Showbags Music

Images from Showbags Trash The Eighties show at PINK . Armen’s lighting tricks are on display and the rope light around the stage, as you can see, is a great effect. 

AM, JJ and Bunny
PINK Stage
Bunny and Armen's lighting

Soundtracks

Picking songs for our shows was difficult, even after we worked out the formula; anthems, comedy and self-satire. At stake was 8 weeks or so of rehearsal time, a trio of costumes and having to come up with a replacement after opening night announced a song was falling flat.

We’d arrived at a formula that was, a banger of an opening, followed by a slower energy, followed by a comedy bit, then something to pull the audience back to spectacle, followed by an ‘anthem’ finale. (anthems are songs such as Xanadu which always fill a dance floor and where everyone knows the words).

Through the shows we had a few ‘clangers’ but purely by luck one replacement worked out very well. We did ‘Teddy Bears Picnic’ by John Inman, and to say we “heard crickets” was an understatement. We were puzzled but ran it a second week. The response was the same. No they didn’t much like this song. So we had to do it a third week whilst we worked a replacement. The replacement “Groove is in the Heart” was a reworked version of the song from our first show. Suddenly the whole show became a unified piece. After that our ‘formula’ became rather flexible!

Chasers

We called the musical interludes between numbers as ‘chasers’. These were 30-60 second edits of sound clips mixed to create a theme, which then led into the next song. For example, the chaser for Kylie’s “Step Back in Time” included the Dr Who theme.

Chasers gave us the time needed to change costumes and get back on stage before the audience got bored. Our lighting man, Armen enjoyed it though, giving the audience all the available lights whilst we were frantically changing backstage. 

Similarly we tried to relate our chasers to our memories, hopefully good memories. For example we loved The Muppets and we used television themes often.

Here are some of the Showbags chasers.

Groove is in the Heart:
A retro chaser for a neo-retro favourite. Our first chaser in our first show. This was in our first show and we repeated it in Show 4 when our ‘comedy’ number fell flat and we needed a quick replacement.

Chicken Dance::
This used the cliche of ‘chicks’ to start with a song called ‘The Stripper’. (chicks-chickens). All our chasers had similarly strange and corny connections to the songs. That voice at the end is the actual Colonel Sanders voice from the one and only recording he did for a KFC radio spot.

History Repeating:
An edit of ‘Anything Goes’ from the Indian Jones film leading into Shirley Bassey. The connection of course being ‘In olden days’ and then ‘history repeating

Manamana: 
This is the only chaser we repeated and we used it before our ‘comedy’ pieces. The audience was entertained by GuyDJ doing the voices in the DJ booth, until he found out he was being watched and being shy at the time, his performances stopped.

And finally, some nostalgia. Our overture was “The Avengers” theme and we used it to open all our shows. A lot of fans were already seated on the carpet in front of the stage waiting for 11 o’clock always!) and as the Overture began, people would flood into the show room filling it up with a wall of people. One week the crowd had almost doubled from the week before and the roar of the crowd as we sprang on to stage after the overture was so startling – we’d never been in that position before –  that Jess, Linda and I all lost our concentration and stuffed up the opening choreography

.
The Showbags Overture