Tribute Bands

Tribute bands have become a fixture on the pop landscape. Some venues and even whole festivals are now given over to these acts, whose raison d’être is to pay homage to established or defunct stars by playing their repertoire and often impersonating their look and other performing mannerisms. Setting the gold standard in this faintly bizarre genre is

The Australian Pink Floyd Show. The band, whose brief is to recreate or, to put it more bluntly, imitate the magic of a Pink Floyd show, claim to have sold three million concert tickets in a career dating back to 1988. They perform in major venues all over the world, and their success has been such that their former promoters have announced the establishment of a rival The British Pink

Floyd Show — effectively a tribute to the tribute band — who will be touring the UK in April and May.

The key to the highly impressive performance by The Australian Pink

Floyd Show in Hammersmith was a level of musical expertise and technological investment that surpassed that of most “real” touring bands currently on the circuit. Tonnes of high-tech gadgetry and state-of-the-art production equipment was deployed on a stage dominated by a circular screen at the back, framed by a huge proscenium of lights and lasers. Many of the images on the screen were filmed in 3-D, so flying pigs and pieces of exploding furniture seemed to hurtle in slow motion over the audience as they sat goggling at the screen in 3-D glasses provided on arrival.

Musically, no effort was spared to recreate the Olympian sound of Pink Floyd. Two guitarists vied with each other to achieve the most perfect replication of David Gilmour’s crystalline solos.

They both sang, as did the bass player and an extra dedicated vocalist, who seemed a little surplus to requirements. There were four more backing vocalists, a saxophonist, a keyboard player and a drummer, all completely static and secure in their musical expertise and ultimate anonymity.

Together they recreated the Floyd’s music with eerie attention to detail, cherry-picking material that ranged from the band’s first single, Arnold Layne, released in 1967, to the tracks What Do

You Want From Me and Coming Back to Life from the band’s last album, The

Division Bell (1994). The PA system bounced sound effects around the theatre as they worked their way through a significant swath of Floyd material including Money, Time, Another Brick in the Wall Part II and a majestic finale of Comfortably Numb.

It was perfect in just about every way — but for the fact that it wasn’t the real group. A perfect facsimile of a diamond will never be as valuable as the diamond itself. But even paste jewellery can acquire a remarkable lustre when constructed and tended with enough care and precision.

I actually prefer tribute bands. I paid around $200 to see (half) The Who at a stadium, which obviously meant that the best view was on the screen.

But it was really the content that I objected to. I don't want to hear the latest crap you've come up with; I'm here for the classics, the songs I can sing (well yell, really) along with. If I'm paying that much money, I call the shots, not the performer. The performer is obviously thinking something along the lines of "I'm an artist, and I'm here to show you my artistry" Well bollocks to that! I'm not in the market for new music. My musical tastes pretty much stopped adding new tracks 20 years ago, and I'm perfectly happy with that.

I read an article recently where the writer described the emotion people used to feel in church services a s a 'Woosh' experience: a transcendent, one-part-of-many all feeling the same intense emotion at once.  His point was that that emotion is today mainly found at the football stadium.

I want to hear my 60's memories in same way. Since I can reproduce a concert hall sound in my own living room , the only point of going to an event is to be with other people sharing the same experience, and we can't do that with songs we've never heard of.

But that's what a tribute band provides - just the classics. They know that the punters won't come back if they try to add their own material. So they play the songs we've all heard before, that we can sing and dance to.