Paul McCartney, National Indoor Arena, Birmingham<br></br>Massive Attack, Brixton Academy, London

The place where normal and abnormal meet and fall in love

It's like the Venetian biennale taking place on the inside of Rene Magritte's head. Or the Chinese New Year art-directed by Fischerspooner. Circus strongmen and periwigged 18th-century dandies and crinolened ladies and bowler-hatted businessmen and dramatic flamenco dancers and gaily-painted harlequins and Three real-life Graces cavort and somersault and balance on rolling globes and parade past with cloud-painted balloons. The Pope gets less of a build-up, and he's a John and a Paul.

What does it all mean? It means... Paul McCartney has more money than the Vatican. "You say goodbye, and I say hello..." he starts, and there's uproar. You get the feeling that in 2003, with two of his bandmates dead, McCartney knows, more than ever, that it's down to him to carry the Beatles torch. It's just a shame that he has to choose such a dire song to spark it up.

Then again, hearing "Eleanor Rigby" ("Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave/ No one was saved..."), you realise that this man invented a whole new way of writing pop songs. The old "John = Edgy, Paul = Comfy" cliché has always been due for demolition, and McCartney's reputation deserves reappraisal. The man himself, though, doesn't help matters. Of course we don't hear "Give Ireland Back To The Irish", or even "Helter Skelter". We hear "Jet", and you instantly remember why it's so right that Wings were Alan Partridge's favourite band. A couple of hundred mischievous souls, dotted around the arena, giggle at the thought of a cardiganned Coogan grooving in the travel tavern. But when Partridge famously declared Wings "only the band The Beatles could have been", he had the germ of a point. You want three-part pop-erettas? Forget "Bohemian Rhapsody", how about "Band On The Run"? You want white-knuckle pyrotechnic drama? Look no further than "Live And Let Die".

And he is, of course, a consummate songwriter, albeit one who leans towards the cosy and twee ("There's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend..." Oh, but there is). But hearing "All My Loving", I remember being really impressed as a child by its inevitability: from the first three notes, the song writes itself.

Last time I saw McCartney – on a big screen on the Mall – the former OBE-rejecter, and now a happy Sir, was whoring himself to The Queen. Tonight's show feels a lot less icky. He's big on the personal touch: bum notes and forgotten lyrics ("at least you know it's live"), anecdotes about massages and playing ukulele with George Harrison, and dedications to his "lovely wife Heather" (decidedly mixed rumblings), Linda, George Martin and his brother Mike (better), and John Lennon (standing ovation). Looking at the vintage footage of Sixties screamagers overhead, it strikes you that being in The Beatles might almost have been a cruel psychological experiment: survive that without going mental. But he's a decent sort – doesn't kill his fellow beasts for meat, he has a peace sign on his piano – and at once surprisingly normal and utterly abnormal. After a rockin' "Back In The USSR", I leave for my train to the strains of "Let It Be" – someone else's memories, not mine.

"I tell you what," says Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja, "I'm never gonna let the fucking tabloid press bring me down to their level." There are, as you might expect, wild cheers, and rightly so. You don't need to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to see some connection between a hitherto low-profile rapper raising their voice against the British establishment in the name of peace, and that same rapper being very quickly discredited by another wing of that same establishment.

Del Naja's been holding this in for six songs, but he's got if off his chest. He dedicates "Butterfly Caught" to his girlfriend Nancy, a quasi-African drumbeat and a rumbling bassline starts up, and they're away again.

It is, unfortunately, a rare – and unplanned – moment of undiluted emotion in the Massive Attack live show. A couple of years ago, Julie Burchill described Massive Attack, en passant, as "the greatest pop group in the world". At first, I thought: really? Are you sure? But then I thought: yeah, you probably would think that if you were Julie Burchill right now, reclining by the pool, sipping cocktails on the south coast, emotional extremes – and music that makes you go mental – a distant memory. (I really like JB, by the way, but y'know.) It all comes down to social class, which I'm afraid (as Julie of all people knows) it invariably does. All around me, white middle-class people dance like white middle-class people do when they hear a quasi-African drumbeat and a rumbling bassline (Mum! Dad! Stop!).

Inertia creeps. I'm surrounded by people whose self-image involves being the sort of person who likes Massive Attack. So I stare straight ahead. It's the best thing to do. The visuals are amazing – at one point a dot matrix shows a NASDAQ ticker-tape rattling off the latest share prices at epilepsy-triggering velocity. (It's presumably intended as a parody of capitalism, but you get the feeling that a couple of hundred audience members are involuntarily reaching for their Palm Pilots to check.) Most powerful of all are a series of stats – presented in the ironic form of a supermarket checkout receipt – detailing the world's military spending. $780bn per annum since you ask, of which the USA spunks over half. "And if you hurt what's mine," sings Deborah Miller, "I'll sure as hell retaliate", the original meaning of "Safe From Harm" artfully subverted by context.

Last time there was a Gulf War, Massive – as they were briefly forced to call themselves – released "Unfinished Sympathy", one of the greatest singles ever made. They play it as an encore, and I remember it wasn't always like this. I go home. I play my scratchy old seven inch copy. I go mental.

s.price@independent.co.uk

Paul McCartney: Earls Court, London (0870 121 2527), Mon & Tue