Hard Rock Calling 2012 (Hyde Park, London) Bruce Springsteen was joined onstage by Paul McCartney as he brought the second night of Hard Rock Calling to a close, but their set was cut shot when organisers turned off their microphones after they broke the venue's sound curfew. McCartney joined Springsteen onstage for "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Twist And Shout", the final songs in Springsteen's 29-song set, which lasted three and a quarter hours in total. But organisers pulled the plug on the encore while The Boss and Macca were trying to address the crowd, rendering them inaudible, to the disbelief of the audience. Bruce Springsteen said he was amazed when concert bosses pulled the plug on his performance with Paul McCartney: "I wasn't aware the plug had been pulled, and people couldn't hear what I was singing. Afterwards I said to Paul, 'I can understand them pulling the plug on me, but you? Aren't you a knight?'" Paul McCartney remembers: "Bruce, sort of, got in touch and said, 'Do you wanna get up? We'd like you to get up'. I said, 'Well, I don't know, I'll just come along to the show', so we're in the side of the show in the wings, and he says 'Are you gonna get up, man?', I said 'I don't know, maybe'. Then his roadie says 'I've got a bass for you, I've got a guitar, it's all tuned, it's ready to go'. I go 'Oh, you're REALLY ready!'. So they're all really ready to go, so, what have they rehearsed? He said 'Twist And Shout' and 'I Saw Her Standing There'. So at last minute, I sort of have to say, 'Yeah, I'll do it', so I go on, and it's great, they really have rehearsed it, and I'm the only one who sort of doesn't know it, even though I wrote the bloody thing. So then they go to 'Twist And Shout', and I'm singing it, and someone had whispered 'We haven't got any time, we can't do it', but it was so nice, Bruce is going 'Yeah, come on, man' and Bruce is you know, he's a do-er, a go-getter, so I was happy. 'Yeah!'. We're rocking away, all our monitors stayed on, so we weren't really aware that the plug had been pulled on the audience, that you see on the youtube later, it's all gone dead. And he is singing, he's gonna then go back and sing ' Good Night Irene', which I think was all dead, but we had a laugh again. You've gotta have a laugh, it would just be so terrifying if you didn't, so we just had a laugh afterwards, I was just apologetic like 'I'm sorry, man, only in Britain!'. It's the only place... You can't imagine in New York somewhere like that, them pulling the plug, and it got everyone of course, so that was the big story. Everyone in America was going to me 'Is it true, man? They pulled the plug on you and Springsteen?!', and I'm saying 'Yeah, well, you know, just some guy. Some bloody jobsworth...'"

• published: 06 Aug 2013
• views: 269