The Analogues

London Palladium

Note-and-sound-perfect recreations of Beatles songs The Beatles never did live.

Dutch five-piece The Analogues are a tribute band, a Beatles tribute band, like no other. They don’t copy The Beatles’ dress sense, or have a designated John, Paul, George and Ringo. Interchanging between vocals and instruments, and augmented by string and horn sections, they faithfully replicate the albums The Beatles never played live, down to every note and vocal timbre. It’s eerily immaculate. They’ve already done Sgt. Pepper and the White Album (extracts of which they played in the second half of the show), and tonight it’s Abbey Road.

Of course, these albums were never created with the live experience in mind. By 1969 the likes of Cream, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix had raised the volume and temperature of the live rock experience; George Harrison’s twangy little solos seemed feeble by comparison with all of that. At the Palladium, an audience mostly of a certain age were experiencing a near-perfect facsimile of something that was never intended or expected to be played live.

Still, presented thus, it was a chance to re-evaluate Abbey Road, curiously dominated by George Harrison’s twin peaks Something and Here Comes The Sun and feeling overall with its closing song suite like an attempt to match Brian Wilson’s studio creations for the Beach Boys rather than to keep pace with festival rock. An uncanny joy.