Fab show? Yeah, yeah, yeah!

LET IT BE, Palace, Manchester, to Saturday
I’LL admit that after the first 10 minutes of this tribute to the Fab Four, I was getting a bit miffed.

Was this all there is? A concert of the songs by a group of soundalike-almost-lookalikes?

As the first few minutes of the show ran through the Beatles’ Cavern Club days, we saw their credentials as one of the hottest upcoming acts of the early Sixties, but the songs, while fresh and energetic, were raw and immature.

And shouldn’t there have been just a little background about the four guys who changed the face of pop, for those who weren’t there first time round?

But by the time the show had reached the “Hard Day’s Night” period, when songs like the title tune brought a new, full-on impetus to pop music, I was sold; and by the time we hit “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby” — two of the greatest songs of the 20th Century — I was shedding occasional quiet tears for my lost youth and lamenting that Paul McCartney hasn’t been able to write anything a hundredth as good in 30 years.

So while the opening night team at the Palace sounded like, but didn’t much look like, John (Michael Gagliano), Paul (James Fox), George (John Brosnan) and Ringo (Ben Cullingworth), the overall musical effect was devastating.

You get in the mood for the Sixties with the help of the projected period ads (Shaw Taylor from “Police Five”, Dusty Springfield advertising flour, and many more) and the mood continues with everything from the Cavern Club to an idea of the psychedelia of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” projected on to the stage backdrop.

While all this is blasting your eyes, John, Paul, George and Ringo — or our local equivalents — are putting together remarkably good, accurate renditions of the songs, playing much of the instrumentation themselves.

This being the Beatles, there is no filler material: the show picks from 40 songs — in fact the guys might perform all 40, I wasn’t keeping score — that have more than stood the test of time, and the show builds over the last half-hour from the White Album’s sweet “Blackbird” to a glorious climax with Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Let It Be” giving way to the ultimate crowd pleaser, “Hey Jude”.

Simply wonderful