Macca: The Paul McCartney Story/Malvern Theatres

THE demands made on a professional musician are many and varied but no performer is subjected to greater audience scrutiny than the tribute band artist.

That trademark guitar lick, the tell-tale descending bass run, the briefest of piano arpeggios… is it truly, really, exactly like the real deal?

Because out there in the gloom of the auditorium lurks the anorak fan and geek only too ready to pounce on the slightest musical inaccuracy. Make no mistake, copying is the hardest thing to do.

Well, you’d be hard pressed to pick any holes in this incredible homage to the life and times of the former mop top who provided the sugar that sweetened erstwhile buddy John Lennon’s more acidic rock ‘n’ roll.

Paul McCartney was the man who filed away the rough edges and created the softer hybrid that would ease the baby boomers’ transition from youth to middle and now the dawn of old age.

Emanuele Angeletti assumes the mantle of the great man and is authentic right down to the last detail, although he thankfully spares us the head-shaking mullet routine that was such a Macca trademark back in the days when the Fabs ruled the Universe.

Angeletti appears to be ambidextrous, playing his Hofner bass left-handed – just like the main man – but picking the acoustic guitar for such favourites as Blackbird and Yesterday in the more familiar manner.

However, this is just the finer detail, because the music is utterly flawless as it coasts through the post-Beatles period and moves smoothly through the 1970s and 80s.

Lennon may have been the uncompromisingly hard rocker, but the more commercially canny McCartney soon realised that the music had to leave Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee behind in the juke joint if there was going to be any future in it. And it’s precisely for this reason that this superlative salute to McCartney would come about all these years later.

It’s no coincidence that no one so far has seemed remotely interested in creating a Plastic Ono Band tribute. The style simply doesn’t travel, whereas the music of McCartney endures, even if Another Day and Let It Be are now very much in their dotage, paraded on the Wallasey waterfront like two old ladies in bath chairs with their legs wrapped in plaid blankets.

But it doesn’t matter… for this was the music that defined the youth of countless young people in the second half of the last century. And to hear it all again, as recreated by these fabulous musicians, is to dip into a treasure chest of memories that once opened never loses it eternal glitter and sparkle.

John Phillpott