`Frank, Sammy and Dean: the Rat Pack, Live from Las Vegas!" Well, not exactly - it's really Louis, Peter and Clive, live from Croydon and Leamington Spa. This trio of British singers, whose physical resemblance to Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Junior and Dean Martin is, to put it mildly, tenuous, will be setting up stall at The Olympia next week, the latest lookalike (or, hopefully, at least soundalike) act of the hundreds which now seem to land here every year.
We find ourselves living in the golden (or should that be tinsel?) age of the glorified showband, with late-night venues booking zillions of acts whose sole raison d'etre is to reproduce as faithfully as possible the sounds of yesteryear. But the deluge of lookalike bands - the ersatz Beatles, faux Abbas and all the rest - clogging up stages around the country, offers only a dubious musical experience.
With the Rat Pack, what you're buying into is a whole dubious lifestyle - a masculine fantasy of swingin' bachelordom: buttoned-up suits; skinny ties; bourbon on the rocks; and a different bottle-blonde on your arm every night of the week . . . Add to that the sulphurous whiff of Mob connections, the neon razzmatazz of Las Vegas and the reflected glory of Kennedy's Camelot, and you've got pre-packaged retro heaven for wannabe lounge lizards.
"The music was always very strong," says Paul Walden, the show's producer, "but the show is about more than that. It's the comedy, the rapport, the slightly anarchic vibe those guys had when they got together."
The breathless blurb for next week's show sets the scene. "It was at the historic nightclub gig known as `The Summit', in 1960 that the legend was born. The Rat Pack performed live together for a month while filming Ocean's Eleven during the day. It was silk and neon, skinny lapels and tail fins, smoke and perfume, cutting a figure and digging a scene. The world's media was focused on them and anywhere else was `Dullsville, Ohio' ".
At the end of the 1950s, bobbysoxers might have been swooning to the Everley Brothers, and beatniks grooving to Bird, but male wage slaves in the mushrooming American suburbs - "Dullsville, Ohio" to you and me - dreamed of being in with the in crowd at the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas.
Lauren Bacall first coined the term "Rat Pack" for the Hollywood drinking circle that included legendary boozers such as her husband Humphrey Bogart, Sinatra, Judy Garland and Swifty Lazar in the early 1950s. But it was when Sinatra brought Martin and Davis into his gang at Las Vegas that the myth began to spread. Sinatra brought in comedian Joey Bishop to come up with the gags and marshall the routines, while British actor (and, more crucially, Kennedy in-law) Peter Lawford also joined the set.
These days, it seems, everyone's trying to recreate the years of the rat. A 1998 TV movie starring Ray Liotta as Sinatra, Joe Mantegna as Martin and Don Cheadle as Davis was favourably received, but you couldn't get around the fact that these were very pale imitations of the real thing (there were, however, loud protests from the dead stars' families at the filmmakers' refusal to airbrush out some of the Pack's more tawdry excesses). Martin Scorsese is still making plans for his Dean Martin biopic, Dino (with, rather implausibly, Tom Hanks in the title role, John Travolta as Sinatra and Hugh Grant as Lawford), while George Clooney is to star in Steven Soderbergh's remake of the Pack's most famous movie, Ocean's Eleven (from which Quentin Tarantino famously pinched the opening credits sequence for Reservoir Dogs).
One of the things that makes these overgrown delinquents so attractive these days is their sheer political incorrectness. Describing his arduous life on tour to a Chicago audience at the time, Sinatra mused on how, after each gig, they'd "have a few glasses of whiskey, get back on the train and spend another sleepless night. And then we'd get rid of the broad and sleep a little better." Random, exploitative sex, chain-smoking and gallons of strong booze - it's amazing these guys lasted as long as they did, and not surprising they are such fantasy role models in the new puritan era. Does any song title encapsulate so many modern taboos in one line as One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)?
The whole ultra-lounge scene of the mid-1990s ushered in a wave of nostalgia for all things Rat Pack-ish, particularly in the US where the new taste for cigars, dry martinis and bloody steaks the size of Frisbees demanded a soundtrack and some role models. Sean Levy, author of Rat Pack Confidential, one of the best of the recent books on the subject, thinks that "as people reach a certain age, they're looking for models on how an adult behaves. And the Baby Boomers didn't necessarily provide the next generation with those models. I mean, you don't necessarily want to act like Bob Dylan as a grown-up, but to put on a jacket and tie and have a drink and a cigarette, that seems kind of grown-up in a twisted way."
The defining movie of that 1990s lounge-movement, the brilliant Swingers, has great fun pointing up the disjunction between the actual lives of its characters as struggling actors in Los Angeles, and their fantasy lives as sharply-dressed hipsters playing high stakes poker in Vegas. "I was born in the 1960s, so I grew up in a very politically correct, very socially aware time and space," says Swingers writer and co-star Jon Favreau. "Then I hit the age when I started dating, and I wanted to know why the girls liked me as a brother and went out with ball players who treated them like crap. Swingers says it's OK to embrace your feminine side, but it shouldn't be at the expense of what makes you a man."
God knows what Sinatra would have made of all this. He was determined to make the most of the connection with the most famous swinger of them all, Lawford's brother-in-law, John F. Kennedy (at one point he even tried to rename the Rat Pack the Jack Pack). Kennedy certainly appreciated the fringe benefits at the Sands, where Sinatra invited him back for an after-show soiree "with oral sex on the house".
But the Pack was finally snubbed by Camelot when Kennedy, at the urging of his brother Bobby, who had evidence from wiretaps of Sinatra's Mafia connections, decided at the last moment to turn down an invitation to stay at Sinatra's house while on a visit to California. Legend has it that Sinatra personally demolished the presidential accommodation he had had specially built for the occasion.
Kennedy's death marked the end of the Rat Pack as the hippest swingers in town. America was falling in love with four moptops from Liverpool, hair was getting longer, suits were going out of style and Scotch was no longer the recreational drug of choice. The three old troupers kept on showboating for a long time - Davis died in 1990, Martin in 1995, and Sinatra in 1998 - but it's only since their long fade to black finally finished that it has become fully possible to celebrate them in their finger-clicking heyday, without being confronted by the corseted, toupeed old codgers they had become. The phenomenal success of CDs such as The Very Best of Dean Mar- tin, which refused to budge from the charts for most of last year, shows the appetite among a generation bored by teeny pop and dad rock for superb melodies and laconic lyrics delivered with a sardonic twist.
So there's only one problem - there's nothing which shows a particular nostalgia fad has well and truly run its course like a tribute act will. But old rascals never really fade away. As Frank put it so well: "Make like a Mister Mumbles/And you're a zero/Make like a Mister Big/They dig/A hero . . ./I tell you, chum/It's time to come/Blow your horn!"
The Rat Pack: Live from Las Vegas runs at The Olympia Theatre, Dublin, April 4th-9th
