Paul McCartney opened his 2025 North American tour with a last‑minute warmup gig at the Santa Barbara Bowl in California on Friday night. He kicked things off by performing the Beatles classic “Help!” in full for the first time since 1965.
The Santa Barbara Bowl holds just 4,562 people—about a quarter of the size of the arenas he’ll play on the rest of the run. The show was announced only two weeks ago and sold out within minutes, with fans required to lock their phones in Yondr pouches for the night. That’s why no full video of “Help!” has surfaced online yet. One enterprising fan did shoot about 30 seconds of the song during soundcheck, giving a rough sense of how it sounded.
McCartney last staged only a portion of “Help!” during the final leg of his 1989–90 Flowers in the Dirt tour, when he performed a medley of John Lennon songs that included snippets of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Give Peace a Chance.” The “Help!” segment at that time lasted under a minute. He hadn’t played the song in full since December 12, 1965, at the Capitol Theatre in Cardiff, Wales.
The revival of “Help!” is notable because McCartney usually avoids Beatles songs primarily written by John Lennon. “When ‘Help!’ came out in ’65, I was actually crying out for help,” Lennon told Playboy in 1980. “Most people think it’s just a fast rock ’n’ roll song. I didn’t realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie Help!. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help. It was my fat Elvis period…I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help.”
There weren’t a lot of other surprises in McCartney’s Santa Barbara set. The program leaned hard on Beatles staples like “Getting Better,” “Lady Madonna,” “Hey Jude,” and “Helter Skelter,” alongside Wings favorites such as “Jet,” “Live and Let Die,” and “Let Me Roll It,” plus solo picks like “My Valentine,” “Coming Up,” and “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty‑Five.” He also dropped the “new” Beatles track “Now and Then,” and delivered a virtual duet with John Lennon on “I’ve Got a Feeling” using footage from the 1969 Apple rooftop performance.
The tour continues Monday night at the Acrisure Arena in Thousand Palms, California. If “Help!” stays in the set, we can expect more footage to surface online soon after the show wraps.
