Last weekend in Brisbane, I had the great pleasure of a repeat viewing of one of the most extraordinary performances I’ve yet seen, when a group of Australian musicians reassembled to perform Abbey Road — the classic 1969 album by The Beatles — in its entirety. Featuring Kram on drums, Davey Lane and Darren Middleton on guitar, and Mark Wilson on bass — as well as a handful of other extremely talented collaborators — it’s a phenomenal feat of musicianship to perform a work the original quartet never played before an audience. As Kram said from the stage at one point, though, the hardest job belongs to Wilson, who is tasked with playing some of the trickiest basslines in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, as penned and plucked by Paul McCartney.
Earlier this week, I asked the Jet bassist how he began scaling that mountain of work. “My whole life, I’ve kind of aped Paul McCartney,” Wilson replied. “But funnily enough, I never really learned a lot of Beatles stuff. I always found it pretty daunting and so I always stayed away from it. Even though I’m a massive Beatles fan, I didn’t really know the ins and outs of any of the songs we played at all. Maybe [first track] Come Together was the only one, because it’s kind of easy, but even that has its tricky bits. But I started really early when we knew we were going to do the tour; I probably started learning the stuff in December (2018) before the first tour in August last year — just slowly, because I wanted time to live with it, because there’s so many idiosyncrasies and nuances.
“Also, I knew that there would be people like me in the crowd, who are Beatles nuts and will know if I don’t put a particular little embellishment, or if I don’t do them exactly right — they’ll notice.”
If you’re a Beatles fan, you simply must see this incredible show, whose second half rewinds the clock from 1969 to 1962. The tour concludes with shows in Canberra on Saturday night, Melbourne on Sunday and Darwin on Friday; perhaps there’ll be more later in the year.
But I wanted to single out Wilson’s outstanding playing here, because in studying Abbey Road so closely — and in performing it so perfectly — he’s become one of very few people on the planet to know McCartney’s notes on that album inside and out. How has that changed his appreciation for Sir Paul’s work? “I’ve always known it was unparalleled, but I reckon it’s helped — it makes you really good at playing your instrument, that’s for sure,” he said. “When you play this much detail every night, you step up pretty drastically. There’s nowhere to hide on this stuff.”
mcmillena@theaustralian.com.au
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