Paul McCartney's hometown show suggests he might go on forever, and we're cool with that

At least one person under the roof of Liverpool’s Echo Arena tonight (28th May) was indeed born at Walton Hospital, which is 7.1 miles away. His name’s Paul McCartney, and he’s the most successful songwriter of all time. Given the inextricable links between his music and his hometown, there’s no way a homecoming gig, even one in as soulless a venue as this one, could ever feel like anything less than a genuine event.

So it proves; everywhere you turn before the show starts - in the surrounding Albert Dock, in the concourse, in the arena itself - there are accents that are decidedly not Liverpudlian. There's an especially strong turnout from the Americans, Germans and Japanese. When McCartney himself carries out a mid-gig survey - “who’s from Liverpool? Who’s from Britain, but not Liverpool? Who’s not from Britain?” - the third category are comfortably the loudest. Both an enormous billboard outside the Echo, as well as placards handed out to the crowd, bellow “WELCOME HOME PAUL”, but whether those doing the welcoming actually call this city their own is definitely up for debate.

This latest in an apparently never-ending sequence of world tours since the turn of the century has already taken in sixty-odd concerts over five continents and it shows; it's an incredibly slick affair. Even by the standards you’d expect, given how long he’s been playing some of these songs, McCartney rattles off the classics with almost disconcerting assurance and polish, and he makes sure there’s something for everybody. Wings were, of course, the band The Beatles could have been, and little wonder on the back of the likes of the fabulously bluesy "Let Me Roll It", despatched early on, or the Bond standard “Live and Let Die”, which comes complete with a hilariously-overblown pyrotechnic display.

There’s a bit of room for the obscure, too; gloriously, the disturbing electro misstep “Temporary Secretary” makes the cut ahead of about fifty different platinum-selling Beatles songs, whilst “Hope for the Future”, penned last year for the video game Destiny, also pops up, along with three tracks from 2013’s more-than-competent New LP. One of those, “Queenie Eye”, is about as much a lyrical throwback as you could ask for, detailing an old ball game he played as a kid, in the same streets that surround us tonight.

Once we’re past the half way point, though, the serious business begins. After all, this internationally-assembled audience haven’t travelled from all over to hear the deep cuts, and after the first ninety minutes are in the books - and without an interval - McCartney obliges them with a long string of some of the best songs ever written. He doesn’t really leave any stone unturned; there’s delicacy in “Blackbird” and “Yesterday”, the thunderous birth of hard rock that was “Helter Skelter”, irresistible pop crackle courtesy of “Lovely Rita”, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Eleanor Rigby”, groove and strut from “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and “Something”, and even a bona-fide rarity; “Another Girl” from Help!, which hadn’t been played live, ever, before last month.

McCartney plays forty songs tonight, without a break. It’s hard to know what’s more remarkable - that he could have put together an entirely different forty-track setlist that would’ve been just as strong, or that he’ll shortly turn seventy-three. The latter point feels like an irrelevance, anyway; he surely can't ever have sounded much sharper than this. Like the Stones, he isn’t still playing live because he needs the money. He’s doing so because he wants to and because, frankly, it’d be a shame if he didn’t. Not a single track that he pulls out tonight feels dated; he’s written more timeless songs than anyone in history. Tonight’s show closes - after a slightly weird episode in which he presides over a hurried marriage proposal - with those glorious last few minutes of Abbey Road, but the real “The End” seems a long, long way off. He might go on forever.