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Dead Cat Bounce do This Is Spinal Tap

On the 15th March 2012 Back

Irish comedy rock band Dead Cat Bounce are making their own This Is Spinal Tap – a ‘guerrilla mockumentary’ about Eighties soft rockers Whitesnake.

Shot in the UK and Scandinavia, Discoverdale traces Dead Cat Bounce lead singer James Walmsley’s attempts to meet his biological father, whom he believes is former Deep Purple vocalist and Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale.

Produced by Welded Tandem, who made This Is Jinsy and Dirk Gently, the low-budget, improvised feature follows Whitesnake on their recent European tour.

Over the course of the film, which is set for a European summer release, Walmsley, bassist Shane O’Brien and drummer Demian Fox are recruited into Whitesnake but are quickly fired.

The Dublin-based trio, who’ve performed Whitesnake covers at late-night shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, spend most of the film busking around Scandinavia.

The film, directed by George Kane, was originally conceived for Channel 4’s Comedy Blaps series of online shorts, but within a week in November they had written a script, secured funding from BBC Worldwide's DVD label 2 Entertain and flown to Norway with a small film crew.

‘We knew what scenes we wanted to get but not how we would get them, so we were improvising across Scandinavia, trying to pursue Whitesnake while they were oblivious to us,’ says O’Brien.

‘We had to busk our way around because we had so little money, playing a cruise ship and quite a lot of truly odd venues. There was no plan, but Scandinavian audiences are great, they have perfect English but no sense of irony. To them we’re just a very weird band.'

Dead Cat Bounce are also writing another film, funded by the Irish Film Board, about a middle-aged man with a terminal illness who convinces his best friend to cycle around Ireland on a tandem bike.