What real life bands/songs sound like Spinal Tap?
I actually wrote a book on THIS IS SPINAL TAP. This doesn’t grant me ultimate authority, of course, but I did turn up a few items in my research. There’s a small section on this topic in the book. Uriah Heep was a band cited often, as was Status Quo. Not so much for their sound, necessarily, as for their longevity and general mediocrity. Hawkwind is another clear influence, as was Saxon, and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in general. (Great site, that.) The great, great joke about Spinal Tap is that, no matter what form of music they tried, they were steadfastly average or subpar. Since the history of Tap is the history of British rock (from skiffle to pop to psych to metal to prog, which incidentally was a not-uncommon evolutionary path for bands to take), if you can find the most resolutely average-to-below-average bands of any genre, they were fi
