Earlier
this year I saw a show by The Liverpool Band, not in Liverpool but in Denia in
Spain. It turns out these four incredible musicians are from the Alicante area,
so the Condado venue, a former cinema in
Denia´s high street, is more or less
home ground.
Watchy
Watchy is what too many substandard bands in Spain use to fill in for the
English lyrics they cannot understand and/or cannot be bothered to learn. Happily there was absolutely no Watchy Watchy
from the Liverpool Band as they sang every song with perfectly accurate content
and with fantastically clear diction. My admiration for this quartet grew by
the minute as they showed their complete mastery of the Beatles catalogue and
their own skills as instrumentalists and singers.
This was a
long show, starting with those amazing 3 minute wonders from the early sixties,
perfect gems that are over almost before they have begun: they had to because
that was all that would fit onto one side of a 45rpm single record. Then the
band moved on to the later material from the White Album and Sergeant Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band and they played and sang with effortless ease those
polyrhythmic figures and complex harmonies, one song after another without
putting a foot wrong.
I do not
know the names of the members of The Liverpool Band but apparently they started
in 1997 and have been working continuously on this material since, and it
shows. In between versions of complete songs they played little fragments of so
many other songs, teasers for another gig, another night. I am full of
admiration for their individual musical skills and for their superb ensemble
togetherness as well as their perfect vocal harmonies: there seems to be
nothing these musicians cannot do.
As the gig
I saw was in the summer there were many Brits in the audience and I suppose
many of us have Beatles stories to tell. I enjoyed a Paul McCartney concert in
Madrid in the nineties and that took me back to early days of listening to the
Wings albums, trying to contain the guilt at enjoying this music which was the
result of the break up of the Fab Four.
In 1963, I
believe it was, The Beatles returned to Liverpool from their first triumphant
tour to the USA. This was a historic moment because the popular music charts
had up to then been the absolute domain of American artists such as Perry Como,
Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, and here were these four young men from Liverpool
who had broken the mould, taking over the highest places in the pop charts the
world over, and especially significantly, in the USA. You have to remember that
the Liverpool of that time was drab, grey and still showing the scars of the
tragic effects of the 1939-1945 war. How could they have dared to achieve so
much?
On the day
the band returned to Liverpool there was a line of people on the streets from
the airport to the city centre: I know because I was one of them. As my memory
has it, and I could be wrong, I walked, or rather I was taken, since I was only
6 years old, along to the main road where they were due to pass by, and waited
a hugely long time until finally a cavalcade of big black cars drove by. The
window of one of the cars was partly open and a hand appeared through the window
to wave. The hand belonged to Paul, or maybe George or John or Ringo… or maybe
one of their assistants, and then they were gone.
Many years
later Paul McCartney gave one of his free concert at the Liverpool riverside,
called the Pier Head, and someone my age was there with her teenage daughters.
When the great man appeared on the stage there was near hysterical applause
before even a note had sounded. One of the teenage daughters said: What are
they all clapping for, he hasn´t done anything yet. To which her mother
replied: It’s not about tonight, it´s about the last 50 years that everyone is
applauding.
All these
memories of the original Beatles only go to increase my respect and admiration
for The Liverpool Band, and I look forward to catching up with them the next
time I am in Denia.
