Hello Fellow Floydian Tribute Bands:
Very interesting post.
I am in a Pink Floyd tribute located in New Jersey, USA called "Brain Damage"
http://www.braindamageband.com. It's nice to see some of the posts about the trials and tribulations of being a tribute act, I don't feel so alone now.
Our band started out 2 years ago we currently have 8 members.
2 guitar players
1 bass player
2 keyboard players
2 female backup singers
1 Drummer
We have a booking agent but he is about worthless, we book more gigs on our own. We play large clubs and theaters. We would prefer to do just theaters but the costs involved are very expensive. We tried getting theaters to book us at a flat rate but we have found that just renting the theaters ourselves work out better all around. Typically a 1,000 seat venue around here costs an average $4,000.00 for the day this fee does not include stage hands, electrician (if needed for power tap) sound and lights, and insurance. A typical rental of sound and lights for about 8 hours runs us $2,000.00 respectively. So in order for a band like us to do a medium size theater show it costs us about $6,000.00 out of our pockets, this does not include advertising. A typical theater show ticket would be about $20-25 a ticket. If we do well at a then we take that money and roll it right back into the band and schedule another theater show and we started purchasing more and more of our own lighting to help offset the production costs. We still have to rent lights but we are starting to accumulate more and more lighting so eventually the costs for lighting will just be an engineer to run them...but that's a little bit down the road. We usually work a door deal with clubs or bars and just take what we earn at the door and put it back into the show as well. Needless to say we don't put on a full blown production when we play a club or bar unless the room can accommodate it. We do our best to slip in some lighting and projections when we can at clubs and bars but it's usually a power issue and a venue size issue at these clubs/bars. So we rarely make money at this...we may eventually but for now we just put the earnings back into the show so we can do the best show we can. It's a good thing we all have day jobs.
The band are all huge Pink Floyd fans which helps because we really love playing Floyd's music and we hope we are giving them the respect they deserve when we play. We really try hard to sound and look like a Floyd show when we play.
We have another issue in regards to Floyd tributes where I live. I am from New Jersey which is very close to another Floyd Tribute, The Machine. I have seen The Machine and they do a very good job at reproducing the Floyd sound and atmosphere. They have been doing this for I think about 10-12 years now so they really have the corner on the Floyd market in our area. This makes it tough for us because their are places that they play that we would love to play and can't because they have been grandfathered in. They have gotten to a pretty big level so there are still alot of places that are probably too small for them play where we can fit right in....but it's not without it's difficulties. For example we wanted to book a show at a place called The Starland Ballroom in my area and they said we have The Machine play here once a year no thanks. That is one of our biggest frustrations but like I said we manage to play alot of places that they don't play.
I don't know of very many more Floyd tribute bands in our area...thankfully.
The reason we started doing a Pink Floyd tribute is we used be in a cover band and we would do a handful of Floyd songs and the audiences always used to go crazy when we did them. So me and my brother sat down one night and said why don't we do a Pink Floyd tribute? We all love the band but I only want to do it if we are doing it justice. So we rehearse alot and try our best to reproduce a good show.
As Floyd fans ourselves we are very picky about the songs and all the little details that go into trying to pull this off....it's not easy....and you get alot of real critical Floyd fans...I understand that completely and we welcome it. Again, I only hope we are doing a respectful job at playing this music we all love. I know we all put alot of effort into doing this so I hope it shows.
Steve / FF
