We all have a pretty good idea of what Paul McCartney’s talents are by now. It might, however, be instructive to dwell upon one of his less celebrated skills.

Is there anyone to touch him when it comes to generating an enormous fuss and then affecting the air of a man who doesn’t know what it’s about? It’s probably a coping mechanism learnt while in the Beatles, but it’s one that served him well as he strode onstage before a thousand-odd fans at this eleventh-hour show.

Disingenuously looking over his shoulder to see what the spectacle was, McCartney broadened what remains of his scouse accent to tell everyone to calm down. But faced with the sight of a close-up Beatle and his band playing a balcony-rattling Drive My Car, that is easier said than done.

Given that this was a free show, it would have been churlish to complain if he then played the whole of Memory Almost Full — the album he has recorded for Starbucks’ Hear Music label. But McCartney cannily adhered to the maxim that if you want people to buy your new record, you can do a lot worse than play your old songs. And for the next 90 minutes or so, that is what he mostly did.

Veterans of his recent tours might have recognised some of the patter. Introducing one of the Beatles’ earliest tunes, I’ll Follow the Sun, he alluded to the family home in Liverpool’s Forthlin Road where he wrote it. His arena-rock treatment of The Long and Winding Road, which he contributed to on the electric piano, could barely be contained in such an intimate environment.

Far better were the rock’n’roll songs that the Beatles never got to play in their collective lifetime. As his band of tanned session musicians whip-cracked into a muggy, edgy Get Back, you realised how perfectly suited the song was to a subterranean sweatbox like the Electric Ballroom. At times, it was an environment that seemed to make greater emotional demands of its 64-year-old star.

Following a huge roar for his solo acoustic rendition of Blackbird, McCartney went straight into Here Today — the song he wrote for John Lennon after Lennon was shot dead. So all-pervasive is McCartney’s blithe, thumbs-aloft persona that, when his voice wavered on the line “I am holding back the tears no more”, you momentarily assumed he must have wandered into another register, before realising that he actually was struggling to hold back the tears.

Several songs on Memory Almost Full portray an artist attempting to make some sense of the surreal twists and turns of his life. If the incredulous reminiscences of That Was Me suggested that McCartney was as dazzled by his achievements as we are, confirmation came with the endearingly dad-like dancing he felt compelled to display as the entire room bellowed the refrain of Hey Jude back at him.

More Fab classics awaited on the other side of the encore: Let It Be, Lady Madonna and an incendiary I Saw Her Standing There. As he and his band took their bows at the front of the stage, no one seemed more surprised by just how much fun it is to play music somewhere other than a huge tin hangar. But a disingenuous approach can only get you so far. As he soaked up the love from the floor, even Paul McCartney couldn’t pretend that he didn’t know what the fuss was about.

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