I feel that "musically boring" is something that's highly debatable... It's like saying that a discussion of surface tension is chemically boring (*), or set theory is mathematically boring!
For those that relish complexity in their music, playing modal progressions in 13:8 time is musically very interesting indeed. Those same people, when hearing a simple 3 chord ditty in straight-ahead 4:4 might say it's "boring" - but that's only to them. Others may find that simplicity is what they like, and complexity is, to them, boring.
But at the end of the day it's all subjective; I personally find Oi bands to be deeply dull and like a bit of crazed widdling though an Oi fan would be the opposite to that.
Same goes for "decent tune". I mean, which is better, Donna Lee or The Birdy Song?
As for backing "tapes", we shall continue to use 'em - though in our case it's a laptop playing Logic; our guitarman fiddles with fx and stuff on the fly.
* to be fair it's a bit dull, after all, the Langmuir Trough experiment was what Thatcher worked on!