Spinal Tap will be reuniting for a 35th anniversary screening of the classic “This is Spinal Tap” at next year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
You may have to travel to witness it in person, but Spinal Tap are reuniting, if briefly. The fake metal rockers — played by the heroic trio of Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, who made their screen debut in 1984’s immortal mockumentary This is Spinal Tap — will be literally getting the band back together. The occasion? It’s for this spring’s Tribeca Film Festival, which will feature a 35th anniversary screening, a live musical performance, and a “conversation,” which will presumably feature them in character, alongside the film’s also fictitious director Marti Di Bergi, played by Rob Reiner.
Guest, McKean, and Shearer have teamed up with some regularity over the three and a half decades, including for a memorable early Simpsons cameo and a 2009 album (and DVD) called Back from the Dead. They three also teamed up for another, non-Spinal Tap band in Guest’s folkie 2003 mockumentary A Mighty Wind, as an outfit called The Folksmen. All three and Reiner are doing well for themselves outside of Tap, especially McKean, now on Better Call Saul. Meanwhile, Reiner and his dad, the also legendary Carl Reiner, are arguably Twitter’s most adorable father-and-son team.