might think.

What Changes Between Tours

The core of the show is fixed, but the edges move. On the 2022 leg, for example, the set included newer songs such as 'Women and Wives' from McCartney III and 'Fuh You' from Egypt Station, along with 'Junior's Farm' early in the show. By 2025 some of those had rotated out, and 'Help!', 'Coming Up' and 'Drive My Car' had come in. Watching those swaps is one of the pleasures of following a tour closely, and it is why fans compare setlists night by night. If you want to know which album tracks might surface next, our list of McCartney deep cuts covers the songs fans most often ask him to play.

Smaller venues bring bigger surprises. On 27 and 28 March 2026 Paul played two phone-free nights at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, a room holding little more than a thousand people, his first shows after the Got Back tour ended in November 2025. The set was a condensed version of the 2025 arena show, 23 songs on the first night, and it added 'Every Night' from McCartney and the title track of Flaming Pie, neither of which had featured on the Got Back tour. The first night also included the Sgt. Pepper song 'Getting Better'. The shows came the day after the release of 'Days We Left Behind', the first single from The Boys of Dungeon Lane. If you ever get the chance to see Paul in a small room, take it.

The Band Behind Him

Paul's touring band is one of the longest-serving in rock. Paul 'Wix' Wickens on keyboards joined for the 1989 world tour and acts as musical director. Rusty Anderson on guitar and Abe Laboriel Jr. on drums arrived in 2001, and Brian Ray, on bass and guitar, in 2002. The Hot City Horns, a three-piece horn section, have toured with him since the Freshen Up tour in 2018.

That continuity is why the show sounds tight even as Paul changes songs: Ray switches to bass whenever Paul moves to piano or guitar, and Wix covers the orchestral and synth parts that would once have needed extra players. Abe Laboriel Jr. is also a big part of the fun on stage, and his dance during 'Dance Tonight' has become a small tradition of its own.

If you cannot get to a show, the live albums are the next best thing. Our list of the best McCartney live albums ranks them from Wings Over America (1976) onward.