It was a scene so perfectly curated for the Instagram age that you almost suspected it was generated by an algorithm. Paul McCartney, national treasure, Beatles royalty, the man who wrote 'Hey Jude' with a toddler in the room, sharing a stage in Dublin with Paul Mescal, the actor whose cheekbones have launched a thousand streaming subscriptions. But this was no cynical stunt. This was a moment of genuine, unforced cultural alchemy – and according to the British cultural envoy who was no doubt watching from the wings, a 'soft power triumph'. And they're right. But what does that actually mean for the rest of us?
Let's rewind. McCartney, 81, is in Dublin for a run of shows that are part victory lap, part testament to the enduring pull of melody. Mescal, 28, is the Irish heart-throb of the moment, fresh off a nomination that has his face looming over every billboard from Shoreditch to Sydney. They duet on something – possibly 'Blackbird', possibly 'Let It Be' – and the internet promptly melts. The clip is shared, retweeted, re-uploaded, and within hours it's being analysed not as a musical performance but as a geopolitical event.
And that's the fascinating part. Our cultural attaché – and let's be honest, every country has one, usually a well-meaning diplomat with a vague brief to 'promote British arts abroad' – has called this a 'soft power triumph'. Soft power: the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion. It's the reason the BBC World Service exists, why Shakespeare is taught in Tokyo, why a teenager in Jakarta might wear a Rolling Stones T-shirt without knowing who Mick Jagger is. And here, in a Dublin arena, it was deployed with surgical precision.
But let's look at the human cost. Or rather, the lack of one. This is a rare example of soft power that costs nothing and hurts nobody. No drones, no tariffs, no visa disputes. Just a man in his eighties and a man in his twenties, doing what they do best: making people feel something. The crowd that night wasn't thinking about Anglo-Irish relations or the Good Friday Agreement or the EU. They were thinking about the chord progression, the harmony, the strange magic of watching two icons collide.
Yet the cultural shift is real. This moment tells us something about how we now consume celebrity. Mescal isn't a musician; he's an actor. But the lines have blurred so completely that a guitar duet between a Beatle and a Normal People star feels not just natural, but inevitable. We live in an age of cross-pollination, where a film actor can become a rock star for a night, and where a rock star can become a symbol of national identity. McCartney is no longer just a musician; he's a prop in the ongoing narrative of Britishness, a walking, singing piece of heritage that we deploy at moments like this to remind everyone that we still have something to offer.
The social psychology at play is equally telling. The audience is divided, roughly, into two camps: those who grew up with McCartney and see him as a fixed point in the universe, and those who discovered him through their parents' vinyl collection and now see him as a kind of living museum piece. Mescal bridges that gap. He's the contemporary reference point, the validation that the cultural conveyor belt keeps moving. For the younger fans in the crowd, the duet says: 'This isn't ancient history. This is now.' And for the older ones, it says: 'Your heroes are still relevant. They still matter.'
On the street, the reaction was predictable. Dubliners, known for their lack of deference to anyone, were genuinely charmed. 'He's one of us now,' said a woman outside the venue, clutching a poster that had both Pauls on it. And she was right. In that moment, the boundaries between British and Irish, between old and new, between music and acting, dissolved into something simpler: a shared experience.
This is what soft power looks like when it works. It's not a trade deal or a diplomatic communiqué. It's a man and a boy, two Pauls, two generations, two nations, playing guitars and making a crowd forget the world outside. The envoy can call it a triumph. I call it a relief. In a time of rising nationalism and cultural antagonism, a duet is a fragile but beautiful thing. And we should treasure it, because moments like this are soft, indeed. But they are also rare.
So here's to Macca and Mescal. Here's to the soft power that doesn't feel like power at all. And here's to the hope that somewhere, in a small venue in a city that knows its own mind, two strangers might yet find a chord to share.
