Dave Stewart is having the time of his life, or maybe he has always had a very good time? At the last minute I got a ticket for the Eurythmics co-founder’s show at the El Rey on Friday night, and although I didn’t know what to expect – it was mysteriously billed as ‘VaVoom… A Rock & Roll Circus’— I had a blast! What a colorful, surprising and amazing show! Stewart has reinvented rock show as old-Paris cabaret, he has re-imagined performance as spectacle with a capital S… after seeing this, everyone pretending to have revived rock shows, has a serious problem. What I witnessed on Friday was a rock concert intertwined with a succession of circus acts, acrobats, contortionists, poll dancers, exhibitionists, with clowns or little red devils popping up in the middle of a vaudeville scene or a burlesque comedy, and there was so much going on at the same time, so many colorful characters on stage at the same time that I couldn’t follow!
Honestly, Lucha VaVoom is the bomb! It was an action pack filled with hot and sexy girls who surrounded Dave Stewart all night long, providing crowd pleasing entertainment with enough steamy and provocative visions to titillate a reaction from the west coast to the east coast. Yeah there was some nudity involved and nobody was complaining! Plus Dave had an all-female army of guests, singing Eurythmics’ classics or covering the Beatles and the Stones, what else could you ask for? The legendary songwriter has probably wanted to be this circus master for some times, after all in 2012 he relesed, ‘The Ringmaster General’, nicknamed given to him by his friends.
After a cabaret number – the dancer had such a way of shaking her buttocks! – and a French chanteuse, who covered Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ while going through a large picture frame held by clowns, sparkling Dave Stewart arrived on stage, playing bass drum and surrounded by his troupe of vibrant characters, who may have found some inspirations in some imaginary Toulouse-Lautrec-meets-Mark-Ryden’s paintings. Dave and his menagerie opened with Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’, and looking around, I thought I may effectively have been loaded myself! It was as if the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s was coming alive under the direction of some outrageous Italian film maker, I spotted some giant chickens, bizarre S &M-ish twins, high boots bikini girls and other freaky circus characters.
I knew very little about Dave Stewart’s solo career post-Eurythmics, and he gave us a taste of his work with songs off his 2011 ‘The Blackbird Diaries’, his 2012 ‘The Ringmaster General’, and his very recent one ‘Lucky Numbers’; there wasn’t any electronic vibe in all this, rather a giant straightforward rock & roll, rhythms & blues direction with well-crafted Stones/Clapton-esque songs, and some superb renditions of them with horn and string sections, a bluesy harmonica, backup singers and an authentic punch. I couldn’t not notice the phrase, ‘parlez vous francais’ during the song ‘The Gypsy Girl and Me’ and that was the second time of the night we were hearing French, as the Piaf-like singer had spoken to the crowd in French at the beginning of the show … Ha! Would Dave Stewart have a thing for my native language? However, I must admit I was not focusing much on the lyrics when there was so much to see all the time. While he was dedicating a more quiet song to his wife who was in the audience, adding ‘it was time to bring some delicate personal stuff’, a poll dancer was flying above his head, and during his song ‘Drugs Taught me a Lesson’, a contortionist popped out of giant plastic pill, and slowing removed her glasses, her gloves, to end up totally naked while dancing in front of Dave’s guitar, only wearing some green lights flashing at the top of her nipples! His very talented daughter Kaya came on stage wrapped with a butterfly-wing silver cape and sang the Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ while two female acrobats were performing aerial hoop, and then came a series of Eurythmics’ covers with some top-notch singers: Grace Potter (of Grace and the Nocturnals) emerged to sing ‘Here Comes The Rain’, Rita D’albert from Lucha Vavoom, who was wearing a Stones giant shirt and behaving like a female Jagger, sent everyone in sex heaven during a hot dance with a hula hoop androgynous dancer while singing ‘I Need a Man’… the temperature had suddenly raised up to ten more degrees and it wasn’t the first time it had happened. Kaya came back for a badass version of ‘Missionary Man’, and Vanessa Amorosi, who was singing like a red-haired Aretha Franklin, appeared several times to do The Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’ and Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams’, … you have to forgive me if I mix things up, there was so much going on, so many people walking around and swinging in the air that it was very hard to keep track. Also Rita D’albert came back for an explosive cover of the Runaways’ ‘Cherry Bomb’ just after Vanessa Amorosi’s powerful rendition of ‘Would I Lie to You’, yeah my head was spinning! One thing is sure,… I hadn’t listened to these Eurythmics’ songs for a long time, and they are still damn effective live.
I read that Lucha VaVOOM, along with Dave and Liz Fairbairn, co- creator and producer Rita D’Albert was referred to Stewart by a friend when he was looking for a magician’s assistant for his bizarre web TV show, The Ringmaster, and I suppose he got sold on the legendary Mexican masked wrestling and burlesque troupe (Rita and the troupe are already featured in his video for ‘Every Single Night’). With his black top hat and glittering face, he truly was a mad ringmaster staying true to his crazy vision of rock n’ roll circus intertwined with decadence and psychedelia. Did he dream all this? I don’t know but it was a trippy and astonishing experience, the first ever in the genre and a real treat for us Angelinos,… take this SXSW!
For more pictures of the show go here.
