LET IT BE 2010: Articles, reviews, pictures, gig dates.
LINK: Official Let It Be website
LINK: Showbiz bookings
LINK: Ticketmaster bookings
LINK: Ticketek bookings (Perth, Canberra, Newcastle)
LINK: RSVP to this event on FACEBOOK
Dates & Venues:
9 Aug 2010, Concert Hall, QPAC Brisbane
10 & 11 Aug 2010, Regent Theatre Melbourne
13 & 14 Aug 2010, Sydney Opera House
15 Aug 2010, Festival Theatre, Adelaide
22 Aug 2010, Civic Theatre, Newcastle
20 Aug 2010, Royal Theatre, Canberra
27 Aug 2010, Burswood Theatre, Perth
Please please me, Melbourne: Let It Be blog.thatsmelbourne.com.au Tuesday 3 August 2010, 11.14 AM By Georgina Laidlaw
Get your dancing shoes on, Beatles fans! Next week, the Let It Be Tour hits Melbourne as a very special ‘Fab Four’ – Jon Stevens, John Waters, Doug Parkinson and Jack Jones – put in a hard day’s night at the Regent Theatre.
These four stars of Australian rock are set to honour the awesome Lennon–McCartney songwriting duo with a little help from their friends, the Day Tripper Band. Lennon and McCartney co-wrote an amazing 23 chart-topping singles during The Beatles’ 10-year career.
As we found out when we spoke with John Waters this week, the Let It Be performers are honoured to use what they describe as the ‘best catalogue of all time’ to prepare a playlist that’s guaranteed to keep you satisfied.
John, are you an early Beatles fan, or do you prefer their later work?
I’m a real 60s person – that decade was my teens and early adulthood, so The Beatles meant everything to me, right from the first single to the last gasp.
So which Beatles song do you crank up when you feel like dancing?
‘She Was Just Seventeen’.
We know what you mean! Fans can list their favourite Beatles tracks on the Let It Be website, helping shape the tour’s playlist. Have you been online late into the night trying to skew the vote?
I haven’t interfered in any way! I just said, ‘tell me what you’d like me to sing, and I’ll sing it.’ It’s an honour to sing anything from the best catalogue of all time.
How are you divvying up the playlist? Has it come down to duelling guitars yet?
The four of us do some solos each; there’s a duet or two, and there’s an ‘ensemble’ vibe on a few of the big anthems. In fact, that’s what all of these songs are to me: anthems of the great sociological change that coincided with my youth – maybe the biggest shake up of the human mindset ever.
It wasn’t all achieved by a couple of lads from Liverpool – but they wrote the score!
Can you tell us what you’re looking forward to most about next week’s Melbourne shows?
Working with great singers like Jon, Jack and Doug is a real blast. We all know each other and get on well and, I think, complement each other with our varying styles. I’m looking forward to the camaraderie that is the great thing about performing beautiful music.
We, and the band, are all there to serve the songs, and in doing that we strike up a real relationship with the audience.
The people who come to see and hear us are ultimately what it’s all about. I can’t wait! Neither can we.
Let It Be is on Tuesday 10 August and Wednesday 11 August at the Regent Theatre. A limited number of tickets are still available, so if you want one, you’d better be quick!
With a little help from friends. By KYLIE NORTHOVER August 9, 2010 SMH
JOHN Waters is never short of an acting role, but throughout his career he has balanced his film, stage and TV gigs with his
love of singing. It's no surprise then, that after his three-year stint on All Saints, he is squeezing in a musical project while
he also films the new drama Offspring.
Alongside singers Doug Parkinson, Jack Jones and Jon Stevens, Waters performs Let It Be: The Beatles Songs of Lennon and
McCartney in Melbourne this week.
''I've always considered myself both an actor and a musician,'' Waters says ahead of tomorrow night's first show at the Regent
Theatre. ''I started out a bass player and singer in a band in my late teens in England, and I always try to fit music into my
commitments as an actor.''
Waters is also, it seems, something of a John Lennon scholar, having toured his one-man show about John Lennon, Looking
Through a Glass Onion, in different incarnations for more than a decade.
''I guess that did make me the go-to person for people wanting to do Beatles and Lennon stuff, but I'm very happy with that,''
he says.
The Let It Be shows will feature Waters, Parkinson - who had a hit in 1970 with his cover of Dear Prudence, Stevens, best known as the lead singer of rock band Noiseworks, and Jones, who fronted the Southern Sons, backed by a 10-piece band, sharing singing duties on a selection of Beatles songs written after 1966.
''This music isn't played live very often - there are some cover bands, but not actual performers doing these songs with a big band. We've got strings, and brass added to the rock section, backing vocalists and big production,'' Waters says.
''The weird thing is that the Beatles themselves didn't perform any of these songs themselves; they stopped performing as a touring band in 1966 because they didn't have the technology in those days needed to play to the number of people wanting to see them. After 1966 they were a recording band only. The technology of massive PA systems came in later, so we can now do what they couldn't. Not that we're better than the Beatles!''
Each of the singers, says Waters, bring something different to the classic songs. ''John, Jack and I did our White Album show at the Sydney Opera House about three years ago, and I think we were chosen because our voices all seem suitable. Jack has a beautiful voice; he sings the McCartney stuff, in particular, very well,'' he says.
''Jon Stevens is a great rock singer of anything, really, and Doug, of course, we know he can sing Beatles. I'm the journeyman of the piece.''
The show will essentially be a ''greatest hits'', he says, with each of them sharing the vocal duties.
''We do a couple of songs solo each, then on a couple of the big anthemic songs we all vocalise together, all four of us, and take a verse each, like on Let It Be, Hey Jude. Come Together is a bit of an ensemble,'' he says.
''It's always a pleasure to sing these songs and people want to hear them. They've all heard them but hearing them in a live situation with vocalists they know and like - it's going to be a really fun night.''
Let It Be: The Beatles Songs of Lennon and McCartney is at the Regent Theatre, tomorrow and Wednesday nights.
They also play Brisbane's QPAC Concert Hall tonight at 8pm QPAC Concert Hall.
John Waters pays homage to the Beatles. The Newcastle Herald. ANITA BEAUMONT. 12 Aug, 2010
THE Beatles broke boundaries and revolutionalised the music industry.
The songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney became legendary, and their influence is still felt in popular music today.
English-born, Australia-based singer and actor John Waters explained why he – along with fellow performers Jon Stevens, Doug Parkinson and Jack Jones – considered it such an honour to pay homage to the songs of Lennon and McCartney in Let It Be.
The production lands at Newcastle’s Civic Theatre next weekend.
‘‘They are the iconic songs of perhaps not just a generation, but the whole of the last part of the 20th century,’’ Waters told LIVE. ‘‘I think they signify so much to me and to everybody else who has come afterwards. I was a teenager at the time The Beatles first came out, so I’m very much in that target group – we’re now called baby boomers. But basically the music has been handed on to subsequent generations, because we don’t have much of a generation gap. We basically all like fall-on-the-floor rock and pop music, and although it goes through different scenes, very little has changed since the ’60s in terms of the music we like. But there was a much bigger gap between me and my parents who listened to Perry Como and Frank Sinatra. That was music of a different type, of a different era.’’
Waters, who also received critical acclaim for his portrayal of John Lennon in his one-man-show Looking Through A Glass Onion, doesn’t believe anyone ever gets tired of hearing Beatles songs.
Particularly when they are presented the way they are in Let It Be – with a 10-piece band, The Daytripper Band, complete with brass and string sections.
‘‘When I was a kid I was a bass player and a singer in a band in England before I came out to Australia, and occasionally people would comment that I sounded a bit like John Lennon,’’ he said.
‘‘In fact, in those days it wasn’t deliberate, it was just a natural thing that happened.’’
The very first Beatles song Waters remembers hearing was Love Me Do.
‘‘It had the sound of the black American groups that I’d been listening to through my older brothers’ record collection, and yet it also had an English pop sound to it as well; it was a strange fusion of those things,’’ he said. ‘‘And I actually thought there was a girl in the group, before I realised it was just high harmonies sung by guys, and that also became something of a motif for the music of the era. But their very first record set me off.’’
Waters said these days it was hard to imagine something or someone having the power to change and influence so much.
People started trying to emulate The Beatles, from top to toe. ‘‘It was a sociological revolution,’’ he said. ‘‘I saw a photograph of The Beatles walking down a street, and George Harrison in particular was wearing these extremely high-heeled Cuban boots, so I went out and bought myself a pair,’’ Waters said. ‘‘I’ve only worn cowboy boots from that day to this actually, but those ones with the heels on them – I just thought they looked like the grooviest things of all time,’’ he laughed. ‘‘I still have several pairs.’’
So what made The Beatles so special? Revolutionary?
‘‘They dared to be different,’’ he said. ‘‘Because most of the musicians and pop stars of the day, by nature they’re very ebullient crazy rock’n’roll people, but they were always kept down. All their managers and publicists kept a lid on them, telling them not to say anything too outrageous. It wasn’t new to be out there – I think the rockers of the ’50s were quite wild themselves – but The Beatles weren’t really, particularly early on, guilty of wild and outrageous behaviour. But they had strong political opinions and they voiced them. The management people around them, you could practically see them shrivelling in horror when John Lennon made his political statements. He was at the London Palladium at a royal occasion and it was full of titled people, lords and ladies, and before he started a song he said: ‘For those of you in the cheap seats clap your hands, the rest of you just rattle your jewellery.’ It was a very class-conscious statement for a working class lad on stage, and it shocked some people’’
‘‘It seems kind of tame by comparison today, but it was a big breakthrough for musicians. They were always very witty about it, but they said what they thought.’’
Waters said The Beatles had given the north of England a voice. "England was very London-centric – the rest of the people were perceived as just peasants – and this was a sore point for people in the north for many years. The Beatles made a big breakthrough in that regard. They broke barriers of class and snobbery and they did it very strongly. It was quite something to live through.’’
Waters loves that they were brave enough to record All You Need Is Love – an anthemic song about universal love.
‘‘It was a sentiment that was new to people in the day,’’ he said. ‘‘People were used to hearing songs about romantic love, and boy-girl love, but to talk about the spiritual, universal love – which they do in that song – was quite different altogether. It was very needed in the world at that time, and it’s still needed. A song like that can be sung again and again for me, and it will never lose its power and beauty. For me it’s an extremely beautiful song.’’
In Let It Be, each singer performs a couple of songs, but they’ll come together and harmonise for the more anthemic numbers like Hey Jude, Let It Be, and Come Together.
‘‘I think what we’re doing with this show is finding that place in everybody’s heart and fulfilling the need to hear these songs live,’’ Waters said.
Let It Be is on at Newcastle’s Civic Theatre on Sunday, August 22, from 6pm. Ticket prices start at $99 through Ticketek.
