Bootleg Beatles start to mark all those Fab Four 60th anniversaries

Love Me Do was the official debut single by The Beatles coming out on October 5 1962; next March sees the 60th anniversary of Please Please Me, the album it came from.

The great news is that The Bootleg Beatles are on the case.

They will be starting to take all those anniversaries on board as they hit the road for their December tour, kicking off with a little focus on that very first album (December 18, Brighton Centre).

Steve White is the band’s Paul McCartney – and he’s delighted to be putting the pandemic firmly behind them: “I do think we are pretty much back to normal now but actually due to Covid we have been inundated with work. We are playing catch up now. We had lots of shows that were put off or postponed but now we are busier than ever which is incredible. At the time it was all very negative but I suppose that's a positive now. It was really hard at time. No one knew we were going to lose two years. At first we thought it would be just a couple of months, but actually I ended up doing some work on a building site. It was a mixture of needing to bring in some money and also no t wanting to go stark raving mad. At first there were a couple of months where you just caught up with things around the house like painting the fence and things like that and doing the garden but after a while you just needed to be doing something or else you would go round the twist. And certainly yes for me it's more pleasurable now to be doing what I want to do to make my living rather than just making ends meet on a building site but actually it was quite demanding. When I first started doing it, it was like a real body blow but then it is such a relief to be back with the band.”

Especially with all the anniversaries coming up: “It's the 60th anniversary of Love Me Do and then also obviously it was the album and that album is just so good. They recorded in something like 12 hours which was just phenomenal. And John was just really suffering from a cold but he just powered his way through it all and you hear that version of Twist & Shout and it is just incredible. I have just never heard anything else like it. So yes, we are going to be trying to highlight the anniversaries. Obviously we can't do the entire album because we're all about wanting to tell the story of their whole career but we will be making a few changes for Please Please Me. We will introduce a few different instruments, a different Hofner bass and a different Gretsch guitar. It's great to change things to some degree just to keep it all fresh but obviously there are so many staples in there that we just cannot possibly not do. We have to keep that balance. We get the die-hards coming to see the show again and again but the bulk of the audience probably are the more casual fans so we really do have to include all the big hits that people would expect.”