The Brighton Beach Boys, St George's Church, Brighton, May 23 (From The Argus)

The Brighton Beach Boys, St George's Church, Brighton, May 23

1:04pm Monday 25th May 2009 in Festival Reviews By Duncan Hall

Pet Sounds and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band are two albums that defined the 1960s and are widely regarded as the high water mark of popular music.

So it made sense for the Brighton Beach Boys to combine the pair in an Argus Angel-winning show that has become a Brighton Festival Fringe tradition over the past three years.

After renditions of California Girls and Eleanor Rigby to show where the two bands' heads were in that 1966/1967 period, The Beach Boys' masterpiece Pet Sounds was performed first, complete with bicycle bells, plucked piano strings and beautiful harmonies.

The 11-piece band, augmented by the four-piece Psychedelic Love Orchestra, excelled on the more unfamiliar instrumental Let's Go Away For Awhile and You Still Believe In Me.

They also gave true fans a chance to hear the heavily bootlegged Hang On To Your Ego instead of I Know There's An Answer.

But it was The Beatles most of the crowd had come to hear.

From the audience overdubs on the title track to the crescendo crash of A Day In The Life it was a fantastic performance of an album the Fab Four never performed live themselves.

As the show closed with the anthemic encore All You Need Is Love, keyboard and sax player Ralph Brown announced to the band: "Looks like we'll have to come back next year."

Here's hoping that's true.