The Analogues
JAC BICO AND FELIX MAGINN FROM THE ANALOGUES ON WHAT THEY’VE LEARNED FROM ANALYSING THE BEAT LES MORE THAN ANY TRIBUTE BAND BEFORE
Widely considered the most sonically accurate Beatles tribute in the world, The Analogues are proven masters of their field. The Netherlands-based group formed in 2014 and chose not to dress up like the original fab four, but instead devote all their attention to nailing the actual sonics of each song, using period-correct equipment and additional session musicians to breathe life into music that The Beatles never performed live themselves, following their retirement from the stage in 1966. On their current tour the group are performing The White Album in full, along with other choice cuts from the Liverpool legends’ relatively short but highly prolific recording career.
TG meets lead player Jac Bico and rhythm guitarist Felix Maginn at London’s Palladium just before soundcheck, where they point out long racks of vintage or custom-shop gear on each wing of the stage, as well as even more rare delights stashed away in endless drawers. For them, the accumulation of knowledge and equipment has very much been a labour of love. Their hard work has also paid off – the band have sold out arenas in their home country, even landing a six-album deal with Decca – the label who famously refused to sign The Beatles in 1962 – for both covers and original “Beatles-inspired” recordings. Here the pair share the secrets to nailing those British Invasion tones and what they’ve learned from studying the timeless music so closely...
COME TOGETHER Jac and Felix weigh up the different personalities behind the guitars...
Jac: “I think Paul Mccartney was a lot more bluesy and a lot more American-sounding. He knew everything about that style of guitar player. George Harrison was more original and melodic, in my eyes. The way he wrote his solos was influenced by Scotty Moore and people like that. There were a lot of styles and techniques in his solos.” Felix: “Mccartney’s leads on Back In The USSR were quite fast and urgent for the time. It was almost shredding! Jac does all the leads and hard stuff, I do all the Lennon parts. On this album, there are sometimes more than two guitars going at one time so our keyboard player Diederik [Nomden] even plays at times. I really love Lennon’s playing. The great thing about being in this band is we do the older stuff just for fun. If you pick a Rickenbacker 325 with flatwounds and you give it the full welly, that’s the Lennon sound right there. Most of the work is done for you! We take a lot of care in our tones for this band, to the point where it feels like we’re almost like standing in the record… every part feels so distinctive because of the attention to detail.”
HELTER SKELTER How The Beatles forced seventh chords all over their chord progressions...
Felix: “Using 7th chords everywhere might not make sense in all styles of music… but it definitely does in blues. The Beatles grew up on all that stuff, so it was already in their playing. The songs they were learning were all bluesy and 7th chord-based, that’s all they knew to begin with, and they kept it.” Jac: “If you listen to She’s A Woman, that’s got quite a hard 7th chord that uses the pinky… but once you master that, you can move it around. Similarly, there are other songs where Lennon uses only a 7th chord, moving the same shape up and down… it’s never quite major or minor.”
A HARD DAY’S NIGHT A look at the more challenging aspects of playing in The Analogues...
Felix: “When we did the Sgt. Pepper’s... album, that was quite a challenge. It had that whole Indian thing going on, with sitars and tablas. It sounded fantastic. Jac used a real sitar…” Jac: “They’re very hard to play. I had some lessons years ago and picked it up again for that tour. On this [ White Album] tour, the most difficult song is Happiness Is A Warm Gun. There are a lot of changes in that, it goes from 4/4 to 3/4 and then switches back, with lots of singing and harmonies. It might seem easy enough doing everything separately, but doing all of it at the same time can be a challenge… if the rhythms feel different, things can get really fucked up. You have to learn it note-by-note, bar-by-bar, to get it right but it’s perfectly possible.”
PAPERBACK WRITER The fab four approach to songcraft and melody...
Felix: “A lot of the Lennon songs are unusual. I Am The Walrus just goes round and round in only major chords… he didn’t really know as much musically. Mccartney was a lot more traditional, while in contrast Lennon was quite punk in ways. But his lyrics were incredibly clever. My guess is he always knew how good Mccartney was at writing songs and figured out how to make those songs even smarter. He’d come up with things that would make you go, ‘What does he mean by that?’. He’d move and throw things off-centre to give them that extra edge.”
Jac: “People talk about Lennon and Mccartney a lot, but Harrison was brilliant too. He wrote While My Guitar Gently Weeps. He developed a lot as a writer on the White Album and even more on the album that followed.” Felix: “Savoy Truffle is another song of his that I love, which is off the White
Album. It has these doubled baritones… it’s almost glam rock, ha ha!”
LET IT BE How open minds and crossing genres helped the Liverpool heroes unlock new sounds...
Jac: “To play like The Beatles, you need
“MCCARTNEY ’S LEAD ON BACKIN THEUSSR WAS
ALMOST SHREDDING !”