Musicians from southern Ontario had a rare opportunity to share the stage with a living legend.
Members of the Paris Port Dover Pipe Band were invited to join Sir Paul McCartney at the TD Coliseum in Hamilton on Friday.
“It was very nerve-wracking trying to make sure that you perform to your best ability,” Gord Black, a senior pipe major, said. “You’ve also got another 27 people that have to perform to the best of their ability.”
The Paris Port Dover Pipe Band is made up of people from Brant and Norfolk counties.
The band prepared for the show in secret after learning only a month before McCartney’s scheduled tour stop that they would be joining him for the Wings song Mull of Kintrye.
Bagpipe player Rowan Paniccia, 19, called it a “pinch me moment.”
“When we finished playing the song and you got to relax and you got to look into the crowd cheering and Paul McCartney yelling, ‘Paris Port Dover’ – that’s probably the highlight. It’s amazing,” Paniccia recalled.
This is not the first time the band has joined the former Beatle on stage. Black said they have played with McCartney four times since 2010, but this time around, they welcomed him into the venue by playing in the TD Coliseum’s loading dock.
“To see him walk out of that limousine, you know who it is right away,” Black said. “As soon as he laid eyes on me, he started to point. So, I stopped playing, went across [to him] and shook his hand.”
It was like a reunion between old friends for Black.
“He’s the man that changed the world of music and you have to respect that right away. It’s just like sitting, speaking with you – he’s just a normal person.”
It’s a moment that will be hard to get over.
“I’m still kind of awestruck about it,” Paniccia said. “I’m hearing recordings from the performance and people’s thoughts about how great it was.”
While McCartney is now 83 years old, Black said he hasn’t slowed down. “It takes a lot of energy to keep going, but he’s surprisingly still pretty fit and young.”
He hopes it won’t be the band’s last collaboration with the former Beatle.
“It doesn’t look as though he’s going to give up, it’s in his blood,” Black said.
The show was McCartney’s final Canadian stop on his ‘Got Back’ tour and the first public performance ever in the newly renovated TD Coliseum. The concert included a mix of songs from The Beatles, Wings and McCartney’s catalogue as a solo artist.
