POP MUSIC REVIEW : ‘BRITISH INVASION’ TRIES TO RECAPTURE ‘60S ROCK

Today’s proliferation of “clas sic rock” radio stations and revival concerts doesn’t do much for rock ‘n’ roll’s role as the sound of eternal adolescence. The revue titled “The British Invasion,” which played the Universal Amphitheatre Sunday night, was hardly an elixir of youth.

Most of the evening’s acts tried to capture a sense of what gave them their 15 minutes of fame back in their Beatles-spawned mid-’60s glory days. The Mindbenders (without singer Wayne Fontana) simply came on as four ordinary blokes from Manchester (and included a father-son team).

Freddie & the Dreamers’ front man Freddie Garrity was reminiscent of a Mod-era Pee-wee Herman with his silly antics, though for some reason the group didn’t perform “Do the Freddie,” the song that inspired the inane dance craze that Garrity popularized on shows like “Shindig.”

In contrast to Garrity’s goofiness, Chad & Jeremy infused their set with intelligence and craft--a reminder that they were always a bit more than another group of faddish mop-tops. With a fresh, young band behind them, Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde presented themselves as adults who could examine their past without having to re-create it. They applied contemporary arrangements to their old hits (“Summer Song,” “Willow Weep for Me”) and put some perspective on growing older through the ‘80s with material by Dave Edmunds and a new, reggae-fied number by Stuart.

The Searchers also fared well. In fact, the 25-year-old group sounded uncannily like all those youngblood L.A. power-pop bands that used to play Madame Wong’s. The quartet didn’t have a distinctive enough edge to separate itself from its imitators, though it played pop classics like “Needles and Pins” with a youthful energy.

Headliners Gerry & the Pacemakers were, in many ways, the biggest disappointment. The band was one of the better Merseybeat groups to capitalize on the blaze of Beatlemania, and “Ferry Across the Mersey” still evokes powerfully the youthful optimism of the ‘60s. But on Sunday, a portly and gruff Gerry Marsden joked around on “Mersey” and did nothing to capture its mood of pining, yearning romanticism.

It was unfortunate anticlimax to a basically good-natured show that only proved once more, as Chad & Jeremy sang, that “yesterday’s gone.”