>>PREVIEW
BC/DC
Hi-Fi Club
Saturday, December 31
Ask Brendan Raftery about the perks of life as a rock star. In seven years he has performed to throngs of screaming fans, contributed to numerous extreme sports soundtracks, and soon he’ll play the penthouse suite of the Playboy Hotel in Las Vegas. For all the rock ’n’ roll debauchery of the Playboy penthouse gig, Raftery will be hard-pressed to top his surreal tour experience in Victoria.
"There were these two girls, these twins that just had kids," he explains. "And in the band room they ended up having a contest on who could lactate the farthest. It was pretty over the top, the lactating distance competition. And they were twins. It was just bizarre. What are the odds?"
The kicker – Raftery isn’t even a real rock star, he’s a photocopy repairman from Nelson, B.C. When the house lights dim and the crowd starts chanting, he transforms into Brian "Bon" John-Scottson, the vocal-chord shredding frontman for hard-rock tribute act BC/DC. What started off as an escape from Nelson’s granola-hippie lifestyle, became Raftery’s gateway into the "mock-star" world. What began as a bit of a lark seven years ago, has now become a heavy metal musical force .
"We thought at our first practice, ‘how long do you think this thing will last?’ And all of us agreed, six months tops. Now we’re getting calls from all over the world, every day of the week. It’s crazy, it’s just the gift that keeps giving," he says.
For some, BC/DC’s appeal is a bit mystifying. Tribute acts don’t typically hold much cachet with scene-conscious hipsters and AC/DC themselves evoke mixed reactions at best. On the other hand, the band played to a double-capacity crowd of those same scenesters at Brew Brothers, with several hundred more turned away at the door, during their last visit to Calgary. Clearly, BC/DC tap into something.
"Obviously the stuff we’re playing is 30 years old, and it’s what everybody listened to in the parking lot of their high school," Raftery offers as explanation. "You feel like you’re 15 whenever you listen to it. We’ve done all ages shows, and kids that are seven years old are singing all the words to Back in Black right in front of you and you think, wow, how do they know that?"
The catch for a tribute band is while everyone knows the words, they aren’t your words. Raftery admits that, as much as he loves AC/DC, he wouldn’t be doing this kind of music outside the band. Classic rock will always hold a special place in his heart, but Raftery started out singing some surprisingly different classics.
"I toured Europe twice singing classical music," he admits. "I sang classical music for seven years. I sang choral stuff, all in Latin and German. So now, I’m sort of destroying that voice. I can’t do classical anymore. Those days are behind me."
Instead, Raftery embraces the mock star lifestyle wholeheartedly. Like Marky Mark in the eerily accurate movie Rock Star, he’s more than content to live the life of a photocopier-repairing, tribute band-fronting, former classical-vocalist until the inevitable chance at rock superstardom presents itself.
"It just keeps going," laughs Raftery. "One day, it’s probably going to stop, but the popularity’s just been growing and growing. I think the day that AC/DC hangs up their boots, that’s where we really take off. That’s where it starts, I think." |
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