Bootleg Beatles celebrate the Fab Four with dates including Worthing and Bexhill

Dates include: Wednesday, March 23 – Worthing, Pavilion Theatre; Sunday, April 3 – Portsmouth, Guildhall; Monday, April 11 – Bexhill, De La Warr Pavilion; and Wednesday, April 13 – Guildford, G-Live.

Steve White, Paul in the band, is delighted to celebrate the Fab Four’s legacy.

“Abbey Road is my personal favourite album, and I think it is the fact that they had very little to work on with the album. When you deconstruct the album, it is lots of bits and pieces of songs, but the way that they put them all together is absolutely fantastic.

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“They were going through a time when there was quite a lot of turmoil in the band, but what they achieved together as a band on that album was absolutely monumental.

“If you listen to the Beatles anthology discs, they give you the first takes and the rehearsals and the run-throughs, and you see how they take just a scrappy idea. It will be maybe just one of them busking away on an acoustic guitar. And they take these little ideas and they turn them into something which is incredibly enthralling and magical and exciting, this amazing way that their musical intelligence comes together… especially as at that time in their career they were spending more and more time apart from each other.”

Steve has been with The Bootleg Beatles for eight years.

“Most members that have been in the band have generally got there by audition process. I was lucky in that. At the time I was playing in a few bands, and I put my name out on the internet as a stand-in Paul McCartney for Beatles bands, and that was what I was doing. I was working with a lot of bands and doing a lot of cruise ship work. It was a great period. I was like a free-lance Paul McCartney!

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“And so I got to know a lot of musicians and then I got a call one day from The Bootleg Beatles. They asked could I come and stand in with them. They had a show coming up and their Paul was ill. Could I cover? I went and covered and they had another show coming up and they asked me if I could do that one as well.

“And over the course of the next six to eight months, I would get the call to go and stand in with them. Their Paul had an ongoing troublesome health condition, and then after six or eight months or so, I had a talk with them about taking over the Paul role properly.”

Initially with his earlier bands, they were just general 60s covers bands, doing a general mix of 60s music, but they started to take on a Beatles look.

At that point Steve was playing rhythm guitar in a kind of John Lennon role, but as The Beatles music took over and the band eventually became The Beatles Experience, Steve found more and more people commenting on his resemblance to Paul.

“They were saying ‘You have got to be Paul!’ And I was saying ‘But I am John!’”

In the end, Steve bowed to the inevitable and swapped to bass – as which point people started saying ‘But Paul is left-handed!’

So again, Steve bowed to pressure and taught himself how to play bass left-handed.

“It just never feels quite as natural as playing right-handed.

“Playing left-handed feels like slipping on thick, uncomfortable work shoes… If I get the chance to play right-handed just for myself, it is like slipping on your comfy shoes!”

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