by There are some truly incredible videos for this topic. The Mamas and Papas‘ Michelle Philips chomping on a banana during a performance of ‘California Dreamin’’, Squeeze all swapping instruments and whacking Glenn Tilbrook front and centre on the drums, or Noel and Liam Gallagher switching costumes and places during a performance. All of it was to rebel against lip syncing.
The lip-syncing debate is a never-ending one. Watch any clip of any major pop artist performing, and you likely won’t have to scroll too deep into the comments to find some kind of remark about whether they’re singing live. A lot of the time, it lacks understanding – plenty of artists perform with a backing track, even if they are still playing and singing live, it’s simply that more details like harmonies or extra instrumentation might have been recorded in advance for a fuller sound. But obviously, there are instances still where an artist is just entirely not singing, causing some funny viral videos where a tech issue has outed them.
It’s seen as a cop out, a cheat. It’s considered fake and false, and downright wrong by a lot of people. If they’re paying to see an artist, they want to actually hear them live. They don’t want to just hear the recorded version, they already have it on record at home.
But from the 1960s, even through to the 2000s, the artist was often given no choice. Top Of The Pops is a huge culprit here. Most of the videos of artists rebelling against their backing tracks come from the famed music TV show because, for a long time, musicians were forced to lip sync – that was the only way.
There are several reasons and theories as to why. The first is that it simply made things easier. When TOTP was focused on looking good and being entertaining for the viewers back home, not having to stress about the potential issues of a live performance took a level of stress away. It ensured that the music was guaranteed to be good and sound good at home, especially when often a TV sound crew wouldn’t have the know-how to record a band live and translate it to the television. A sound stage and a studio or a venue are two very different places, making one work for the other can be tough and can sometimes simply not work.
The other issue comes down to technicalities and red tape, prompting a battle between two different unions. For a long time, the only music played live on television had to be played by union musicians. Any live performance had to come from the studio’s players, so it meant that the artists themselves either had to allow union musicians to play their work for them to sing over the top of, or that they’d just have to lip sync to their own already recorded version.
This went directly against the interests that musicians themselves were fighting for – they wanted to play live, they wanted to keep control of their work, they wanted the credit for it, and obviously, they simply wanted to do what they were there and invited to do, which was perform.
This goes back to as far as the 1960s when the Musicians’ Union started their first of many attempts to ban miming, or at least ban the broadcast of mined performances. But to try and get around it, and to avoid having to rework their entire production plans, TV crews would genuinely hide their amplifiers or move them off stage, so if a band were performing live, they wouldn’t be able to hear themselves, making for an incredible stressful show that would make the group wish they’d just lip-synced instead.
It was a tough standoff, and it was for decades. There would be pop acts keen to lip sync to lean into the performance of it all, and then you’d get the acts rebelling against the whole system, making a mockery of the TV show by pulling pranks and pointing out the falsity of it all. No conclusion was ever really reached as the issue still splits the crowd, but at least we can all enjoy the funny videos of Noel doing his best Liam, or The Mamas and Papas taking the piss.
