Tonight’s gig is a little different to my usual Friday evening, a night of two bands mixing parody with tribute, taking two different sets of source material and mashing it into unholy matrimony. It’s also, somehow, the first time in my eighteen years living in Colchester coming to a standing show at Charter Hall, a room that, by day, isused for badminton and trampolining but by evening hosts the biggest stage in town. The transformation is pretty impressive, who’d have known how good the stage lighting is while knocking a shuttlecock about!
But enough about the room, first up tonight is Nic-Cage Against The Machine. Concept wise, I think the idea is genius, I did check them on YouTube beforehand and, well, the videos out there really undersell this band; in the flesh they’re incredible. Without considering the Nic Cage element the covers are still spot on, everyone has a great, pretty accurate, sound – they woild be an excellent RATM cover band anyway – but the impersonation takes it to the next, incredibly funny, level. Each member represents a different Cage role, with DVD cases littered around the front of the stage, with the frontman impersonating his voice and mannerisms.
One of my highlights threw in a third reference that clearly everyone at this gig was going to get excited by, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 – playing the title video song, Guerrilla Radio, frontman Nic Cage hops the barrier and skateboards through the parted crowd. They open Wake Up by referencing The Matrix, opening the song with an impression of Cage doing one of the key speeches from the series. Later in the set a quote from Lord Of War actually site quite poignantly along the music; “There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other eleven?” Genuinely wonderful. I ask the frontman where the concept came from and he said they had the idea driving back from an Elvana gig – true or not, Nic-Cage Against The Machine demonstrate why you should definitely act on your ideas, no matter how out there they may seem.
Elvana are one of those bands that I always want to check out at a festival but they always end up in my clashes, so I’m pretty excited to see if they live up to the hype. No doubt about it, they’re an incredibly polished group, clearly a lot of time and effort has gone into working the elements of Nirvana and Elvis Presley into each other. The set starts slightly weirdly, with someone coming out to announce that Elvis is unwell and the show is cancelled, which gets a weird response from the audience, unsure that this is their first skit of the night, setting the tone of the next ninety minutes. With that, the band run out on stage, followed by the king himself, with a zimmer frame, which gets abandoned a few seconds in – given the swagger of their frontman I’m glad it’s just a bit and he gets to prowl the stage, and later the crowd, with the charisma of Presley. When working through a run of Nirvana songs the band sound genuinely excellent – the guitarist has absolutely nailed the tone, they perform at the perfect level where it’s tight but still loose enough to sound like Nirvana playing live. It’s the novelty that takes this beyond being a straight up tribute though; their frontman acknowledges that he rarely sounds like Elvis and, well, yes, that’s true, he doesn’t. It doesn’t really matter though, the attitude is right and visually it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.
The bits where they combine both bands work really well – A Little Less Conversation goes perfectly with Smells Like Teen Spirit which, predictably, goes down incredibly with the audience! Heartbreak Hotel with the guitar parts from Lithium also create a wonderful effect. During the costume changes (did I mention Elvis has multiple outfits? Of course he does!) the rest of the band hold down the fort, the backing vocalists taking the lead for a cover of Breed. The crowd interaction is good too – at one point Elvis is out in the crowd posing for selfies with the audience while still singing but later in the set he manages to get a circle pit going, which I’m genuinely impressed by in the context of the evening.
With the set getting close to the end, we’re treated to a cover of Viva Las Vegas, giving the Elvis part of the name a good outing. There’s a good sing along during the chorus amongst a crowd largely grinning from ear to ear. In many ways this isn’t like a normal gig, certainly there are very few faces I recognise from shows on the local scene, it’s more theatrical, with as much emphasis on the performance part as the music. That’s not to downplay the music, of course, the band are excellent and the mashup elements work brilliantly, as you’d hope from a band as well travelled and with a reputations like Elvana, it’s just between the outfits, the bits between songs and the interactions with the audience; this is entertainment, and damn are they good at it.