I live in a small town in the English country side called Petworth.  Nestled in the rolling South Downs of England, it's most famous for the painting's Turner (no relation, unfortunately) painted there in the 1800's.  It quite a long way from the centre of the universe when it comes to live music, so when my local pub 'The Star' advertised that a Bon Jovi tribute band would be playing there called 'Bad Medicine' (the title of one of the band's signature songs), I frankly didn't care how good they were - any live rock and roll was good enough for me, so I went to see them, had a great time singing along and was grateful that I could stagger home after seeing a live band instead of driving for miles to a city centre.

So when they announced that their lead singer of 4 years was leaving the band, I jumped at the chance.  I'd sung in a couple of bands before - a rock covers band called 'The Switch', and a spin-off called 'Foos of the Stone Age', and I really missed it.  So along I went to the audition, pulled it of and here we are, with 23 gigs already booked for this year alone at the time of writing.

You'd probably expect that being a tribute band is a simple thing to do - all the songs have been written for you, the stage performance is there on YouTube for the world to see, etc.  There's actually a myriad of considerations and problems that can trip a tribute band up.

The primary one seems to be 'how far do we go with our imitation'.  To anyone with any sense of style or taste whatsoever, the thought of donning cheesy wigs and costumes should make one recoil at the thought.  When you are genuine fans of the band you're 'tributing' as well, it's a double-whammy, as it can be perceived as disrespectful to the original artist to ape them in public.  Our guitarist Steve Gladman has been a Richie Sambora (Bon Jovi's lead guitarist and main song writer with Jon Bon Jovi) fan all his life.  It was listening to Sambora play that inspired him to learn to play the guitar in the first place, so he's pretty defensive of the man and his image.

My last band, Foos of the Stone Age, got around this issue by tributing two bands - the Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age.  It was occasionally toyed with how far we should go in terms of replicating the bands, but in the end we settled on just using signatures - a t-shirt here, a chequed (plaid) shirt there - that fans of the bands would recognise.  

Ironically, that band also suffered with a well-known syndrome musicians will all be able to recount if they've been around long enough - paralysis at the thought of actually gigging, which is the second main factor that I've found trips bands up.  Rehearsing is easy - nobody can hear you, and when you finish playing, you think you sound great so there tends to be congratulations all-round apart from the odd pick-up here and there.  Contrast that with your average rock audience - all self-appointed aficionados, staring blankly at you, often emotionless - at least until they have some drink inside them.  It's a very different world to endlessly practicing and it's quite a leap of faith to put yourself out there.  

As an outgoing and confident singer, that's not a problem for me.  But if you're an obsessive with your particular instrument and perfection is all that you'll ever allow an audience to hear, it can be a long time before that happens.  And who's to say when you'll attain your idea of 'perfection'?  Gigging is a nerve-wracking event as well - there's no substitute for it, and it needs to be practiced just as much as the actual songs.

In the end we sounded fantastic (after a year of rehearsing 25 songs every week we should have been), but nobody in the outside world had a clue we existed.  Since I left the band (i.e. ditched), the guitarist has decided to be the lead singer and inevitably they've dropped the Foo Fighters side of the act which was the most demanding part.  

It's been nine months since I left, and prior to writing this article I tried to look them up to see how they're getting on.  It wasn't easy, and in the end it took scouring Facebook to finally locate them.  They're under a different name now of course, and in the nine months since I've left they've managed to acquire a grand total of 35 fans - this is in a huge city where they've lived all their lives, while tributing a band that sells out whenever they tour the UK.

They got a gig back in November, and that's it. One or two gigs in two years.  And it's not hard to see why.  No publicity shots on their profile, no pictures of them performing, no demo tracks, no web presence whatsoever.  And the tragic part is, I guarantee they sound fantastic.  

My point is, if nobody knows a band exists and the ones that do can't see them play, what's the point?  Looking back it's funny to think that one of the reasons sited for ditching me was that I might leave them one day and wanted to get on and make a career out of the band, which meant 100% commitment.  100% commitment to rehearsing forever?  No thanks.  It was a massive frustration with them when I was in the band, but they were so obsessed with sounding exactly like their idols, in order to pay a worthy tribute, they never got out of the rehearsal studio and, if their Facebook page is anything to go by, they haven't since.  The reality they could never grasp as well is that your average rock fan just wants to hear a band play and be entertained - not have the combined sound of a CD player.

Something I've since realised as well is that when people go to see tribute bands, they expect to see a concerted effort to be made to be as close to the original band as possible in terms of look as well as sound.  A lot of these guys can't get to see the actual band perform, or find the thought of a festival gig intimidating, so they go for the 'next best thing'.  This means that tribute bands that are 'branded' the right way can sell-out pretty decent-sized venues.  They are also very popular at festivals and even tribute band stadium gigs - for example our drummer Gavin Tester played for another Bon Jovi tribute band [http://www.bonjovitributeband.net] at Coventry's Ricoh Arena to an audience of 30,000.

Since I've joined the band along with Gav, it's been decided that the only way for us to develop is indeed for us to go the 'imitation' route and for me - a 38 year old with short brown hair - that can only mean one thing if we were to really explore the potential of 'Bad Medicine [http://www.bonjovitributeband.net]'.

Wearing a wig on stage is, at first, a pretty terrifying thought.  Pictures of running around with a dead cat on my head singing rock ballads is enough to give me sleepless nights.  There's a couple of things that have helped.

First of all, I looked at some successful tribute bands already operating in the UK and Europe, and the fact is, if you look good at 30 to 40 feet, you're fine.  Most gigs tend to be in the dark with stage lighting, and a thick pair of black wrap-around sunglasses or a Sgt Pepper uniform can hide a multitude of evil's.  

Going back to hair, a big consideration for anyone pretending to be Jon Bon Jovi [http://www.bonjovitributeband.net], if you dig around enough you can actually find some pretty decent and convincing constructions to stick on your head.  With a lot of time and a little effort, I've put together a 'look' that I'm happy standing in front of an audience in - which means it can't be that bad.  I've even tested the water with the hardcore fans and posted images to Facebook, and they've been very positive, which is surprising as they've had a band for four years that has stayed away from anything remotely like a 'look alike' tribute act, being more like a Bon Jovi covers band [http://www.bonjovitributeband.net].  It's all about giving a potential audience what they expect - often they pay a venue to see us - and the last thing we want is for them to turn up and think "oh - they're just a normal band playing Bon Jovi songs".

Live entertainment, ironically considering the demise of recorded music, is in rude health.  Stadium shows and festivals, with ticket prices from £40 to £175 or even more, can sell out in an hour.  That demand isn't going anywhere and it's clearly having a trickle-down effect to the local live music scene, including tribute bands.  Local pubs are closing at an alarming rate around the country too, and it seems the ones that are converting to live music venues are the ones that are prospering.  For a budding musician, choosing your favourite band and getting together with some like-minded buddies is a pretty good way to get in to gigging to decent sized audiences pretty quickly.  If you ever leave the rehearsal studio that is...