Those of you who know me will be well aware that I don’t like to moan (actu­ally that’s not true – I love it) but I’d like to share with you a par­tic­u­lar gripe that’s been the thorn in my side since I first encountered the Birm­ing­ham music scene many a year ago, and dis­covered a form of music so grot­esque, so vile and chee­sey in its unashamed copy­ing of proper enter­tain­ment that I imme­di­ately expec­ted the people respons­ible to be run out of town by pitchfork-wielding yokels. I am talk­ing of course, about trib­ute bands.

There is a pub not too far from where I live which is nearly always a good set­ting for a couple of after-work drinks and a quick chin-wag, but almost every Fri­day night it is plagued by the kind of live music so awful that I wish they would set the stage up in front of the dart­board, just to give me an excuse. I went there for a few drinks the other night, and the enter­tain­ment (a term I use very loosely) con­sisted of a one-woman karaoke act who soun­ded like a gaggle of howler mon­keys being tossed into a sack and then set on fire. In a mad­cap effort at ori­gin­al­ity, she’d had the idea of chan­ging her cos­tume to suit the era from which the cover songs came; how­ever it didn’t change the fact that she had a voice that made the paint peel off the walls. Look­ing around I can say without an iota of doubt that not one per­son appeared to be enjoy­ing them­selves. The sur­round­ing tables were occu­pied with people try­ing to scream broken snip­pets of con­ver­sa­tion into each oth­ers ears, or star­ing off into space with the pained blank expres­sion of someone who is giv­ing blood.

I am there­fore, com­pletely baffled as to why any­one would bother start­ing their own trib­ute act. Espe­cially as you’re always going to have that wor­ry­ing niggle at the back of your brain remind­ing you that you will NEVER be as good or as suc­cess­ful as the artist you have chosen to ape. And it’ll never be as good for the audi­ence to watch either. They may like the music, but again there’s the man­dat­ory sense of accept­ance that Terry the ten-thumbed IT tech­ni­cian is not, and never will be Angus Young, no mat­ter how authen­tic he looks in his daughter’s school uniform.

Let’s tune into real­ity FM, all you’re going to be see­ing is a pathet­ic­ally watered-down ver­sion of the real thing, and that’s just never going to do. If you want to see Nia­gra falls, you go and see it; if you can’t afford to then you watch it on You­tube or wait for the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel to do a doc­u­ment­ary on it. What you don’t do, is go and sit in the rain with a post­card of it sel­lo­taped to your glasses.

The worst part of all this is that a lot of the good ven­ues are booked up by people like Terry, so hatch­ling musi­cians often find them­selves scuppered before their feath­ers are dry. Pro­moters seem to think that book­ing trib­ute acts is a sure-fire way of draw­ing a crowd, rather than upset­ting the reg­u­lars by play­ing some­thing they’ve never heard of before. I don’t know who in their right mind would actu­ally go to these gigs hop­ing to see some­thing like the real thing, but if I want to listen to Dire Straits, I can think of bet­ter scen­arios in which to do it than hav­ing “Sul­tans of Swing” lisped at me through a broken micro­phone, and hav­ing the froth blown off my pint from hav­ing to sit too close to the speak­ers. What’s more, I write this there are TWO Abba trib­ute acts per­form­ing on the Birm­ing­ham cir­cuit, which quite frankly is two too many.

It all just seems lazy though doesn’t it? If you can play an instru­ment and you want to do it in front of an audi­ence then write some songs. Form­ing a trib­ute act is just an excuse for pla­gi­ar­ism; you can’t go to school with someone else’s home­work and then argue it’s a trib­ute essay. The bot­tom line is, if you want recog­ni­tion, you’re going to have to actu­ally do some work. Pick­ing up a gui­tar to chunk out a few chords from “Killing in the Name of” to make your­self feel a bit more Rock ‘n’ Roll is fine. Hav­ing what’s left of your hair yanked crudely into dread­locks and call­ing your­self “Age Against The Machine” is just a bit sad.

I will con­cede there are one or two trib­ute acts that are actu­ally pretty good. Fred Zep­pelin have accu­mu­lated an enorm­ous fan base includ­ing, I am told, Mr Robert Plant him­self; The Smiths Indeed are cur­rently play­ing almost every venue that O2 can get the deeds for, and The Doors Alive have gone on tour. In Europe. That said, for every one band or artist liv­ing or dead, there should be a strictly enforced law that one trib­ute act, and one alone will be allowed. In fact we could set up a gov­ern­ment office for the admin­is­tra­tion of such acts. I could call it the Per­mit Asso­ci­ation for the Ser­vice of Trib­ute Acts, or PASTA for short.

“No I’m sorry madam, there’s already a trib­ute for that Artist…yes, they’re called Shakespeare’s Sis­ter In-law and they’re based in Burnley”

Watch this space.