- January 7, 2026
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What if Sergeant Pepper got lost in Sarasota? You’d end up with something like “All You Need Is Love,” a collaboration between the Beatles tribute band Liverpool Legends and The Pops Orchestra of Bradenton and Sarasota. The show is coming to Riverview Performing Arts Center Jan. 11-12.
Every tribute band has a story to explain why they are different from the other musicians traveling the country doing covers dedicated to a particular artist, whether it be Fleetwood Mac, ABBA or Tina Turner. Usually this origin story has a bit about the band receiving the imprimatur of a key figure, such as a widow, father or sister.
Formed in 2005, Liverpool Legends has the requisite seal of approval. Its members were personally selected by Louise Harrison, the late sister of Fab Four member George Harrison.
According to Marty Scott, who plays George in Liverpool Legends, Louise Harrison spent the last 10 years of her life in Sarasota before she died at age 91 in 2023. At one point, she invited Robyn Bell, now artistic director and conductor of The Pops Orchestra, over for “tea and crumpets,” Bell said in an interview.
It was Louise Harrison who acted as a musical matchmaker for Bell and Scott. This was back around 2019, when Bell was director of instrumental music studies and music program manager at the State College of Florida Sarasota-Manatee.
“We were doing a project working with kids to promote music education,” Scott recalls. “We met Robin, band director at the college. They were going to be doing a show called ‘George.’ I was the guest singer. That was the first time we worked together.”
The show that Liverpool Legends and The Pops will be performing at Riverview Performing Arts Center is billed as “The Complete Beatles Experience.” That marketing moniker takes on added luster with the new film “Song Sung Blue” starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson. They star as Lightning and Thunder, a married couple who create what they call “The Neil Diamond Experience” against some tough odds. Some tribute bands are having a moment.
In addition to Scott, Liverpool Legends consists of Kevin Mantegna as John Lennon, John Perrin as Ringo Starr and David Tanner as Paul McCartney. Their repertoire covers the history of the Beatles, from the early days of Lennon/McCartney pop songs such as “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” to the band’s experimental phase of “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” replete with period costumes.
The early pop ditties weren’t written with orchestral arrangements, so Bell has had to create them. Other songs, especially from the Sergeant Pepper album, are more suited to the collaboration with The Pops.
The spirit of George Harrison must be hovering over Sarasota. Last year, Selby Gardens’ blockbuster Jean and Alfred Goldstein Exhibition, “George Harrison: A Gardener’s Life,” recreated elements of Friar Park, the Victorian estate he and his wife, Olivia, restored in Henley-on-Thames, England.
During an interview, Scott confessed he missed the Selby exhibition because he spends most of his time on the road, travels that included a long residency in Branson, Missouri, the family-oriented entertainment destination in the Ozarks.
Scott listened patiently as an interviewer shared a spooky story about George’s music and Selby Gardens. She had stopped by Selby’s gift shop on Thanksgiving to pick up a copy of Olivia Harrison’s poetry book, “Came the Lightening: Twenty Poems for George." It was drizzling, but she decided to meander around the gardens, where the Lights in Bloom exhibition was already set up for the holidays.
As she sat on a bench, a nearby home turned on its music system. Out of the blue, “My Sweet Lord” came wafting across the gardens. It seemed like more than a coincidence.
Was George’s spirit still in residence at Selby Gardens, where his songs had been piped into “horticultural vignettes” earlier in the year?
Quite possible, Scott opined, but perhaps he was merely being polite. After all, when your livelihood depends on Beatlemania, you hear thousands of fan stories each year.
Scott and Bell agreed that whether Harrison’s soul can move between the material and invisible worlds, the spirit of the Beatles transcends time. “The Beatles are this weird thing,” Scott says. “They somehow transfer to every generation. Nobody else really has that appeal, not even Elvis. The Beatles remain relevant today.”
The recent release of “Anthology,” a nine-part documentary about the Beatles on Disney+, is bringing new fans into the Beatle fold, Scott says, as is TikTok, where creators use Beatles songs as background music.
Collaborations such as the one with Liverpool Legends are The Pops’ raison d’etre, Bell says. “Pops is short for popular music and that’s what our orchestra performs, whether it’s Beatles, Beach Boys or Jersey Boys,” she says.
Bell is something of a Beatles expert herself. When she was a high school band director in Tennessee for nearly a decade, she created a music appreciation class called “History of Rock Music” to engage students bored by the curriculum’s emphasis on classical music.
“We spent two weeks on the Beatles,” she says. “I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation on this class, which is now taught in Chattanooga.”
So what’s Bell’s favorite Beatles song? “Because I’m a trumpet player, it would have to be ‘Penny Lane,’” she responds.
It doesn’t take a master’s degree in music to accurately guess Scott’s answer: George Harrison’s masterpiece, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
