Paul McCartney performs career-spanning concert for Apple’s 50th-anniversary
Paul McCartney took to the stage on March 31st at Apple Park in California to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the pioneering tech company.
Apple held a similar event in London last week, which saw Mumford and Sons take to the stage outside on a crisp March evening, but their party in California, aided by the McCartney live performance, was the real celebration.
Per Setlist FM, The Beatles legend began his set with ‘Help!’, before playing ‘Coming Up’, ‘Got to Get You in My Life’, ‘Let Me Roll It’, ‘Getting Better’, ‘Let ‘Em In’, ‘My Valentine’, and the Wings classic ‘Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five’.
Later in his set, McCartney performed the following songs one after another: ‘Love Me Do’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Now and Then’, ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘Something’, ‘Band on the Run’, ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, ‘Get Back’, ‘Let It Be’, ‘Live and Let Die’, and ‘Hey Jude’.
Then, for his encore, McCartney treated those at Apple Park to ‘Golden Slumbers’, ‘Carry That Weight’, and ‘The End’.
It’s both fitting and somewhat of a full-circle moment that McCartney was picked to perform at Apple’s 50th-anniversary, considering The Beatles were the ones to use Apple in a business sense first, founding Apple Corps in the 1960s.
After Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer, Apple Corps sued the technology brand for trademark infringement, with his company later paying three settlements. The first was $80,000 in 1978, followed by $26.5 million in 1991, and lastly, a reported $500 million in a 2007 arrangement, which ended the feud for good.
However, it still took until late 2010 for The Beatles’ back catalogue to be made available to be legally downloaded on iTunes.
The late Apple founder Jobs admired The Beatles greatly, hence why he chose to use the name of their record and logo, once saying, “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check.”
His famous quote continued, “They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”
Watch footage of McCartney performing ‘Love Me Do’ at Apple Park below.
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