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Jasper Carrot: Stand Up and Rock

Jasper Carrot and the Bev Bevan band on tour. A superb evening of good humour, nostalgia and great sixties and seventies music. Not to be missed if you remember Funky Moped.

On Saturday evening, four of us went to the Wycombe Swan to see veteran stand-up comedian, Jasper Carrot and a bunch of his friends in a performance which mixed comedy and rock and roll nostalgia. Famously, Carrot’s best friend from his school days is Bev Bevan, the drummer from the Move and ELO and the two of them had drawn together a very talented group of musicians, some of whom were famous-ish faces from the sixties.

It was an excellent evening. Each half started with a stand-up routine from Jasper; good stuff, if a tad rude from time to time. And then we were treated to the best sixties and seventies cover band you could ever imagine. They covered everything from early Roy Orbison, to Elvis Costello, with songs by The Beatles, The Stones, Hendrix and Steeleye Span all getting an airing, too. Naturally enough, the last few songs and the encore were stompy, dancey songs from ELO. Great stuff.

The performance was livened by screens which showed nostalgic pictures of the bands they were covering along with shots of the musicians themselves,  back in the day.  This rather sums up the evening, actually, it was all about nostalgia, or perhaps ageing.

Jasper’s stand up routines talked about the problems of getting older and were all the funnier for being recognisable, to most of the audience. The band played old songs and joked about their age and forgetting things while we, in our fifties, may well have lowered the average age of the audience.

Mind you, the thing about musicians who have been playing for forty years or more is that they are very good at it! What they lack in youth, energy and swagger, they make up for in skill, in the ability to work together with other musicians and to entertain. They were blooming great.

If you once had long hair, loon pants, laughed at Funky Moped, but now have aches and pains and struggle to get out of bed in the morning, you won’t want to miss this evening. Go and see them while they are still on tour.

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