![Wednesday, 13th December 2006]( "Wednesday, 13th December 2006")
Wednesday, 13th December 2006
Apollo return for copycat Beatles
Paul Taylor
WHEN the West End stage musical, Beatlemania, closed in 1980, four young musicians with a striking resemblance to the Fab Four and a note-perfect command of the Beatles songbook were left twiddling their thumbs.
What next? The quartet hit on the notion of taking their Beatles act on the road. After all, the real Beatles had not toured for 15 years, yet their music was, if anything, even more popular.
“It was a stop-gap between finishing one thing and starting another,” says Andre Barreau, the Bootleg Beatles’ George Harrison in an interview in 2004.
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“There was no tribute act circuit then, just a couple of Elvises going round in Wales doing a late period, gone-to-seed Elvis.
"There was nobody doing what we do, trying to dress up like the Beatles, copy the mannerisms and be those characters so that you had this second-hand experience of what it would be like to see the actual artist.”
NEMS
The Bootleg Beatles offered their services to NEMS, the agency once run by the Beatles’ late manager Brian Epstein, and hit the road. What started as college gigs and dates on the northern club circuit, playing second fiddle to bingo, evolved into a career where the Bootleg Beatles were playing the same theatre circuit the Beatles once played.
“It was hard in the eighties for us because people thought it was cheating, or ripping off, because there was really only us doing it,” says Wimbledon-born Barreau.
“It is only since the nineties, when we started doing Glastonbury and playing with Oasis that it got some kind of credibility as an entertainment.”
It was in 1995 that the Beatle-loving brothers Gallagher caught the Bootlegs’ act, loved it and invited them to support Oasis at Earl’s Court, Knebworth and Loch Lomond. But what did the real Beatles think of these imposters doing their act?
“The first thing we heard was a BBC documentary on us in which they interviewed George Martin,” says Barreau. “He was asked what the surviving Beatles thought about us, and he said they were very happy because it was keeping the music alive.
George Harrison
“Then we met George Harrison at a party and spent a lot of time with him. He was just so funny and so charming. He said ‘Who’s the Bootleg Brian Epstein, because he’s got all the money’. That was so special.
“And we met Paul McCartney at the Jubilee thing at Buckingham Palace, because we were playing at that, too. He was great. He said he would come and see us and heckle us.”
Today there are countless Beatles tribute acts doing the rounds.
“A lot of them use our format for the show or our jokes, which would make them bootleg Bootleg Beatles,” says Barreau. Packing the entire Beatles career into their stage show, the Bootlegs start off with the suits and mop top era, then on through a Revolver set to Sergeant Pepper and then Abbey Road eras.
The stage set, costumes and hairstyles are all authentic to each chapter of the Beatles, and the band even use the proper musical equipment, including Vox AC30 valve amplifiers and increasingly fragile period guitars.
Sanity
The Bootlegs perform around 120 gigs a year, but maintain careers as themselves to preserve the sanity. Barreau has a country-influenced band, Those Magnificent Men, and has worked with Robbie Williams - that’s his slide guitar solo on Angels.
Neil Harrison (who plays John Lennon) is a playwright and screenwriter. David Catlin-Birch (Paul McCartney) has also worked extensively with Robbie Williams and done sessions with everyone from Chas ’n’ Dave to Stevie Wonder. Hugo Degenhardt (Ringo Starr) has toured and recorded with a host of artists, including Kylie and Robbie.
After a quarter-century of playing the songs, the Bootlegs have been at it twice as long as the Beatles. The originals were only in their late twenties when they split in 1970, while time creeps on for their imitators.
”We dress the Zimmer frames up as well as we can,” jokes Barreau. “You have to keep trim and, obviously, we wear all these different hairstyles, so that’s wigs. If we could not deliver it we would just say time’s up and we would replace ourselves with someone equally as good with fresher legs. It is going well for the moment, but we are well aware that the clock ticks.”
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/entertainment/music/indieandrock/s/140/140054_ap...
