Review: H&TH at The Ritz Club Burnham-on-Sea
Thursday 19th February 2009

by Dominic Wills

At first you wonder what the hell is going on. The band onstage - a man in a battered hat, another man in leather strides, and a well-built woman in the loudest, tightest costume you've ever seen - clearly have little in common with the bearded veterans and straight-outta-college prodigies we've all grown so used to.

The music starts, a dotty plinking of keyboard, and the man in the hat fixes us with a suspicious glare, regaling us with a cautionary tale of studied madness - Walter de la Nightmare, indeed. The audience is squirming, not knowing how to take it. Some giggle, but nervously, unsure if the people onstage are genuinely disturbed. You mustn't laugh at the genuinely disturbed. Most sit staring, a little fearful, no longer snug in their musical comfort zone.

Then the band gets going. The man in the hat produces a ukulele and a driving strum, the man in the strides delivers an insistent, rolling bass-groove. The woman, her hair an electrified fright-wig, her expression veering between the bemused, the horrified and the homicidal, wiggles and jives with clumsy enthusiasm, like a blonde Magenta from The Rocky Horror Show. At first you think she's terrible, a gawky loon, only gradually coming to understand that she is, in fact, possessed of uncommon comic flair. She's also a fine flautist lending pretty melodies to the man in the hat's twisted tales.

There's a feeling of Vaudeville here, and a happy hint of the B-52's. There's wit, bravado and precision. There's also a strong scent of Victorian institutions, a whiff of Bedlam. When the woman with the hair dances with the man in the hat you can't help but think of Carnival Of Souls. Others have trod this path - Vivian Stanshall, Edward Barton, The Very Things - and it's a delight to find that the road less travelled is travelled still.

Harry & The Hecklers are an unusually entertaining band, excellent musicians, their songs funny, fried and heartfelt. The audience demanded that they return to the stage, and they did, playing till they'd run out of songs. Then they were gone in true vaudevillian style - leaving them wanting more.