Snake Oil is no cheap trick

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/12/2016 (3553 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Trying to absorb everything local cover band Snake Oil is throwing at you can be a difficult task. 

First off, each member of the five-piece group has their own stage name and back story. For example, there’s Due (played by Darren Moore); Due is said to hail from Muff, Ireland, (each character has a similarly vulgar-sounding name or town of origin) and plays piano, bass and guitar in the band, except when he fronts it as one of the musicians he portrays, which include Paul Stanley of Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Joe Elliott of Def Leppard, David Lee Roth of Van Halen, among others. So it’s not Moore as Ozzy, it’s Moore as Due as Ozzy. 

Three of the five members take turns fronting the band as various musicians, nipping on and off stage for two-song sets, using their brief breaks while the others are on stage to get into their next character. 

“It just continuously moves, no dead air,” Moore says. 

Snake Oil takes great pride in the attention to detail that goes into their two-hour set of ’80s rock classics. The costuming and makeup as they change from musician to musician is precise and impressive; the songs themselves are exact replications of the album versions, including any sound or technical effects; and the frontmen mimic the accents and mannerisms of the famous musicians to a tee, using old live concert footage as reference material.

“It is a theatrical experience; we imitate the characters, we portray them, we have interactivity between the characters, we make up what would happen if Ozzy ran into Alice Cooper on stage, y’know?” Moore says. “There’s elements of comedy… but the music side of it we take very seriously.”

The band name, too, plays with the idea of reality — Moore says they were inspired by the idea of a travelling salesman from the “old days” going from town to town peddling snake oil, pegged as a cure-all for anything. Customers would come from far and wide to see his pitch, but they wouldn’t know until after they bought the oil if it was authentic.

“Whether it was real or whether it was not, it was up to you to decide… so Snake Oil is kind of tongue-in-cheek; is this real or is this not?” Moore says.

Snake Oil has played huge shows all throughout the United States — including the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota (which saw more than 700,000 attendees in 2015) and at the iconic Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa (famous for hosting the final performances of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper before their death in a plane crash in 1953) — but their performance at the Burton Cummings Theatre tonight will be their first non-club headlining gig in their home city.

They graced the Burt stage once before, opening for ’70s Scottish rockers Nazareth earlier this year, an experience Moore says caused him some apprehension.

“Who wants to see a band doing cover tunes open for an original act?” he says. “But it was very, very well received because we brought the ’80s alive, there’s a sense of humour there. We’re not taking ourselves too seriously, although the music we do (take seriously). And the people enjoyed it, it’s a good show.

“There’s a big market for what we’re doing because it’s entertaining.”

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca  

Twitter: @NireRabel