McCartney to take a crash-course language lesson for Independence Concert

Paul McCartney will be seeing a language coach to be taught some instant Ukrainian, backstage before his concert this weekend in Kiev.

McCartney is to learn some of the language in just under an hour so that he can talk to the crowd in their native language at his special free Independence Concert this weekend. It's expected that hundreds of thousands of people will come from all over the Ukraine to watch this historic show.

The McCartney concert at Independence Square, Kiev on June 14th will be the biggest concert ever mounted in Kiev. The massive stage will be the largest ever built for a McCartney show, featuring spectacular visual images played throughout the gig on giant screens.

Organisers say the 150-minute show will be crammed with Beatles, Wings and solo songs. McCartney is expected to play more than 30 greatest hits in the show.

But besides singing the songs that everybody knows, Paul is planning to talk to them too - in Ukrainian.

An insider said: "Paul likes to talk to the audience in their own language; he introduces songs and chats away in their native tongue. It makes the gig more intimate and personal. Because Paul is a musician, he's got a good ear and that helps him learn languages phonetically and very fast".

But as Paul does not speak Ukrainian, he will have just one hour backstage before the concert to learn the local dialect for his onstage announcements.

Paul is no stranger to learning new languages. Of course his German is pretty good after his years in Hamburg and on previous world tours he has learnt Japanese, Hungarian, Norwegian and many more along the way. When he played in Moscow in 2003 he even took language tips from President Putin himself!