SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Oct. 4, 2023 (Gephardt Daily) — Beatles fans should get ready to twist and shout Friday night as “The Fab Four — The Ultimate Tribute” takes the stage at Peery’s Egyptian Theater in Ogden at 2415 Washington Blvd. on Oct. 6, at 8 p.m.
The group’s 2023 tour brings their all new show to the stage, with a performance of The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” in its entirety, as well as a selection of the band’s greatest hits. The Emmy Award-winning group is known for their attention to detail, with note-for-note live renditions of classics such as “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Yesterday,” “A Day In The Life,” “Twist And Shout,” “Here Comes The Sun,” and “Hey Jude.”
Each performer is an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, a factor that allows the band to recreate, note-for-note, a broad cross-section of songs from The Beatles’ diverse music catalog live on stage.
The group provided motion capture performances for the Cirque du Soleil “The Beatles LOVE” show’s 10th anniversary revamp in 2017 and for “The Beatles: Rock Band” music game, released in 2009. Its numerous television appearances include “Entertainment Tonight,” “Good Morning America” and “Ellen DeGeneres’s Really Big Show,” and it also recorded the soundtrack for the CBS TV movie, “The Linda McCartney Story.”
I spoke to Ardavan “Ardy” Sarraf, who plays Paul McCartney in the band, over the phone from his home in Los Angeles.
Sarraf told me he first heard The Beatles on his mom’s record player when he was a kid.
“My mom had some records, old records, The Everly Brothers and all that kind of stuff,” he said. “My sister, when John Lennon was killed, she started, basically, a photo album, newspaper clippings, like a tribute little photo album. I didn’t realize at the time why everybody was so upset that this guy had died. I had no idea really, who he was and his music and all that. So I started listening to some of the music and then I got it pretty quickly, like a lot of people.”
I asked him how the music of The Beatles made him feel when he first heard it.
“I think the only word I can think of is happy,” Sarraf said. “It’s just a very, a very pleasant happy; the first things I listened to were the ‘Red Album’ stuff, like you know, ‘I Feel Fine’ and ‘Hard Day’s Night,’ ‘Love Me Do,’ and just at that time for me, I was all into the band Kiss, harder rock, right? They were my first Beatles before The Beatles, basically. So yeah, I think just something about the music caught me early on as a young kid, while a lot of my friends were listening to you know, Ozzy Osbourne, and a lot of a lot stronger, harder rock. I love Ozzy too, don’t get me wrong, but at that time, I was kind of, I felt like I was of a different time. You know, I should have been in the 60s, at the age I was because I really loved the music.”
Sarraf then became one of the founding members of the tribute band in 1997.
“I happened to be going to a Beatle convention out here, called Beatlefest, in downtown Los Angeles, and they have bands playing and you can sign up and play with your band if you want to have a battle of the bands,” he said. “So I had some friends of mine in high school say, ‘let’s go play.’ You know, let’s not pretend to be The Beatles, right, and let’s go up there and play some music. And we did. And we won four years in a row. That was kind of cool, and we weren’t dressing up like them or anything. So fast forward a few years. Some of the same people that went to those Beatlefests back then saw me playing and said ‘hey, would you like to go to Japan with us?’, and I’m 20-something years old. Go to Japan? Yeah, let’s go. It didn’t take very much prodding to get me to say yes. And we just, our basic outlook was look, it’s called the Fab Four. At the time, I was playing right-handed and everybody knows Paul McCartney’s left-handed. I taught myself how to play left-hand bass like Paul. And we called it the ultimate tribute because we wanted it to be the ultimate Beatles tribute band.”
He told me a little more about learning to play the bass left-handed.
“It took a few months to really play, and it all depends on people’s dedication,” Sarraf said. “You know, there’s a lot more people doing it these days. Back then there weren’t too many guys that tried it or were good at it. But it’s all about the dedication. It’s all about what you want to do and present the Beatles in a loving way and the way you want to see it. For me, I wanted to see the Fab Four; if I was in the audience. I’d want to see a left-hand Paul McCartney.”
Sarraf said the group focuses on the musicianship of The Beatles, rather than creating a showy spectacle.
“A lot of the acclaim is just because of all the detail,” he said. “The records are the Bible for us. So we don’t stray from the records. We don’t do our own interpretations of the melodies they’re singing. We do it like the record as close as we possibly can. And obviously we’re never going to be them. But I think with all the different bands that have ever done it, I’m gonna pat myself on the back with the other guys and say we’ve done a pretty good job to do that, and everything we do is done live on stage. But we’re four guys, we’re very, very lucky to be able to say that because a lot of other bands have a fifth member backstage or offstage or right behind them. It doesn’t quite look right to have some contemporary looking guy on keyboards while you’re dressed up as Beatles in front of him, it just doesn’t look right. So we do all that kind of stuff. I think the detail; we try to look like them as much as we can with makeup and wigs and the costumes and the gear and we’ve really spent a lot of time; the devil’s in the details as they say, and that’s kind of been our mantra.”
He also told me more about the format of the show, or as he refers to it, the Fab Fourmat.
“The general format is we basically have a four-costume change show, a two-hour show,” he said. “We will come out with the Ed Sullivan, the black suits with the ties, right? We’ll do all the early Beatlemania stuff, ‘She Loves You,’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ all that stuff. We’ll take a break. We’ll come back and do the Sgt. Pepper material, Sgt. Pepper outfits. Yeah we do ‘Day in the Life,’ as a four-piece, we’re the only band that that we know that does ‘Day in the Life,’ sounding as good as it does, as a four-piece. And then we end up with some of the later, ‘Let it Be,’ ‘Hey Jude, the ‘Abbey Road’ stuff. We basically do it chronologically. We feel that’s the way to do it.”
He said that people will often wear Sgt. Pepper costumes to the shows.
“That happens quite a bit, actually more so now than before for some reason, there tends to be a Paul Sgt. Pepper guy out there or a John one or a George one, we try to get them up close to the stage take a photo with them or even get them on stage while we’re in ours too,” he said.
Sarraf also told me that because the Fab Four have played Ogden a few times now, they have a special treat for the fans.
“We’re gonna also play the ‘Rubber Soul’ album in its entirety,” he said. “So we’re doing ‘Rubber Soul’ and we already started doing that show last weekend. And so we’re looking forward to that. That’s gonna be definitely a different kind of show for the people in Ogden. We hope it goes over well, it’s a lot of album tracks. A lot of songs that people might not know but hopefully then turn them on and they go out and get it if they don’t have ‘Rubber Soul.’
“We were trying to do a different show and take it on the road. So that was kind of the consensus was let’s do ‘Rubber Soul’ and see how it goes out there. Because when you go to the same place every year, you can change it up only so much, right? You can’t really take out certain big songs, you can’t take out ‘She Loves You’ and throw in a B-side, so you know it’s kind of it’s kind of a Catch 22; there’ll be people that will go to the show and go ‘oh my God, they nailed the ‘Rubber Soul’ album;’ one of the best albums ever. It is a great, great album. ‘In My Life’ is on there, ‘Michelle’ is on there. ‘Drive My Car.’ A whole bunch of classics; so we’re hoping that it really catches people and that we get a good crowd up there in Ogden and fill up the Egyptian Theater.”
Sarraf also spoke about his other musical influences.
“I love Elvis,” he said. “You know, I think any band that has singers that are, you can listen to them harmonize. I love harmony groups; Eagles, Crosby, Stills and Nash. I’m an oldies kind of guy as far as my taste. Queen; I love Queen. Freddie Mercury; he’s one of my heroes for sure. Anything that’s good; I like old country, not this new crap that’s out there. I listen to classical music all the time, almost every day, to kind of relax, I have it in my car, to go to sleep.”
Sarraf also talked about what other than music brings him joy.
“Obviously, it’s corny but family of course,” he said. “I’ve got three kids. My little guy Sebastian, my son, he’s drawing these crazy little stick guys that are just the cutest little guys. And I’m actually wanting to make them into a little children’s book. So I’m going to see if I can get that going in the next few months. These little drawings, and make a little storyboard and, you know, do a little father son book together. That’d be kind of fun. Sports. I’m a sports guy. I love hockey, ice hockey. I’m not really big on baseball or football or all the other American ones anymore. I grew up with all that stuff. But hockey is my sport. I like football, English football. I love watching that. That’s always fun to play too. But yeah, I try to enjoy everything we do and when we travel, get some culture. I like visiting places that are a completely different culture and food and people. It’s always great to go places like that because you know, 99% of people in the world don’t ever get a chance to do that.”
He added: “My middle daughter really is; she’s taught herself piano and I bought her first guitar for Christmas. So she was thrilled with that. I bought her an acoustic years ago and she borrowed one of my electric guitars. I finally said you know, she keeps talking about it, I can buy her her own, so she has her own guitar. Both my daughters, they were Irish dancers. They did all that crazy Riverdance stuff. They love doing that. They’ve always had that kind of element; music and dance and all that kind of stuff.”
Sarraf also talked to me about what some of his other bucket list items are to achieve.
“Well, I’ve been working on my own album for a few years here and there and then COVID hit and that kind of derailed that a little bit. For fun, to get out my original music, because a few of us in the band, you know, we were in different original groups when we were younger; that never leaves you. You still want to write your own songs, it’s always fun. So I’ve always wanted to get that done. But with the Fab Four schedule it’s been very difficult. And like I said when COVID hit, I couldn’t really go out there to record it at my friend’s place because of COVID. And it kind of derailed some things, but I’d like to put out an album.
“And other than that, I mean, we were just in Liverpool two weeks ago, we were headlining at the International Beatleweek Festival. So we did that. That’s our fourth time going over there, so we headlined it with the Liverpool Philharmonic, Saturday night, the 26th I think. Doing it as long as we have, for over 20 some years, we’ve been to Japan, we’ve done Australia, we’ve done Canada, Mexico. I mean, pretty much everywhere. We’ve done Liverpool, we’ve done London, but we haven’t you know, we haven’t gotten to certain places, and my bucket list I guess would be some of those other places. I’ve never been to let’s see, like New Zealand, Amsterdam. I’ve never been to Amsterdam. A lot of the European countries, like I’ve never been to Spain or Italy. You know, the Beatles played those areas as well obviously back then. So there’s a few places that I’d like to visit before I stop doing it.”
Tickets for the Ogden show are available here. For more information about the group click here.
