Putting on a Beatles show must surely be a challenge. It’s not simply that you’re trying to reproduce the most famous and influential act in musical history; there’s also the huge question of where to start when you assemble your set list.
The Come Together team last night started with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s an interesting choice—one or two of The Beatles’ best-loved moments are to be found on this album. There’s With A Little Help From My Friends (even if The Beatles’ version is far from the definitive reading of the song), there’s When I’m Sixty-Four, there’s…well, that’s the problem. Sgt. Pepper was never The Beatles’ finest hour (that would be, perhaps, Abbey Road, or The White Album, or Revolver, or any one of several others). By the time they recorded it, The Beatles had, understandably, given up touring, and it’s clear that songs like Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds weren’t written with a live performance in mind; these are songs to put on your record player with the lights dimmed and to be enjoyed in possibly an illegal frame of mind.
So it was, well, a brave choice of album to kick off last night’s show. The plus side, of course, is that you can’t have your memories of your favourite performance of, say, Lovely Rita Meter Maid by The Beatles themselves ruined because, as we’ve said, these songs weren’t performed live. So the Come Together band had room to move, room to leave their own mark, and they clearly had fun. Sam Scott put a little more edge in Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds than I’m used to hearing in the original, and it worked quite pleasingly well. James Milne found the whimsey of When I’m Sixty-Four and the band made it a joyous little romp through what should have been just a throw-away number.
But Sgt Pepper alone wouldn’t have made a terribly satisfying show. A Beatles night without the classics—your Help!s, your Yesterdays—would be a travesty, so after the first set, which closed with a surprisingly raw reading of I Am The Walrus from Dianne Swan, we got a dozen or more tracks cherry-picked from the latter half of The Beatles’ oeuvre. Help! was a staple of their brief touring career, but much of last night’s set took in songs that have relatively rarely had public outings. Get Back is perhaps the most understatedly wonderful rocker The Beatles ever wrote, while Yesterday is, perhaps alongside Let It Be (which was curiously absent last night), one of The Beatles’ most instantly recognisable and fabled numbers.
There were a couple of curious choices; I’m not sure I’d have picked For No One, or Across The Universe. But you simply can’t argue with Lady Madonna, or All You Need Is Love, complete with horn section to fill in that glorious call-and-response with the chorus.
So Sgt Pepper, while possibly not the show I’d have compiled, was everything the Come Together concept was meant to be. We’ll never see The Beatles again, obviously. Paul McCartney, now comfortably into his ninth decade, is increasingly unlikely to make it back to Aotearoa, and if he did, well, he’s a lot older than he was when he was sixty-four. This, then, was our chance to enjoy some wonderful songs by the most significant, perhaps the best-loved, surely the most enduring, band ever to come from the wrong end of the M62. Thanks to Come Together, Strawberry Fields might well be Forever.