"It captured the joy of feeling music in-the-moment rather than frozen on record."
Fifty years after its release, The Beatles' "The White Album" remains a masterpiece, and you could ask what business does an Australian cast of male indie-rock darlings including Tim Rogers, Chris Cheney, Phil Jamieson and Josh Pyke have replaying it live.
Comparisons between The Beatles themselves and our boys do neither side justice though. This local production, now having done the rounds a few times and with a super strong musical backing, really does make the album experience something to engage with rather than a museum piece to observe.
Today's performance was a little loose in lots of ways (even with the odd missing chord and lyric) — but it captured the joy of feeling music in-the-moment rather than frozen on record. The singers mostly performed solo, taking a track each, roughly split between Cheney the guitar god, Jamieson the rocker, Pyke the balladeer and Rogers the wonderfully bizarre. While each is well accomplished and held the room in their own way, it was hard to go beyond Rogers' irreverence, greeting us with a, "How are you, Sydney, you tart?!" Having said this, he was mindful of pulling it all back when he felt he was "getting a bit too theatrical", making a rare-as-hens-teeth Wagner joke between songs — a nod to the venue and an interesting way to gauge the diverse musical tastes of the crowd. Hilarious and very confusing for those who got the opera thing but didn't know You Am I.
Between tracks the boys played with and at each other, with Rogers piggy-backing Jamieson offstage at one point for no reason other than he could, and Cheney getting so lost in his weeping guitar solo that real disaster nearly struck as he threw his axe in the air, only narrowing catching it again. The set list was the album track-by-track as it appeared originally (including an intermission to "turn the record over"). All appeared together for an encore combining some of the broader Beatles catalogue, including Across The Universe, The Two Of Us, Revolution (again) and All Things Must Pass. The last was played as a tribute to Paul Gray, another Oz rock God who had played in earlier versions of this show but passed away last April.
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