New Year’s Eve and we’re driving to the super market. The roads are surprisingly clear and the snow and ice that’s been part of our lives for the last month has finally given way to an amorphous grey sludge that sticks to the underside of the car, huge chunks bouncing around inside the wheel arches and off the brake pipes. It’s not something that I enjoy. Not at all.
To deaden the noise, I put a CD into the player - Greatest Air Guitar Hits 2 - and press ‘Go’. Queen’s “We Will Rock You” bursts forth though we both quickly tire of the noise. It seems cliched, hackneyed, done-to-death. We skip to the next track and, alas, it’s the same. At any other time, we might have paused to listen but we both agree that we’ve heard this too many times in recent months to be impressed, to want dwell any longer.
Back in February, we played a couple of pub gigs - The Three Tuns in Gateshead to be specific. There were four bands on that night and, whilst they were all mighty fine bands, we were the only group who played original material. Indeed, when band number four took to the stage, the began covering tracks that had already been played by the previous two bands. That’s when I knew it was time to leave.
Covers bands are nothing new. They deliver what an audience wants - entertainment, nothing more, and usually at a fraction of the price of seeing the real thing. I mean, who wants to pay £100 or £150 to see The Stones play live in a stadium with another 50000 screaming fans when you can see a cover act playing identical material for next to bugger all at your local pub?
The problem of course is that modern digital technology enables a covers band to reproduce an exact replica of an original work without having to cart around thirty odd guitars, amps, cabs etc etc etc. My little Zoom Pod contains something like twenty amp simulations and fifty effects units, all perfectly modelled down to the last detail within it’s little DSP brain. It only weighs about half a pound too, so I don’t get a hernia picking it up. You can’t say the same for a Marshall Stack or a Vox AC30.
When you’re exactly re-creating a piece of music, so that the punters can’t tell the difference between you and the Real McCoy, there’s no room for your own personal interpretation, no space for your own voice. The work no longer belongs to the original author and it doesn’t really belong to you.
Is that why so many of these covers bands sound so utterly gutless and soulless?
- January 2
- , 2011
