Tribute tribunal

WHEN I were a lad, as the saying usually begins, all this were fields.

It was also a landscape free of tribute bands.

Time was when you and your long-haired, acne-ridden, foul-breathed, furry-toothed, greasy-foreheaded mates who shunned anything sporty got together to form a band and ambition usually overrode any real discernible talent. But one thing usually came to the fore: dogged determination.

You'd all lend each other LPs to listen to the intros of songs, how a guitar solo went, a drum fill, a bassline.

Everyone wrote songs in the back of their jotters with lyrics about angels, devils, dealers and broken hearts, whiskey – with the obligatory e, natch – painted ladies, bad lovin' (without the g) and life on the road.

All stuff in which a 14-year-old was well versed, of course.

Our band's first performance was a school concert and we played Deep Purple's Burn, a phenomenally difficult, not to say excruciatingly bombastic, song.

Then our guitarist, Wilf, the only one of us who could really play, left along with singer, Reg, and we got two replacements.

Bob was a deep-voiced, handsome, Mick Jagger-alike dude, Alan a poncey, Leo Sayer-permed classical-guitarist poseur.

Dave, a Mormon who didn't drink tea or coffee but wouldn't say no to my dad's Guinness, was on keyboards. Howley, whose dad made all his gear out of chipboard and Tandy components, was on bass.

Then there was me, a Neil from The Young Ones look-alike, on drums. What a shower.

But by the time of the next school performance, we were a shower who wrote and played our own songs: Locomotive, White Boy, Black and Blue and, ok, we finished off with the old standard, Johnny B. Goode.

As we went into the sixth form we shed members, collected new ones and started playing in pubs.

The original songs kept coming: Flunky's Two-Minute Stomp,

Too Much Whiskey In The Blood, Listen Jemima, A Weasel and, a particular crowd-pleaser, Even Jesus Had The Blues.

Looking back, none of them was a classic: they were all 12-bar blues and in the key of D. But do you know something? They were our non-classics and we were proud of them.

We did covers, of course, old blues tunes, but we never thought we sounded like Muddy Waters or Elmore James.

And, for obvious reasons, we knew we didn't look like them.

In those days the closest you got to tribute bands were Gillan, Whitesnake and Rainbow, all of whom contained various members of different line-ups of Deep Purple.

Not surprisingly, they all sounded like them, too.

But deliberately dressing up in the same clothes and, gasp, wigs, and trying to sound like Rory Gallagher or George Thorogood and The Destroyers was as alien to us as the laptop computer I'm using to write this.

I believe the beginning of the age of the tribute band can be traced back to one single incident – the film, The Commitments – and one song

in particular, Mustang Sally.

After that, every tinpot blues band who had a couple of mates in ex-colliery brass bands or jazz combos and knew a couple of lasses with black dresses who could sing after a few pints of Woodpecker would invite them along to practices, draft them in and become a soul band.

It would start off with Mustang Sally and then the repertoire would grow. But Mustang Sally was the root. I hate that song.

If Wilson Pickett was resurrected this afternoon and announced he was playing at the Wayside Cheer free tonight,

I'm afraid I wouldn't even bother getting a babysitter.

Nothing against old Wicked himself, but countless bands have ruined Mustang S for everyone.

They were a novelty at first but now, more's the pity, tribute bands are the rule rather than the exception. Some places won't even employ bands that play their own stuff. Thanks for encouraging originality, lads.

I know they have to sell beer and potato- or maize-based snacks, but if art galleries insisted on the same, we'd all be looking at fakes (and for another but no less stupid extreme, what about swimming pools insisting that people swim only breaststroke – no freestyling allowed?).

Watching a load of office bods giddy and gipping on WKD, lighters held aloft as they shout Angels along with 'Blobby Williams' singing along to backing tapes, is more dispiriting than a Methodist exorcists' convention.

I'll give the tribute bands one thing, though. They come up with some good names: Nearvana, aRe wE theM,

Girls Alouder and Metal Licker, for example.

Then there's the concept tribute band: lesbian group Lez Zeppelin, Geordie band Durham Durham, jazz-pop's Thelonious Monkees, three-in-one Boy George Michael Jackson, folk duo Simon and His Dwarf Uncle and my favourite, Rodeohead.

How about some Guernsey ones? We could have Bloney M, The Buzzm'cocks, Val des Terres for Fears, The Vale Saints and Cobo Diddley. And, as suggested by my old mate, Wick Ninja, Hanois Rocks.

But that's the clincher: the bands' names are usually the best thing about them.

After tribute bands, what next? Cars? That's already happend. The jelly-mould VW Beetle, the too-long-to-be-a-Mini Mini, the new Fiat XX.

All are tributes to much better-looking cars designed years ago.

And how about comedy tribute acts? Can you think of anything more pitiful than seeing Chubby Brown? Yep, seeing someone pretending to be Chubby Brown.

Aeroplanes? What about a Trislander painted in camouflage and duck-egg blue at the next Battle of Britain Week as a tribute Spitfire?

Or tribute football teams in the Sunday leagues? A little bloke in a fuzzy ginger wig feigning a Scots accent being Billy Bremner and another with a penchant for dirty tackling as Norman Hunter? In an all-white kit, they could be Bleeds Utd 1972.

Then again, things could be worse. I cheer myself up with this thought: We could all be living in Jersey.

Which, as we all know, is a very inferior tribute Guernsey.