Beatles Tribute Bands: Like The Beatles

Like The Beatles are dedicated to recreating The Beatles music in front of live audiences throughout the country but they also enjoy recreating other aspects of the Beatles fabulous career. An example is the band’s attempts to recreate The Beatles iconic album covers from Please Please Me all the way through to The Beatles Anthologies.

Here are some of our creations and how we achieved them.

Please Please Me

The original Please Please Me Album Cover was photographed at EMI’s London headquarters in Manchester Square by legendary theater photographer Angus McBean in Feburary 1963. The decision to photograph having only been arrived at after the idea to photograph them outside London Zoo’s insect house fell through. Sadly the iconic staircase was removed in 1995 so Like The Beatles were forever searching for an opportunity to look down another staircase..

One day their opportunity came when performing a show at Gillingham Football Club.

A Hard Days Night

The Hard Days Night Motion Picture was accompanied by a soundtrack which had a cover recreating the effect of a film reel as seen in an iconic moment in the film. Recreating this album cover was a simple case of adorning black polo necks and armed with the original album; posing.. cropping, colouring and carefully lining them all up. It is faithful to the original even down to the lack of emotional diversity in Ringo’s face.

Revolver

Klaus Voormann, The Beatles friend from their days in Hamburg created the famous Revolver album cover which was a combination of line drawing and collage. Klaus used a number of photos taken by Robert Whitaker who took a hundreds of famous photos of the band including the infamous “Butcher Cover”. On this album cover there are all sorts of weird and wonderful things happening and as you can imagine it took a while to try and recreate it from scratch.. but we tried nonetheless. Using a combination of drawings and recreated photographs; below is our attempt at recreating Revolver… it includes details like individual lines for each hair just like the original, a little face in Paul’s ear.. John in Paddington Bear trousers, George in a helmet and Ringo sitting on George’s head with fake legs.

Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band

Probably the most iconic album cover of all time. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts club band had a cover which captured the psychedelic nature of the summer of love every bit as well as the music within it. The Grammy Award winning Album cover was designed by Peter Blake and Jan Howorth and photographed by Michael Cooper. The Beatles used cardboard cutouts and library sourced images blown up to life sized proportions which were lined up and photographed in a studio in London. The Beatles wore custom made military uniforms made from satin and dyed in day-glo colours which were covered in paraphernalia and medals… not an easy thing to recreate.

Like The Beatles had their one-of-a-kind costumes custom made by a friend who also used satin and colour matched them to those originally worn by the band. Each medal and badge was sort after and painstakingly matched where possible right down to Paul’s Ontario Provincial Police patch which we found on Ebay, Ringo’s British Coat of Arms and Paul’s Grenadier Guards Badge to name but a few.

We didn’t have our own studio in which to print lots of life size figures (we also don’t like to waste paper) so we used our computer skills to create our own updated version with new faces for you to identify. Nothing from the original album cover was used in this recreation.

How many faces can you identify?

While we were at it we also posed for the Sgt pepper Gate-fold…

We have recreated many more album covers which can all be seen at www.likethebeatles.co.uk so please feel free to check them out and see what else the band are up to.