Even legends get stage fright. Paul McCartney told a fan on his blog series “You Gave Me the Answer” that he almost walked away from his entire music career early on because he was so unsure of himself on stage.
Says McCartney:
Performing, it was always the idea that the audience didn’t like you and you had to prove yourself. I think that’s why a lot of people get stage fright and get nervous. You think, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna be terrible, they hate me, and it’s all terrible.’ And so I think that was one of the earliest fears. I remember nearly giving it all up when we were doing a concert in Wembley…in the really early days of The Beatles. And I remember feeling physically sick with a knot in my stomach thinking, ‘I should give this up, this is just too painful, what am I doing?’ I got over it.
How’d the 74-year-old rockstar get over it, you ask? Well, not to toot his own horn, but he’s pretty sure people like him now:
What I do is I always say to my promoter when a tour is coming up: ‘Put one show on sale and see how it goes.’ And he’ll ring me back and say, ‘It’s sold out! Twenty minutes!’ So I’ve got to assume that they like me. So it gives you a confidence and I think I can probably relax, they probably like me. And it means you can enjoy the show more.”
Paul McCartney at Desert Trip 2016
Facebook feature photo by Oli Gill – originally posted to Flickr as Paul McCartney, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link