The Analogues' Quest For Perfection

 

The Beatles are without question the most significant act in rock history. I grew up in a time when the band was reshaping everything–culture, fashion, politics, even hairstyles. Their music took the world by storm and gave voice to the youth movement that would come to define the 1960s. “Beatlemania,” the term given to the frenzied fan response to the band, begat the “British Invasion.” The Yardbirds, The Who, The Byrds, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and The Animals all formed in Britain, all are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and all owe at least a portion of their success to The Beatles. In a 1991 article entitled “How The Beatles Changed Britain”, Hanif Kureishi wrote that the band was "the only mere pop group you could remove from history and suggest that culturally, without them, things would have been significantly different". Indeed. Taylor Swift’s current grip on popular culture only hints at the magnitude of The Beatles’ popularity.

My two older sisters were just the right age to be swept up in Beatlemania. The seminal moment was of course the Beatles’ February 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. I was just a little more than a year old, but my sisters, ages twelve and ten, were just the right age. My sister Tricia remembers that night. “My best friend Becky Jones had two older brothers, so we had been listening to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” nonstop on the record player in their den." My sister Susan chimed in. "I vivdly remember watching them on the Ed Sullivan show. I was a seventh grader , just becoming interested in boys.  After that night, the question everyone asked of everyone else was 'Who's your favorite Beatle?' I liked John." Tricia preferred Paul.  Just another chapter in the sibling rivalry, I suppose.   Tricia added that "their music was such a part of my life, when I hear certain songs it just transports me back to young innocent girl that I was.”  Ah, the power of music. 

It would be impossible to overstate the Beatle’s cultural importance, which is of course why John, Paul, George, and Ringo are considered icons. Their music has been in non-stop rotation for almost seventy years. The band has more than 32 million monthly listeners on Spotify. In 2019, almost fifty years after breaking up, the Beatles grossed more than $67 million dollars. 

One night, while perusing YouTube I came across a video of a band performing the Beatles music. Now, the Beatles likely have spawned more cover bands and tribute acts than any other, but these fellows in this video weren’t amateurs and this wasn’t some grainy phone video with bad sound. This band, The Analogues, was playing to packed house of enthralled Beatles fans who seemed to sense the enormity of the evening. (Enormity? I’ll get to that in a minute.) Their playing was so precise that, aside from the vocals, it would have been almost impossible to know that this wasn't the actual Fab Four. They didn’t try, like some other schlocky acts, to look like The Beatles, but boy did they sound like them. Like, exactly. Fascinated, I dove in. Their videos were a few years old and most had several hundred thousand views already, making me wonder how I had not heard of them previously.

I soon got my answer. The Analogues are a Dutch band, and while massively popular, they have never performed outside of Europe. Formed as a project in 2014 by bassist Bart Van Poppel, drummer Fred Gehring, keyboardist Diederick Nomden, and guitarists Jac Bico, Jan Ven Der Meij, and Felix Maginn, the band has chased perfection for the last decade. The goal, according to the band's website, has been “to perform the Beatles’ music from their later studio years live, utilizing analogue and period-accurate instrumentation.” 

When John, Paul, George, and Ringo made the decision to retire from touring, it freed them up to experiment and incorporate arrangements and elements that would be difficult to recreate live. Therein lies the enormity that I wrote of earlier.  Guitarist Felix Maginn expounded on this point in a 2019 interview. “When The Beatles stopped playing live, they realized they had more opportunities and instruments available in the studio. It didn’t have to be live anymore; it became more of an experiment. We’ve listened very carefully to figure out what exact instruments were used for what parts and can hear where Harrison used an SG or when McCartney switched to a Hofner bass. There are even some songs where you can hear it’s a different guitar on the same track! At this point of their career, they were very edited, with lots of cut and paste, so quite often things like that would happen. They never wanted to repeat themselves... a lot of bands say that, but it always sounds like the same album again from them. 

Writing in 2014 after attending the band’s Magical Mystery Tour performance, writer Peter Van Brummelen opined that “unlike the Beatles, who never performed many of these songs or entire albums live, the Analogues gained recognition for their meticulous diligence and authenticity. Though they do not strive to resemble the Beatles visually, their performances are celebrated for accurately reproducing the band's distinctive sound and musical complexity.”  No less an authority than Beatles' sound engineer Geoff Emerick is amazed at what they have been able to do. 

For the past decade they have worked to master and play for live audiences the songs from the albums that The Beatles themselves never played live: Sgt. Pepper, the White Album, Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, and Let it Be. It proved to be quite the challenge, even for musicans as experienced as they are. What they have accomplished is indeed amazing, especially given that English is not their first language!   

To make the project even more daunting, the band determined that the only way to achieve the level of perfection that would satisfy them was to use the same type instruments and recording equipment that The Beatles themselves had used. This required a years-long hunt–and no small expense–for the correct equipment. Fortunately, no band’s recordings have been as meticulously studied as The Beatles. The compilations of photographs, studio notes, and track sheets proved invaluable. For example, the opening notes of "Strawberry Fields Forever" were made on a keyboard called a Mellotron. Only thirty of the Mark V model that The Beatles used were ever manufactured, so it was a stroke of good fortune that the band not only found one, but also found that the company that made it still existed and had the expertise to repair it. 

Did The Analogues succeed? Absolutely.  Fans and music critics agreed.  What they accomplished was phenomenal, an homage like no other for a band that has no peer. 

If you love The Beatles, you'll love and appreciate The Analogues. 

From the above review:

Dutch tribute band the Analogues don’t bother with costumes and impersonations, which is a relief. There are no silly wigs, moustaches or terrible Scouse accents. Their drummer, Fred Gehrig, is a grey-haired retired business executive. Their bassist, Bart Von Poppel, is a stocky, bearded advertising composer who plays his vintage Rickenbacker right-handed. Their particular obsession is perfectly recreating The Fab Four’s recordings, even if it takes five of them to do it, supplemented by a ten-piece orchestra and guest vocalist.

It is a form of musical archaeology, involving only original vintage instruments. A busy road crew rolled on an antique harpsichord for the two-minute rendition of George Harrisons’s Piggies, where less pedantic bands would have just sampled the sound on synthesizer. French horns, tubas and clarinets emphasised the period richness of McCartney’s music hall pastiche Honey Pie. Frankly, when McCartney himself plays his back catalogue, he goes to less trouble.

Incidentally, for those of you who might know my friend Bobby Swindell, Gehring, the drummer and former CEO and Chairman of Tommy Hilfiger, is his doppelganger. 

The band's YouTube page can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/@the-analogues

If you click through–and I hope you will–don't say I didn't warn you!  As Ringo would say, peace and love, peace and love!