If You Love The Beatles, Then You Should Know "The Analogues"

Mossman · Fri Dec 04, 2020 11:15 pm

Ok, so I'm usually pretty critical of Beatles tribute bands, but these guys are on a whole other level! Most of the better tributes can nail the early material, which in itself is not what I would call "easy", but when they get into the later stuff, they tend to start sounding less like a tribute band and more like four guys (in stupid costumes and fake mustaches) playing Beatles covers. The Analogues focus mostly on live performances of the albums released after the Beatles stopped touring, with an insane amount of attention to detail. Not only do they analyze the music on a forensic level, picking out every instrument, every note, every random noise, but they scour the world to acquire vintage examples of every instrument the Beatles used in the studio. No cheats, no sampling, no synthesizers (well, except for the Moog the Beatles used on Abbey Road). Just authentic, analogue instruments (hence the name). The level of commitment these guys have for reproducing this music live on stage is nucking futs! I don't even think the Beatles themselves could have pulled this off. In fact, on the Beatles' last tour, they didn't play a single song from Revolver, because they didn't think they could do it justice in a live setting (and nobody would have heard it, anyway).

The first video is a documentary detailing the immense amount of work they put into dissecting the music, acquiring some of the more difficult to find instruments, and putting their show together. The second video is their full performance of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Enjoy!

They have also done performances of Magical Mystery Tour, the White Album and Abbey Road, and you can watch excerpts from those shows on their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSb0az ... s_g/videos

Partscaster · Sat Dec 05, 2020 5:25 am

If I may, I'ld like to add this Beatles White Album cover by Morgan James. Serious eye candy with good singing of a great album.

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bleys21 · Sun Dec 06, 2020 6:49 pm

Those guys are insanely good! Can't believe I've never heard of them. I listened to a handful of songs, and even live, they sounded just like the albums. Pretty amazing...

Mossman · Sat Dec 12, 2020 3:33 pm

bleys21 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 06, 2020 6:49 pm Those guys are insanely good! Can't believe I've never heard of them. I listened to a handful of songs, and even live, they sounded just like the albums. Pretty amazing...

Yeah, somehow they remained under my radar for a while too. Usually, not much Beatles-related stuff escapes my attention for too long, but these guys had already done Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, the White Album and Abbey Road by the time I got hip to them. I think their level of commitment is unbelievable. I got exhausted just watching all the work they put into developing the Sgt. Pepper show. If you haven't watched the "making of" video yet, I highly recommend it.

I think it's deceptively difficult to cover the Beatles. There's just some ineffable quality that's impossible to duplicate.... because... you're just not the Beatles. Even the early stuff is more sophisticated than you expect it to be in so many ways, and it's hard to pull off accurately without a lot of attention to detail. Even if you're playing all the parts perfectly, at best, you just sound like a bunch of guys playing a version of a Beatles song. So I have big props for all the better tribute bands who really nail it, but don't venture past 1966. However, I don't particularly care to hear a cover/wedding band attempt any Beatles song. And as big a Beatles fan as I am, I have never had any desire to attempt covering the Beatles in any band I've been in...

Except for this one time... with the last band I was in.

Somehow, I thought we had a chance of pulling it off. We chose a few songs that we thought were attainable while still being a challenge to play (One After 909, Back in the USSR, Get Back, Paperback Writer), and after weeks of intense study and rehearsal, we couldn't get any one of those songs worked up to a point that any of us were satisfied with. The closet we got was One After 909, but it sounded more like a cover of the Grateful Dead covering the Beatles, and we figured maybe we oughta quit while we're behind.

Also, I was playing bass in this band, and was chosen to sing all these songs too, and it was damn hard playing Paul's basslines and singing at the same time! Especially Paperback Writer... That was the first song to go. I don't know how he does it.

bleys21 · Sat Dec 12, 2020 7:52 pm

I know what you mean. The Beatles made everything sound *easy*. I've been a fan since I was a little kid, as my dad listened to them all the time. Flash forward like 30 years later when I finally got around to learning the guitar, my dad buys me a Beatles songbook. I'm thinking "Cool!"... until I tried learning the songs. Every song I tried, all I found was strange chords, time signatures, you name it. Everything was hard, and like you said, its like impossible to really make their songs sound good. I mean, I always knew how good they were, but it wasn't until I started to learn the guitar that I really understood why they were (and still are) head and shoulders above everyone else. I read somewhere that of the 25 #1 hits by the Beatles, only one used one of the "standard" chord progressions that dominate popular music. That confirmed what my ears have been telling me for years...

Mossman · Sun Dec 13, 2020 6:23 pm

bleys21 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 12, 2020 7:52 pm I know what you mean. The Beatles made everything sound *easy*. I've been a fan since I was a little kid, as my dad listened to them all the time. Flash forward like 30 years later when I finally got around to learning the guitar, my dad buys me a Beatles songbook. I'm thinking "Cool!"... until I tried learning the songs. Every song I tried, all I found was strange chords, time signatures, you name it. Everything was hard, and like you said, its like impossible to really make their songs sound good. I mean, I always knew how good they were, but it wasn't until I started to learn the guitar that I really understood why they were (and still are) head and shoulders above everyone else. I read somewhere that of the 25 #1 hits by the Beatles, only one used one of the "standard" chord progressions that dominate popular music. That confirmed what my ears have been telling me for years...

You're lucky you got an accurate songbook. A lot of them simplify the chords, or change the key to make them easier to play. For the longest time, I avoided learning Beatles songs... I think I was afraid that if I learned how to play them, it might spoil the "magic" somehow, but when I finally decided to start learning the Beatles in earnest, more often than not I found myself thinking: "Where the hell did they get THAT chord from??", or: "There's NO WAY I'll ever get my fingers to do that on the fly!". Sometimes I would cheat the hard chords, but at the end of the day, if you want it to sound "right", then you have to knuckle down and learn to play the correct chords. The Beatles ended up being more responsible for expanding (and deepening) my chord vocabulary than anybody else. I read an interview with George Harrison from around '64 or '65, where he said that he and John didn't like musical clichés, and would often avoid standard chord voicings. Just another little bit of flavor that isn't obvious, but contributed to their unique sound.

And Lennon was a monster rhythm guitarist too... Something else that's almost always overlooked. If you really pay attention to what he's doing, and try to replicate that, it sure as hell ain't easy to play like him.

Add to that their impeccable harmonies, sophisticated melodies, their sense of time and counterpoint, and a combination of compositional maturity and inventiveness (they knew when to throw the rules away and when not to), it's not hard to see why everybody lost their frickin' minds when they came around. And they didn't even know WHY.

I was watching a press conference from their last (1966) tour where they were asked (probably for the 5,000th time) how they accounted for their success and popularity, and Paul (visibly annoyed) said: "Look... WE DON'T KNOW... We're not even GOOD musicians... We're just ADEQUATE musicians writing ADEQUATE songs that a lot people seem to like!"

Of course, he was wrong... The Beatles were genius musicians, they just weren't virtuosos.