Review by Steve Bennett

Proof that you can get away with pretty much anything if your tongue is embedded far enough in your cheek, Dave Eastgate could be a fairly standard musical comedian, even down to doing tired lyric-swap parodies, were it not for his appealingly cheeky stage presence.

His shtick is that he should be an arena-filling rock and roll star, so the realities of a Monday-night room in Melbourne aren’t quite what he expected; yet still he perseveres with the high-octane performance until it becomes abundantly clear his dreams are not being realised. Just where are those pole-dancers and pyrotechnics?

Those altered lyrics are audaciously ridiculous, with Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl? painfully mutated into a pensioner singing Are You Going To Bingo, Shirl? and Eastgate daring you not to laugh at the gall of it.

But he also has songs of his own, for example combining what he professes are his two main spheres of interest: skin cancer awareness and gangsta rap – again, the sheer stupidity of the concept proves the joke, no matter what happens in the track itself.

Not all the songs quite come off. The heart sinks when he announces one about Facebook – and true enough, he joins the graveyard full of comics who’ve failed to find anything funny in the subject beyond the word ‘poke’ – while his show-stoppper listing various euphemisms for breasts is as easy and lazy as American comic Stephen Lynch’s song that fulfils the exact-same brief.

But Eastgate’s banter between the songs is far more endearing, whether wittily demeaning overdeveloped bodybuilders or heaping scorn on the backwards town of Caboolture, best known for producing Keith Urban and teenage pregnancies. The starting points for these routines aren’t always strikingly original, but he brings a mischievous skill to their telling.

Don’t scratch the surface too deeply, but Eastgate certainly produces a solid hour of pub-rock frolics.

Review date: 7 Apr 2010
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett