For visitors to the North Carolina Symphony last Wednesday, a trip down memory lane detoured through Penny, as the Beatles performed live in Raleigh. Though the cover band knew all the songs, there were tell-tale signs that it wasn’t the original as Vann Dwiggins, an alumnus, pointed out.”Paul was left-handed and this one was right-handed, but that’s about it,” he said. “Their British accents were a little off but they had their characteristics really down pat.”Simon Phillips-Hughes, a native of the UK, seemed to be more convinced by the actors.”You’d never know Paul McCartney was from Tuscon, Arizona,”  Phillips-Hughes said. “It was very good, very authentic.” Pamela Wimbush-Cady said the cover band was so convincing, it felt as if the sixties were just a squint away.”It’s pretty close, pretty close – if you close your eyes you can practically see the real Beatles,” Wimbush-Cady said. “I have read all of the reviews but I think once you are here and you get to hear the music and see the costumes and their mannerisms … it’s a lot better than what I had expected.” The audience was a decisively older group comprised of people who were undoubtedly alive when the Beatles launched the British Invasion in the 1960s, as well as families coming out for an evening of fun and a chance to expose their children to what was once, and in many respects still is, truly groundbreaking music. “I’ve been a Beatles’ fan for a long time … I was a young kid when they started putting their music out and I had some older siblings that had their records and I had all the 45s … and the other day I saw an announcement about the concert and went online and bought the tickets, thought I’d bring my son,” Daryl Duncan said, adding his son was excited, as this was a far different experience from The Beatles Rock Band, which had been the extent of his British Invasion experience thus far. “He’s learning the music right now, so the timing is great.” Dwiggins said coming to see the concert was a no-brainer.”Our sister heard of it and got the tickets and all three of us have listened to The Beatles since we were … old enough to listen to music in the car with our mom and we’ve loved them ever since,” Dwiggins said. “So it made sense to come and see what the symphony sounded like.”Beyond the sheer excitement that can only come from Beatlemania, those in the audience said the marriage of the band and the symphony made the event wholly worthwhile.”It’s superb. It really is,” John Cady said of the interplay between the “Fab Four” and the orchestra. “They play off of each other very well. They take their cues very well. It’s very impressive.”  ”It’s just so wonderful … coming from the UK, just to see how much enthusiasm there still is for The Beatles – because it is [a little] cheesy and it’s cheesy ‘cause it’s fun. You know what I mean?” Phillips-Hughes said.Some of the music is light, some is serious, and some seem to be the result of drug induced ideas, but all of them have a valuable message and all of them are fun.