CityLife Rating
Mitch Benn
AS the guitar playing comedian Mitch Benn agrees, when he teams up with his band The Distractions to go on tour the spectacle sits somewhere between music and comedy – “I love being with the band because it feels like the most complete thing that I do.
"It’s combines everything. It’s kind of a two-hour rock concert but it’s funny, but even rock concert is restricting because it makes it sound like it’s just one genre and the whole point is every song is completely different to every other song in the show.”
And that’s certainly what he presented last night at The Dancehouse.
It was a small-ish but perfectly formed audience that attended; in main, it seemed, made up of The Now Show fans - the topical Radio 4 show that Benn appears on.
But the night, unlike his radio and comedy circuit appearances, saw him and his mirthful melodies hook up with Kirsty Newton on vocals, bass and keyboard and Ivan Shepherd on drums.
Their set began beset with a few techie problems, ‘can you hear the vocals all right?’ he was forced to ask – pretty essential in comedy songs, but by the third song they had got it sorted.
Almost the entirety of his latest album Sing Like an Angel was showcased; kicking off with the peace anthem Rubbish, followed by playful songs such as the gleeful homage to Keith Richards’ antics Get Out of That Tree and the daft What Have You Done to My Eyes, which ponders the nature of country singer Kenny Rogers’ disastrous cosmetic surgery.
Political
Of course there’s plenty of the political to be found here too with Happy Birthday War sadly having to be rewritten to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, State of Emergency featuring third world leaders preferred methods of remaining in power and the Lebanon song Ceasefire that almost got him into a rare bout of trouble.
His great skill in emulating genres is in evidence too, particularly in his drugs song with no less than four genres including reggae and hard house.
In fact it’s when he pushes the boundaries and the genres that Benn is at his finest, his Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds-inspired rock opera based the slightly shorter tome of the Hungry Caterpillar is a delight and the accurate rap parody joining Eminem with Shakespeare’s Macbeth is beautifully crafted.
Conversely, of the new stuff his album title track (and single) Sing Like an Angel is the stand out track with its X Factor parody, a strangely sympathetic nut job protagonist and simple, but very effective central gag.
All good stuff.
What did you think? Have your say.
Reviewed: Sun, 16 November, 2008
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