THE GRAND SLAMBOVIANS – Gandalf Murphy And The Slambovian Circus Of Dreams – Live Review

West End Centre, Aldershot -1 June 2012

I tried to discover if this is a permanent name change and received the sort of answer you always get from a Slambovian – polite, detailed and revealing absolutely nothing.

This was the band’s second tour gig with new drummer Eric Puente, a player of the early Gerry Conway school – not that Tony Zuzulo was a shrinking violet. Joziah Longo’s fist-bumping with the band and ritual “good luck everybody” was perhaps rather more apt than usual. A Slambovian set-list is usually merely a series of guidelines but Joziah was actually rather restrained, probably for Eric’s sake, and although there were alternatives actually written down he didn’t go off on any flights of fancy apart from a verse of the ‘The Motorcycle Song’ before they started the encores. Even so, there were a couple of on-stage seminars as they discussed a number.

This show was core Slambovia as they mixed old and new songs, opening with ‘The Grand Slambovians’, ‘Sunday In The Rain’ and ‘I’m Very Happy Now’. The latter was described by Joziah as a cross between The Ramones and Donovan which is a pretty good description of the band’s music come to think of it. There were the greatest hits like ‘Talking To The Buddha’ which gives Sharkey McEwen the chance to show what he can do as does their final encore, ‘Look Ma No Hands’. There was a new song which may be called ‘I’m Not Ready’ and obviously The Grand Slambovians provided a lot of material but so did Flapjacks From The Sky. Their last song was ‘Alice In Space’ from their debut album and there was a feeling that they had looked upon the line-up change to expand their live repertoire. The sound balance was immaculate, I should add: Tink Lloyd’s ukulele has to be audible over Sharkey’s Les Paul and it was.

The looseness and the impression that the Slambovians were having as good a time as we were was infectious and after the show lots of people were talking to each other as if they were old friends. The band always talk to the audience in the interval and afterwards anyway and the idea catches on. Probably because I was fairly obviously wielding a notebook and camera people assumed I was in the know and were asking me questions and enthusing about the band – a slightly surreal experience. My message to them was simple: “spread the word”.

Dai Jeffries

See the full photo set below:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/daijeffries/sets/72157630009903506/

Artist Web link: http://www.slambovia.com/