There is more to impersonating a rock star than grabbing a glitzy jacket, shades and turning up at a karaoke bar. Alan Perrott meets four musicians so devoted to their chosen idol that it has become a part of their life.
It's impossible to tell if Marcus Lammer has stars in his eyes when there's an angry drunk in his face.
In real life, the builder who dabbled in karaoke bars of Orewa might have tried reasoning with him. But tonight, Lammer is "Randy Rocket", a part-time rock star who
can pull off a fair Jon Bon Jovi vocal and he knows exactly what a leather-panted frontman should do - he hits the drunk on the head with his mic, kicks him back into the crowd and pouts to the ladies.
It's the rock 'n' roll dream scaled down to fit inside a Whangaparaoa pub ... it's the life of a tribute artist.
Usually when that phrase pops up, people think of fat blokes doing Elvis. It looks dead easy: a jumpsuit, bedazzler, stick-on sideburns, a bit of the Hong Kong Phooey and it's "Thank you verrah muhch." Even if they sing like mud they'll never top the parody the great man made of himself during his final daze.
Difficulties like that encountered by Mr Rocket become more likely when you start apeing acts that attract demanding fans clad in anoraks, berets or beer. Then your act becomes a Stars in Your Eyes audition conducted before a live - and most likely legless - audience. It's where heartfelt homage and mimicry meets the hobbyist and piss-taker.
All the same, you might think a band like Maskara would be immune to the slings of any critic. How could anyone sensibly take umbrage over a bunch of guys in Spandex and bad wigs representing all the great lows of hair metal?
But they can and they do. If you're up there pretending to be Guns N' Roses or Def Leppard, you had better go to more trouble than sticking a cucumber down your trousers. True fans know every solo and every shriek by heart and they expect to hear them as clearly as they do on their stereos at home. They also expect you to look, move, talk and perform like the real thing. And all for the price of a pint.
None of these factors has prevented tribute bands from becoming a worldwide phenomenon. England even has three dedicated festivals - Glastonbudget, the Fake Festival, and Tribfest - which boast nothing but weekend knock-offs such as Oasish, the Iron Maidens and Fake That.
No one is sure where they really started but the most popular theory points to cheapskate Australian promoters who got sick of the cost of luring big acts Downunder. Tributes are not only cheaper, if not free, they don't care what colour M&Ms they get backstage.
They can also be lucrative. Before Led Zeppelin permitted digital downloads of their music, one canny promoter started putting the versions performed by his act, Led Zepagain, on iTunes and made almost US$500,000 before the real deal decided to get in on the action.
If they have an archetype, it's Bjorn Again, the Australian Abba impersonators. They are modelled on an iconic act that doesn't perform any more, have a punny name and fake personas, and they roll out note-perfect hits with the same costuming and dance moves. When they flew into London for the first time, Bjorn Again even climbed off their plane in the white suits used for the cover of Abba's Arrival album. The joke proved so successful the band even played the main stage at the Glastonbury festival.
But if the scale of their equivalents here is rather smaller, our enthusiasm isn't.
For Bruce Watters, aka Maskara guitarist Izzy Cooper (from Izzy Stradlin and Alice Cooper), glamming up not only looked like great fun, it also promised extra income. He joined in 2004 after spotting an ad in the paper. Cash aside, a little head-banging promised a change from his usual jazz and classical gigs.
As a member of about eight different bands, Watters is used to learning new repertoire, but this was an entirely different experience. For starters, he had to sit down and devour hours of videos, over and over again.
"Obviously the idea is to have some fun with the concept," says the 25-year-old, "but with tribute bands you also have to do everything you can to get everything 100 per cent right. If you fluff a solo you can't just improvise something on the spot. Fans are harsh critics, so it's about absolute attention to detail and that includes a real element of acting as well. When you get all that right the crowd reacts to you like you're the real thing and that's like nothing you can get doing anything else."
Frocking up properly is vital. For Watters, the best source for glam is the women's section of the local op shop. "That's where the gold lies," he says. "PVC pants, sequinned tops and scarves - lots of scarves. A mate of mine's mum made me some pink Spandex tights, which I top off with some cowboy boots. Then there's women's undies to drape on the drums. I've collected a big bag of this stuff over the years and I rock up to the gig with it and pull out whatever smells the least offensive ... that's one bag no one will ever steal. Then it's on with the eyeliner - always the most important part - and you're ready to rock. It makes my dad so proud."
Like most tribute musicians, Watters also has a day job. Or jobs. Before his present position with a consultancy firm, he'd done time as a brewer and stonemason. But before you go thinking his weekend exploits add some excitement to the tedium of being a nine-to-fiver, "we have what we call the weekend office, you'd call it the men's loo ... we take it turns to go in and try not to get splashed too much as we're changing. It's like every time you're pulling up the Spandex or putting your makeup on, some guy will walk in and say something like 'what the bloody hell's going on in here?' Just like in the movies, eh? Really glamorous."
So there's a lot of slog to getting a tribute act up to speed. The danger, says musician Deryn Trainer, is that you get so wrapped up with your character that you lose yourself. Trainer became this country's most-recognised tribute musician when his Billy Joel act won the first series of Stars In Your Eyes.
"I've noticed that with some people, particularly if the character involves an accent or a voice they do on-stage, it slowly creeps into their real lives ... a very dear friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, has all but disappeared into his alter-ego. He has become more comfortable as this larger-than-life character than as himself. It's like the mannerisms start to take over and pretty soon it's a different person going to the dairy to get the milk."
Trainer cringes inside when people tell him how much he looks like Joel, even if he is pleased that it's the model of 15 years ago rather than the Joel of today. He also "loathes" being called an impersonator or tribute artist. "Maybe I'm being a little precious, but it makes me think of terrible Elvis impersonators."
Instead, he sees dressing up as Billy Joel or Elton John as part of life as a professional musician - a case not helped much by having a Billy Joel number plate on his van.
Trainer has been a working muso ever since he finished piano lessons as a boy. The 42-year-old first worked his way up to musical director on theatre productions, then filled the same role for Sir Howard Morrison for 15 years while performing in various combos of his own.
To look like Joel all he has to do is dye his hair, slip on the black suit and Ray-Ban sunglasses and sit behind a piano. The rest comes from work. "It's that magic 10,000 hours thing. If you dedicate enough time to something, then you're going to become good enough at it that it feels natural."
He owns every DVD of Joel performing live and has every tiny nuance down pat. "I know, in some ways that it's a bit easier for me, I'm just sitting at a piano. That means it's about getting the details right, how he moves on the stool and moves his head. It'd be a lot different for anyone doing characters like Mick Jagger or Tina Turner."
His biggest challenge now is banging out songs like Piano Man and Uptown Girl night after night. These are the moments when he channels whatever vibe is coming from his audience to keep them convinced.
But it must help that he is a genuine fan. "This guy is a modern Mozart. Even after all these years of playing him I'm still happy to stick on a CD and listen to him alone. The only place I won't do that is in my van, that's my music-free space. The thing is, I know I'm not Billy Joel. And I don't want to be Billy Joel. I just want to be as faithful to his music as I can and I do whatever I have to to get that across."
So, how faithful do you need to be? This may depend on who you're pretending to be and the scale of your own obsession - tribute artists are usually true fans themselves. Who would go to all that bother for music they can't stand?
Especially when it's as bombastic as that of Pink Floyd. Phill Macdonald is part of three-piece group In The Pink, who have been taking their Floyd very seriously indeed for seven years. After all that study, Macdonald can now watch them live and pick up mistakes no one else can hear.
"But if I'd known how hard it would be to play, I would have turned the idea down," he says. "On the bright side, we don't need to buy any fancy costumes but still, I had to umm and ahh for a fair while before I decided that it sounded like a great challenge ... Ha, if only I'd known."
His decision launched two-and-a-half years of pernickety practice, purchasing and research until the trio felt they had created a show that looked and sounded like an 11-piece stadium band yet was small enough to fit in a country pub without blowing it up. Low bar ceilings have so far ruled out introducing the famous flying pig.
As a synthesizer designer, trance producer and former keyboard player for 80s group Marginal Era, Macdonald drives all the science. He built an onstage computer system to mesh his customised lighting rig with the guitar and vocal effects, samplers and backing vocals, a job that got more complex as he sank deeper into the music. As Pink Floyd's music mostly predates modern synths with their push-button settings, it took many hours of painstaking noodling to match the sounds the band had invented for themselves.
None of which came cheap. Neither was powering up their PA or the guitarist's determination to assemble an identical battery of guitars and amps to that of David Gilmour. "He's been a Pink Floyd fan forever," says Macdonald. "If he could, he'd be reincarnated as Gilmour - so absolutely obsessive with getting everything right." It's an ambition assisted by his collection of 500 or so live concert videos.
All the same, Macdonald insists it's a hobby, if an expensive one. He won't even guess how much they have collectively spent - "it was a bit like building the Concord, we got to this point of no return where it was too late to stop because we'd ended up wasting so much money and even more time" - but he's certain it's been worth it.
"Shows like ours are strange. It's not simply about people going to the pub to hook up over a beer. We make them events where people come along to hear Pink Floyd and, for a lot of them, that band is and always will be their all-time favourite. That comes with high expectations and a lot of scepticism. We get a lot of 'Oh yeah? How are you going to do this?' so we have to nail it straight away or we've lost them. But we're confident that we've spent so much time getting everything right that by the time our first song (Shine On You Crazy Diamond) has finished and the lasers, strobes and smoke machine have stopped, we've got them.
"And after all the challenges we faced putting this together, that's a great reward. So yeah, it's something that we love to do. Who wouldn't want to drive around the country playing a bit of Pink Floyd to Pink Floyd fans?"
