There’s no build-up. Chris Cheney (The Living End) takes the stage for the opening song, Back in the USSR, in front of a 17-piece band split along strict gender lines (the only female players are in the string section), shuffling across the boards and holding his guitar like Michael J Fox channelling Chuck Berry in Back to the Future. (Maybe it’s the white sneakers.)

The rendition is fine: faithful, if a little flat — thus setting the tone for the afternoon. There’s any amount of polished musicianship on display but very few pyrotechnics.

After a brief appearance from Grinspoon frontman Phil Jamieson on an immediately forgettable Dear Prudence, Cheney is back for the John Lennon song Glass Onion. His diffident, full-on rock reading recalls that other great Beatles tribute band, Oasis.

The Beatles’ White Album (that’s its unofficial title: the actual name of the sprawling 1968 double set is The Beatles) is an interesting choice for a live tribute set. Recorded a few years after the Fab Four ceased performing live together, it’s often referred to as "difficult" or "demanding", a common enough euphemism for "patchy".

Alongside crowd-pleasers like Revolution 1, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Lennon’s touching ode to his mother Julia are several satirical, music hall-influenced songs (the dire Savoy Truffle, The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill, Piggies) – many of which, one feels, would have ended up on the cutting room floor if they’d been recorded by anyone less famous than the Beatles.

To make this set work, the four frontmen – a veritable who's who of white male Australian album-oriented rock, with Jamieson, Cheney and You Am I frontman Tim Rogers joined by singer-songwriter Josh Pyke – need to be on top of their game. Sadly, this afternoon, they’re not.

In all fairness, this is an accomplished showing. One admires the nerve of Cheney, manfully struggling to duplicate Eric Clapton’s famous guitar solo (written for the Beatles) in While My Guitar Gently Weeps. He fails, just – turning the original bluesy wail into a metal squall, and reminding us of the thin line that separates genius from the merely average.

Of the four performers, Cheney seems to be having the hardest time of it. His body language (always at the side of the other three) hints at a falling-out somewhere, but when he turns in another Michael J Fox tribute – the one where Fox moves from Berry onto Jimi Hendrix in the space of a few bars – on the white light of Paul McCartney’s Helter Skelter, it’s hard not to warm to his solid rock man-like presence. And the songs he fronts are, hands-down, the most enjoyable.

Jamieson, meanwhile, behaves like he’s intimidated by Rogers’s presence during the first half, moving his hands around vaguely and smiling at his fans, nervous and arrogant. To start with, his presence is negligible – on his I’m So Tired, the entire band seems to plod, perhaps appropriately. (Jamieson also pronounces the penultimate “git” correctly: something that seems to miss the point of Lennon’s sarcastic mis-rhyme “get”.) The Grinspoon singer shines brighter during the second set, especially on a smooth Noel Coward-esque version of Honey Pie, where a rare flash of his appeal is evident.

Rogers possesses the weakest voice of the four – on this showing, at least – hitting bum notes and missing his cues on several occasions, particularly Happiness Is a Warm Gun and on the encore of A Day in the Life. He more than makes up for it by his insouciant chutzpah and his outlandish ill-fitting suits (one in country checks and hanging off his bum, the other white with the flies safety-pinned together). His stage antics, meanwhile, are part Jarvis Cocker, part Lennon at his most schoolboy irritating and part Dick Van Dyke.

For his first appearance (during a thoroughly enjoyable and unashamedly honky tonk version of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da) he makes a point of sidling on stage after the other three singers, so the crowd notices him. (It’s one of the rare occasions when all four singers are on stage – otherwise, it’s mostly production line on-off with the mic stands and guitar techs between numbers.) Rogers clearly considers himself the star of the show – hamming it up on Piggies, playing the eccentric outsider on a pleasingly personable Bungalow Bill.

And he's probably right, even if he does strike one stunningly jarring note, with his patronising and unnecessary mention of the string section – no words for the two male drummers, brass section, weirdly unprepossessing backing singers (one of whom can be seen playing air guitar in the breaks) or the Ser Ilyn Payne lookalike on piano.

“It’s a good thing they’re not supernaturally good-looking as well as being supernaturally talented ...” Rogers leers, looking in the ladies’ direction.

Even so, it seems a shame the other three singers refuse to take the bait and compete with him. (Footage from the previous 2009 tour on this album suggests that sometimes they do.) It would have made for a more thoroughly enjoyable spectacle.

Instead, Jamieson seems almost cowed, Cheney is going through the motions (albeit in a professional and likeable fashion) and Pyke is determined to prove his credentials as the most soulful and musicianly of the quartet, with some breathtaking unaccompanied finger-picking on McCartney’s Blackbird and Long Long Long. Even a mic failure on Rocky Raccoon fails to throw him.

So it’s up to Rogers to provide the occasional elusive spark. Some might read his mistakes as unprofessionalism. I take it the other way — that he’s not scared to take chances; indeed, that he feels that hitting the odd bum note is at the centre of rock music’s appeal. (Hence the continued popularity of the White Album, with its numerous outtakes and bum songs.)

The light show reflects the performance: technically excellent but what an opportunity missed when there's so much footage and psychedelics that could have been shown.

Revolution 1 is performed twice: once during the set fronted by Rogers, and once as the final encore. It’s the only time the four frontmen attempt to engage the audience, and accordingly it stands out. Cheney’s reading of Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? and spirited take on Helter Skelter are two other stand-outs. The real highlight of the show, though, is – perhaps surprisingly – when the singers leave the stage, and the musicians are left to their own devices on an ambitious and mostly successful orchestrated version of the notorious "experimental" track Revolution No 9.

The band also shine on the first encore, A Day in the Life, a song somewhat marred by the Band-Aid approach of having each performer sing a line or two in succession – and a timely reminder of how much worse this show could have been.

• The White Album concert tours the country throughout July.