The Bootleg Beatles play The Brighton Centre

Steve White, who plays Paul McCartney in the band, has been a Bootleg Beatle for coming up for ten years now – longer than The Beatles themselves were Beatles.

“And it has been great. It just doesn’t feel like ten years. It feels like two or three, and I just love my job.

“But obviously we were not able to play for a long time. Everything had to move to the internet and we did a few bits and pieces and also we just had to change our skills and do other things. We were just about to start a tour when the pandemic hit. We were just two days away from the March/April tour that we usually do. We’d just finished a Holland and Belgium tour and we had been at home for five or six days and had another couple of days to go. All the speculation was aiming at a national lockdown and then two days before our UK tour, it happened. The first tour went by the wayside due to the lockdown and we were thinking it would be just a couple of months and we would be back. Little did we know that 18 months later we still wouldn’t be back. But we are now.

“I ended up working on a building site for about a year. It was not the best but it was just a way of coping. But with the band we set up a few little internet things for the fans. Every month or so we would do a song.

“We would decide on the song and then all play our parts and we would send them around between us and people would add their bit to them and eventually we got the song and we would edit it to a video. It was just a case of doing something.

“And then this summer we were able to do odds and sods. It was two or maybe three odd very, very small private affairs and that was it, absolutely nothing on a grand size but now we have got the tour and it is really exciting. We’re just hoping it’s going to happen.

“We had a couple of gigs recently just to whet the appetite and it was great”

And with perfect timing, November saw the release of the three-part film Get Back, a new much longer look at The Beatles’ Let It Be sessions.

“At the moment I have only watched the first part but it was really exciting. I hope to watch the other two parts soon. I think it’s just amazing. Heaven only knows why it took all these years for it to come out. We know they had their ups and downs. Really it was just like a marriage between four people and all marriages have times when people bicker but now this comes out and it’s just great. It’s a lovely film. It is such a joy to see.

“I wouldn’t say that it will change things in regard to more people discovering The Beatles because already we get all the generations coming along to our shows. It is incredible the age range that we get from 60s to six. We get young children in the front row and you can say that their mum and dad have brought them along because they couldn’t get babysitters but you look and you see a six-year-old singing along to all the words from album tracks! The power of that band is just incredible!”