Live It Up with Peter Combe and the Juicy Juicy Green Band @ The West Australian Spiegeltent at The Pleasure Garden (for Fringe)
Friday, February 9, 2018
If you went to school in Australia during the 80s, you would know the name Peter Combe, and with nostalgic shows being at an all time high, the excitement among the 30-plus crowd on Friday night was high. There were even a few people wearing their newspaper hats in attendance.
Combe started the show with some of his newer songs, Big Yellow Ball and Live It Up. Every single person in the room had big grins on their faces – including the musicians who were trying not to laugh as most adults were chair dancing and some even stood up to dance in their spots. But the room really came alive when Combe played a song from the Toffee Apple album, Jack And The Beanstalk.
As he was tuning his guitar, he turned to his longtime keyboardist Phil and said, “This has never gone this badly!” To the audience he said, “You know something, if I took two and a half minutes to do this in front of 500 children, they would walk out. As adults, we learn this thing called politeness.” He went on to tell us about a new song that he wrote, Sun Comes Up, Sun Goes Down. “I know what you want to hear!” he laughed, as he told everyone to indulge him – just as Paul McCartney had said in his recent tour last year.
He went on to play Lullabies For Tom, Chopsticks, Baghdad, Nutrition Blues and the oldest song in the set, Spangle Road, interspersed with little tales about how some of the songs came about.
Combe did indeed know the songs that we all wanted to hear; the audience sang along with him and knew all the words. It wasn’t until Toffee Apple that a little mosh formed, before settling down for George Harrison’s Here Comes The Sun. “If I don’t sing this song, people demand a refund,” Combe laughed as they started the song that every single person sitting there had been waiting to hear – Mr Clickity Cane.
And that was the moment that people lost their shit. They all stood up, came to the front of the stage, and when he reached ‘that part’, those few that weren’t standing up and singing at the top of their lungs lost it laughing as the audience sang “Bellyflop in a pizza? EWWWWW.” Even the band were struggling to keep it together. He finished the set with Spaghetti Bolognaise, Newspaper Mama, Juicy Juicy Green Grass, and “Thanks for being a marvelous audience!”
While it was incredibly daggy, there was not one miserable person in that room and everyone left with huge smiles on their faces. Even the biggest cynics would not have been able to sit in that room without laughing in pure joy as they watched all those adults revert to their childhoods.
In terms of nostalgia for our generation, the only place we could go further back would be Patsy Biscoe or The Mucky Duck Bush Band. From the bottom of everyone’s hearts, we all thank you, Mr Combe, for giving us a few hours of carefree happiness and an escape from reality. I would highly recommend next year, you leave the kids at home with a babysitter and go relive your childhood.
KAREN LOWE
Live It Up with Peter Combe and The Juicy Juicy Green Band’s FRINGE WORLD season has ended.
