‘I read the news today . . . ’
Repeating the opening words to The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”, Neil Harrison purses his lips, narrows his eyes and makes a beckoning gesture with his fingers. “Do you see?” he asks. “It’s ‘neews’. Try it again.”
He is directing Paul Canning in an empty Canterbury theatre on a rainy day in April. Canning has been playing the part of John Lennon in The Bootleg Beatles for precisely five weeks. Harrison, the band’s co-founder and creative force, spent 31 years onstage as Bootleg John, and the real John’s vocal tics and mannerisms remain second nature. With his avian frame and wispy grey hair, Harrison sometimes looks like the man Lennon might’ve become, had he lived to his seventies.
Harrison takes up his position at the front-of-house sound booth, as the band, still in their civvies, restart the song. Flanking the stage is a galley of flamboyantly necked vintage guitars, road-worn Rickenbackers and a Höfner 500/1, Paul McCartney’s slender, signature violin bass. Huge Vox AC30 amplifiers, the sonic backbone of the Swinging ’60s, stand on either side. A drum set, raised on a plinth centre stage, displays the band’s insignia. It looks like the classic Beatles logo with the word “Bootleg” wedged in. Above it all, a projector is primed to bombard the upstage wall with visuals pulled from song lyrics.
The Bootlegs are Britain’s oldest, most famous and most successful tribute act. Since 1980, they have performed more than 5,000 times worldwide, often on the grandest stages and to enormous, adoring audiences. They are revered in the world of imitators as the gold standard, setting a bar for authenticity that few acts have the expertise or resources to match. Their aim is simple: to suspend your disbelief for a couple of hours.
When you’re being assessed by rock music’s most assiduous fandom, achieving that aim is easier said than done. “We had one audience member spot the lightbulb on the Vox amp one night in the Netherlands,” Harrison recalls. “After the show he asked, ‘Why is it orange instead of yellow? Did they use a Vox I haven’t heard about?’”
Unsurprisingly, Harrison is meticulous in his approach. Some evenings, he films performances from a vantage among the crowd and conducts video analysis with the band the next morning. This is often paired with viewings of archival footage. Every detail on stage has a reference point from the band’s true past, all of it guided by Harrison’s vast knowledge of Beatles history. He “will show you exactly which gig, pull up the footage [and say] ‘Look at John’s elbow. Look where Paul and George’s guitars are pointing,’” Canning tells me later. “It’s another level.”
Back in the sound booth, Harrison and a sound tech are still focusing on the new Bootleg John. They cock their heads and fold their arms, as they study him. “It’s confidence, it’s that . . . ” says Harrison, as he rubs his fingers together again. “It’ll come, though, the longer he’s up there. Now I’ve got to go give them notes again.” He chuckles. “They don’t like that!”
Born in 1950 in West Kirby, just across the Mersey from Liverpool, Harrison grew up immersed in music. “My mum was a piano player,” he remembers, “and my dad loved to sing. He was a sort of bootleg Sinatra. They would have parties where mum would knock out the tunes on the piano, with a gin and tonic, and he’d croon away.” He clearly remembers when he first heard The Beatles in 1962. “It was like an explosion,” he says. “My brother and I spent our hard-earned pocket money on Please Please Me, and we played it to death.”
As the band transformed themselves and popular culture throughout the 1960s, Harrison followed their every move. One evening in December 1968, he and his friends embarked on an audacious spot of Christmas carolling outside a house in a nearby suburb, after hearing that Paul McCartney’s Aston Martin DB5 was parked there. Disappointed to be greeted by McCartney’s stepmother, Angie, the troupe began playing anyway. Then the flash of a camera went off at one side of the house and out stepped Paul with a guitar around his shoulder. “He was God,” says Harrison.
God, with his pregnant fiancée, Linda, at his side, proceeded to invite the carollers in. “We played ‘Rocky Raccoon’, ‘Mother Nature’s Son’. [Then] he asks, ‘What do you want to learn from me?’ and teaches me ‘Blackbird’, before showing me a new song he’d just written.” Ruefully, Harrison says over the years most people didn’t believe this anecdote about the new song — until the number surfaced in footage used in Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary Get Back.
The chance to make an album in London with friends took Harrison south in 1971, and he released a solo album, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, a few years later. He was signed to Elton John’s label, The Rocket Record Company, where he also wrote hits for Lulu. But mostly, he made his money playing covers on the pub circuit. One night, another musician with a Beatles haircut approached him and offered to join forces. David Catlin-Birch and Harrison started touring together, honing their harmonies. As they only played Beatles and Eagles covers, they called themselves The Beagles.
In 1978, the two heard a casting call on Capital Radio for a British production of Beatlemania, the Broadway sensation that was later killed by a lawsuit from The Beatles’ Apple Corps. Their experience landed Harrison and Catlin-Birch the plum spots of John and Paul, respectively. “The drummer was Jack Lee Elgood, who did look quite like Ringo actually, and then there was André.” André Barreau, then a researcher at the BBC, was the perfect George Harrison: spindly, angular, with a thick mop of hair.
Despite the cast’s efforts, Beatlemania’s West End run was a disaster. The show had been written for American fans, for whom the band was practically born on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9 1964. British fans knew better and, even then, the authenticity of The Beatles’ story was make or break. As crowds dwindled, Harrison had a proposition. “Why don’t we just try six months touring as the cast of Beatlemania? If it fails, we can just go back to doing our own thing.”
A few weeks earlier in Oxford, the band stopped playing halfway through a rendition of “Revolution” when there was a medical emergency in the audience. While the show was paused for an hour, The Bootleg Beatles stayed onstage directing the crowd towards the fire exits. They did this all in character, in their chirpiest Liverpudlian drawls.
Every band has Spinal Tap moments on the road. (The 1984 mockumentary continues to loom large as a shorthand for the absurdities of touring life.) But The Bootlegs have perhaps more claim than most, given their act is playing four truculent, eccentric rock stars every night. It’s a job they take extremely seriously. “You’ve got to have a totally clear mind for it,” Ste Hill, 42, and the current Bootleg George, says. “That means staying sober before the show, Neil’s big on that. You’re not just playing covers with your mates. It takes focus. Otherwise, you’ll never pull it off.”
Dedication to the role of Bootleg Ringo Starr means Gordon Elsmore has to spend an hour longer in make-up than the rest of the band. On his desk in the back of the theatre in Canterbury, there is cleaning spirit from Boots, cotton pads from Superdrug, eyeshadow and foundation from Artdeco, a brand Elsmore can only get when the band is touring in Germany. L’Oréal Elnett hairspray keeps his wigs, hand-woven from human hair, looking tight amid the relentless head bobbing that being Ringo requires. “You get very attached to certain products,” Elsmore, 50, says. “I certainly do, anyway.”
And then there’s the nose. It’s a Hollywood-grade replica, made by a veteran stage prosthetist, and ferried between shows with fleshy backups in a large Tupperware container. “I spent hours and hours in the casting mask,” Elsmore says, mixing epoxy in the lid of an Extra chewing gum tub. “So it fits perfectly on my face. And once it’s on,” he smears the bridge of his nose with the tacky end of a wooden spoon, before pressing on Ringo’s snout, “it’s hard to drink with, and it catches a lot of snot. But I can sing with it, no problem.”
There is much more to playing Ringo than a big nose and a willingness to be the band’s punchline. “He’s such a creative drummer, it really is under-appreciated,” Elsmore says of the real Ringo. “The way he could speed up, slow down, move with the music and follow the band’s lead.” He was “playing for the song, not the crowd”.
Elsmore has, to date, spent 30 years playing Ringo in different cover bands and Beatles acts. “I’ve been in The Compleat Beatles. I’ve been in The Paperback Beatles,” he says, as he blends skin tones along the nose’s seal. “There’s always work for a Ringo.” He also played Ringo on the West End stage in the musical Let It Be, which started in 2012 and is still running.
That show has served as something of a talent pool for the present-day Bootlegs. Hill spent a couple of years as Let It Be’s George before being drafted to The Bootlegs in 2014. Canning also learnt the ropes as Let It Be’s John. Only Steve White, Bootleg Paul since 2012, didn’t pass through the stage on his way to mimicking Macca. He was supposed to follow in the family stonemasonry business before discovering his musical talents at the comparatively late age of 20.
Then there’s the psychology behind playing a long-dead rock icon. One evening, Harrison told Canning about the genesis of “All You Need is Love”, the song penned by Lennon during the summer of love in 1967. He performed it during the first live global satellite broadcast. “We know it starts with the ‘Marseillaise’, but . . . it’s about knowing where Lennon was coming from: pulling a prank on the whole world, playing France’s anthem instead of Britain’s. And to know that, you have to go back to the source material.” Hill says all of that work goes into the two and a half hours on stage. “And as soon as you’re off, you’re back to being you again. It’s a job.”
It may be one of the most coveted jobs in the British music industry. Hill says the mere mention of the band’s name prompts other musicians to start auditioning, just in case a position opens up. He recounts the story of his own wedding day. Harrison and Barreau were both in attendance, he says, “so are all the mates I’ve made from The Beatles circuit. They know this, so they show up to my wedding dressed like John or George or Paul, trying to impress the two of them. And I’m just watching this wedding crowd all dressed like The Beatles, thinking, ‘What is going on here?’”
The Bootleg Beatles played their first set in a student hall in Tiverton, Devon, on March 26 1980, nearly a decade to the day of the original Fab Four’s break-up. Harrison, Barreau and Catlin-Birch had pooled the last of their cash from Beatlemania to buy two guitars, an Epiphone and a Gretsch, as well as a set of turtleneck jumpers and glossy acrylic wigs. Looking for their first few gigs, the newly formed cover band reached out to Nems, the company started by The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein.
With its help, The Bootleg Beatles bounced between university campuses and small regional venues, something Harrison describes as the band’s “Hamburg phase”. On the night John Lennon was shot, the band was in Keele playing the university’s Christmas Ball. In a way, the assassination fuelled demand for their act. “Before John’s death,” Harrison says, “The Beatles still could’ve reformed. So perhaps people thought, why see some imposters when, at some stage, we might get the real ones back again?”
Nems could only find small British venues for The Bootlegs, but managed to book the band on to three extraordinary international tours. Within a year, The Bootlegs were touring Israel. “I’d only ever been on package holidays,” Harrison says, “and I remember playing ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ to what must’ve been 100,000 people at a festival north of Jerusalem.”
In October 1982, the band embarked on a six-week tour of the Soviet Union, the first western rock band to do so. From Moscow to Vladivostok, Harrison was astonished at the depth of feeling that the band aroused in audiences. “We’d have all these Brezhnev-era dignitaries sitting in the front row of the Rossiya concert hall, frowning, and then all the kids going bonkers behind them.” When they’d leave, the crowd would chase and rock the tour bus. “I’m sure a lot of them thought we were the real thing.”
The Bootlegs’ 1984 tour of the US was the stark opposite. It was the band’s first of many efforts to position itself side by side with Beatles history. “It was the Twenty Years Ago Today tour,” says Harrison, “and we flew first into JFK on the Pan Am flight, just as the band did before The Ed Sullivan Show, expecting TV cameras waiting for us. We land, and absolutely nobody is there. The promoter had gone to Newark by mistake.” Things continued from there, with the promoter fleeing the tour after several empty gigs. To fund a ticket home, The Bootlegs took any booking they could. “We played lots of tiny little towns. We played a Chinese restaurant. We played a Les Paul club somewhere in Cincinnati. It ended up being a bonding experience.”
Up to the 1990s, British venues remained reluctant to welcome tribute shows. “For our first full UK tour in 1990,” says Harrison, “we wanted to mirror all the places The Beatles themselves had played 20 years prior. Half of the venues told us no, we were too low rent.” But as other tribute acts began emerging — Abba cover band Björn Again, The Australian Pink Floyd Show — The Bootlegs thrived.
In 1994, they made their debut at Glastonbury, headlining the acoustic stage for the first time. Oasis singer Liam Gallagher fell in love with them soon after and invited The Bootlegs to open for the band at Earl’s Court, then at Knebworth in 1996, two gigs that defined the peak of Britpop.
Revivalist at its core, Britpop created a fresh wave of appreciation for the original Beatles. In 1995, Paul, George and Ringo released a new single for the first time in 24 years, finishing the incomplete demo “Free as a Bird”. The Bootlegs moved quickly to incorporate the new track into their oeuvre. “You dropped a note,” the real George told them drily, after he heard them play it at the 50th-birthday party for Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. “It’s an F major seven, not the D minor.”
On the latest tour, Harrison has had the band close their shows with “Now and Then”, the “last Beatles song”, released as a single last November. “I really like it,” Harrison says, “You can tell it’s a classic Lennon melody.” The track itself, cleaned up to great fanfare by machine-learning technology, sits squarely in the uncanny valley, splicing the John of 1977 with the George of 1995 in a way that already sounds dated. But The Bootlegs’ rendition lends a coherence, an authenticity, that the Computerised Beatles were unable to. They place the song back in the world it belongs in, a world of human beings with quirks and eccentricities.
Bootleg Pauls and Ringos shuffled in and out of the band, but Bootleg John and George were its fixtures. Over the years, their stage make-up started painting over deepening wrinkles. Harrison was the first to hang up his guitar, in 2011. Three years later, Barreau followed suit, transitioning out of playing George, although he still played the occasional show until 2017. “My voice was suffering,” Harrison confesses. “Acid reflux. The older you get, the more difficult it is to sing like a 20-year-old. Life takes its toll on you.”
Harrison’s retirement signalled the end of the band’s first chapter, leaving the small matter of his successor. Bootleg John is inarguably The Bootleg Beatles’ most complex character. First to attempt taking on the role was a tyro, Adam Hastings, who arrived in the band in 2011 straight out of university. He was not only a Lennon prodigy, but also a Bootlegs superfan. “I had three posters on my bedroom wall. Nirvana, one of the real Beatles and the autographed Bootlegs poster, and in my mind they all had equal status,” Hastings told the Liverpool Echo in December 2017.
Hastings swapped The Bootlegs for The Fab Four, a California-based tribute act, in 2018. He was replaced by Tyson Kelly, an American singer from an exceptional musical lineage. His father, Tom, wrote Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself”, among other hits. Kelly had risen through the ranks of The Beatles circuit, appearing as John in Let It Be, among other tributes. “Tyson was a great guy,” says Harrison, “and a great John, but he wanted to make more of his own name.” This is a frustration that Harrison himself wrestled with through his time as Bootleg John. “When you’re moving around with people that have made it in their own right, you do feel a bit of a second-class citizen. You can’t help it.”
From the faintly stung rumblings within the band and crew, Kelly’s departure seems to have been long in the making and less than amicable. One benefit, however, was that it gave Harrison ample opportunity to test replacement Johns with his audience. “I did my first gig with The Bootlegs with four hours’ notice,” Canning remembers. “They needed an emergency John for a show, I got the call and obviously I just said ‘Yes.’” By the time Kelly’s departure was finalised this year, Canning was the leading candidate. “I’ve been in bands with all these guys before,” he says, “Beatles bands and other bands. For life on the road, you need that chemistry.”
Through all the comings and goings, Harrison and Barreau were determined to advance the stagecraft and sonic complexity of the show. In 2017, the band embarked on their first collaboration with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, performing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in full with the orchestra’s 70-strong backing. The most recent collaboration with the RLPO took place this month with an orchestral reconstruction of The Blue Album, the compilation covering the period from 1967 to 1970 and featuring the band’s last songs together. “Their music is classical music now, to me,” says Harrison. “Those melodies, they’ve crossed over. And they’ll last for ever.”
In August 2023, Barreau passed away at the age of 67 from cancer. When the news came in, the band was backstage at CarFest, the DJ Chris Evans’ music festival on the Bolesworth Estate in Cheshire. In a tribute on The Bootleg Beatles’ website posted shortly after, Harrison went over one of their final conversations. “We spoke about legacy the last time we were together,” he wrote, “when he knew he was ill. He said that he’d hoped to achieve more in his life, like we all do, I guess, but I gently reminded him that he’d achieved so much already with his writing and his music . . . It really was a life well-lived.”
For the second night in a row, the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury hosts a few hundred attendees eager to live, for a night, in the 1960s. Gig 98 of The Bootleg Beatles’ current seven-month tour is about to begin. Backstage, during the brief window between make-up and final warm-ups, the band is quiet as Harrison and the tour manager film content for social media.
The band has to co-ordinate costume changes. Outfits are stacked neatly, building outwards like a Beatles matryoshka, from the linen suits of Abbey Road to the lurid jackets of the Magical Mystery Tour. Mirrors are fixed for make-up adjustments. Vocal warm-up remedies and bottles of water wait on standby. Wigs sit on styrofoam mannequin heads.
When showtime comes, The Bootleg Beatles launch into “It Won’t Be Long”, opening track of With The Beatles from 1963. Over the next two and a half hours, they showcase their capabilities as musicians and actors. Bootleg Paul is full of Macca’s awkward charm. Bootleg Ringo is on-point. Bootleg George pulls off the heavy responsibility of an acoustic cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, dedicated to Barreau. The audience crackles with a vibrancy the band can feel on their skin. “It’s like a wave, it’s warm, it hits you,” Hill says afterwards.
Bootleg John displays the greatest transformation from start to finish. Even his stage patter shifts from iconoclastic sarkiness to blissed-out aphorisms and puns. He hits “neews” in “A Day in the Life” perfectly. From the back of the hall, Harrison watches from his usual vantage, taking notes and conferring with the sound desk.
Afterwards, the crackle of the crowd carries backstage, into The Bootlegs’ dressing room and back on to the tour bus, where they decamp to eat, sleep and unwind. “This is very rock and roll, isn’t it?” Hill says, gesturing to the offstage tableau. All four Bootlegs are in varying states of undress, eating Maltesers and sharing supermarket Rioja, as fans and guests pass through to congratulate them. As make-up wipes pile up and the adrenaline drains, everyone finds their way back to reality. A reality shared by The Bootleg Beatles and the real Beatles alike. “I think back to playing ‘Rocky Raccoon’ with McCartney,” Harrison says. “And feeling like, ‘Oh, we’re just two musicians talking.’”
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