Music

The Thin White Duke band features Dave Cull as David Bowie. The group will return to South Street arts centre this Saturday
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South Street playing host to David Bowie tribute

By Phil Creighton
July 09, 2010

David Bowie will be storming South Street’s stage on Saturday night – well almost. Phil Creighton talks to the tribute band

South Street has played host to many famous names in the past including one David Bowie. In fact, the multi-faceted popstar was such a hit when he played there last year the gig was a sell-out.

And this Saturday, he’s coming back – not as Ziggy Stardust , or Major Tom, but as The Thin White Duke. Well almost.

The Duke here isn’t David Jones, but Dave Cull, a 44-year-old digital products sales manager for Fuji Film. Tall and thin with strikingly blond hair, he is a dead ringer for one of pop’s biggest success stories. And he’s living the dream.

“It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” says the Bowie impersonator from Tadley. “We love what we do so much and we just want other people to enjoy it. What we get out of it is the enjoyment of playing what we love.”

The show, also called The Thin White Duke, sees the five-piece band perform almost two hours of wall-to-wall Bowie tracks and, with a career going back to the 1960s, there’s a big back catalogue of songs to get through.

“We’re hoping we sound as much like the original as possible. We play it straight, no spin,” Dave says. “Authenticity is important.

“There is no one on the planet who will sound like David Bowie but David Bowie. My target is to mimic the phrasing and the structure of songs. To have that same unique vocal quality is difficult but it’s what we strive towards.”

It’s a tough job says the self-confessed Bowie fan, but he’s loving it.

“I’ve always been a big fan,” he says. “And I love talking about David Bowie.”

And he does. Without being a bore, Dave leads me through a potted history of the musician who built up many different personas over almost 50 years in showbiz, including Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke that the band are named after.

“The rate at which he changed appearances, personas and music was staggering,” he says. “He didn’t stick to a formula, [once something was successful] he dumped it and moved on to something else.

“The Thin White Duke was quite a contrast to what had gone before, with its slicked back look.”

The dapper character, which first appeared in the 1976 album Station to Station , is Dave’s favourite, so it’s serendipity that he joined a band named after him.

“I’ve been with the band 18 months,” he explains. “It was already called The Thin White Duke. I’ve had a suit made from a tailor in London that’s modelled on [Bowie’s] Heathen tour of 2002.”

This helps sell the illusion – vital for any tribute band – that Dave has stars in his eyes and is David Bowie.

“I go to see tribute bands because you can’t see David Bowie even if you wanted to. If you do, he’d be in a stadium at £100 a ticket. With tributes in intimate venues, you can stand with a drink and you can enjoy the music.

I want to hear them sound as much they can like the originals,” he explains, adding that in a stadium you can barely see the artiste from your seat.

The band, in its current guise, are happy being a straight tribute band paying homage to Bowie.

“We saw the Counterfeit Stones tribute band – they are at the very top of the tribute tree,” Dave says. “They do a bit of comedy in the show. We don’t because we’re not confident we could make it work – we’re not sure how you make David Bowie funny without sending him up.”

And the band are looking forward to returning to South Street this Saturday.

“We’re very excited,” Dave says.

“I love South Street, it’s a great venue. It’s almost like a hidden gem.

“It’s a fantastic venue: the lighting is fantastic, the sound is fantastic and it has a really nice feel about it. I loved playing there last year and I’m looking forward to playing there again on Saturday.”

The audience likes it too. Dave reveals that, after having sung along

to every word from every song, fans of Bowie come up after the show to let him know how he did.

“Spot on,” they tell him.

“You can’t get a better kind of feedback,” he says.

* The show takes place on Saturday at South Street arts centre, Reading. Tickets cost £9 in advance or £11 on the door. For more information, call the box office on (0118) 960 6060 or log on to www.readingarts.com.

* For more information on The Thin White Duke, log on to www.thinwhiteduke.biz.