Who's Playing Tonight? The Strange Persistence of the British Guitar Alter Ego

On 6 July 1972, a man in a quilted jumpsuit put his arm around his guitarist on Top of the Pops and the country briefly lost its mind. What people tend to forget is that the guitar was doing half the work. Mick Ronson's Les Paul, snarling through “Starman”, gave the character credibility — the alien had chops. Without that, Ziggy Stardust was a costume. With it, he was a band.

Which is a roundabout way of asking a question that feels oddly urgent in 2026: whatever happened to the British guitar alter ego? The mask, the pseudonym, the fully invented human being with a rider and a backstory. Has it died out, or has it simply changed clothes?

The character was never a disguise

Ziggy wasn't a hiding place. It was permission. Bowie had spent years failing to be himself in public — the mime, the folk, the debut album nobody bought — and the alien gave him licence to play louder, wear more and say stranger things in interviews. The character wasn't a retreat from authenticity. It was a way of finally getting to the honest stuff by pretending to be somebody else.

It also solved a practical problem that every working musician understands. A character can be retired. A character can be killed off on stage at Hammersmith Odeon. A character can go on tour when the person behind it cannot face another interview. Try doing that with your own name.

From Sgt Pepper to the Ants

Bowie didn't invent the idea, of course. The Beatles had already turned themselves into another band entirely for Sgt Pepper, right down to the uniforms. Bryan Ferry spent the Seventies as a lounge lizard with a geography degree, with Phil Manzanera and Chris Spedding providing the guitar menace underneath. Peter Gabriel wore the costumes in Genesis while Steve Hackett stood at the side looking like a man waiting for a bus, which was arguably its own kind of performance. Gary Numan went full android. Captain Sensible wore a beret and meant it.

And then there were Adam and the Ants, who are due a proper reappraisal. Adam Ant's persona was pure theatre, but Marco Pirroni's guitar turned it into something with teeth — clipped, tribal, oddly funky, built on Burundi rhythms and riffs that seemed to arrive from the next room. It's hard to imagine that sound being made by a man in a plain t-shirt singing about himself.

That's the point the authenticity crowd keeps missing. The alter ego is usually a way out of a scene's expectations. Punk's uniform of sincerity made dressing up look like treason, so the ones who dressed up — Ant, and Bowie before him — got accused of betrayal by people whose own uniform was a ripped t-shirt and a sneer.

The Nineties got embarrassed

Britpop put a premium on real bands playing real songs in real pubs, and the persona suddenly looked a bit silly. Costumes survived as irony rather than commitment. For a while, the most flamboyant thing a British guitarist could do was stand still and mean it.

It's worth saying that this was not a golden age of honesty so much as a different costume. The parka, the Adidas trackie, the vintage Fender — that's styling too. It just came with a story about how it wasn't.

So where did the characters go?

They didn't vanish. They went underground and rebranded. Yungblud is a fully realised persona sold as unfiltered selfhood. The Last Dinner Party do theatrical dressing-up but frame it as something a group of friends do for each other rather than a fictional person with a biography. Wet Leg's deadpan is a character every bit as constructed as any spaceman. Meanwhile Sam Fender and English Teacher have built their appeal on being visibly, almost aggressively themselves.

There's a structural reason for the shift. Streaming rewards a consistent artist name and a searchable face. Social media rewards continuous self-disclosure — you can't disappear into a fictional persona when you're expected to post from the van at eleven at night. And the reunion economy, which is currently shaping so much of the live calendar, prefers nostalgia for characters we already know over the invention of new ones.

What gets lost when nobody pretends

Here's the counterintuitive bit. The alter ego is good for the guitar. It lets a player step outside their genre without having to explain themselves — the punk who secretly wants to play funk, the folk act with a Les Paul, the indie band that fancies a bit of disco. Under your own name, every deviation needs a press release. Under a character, it's just what the character does.

Without that licence, scenes tend to narrowcast. Everyone stays in their lane because leaving it looks like a credibility problem. The mask, oddly, is what allows the playing to be more truthful than the marketing.

The mask is still on — it's just clear

So no, the alter ego hasn't died. It's been absorbed into the language of authenticity, which is the cleverest costume of all. Anyone performing sincerity on camera, night after night, from a stage, for money, is doing a character. The only difference is that this one doesn't come with a jumpsuit.

The domain you're reading this on makes the argument better than I can. Nobody says David Bowie played guitar. They say Ziggy played guitar. The character is the bit that survives — the name on the poster, the reason the ticket got bought, the thing that gets remembered long after the session files have been wiped.

So here's to the invented ones. The renamed, the masked, the ones with a backstory and a rider. 2026 could do with a few more of them, and a few less people assuring us they're being themselves.