Viva la tributes: David Jenkins, right, with guitarist Chris Welch in Ultimate Coldplay
(Picture: Lee Slater)In the early Noughties, when people first started telling David Jenkins that he looked a lot like Chris Martin, Coldplay’s lead singer, he ignored them. He’d heard a few hits but, as he remembers, “I was listening to other stuff”.
But then, in 2008, he went to see Coldplay in concert. “I was absolutely blown away,” he says. “I thought they were absolutely brilliant live. Fast forward to 2017 and I was talked into starting the tribute band by a friend of mine.”
That friend, now the guitarist in their group, Ultimate Coldplay, was persistent in persuading Jenkins not to let his unique situation — an experienced singer and musician who’d played in bands before, but who also had an uncanny resemblance to Martin — go to waste. “He wouldn’t leave the subject alone,” Jenkins says.
He relented, and the first few gigs were a success. Jenkins soon realised how much he enjoyed emulating one of the UK’s biggest bands on stage. Ultimate Coldplay began to grow, the bookings kept on coming, and after only a couple of years, Jenkins decided to take the plunge — he left behind his former life, working as a music teacher among other things, to make the tribute act his full-time pursuit, touring the UK and beyond.
His decision to dedicate himself to being someone else on stage might, to many, seem a curious one, but he’s part of a small subset of musicians who not only make a living this way, but who get huge fulfilment from the process.
“I played with lots of different bands over the years, and you get different responses to different types of music — I played in a blues band for a long time, and some of the audiences can be a bit reserved and, dare I say, boring,” Jenkins says. “Doing a Coldplay tribute, where the audience is really enthusiastic, and sings along, it’s like, ‘Woah!’ It became addictive quite early on.”
His story is also indicative of a boom in the tribute act market; derided years ago as shoddy rip-offs, they now draw in bigger crowds than ever. All of the acts interviewed for this article, some of whom have been in the business for just a few years, others decades, say they can’t remember a time in which tribute acts have been so widespread.
“I think people are more accepting of tributes now, particularly people within the industry, who realise how important they are to keeping grassroots music venues open,” says Gavin Scott, who for more than 20 years has been performing with his Stone Roses tribute band, the Clone Roses — something that started soon after his brother (and future bandmate) overhead him singing along to a Roses record at their parents’ house, and pointed out just how similar he sounded to Ian Brown.
“Some of these emerging bands are playing venues on midweek shows that are being kept going because tributes can make the venues money on the weekend,” Scott adds. “That’s why a lot of venues love tributes, because they make more money on the bar. If you’re going to watch a headline band and don’t know who the support is, you might stay in the pub next door until five minutes before the band come on, have a couple of pints and then go home. That’s not great for the venues. But when we play, we’ll put two or three tributes on in one night and get people queuing up at seven o’clock to get in and spend four hours’ worth of money in there.”
Back in November, the Clone Roses played a packed-out show at the 2,000-capacity Shepherd’s Bush Empire alongside fellow tributes Oasish and the Smiths Ltd. And you don’t need to scour London’s gig listings for too long before you find others popping up — the O2 Academy in Islington has tributes to Prince (called EndorphinMachine), Toto (A Touch of Toto), Daft Punk (Daft Funk) and Fleetwood Mac (Fleetwood Bac) all booked within the next couple of months.
So, what’s behind their popularity? Perhaps it’s the way in which tribute acts provide a service to fans that the original heroes no longer can. One of the few remaining tickets for Coldplay’s opening night at Wembley Stadium this summer, sat right up in the gods, will set you back more than £170; a night watching Ultimate Coldplay in Reading this March will cost £11. The Stone Roses disbanded in 2017; the Clone Roses tour regularly.
For Richard Gaya, who up until recently was bassist in a Pearl Jam tribute band (and is now in an Iron Maiden tribute act, called Inot Maiden), there have been fans “who have come up to us after gigs and told us that they preferred our gig to Pearl Jam’s”. He’s quick to point out that this doesn’t mean he in any way thinks his band is better than the original; it’s just that they provide something Eddie Vedder and his stadium-filling bandmates no longer do.
“We’re a younger band than Pearl Jam, the venue is much smaller, you’ve got that core of people right in front of the stage — it’s far easier for us to recreate [the early days of Pearl Jam] than you can in an arena or stadium,” Gaya says. “People say our shows are like what a Pearl Jam gig would’ve been if they didn’t get big but they carried on writing music.”
And what about the superfans, left bereft when their idols stop performing live altogether? “We’ve got one lady,” says Justine Riddoch, the woman behind Tina Turner tribute act Totally TINA, “who’s a superfan, she’s been to see nearly every single Tina concert. And when Tina stopped touring, she found us — and she’s been to nearly every single one of our shows. We are the replacement for what she lost.”
Riddoch has been building up this kind of fan base with Totally TINA since 2009, but she’s been in the business for far longer. Starting out as a singer in and around Liverpool in the early Nineties, she realised after a decade or so of singing she was “getting absolutely nowhere”.
“I just thought, ‘Well, okay, it doesn’t seem to be happening for me, and I’m 28, I’m getting older. What on earth am I going to do?’”
It wasn’t until a friend was listening to the radio one day and heard a voice similar to Riddoch’s — “Aretha Franklin-stroke-AC/DC”, as she describes it — that she happened upon a new path. The artist on the radio was Anastacia, and in 2002, Riddoch found her way onto Stars in their Eyes as the American artist. She lost in the final — “the king, Elvis, beat me” — and as Anastacia fell from the limelight, Riddoch had to find a new venture: Totally TINA.
Riddoch didn’t take the new challenge lightly — her and her band made losses for six years “to make it work” — and her dedication is a common thread tying together the most successful tributes. The ones who have put in the time and the effort, the ones who can make their audiences believe they’re watching the real thing — basically, do nostalgia the right way — draw in the crowds. Jenkins nails Chris Martin’s vocal style and arms-in-the-air twirls (as well as his long-sleeve-under-short-sleeve fashion style). Gaya and his bandmates obsessed over playing note-for-note recreations of Pearl Jam songs. In the Clone Roses, Scott’s attention to detail goes right down to playing the same pre-gig playlist that the Stones did, and even wearing the same shoes as Ian Brown. “People might think I’m really weird,” Scott says, “but people down at the front by the barrier point at them and recognise the trainers.”
And when it comes to musicianship, the bar is often set higher for tribute acts than it is for the real thing. “They know that every time they go on stage, they cannot fail. They have to do the gig of their life,” says Graham Sampson, who since 2003 has been embodying Morrissey in The Smyths. And performing in front of an audience who, as Sampson puts it, are “not expecting you to fail, but would not be surprised if you did”, can sometimes lead to an intriguing atmosphere at gigs. “You can always see them, in the first 20 minutes, the people just standing there, and they’re slightly in judgement. Our shows are broken up with an interval, and you know that when you come back, they’ve relaxed, and at half-time they’ve gone: ‘Wow… they’re not crap.’ And then they kind of unwind and really, really enjoy themselves. And then it’s lovely.”
The response from fans, in fact, is often effusive. Riddoch recalls one audience member, who was living with cancer, thanking her after a show for “taking me out of my life for the last two hours”; Sampson says some people thank his band for making them feel like they’ve seen the real Smiths, even though they never did.
The psychological effect of it all on those performing is peculiarly fascinating. Growing up as a Smiths obsessive, Sampson says he picked up Morrissey’s traits as “as a second nature, so I always felt quite liberated on stage to kind of be myself, because so much of myself had already absorbed the Morrissey aesthetic”. In the past, journalists have even called up Sampson to ask for his reaction to one of Morrissey’s more controversial remarks (he always politely declines).
For Riddoch, who speaks passionately about her love for Turner’s work and getting to perform as her, there’s a “knife edge” between the conflicting emotions of receiving adoring praise as Turner, but also wishing she was a star in her own right. “And that’s what’s sad about us tributes,” Riddoch says. “We never quite got the same stardom.”
But even with any lingering regrets, there’s no doubt that life as tribute act can provide some incredible moments for the musicians in them. When Pearl Jam cancelled a gig at The O2 in 2018, Gaya’s band put on a replacement show at the now-defunct Borderline, which became the legendary Soho venue’s fastest selling gig of all time. Last summer, the Clone Roses headlined a line-up of tribute acts at Spike Island in Widnes, recreating the iconic Stone Roses gig from 1990. And with Ultimate Coldplay, Jenkins recalls a show in the South Korean capital Seoul, in front of 1,800 people, as his all-time favourite concert. “There were a few returns because people found out it was a tribute band, rather than the real thing,” he says. “I was flattered and insulted at the same time.”
Some tribute acts have even received the ultimate honour: a seal of approval from the bands they’re paying tribute to. Sampson recalls Johnny Marr saying “lovely things” about The Smyths on the radio, and Mani, bassist in the Stone Roses, once called Scott’s band “the second best Stone Roses in the world”. “I’ve got his number, I text him now and then,” Scott adds. “He’s an absolute gent. He’s dead supportive of what we do.”
It’s the kind of thing that makes all the hard work, and even the odd bit of stick, worth it. “Sometimes you go on Facebook and socials and you see someone who slags off what we’re doing, and you think, ‘Well, if Mani doesn’t mind, why should you?’”
