A new Karl Spain-fronted reality TV programme is taking the talent show to a new platform, where long hair, guitar riffs and egos reign supreme – at least in theory, writes RONAN McGREEVY
AND TONIGHT, Matthew, they are going to be the biggest bad ass rock bands on the planet. Karl Spain Wants To Rock, as the title suggests, is a vehicle for the likeable comedian of the same name, but the real stars are five of Ireland's best heavy metal tribute bands.
Thunderstruck(AC/DC), User Illusion(Guns 'N' Roses), Ireland Maiden(Iron Maiden), Rubber Plants(Led Zeppelin) and Metallitia(Metallica) are living the dream, even if it is somebody else's.
“It’s nothing about being revolutionary in music, it is nothing about being the next U2 or even the next Led Zeppelin. All I ever wanted to do and all I want to do is play drums,” says Gerry Wilkinson, drummer with the Rubber Plants.
The trio from Derry have been recreating the music of Led Zeppelin, hard rock’s fab four, for a decade.
Karl Spain Wants To Rockis part X Factor-type talent competition, part documentary and part a turbo-charged version of the old ITV staple, Stars in their Eyes. The bands embarked on the Scrap Metal Tour last May, taking in Limerick, Tullamore, Mullingar and The Button Factory in Dublin. Each night a separate band was voted off.
The format may be familiar, but the line-up was as far removed as possible from the usual anodyne, family-friendly, lowest common denominator acts which are the mainstay of conventional talent programmes and are enough to make any self-respecting hard rocker put his foot through the television.
“The main reason for choosing metal bands is to try and get away from the idea that Ireland is a nation of minstrels and singer-songwriters,” says co-director Brian Cox. “The programme acknowledges that there is a kind of a dark underbelly to Irish music that you don’t see in mainstream media.
“If you go to any pub in Ireland, there are probably twice as many metal fans as anything else. It’s a kind of an underground scene and community where everyone looks out for each other.” The prize for the winner was a trip to Glastonbudget, the world’s biggest tribute band festival, held in the UK every year.
The programme attracted a trio of heavyweight judges: bona fide metal legend Biff Byford, the lead singer of Saxon; Brian Tatler from Machine Head and Brian Robertson, of Thin Lizzy and Motörhead.
The standard of musicianship was high, so high that the judges often resorted to relatively trivial reasons to arbitrate between the bands – the look of the bass player in one instance, the song selection in another.
There weren’t too many Guitar Georges who knew all the fancy chords but didn’t know how to make their guitars cry or make them sing, à la the Dire Straits song.
Heavy metal may be many things, but easy it ain’t. Carrying off the technical proficiency and lightning quick reflexes of lead guitarists like Metallica’s Kirk Hammett or AC/DC’s Angus Young would challenge the best of guitar players, but their dopplegangers Richie Sheehan and Adrian Fitzpatrick do it with note-perfect precision.
Metallitia drummer Joe so impressed Biff Byford that he pronounced him better than the real thing, Lars Ulrich. In a radio interview, Newstalk presenter Tom Dunne, once a front man himself with Something Happens, expressed incredulity that Rubber Plants’ singer and guitarist Gavin Corry doubled up as both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. That’s impossible, he said. “Anything’s possible, you watch me,” Corry replied.
The only thing any of them lacked was originality. “We get a lot of stick, being in a metal tribute band. People think why don’t you write your own music. Sure, I would, but would they listen?” asked Aidan Williams, the lead singer in Ireland Maiden.
All are part-timers and all fit their music around real life. David Byrne, the lead singer in User Illusion, is a soldier; Adrian Fitzpatrick works in a green energy company; Richie Sheehan in Intel; and his friend ‘Flash’ Gordon Murphy is a part-time music teacher.
As the lead singer in Metallitia, Flash looks and sounds like a Viking marauder. Off stage he is the father of Caoimhe (age three) and reflects on how the week he spent on the Scrap Metal tour was the longest he had been away from her in his life.
Documentaries about heavy metal bands are often rich in comedy and pathos, as witnessed by the marvellous film about Canadian metal band Anvil or the unintended hilarity of the mighty Metallica behaving like schoolboys in the film Some Kind of Monster.
Karl Spain Wants To Rockis no exception. There is a scene when Sheehan and his mother Kathleen 'Silverhead' Sheehan are at the table recalling the first time she saw a video of Metallitia playing. "It just reminded me of The Muppet Show, with the bodies flying over and landing on top of other bodies and then the long hair," she says.
Mrs Sheehan also recalled how music saved her son from complete despair when five of his friends died within a year when Richie was in his early twenties. The notion of music being a lifesaver is also expressed by Wilkinson, who has a minor disability, and Nick Jordan, the lead singer of Thunderstruck, who lives in a caravan.
“Before I started, I had no idea what to expect. The biggest surprise to me was just how good these bands were,” says Spain, compere and sometimes fall-guy of the programme.
“They are greatly talented, all the lads. The performance of all of them was fantastic. The only difference live between the lads and the real thing is the standard of equipment.
“They were very warm, friendly guys. It was almost disappointing that there were no major egos, that they didn’t take the tribute thing too far.”
Karl Spain Wants to Rockis on RTÉ2 tonight at 10.30pm
