Project Description
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Josh Pyke, Chris Cheney, Phil Jamieson; The White Album Concert Adelaide 2023 / Photo – Colin Reid (@cdrimagery)
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The Beatles White Album Concert
(Phil Jamieson, Chris Cheney,
Tim Rogers, Josh Pyke)
@ The Adelaide Festival Theatre, Adelaide,
8th September, 2023
(Live Review)
Review and photos by Colin Reid (@cdrimagery)
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Phil Jamieson, Tim Rogers; The White Album Concert Adelaide 2023 / Photo – Colin Reid (@cdrimagery)
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Way back in 2009, Australia’s own fab four of Tim Rogers, Chris Cheney, Josh Pike and Phil Jamieson plus a rock orchestra ensemble chose to pay homage to The Beatles White Album, which was then celebrating its 40th Birthday. Fast forward 14 years and this is now the fourth time that they have taken their show around the country and it is still filling theatres wherever it goes.
It is both an interesting and an intimidating idea for anyone to try and recreate an album that was written by such musical icons. This is especially so when they wrote it with no intention of ever taking it out on the road and playing it live. The “White Album” is a collection of songs written in differing styles from different writers and whilst it is rated as one of the top ten albums of all time by Rolling Stone magazine it is somewhat uneven and isn’t always easy to listen to. Thankfully, some of the Avant Garde strangeness, the vaudevillian musical hall or 1920s flapper elements of some of the numbers are rounded out as each member puts their own interpretation onto the material rather than simply reproducing the songs as they were first recorded.
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Chris Cheney; The White Album Concert Adelaide 2023 / Photo – Colin Reid (@cdrimagery)
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Adelaide Festival Centre is pretty much full, there are only a handful of spare seats in the venue. The demographic is very firmly in the white and over 60s club and this is reflected in queues of the toilets which rival those to the bars!
The album is played in full, track by track, in the original order with an intermission at the end of what was side two on the original vinyl release. Chris Cheney kicks things off with a rollicking version of Paul McCartney’s ‘Back in the USSR’ before vocals pass to Phil Jamieson to sing Dear Prudence. Phil is dressed in an unusually high waisted pair of white slacks and is sporting a full set of pink fingernails. He claims ownership of the stage from the start, taking the earliest opportunity to get atop of the grand piano and reaching out to all points of the venue as he sings the lyric “look around, around, around”. Whilst both of the opening numbers were okay neither really stood out as great, something about it seemed flat and I wondered if it was going to be a long night?
Chris is back with track 3, ‘Glass Onion’. It is great, something has shifted and the night begins to feel like a real gig. The crowd are starting to sway in their seats and really gets going when the four vocalists unite for an ensemble version of ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’.
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Phil Jamieson; The White Album Concert Adelaide 2023 / Photo – Colin Reid (@cdrimagery)
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Of the four vocalists, it is the witty and somewhat eccentric Tim Rogers who engages the most with the audience throughout the night. Whether it is praising the musicianship and vocal capabilities of the other members whilst confessing that he can only get by through trading on his good looks or complaining that at 33 his attempt to wear a catsuit in the style of Eartha Kitt is becoming more and more difficult! He attempts to match his headwear to some of the songs he wears i.e. a bear hat for ‘Bungalow Bill’ or a pig mask for ‘Piggies’. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. He is always looking for a comic twist and doesn’t miss an attempt at humour at one point in the second set paraphrasing John Lennon’s joke at the 1963 Royal Variety performance. Instead of the people in the expensive seats being encouraged to rattle their jewellery, they are asked to shake their football memberships “probably Sturt ones” , says Tim poking fun at the SANFL team he has followed since a child.
If I am honest both Tim and Phil’s stage routines verge into over acted campness. Whilst this extracted faux shocked gasps and giggles from the boomer generation women who were seated around me I began to find it irritating. Imagine, if you can, Mr Humphries, the over the top camp character from the dated 1970s British TV comedy “Are You Being Served” attempting his best dance moves. Thankfully as the night progresses the campness becomes less.
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Tim Rogers; The White Album Concert Adelaide 2023 / Photo – Colin Reid (@cdrimagery)
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One of the absolute highlights of the night was Chris Cheney’s amazing guitar work on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. It is incredible and surpasses the solo that Eric Clapton put down during the recording of the album. There are many other highlights during the evening. During one number Phil leaves the stage and heads off into the crowd leaving the rock orchestra to hold centre stage to show off their formidable skills. Another is Tim’s, thankfully this time without an animal hat, providing a great interpretation of ‘Everyone has something to hide except for me and my monkey’. Here he pulls out all the moves; there are elements of every great frontman who ever strutted a stage.
Chris returns calling out to the audience “They say that rock ‘n’ roll is the Devil’s music…let’s find out shall we” before crashing into ‘Helter Skelter’. There is more guitar magic. At one stage the guitar is on the ground as he coaxes sounds out of it with his feet and the next moment he is tossing it into the air. He gets all the hard rocking tracks and he brings them all to life.
Josh has plenty of highlights too. In the first half of the album, he brought such beauty to ‘Blackbird’ and in the second half he followed Chris’s rock n roll theatrics by walking onto the stage, noodling the bottom string and joking that he too can play solos! He plays a great version of ‘Long, Long, Long’.
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Tim Rogers, Josh Pyke; The White Album Concert Adelaide 2023 / Photo – Colin Reid (@cdrimagery)
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The album signs off firstly with the rather strange Revolution #9 which has been left left to the orchestra and they are excellent in their arrangement and execution and then the ensemble returns to collectively wish us ‘Goodnight’
A first encore is taken with the 4 singers taking the stage without the orchestra. Cheney and Rogers playing acoustic guitars. Jokes and bad puns are shared about Josh getting the middle seat in the aisle “you should rename your song to that” says Phil in a reference to Josh’s best known track “Middle of the Hill” and Tim telling the other “not to have a heavy heart about the mention of their solo work”. They combine to play a wonderful version of ‘Two of Us’, the four voices harmonising perfectly as well as ‘Across the Universe’ and finally ‘The Ballard of John and Yoko’. I loved the chemistry and the camaraderie of the four of them on stage together; clearly they are very comfortable with each other and the warmth of their friendship shone through.
The night finishes with the orchestra returning for ‘I Am the Walrus’ and the single version of ‘Revolution 1’. At last the audience feels free to begin dancing in the aisles and everyone is on their feet to acknowledge the whole band as they take a well earned bow.
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Check out Colin Reid’s (@cdrimagery) full gallery of this event HERE
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Chris Cheney, Josh Pyke, Tim Rogers, Phil Jamieson; The White Album Concert Adelaide 2023 / Photo – Colin Reid (@cdrimagery)
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