You Gave Me The Answer – How do you entertain yourself when travelling?

The rumours are true: the GOT BACK tour is heading back on the road! Paul and the band will take their phenomenal live show to Australia, Mexico and Brazil later in 2023. These will be the first shows Paul has played since his historic headline set at Glastonbury Festival and the huge US tour back in 2022, which received rave reviews and saw Paul play non-stop for almost three hours.

As you can imagine, the excitement is palpable. We’ve received a lot of questions about the tour already, with fans online asking if there will be more dates, what the setlist will be and even what the tour posters will look like! And while we have to keep a few things quiet for now, there are a few questions we can put to Paul before he starts tour rehearsals.  

With so much travel ahead of him in 2023, we thought this question from Alex on Instagram was the perfect way to start things off. Take it away, Alex!

What do you do on a plane when you are travelling on tour? Are there certain hobbies you do, like reading, watching TV, or knitting…? - Alex

Paul: I don’t knit, I imagine that would be quite cool, actually. Tom Daley knits and so does Michelle Obama, and I get why they do it; it must be a great release of tension. But I watch movies. So when I travel from London to New York, its normally a seven-hour journey so I end up watching about three movies, and in the middle of it all I try and have a meal.

PaulMcCartney.com: Do you plan the movies you’re going to watch?

Paul: No, I just go to ‘New Releases’ and unfortunately they’re not new – I’ve seen most of them! They don’t update them quick enough for me. I scan through and think ‘ah, I’ve been meaning to see that’.

On car journeys, I watch stuff on my iPad which can be films or series. I’m currently on Better Call Saul and it’s a good one. I don’t read on journeys so much, I read at home instead before going to bed. I get ready for bed and the last thing I do is read. Nancy will often look at a series at that time, but I think it’s not conducive to sleep because some of the things she’ll watch are a little too exciting, and the plot will keep you up all night! So I try to read biographies, which can be a little bit dry. After a few pages you start you yawn, the page goes fuzzy, so it’s light off and straight to sleep. I like that!

PaulMcCartney.com: What kind of biographies? Do you read music biographies?

Paul: Yeah, and I sometimes will make a note if they’re talking about something I don’t know about. I read a Phillip Glass book and some of his pieces I didn’t know about, so looked them up on Spotify. Some others I’ve recently read are about Bernstein and Mozart. One of the things I find interesting is relating to them as musicians, because without meaning to, I’ve ended up as one of them! So if the biography is talking about Mozart struggling to write a piece, I can relate to that.

Thanks for the recommendations, Paul! That’s a few more titles added to our ‘to be read/to be watched’ piles. Remember, if you’ve got a question for Paul, you can ask it via the Paul McCartney Official Fan Group on Facebook, on the Maccaboard fan forum, or simply by posting it on your social media platform of choice using the handle @paulmccartney.

The 2023 GOT BACK tour kicks off in Adelaide, Australia on 18th October 2023. Find out more here, and sign up to the mailing list to get the latest tour news first.