Stephen Dixon spent his art-school years being lofty about Paul McCartney. But that was then. Now, after seeing him in concert, he feels sorry for the sneerers

The lifestyle of the incalculably wealthy rock legend Sir Paul McCartney would be pretty unfathomable to me, given the gulf between our personal circumstances. But there is, or was, another Paul McCartney, whom I can, without too much presumption, claim to understand a little better, because our circumstances were once far closer.

And as I stood in the drizzle at the RDS in May, enduring the dull warm-up - clowns and actors posturing in historical costumes - that preceded the Dublin date of his Back in the World tour, I'm sure I wasn't alone in wondering whether I would catch a glimpse of the boy who helped found The Beatles more than four decades ago.

He's got a few years on me, but we're both from northern England and the same social class: lower middle - or, you might say, working class with notions. My home city of Manchester is only 40-odd miles from Liverpool, and in the 1960s the cities, long friendly rivals, were galvanised by the same seismic changes brought about by the beat boom.

But that was before Manchester became Manchester, and in those days our bands - among them The Hollies, 10cc and, er, Freddie and the Dreamers - just weren't in the same league as Liverpool's. The Manchester art-school crowd to which I belonged, the epitome of black-polo-necked amphetamine cool in its day (don't laugh), had an equivalent in Liverpool, and that was the energetic, creative melting pot that had nurtured Lennon and McCartney.

All the same, me and my mates were a bit lofty about The Beatles at the time, reacting against the avidity with which the band was embraced by the establishment, royalty and the world. So I never saw them live when I was young.

Ah, but that was then. Now it's 2003, and Paul McCartney is 61. More than 30,000 fans were at the RDS, hoping that he wouldn't let us down, wouldn't be too much like your granddad. In the days running up to the concert there had been the predictable sneers.

A writer in this very newspaper asked why on earth anyone "would pay good money to sit through a set from a Ron-Dixon-from-Brookside lookalike who gave the world The Frog Song and Pipes Of Peace."

But isn't it a bit unkind to attack the first rock 'n' roll generation for growing old? As Keith Richards observed recently: "What do the critics know? They've never sailed this sea before because nor have we. We're just floating out there and seeing how far it can go."

Anyway, when McCartney started into his opening song, Hello Goodbye, the weird orange hair and thickened waist became an irrelevance, because, magically, his voice hadn't changed at all. And as the concert found its pace the scale of what we were witnessing flooded in: we were actually watching one of The Beatles, singing Beatles songs.

McCartney was always a consummate storyteller, as a young man well able to see life from the perspective of an older generation - it's one of the things that made him seem so uncool then and so admirable in retrospect - and there he was in front of us, giving us those little poems of English suburban loneliness and loss that went around the world.

Sometimes the whole story is there in one brilliant opening line ("Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice at a church where a wedding has been"); sometimes he asks us to sit down and pay attention while a more leisurely tale unfolds ("Monday morning at five o'clock as the day begins . . . ").

Mostly backed by his tight Back in the World tour band, sometimes alone on stage with an acoustic guitar or keyboards, McCartney defied the years by singing solidly for more than two hours. There were some songs from the Wings era and afterwards, but he gave us the stuff we had really come for, too: All My Loving, We Can Work It Out, Fool On The Hill, I Saw Her Standing There, Can't Buy Me Love and so many others.

The decades melted away, and it was with a shock that you noticed his hands, on the giant-screen close-ups, were those of an elderly man.

And McCartney seemed comfortable with his age, happily chattering on about George Formby and even playing Something on the ukelele as a tribute to the two Georges.

As the show drew to a close I felt sorry for the sneerers and anyone else who had not seized the opportunity to see one of the 20th century's great songwriters, a man who has brought so much pleasure to so many millions. After two encores he shouted slán abhaile and threw his plectrum into the crowd.

If it was a smug-looking old-timer who walked on stage at the start, it was the boy from Liverpool who waved goodbye at the end - and the boy from Manchester waved back, filled with bittersweet memories of so many milestones and potholes that each of us had encountered on the long and winding road that had brought him to my door.

• Stephen Dixon is also known as the sculptor Stephen Dee, whose multimedia Freakshow? was part of last year's Galway Arts Festival and this year's Dublin Fringe Festival