The Bootleg Beatles on a high at fab time for fab four

With The Beatles recently hitting number one with the new single Now And Then, The Bootleg Beatles have also got the delicious prospect of seven years of consecutive 60th anniversary celebrations ahead of them as they look back on the Fab Four’s fab output through the 1960s.

Plus right now, they are on one of their favourite tours of the year taking them through until Christmas including a date at the Brighton Centre on Sunday, December 17.

“Australia was great,” says Steve White, the band’s Paul McCartney. “We have only just got back so I'm still all in a bit of a pickle and I don't know what's happening in the news but the crowds were just wonderful and we had some really brilliant dates.

“We have been to so many places over the years. We even went to Mongolia, places which are quite remote but still The Beatles are massive. You're playing to people who might have a tough time speaking English but they still know all the words!”

Now comes the excitement of the new single which The Bootleg Beatles, of course, have had to master: “There was a lot of excitement around the single and maybe it just a little bit overriped it for me because I was expecting this amazing mix with absolutely everything in it but when it came out it was quite subdued and quite a melancholy sort of song. I really wasn't expecting that but I listened to it a few times and started to think ‘I really, really like this.’ It really started to grow on me and then of course we had to learn it and once you start taking it apart listening to it in that kind of detail. then you just think ‘Wow!’ Paul McCartney’s bassline is a little bit hidden in the mix but once you start learning that and trying to replicate it, it's just amazing. The chords are quite simple but the bassline is incredibly unsimple. It's all over the neck. It is brilliant and you can sense the little bits where Paul wanted the song to go in a certain way and John was sending it in another and in the end Paul had to fill in the blanks and make it the finished article. I just think it is fantastic.”

Beatles interest, of course, is always high but there's no doubt that the recent Get Back film plus the new single have added to things. Plus of course there is the fascination of the remarkable journey that The Beatles themselves went on in such a relatively short space of time: “You think of what they covered in that time and really it's just unheard of. Most bands first of all would take about two years to make an album, always refining every little bit but The Beatles were having to put it out quickly and it's a little bit warts and all on there and you can hear a few mistakes but that’s all part of the lovable charm. And then a band now would then take another two years to make the next album but with The Beatles it was full on and they would be making another album just a few months later.”

All of which gives The Bootleg Beatles such vast choice. Obviously there are many, many staples that they absolutely have to play: “But on the last tour we introduced Tomorrow Never Knows and who would have thought that it would have gone as well as it did. People absolutely loved it.”