It’s an expanded band – at the core are the Bonzos - Neil Innes, Roger Ruskin Spear, Rodney Slater, “Legs” Larry Smith, Sam Spoons, Vernon Dudley Bohay Nowell and Bob Kerr. But there’s a four piece rhythm section (including Andy Roberts) and fronting on guitar and occasional vocals is former World Party bassist, session man to the stars and sometime Bootleg Beatle David Catlin-Birch. He takes on some of the Viv Stanshall crooning parts very well, like song number two, ‘By a waterfall’, where the Slater/Ruskin Spear/Kerr brass section also announce their intention to play – watched with great pleasure, by the rest of the band. There’s a lot of watching going on – you can see the faces of the whole band, taught with tension and the fear of impending doom every time Ruskin Spear takes on one of his gadgets (and he has trouser-press, Theremin leg, robots, electric torsos – the whole bloody lot except the famous wah-wah rabbits) melt into grins of delight when they all work. At the side of the stage (when they’re not performing) Adrian Edmondson and Phil Jupitus, who’ve been on the whole tour, have their eyes glued on the band. And there’s a lot of pleasure in their own performance – hysterical laughter as Bohay-Nowell camps up ‘Falling in love again’, and when Kerr and Sam Spoons perform the ventriloquist routine on ‘Little Sir Echo’ – “I was laughing so much I couldn’t hold the camera still’ said the Photographer. If you want to know what Jupitus thought about it then you can read his tour diary, all laughter, tears and more laughter.
At the Astoria the set was divided into the trad-jazz half and the rock and roll half. Here the songs are matched and mixed to much better effect. And Innes is relieved of the pressure of doing so many of the vocals (difficult for him as he has a fairly one dimensional voice) by Catlin-Birch, a far more prominent “Legs” Larry Smith (‘Jollity Farm’, ‘Monster Mash’) and Edmondson, who in addition to reprising his ‘I’m bored’ and ‘The strain’, and the brilliant ‘My pink half of the drainpipe’ introduced the second half with a full version of ‘We are normal’ and later dueted with Ruskin-Spear on a near-perfect ‘Trouser press’.