Coverband: Even losers get lucky

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26 Sep, 2014 08:00 PM3 mins to read

So you wanna be a rock 'n' roll star?*

Then listen now to what I say: just get an electric guitar and take some time and learn how to play. Then, maybe, if your hair's combed right and your pants fit tight, you'll have a big hit and move to LA and ... then what?

Well hopefully, like Meatloaf bellowed, your rock 'n' roll dreams will come true. But what if they don't? It is with this alternative universe, the shaky afterlife following the half-life of rock 'n' roll success, that new local comedy, the terrifically silly and rather mischievous Coverband (9.30pm, Thursdays, TV One) has decided to have some fun.

This is the story of the brothers Gibson, Matt and Alex, who started a band at high school. They played guitar and bass; Ivy was the singer. At first they called themselves Ivy and the Poison (ha!) "It was Ivy's idea," the opening voiceover from Matt told us, "to change the name of the band to just 'Ivy'." (a poke at the ego of singers! ha again!) And then they had the big hit and Ivy and Matt moved to LA - dumping brother Alex and drummer Knuckles in the process - and then ... it all went pear-shaped.

Well, it did for Matt anyway. The suits in LA, we learned, only wanted pretty young Ivy. And as episode one opened, a broke and broken Matt returned, shamefaced, to Auckland.

With no money and no future, he decided, Blues Brothers-style, to put the band back together. Only it wasn't that simple. First, he had to convince a doubtful and still pissed-off Alex, who'd found a job, a life and a girlfriend, to rejoin.

Then they auditioned for a pub gig: "You can't drink piss to that," the bar owner Don spat at them as they belted out one of Ivy's originals.

"I don't want to hear your sad little poems set to whiny music. Play something we all know."

You don't have to be genius to know where all this is going - the show is called Coverband, after all. But as the premiere episode ended, after an amusing Commitments-like audition process to find a "sexy" vocalist, the band, now The Silhouettes, had found a new lead singer, a wild fella called Jukebox, who'd been doing karaoke in some awful bar where the band had chosen to drown their sorrows.

It was all quite mad. But of course mad is what is to be expected from any offering from The Down Low Concept, a group of mates whose sterling record includes 7 Days and the quite bonkers Hounds.

Coverband, like Hounds is well cast. Johnny Barker (serial killer Joey Henderson on Shortland St) and Matt Whelan (Go Girls) are a nice pairing as the brothers and Laughton Kora is many times larger than life (more to come here I'm sure) as Jukebox. But the stars so far (though we are yet to see Liesha Ward-Knox as Ivy) are Wesley Dowdell (Aaron Spiller in Outrageous Fortune) as Knuckles, the slightly dim drummer, and Mark Mitchinson as Don the pub owner.

It's too early to tell whether Coverband is going to be as terrific as the small surreal classic that was Hounds. But the first episode was terrific good fun as it went about nailing the pitfalls, pratfalls, sad realities and humiliations of being in a band.