RHÉAL SÉGUIN

QUEBEC — “Quebeckians” should smoke “the pipes of peace,” Sir Paul McCartney proclaimed yesterday, after nationalists criticized the decision to invite the former Beatle to celebrate Quebec City’s 400th anniversary.

Sir Paul said he was coming to Canada to party, have fun and not get embroiled in a row over language sensitivities. As many as 200,000 people are expected to attend the free concert on Sunday on the Plains of Abraham.

“I hate to go off half-baked. I don’t like to just launch into an issue and not really know what I’m talking about,” he said, in response to criticism from Quebec nationalists who decried the “dangerous” presence of music with English lyrics.

The Quebec painter Luc Archambault launched a protest petition, but yesterday, Sir Paul responded: “Come on Quebeckians [Quebeckers], love me, baby.”

And by the end of yesterday, Mr. Archambault’s campaign appeared to lose momentum.

“I greatly admire McCartney … and I am counting on him as a socially engaged artist to be receptive to my proposal. My proposal is to inform about the situation in which we [francophones] live in Quebec,” he said, adding he is not opposed to Sir Paul’s concert itself, but believes Quebec artists should be given the same amount of attention.

Sir Paul gave separate interviews to The Globe and Mail and Radio-Canada ahead of Sunday’s gig and he was keenly aware of the bubbling controversy.

“I’m not that fluent. But I love speaking French. If anything, most English people learn French in school. If they are going to learn a language, it’s French. In my school, it was weird, because I learned Spanish and German. I never learned any French in school … so yes, I’ll be looking forward to speaking a bit of French,” he said.

The Parti Québécois’ culture critic, who signed the petition, also distanced himself from earlier anti-McCartney comments. Pierre Curzi issued a news release to say he, too, is a Beatles fan and only wanted to remind Sir Paul about the precarious state of the French language in Quebec.

“When you step on stage Sunday to celebrate this beautiful French city, remember with us that the language which gives it life is still fragile,” Mr. Curzi said.

What little French the musical legend possesses was largely learned while travelling to Paris, especially to visit his daughter Stella, who started as a fashion designer there.

The former Beatle hasn’t shied away from embracing his own social causes, joining the campaign against the baby seal hunt. And he believes celebrities have a right as citizens to use their status to help causes that are important to them. For him, George Harrison was among the first to do so with the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh; Bob Geldof’s Live Aid concert for famine relief in Ethiopia was another major event.

“I think it is quite a good idea to use your celebrity for what you see as being the good of people. So I think something like the original Live Aid by Bob Geldof was a very important thing for him to do. Or Concert for Bangladesh that George did way, way before that. I think George probably started that whole thing. I think it is a great thing. It can obviously affect people’s thinking,” he said.

The open-air concert is Sir Paul’s only scheduled appearance in North America this year, ahead of a planned tour next year.