Live Review: Rubber Soul Revolver: Marlon Williams, Jordie Lane, Fergus Linacre, Husky Gawenda

The last time the Beatles Live production company put on one of their tours it featured four of the biggest names from the Australian contemporary rock scene - Tim Rogers, Phil Jamieson, Chris Cheney and Josh Pyke - performing The White Album. For this tour though, they've changed their approach and conscripted up-and-comers from further outside the rock scene to tackle the Rubber Soul and Revolver albums. But it's apparent from the first notes of Drive My Car that the vocalists - Marlon Williams, Jordie Lane, Husky's Husky Gawenda and Fergus Linacre from Kingswood - are all going to be able to hold their own with the material.

But that doesn't mean tonight is without teething pains. As its the first show of the Rubber Soul Revolver tour, there's a fair amount of awkwardness from the four vocalists as they work through Rubber Soul. You take the guitar away from these singer-songwriter types and they immediately become ill at ease Year 8 boys with a fear of public speaking giving an oral presentation to their English class. The awkward hunching and shuffling detracts from the music. This however, is fairly easy to forgive when the six-piece backing band adroitly revive the lush interpretations of numbers like Nowhere Man and I'm Looking Through You.

After intermission, the singers come back having shed some of their Rubber Soul self-consciousness. As the screen (something which seemed under-utilised during the first half of the evening) behind them alights with psychedelic visuals, they seem more comfortable with what they're here to do. They're working with, arguably, better material on Revolver and there are some numbers here where they really hit it out of the park. Marlon Williams' handling of its haunting melancholy makes Eleanor Rigby far and away the song of the night and Fergus Linacre brings a touch of Kingswood's stomp to Got To Get You Into My Life.

The over-50 portion of tonight's crowd are especially engaged, and there's a very visceral pleasure that the rest of us can derive from watching a group of sexagenarians headbanging and smiling like idiots as they sing every single word.

Tonight is clearly targeted towards this section of the crowd, the ones who don't know Paul McCartney as that dude who was lucky enough to collaborate with Kanye West, so everything is just about a note-perfect reproduction of the album. While this doesn't give the vocalists a chance to show off their individual styles (especially Marlon Williams; you're not going to find a more unique and arresting singer going around today than Marlon Williams) it does respectfully pay homage to these iconic pop songs.