The case for… Tribute bands

There’s an urge, one I may not entirely resist in these paragraphs, to mock the tribute band. As the low-hanging fruit of the music world, the jokes write themselves. Many of those jokes are, of course, written by the acts themselves. I speak of the wonderful naming conventions which persist as one of Tribute Actery’s true joys, summiting the prosaic form of big names like the Bootleg Beatles and Björn Again, to exquisite coinages like Proxy Music, Definitely Mightbe, or plus-sized pop impersonator Blobbie Williams. Is Amy Housewine any good? I have no idea, but I reckon she deserves an airing for the name alone.

From a logistical standpoint, there are dozens of great acts who are either dead and gone, indefinitely retired, or only willing to come out of retirement for sold-out $800-a-ticket shows in stadia and arenas. It would be asinine, therefore, to begrudge fans the chance to see their work performed, with skill, spirit and cheer, for a fiver down their local pub, or on a cruise ship round the Norwegian fjords.

Moreover, in purely artistic terms, it makes little sense to me that we disdain these acts while simultaneously lauding orchestras and touring theatre troupes. What, after all, are the London Symphony or the Royal Shakespeare Company, but tribute acts taken to their highest cultural pitch? Is it not worth contemplating, just for a n idle moment, that any time you’ve heard a virtuoso pianist play the Brandenburg Concertos to an astonished crowd, you were not only hearing Bach’s music played by someone born centuries after his death, but on an instrument he never once played in his life?

Whether in a black-tie concert hall on the last night of the Proms, or at a bowling alley happy hour every second Wednesday, the lesson these performers teach us is that art can live on forever in the souls of those who love it. What could be a greater tribute than that?