Usually I'm ready to leave by the time a concert ends.
Either I've run out of dance moves or I'm bored of sitting, but Sarah Jane Morris and the Solis String Quartet had me wanting more with their gripping arrangement of songs by The Beatles. After 60 years, it's easy for a cover to sound feel flat and tired when taking on the challenge of a Beatles song.
We've heard every version imaginable, right? That's what I thought until seeing this performance at The Tung Auditorium where Sarah Jane and what she refers to as "the four boys from Naples" gave a concert for the Yoko Ono Lennon Centre's first anniversary on Saturday, March 25.
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Opened by Sean Ono Lennon, son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, last year, the University of Liverpool's 400-seat auditorium was designed by local architects Ellis Williams to work best with acoustic music. From the moment a bow first touched the string in Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, the music enveloped me.
I was caught off guard, partly due to going in unprepared - I'd decided against listening to the album, All You Need Is Love, beforehand like a usually would. But it was also because Sarah Jane and the Solis String Quartet really had delivered on their promise of a "magical" and "extraordinary re-invention" of The Beatles' game-changing music.
It's pretty amazing what you can do with just a voice and some strings. The musicians made full use of their instruments - two violins, a viola, and a cello, sometimes swapped with a guitar - plucking them, bowing them, strumming them.
They work perfectly with Sarah Jane's deep, booming, almost raspy voice. Particularly with the high pitch of the violins, it's a coupling reminiscent of her duet with Jimmy Sommerville in The Communards' 80s dance classic, Don't Leave Me This Way.
Combined, they bring The Beatles' songs to life like never before. Plucked strings had me skipping Strawberry Fields, and I could see myself waiting for a haircut on Penny Lane, all from the comfort of my seat. The drama of Sarah Jane's full-bodied baritone vocals and staccato on strings made the intro to Helter Skelter feel like a genuine descent into chaos.
At one point, they quite literally took a sad song and made it better with brightness of Sarah Jane's smile resonating through every word.
The warm atmosphere of the concert, which felt smaller and more intimate than it was, was helped by Sarah Jane's presence on stage. She introduced each song with a story, sprinkled with jokes about being banned by the BBC because they suspected she was a "glamourous lesbian", or pausing to wipe her forehead, saying: "We've all grown up with that expression, 'women glow' - I sweat."
It carried the audience with them enough to encourage a singalong in the closing songs - All You Need Is Love and Imagine - and bring them to their feet for a standing ovation.
There were moments during the gig when I heard the twang of what sounded like a loose guitar string, and Sarah Jane at one pointed sounded like she couldn't muster quite enough breath to carry notes to their fullest, but I'll let her off on that.
She'd just to deliver powerful renditions from a sedentary position while her "Paul McCart-knee" recovers from surgery. There's just one week of recovery left until she can do her "constipated octopus" dance, born from a need to readjust her kneecap, again.
Overall, the concert was energetic, joyous and encouraged singalongs in the audience. What more can you ask for from music? Maybe it spoke to my past life moonlighting as a jazz singer, or maybe it's because I value novelty above most other things, but I do think this re-imagining of some Beatles classics was - dare I say - better than the original.
It's a sign of just how much you can do with the work of great songwriters like The Beatles, and of the "absolute respect" Sarah Jane and the Solis String Quarter wanted to show "absolute respect" them.
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