Porthcawl’s Elvis Festival has for many years now been a fixture for diehard Elvis fans everywhere, helping bring a much-needed boost to a Welsh seaside town that otherwise often gets overlooked. But festival organiser Peter Phillips certainly can’t be accused of a lack of ambition; in recent years he’s set up a vampire festival in Transylvania and is now looking to put together a large-scale night of Elvis tribute acts with the aim of touring in the future, which you might argue has been done before, but not with a full 80-piece philharmonic orchestra. “We’ve chucked in a voice choir at the end, too, for good measure!” he adds.
Most people don’t normally associate Elvis with an orchestra – most of us likely think of quiffs, rock ’n’ roll licks and a walking bass – but according to Peter, Elvis was always about big production values: “If you look back to his Vegas shows he actually performed with a small orchestra behind him. Through running the Porthcawl Elvis Festival I got to know Charles Stone, who was Elvis’ tour producer. He told me one of the projects that he, Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis were working on just before Elvis died was the use of a full symphony orchestra.”
The tribute artist industry has been growing over the past few years, yet Elvis tribute acts (or ETAs as they’re often known) are have long been an industry unto themselves. What is it about Elvis that produces such a reaction that no other performer seems to match? “I would say that the two greatest entertainers of the 20th century were Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. What they had in common was that neither of them wrote their own songs; there’s a lot of pressure on singer-songwriters to produce new material all the time, but Elvis and Frank Sinatra could pick and choose exactly what songs they wanted to sing.”
“It’s all in the word tribute,” he adds. “There is a distinction between those who are merely imitating Elvis, and those who are genuine tribute artists to Elvis. You have to look like him, sound and move like him, but on top of that you must bring your own sound. You’d have to be good in your own right.” But why do nearly all ETAs copy the late-era Vegas look? “[laughs] I think it’s because the jump-suited look is easier to copy. We have two Elvis artists in our show, Gordon Davis, who is a constant 1960’s-early 1970’s era Elvis, and also 19-year old Michael Glaysher. In Gordon’s case, it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to do the early stuff. You have to be the right age to do early Elvis. What is hugely encouraging is that there are some extremely promising young Elvis’s out there, as young as 15, with the raw material to become a fantastic Elvis.”
A recent documentary about the Porthcawl Elvis festival, The King and Dai, which premiered at the Wales International Documentary Festival in 2017, painted a slightly different picture of the festival and of Peter Phillips. Though a friendly, talkative and charismatic fellow, there were a handful of voices in the film who saw Peter Phillips as a Colonel Parker-type figure, but there’s also the sense that he enjoys this rogue-ish reputation: “I actually wrote a documentary about Colonel Parker for the BBC a few years ago. In the process I interviewed his widow. She told me Parker had a phrase in private: “For Elvis to be a God, I have to be the Devil.” So maybe in that respect I am indeed following Colonel Parker’s example!”
Classic Elvis, with the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Quirk is at St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, Sat 13 Jan. Tickets: £27/£9 (U18s). Info: 029 2087 8444 / http://www.stdavidshallcardiff.co.uk/
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