Send in the Clones: A Cultural Study of the Tribute Band: Studies in Popular Music

1. Introduction 2. Tribute Bands in Context 3. From 'Ghost' and Cover Bands, to Pop Parody and Tributes 4. Establishing a Typology 5. Getting Established and Maintaining a Career 6. The Value of Paying Tribute: Critical Responses 7. Fandom and Collective Participation

Georgina Gregory is a senior lecturer in Media and Film at the University of Central Lancashire where she teaches modules on popular music, youth and popular culture and cultural theory. She also works as a freelance music researcher for the UK Performing Rights Society. In addition to publications on popular music and youth culture, Georgina is co-author of The Essential Guide to Careers in Media and Film (Sage, 2007).

'Some say the past is a foreign country; Georgina Gregory offers a exhaustive guidebook to the musical outlands where rock's back catalogue becomes reanimated Her spirited and insightful examination of tribute bands celebrates these critically overlooked ensembles as much more than just stand-ins for the 'real thing.' The subtle typology she elaborates furthermore illustrates the diversity of goods in the semiotic supermarket: how a sound-like need not be a look-alike; and how a tribute group can cross not only genre but gender, too.' David Sanjek, Professor of Music, University of Salford 'Georgina Gregory has shone a spotlight on the little-studied world of tribute bands and their fans. Her brightly-written book serves up a heady and original interdisciplinary potion, a mix of cultural studies, (firmly grounded) contemporary history, ethnography and other ingredients. She makes the importance of the phenomenon abundantly clear, while providing engaging portrayals of its eccentricities and explaining the difficulties encountered in bringing it in from the margins of popular music studies. Insights into the relationships between notions of the artist and the craft worker, the textual and the performative, the original and the reproduction, the artiste and the fan, heritage and memory, are transferable to related areas of cultural history and its 'uses'. This splendid, enthusiastic, articulate book deserves to be widely read and discussed, within and beyond an extensive academic constituency.' John K. Walton, IKERBASQUE, Department of Contemporary History, University of the Basque Country, Leoia, Bilbao, Spain