Digging into the Nashville scene

As someone said to me when I was weighing up whether to go and see McCartney in Nashville, 'Paul's not getting any younger. And neither are you. Buy the ticket.' 

So I did. I bought two, the other for the beautiful firstborn. They cost me more than the pair of return flights from London. I’d already seen him on this Got Back tour, at London’s O2 on 18th December last year. But unfathomably for a music writer, I'd never been to Nashville. In the days when I was writing, toiling and touring for national newspapers, the town was still country music central, not yet the multi-genre mecca of today. A bucket list is still a bucket list. No returns.
The oddest thing about that place: it's not there. The fog off the Cumberland River waterfront, rolling along Broadway and onwards to the Gulch, still swirls with ghosts. There are echoes of the Oz-like old town on Music Row, where hopefuls still dare to dream.

But they have done such a job of razing the rotten that little of what you might wish to experience remains. It’s as though the buckle of the old Bible Belt has been bent out of recognition, its rusted prong stamped into earth and lost to time. Although Nashville remains a hub of religious organisations, establishments, publishing, education and Christian music, and is often referred to as ‘the Protestant Vatican’ thanks to its seven hundred-plus churches and many religious schools, universities and colleges, it resonates relentlessly around the world as Music City.

Macca wows them at Nashville's The Pinnacle

They were laying odds in the bars beyond Broadway as to who might show up with him on stage. Dolly? Sabrina? Taylor, even? Eleven years since his last performance here, he needed no one. 

Music City has changed beyond recognition. Architectural cliffs have crumbled, making way for the steel-glass new. Antique neighbourhoods have caved to the wrecking ball, and the skyline has taken on a not altogether comforting shape. But the heart of Tennessee still thrums to the beat. If anyone chimes with such a metaphor, Macca does.

So homage was paid: to one of the architects of the British Invasion and a supreme driving force. A musician who, in this place at least, will always remain a Beatle.

The truth about Freddie Mercury that Hollywood missed...

To label Freddie ‘the boy who went from Zanzibar to Wembley’ as if in a starry- eyed blink without considering everything that happened in between, is to suggest that he had an easy ride. It is to imply that all it took was a surfeit of talent, guts and determination to get himself out of Africa, where there were scant opportunities and no future for a boy like him, and into the bright lights of a big First World city where he wanted and needed to be.

Had Queen’s film been more factual about his life story, many fans might not have been so shocked by the whole truth as presented in Love, Freddie.