Paying Tribute

The main point about tribute bands is that they tend to make money. They're easy to sell and easy to explain and the punters seem to love them. Who wants or needs original music? Or, in fact, music? The tribute band is not so much about music as about nostalgia – for an era you lived through, or for an era you wish you could have lived through. 

I once enquired about playing with an established Eagles tribute band – yes, I admit I did fancy the gigs and the money, and I confess that I really admire the Eagles – and was told that every drum break would have to be note for note the same as on the original records, because the audience would notice if it wasn't. It sounded a terribly sad experience for musicians and audience alike. Trainspotting would be more interesting.

A band called the Fab Beatles are due to play the album Revolver in full at a gig in Brighton to mark the record's 50th anniversary. I'm sure they are a wonderful band but the point of all this seems elusive. If you want to listen to Revolver (the first album I bought, and to my mind, better than its follow-up), listen to Revolver.

The only possible point of covering someone else's song is to bring something new and different to it. Tribute bands, on the whole, do the complete opposite. But that, of course, is what a lot of people want.

God Bless The Eagles

I really like the Eagles. There, I've said it. I don't care who knows. I think they've played some of the greatest rock music, written some of the best crafted songs and sung some of the finest harmonies.

In a roundabout way, I was reminded of one of their best lines when an old friend and newspaper colleague posted the fact that he'd finally been made redundant after 40 years by a company whose bottom line is... the bottom line.

Good old boys down at the bar,
Peanuts and politics.
They think they know it all,
They don't know much of nothing.
Even if one of them was to read the newspaper
Cover to cover,
That ain't what's going on.
Journalism dead and gone.

And rock lyric writing with any real meaning seems pretty much dead and gone too.

The papers and magazines are generally full of confectionery... and so is the music.

The Eagles may be jaded old rockers, but at least they bothered to write about America's ignorance, arrogance and greed, about what presidents really mean when they talk about "freedom", and about the quagmire of Iraq.

Which hip young songwriters with that kind of mass audience did anything similar?