Paul Is Live

A very rare smart clean package double album, inserts and gatefold cover.

Paul Is Live is a live album by Paul McCartney, released in 1993 during his New World Tour in support of the album Off the Ground. The album cover is based on that of Beatles' 1969 album Abbey Road and contains multiple references to the "Paul is dead" conspiracy theory.

The album's title is a response to the "Paul is dead" rumours after the 1969 release of the Beatles' last studio album, Abbey Road, and the cover of Paul Is Live is a digitally altered version of the 1969 album's sleeve. Intentional differences between the two covers are:^[1][2]

• The infamous "LMW-281F" on the Volkswagen Beetle's license plate was mis-read as "LMW-28IF", purportedly meaning that Linda McCartney Weeps and that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – is edited to read "51IS", indicating that he is alive and his age at the time was 51.
• McCartney is wearing shoes; on Abbey Road he had appeared with bare feet, while the other Beatles had shoes. This mismatch was viewed as an eyecatch to the hoax.
• His left foot is forward. In the original cover, McCartney's right foot was forward, out of step with the other Beatles.
• He holds the dog's leash in his left hand; since he is left-handed, many thought that another clue of the "dead Paul" from Abbey Road was the cigarette he held in his right hand.
• The police car - said to symbolise the policemen who had been bribed by the other three Beatles to keep quiet about Paul's death - has been removed.

The dog appearing on the cover is Arrow, one of the offspring of Martha, the sheepdog that was the inspiration for the title of the song "Martha My Dear". The cover photo is from the Abbey Road cover photoshoot by photographer Iain Macmillan. There are differences between this and the photograph used for the Abbey Road cover; most notably, the taxi present in the Abbey Road cover photograph does not feature here. The retouching was done by CGI artist Erwin Keustermans, who erased the Beatles and put in McCartney and the dog, taken from 35 mm pictures by Linda McCartney.