★★★★★

Review by Tony Frame. Venue 14. Gilded Balloon Teviot – Nightclub @ 20:30

Grant Busé saunters onto the stage with his acoustic guitar and his long sandy-coloured (and slightly curly) hair, wearing a purple shirt that has what can only be described as a ‘90s bus-seat-fabric splashed across it. It’s beautiful. He looks like he’s just strolled off the beach from the Home and Away set from his native Australia, and now, now he’s going to just chill with us and sing us some songs. That’s what it feels like twenty seconds into the show. Except Grant’s never been on Home and Away or to Summer Bay, nope. But he’s been on Neighbours though (a couple of times in fact), and no, he wasn’t the reason it got cancelled before you ask. But don’t you just miss that theme tune…Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours, with a little understanding—okay enough!

I’ll stop my rendition of the Neighbours theme tune right there as it has nothing to do with Grant’s show, but it does serve a purpose for my point, as his show is about nostalgia. From the moment his opening song had finished he had the audience’s nostalgic juices fully flowing, and some of them were even dripping…like a Calippo Ice Lolly melting in the summer sun.

His show takes you back to the era of dial-up internet, of not having the ability to watch movies on demand, when the video store was a mecca on a Saturday night, when musicians played instruments and didn’t sound like auto-tuned robots, of family memories and everything in-between from the ‘90s onward.

The beauty of the show is that it’s not just Grant reciting a list of the things we miss; he does stand-up routines about them, he incorporates them into his own songs and makes hilariously witty observations, there’s sing-alongs too (with the audience) which adds a gig-like atmosphere, and then there was the brilliantly funny (proper belly-laughs) segment with an audience member, which was beautifully incorporated and handled by the charismatic Aussie comedian.

This was a night of comedy, cabaret and music that left everyone buzzing and on cloud nine afterwards. And then there was an encore! Oh boy, was there an encore all right! I could go on and on about this fantastically funny and entertaining show which has been one of the highlights of my Fringe so far, so go and see it, it’s a memory just waiting to be made.