Seeing a tribute band can be a strange experience. There are your heroes on stage once more, magically rejuvenated and playing the music of your youth. You too feel briefly young again – until you notice everyone else at the gig is also at least 57.
But as often as not the band is brilliant. They have lovingly tracked down the right guitars, effect pedals and amp settings in search of the perfect sound. They have styled their hair just so, applied the requisite tattoos and, at some obvious expense, commissioned perfect replicas of signature stage outfits. See Björn Again and the girls might come complete with the purple capes worn for Abba’s 1980 world tour before changing into the white-booted ‘SOS’ look.
This is interesting, as it apparently never occurs to a concert pianist that he should perform dressed as Liszt or Chopin. Yet while tributes take their appearance as seriously as their music, they usually acknowledge the strangeness of what they do by sending themselves up in their names. These can be glorious, with some of the best punning on the fact that they are not the genuine article: Proxy Music, Fake That, Faux Fighters and The Rolling Clones. Also, Oasish and Oasisn’t. Being a Pretenders tribute is obviously challenging, name-wise.
Tribute acts also love to riff on their origins, so please welcome, from the North-east, The Reet Hot Chili Peppers; and from Scotland, The Red Hot Chili Pipers. Also from north of the border there’s heavy rockers MacTallica and Eagles tribute Hotel Caledonia. Then (as seen advertised in an Indian restaurant) we have Patelvis. Other performers cheerfully admit to less than rock-god physiques, such as Blobby Williams, and Abba-gone-to-seed act, Flabba.
This tendency towards self-deprecation is a regular element of the tribute genre; witness the dead-pan wit of Fred Zeppelin, Jack Sabbath and the fabulously prosaic Brian Maiden. Even Spinal Tap had its own tribute band called Hell Hole.
Happily, the opportunities for wordplay are endless. I’ve long been amused by an off-licence in Bristol called Amy’s Winehouse, but imagine my delight upon discovering a tribute act going by the name of Amy Housewine. Some scope there for some joint promotional activity. Ziggy Sawdust and By Jovi are also personal favourites. In fact, tribute band joke names are such an established art-form that some bands exist only in joke form – such as fictional Elbow tribute, Arse (‘Most people can’t tell them apart’).
Perhaps some of the most interesting tribute acts are those which threaten to escape the confines of mere mimicry and become something more original – such as the intriguing reggae take on Page and Plant, Dread Zeppelin. Similarly, there’s a heavy metal exploration of the Abba canon featuring snarling, leather-clad versions Frida and Agnetha. You won’t be surprised to hear this self-styled ‘slaughterhouse disco’ outfit call themselves Abbatoir.
Another band to stretch the boundaries of tributism is Bootleg Blondie. They are so good that in 2019 Blondie’s drummer, the late Clem Burke, teamed up with them for a 15-concert tour. Like the fans, he was reliving his youth, and briefly the band were only 83 per cent bootleg. Incidentally, Bootleg Blondie’s singer, a remarkable Debbie Harry lookalike, was actually born Debbie Harris. How’s that for nominative determinism?
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