Beatle Mania
Shake it up, baby, in Strauss Square with the faux Fab Four
It would be so easy to go totally Daily Show on a guy who makes his living pretending to be Paul McCartney in a Beatles tribute band.
“Have you ever pretended to have a feud with the wife of the guy who pretends to be John Lennon?” I am dying to ask him that in our short phone interview. Or “Have you ever fake-married a girl who pretends to be an amputee?”
But that wouldn’t be nice. And Tony Kishman, the McCartney in Twist and Shout, a Fab Faux band performing at ATTPAC’s Annette Strauss Square at 7:30 pm, Sunday, October 14, seems like a nice sort of bloke.
Based in Tucson, Arizona, Twist and Shout has a 40-song Beatles repertoire, mostly the old stuff up to and including the White Album. The other band members are Jim Owen (“John”), Chris Camilleri (“Ringo”) and John Brosnan (“George”).
Let’s hear more from Tony “Fake Paul” Kishman. Dig how he wigs out over that other Beatle tribute band.
CultureMap: What are the best and worst things about performing as a wanna-Beatle?
Tony Kishman: I enjoy doing it. It’s the greatest music ever written, and when you get involved with a show that features the greatest music, it feels good. I’ve been playing music all my life. When I first started, it was classic rock in the 1970s. I played in the clubs. Then I started portraying Paul and realized what great music really is and how timeless it is.
CM: What’s your favorite Beatles song to perform?
TK: We particularly like doing “Hey Jude.” The crowd joins in, and it’s a lot of fun to do.
CM: How old are you?
TK: I’m a lot younger than Paul, I’ll put it that way. Paul is 70.
CM: Why do fans like tribute bands?
TK: A lot of the fans thank us for bringing a piece of their past back to them. This music is their memories. It’s their childhoods. It’s their first romance. Every time we do a song, it’s a moment in someone’s life. They always comment on how accurate we are and how close we are to the record.
CM: You have a lot of competition from other fake Beatle bands like Rain: The Beatles Experience. They've been to Dallas at least twice. What do you think of them?
TK: Rain and our band have played in many of the same venues. They’re robots. They get onstage and pretend they’re the Beatles, but you have to remember to be entertainers. We make this music our own and take it a step further. They are friends of mine. I know all the guys in Rain. But their concept is robotic and boring and they do too long of a show.
They overstay their welcome. No one has ever said that about our show. That’s what we’ve got over any other Beatle group. We know what we’re doing as a show.
