‘I learn the information right this moment . . . ’
Repeating the opening phrases to The Beatles’ “A Day within the Life”, Neil Harrison purses his lips, narrows his eyes and makes a beckoning gesture together with his fingers. “Do you see?” he asks. “It’s ‘neews’. Strive it once more.”
He’s directing Paul Canning in an empty Canterbury theatre on a wet day in April. Canning has been taking part in the a part of John Lennon in The Bootleg Beatles for exactly 5 weeks. Harrison, the band’s co-founder and artistic pressure, spent 31 years onstage as Bootleg John, and the actual John’s vocal tics and mannerisms stay second nature. Along with his avian body and wispy gray hair, Harrison generally seems like the person Lennon may’ve turn into, had he lived to his seventies.
Harrison takes up his place on the front-of-house sound sales space, because the band, nonetheless of their civvies, restart the track. Flanking the stage is a galley of flamboyantly necked classic guitars, road-worn Rickenbackers and a Höfner 500/1, Paul McCartney’s slender, signature violin bass. Big Vox AC30 amplifiers, the sonic spine of the Swinging ’60s, stand on both facet. A drum set, raised on a plinth centre stage, shows the band’s insignia. It seems just like the traditional Beatles brand with the phrase “Bootleg” wedged in. Above all of it, a projector is primed to bombard the upstage wall with visuals pulled from track lyrics.
The Bootlegs are Britain’s oldest, most well-known and most profitable tribute act. Since 1980, they’ve carried out greater than 5,000 occasions worldwide, usually on the grandest phases and to monumental, adoring audiences. They’re revered on the earth of imitators because the gold normal, setting a bar for authenticity that few acts have the experience or assets to match. Their intention is easy: to droop your disbelief for a few hours.
Whenever you’re being assessed by rock music’s most assiduous fandom, attaining that intention is less complicated mentioned than completed. “We had one viewers member spot the lightbulb on the Vox amp one evening within the Netherlands,” Harrison remembers. “After the present he requested, ‘Why is it orange as an alternative of yellow? Did they use a Vox I haven’t heard about?’”
Unsurprisingly, Harrison is meticulous in his strategy. Some evenings, he movies performances from a vantage among the many crowd and conducts video evaluation with the band the subsequent morning. That is usually paired with viewings of archival footage. Each element on stage has a reference level from the band’s true previous, all of it guided by Harrison’s huge data of Beatles historical past. He “will present you precisely which gig, pull up the footage [and say] ‘Have a look at John’s elbow. Look the place Paul and George’s guitars are pointing,’” Canning tells me later. “It’s one other degree.”
Again within the sound sales space, Harrison and a sound tech are nonetheless specializing in the brand new Bootleg John. They cock their heads and fold their arms, as they research him. “It’s confidence, it’s that . . . ” says Harrison, as he rubs his fingers collectively once more. “It’ll come, although, the longer he’s up there. Now I’ve obtained to go give them notes once more.” He chuckles. “They don’t like that!”
Born in 1950 in West Kirby, simply throughout the Mersey from Liverpool, Harrison grew up immersed in music. “My mum was a piano participant,” he remembers, “and my dad liked to sing. He was a form of bootleg Sinatra. They’d have events the place mum would knock out the tunes on the piano, with a gin and tonic, and he’d croon away.” He clearly remembers when he first heard The Beatles in 1962. “It was like an explosion,” he says. “My brother and I spent our hard-earned pocket cash on Please Please Me, and we performed it to dying.”
Because the band remodeled themselves and fashionable tradition all through the Nineteen Sixties, Harrison adopted their each transfer. One night in December 1968, he and his buddies launched into an audacious spot of Christmas carolling exterior a home in a close-by suburb, after listening to that Paul McCartney’s Aston Martin DB5 was parked there. Dissatisfied to be greeted by McCartney’s stepmother, Angie, the troupe started taking part in anyway. Then the flash of a digital camera went off at one facet of the home and out stepped Paul with a guitar round his shoulder. “He was God,” says Harrison.
God, together with his pregnant fiancée, Linda, at his facet, proceeded to ask the carollers in. “We performed ‘Rocky Raccoon’, ‘Mom Nature’s Son’. [Then] he asks, ‘What do you need to be taught from me?’ and teaches me ‘Blackbird’, earlier than exhibiting me a brand new track he’d simply written.” Ruefully, Harrison says over time most individuals didn’t consider this anecdote concerning the new track — till the quantity surfaced in footage utilized in Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary Get Again.
The prospect to make an album in London with buddies took Harrison south in 1971, and he launched a solo album, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, just a few years later. He was signed to Elton John’s label, The Rocket Document Firm, the place he additionally wrote hits for Lulu. However principally, he made his cash taking part in covers on the pub circuit. One evening, one other musician with a Beatles haircut approached him and supplied to affix forces. David Catlin-Birch and Harrison began touring collectively, honing their harmonies. As they solely performed Beatles and Eagles covers, they known as themselves The Beagles.
In 1978, the 2 heard a casting name on Capital Radio for a British manufacturing of Beatlemania, the Broadway sensation that was later killed by a lawsuit from The Beatles’ Apple Corps. Their expertise landed Harrison and Catlin-Birch the plum spots of John and Paul, respectively. “The drummer was Jack Lee Elgood, who did look fairly like Ringo truly, after which there was André.” André Barreau, then a researcher on the BBC, was the proper George Harrison: spindly, angular, with a thick mop of hair.
Regardless of the solid’s efforts, Beatlemania’s West Finish run was a catastrophe. The present had been written for American followers, for whom the band was virtually born on The Ed Sullivan Present on February 9 1964. British followers knew higher and, even then, the authenticity of The Beatles’ story was make or break. As crowds dwindled, Harrison had a proposition. “Why don’t we simply attempt six months touring because the solid of Beatlemania? If it fails, we will simply return to doing our personal factor.”
Just a few weeks earlier in Oxford, the band stopped taking part in midway by way of a rendition of “Revolution” when there was a medical emergency within the viewers. Whereas the present was paused for an hour, The Bootleg Beatles stayed onstage directing the group in the direction of the fireplace exits. They did this all in character, of their chirpiest Liverpudlian drawls.
Each band has Spinal Faucet moments on the street. (The 1984 mockumentary continues to loom giant as a shorthand for the absurdities of touring life.) However The Bootlegs have maybe extra declare than most, given their act is taking part in 4 truculent, eccentric rock stars each evening. It’s a job they take extraordinarily severely. “You’ve obtained to have a completely clear thoughts for it,” Ste Hill, 42, and the present Bootleg George, says. “Meaning staying sober earlier than the present, Neil’s massive on that. You’re not simply taking part in covers together with your mates. It takes focus. In any other case, you’ll by no means pull it off.”
Dedication to the function of Bootleg Ringo Starr means Gordon Elsmore has to spend an hour longer in make-up than the remainder of the band. On his desk at the back of the theatre in Canterbury, there may be cleansing spirit from Boots, cotton pads from Superdrug, eyeshadow and basis from Artdeco, a model Elsmore can solely get when the band is touring in Germany. L’Oréal Elnett hairspray retains his wigs, hand-woven from human hair, wanting tight amid the relentless head bobbing that being Ringo requires. “You get very connected to sure merchandise,” Elsmore, 50, says. “I actually do, anyway.”
After which there’s the nostril. It’s a Hollywood-grade duplicate, made by a veteran stage prosthetist, and ferried between exhibits with fleshy backups in a big Tupperware container. “I spent hours and hours within the casting masks,” Elsmore says, mixing epoxy within the lid of an Further chewing gum tub. “So it matches completely on my face. And as soon as it’s on,” he smears the bridge of his nostril with the cheesy finish of a picket spoon, earlier than urgent on Ringo’s snout, “it’s laborious to drink with, and it catches a whole lot of snot. However I can sing with it, no drawback.”
There may be rather more to taking part in Ringo than an enormous nostril and a willingness to be the band’s punchline. “He’s such a inventive drummer, it truly is under-appreciated,” Elsmore says of the actual Ringo. “The best way he may pace up, decelerate, transfer with the music and observe the band’s lead.” He was “taking part in for the track, not the group”.
Elsmore has, so far, spent 30 years taking part in Ringo in numerous cowl bands and Beatles acts. “I’ve been in The Compleat Beatles. I’ve been in The Paperback Beatles,” he says, as he blends pores and skin tones alongside the nostril’s seal. “There’s at all times work for a Ringo.” He additionally performed Ringo on the West Finish stage within the musical Let It Be, which began in 2012 and continues to be working.
That present has served as one thing of a expertise pool for the present-day Bootlegs. Hill spent a few years as Let It Be’s George earlier than being drafted to The Bootlegs in 2014. Canning additionally learnt the ropes as Let It Be’s John. Solely Steve White, Bootleg Paul since 2012, didn’t move by way of the stage on his solution to mimicking Macca. He was alleged to observe within the household stonemasonry enterprise earlier than discovering his musical abilities on the comparatively late age of 20.
Then there’s the psychology behind taking part in a long-dead rock icon. One night, Harrison advised Canning concerning the genesis of “All You Want is Love”, the track penned by Lennon in the course of the summer season of affection in 1967. He carried out it in the course of the first reside world satellite tv for pc broadcast. “We all know it begins with the ‘Marseillaise’, however . . . it’s about figuring out the place Lennon was coming from: pulling a prank on the entire world, taking part in France’s anthem as an alternative of Britain’s. And to know that, it’s a must to return to the supply materials.” Hill says all of that work goes into the 2 and a half hours on stage. “And as quickly as you’re off, you’re again to being you once more. It’s a job.”
It could be one of the crucial coveted jobs within the British music trade. Hill says the mere point out of the band’s identify prompts different musicians to start out auditioning, simply in case a place opens up. He recounts the story of his personal marriage ceremony day. Harrison and Barreau had been each in attendance, he says, “so are all of the mates I’ve constructed from The Beatles circuit. They know this, in order that they present as much as my marriage ceremony dressed like John or George or Paul, making an attempt to impress the 2 of them. And I’m simply watching this marriage ceremony crowd all dressed like The Beatles, considering, ‘What’s going on right here?’”
The Bootleg Beatles performed their first set in a scholar corridor in Tiverton, Devon, on March 26 1980, practically a decade to the day of the unique Fab 4’s break-up. Harrison, Barreau and Catlin-Birch had pooled the final of their money from Beatlemania to purchase two guitars, an Epiphone and a Gretsch, in addition to a set of turtleneck jumpers and shiny acrylic wigs. On the lookout for their first few gigs, the newly fashioned cowl band reached out to Nems, the corporate began by The Beatles’ supervisor Brian Epstein.
With its assist, The Bootleg Beatles bounced between college campuses and small regional venues, one thing Harrison describes because the band’s “Hamburg section”. On the evening John Lennon was shot, the band was in Keele taking part in the college’s Christmas Ball. In a means, the assassination fuelled demand for his or her act. “Earlier than John’s dying,” Harrison says, “The Beatles nonetheless may’ve reformed. So maybe folks thought, why see some imposters when, at some stage, we’d get the actual ones again once more?”
Nems may solely discover small British venues for The Bootlegs, however managed to ebook the band on to 3 extraordinary worldwide excursions. Inside a 12 months, The Bootlegs had been touring Israel. “I’d solely ever been on bundle holidays,” Harrison says, “and I keep in mind taking part in ‘You’ve Received to Conceal Your Love Away’ to what should’ve been 100,000 folks at a competition north of Jerusalem.”
In October 1982, the band launched into a six-week tour of the Soviet Union, the primary western rock band to take action. From Moscow to Vladivostok, Harrison was astonished on the depth of feeling that the band aroused in audiences. “We’d have all these Brezhnev-era dignitaries sitting within the entrance row of the Rossiya live performance corridor, frowning, after which all the youngsters going bonkers behind them.” Once they’d depart, the group would chase and rock the tour bus. “I’m positive a whole lot of them thought we had been the actual factor.”
The Bootlegs’ 1984 tour of the US was the stark reverse. It was the band’s first of many efforts to place itself facet by facet with Beatles historical past. “It was the Twenty Years In the past Immediately tour,” says Harrison, “and we flew first into JFK on the Pan Am flight, simply because the band did earlier than The Ed Sullivan Present, anticipating TV cameras ready for us. We land, and completely no person is there. The promoter had gone to Newark by mistake.” Issues continued from there, with the promoter fleeing the tour after a number of empty gigs. To fund a ticket dwelling, The Bootlegs took any reserving they might. “We performed numerous tiny little cities. We performed a Chinese language restaurant. We performed a Les Paul membership someplace in Cincinnati. It ended up being a bonding expertise.”
As much as the Nineteen Nineties, British venues remained reluctant to welcome tribute exhibits. “For our first full UK tour in 1990,” says Harrison, “we needed to reflect all of the locations The Beatles themselves had performed 20 years prior. Half of the venues advised us no, we had been too low hire.” However as different tribute acts started rising — Abba cowl band Björn Once more, The Australian Pink Floyd Present — The Bootlegs thrived.
In 1994, they made their debut at Glastonbury, headlining the acoustic stage for the primary time. Oasis singer Liam Gallagher fell in love with them quickly after and invited The Bootlegs to open for the band at Earl’s Courtroom, then at Knebworth in 1996, two gigs that outlined the height of Britpop.
Revivalist at its core, Britpop created a recent wave of appreciation for the unique Beatles. In 1995, Paul, George and Ringo launched a brand new single for the primary time in 24 years, ending the unfinished demo “Free as a Chook”. The Bootlegs moved rapidly to include the brand new observe into their oeuvre. “You dropped a word,” the actual George advised them drily, after he heard them play it on the Fiftieth-birthday occasion for Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. “It’s an F main seven, not the D minor.”
On the most recent tour, Harrison has had the band shut their exhibits with “Now and Then”, the “final Beatles track”, launched as a single final November. “I actually prefer it,” Harrison says, “You possibly can inform it’s a traditional Lennon melody.” The observe itself, cleaned as much as nice fanfare by machine-learning expertise, sits squarely within the uncanny valley, splicing the John of 1977 with the George of 1995 in a means that already sounds dated. However The Bootlegs’ rendition lends a coherence, an authenticity, that the Computerised Beatles had been unable to. They place the track again on the earth it belongs in, a world of human beings with quirks and eccentricities.
Bootleg Pauls and Ringos shuffled out and in of the band, however Bootleg John and George had been its fixtures. Through the years, their stage make-up began portray over deepening wrinkles. Harrison was the primary to hold up his guitar, in 2011. Three years later, Barreau adopted go well with, transitioning out of taking part in George, though he nonetheless performed the occasional present till 2017. “My voice was struggling,” Harrison confesses. “Acid reflux disease. The older you get, the tougher it’s to sing like a 20-year-old. Life takes its toll on you.”
Harrison’s retirement signalled the tip of the band’s first chapter, leaving the small matter of his successor. Bootleg John is inarguably The Bootleg Beatles’ most advanced character. First to try taking up the function was a tyro, Adam Hastings, who arrived within the band in 2011 straight out of college. He was not solely a Lennon prodigy, but in addition a Bootlegs superfan. “I had three posters on my bed room wall. Nirvana, one of many actual Beatles and the autographed Bootlegs poster, and in my thoughts all of them had equal standing,” Hastings advised the Liverpool Echo in December 2017.
Hastings swapped The Bootlegs for The Fab 4, a California-based tribute act, in 2018. He was changed by Tyson Kelly, an American singer from an distinctive musical lineage. His father, Tom, wrote Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and Divinyls’ “I Contact Myself”, amongst different hits. Kelly had risen by way of the ranks of The Beatles circuit, showing as John in Let It Be, amongst different tributes. “Tyson was an excellent man,” says Harrison, “and an excellent John, however he needed to make extra of his personal identify.” This can be a frustration that Harrison himself wrestled with by way of his time as Bootleg John. “Whenever you’re transferring round with those who have made it in their very own proper, you do really feel a little bit of a second-class citizen. You possibly can’t assist it.”
From the faintly stung rumblings throughout the band and crew, Kelly’s departure appears to have been lengthy within the making and fewer than amicable. One profit, nonetheless, was that it gave Harrison ample alternative to check alternative Johns together with his viewers. “I did my first gig with The Bootlegs with 4 hours’ discover,” Canning remembers. “They wanted an emergency John for a present, I obtained the decision and clearly I simply mentioned ‘Sure.’” By the point Kelly’s departure was finalised this 12 months, Canning was the main candidate. “I’ve been in bands with all these guys earlier than,” he says, “Beatles bands and different bands. For all times on the street, you want that chemistry.”
By all of the comings and goings, Harrison and Barreau had been decided to advance the stagecraft and sonic complexity of the present. In 2017, the band launched into their first collaboration with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, performing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Membership Band in full with the orchestra’s 70-strong backing. The latest collaboration with the RLPO occurred this month with an orchestral reconstruction of The Blue Album, the compilation masking the interval from 1967 to 1970 and that includes the band’s final songs collectively. “Their music is classical music now, to me,” says Harrison. “These melodies, they’ve crossed over. And so they’ll final for ever.”
In August 2023, Barreau handed away on the age of 67 from most cancers. When the information got here in, the band was backstage at CarFest, the DJ Chris Evans’ music competition on the Bolesworth Property in Cheshire. In a tribute on The Bootleg Beatles’ web site posted shortly after, Harrison went over considered one of their closing conversations. “We spoke about legacy the final time we had been collectively,” he wrote, “when he knew he was unwell. He mentioned that he’d hoped to attain extra in his life, like all of us do, I assume, however I gently reminded him that he’d achieved a lot already together with his writing and his music . . . It actually was a life well-lived.”
For the second evening in a row, the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury hosts just a few hundred attendees desperate to reside, for an evening, within the Nineteen Sixties. Gig 98 of The Bootleg Beatles’ present seven-month tour is about to start. Backstage, in the course of the temporary window between make-up and closing warm-ups, the band is quiet as Harrison and the tour supervisor movie content material for social media.
The band has to co-ordinate costume modifications. Outfits are stacked neatly, constructing outwards like a Beatles matryoshka, from the linen fits of Abbey Highway to the lurid jackets of the Magical Thriller Tour. Mirrors are mounted for make-up changes. Vocal warm-up treatments and bottles of water wait on standby. Wigs sit on styrofoam model heads.
When showtime comes, The Bootleg Beatles launch into “It Received’t Be Lengthy”, opening observe of With The Beatles from 1963. Over the subsequent two and a half hours, they showcase their capabilities as musicians and actors. Bootleg Paul is stuffed with Macca’s awkward allure. Bootleg Ringo is on-point. Bootleg George pulls off the heavy duty of an acoustic cowl of “Whereas My Guitar Gently Weeps”, devoted to Barreau. The viewers crackles with a vibrancy the band can really feel on their pores and skin. “It’s like a wave, it’s heat, it hits you,” Hill says afterwards.
Bootleg John shows the best transformation from begin to end. Even his stage patter shifts from iconoclastic sarkiness to blissed-out aphorisms and puns. He hits “neews” in “A Day within the Life” completely. From the again of the corridor, Harrison watches from his regular vantage, taking notes and conferring with the sound desk.
Afterwards, the crackle of the group carries backstage, into The Bootlegs’ dressing room and again on to the tour bus, the place they decamp to eat, sleep and unwind. “That is very rock and roll, isn’t it?” Hill says, gesturing to the offstage tableau. All 4 Bootlegs are in various states of undress, consuming Maltesers and sharing grocery store Rioja, as followers and company move by way of to congratulate them. As make-up wipes pile up and the adrenaline drains, everybody finds their means again to actuality. A actuality shared by The Bootleg Beatles and the actual Beatles alike. “I feel again to taking part in ‘Rocky Raccoon’ with McCartney,” Harrison says. “And feeling like, ‘Oh, we’re simply two musicians speaking.’”
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