Review by Northings
Club Tromolo
11 Apr 2008 in Music
Classic Grand, Glasgow, 9 April 2008, then touring
Club Tromolo
WHAT IS it about the Northern dialect that fits so well with an irony-laden variety show? From Vic and Bob to Peter Kay, comedians have milked the humour value of a voice that sounds rough as old boots attempting to be genial and welcoming for many years now.
It’s a trick which Frank Percy (OBE), the bespectacled, blazer-wearing host of the nine-member, Glasgow-based ‘wonky cabaret’ night Club Tromolo, knows only too well. Although the press material for this Tune Up tour of Scotland would have us believe that this awkward but sharp-tongued character actually got lost in Glasgow on a day trip from Macclesfield in 1981, and never went home.
Just say the word in your head using the right accent. ‘Macclesfield’. Funny already, isn’t it?
Anyway, Frank’s a well-worn comedy archetype, but it’s hard not to raise a few laughs as he introduces us to his creepy nephew ‘Norman’, or his wife ‘Doreen’, who spends her days perfecting a version of Abba’s ‘Fernando’ locked in the spare room with Spanish lodger Juan Hernandez. Each part is played with unashamed vigour.
The show’s guests get a lot stranger, though, and the comedy value rests somewhere on a scale between ‘hilarious’ and ‘hopeless’. In the latter case, though, that’s often the point, as with the inexplicable Jazzbadger (man with fake badger’s head plays manic, tuneless noise on guitar) and Sir Clifton Sainsbury, who performs avant-garde poetry based on the characters from Rainbow and a bunch of old magazine adverts.
Among the more amusing excursions were the Govan Seer, a foul-mouthed member of the Psychic Young Team whose readings involve passing a bit of extra comment on today’s stars in the newspaper (“cancer… nae luck, big man”). Like the Northern host, the ned-out-of-his-element is an eternally reliable comic creation.
Then there’s Jean-Luc Panty-Ho’ MacDonald III, a crusty old bluesman who was “at least 95″ when Frank first met him in the 70s, and who regales us with the world’s shortest blues song: “woke up this morning / and got myself a job”. Or Miss Leggy Pee, who mimes to 60s easy listening duets with a puppet which looks like Statler from the Muppets, in far and away the evening’s sweetest moments.
Headline ‘special guests’ for this tour are Glasgow quartet A Band Called Quinn, who have been involved with Club Tromolo since it started at the city’s Buff Club. Any expectation that their guest status will let them be the Morecambe and Wise-style straight-people to the madness around them is blown away as singer Louise Quinn is carried on stage by a man in a King Kong suit, who is being chased by another bloke with a huge butterfly net.
It’s all very silly, but the Goldfrapp electro grind of the opening ‘The Glitter Song’ soon pulls things together. Quinn, in a vintage red dress, is a charming frontwoman with a beguiling voice which straddles the gap between sweet girl-pop and sultry femme-rock. Her band see this energetic but occasionally impenetrable night off on a high, with the whole cast’s conga around the room to the closing ‘DIY’ a very fitting, foolish, finale.
Club Tromolo visits East Grange Loft, Forres (12 April), Aros Centre, Skye (15 April), Lyth Arts Centre, Wick (16 April), Gable End Theatre, Orkney (17 April), Lerwick British Legion (18 April), An Tobar, Tobermory (22 April) and Eden Court Theatre, Inverness.
© David Pollock, 2008
