Meet the Silver Beats! - The Beatles Tribute Band from Japan

My wife and I had second-row balcony seats for the Killers show at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre on April 22, 2007. Unusual band: There’s a real guitar presence with the Killers, but the guitars are weirdly subservient to keys, synths, and vocals. They remind me a whole helluva lot of PiL, Oingo Boingo, and even A Flock of Seagulls. Good group, great show.

Anyway, the wife and I are old farts, so we were disappointed to learn upon arrival that there was an opening act, from Japan no less – “Silver” something or other – so we were going to get even less sleep that night than we originally thought. Eight O’clock rolls around, this mystery band starts to take the stage, and I notice they are all wearing suits. Interesting. When they stepped up to their mics, I saw they were also wearing familiar-looking black leather boots. “Hey, wait a minute, these guys are. . .” I whispered, and they broke out with a marvelous, spot-on cover of The Fab Four’s “Drive My Car”! “Asked a girl what she wanted to be / And she said baby can’t you see / I want to be famous / A star of the screen / But you can do something in between. . .” Yeaaaaaaah! It’s Beatlemania bliss!

So it turns out the Silver Beats are a Beatles tribute band. . .from Japan! All four players were great: Yukinobu Kabe (Ringo), Tadaaki Naganuma (Paul), Hajime Kubo (George), and Hidemasa Mabuchi (John) sang to us in the Queen’s English, then cut up with the crowd between songs in Japanese, to hilarious effect. Hajime/George, who stood front and center, was playing a Telecaster, kind of compromising the overall visual effect, but I guess that doesn’t really matter when you can nail the licks like he did. Mabu/John, who knew the most English, even spoke with a Liverpoolian accent. If you go by their website, you can see how much Mabu looks like John, even in the face. Eerie.

For this set, the Silver Beats concentrated on the earlier half of the Beatles career: “Day Tripper”, “I Feel Fine”, “All My Loving” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”, etc., which was appropriate for their costumes. But they also nailed “Don’t Let Me Down” (the fellow who helped the Silver Beats get their visas sang lead on that one, and he was killer) as well as “Come Together”. Their set-ending “Sgt. Pepper (Reprise)” was the perfect capper, stirring me way, way down, reminding me of what made me a music fanatic in the first place. I must not have been the only one, since the crowd gave the Silver Beats a stomping standing ovation when it was time to go. (Another blogger who saw them at the Ryman in Nashville said they got a standing ovation there, too.)

So, thank you, Silver Beats, for giving me such an unexpected, wonderful experience. Please come back at my town someday!

Here’s the Silver Beats website:

http://www.silverbeats.com/english/about.html

Here’s the (mediocre) vid I shot of the Silver Beats performing “Come Together”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLx-ZMyLPuE