That 70's Night

Vintage Voltage are a 60s and 70s rock collective from Brighton and London. Four to eight of them depending on the room, three for the acoustic set, playing Zeppelin, Purple, Sabbath, Bowie, Hendrix, Free, Humble Pie, Thin Lizzy, Fleetwood Mac, Cream, and the deep cuts either side of them. Technically a tribute band. Actually a rock and roll rave inside a time machine. It started with a frustration. Guitarist Folly den Toom came back from Nashville, where he had watched people of every age pile into the bars on Broadway for live classic rock, and found almost nothing like it at home. Britain had bands playing these records, but mostly older men playing to older rooms, and almost nowhere to go on a Friday to hear this music loud and played properly. The bands who made it are disappearing. Some are gone, some have stopped, and the ones still out there are playing arenas to people who were there the first time. Somebody has to keep the flag in the air, and it may as well be people young enough to be doing it for another forty years. The trick is doing it without the cheese: no wigs, no costumes, no winking at the audience, no medley. Play it like you mean it, because they do. That 70s Night is their own event, and the thing they built rather than the thing they were booked for. A wall of working vintage televisions, an oil projector, lamps, rugs, a DJ after the band, and a room full of people who dressed for it. They build the room, they fill it themselves off their own list and their own ads, and they stay until the lights come up.