Richard Cheese

We’d “umm-ed” and “ah-ed” about getting tickets to this gig, but are very pleased now that we did  - what a great night!

We’ve been listening to Richard Cheese and his “Lounge Against the Machine” band for a good few years and often play their tracks on the radio and to friends to show how clever his stuff is – he is the original lounge / swing artist to do covers of pop and rock songs, and he is just brilliant at it. He manages to transpose the tune perfectly from a fast metal beat into a slow swing and then when he sings and you can actually hear the original lyrics it is just hilarious.

We’d heard about the gig after reading that Richard Cheese was playing at the royal wedding. We thought this was brilliant news and showed that the couple were a bit more down to earth than we’d thought. Dick was also advertising that they were recording a live CD there – which promised swearing and all! We were very excited about this prospect, but seeing the cost of tickets to their only UK gig (well, only UK gig that we were going to be able to go to!) we weren’t too sure. It was over 50 quid to be downstairs, but these tickets were soon sold out. Upstairs at the Kentish Town Forum and it was still 30 quid for unreserved seating and standing. That’s more than we pay for downstairs at most gigs and with this we’d be pretty far away. Obviously we decided to go for it in the end and the deciding factor was that as we weren’t going to Vegas in the near future this would be our only chance to see him.

 

He was as outrageous and rude as we’d hoped and he kept the songs coming – sometimes he’d only play the first verse and chorus of a song before going onto the next one. He had some great lines for the crowd though; when one guy started calling out songs and basically heckling, Dick Cheese replied “Sir, it’s OK. I have created what we call a ‘set list’ so we know what songs we’re going to play to save you the trouble of calling them out!” There were times when he took the mic and got down from the stage to wander around the audience. We’d managed to get pretty good seats for what we paid as they were in the first section of the balcony, but although we could have gone for second row here we went for sixth which was he only row with a backrest! Dick Cheese never made it up to the balcony but we managed to see most of what he was up to down below.

The evening progressed with top songs, Dick Cheese getting ever more drunk and rude words getting ever more prevalent (in the songs and his chatter). A note has to go out to the band though who were also just brilliant. It was so simple – a keyboard player, drummer and guy on bass. The bass player seemed the pro and he was pretty cool about the whole thing. The keyboard player though was having the time of his life and really getting into the tracks and the buzz of a London date after 7 years. He played the prefect lounge notes and just ‘looked’ like a lounge player should do – but was playing along to an incredibly drunk (not uncommon) and rude singer! The drummer seemed to be the rookie and was chastised a few times for missing Dicks punch lines with a “boom, boom” which caused Dick to say “Are you even working tonight?”

It turned out that actually a second gig was being played in the UK as they were playing “late Friday night” at Sonarsphere festival that weekend. They’d requested this slot so that they could have dinner, go to a bar, go to a whore house, go to a bar, go to a casino, go to a bar for breakfast and then sound check and play….at 11.30am on Saturday morning! Metal!

Don’t leave it so long next time, Dick! (and you could charge a little less for your tickets if you want )

OK so the photo to kind of the guy in front of us’ head – but you can see Dick!