Peter Viney's Blog

The Bootleg Beatles

with The Pepperland Sinfonia

Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre
Tuesday 10^thApril, 2018

The Pavilion Theatre, Bournemouth

Adam Hastings (John Lennon) – vocal, rhythm guitar, keyboards
Steve White (Paul McCartney)- vocal, bass guitar, acoustic guitar, piano
Stephen Hill (George Harrison) – vocal, lead guitar
Gordon Elsmore (Ringo Starr) – vocal, drums

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Max Langley – keyboards, percussion.

and orchestra:

Rob Woollard: cello, fireman’s bell
Tom Bott: violin
Harret Baker: Tenor saxophone, clarinet, flute
Vanessa King: French horn, flute, tubular bells
Matt Grouchett: Trumpet, piccolo trumpet, flugel horn,

From  the programme

POP GO THE BEATLES 63
She Loves You
Roll Over Beethoven
I Want To Hold Your Hand

BEATLEMANIA – SHEA STADIUM
Help!
Act Naturally
I Feel Fine
Can’t Buy Me Love
Ticket To Ride
Twist & Shout

Yesterday (solo)

SERGEANT PEPPER’s LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
A Little Help From My Friends
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
Getting Better
Benefit of Mr Kite
Good Morning
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise)
A Day In The Life Of

INTERVAL

THE SUMMER OF LOVE

Hello Goodbye
I Am The Walrus
Penny Lane
Strawberry Fields Forever
The Fool On The Hill
All You Need Is Love

AND IN THE END

While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Revolution
Get Back
Don’t Let Me Down
Here Comes The Sun
Ballad of John & Yoko
Hey Jude 

ENCORES
Abbey Road Medley:
Golden Slumbers
Carry That Weight
You Never Give Me Your Money
In The End

Lady Madonna

The Bootleg Beatles are the granddaddy of tribute bands (established 1980), the best-known, the most popular too. They were originally formed from the cast of the West End show Beatlemania. When they were booked for David Gilmour’s 50^thBirthday party, they met George Harrison who said “You probably know the chords better than I do.” The Beatles stopped playing live over 50 years ago. One of the great things about the Bootleg Beatles is that they go beyond the end of the live band to present later material. I never met any of them, but in one of my ELT textbook series we used authentic rock songs for teaching, and recorded cover versions. I was told The Bootleg Beatles did Hello Goodbye, and it is extremely good indeed. I often played it before talks on the books.

Last month they advertised for a new “John Lennon”:

“The world’s premier Beatle band is searching for a new John Lennon. Must have the look, the voice, basic keyboard and rhythm guitar skills.”

Anyway, Adam Hastings is still John Lennon. The Bootleg Beatles are an ongoing concept rather than a band. Steve White (Paul) joined in 2012, Stephen Hill (George) in 2014 and Gordon Elsmore (Ringo) in 2016. So they have perpetual youth on their side.

They’re playing at Bournemouth Pavilion, directly opposite the Gaumont where I first saw The (Real) Beatles in 1963. They’re not playing the larger BIC which replaced the Winter Gardens where I later saw the real ones twice, and we heard very little above the screaming. An odd fact: Bournemouth boasts the second largest number of Beatles concerts of any town, due to them playing The Gaumont for a week at two shows a night.

Bournemouth Gaumont: currently closed, an important part of The (real) Beatles story. The sleeve for “With The Beatles” was photographed in the hotel next door.

My second Beatles show, November 1963

Every time I get a theatre or concert hall brochure from outside London, it’s full of tribute bands. They far outnumber the originals who will be too old, too rich, too idle, too addled, or unfortunately, too dead, to play Yeovil or Basingstoke on a cold, wet February Tuesday. The demand is there.

The thing is, people want the bands as close to the original songs as possible. They like costume, the right matching guitars. If we take a hypothetical late 60s band who split and recently reformed, or a solo artist, they might do their greatest hits, but they’d add a more recent cover or two. They’d change things around, update a little. In the case of Don Henley, saddled with Hotel California every night, he did a wonderful tuba version on a video. Bootleg bands can’t do that. Nor do they usually take requests, or vary the set list. So is it “theatre” as much as a “concert”? The “theatrical version” can fill more seats than originals. John Wetton told me he once played a small hall in Montreal with the John Wetton Band, only to find a King Crimson tribute band was playing a much larger venue down the road. So people chose someone dressed up as John Wetton was in 1973, imitating his song Easy Money, to the real one singing the same song in the same city on the same night.

Concert poster, featuring All You Need Is Love

The Bootleg Beatles vary the show from year to year, but it is a show, and as far as I can see, there are different set-lists for any given year, and it is  not set in concrete. So it is not just a rehearsed theatre show. The Dutch shows directly before this were in three sections with a much greater focus on pre-1966, but for the UK tour, with five piece orchestra they have a much shorter Beatlemania set, then separate Sergeant Pepper and Summer of Love and Abbey Road sets. In fact, the setlist tonight is nearly 50% different from Holland a few weeks ago.

They are playing what The Beatles declared was impossible to play live and getting it brilliantly close, with the addition of a five piece mini-orchestra and a keyboards / computer addition. Paul McCartney does the later stuff stripped down now … maybe too tight to pay for a mini-orchestra, they say. The Bootleg Beatles have the orchestration, and dare I say, sound better as a result. To a degree, I was reminded of Brian Wilson’s SMiLE show. Everyone on stage except Brian is non-original and the core was drawn from The Wondermints, who were virtually a Beach Boys tribute band, so the SMiLE show is very close to being an expert tribute band. Like The Bootlreg Beatles, the Brian Wilson / SMiLE shows also included songs the Beach Boys had not (and probably could not) play.  Just like the SMiLE tour, the Bootleg Beatles have WAY better material to draw from than anyone else currently on the road, and I never imagined I would ever hear Strawberry Fields Forever, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, A Day In The Life or Golden Slumbers played live and sounding so close to the original.

The stage is set with all the right stuff: Twin Vox AC-30- amplifiers, and a rather rarer Vox T-60 bass amp … you can buy modern AC30s. “Ringo” has a classic small Ludwig kit. The projections are a feature of the show with archive stills and video footage linking sections, and the show starts with a recorded 5-4-3-2-1 by Manfred Mann, because that was the opening theme of the Ready Steady Go! TV programme.

The Beatlemania section was short: She Loves You, Roll Over Beethoven, I Want To Hold Your Hand. I was transfixed by how carefully they had studied the stage act of The Beatles. The stances, the movements were so reminiscent of the footage in Eight Days A Week. I hadn’t made the connection until I saw it here, but “George” has the nervous habit of going back and looking down at the amp controls. Absolutely accurate. The stage is also set up with just two mics at the front, with “Paul” and “George” sharing one. Now even in 1962 the cost of a third Shure Unidyne mic and stand was hardly prohibitive for even a semi-pro band, but that’s how The Beatles did it, probably a left-over from the confined spaces of The Cavern and Hamburg clubs. They have the right guitars: Hofner violin bass, Gretsch for George, Rickenbacker for John. Right away, you wonder at the requirements for being “Paul.” Steve White, the current incumbent has to look reasonably like the original, be a first rate singer, play acoustic guitar and piano, but also has to play bass guitar left-handed. While Sir Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix played with their guitars the other way round, most left-handed players simply learned the other way … the aforementioned John Wetton was also left-handed, but always played conventional guitars.

The SHEA STADIUM set follows closely, with the right jackets and all the right physical stances and mannerisms. If you’ve seen the cinema version of Eight Days A Week you’ve seen the full Shea Stadium recording. Again, the attention to detail is uncanny, starting with Help! “Ringo” gets his spot for Act Naturally and introduces it as “a sing out of tune version” but actually our Ringo can sing in tune better than the real one could. Then it’s I Feel Fine, Can’t Buy Me Love (introduced as an oldie, which it was by Shea Stadium), Ticket To Ride and a final Twist & Shout though we don’t get the ripped throat hoarseness of John Lennon’s truly unmatchable original …  the sore throat is not something you can ask for. By this point, belief is set in. I can accept that I’m watching (well, more or less) “The Beatles.”

At this point they use Yesterday as a bridge, with “Paul” solo on acoustic guitar starting it. I hadn’t noticed them slip on, but the lights reveal the addition of cello and violin. It’s astonishing how much a string duo can add. The programme notes that the orchestra will be only 5 piece on selected dates, and this is one of them. In larger venues they use a string quartet, but I’m amazed how full the sound is (probably processed, I guess) with two. In fact cello is used a lot from now on. Yesterday is the first invited singalong too. Anyway, it gives the others a chance to change, and the stage is dressed for Sergeant Pepper to more well-curated archive footage with Dedicated Follower of Fashion and Wild Thing on the speakers.

Sergeant Pepper set

So we’re into the stuff that “was impossible to play on stage” and the full costumes. I feel a sense of relief for Steve White now able to drop the Hofner violin bass and play a decent Rickenbacker bass instead. I hated violin basses. The weight’s in all the wrong places, and the sound is too muzzy or farty compared to a Precision bass, though “actual” Paul always said the size enabled him to move around more freely and no doubt has his current model tweaked. “George” gets a Stratocaster alternating with a Gibson SG, and John gets a Gibson 335, but as the originals never played this live there must be an element of freedom of choice, I guess. Steve White is playing the bass parts of the best-ever melodic bass player, but then Paul’s parts weren’t so much difficult to play, as that no one else would have thought of playing those notes.

Of course, technology has changed. You can also get brilliant orchestral musicians who clap along and immerse themselves fully in the show (while wearing the requisite bow ties, black frocks etc) which may not have been likely in 1967. I’ve seen John Cale and Brian Wilson benefit from that change with young orchestras too.  Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band starts the set, and is stunningly good. I recall a soul band which friends played in trying this in 1967 and it was a rare failed cover for them, it just never worked, but technology has changed.

Over to Ringo. By now I’m thinking of a deserved piece of praise for the original Ringo by a drummer. If you isolate the drum track from around 1966 on, you know what the song is just by listening to Ringo. That is virtually unique. Ringo is one of the greatest drummers ever, yet with no “flash.” Maybe the stripped down kit helps our “Ringo” (Gordon Elsmore) replicate the style so well tonight.  With A Little Help From My Friends is more accurately in tune than the All Starr Band versions.

They start Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds – this can’t possibly … but yes, it does! Magnificent. I’m shaking my head in disbelief at how good in sounds and smiling from ear to ear too. The next two were Getting Better and Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite, then Good Morning. The reprised Sergeant Pepper was even stronger. Then came the next “surely not” as they started A Day In The Life. Could they get the cacophonous ending? Very well indeed … the four “Beatles” went off and left it to the orchestra.

The interval comes here, where I noted a programme was £5 … I’ve seen similar at £12, and a 100% cotton Fruit of The Loom T-shirt was £10. Fair prices. Again, £15 is common at shows. I’m beginning to like this show more and more …

The Summer of Love set

Onto the SUMMER OF LOVE set. The cream of The Beatles in fact.  If I had to choose one LP side of The Beatles for a Desert Island, being of an age when I still think in LP sides, I’d be torn between Magical Mystery Tour (American LP) Side 2, the singles and B-sides, or Abbey Road Side 2. They started with Hello Goodbye. See above. Adam Hastings gave us a perfect John soundalike I Am The Walrus. Then two sides of the first Beatles 45 not to get to number 1. I noticed that the awful record that stopped it, Englebert Humperdink’s Release Me, was flashed onto the screen behind. In fact some retailers accounted the sides separately which stalled it. They did Penny Lane first, and we were just starting to get the onstage Paul / John banter and teasing (no joke spoilers. Go and see it). So “Paul” first with Penny Lane, technically the B-side. I still remember the buzz of anticipation at university. At a certain time (11 pm?) they announced they would be playing the new Beatles single. Nine of us gathered solemnly round a radio to wait. Strawberry Fields Forever. In my much honed Desert Island Discs Eight Songs  (I await the call from Radio Two, Kirsty) it’s the Beatles choice.  We listened to it coming out of the radio that first night. One of my fellow students, a burly Wiltshire lad, announced ‘This is a load of shit.’ Three or four others nodded. I shook my head and said ‘This is the most brilliant record I’ve ever heard.’ So I can’t express the pleasure of hearing it live. OK, it’s a facsimile. It’s a cover. Doesn’t matter. Then we switched back to “Paul” for The Fool On The Hill. OK, my choice from Magical Mystery Tour LP would have been Baby You’re a Rich Man, but the tapestry of delights is rich enough.

The section closed with All You Need Is Love. We all dutifully stood up, and waved our arms and did the Mick Jagger / Donovan / Marianne Faithful part from the World TV broadcast: we sang along.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps (Stephen Hill)

This is no 90 minute + support show. We still had a full section to go. AND IN THE END. This was introduced by “George” (Stephen Hill) singing While My Guitar Gently Weeps alone with acoustic guitar … again allowing the rest to get changed. I wondered what they would do about the Eric Clapton part, but then cello and violin joined him., and violin took the part. So here we have quite a radical re-arrangement. Not the kind of thing that tribute bands usually do.

The rooftop of the Apple Building set

They wheeled on big Fender amplifiers, mimicking the final Beatles rooftop impromptu show, though whether they actually switched from the Voxs, I don’t know. In this section Max Langley came and took the keyboards seat which “John” (Adam Hastings) had occupied for much of the Summer of Love set. Max Langley had been adding percussion and hovering in the background for some numbers. There was an extra keyboard back there, I guess, plus a screen, so presumably effects could be added. The set started with Revolution (pictures of Chairman Mao, The Stones …) then Get Back. Max Langley was playing the Billy Preston part, though didn’t have to shave off his beard or apply face make-up! Some excellent keyboard work too. What looked like an upright piano clearly concealed a keyboard where they could get piano or Hammond or synthesized sounds. Don’t Let Me Down was rooftop show. Here Comes The Sun highlighted “George” again, then we were into Paul v John banter for The Ballad of John & Yoko from Adam Hastings, and Hey Jude from Steve White. Ballad of John & Yoko sounded stronger and more insistent with a full band … total authenticity would have required “Paul” to play drums and Ringo and George to take a break! I always get an earworm after a concert, and the surprise tonight was that it was Ballad of John & Yoko.  Hey Jude was another where audience joined in. It was the last number of the main set: instant standing ovation.

It must be an odd feeling. They’re getting a deserved standing ovation for their own performance, but they’re also getting the ovation as surrogates for the guys who wrote and originated this stuff.

The encore was the selection from Abbey Road side two. Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, You Never Give Me Your Money, In The End. Yet again they proved this material can be done live and done sublimely well live. A raucous Lady Madonna closed the evening to another standing ovation.

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A splendid time was guaranteed for all.

*****

LINK:

Music To Watch Girls By,

by Dart Travis

My pseudonymous novel on the Summer of Love.