Neil Harrison – The Bootleg Beatles’ original John Lennon – on meeting Paul, dealing with fatigue and keeping the show going
Bootleg Beatles founder member Neil Harrison
Neil Harrison never left the Bootleg Beatles. For the last 14 years, since hanging up his round glasses and white suit, Neil – the band’s original John Lennon – has managed the group he formed with David Catlin-Birch and Andre Barreau in 1980 before the term “tribute band” was even coined.
The ECHO spoke to Neil, who reflected on a long career in the music industry, his own battles with finding space for creativity and the “religious experience” of meeting Paul McCartney at Christmas as a teenager – a moment Paul had forgotten when the pair met again at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.
Neil told the ECHO: “He kind of nodded like, ‘oh yeah’. And Andre [Barreau, who played George Harrison from 1980 to 2017] was with me, and he said “you don’t remember,” and he said no. He was nodding, but he didn’t really remember it.”
The meeting in 1968 had come about when Neil and his friends heard rumours that Paul had come home for Christmas. The Beatles star’s Aston Martin had been spotted in the Wirral village of Heswall, where Paul’s father moved to after leaving Forthlin Road. The youngsters sniffed opportunity, so decided to knock on the Baskervyle Road home and sing some carols.
Neil added: “[Paul’s] dad remarried. So she opened the door and gave us some money and then waved us off or something, and we went, ‘oh, b****r’. So we sang some Beatles song. Then the door opened again, and Macca came out with his guitar on, and it was quite cold. He was just wearing a t-shirt. And so he said, ‘do you want to come in for a drink?’
“We all went in the hallway and he sat on the stairs and Linda was above him, and he played songs from the White Album. And right at the end he said, ‘try these chords’. So he was showing me this chord he used for that particular song and then he starts singing it. It was this new number, I’ve Got A Feeling, and he was getting me to sing it. And I thought, ‘f***. I’ve got to remember this.’ So I was singing and singing and singing it all the way back to my house.”
It was only when Peter Jackson’s Let It Be documentary series was released that Neil realised Paul had taught him the song before the rest of the Beatles had even heard it. The following year, he finally had the proof that this magical moment really did happen.
Neil said: “I told everybody, obviously, about meeting him at school. People asked ‘did that really happen?’…Then there were these pictures that came out. Linda had a retrospective just after the pandemic in the Walker Art Gallery. Some mate of Andre’s was there and took a picture of this photograph on the wall. It was a picture that Linda had taken of us standing outside.
“It’s a total vindication, you see. I was there. But my poor brother who was there was masked by Macca so you couldn’t see him.”
Leaving the Bootlegs
Despite playing John in the Bootlegs’ act, Neil says he always preferred Paul personally. Long-serving Paul impersonator Steve White retired from the Bootlegs earlier this year, with Miles Frizzell, 21, from Nashville, named as his successor.
Miles Frizzell of the Bootleg Beatles(Image: Bootleg Beatles)
Neil spoke proudly of Frizzell. He said: “He’s really experienced but he’s got a really old head on young shoulders. He’s precocious – in a good way – he’s just so bloody talented. And he’s quite humble, really. It’s not like he knows it all, he wants to learn more.
“And the other thing is, he’s a massive McCartney fan…He’s just manic about McCartney. Everything, not just Beatle McCartney, but Wings, you know. Later stuff. All of it.”
Neil paused when asked what it was like when his time came to step down from the band. He said: “It was difficult to watch somebody else doing it. I’d done it for 30 years…The guy that took over was much younger and, in fact, I thought he looked much more like Lennon than I did. So, you, know, that’s quite hard to take. And he was great, and amazing. But [eventually] I realised I had to do it.
“I was finding it really difficult to sing those parts. My voice was going quite a bit. Those songs are in keys that work for those voices, young voices, but 60, which is what I was? It’s a struggle.
“I mean, look what’s happened to Macca now. I don’t understand that with him. He’s still composing songs in those keys and it’s patently not done his voice any good. I find it a bit sad, really. But who am I to judge Macca? He’s great and that’s what he wants to do. And the funny thing is, the Stones get away with it.”
Following his dreams
Neil has always kept his love of the Beatles, but he doesn’t hide his more jaded perspective. As a songwriter himself, who released his own album in 1974 and once wrote a Billboard top 20 hit for Scottish singer Lulu, he has had to find new ways to stay creative even after stepping down from the stage.
Neil told the ECHO: “I suffered a lot of fatigue. Because you’re straitjacketed by those songs. There’s a lot of songs to choose from, but they’re still Beatles songs. And if you’re a creative person, it’s quite difficult to be able to create in that situation. You can’t do it with the songs. You have to do it some other way with the production itself.
“So that’s where I think the creativity comes in, you know: the presentation of it. Otherwise, it would be so boring, and I’ve heard stories about certain bands literally sticking to the same setlist every night. As a musician it’s so boring and lazy. At least with us, we’re challenging [the band] as musicians and challenging the audience as well:
“‘Here’s Savoy Truffle, here’s how it would’ve been played live with a brass section by the Beatles.’ And some people will go, ‘big deal, I don’t like the song’. A lot of people go, ‘bloody hell! Actually, that’s a great song when it’s given the full might of a live gig.’ I relish that, and if I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t do it. I would end it.”
Gordon Elsmore, Miles Frizzell, Stephen Hill and Paul Canning of the Bootleg Beatles(Image: Bootleg Beatles)
Neil has struggled with finding time for his own creative practice for his whole career. His musical about tribute acts, Great Pretenders, has had runs in London and Edinburgh, but managing the Bootleg Beatles has proved a hard gig to give up.
With a smile, Neil mused over the idea of quitting. He said: “I keep thinking, I’ll just do one more. Just one more. I think it’s quite difficult to let go of it. I’ve done it all my life so to go, ‘ okay, some other person’s gonna do this’ – now I do think that’d be quite difficult. But I think I have to do it, to give myself more time to do other stuff that I’d like to do for myself rather than just my Bootleg Beatle legacy.”
Neil’s father was a writer who never followed through on his dream of giving up his day job in accounting to work on his own projects. Despite Neil’s own frustration, he is determined not to follow the same path.
He said: “It drove him to drink, you know, in the end. Because he couldn’t. He never had the time to be able to do the creative stuff that he really wanted to. And it happens, it’s happening all the time. And I don’t know what the answer to it is really. I feel like I’m a bit like him.”
His ongoing fight for creative control made Neil sympathetic to co-founder and original Macca impersonator David Catlin-Birch’s decision to quit the band back in 1987, and again in 2012 after rejoining in 2001. He hasn’t heard from Catlin-Birch since Andre Barreau’s funeral, two years ago.
David Catlin-Birch, Andre Barreau, Neil Harrison and Rick Rock of the Bootleg(Image: Bootleg Beatles)
Neil said: “David left the band to do his own music. He did a lot of session work and then he joined World Party, so he was playing original music for a while but then re-joined the Bootleg Beatles a bit later.”
On the balance between creativity and needing to pay the bills, Neil said: “I certainly have battled this for a long time. This need to be myself, to do my own stuff, against having to make a living. But there’s a lot of people that depend on this, so I’ve got to be in position to keep this going. There’s a lot of pressure and it’s been an internal battle, and it’s not even really resolved even now.
“I would find it difficult to pass it on to somebody else. A bit like passing the baton on playing John Lennon. That wasn’t easy, but I think this probably would be even more difficult, actually.”
Fans of the Bootlegs’ elaborate stage shows can rest assured that Neil will be firmly involved in the planning and execution of at least one more tour. He said: “There will be another one. This time next year. You’ll hear about it soon enough because it has to be advertised in the Phil [Liverpool Philharmonic Hall], probably at the end of January or early February.”