No Thugs in Our House

Nigels with Attitude
The EARL
Atlanta, GA
November 24, 2009

As a general rule, I think tribute bands are complete and total dogshit. No matter how well they can play the songs of the band they're mimicking, there's always something about the set, or the band, or one member in particular that chaps my ass to no end. I once went to see a Replacements tribute band from South Carolina play a show here in Atlanta. When they took the stage, the singer didn't have a guitar, or any other instrument, in his hand. If someone is going to pretend to be Paul Westerberg, and is planning on doing so without a guitar in his hand, that's something to which I will not be a party. I left as they started playing their opening number: a boring, one-guitar version of "I.O.U.". Among the myriad problems this band had, there wasn't one greater than the fact that it lacked imagination. Sure, you could make a pretty compelling argument that the whole point of a tribute band is that it's supposed to lack imagination; you are covering another artist's material, after all. But I think imagination is what sets the really good ones apart from the really bad ones. A good tribute band is able to use their own imagination to channel that of the artist they're honoring. Nigels with Attitude is probably the best tribute band I've ever seen, and it's probably because they were able to dream really big, just like XTC did for so many years.

The Nigels, led by Sheryl Crow sidemen Tim Smith and Peter Stroud, tore through a 19 song set that spanned XTC's entire career and they did so in style. They began the set with "This is Pop?" from XTC's debut White Music, finished with a raucous encore of "No Thugs in Our House", and did their take on many other classic XTC songs in between. The band, which also included most of the recently disbanded Y-O-U, was spot on, used a lot of different instruments in order to duplicate the big sound of many of the original songs and they received quite a boost behind the boards from EARL sound man Curt Wells, who was obviously a big enough XTC fan to know where they echoes and the delays and such were supposed to go.

The set seemed to include anywhere from one to three songs off of each of XTC's major releases, and that was enough to keep everyone in attendance happy (although, admittedly I would have preferred it if they would have played more songs off of my favorite, Drums and Wires). They even included a couple of tunes from the Dukes of Stratosphear releases, which I hope would silence even the toughest critics. I considered the highlights of the set to be "Life Begins at the Hop", "Generals and Majors", "Senses Working Overtime", "Mayor of Simpleton" and "Ball and Chain".

What I saw on stage that night was a group of guys who are all professional musicians, that did this gig for fun. There's no telling when or if there is going to be a next time for Nigels with Attitude, but if there is, I will be there. As I stated before, as much as I generally detest tribute bands, there are exceptions to every rule, and this was rather exceptional. And it certainly didn't lack imagination. All it lacked was a version of the song "Helicopter", and hopefully next time they'll have the imagination to work that into the repertoire.