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Sunday 27 January 2008

Take This at the Bolholt Hotel, Bury

One of the drawbacks of living in a celebrity-obsessed culture, where people can earn a living by bearing a passing resemblance to Posh or Paris, and Graham Norton is given a prime-time Saturday night show to celebrate such individuals, is that we have come to misunderstand the notion of a tribute band. After all, a tribute band makes no promises other than to play the songs of a certain artist: there is no obligation that they should look like them too.

However, they could at least try. The Bolholt Hotel in Bury was packed to the rafters on Friday night, full of women of a certain age (I estimate the members of my party were the youngest there by a good decade or so) desperate to get as close to Mark, Gary, Jason and Howard as they were ever likely to. Indeed, having sat and endured the vision of a fat hen giving pretend oral-sex to a well-equipped blow up doll on the dance floor for the last hour, we were all ready for some distraction.

Rather disappointingly though, the four scruffy lads who had earlier conducted the sound check turned out to be Take This, and came bounding onstage dressed in suits ready to relight our fire. None of them looked remotely like the band they were pretending to be, and thus although they gave their all to their performance, they were ultimately just four boys doing some admittedly tuneful karaoke up on the stage.

Doh! I have been sucked into the age of the lookalike: I'm off to watch Graham Norton.

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