ZZ Top tribute band ZZ Toppd heading to Cambridge

With no UK dates announced (so far) for 2025 by ZZ Top, fans of the legendary ‘little ol’ band from Texas’ could do a lot worse than check out ZZ Toppd, a loving tribute band from Essex.

The trio, hailed as “the UK’s no 1 tribute to ZZ Top”, are set to perform at the Six Six Bar in Cambridge in April, and concert-goers can expect to hear all the classics – with perhaps a few surprises thrown in.

The group comprises singer/guitarist Tom, who takes on the role of Billy Gibbons, bass player Mike, who portrays the late Dusty Hill (Hill was replaced in the band following his passing in 2021 by his guitar tech Elwood Francis), and drummer Steve, who takes on the role of Frank Beard, ZZ Top’s long-standing drummer who famously doesn’t have a beard – although Steve does.

“We started back in 2020,” says Steve, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his home in Hertfordshire.

“The seeds were planted around the summer of 2019; our frontman, me and him, were in a band before this, he wanted to put a group together but wasn’t too sure what he wanted to do…

“He was working at a festival – because he works in security – and one day he met a bass player from a former ZZ Top tribute band [the ZZ Tops].

“They had to stop because their frontman had passed away. He said, ‘Look, this is what we used to be doing, if you wanted to do a ZZ Top tribute, you’ve got my blessing to do it, and if you wanted to buy some of the old equipment off us to get started, obviously we don’t need it anymore’.

“So we did that and then we got together for rehearsing in early 2020, obviously not realising what was about to happen…

“For the first two and a half years we were together, in between all of the Covid stuff, all we could do was rehearse – we didn’t actually play our first show until June of ’22.”

Steve notes that he first got into ZZ Top when he was in his early teens.

“I thought they were really good,” he says, adding: “to kind of get my drumming chops up, that Greatest Hits album, along with many others, was one of the ones I used to put on and jam to back in the day.

“There were quite a few of the songs I knew pretty well, just from the years of practising along with it, but of course there’s a big difference between playing along to CDs and actually going into a rehearsal room with other people and putting stuff together.

“So it wasn’t the easiest thing, but it was good – it’s been very rewarding so far.”

The real ZZ Top tend to stick to the songs that people know best at their gigs, namely the hits from the 70s and 80s, such as Gimme All Your Lovin’, Sharp Dressed Man, Legs, and La Grange, without really going beyond 1992’s Greatest Hits album.

But Steve insists that his band try to throw some less well-known tunes into the mix.

“We really tried to make an effort when we first started to put a setlist together,” he notes, “because our show is pretty long – it’s well over two hours – and we tried to include at least one thing from every album, just because there’s such a huge catalogue of stuff there.

“We didn’t do every album because there were some albums that maybe we listened to that we thought, ‘Well there isn’t really much on here that anyone apart from mega die-hards is going to know…’

“But we do try to cover everything; we do a track off the first album [1971’s ZZ Top’s First Album], we do a track off their last studio album [2012’s La Futura] and everything else in between.

“That’s really what we’ve tried to do – especially on last year’s tour. The tour we did before that, in ’23, that was the 40th anniversary of the Eliminator album, so we did the album in full.

“And this year it’s the 40th anniversary of the follow-up album, Afterburner, so we’re paying tribute to that album.

“We’re not doing the whole album in full but we’re playing the bulk of it. So we try to cover all of the bases really.”

I suppose the question on everybody’s lips would be “Are Tom and Mike’s beards real?” “No,” laughs Steve, “the beards they use are not cheap either and they have to buy a new one every year – we don’t scrimp on them!”

ZZ Toppd will be performing at the Six Six Bar on Saturday, 5 April. Tickets, priced £16.80, are available from thesixsixbars.com. For more on the band, go to zztoppd.com.