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Gigs & Festivals
Beach Boys deny lip sync allegations
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 27 October 2010
Those most Beach of Boys have hit out at reports that they lip synced at a recent concert in Australia staged alongside the Gold Coast 600 motor racing event.
As previously reported, Sky News claimed fans quickly drifted away from the gig because frontman and founding member Mike Love was miming to his songs, and rather badly that. They quoted one gig-goer as saying: “The Beach Boys were a fraud, they were miming everything. You could tell they weren’t even singing, he [Love] was barely even moving”. However, Sky News has subsequently removed the report from its website.
Tom Bonhomme, keyboard player and tour manager with the current incarnation of The Beach Boys has insisted nothing was mimed at the gig, or any gig for that matter. He told WENN: “We do not lip sync. I want to make it 100% clear that The Beach Boys do not and never have lip-synced their concerts. They have been touring since 1961 and generally have performed in more than a hundred cities a year since the beginning. I guess we should take it as a compliment that it sounded so good”.
Promoters of the gig say that there might have been a slight delay between on-stage action and what was projected on screens at the event, which is why it might have appeared to some of the 20,000 crowd that Mike Love’s lips were out of sync with the soundtrack.
Love himself has also issued a statement denying the show had been badly received. He told reporters: “Throughout the duration of my stay in Australia I heard nothing but positive feedback on our show. We pride ourselves on providing a great live show to our millions of fans around the world and spent time that day soundchecking our vocals to ensure a great live mix. In our almost 50 years of performing The Beach Boys have never lip-synced and we are not about to start”.
