It’s hard to know how to feel leaving Benjamin Bloom’s show. Named after his album, Weird and Wonderful shows that Bloom and his band are very much speaking about themselves. Obviously drawing influence from 70s/80s arena rockers like Queen and AC/DC, Bloom puts on a show that is completely incongruous with his band’s surroundings.
Playing to ten to twenty people with a band consisting of a drummer, bassist, and piano player, Bloom handles himself on stage as if he were playing to a sold out crowd at Wembley in ‘86. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it is jarring and odd to see Bloom stand behind his piano with his mic lifted to the ceiling and his head down.
Before the oddity of the gig even starts, Bloom, dressed in a Beetlejuice-like black and white striped jacket with coat tails stands behind a piano with a model brain on it, face obscured by wavy brown hair.The main thing that comes to mind is the question, how would ‘Space Oddity’ or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ have fared if they had been performed on stage in a bar with half the necessary members? Much of the show uses a pre-recorded track of synth and other instruments, and in close quarters, moments of theatricality and grandeur seem out of place. Moments of grandeur like extended bass, drum, and piano solos over pre-recorded backing tracks. Moments of theatricality like Bloom pretending his hand is out of control in the middle of the song ‘Out of Control,’ or standing at his piano and holding up the model brain and singing ‘Welcome to my mind.’ Or perhaps the incongruity simply comes from the fact that the show comes with a narrative that is so terribly odd.The set list has an intermittent narration between some of its songs, explaining a story of a patriarchal system which brainwashes its citizens, and prompts a little girl to start an uprising of women. ‘We are at war,’ a woman on the recorded narration says before Bloom launches into a song which makes use of the incredible portmanteau ‘Apocalypstick’. Eventually, the last man on earth plays a 5-minute piano solo and the leader of the women decides ‘Only together can we advance/Only together, this is our chance/Only together can we succeed/Only together, that’s guaranteed.’Clearly, the lyrics are not great, and the music isn’t very inventive, but Bloom seems aware of that. He knows it’s a bit ridiculous, he wants it that way. That seems to be what ‘Weird and Wonderful’ is all about. He’s so committed to that idea that it’s hard not to be entertained by all of it. Weird and Wonderful is a show completely out of touch with Bloom’s relative anonymity, and an incredibly strange show of rather uninteresting music, yet I left with a smile on my face.
