Absolute Bowie

An advert, a birthday, and his mum in the audience

Absolute Bowie did not begin as a concept. It began with a classified advertisement, which John O'Neill — an Australian guitarist who had taught himself to play and was earning a living as a builder — answered in 2004. He got the job of being David Bowie, and his first public outing in the role happened to fall on his own birthday, 8 January, which is also Bowie's. His mother was watching. 'I thought I might run off stage crying,' he later told the Romford Recorder, 'but if you don't get it right in front of your mum, when are you ever going to get it right?'

O'Neill has been consistent about why the material suits him. He describes himself as a child of the 1960s, drawn to 'the power, the colour' of the era's records, and talks about Bowie's writing as a puzzle worth studying rather than a costume worth wearing: 'It's so interesting to study his narrative — he doesn't give much away but yet his songs say so much.' That split, between the showmanship and the close reading, is roughly what the band has been selling ever since.

The arithmetic of the band's own history is slightly elastic. O'Neill joined in 2004, and a 2017 interview put the operation in its 13th year, while the group's current billing counts 2026 as its 20th year of touring. Either way, it has outlasted most of the acts it shared bills with.

Awards, an endorsement, and a line-up that keeps moving

The hard credentials arrived in 2018, when Absolute Bowie took both 'Best Bowie Tribute' and best tribute band in the UK at the Agents Association of Great Britain awards — a trade body vote rather than a public poll, which matters on a circuit where self-description is cheap. The band has also collected 'Best UK Band' and 'Best Bowie' at the National Tribute Music Awards, and venue copy routinely carries lines from The Times ('Britain's top Bowie tribute'), the NME ('a lovingly crafted Bowie show') and the Mail on Sunday.

More useful than any of that is Woody Woodmansey, the drummer on Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, who has gone on record about them: 'As one who was there, watching Absolute Bowie put me back there again... as close to the real thing that you'll get.' No other Bowie tribute carries his endorsement.

The personnel have turned over steadily, which is normal for a working tribute band and worth knowing before anyone claims to have seen the definitive version. The 2017 line-up had Chris Buratti on guitar, Fabio Cashio on bass, Alex Paollilo on keyboards, Alessandro Riccardi on drums and Fiona Asbury on saxophone. By the Norwich show in March 2024 it was O'Neill, Andy Marr on guitar, a bassist billed as Telegram Sam, Varo Sisti on keyboards and Riccardi still on drums. At Brighton in December 2025 the bass was Sam Ferrari, with Alex Face on drums and Danny Mattin on keyboards and harmonica. The band's current roster lists O'Neill on vocals and twelve-string, Marr, Mattin, Telegram Sam and Face, with Fiona 'Fizz' Asbury on saxophones and flute when available.

The repertoire is the record

A tribute act has no discography, so the thing to assess is the curation. Absolute Bowie's show is built as two long sets drawn almost entirely from 1969 to 1983 — the 18 songs played at Concorde 2 in Brighton in December 2025 sat inside exactly that window. The billing names Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars, Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, Young Americans, 'Heroes' and Let's Dance, and the running order is organised around Bowie's successive personas rather than chronology for its own sake.

The Norwich set in March 2024 ran Hang On To Yourself, Changes, The Jean Genie, Starman, All The Young Dudes and Life On Mars in the first half, then Fashion, Ashes To Ashes, China Girl and Let's Dance in the second, with Space Oddity and 'Heroes' in a three-song encore. That is a mainstream shape, and the band does not pretend otherwise: the current tour is billed simply as Greatest Hits. Earlier runs were themed — around 2017 the show went out as '50 Years of Bowie'.

The guitar chair carries most of the technical weight, and it is where reviewers keep landing. Writing about the Half Moon in Putney in August 2025, Putney.news credited the guitarist with recreating Bowie's riffs and solos 'right down to the feedback and tonal quirks of the originals'. Outline's David Auckland, reviewing Epic Studios in Norwich on 1 March 2026, singled out Andy Marr's handling of Mick Ronson's sound.

Where they stand in late 2026

The most recent full review is Auckland's, from Epic Studios on 1 March 2026. It was favourable about O'Neill — who 'walked the walk, and talked the talk, and sang the songs', with the occasional Australian vowel surfacing — and about the arena-scale production the room allows. It also recorded two things fans should weigh: two band members were absent that night and their parts were covered by backing tracks, and the reviewer missed several songs he had expected. Both are the ordinary hazards of a five-piece playing 40-odd dates a year, but they are on the record.

The 2026 diary has been a mix of club rooms and 1,000-plus capacity halls: The Live Rooms in Chester on 27 March, O2 City Hall Newcastle on 31 July, Metronome in Nottingham on 14 November, The Crescent in York on 20 November, O2 Academy Liverpool on 21 November, Manchester Academy 3 on 28 November and O2 Academy2 Birmingham on 4 December. A booking at Aylesbury Waterside Theatre on 6 November was cancelled. The year closes, as it often does, at Concorde 2 in Brighton on 19 December.

Then the run keeps going. Chinnerys in Southend on 8 January 2027 falls on the birthday O'Neill shares with Bowie, followed by O2 Academy Islington on 9 January, Epic Studios in Norwich on 20 February, Cambridge Junction on 26 February, The 1865 in Southampton on 5 March, St Albans on 6 March, the Picturedrome in Holmfirth on 13 March, Queens Hall in Nuneaton on 2 April, Carlisle's Old Fire Station on 10 April and St Mary's Chambers in Rossendale on 22 May. Tickets have been sitting around £20 to £21 — £20.50 at the Sub Rooms in Stroud, £21 at the Half Moon.

The rooms and the crowds

The audience is the unusual part. Putney.news described a Half Moon crowd spanning generations, young fans pressed to the stage and regulars at the bar, singing and dancing by the finale 'as though at a stadium rather than a pub venue', and scored the night 4.3 out of 5. O'Neill has said the draw is 'hugely diverse audiences, all sharing the same energy', with ages running from 18 to 80.

A lot of them come back. At Concorde 2 in December 2025 — the middle night of a three-day tributes run at the venue — O'Neill reckoned the split was 60/40 in favour of people who had seen the band before. The reviewer there wrote that the screams were intense enough that it felt as though the Thin White Duke himself had just played, and the band added an unscheduled third encore because the room would not let them off.