He knows what his audience wants and he’s still delivering after all these years. His sets will almost certainly include Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?, Hot Legs and Reason to Believe.
“He says Kiwis are some of the best audiences, if not the best audiences that he’s played to. That’s why he likes coming back so much,” says promoter Steve Tree, talking about Rud Stewart.
Rud is really Michael Dean from Yorkshire, and he’s one of the most successful acts on Topline Entertainment’s roster. Founder and manager Tree promotes “around 14″ tribute acts, including Born on the Bayou (Creedence Clearwater Revival), The Refugees (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) and Brown Sugar (the Rolling Stones). “The other one that’s popular is Queen. I’ve got a good Queen tribute act from a guy in Nelson.”
And nearly all are locally born and bred.
“I bring the odd act in from overseas, but only if the act is not here in New Zealand, because I want to support New Zealand musicians,” says Tree. “That’s the No 1 priority. The one I probably bring in the most and is very successful here is Rud. I was with him last night and we’re heading off again shortly. He’s got a sold-out show at the Huapai Tavern this afternoon at three o’clock.”
Tree says that with all his acts it’s how well they play the original music that makes the difference, the look is less important. Rud, however is in a class apart, the complete package: “He looks like him, he sounds like him, he’s got the moves, he’s got the outfits, he’s got that cheeky banter.”
What he doesn’t have is the high ticket costs. “If you have a look at some of these prices for bands that are coming here, there’s maybe only one or two of the original members left, they carry on with the name and are, in effect, a tribute show to themselves and are still charging $300 for tickets.”
And besides, in a world where Abba themselves can perform as “digital avatars” in their high-tech show Abba Voyage, is it worth even trying to decide whether an act is authentic? Is there any difference between the Beatles and the Bootleg Beatles, apart from the fact one is alive and the other half dead?
The line between original act and tribute is increasingly blurred. Björn Again began as a semi-affectionate, semi-pisstake of Abba in 1988. They were formed by a couple of Melbourne “metal-heads in our early 20s”, according to co-founder John Tyrrell, who now oversees three incarnations performing at any one time in Europe, the US and Australia. One is coming here for a Waterloo anniversary show in August. “We used to play in bands and think, ‘How do we rise above the rest?’” says Tyrrell. “And then we just started brainstorming for a couple of months … and came up with the idea: Wouldn’t it be funny just to dress up as Abba and play those daggy songs?”
Add some theatrics and a whole lot of jokes and you get an enduring phenomenon that mashes up old-fashioned variety, performance art, nostalgia and tribute-band musical basics.
Over the years, they have received an official blessing from Abba members, been asked to play support at Wembley Stadium by the Spice Girls, and politely answered, “How did you come up with the name?” over and over in interviews. Now they must compete with Abba themselves, in a further blurring of the line between real and whatever Abba Voyage is.
Basic tribute acts that purport to faithfully recreate a show by the likes of the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac are now just one part of a crowded tribute-act multiverse where local acts are competing with imports. This month, overseas tribute acts touring here include Europe’s Premier Tribute to Shania Twain by British singer Liza Rebecca Walsh who will be bringing the solo act she’s done on cruise ships to North Island pubs and clubs. Also coming is multi-instrumentalist South African Prince impersonator Dale Ray, as well as The Doors Live.
Overseas, that multiverse now includes gender-swapped tributes such as Some Girls (the Rolling Stones), AC/DShe, Killer Queens, Lez Zeppelin and Vag Halen. Special gender-confusion mention here for San Francisco’s Mandonna.
Then there are the mashups. “You get trippy tributes where they play the music of Elvis in reggae style,” says UK researcher Georgina Gregory, author of Send in the Clones: A Cultural Study of the Tribute Band. “Beatallica play the music of the Beatles and change the lyrics. All You Need Is Love becomes All You Need Is Blood. Actually, quite a lot of these mashups are Metallica involved.”
As for our own national treasures: “In Manchester, there is a pub band, which I found not very good, called Split Frenz,” reports Melbourne-based academic Shane Homan, editor of Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture. “Then you’ve got Crowded Scouse from Liverpool. And the Crowdies, in Australia, who play Crowded House in set one, go off stage, put on the Split Enz costumes, and then do a second set.”
Elvis Presley inspired the first wave of tribute acts with impersonators springing up and flourishing while he was still alive. He was reputedly bemused by the phenomenon, as he seems to have been by so much that went on around him.
The ambivalence remains for some of today’s acts. “When I interviewed some musicians,” says Homan, “some said they didn’t mind tributes, they were actually quite nice people and some of them did a very good job. And then others were just outright hateful, saying they were leeches and why didn’t they go and write their own music?”
Gregory says tribute acts can benefit their originals. “From a reputational point of view, if they’re half decent, they’re keeping the repertoire alive. And the originals are making money from performing rights.” The rules – and how well they are followed – vary around the world, but usually, at some point, money goes back – or should go back – to the original artists.
The art of creatively ripping off has been part of the music industry for decades. In the 70s, budget record labels produced “sound-alike” albums on the cheap by getting session artists to re-record hits of the day. Like today’s tribute acts, these were often packaged to look like the real thing.
And as Homan points out, the likes of Eric Clapton could euphemistically be described as tribute acts “honouring” the pioneering work of Black artists by copying their styles, although often without due acknowledgment.
Sometimes a tribute artist will go all the way. David Victor runs protributebands.com, a sort of Tinder for tribute acts and audiences. If you’re a band, you can list yourself in detail on the website and get bookings through it. If you’re a corporate or venue wanting to hire a tribute act, it’s a one-stop source.
Victor is a musician who has released recordings under his own name and also used to play in a tribute band to Boston. When the More Than a Feeling hitmakers needed to replace their lead singer, he was shoulder tapped and moved up to performing with the act he had been imitating. Victor notes that because Boston was all about a sound not a star it was easier to fill the gap. Similarly, because their characters are so defined, the Björn Again bands around the world can replace members easily when one wants to move on.
It’s worth noting that the more distinctive an act’s sound, the easier they are to imitate. There are at least 80 Queen tribute bands.
An admittedly rare variation is represented in the person of Danielz, who fills in for the late Marc Bolan in T.Rexstasy. He seems to have got everyone associated with Bolan on his team. TRex percussionist Mickey Finn, Bolan’s son Rolan and producer Tony Visconti have all worked with him. He also writes and records songs in the spirit of Bolan and received an ultimate accolade when the Bolan estate’s offshore holding company, Wizard [Bahamas] Ltd, gave him their blessing, saying they “authorise and endorse T.Rextasy in their ability to keep Marc’s music alive and in the public eye in a professional and authentic manner”.
Live theatre has proved yet another way of remonetising original acts, in the form of song-heavy dramatised biographies of stars. Buddy and Jersey Boys were pioneers. More recently, Carole King, Tina Turner and Cher have provided the raw material for so-called jukebox musicals. These don’t always reach us, but a lot of entertainment dollars are swallowed up by people going to Australia to see the likes of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical or Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.
Even schools are getting in on the acts with Mamma Mia! (Abba) a popular choice for teen productions and We Will Rock You (Queen) coming up at Auckland’s Takapuna Grammar this month.
More recently, we have seen all-star casts performing classic albums – sometimes their own, as Brian Wilson did with the “lost” Beach Boys album, Smile, in early 2000s, or John Cale did when he “presented” The Velvet Underground & Nico live with MGMT, Pete Doherty and others.
But for a sense of the full apocalyptic future for tribute acts, one needs to consider the implications of AI.
“There’s a lot more scope for future developments with AI,” says Gregory. “There’s some evidence artists might actually start to develop their own tributes and license them.”
Worse – or better, depending on your feelings about the act in question – AI could be taught a band’s canon and then come up with an entirely new album by that artist, which could be toured virtually by musicians in motion-capture suits, a la Abba Voyage.
Which raises more questions about who gets shown the money, says Gregory. “Whose creativity is it? Is it the AI’s creativity or is it the original artist’s?” The AI couldn’t have come up with it without the original artist’s work to emulate, but the original artist didn’t do it.
All of which could lead one to wonder, not what is real any more, but whether it matters?
And who cares? Because the reason tribute acts do so well is that people love the originals and are happy to have their nostalgia buttons pushed.
This is partly why the biggest tribute acts in the world are for bands whose fan bases are, to put it kindly, getting on a bit. According to protributebands.com, the biggest artists being paid tribute to in the US are Queen, Journey, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Abba, the Grateful Dead, Guns N’ Roses and Boston.
“In our Q3 2023 rankings, we had the Beatles with 16,400 searches on our website in the US alone,” says David Victor. It looks like the No 2 was 9050 searches – the demand for the Beatles was almost twice as much as for Zeppelin bands. And then, believe it or not, Grateful Dead at No 3.”
There’s nothing edgy or innovative here. In fact, quite the opposite. Because, to employ a word that’s not inevitably attached to music these days – it’s all about fun.
Let Victor, who’s looked at tributes from both sides now, explain: “Being in Boston, looking at the audience – they’re in pure bliss, because they’re hearing it like they remember it. And that’s the promise of tribute bands – delivering the experience of the original sound. If you add the original costuming or stage affectations, it enhances it a little bit, but really it’s the music.”
NZ stars cover the classics
First, there was The Last Waltz: 40th Anniversary Concert Tour, a live re-creation of The Band’s farewell concert performed here in 2016 by the likes of Delaney Davidson, Tami Neilson, Kevin Borich and original member of The Band, Garth Hudson. Liberty Stage promoter Simone Williams took on the ambitious project because, “The Last Waltz was my all-time favourite music documentary. To actually put it together, with [music director] John Simon and Garth Hudson – the originals – was pretty special.”
That has evolved into Aotearoa Come Together, the umbrella for stellar New Zealand musicians joining to perform albums from the canon – plus “a bonus set of deep cuts and classic hits” – in their entirety. Last year, Neil Young’s Harvest, Dire Straits’ Making Movies and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours were performed.
In Christchurch on May 8, Jon Toogood and Julia Deans, among others, will perform U2′s The Joshua Tree before taking it on the road to Wellington and Auckland. Later this year, Led Zeppelin IV and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band will get the same treatment with more big names.
“What makes these shows different,” says Williams, “is that all of the musicians involved are artists and producers in their own right who come together three times a year to work on these iconic albums and recreate the sound of the album. It’s not like a covers band who are trying to impersonate. This is quite different. It is extremely accurate.”
All those musical egos in a room together. It must be awful? “It is so collaborative, and just so professional. They know what’s expected of them and what the audience is expecting, so they want to deliver.”
One who delivers with relish is Shihad’s Jon Toogood. “Simone Williams reached out to me about 10 years ago,” he says. “I really liked her vibe, but I think I was a little bit scared.
“She came back a few years later and said, ‘We’re going to do Neil Young’s Live Rust.’ I’m a massive Neil Young fan, but it was actually the fact that she got Reb Fountain and Delaney Davidson and Liam Finn, and all these people I knew and respected that got me across the line.”
Toogood is now a Come Together regular. “It’s a really nice family. Although we come from slightly different backgrounds, we’ve all gone through the music industry and survived, and everyone brings all that experience to the table. And we get to be kids with each other as well.”
There have also been spinoff benefits.
“I’ve literally just finished my first solo record. And I honestly think if I hadn’t done the Come Together things, the record I’ve just made wouldn’t be as good as it sounds. It’s taught me so much about song arrangement and it’s been beneficial to me as a writer.”
