Re: Alan McGee – I’ve read enough of his breathless hypings of yet another bunch of derivative no-hopers on the Grauniad Music Blog to recognise he knows nothing about music – he only cares about image and attitude and knows a good tune about as well as Jimmy Saville. But what would you expect from the man who inflicted Oasis upon the world?

BTW, sorry your post took 24 hours to appear – it got caught in my spam filters – I think that’s only the third false positive I can remember. The last one was from Fish (yes, *that* Fish. Really)

Again to generalise, it often tends to be a younger crowd that is open enough to listen to original material.

If a band want to appeal to the widest possible audience I always suggest they play a combination of their own and other people’s material. If you don’t want to get involved in playing anything other than your own songs fair enough. But, if you’re looking to maximise your gig income then mixing material up can obviously appeal to both “types” of audience.

As someone maintaining a band’s tour history and who has a blog, I’m frequently asked to promote related tribute bands. I hope I’m polite, but I invariable decline, on principle.

an already saturated market just like Jing Jang & co. found with their Razorlight furrow?

turns out White Lies used to be called Fear of flying, and sounded more like the Teardrop Explodes- as Guardian blogger and ex A&R guy Ben Wardle reveals-
http://benwardle.blogspot.com/2008/02/night-in-hoxton.html
looks like they got nowhere until they jumped on the Joy Division clone bandwagon, donned the black clothes and then all the A&R guys came sniffing to get their chunk of the Editors market.

lazy A&R ploughing the same old furrows to death, and unwilling to promote anything different-

because nearly all of them are tone deaf and can’t really tell what has promise. bands have to learn to play them on their level if they want to attract their interest..

Alan McGee is particularly clueless- as anyone will know if they’ve been to Death Disco or any of his clubnights. he judges bands on their appearance
and swagger/cockiness. what he writes (or gets Paul Brownell or whoever to write) on the Guardian blogs is utter garbage.

I wrote a thread on clone bands on the 6music messageboard-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mb6music/F3920735?thread=2589064

the Strokes and Libertines clone bands were at Death Disco.

And you’re absolutely right about generic indie being coverbands in all but name.

however people have always been willing to come out for the covers bands I’ve also played in-
particularly weird being the amount of praise the covers bands got, when they couldn’t be bothered to check out my original bands.
the oddest being when A&R people have approached us (a covers band) saying they’re interested (yes, really)-
obviously liking the way we looked, moved, acted onstage, and considering
writing original music to be a mere token formality.
the same people would bin a CD from any of my original bands rather than give it a listen.

the truth is that most people are unwilling to check out new music that hasn’t got the endorsement of press, radio and tv coverage.

creating a buzz to attract people along is tough for a band to do by themselves, and very non-music related- admittedly the original bands I was in were pretty clueless/reserved about that side of it.

so i’ve got mixed views about tribute bands- yes, it would be better if everyone wrote their own music and only played that, but you have to deal with a lot of bullshit to get anywhere, unless you take the easy option and become a generic indie (or whatever populist genre) band- in which case you might as well be a covers band- eg. Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Razorlight tribute band.

I’d rather see a tribute band for someone I liked than a generic top 40 cover band, but a band that I like who does their own original material is way better than either. Although there are bands around that do both — there was a local band a while ago that would play their own stuff at club shows but you could also book them for, say, a school dance, and they’d be a lot more like a cover band then.

Seriously, do you see like more than one tribute band a week in local clubs? I don’t know if we have one play every month here in Vancouver, at least not in the big venues…