Paul McCartney performs “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for the first time in about 60 years during a reception connected to Taylor Swift’s wedding. Multiple outlets report that McCartney plays the Beatles’ 1963 classic at a star-studded event at Madison Square Garden in New York on Friday. The song is described as the Beatles’ first U.S. No 1 hit, which helped spark Beatlemania in the United States and is associated with the “British invasion.”
Rolling Stone reports that McCartney plays the song as a solo artist for the first time since the Beatles last performed it in 1964. The Guardian’s report, citing People, similarly says McCartney performs the track at the Madison Square Garden reception tied to Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding. Across the accounts, the key point is that the performance is a rare return of the song in public, framed both by its historical impact in the U.S. and by McCartney’s first solo rendition in roughly six decades.
