Fifty Years Ago Today: Marking the 50th anniversary of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Shortis and Simpson. Saturday, Marcy 18, 8pm. Bicentennial Hall, Queanbeyan (enter via Q foyer) $25-$52. Bookings: 6285 6290 or theq.net.au.
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In 1967. prime minister Harold Holt disappeared, the Vietnam War was raging - and The Beatles released their landmark album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
John Shortis and Moya Simpson have assembled a band of their own and their Worldly Goods Choir to mark the 50th anniversary of the record, in which The Beatles played "characters", the tracks played through as if part of a single work, and the album was the first to have the first to have the lyrics printed on the sleeve.
"It's a mixture of old-style entertainment - music hall, vaudeville, brass band - '60s trippy and kitchen-sink," Shortis says of the album's contents and styles.
In their show, Shortis and Simpson will tell the story of the album and its creators as well as the political and social climate of the era.
The Beatles had given up touring by this time and were focusing on studio production. A lot had changed since the early days of the Fab Four.
Shortis says their first album, 1963's Please Please Me, cost £400 and took 10 hours to record.
"Sgt Pepper's cost £25,000 and took five months."
With the freedom granted by their commercial success and with the help of their producer, classically-trained musician George Martin, The Beatles were becoming increasingly experimental and were achieving things in the studio that would not be possible to replicate live even if they had wanted to do so.
Shortis says, "We're doing it as a band" - the members include Dave O'Neill (guitars and violin), Jon Jones (drums), Ian Blake (bass and woodwinds), Bob Rodgers (guitars, bass and vocals) and Andrew Purdam (on tabla) but Shortis says his group won't be trying to sound exactly like The Beatles.
He mostly did the arrangements himself, discovering the published scores were full of errors and having to produce his own versions for the ensemble he had at hand anyway, But he says he soon discovered just how complex their work really was when he came to work on it, giving him new-found respect for the music he thought he knew well.
This version of A Day in the Life will feature a 47-voice choir making its way up 16 bars to a crescendo (as distinct from the original 24 - "It's a bit harder to sustain live with voices")
It's not just going to be the familiar album songs like When I'm 64, and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, either that will be performed.
The double-A side single that didn't originally make it onto the album, Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, will be played as a medley - Shortis notes a 50th-anniversary reissue of Sgt Pepper's is planned that will include the songs - as will God Only Knows, one of the Beach Boys songs that helped inspire the album in the first place in a bout of friendly rivalry.
And there'll be plenty of stories, many of them light-hearted, about The Beatles and the era. Shortis notes that the release of the album was delayed in Australia. Although Sgt Pepper's was available in Britain on June 1, 1967, the British apparently didn't trust us to do justice to the album and its elaborate artwor.
"They sent 50,000 copies out via the Suez Canal but then the Arab-Israeli war broke out and they didn't arrive until the end of July."
Audience members can bring their own food to the Bicennential Hall which has a bar from which to buy drinks. Seating is at chairs and tables. Dressing up in 1967-style fashion is optional.
