A man takes the stage at the Clapham Grand. His large, histrionic eyes are ringed with kohl. His slim limbs are decked in spandex, open to a furry navel. He throws back his flaxen hair and punches the air. “Thunder!” he yells to the opening salvo of the AC/DC tub-thumper Thunderstruck. His name is Mac Savage and I used to know him at school.
The set that follows is a greatest hits of the Eighties and Nineties, from Bono to Britney. And there are revelations. Did you ever notice, for instance, how tender the lyrics are to Tina Turner’s The Best? Or how terrible they are to The Final Countdown?
My reason for double-clicking on these staples is that, as Mac Savage flings himself into each with the decorum of a bungee jumper, the words flash up on a screen. In every case, this happens a few seconds early, which gives the gyrating crowd a chance to sing along. And we all do, every time. The evening is billed, on the posters and website, as “Massaoke”. The word is a hybrid of “mass” and “karaoke”, because there are no heroes or horrors here. No microphone-hoggers. It’s communal. It’s about the crowd.
In the dim days when we knew one another at Harrow, Mac Savage was Mark Nilsson—a mop-haired sweetheart who lurked at the back of my Latin class. There were few signs, back then, that he would one day capture the essence of stomp rock and stuff it into his tights. Recently, on a whim, we met up for the first time in 30 years. And I admit that I was a little taken aback, when I strolled into The Iron Duke in Mayfair, to be greeted by a man who looked like a close relative of the thunder god.
His once-fluffy hair hung in Viking curtains to his shoulders. He was rangier, skinnier. He was raunchier than I remembered. And he was sporting a floor-length yeti coat.
What happened, I asked him. Turns out, in 1994, Mark defied his parents by doing drama at Birmingham. But his dream was to be “the next Thom Yorke”. So Mark was an indie kid with big ideas. But the Nineties gave way to the Noughties, Blair bent over for Brown, and the hits never came. Mark wound up playing at weddings.
Then, in 2010, he was persuaded by a friend called Neil to join a strange kind of covers band. What was strange about it? They got the audience to sing along. To every song, to every word. “It’s not karaoke,” he explains. “In karaoke, an individual pretends to be Axl Rose or whoever. Massaoke is the opposite because it’s about losing your individuality. It’s about blending into the crowd and the joy of disappearing.”
We need a little less individuality these days: we can all agree on that. The social media psychos, the bar-room bores, the columnists. You know the ones I mean. Don’t we wish sometimes they would just stop? That they would spare us their terrible individuality?
Back in Clapham, mid-evening on this faceless Saturday night, Mark launches into a song he didn’t write. “Take me down to the Paradise City, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.” Failing that, I think, take me down to the Clapham Grand, where the floor is sticky and the women are middle-aged and having a good time.
Whether the band plays in Adelaide, like last year, or at Between the Bridges by the London Eye, as they will next month, the audience is 75% women. Why, I ask at the interval. “Women are better at having fun than men,” Mark replies. We’re in the dressing room he shares with his mates in the Massaoke band they call Rockstar Weekend: Mat Factor, Rebel Rye, and the others. “Women just get to a point where they say: fuck it, I want a glass of Sauvignon and then I want to dance. Men sulk on the sidelines.”
He’s right. This Massaoke crowd is wild. I actually have to swerve, in the middle of Livin’ on a Prayer, to avoid getting snogged. “I do get a surprising amount of inappropriate behaviour when I go out after gigs,” Mark confesses, when we sit down after the show has climaxed with Bohemian Rhapsody. “Women grabbing my arse. Licking the sweat from my chest.” He pauses. “It’s hard not to wish I had got into this in my 20s.”
Now 47, Mark is married to Maeve, a drama teacher who loves what he does, and they have a three-year-old son. It’s five years since he quit his day job. The band plays Glastonbury. They play Latitude. On average, they perform to about 250,000 people a year, which is a hell of a lot more than 99% of bands who are welded to authenticity. Success often comes in like this, it seems to me. It doesn’t knock on the front door. It slips in through the fire escape, when you’ve stopped paying attention.
“A couple of years ago,” Mark reveals, “we played a festival with Ash. And their singer, Tim Wheeler, was really envious about the fact that, with us, it’s about the brand not the band. Because when we get sick of doing this, we can just replace ourselves with younger models, and we’ll still make money. To be honest, he looked tired.”
Maybe I’m prejudiced, because I had such a great time, but it seems to me Massaoke challenges our assumptions of what rock music is. Back in the Sixties, bands learned their craft playing covers. That was all the Beatles and Stones did at first. Even Bob Dylan’s first album was covers. But these days, from the off, bands will only play their own stuff. That means they never learn. Rockstar Weekend, meanwhile, have been learning for ten years. Which is why they’re the best covers band in the world.
With Massaoke, in a sense, rock has come full circle. It’s where it began, when no one cared who wrote the song. They just cared if they could dance to it. Why do we insist on originality from rock bands, but not other performers? We don’t walk out of the Globe because the actors aren’t doing their own stuff. We don’t demand it from cellists.
By this rationale, Freddy Mercury is the Mozart of rock, Bon Jovi the Beethoven of roll. And Mac Savage and Rockstar Weekend? They’re the Proms. They’re Glyndebourne. They’re Bayreuth. So grab yourself a ticket. Brim a glass with Sauvignon. And check in your individuality at the door. You’ll find that you dance a lot better without it.
