Gawenda’s serious intimacy with the Fab Four began when he got a call from an entrepreneur asking if he was interested in joining a 17-piece band playing beautiful Beatles music led by musical director Paul Gray.

“It didn’t take me very long to think about that,” Gawenda tells me by phone from Berlin, where he is living at the moment.

One-time journalist at “The Age” newspaper and the son of a famous editor, he’s familiar with the old journos’ joke, “it’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it”.

Gawenda will be joining three other top Australian singers, Marlon Williams, Jordie Lane and Fergus Linacre, on the eight-stop “Rubber Soul/Revolver” tour that will swing by Canberra soon. He adamantly denies that any of them is going to “be” John, Paul, George or Ringo. “We talked about that,” he says, “but the idea is that we don’t imitate them… we sing the songs the way they were sung by the great singers, but somehow we also use them as ourselves.”

The tour is the brainchild of Phil Bathols, the entrepreneur who’s brought in everyone from José Carreras to Ravi Shankar. The 28 songs of 1965-66 albums “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” will be performed back to back, in track order, starting with “Drive My Car” and closing with “Tomorrow Never Knows”.

For those not in the know, “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver”, the sixth and seventh studio albums for the Beatles, put them on the map not just as famous rock stars, but as innovators. In the first, we heard numbers such as “Drive My Car”, “Nowhere Man” and “Norwegian Wood”; in the second, “Yellow Submarine”, “Good Day Sunshine” and “Eleanor Rigby”.

So, who’s your favourite Beatle? I ask.

“If I had to choose, I’d probably go for John Lennon or George Harrison for their song-writing sensibilities,” Gawenda tells me. When he was young, he says, he went for McCartney, but now he appreciates the musicality of Lennon and Harrison.

Harrison’s album “All Things Must Pass”, produced after the Beatles split up, featured songs that might not have made the cut when he was in the band, but even in its heyday he had a role to play as the original musician who brought in the Indian instrumentation that is seen in both albums.

“Some of my favourite songs are George Harrison songs,” he tells me, and he looks forward to singing and playing them, “note for note”. And he’s curious as to who will be playing the sitar.

So is Gawenda up to the task? He should be. He’s been likened to Paul Simon and, with his band Husky, he’s opened for Neil Young and The Shins. Last year he won the $50,000 Vanda and Young songwriting competition.

“I may not sound like the Beatles, but I can sing in a way that brings them to life and hopefully the people who come to the show can connect with these great songs,” he says.

As he looks back on their Golden Age, well before his birth in 1980, Gawenda thinks of it as “all too fleeting…looking back, it was musically very innovative, the beginning of an experimental period using the studio and production technicians as a creative tool rather than sitting on mics”. He believes it was because of “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” that the album became an art form.

Right now Gawenda and Husky have set up camp in Germany, a base for the European summer festivals. “Berlin is a good spot to do all of that. It is a very interesting city and sometimes a killer, too – I seldom go to bed until the sun comes up,” he says.

The tour cuts into that, but not to worry, it’s going to be a labour of love, and besides, “it’s only a plane ride”.

“Rubber Soul/Revolver”, Canberra Theatre, August 6. Bookings to 6275 2700 or canberratheatrecentre.com.au