IN a parallel universe free of cheeseburgers, yes-men and dubious pharmaceuticals, Elvis Presley might be waking up in Perth this morning, just as the members of his TCB Band are doing here on earth.

Elvis in concert 1970

You'd imagine he'd be the consummate professional, even in his later years.

Sadly, few Australians got to know what it was like to hold Elvis's hand, or to catch one of his scarves as it flew off the stage, or to touch the hem of his jewelled trousers.

He never made it to perform here or, indeed, anywhere outside the US during his reign (aside from three performances in Canada in 1957), which ended so abruptly on August 16, 1977. It is one of the tragedies of popular culture that one of its greatest exponents was prevented from showing his talents to millions of his fans in the flesh.

One can watch the '68 Comeback Special or Aloha from Hawaii until one knows them back to front, but it will never be quite what it must have been to be there, in the room, with the best entertainer of the 20th century.

All we unfortunates are left with is his astonishing catalogue of music, a body of work that changed the world in its pioneering rock'n'roll days and that in its latter period ushered the term "white satin flares with red velvet inlays" into the public domain.

"Elvis lives" is another popular phrase that has been knocking around for the past 29 years. Kebab shop and burger bar jokes aside, there are Elvis fans across the world whose devotion is so strong that, for them at least, he remains among us.

In that sense, for those true believers in Australia, the Elvis Presley in Concert tour experience that starts in Perth tomorrow night will be more an audience with the star than it is the star with an audience.

Yet, despite the fanaticism, the overwhelming evidence is that Elvis left the building long ago and won't be coming back any time soon.

So how is it that thousands of people, primarily in those territories where he didn't get to perform, are willing to pay big bucks for the pleasure of seeing him on a big screen, performing at concerts in the early 1970s, while his real-life buddies, many of whom are also on the video footage, are on stage re-creating the magic to synchronised perfection?

The answer, according to the TCB Band's famous drummer, Ronnie Tutt, is that the line pushed by the concert tour promoters, that it is almost as if Elvis is present, is true. But then he would say that, wouldn't he?

"I'm driving the bus, so it's hard to be objective," says Tutt, who been a long-time drummer with Neil Diamond as well as the King for most of his career. "But when you say that they're pushing it as if it's almost like being with Elvis, well, it truly is.

"I have a lot of respect for a lot of the people I know who have seen the show. Most modern shows today are seen with video enhancement anyway, so it's no different that he's on two big screens. It becomes a collage and so they say in a short while the only thing you miss is this small image of him. Everything else is being shown. Everyone else is watching the screen. You'd have to look down to see that he's not there."

So rule No.1: don't look down. Rule No.2, most likely, is not to try picking out parts of the video images that aren't quite in sync with what's happening on the stage. Tutt spent months before the launch of the Elvis the Concert experience in the '90s making the music fit as best he could with the fluctuating timing and unpredictable movements of the singer. That, during the original '70s performances from which the video footage comes, was part of the act and Tutt was central to it.

"We were very much focused on him," Tutt says. "I had a lot of eye contact with him because he relied on me to accent all the moves that he made, whether they be just body moves or karate moves or whatever. It became part of how we played the songs. I think we inspired each other that way. It wasn't always cut and dried that we'd do exactly the same thing. There was an impromptu part to the show, so that's what made it exciting."

To keep this level of excitement in the show sans Elvis meant Tutt had to add percussive or other elements to the original soundtrack. One karate chop from the King during the recording of the '70s shows and a few seconds of the whole band disappeared.

"I spent a lot of time in the studio ... putting percussion of some kind into the material," he says. All he had to work with was the original mono TV mix.

"There were times when he would lean down into the audience and give a girl a kiss or a scarf or something and she would scream at the top of her lungs and totally mask out the whole orchestra for several seconds. So I had to click through those segments and find sounds for them. It became tricky.

"The main thing I tried to do was to make it (the concert) doable and redoable with the same level of energy and excitement as we had then. And we couldn't make it metronomically perfect. There were too many rises and falls in excitement levels."

Elvis the Concert, as it used to be called, first played in Australia in 1999, so this tour could be considered the comeback special of the post-Elvis era.

As someone who was there seven years ago, I can't honestly say that Elvis was there with me, but plenty of people around me acted as if he were there for them.

If you have a ticket and can grab a hold of that feeling in the coming week, Elvis Presley the Concert may well change your life. Just don't go trying to grab his pants.

Elvis Presley in Concert opens at the Burswood Dome in Perth tomorrow, then tours to Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.