When Putin brought nuclear briefcase to Paul McCartney show
I met President Putin once. His eyes scared me when they locked with mine across Red Square and I got the feeling from his hard, cold look that we weren’t going to be mates.
It was back in May of 2003 and my then-boss Paul McCartney was performing for the first time in Russia as part of a European concert tour on which I was the head of Macca’s publicity team.
If you’re the Beatle who wrote Back In The USSR for The White Album in 1968 and you finally get to play in Moscow 35 years later, then there’s only one place that you want to do the gig – beside The Kremlin in Red Square.
And so that’s where we built the huge stage. We were told that there was only space for about 60,000 in Red Square. We had a look and said no, we think you can fit in at least another 40,000. The Russians said no, our eyes deceived us, there wasn’t the room. So we put 60,000 tickets on sale and they went in a flash. Oddly enough, come the night of the gig, another 40,000 had squeezed in. The Russians said that had nothing to do with them…
Source: Geoff Baker/thisiswiltshire.co.uk
