Live Review: The White Album Concert - Sydney Opera House Concert Hall

20 July 2014 | 12:15 pm | Xavier Rubetzki Noonan

The show's problems lie not in its execution, but the idea itself.

In 1968, The Beatles continued their streak of making innovative, challenging pop music with a self-titled album, which challenged audiences and flew in the face of expectations. Containing some of the band’s strongest and most enduring material, and showcasing the variety of influences and ideas the band were playing with at the time, it was an album which the Beatles never had any intention of bringing to the stage. Now, in 2014, the idea of performing it live has been taken as a challenge by a team of 21 very capable musicians, led by four of Australia’s foremost rock artists: Chris Cheney (The Living End), Phil Jamieson (Grinspoon), Josh Pyke, and Tim Rogers (You Am I).

The division of the album played to each artist’s strengths, with Cheney naturally fitting in singing the crowd-pleasing guitar-rock-based numbers (While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Revolution 1) every bit as much as Pyke did on the weepy acoustic-guitar tunes (Julia, Blackbird). Rogers seemed to be having the most fun, larking about onstage during songs like Piggies and Happiness Is A Warm Gun, while it seemed Jamieson had been sent in to sweep up what was left, dutifully but never inspiringly singing Honey Pie & Yer Blues.

The album, for all its impact and importance in the Beatles’ catalogue, does have a couple of clunkers on it, and while it took the opening of Revolution 9 for someone in the crowd to yell out “Skip this one!” (Revolution 9 was in fact quite cleverly arranged to represent the musical themes in the song), Ringo’s drab (and long) country-rocker Don’t Pass Me By needed a lot more than Jamieson’s awkward, bow-tie-adjusting dancing to maintain interest. There was rarely enough happening on-stage to keep things interesting, and the night had an Australian Idol, jukebox-musical feeling to it as a result.

However, the real problem with the show wasn’t in its execution, but the idea itself. The performance didn’t feel like an attempt to play these songs live so much as an attempt to recreate the album on stage, down to tiny details like the mumbling at the end of I’m So Tired. Unfortunately, this meant that the show never exceeded that level: everything felt calculated, safe, and read off bloody sheet music. At its best it was a pretty close imitation, which felt utterly pointless, because why not just go home and listen to it?

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