Review by Steve Bennett

Benny Davis was one of the members of Axis Of Awesome (which surely makes him a Co-ordinate Of Awesome) – the Australian musical comedy trio best known for their viral hit Four Chords, which demonstrated just how many pop classics you could make from a simple base.

Whenever he asks however the group came up with that idea, Davis always answers the same... making it absolutely clear that it was HIM who came up with the idea. For it seems like he’s something of a musical Rain Man, able to hear patterns in the melodies but often deaf to the lyrics.

It means that if he’s heard something once, he can play it, which stood him in excellent stead when he was a busker, doing requests. His pitch was the Kings Cross nightclub district of Sydney, so picked up a lot of Nineties dance tunes, brilliantly captured in the melodica megamix which gets his hour of to a rollicking start.

Yet for all the clever things he can play, Davis gets the first applause break for recreating the sound of the Countdown clock. Simple things...

Inventive mashups are his forte, however: One Direction, Mozart, Eminem, the Dexter theme, Eurythmics and nursery rhymes are just some of the tracks that get fed into his musical sausage-machine for amusing new concoctions to emerge out of the other end. OK, so this is more fun than funny – and putting old backbeats to new raps is pretty much what the past 15 years of hit music has been built upon – but for sheer entertainment value, it’s a blast.

There’s a redux version of Four Chords, then Davis puts his Human Jukebox monicker to the test with a finale, when he tries to crash as many random audience suggestions into one long DJ-style set as possible, and pulls it off remarkably well. He’s not just a human jukebox, but a one-man party machine.

Review date: 9 Aug 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett