The upstairs room at Brighton’s Prince Albert pub is so crowded on this Saturday night that the only floor space left is next to the soundman, who is playing a pre-show tape of forgotten 80s hits. As A Flock of Seagulls’ Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You) trails off, tonight’s band – a Duran Duran tribute act from London called Joanne Joanne – get into position. The keyboard player is having a last-minute tune-up, causing the singer to apologise: “We have to wait for Nick – he’s got a lot of keyboards.” Eventually, Nick produces the opening bleeps to Duran’s debut single, Planet Earth, and the crowd of mainly women in their 40s erupts. The song sounds much as it does on record, the only measurable difference being that the voice singing it is female.
All five members of Joanne Joanne are women, including “Nick Rhodes”, aka Lolo Wood, who not only sounds like Rhodes but, thanks to purple eyeliner and blusher, vaguely looks like him. Forming a tribute band is perhaps the ultimate gesture of admiration, and Joanne Joanne are lifelong Durannies. But, as with the other all-girl tribute bands who have emerged in the past few years, they are also free of the slavishness and braggadocio common to male tribute acts (as well as some of the actual bands they emulate).
In Joanne Joanne’s case, that means refusing to play most of Duran’s biggest hits, which runs counter to conventional tribute working practice. Their favourite period was 1981-82, before the Rio album swept their heroes from New Romantic niche stardom to household-name status. Accordingly, Joanne Joanne’s set focuses on B-sides and obscurities from the early days, with only the odd post-82 track tossed in. So there can be no mistake, their website declares: “We don’t do Rio”.
Cross-gender tribute acts are still a novelty, but until the advent of bands such as Joanne Joanne, they were a single-genre novelty. (Not to mention single-gender: there are dozens of all-girl acts, but almost no male bands covering female groups, more of which below.) Nearly all the early cross-gender groups were metal, which came with the inbuilt challenge of persuading sceptical metalheads they could rock out as vigorously as men. Some went a step further, apparently endorsing metal’s objectification of women (the website of a Metallica tribute exclaims, “MISSTALLICA was the response to the want and need for old school thrash metal and a pretty face to go with it!”). But the scene now has female pop, punk, grunge and even country tributes, who interpret their subject matter as they see fit.
The emergence of Joanne Joanne, Ramones tribute the Ramonas, Hervana (fronted by Skirt Cobain), et al, means that virtuoso copycatting is no longer the (only) point. They love the music but they mould it to their own tastes. “It’s like inhabiting the songs from inside,” as Joanne guitarist Charley Stone puts it. Ramonas bassist Vicky Smith, who’s gamely adopted the stage name Pee Pee, says: “I didn’t set out to be sweaty onstage and look like Dee Dee Ramone – I wanted to be me even though I was impersonating someone onstage. We’re not a massively straight tribute, but what people like about it is that we keep the spirit alive, but we’re doing it our own way.” Onstage, the Ramonas are closer in tenor to the proto-punk girl band the Runaways – if Joey Ramone were around to see himself being “inhabited” by Lisa “Cloey” Breyer, he might be impressed that she has created a persona that somehow blends his stark impassiveness and her own fizzing energy.
Bands who remain completely faithful to their source material, such as California’s Iron Maidens, often find they have more to prove. Drummer Linda McDonald has known people to turn up just to see whether an all-lady Iron Maiden would be “a complete trainwreck”. But in the band’s 15 years together, the reaction has gradually changed: “They’ve seen the videos on YouTube and they know what to expect. It’s the most rewarding thing when someone says after the gig that they closed their eyes and felt they were at a real Maiden concert.”
But many bands aren’t in it to recreate the exact concert experience. “This sounds quite wanky, but we’re more a concept band than a tribute band,” says Joanne singer Val Gwyther. Applying her Nick Rhodes makeup at a pub table before the gig, Wood adds: “Originally it was going to be only album tracks, no singles at all. It rules out doing weddings and things, where you’d have to play them.” “We’d have made a lot more money if we had,” puts in bassist Jo Gate-Eastley, one of the two titular Joannes (the other has since left).
That is indisputable. The UK’s top tribute act, the long-established Bootleg Beatles, don’t put on their wigs for less than £10,800 a night, and second-tier outfits can earn upwards of £1,000 a gig. While you wouldn’t want to accuse a band of being in it just for the money, the websites of some male groups compete hard for the wedding/birthday-party buck, highlighting their professional-sized PAs and hit-filled sets. “It’s like the traditional bloke-type bragging and one-upmanship you get in music shops and rehearsal studios,” says Gate-Eastley.
The tribute industry is flourishing, with specialised agencies representing an astonishing array of soundalikes – not just the predictable Oasis, Bon Jovi and Madonna copyists, but acts that seem too niche to merit covering, such as Oingo Boingo. Cross-gender groups tend not to be on their books, however. “They don’t come forward for work, so we don’t know that they’re out there,” says a spokeswoman for the major UK booker Scott Jordan Entertainment. “We do have one female who goes out as Michael Jackson, but no bands.” (Intriguingly, their website doesn’t mention that “Mikky Jay” is a woman, perhaps to avoid putting off clients who are expecting a male Michael Jackson.)
Most female tribute musicians also play in non-tribute bands, and have discovered that impersonating Simon Le Bon or a Ramone can attract listeners who might go on to investigate their other projects. The Ramonas are also considering recording their own material this summer and releasing it under the Ramonas name.
But where, in all this, are the male-to-female bands? There are few male equivalents of the Ramonas and Iron Maidens, perhaps because male musicians regard covering a female band as drag-queen territory. Or, in Pee Pee’s view, “they probably think they have to make it comical to work”. This month, though, sees the launch of the Donalds - the first male tribute to punk-pop survivors the Donnas. Led by Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos, they’re guileless about their motivation. “It’s mainly because I thought it would be funny having a band called Donalds. I love them, and I thought that calling ourselves the Donalds, singing those quite glamorous Los Angeles songs, would be fun.”
