Parkes – Day 5 – Forbes

Steve got picture uploads working again! YAY! Thanks Steve!

Well on Rocky and Habib’s suggestion, we decided to book a couple of tickets for the one remaining show at the Leagues Club. At $40 a ticket, we got one of the few remaining tickets, to what was to be the 4th sell out show of Mark Andrew – see http://www.markandrew.com.au for info. He started out quiet slowly. Did a bit of Dean Martin, Buddy Holly, Tom Jones and for us it was okay, but then he moved on to the shagadelic Austin Powers followed by John Travolta, and then he did almost half the show as Elvis.

Tom Jones

Apart from a couple of classics, most of his songs were his later 70s numbers, most of which I wasn’t familiar with, but it didn’t make a difference as he had the movements down pat, as well as an excellent voice rendition of Elvis. He then did the obligatory wiping the sweat from his brow, and then out came the assistant with a hand full of “Elvis” towels in which a crowd of females from 12 to 70 years of age, had started to gather at the foot of the stage and he wore one, sang a line, took it off and got a kiss from someone in the audience. It was so funny.

There were also a great number of disabled people in attendance. He apparently regularly visits disabled and senior citizens groups in Melbourne. There was one downs guy, who was obviously a huge fan, and he was dancing for the remainder of the show down in front of the stage. Mark, sorry, Elvis, invited him up onto the stage to join him for his last couple of songs. He copied every action he did so Mark ended up handing him the microphone. It was such a great laugh and he got a huge round of applause at the end when he finally left the stage. I’m not much of an Elvis fan, but having listened to at least 30-40 of his most popular songs at least a dozen times or more over the course of the 5 days, I have to say I really did get sick of listening to the songs, and enjoyed the event overall.

Mark is about to tour the country and is coming to Perth. So if you’re passing, you wont be disappointed. The show is really well lit, really well choreographed with both two dancers (who have about 12 costume changes alone) two backup singers, a keyboard player, two guitarists, a sax/flautist, trumpeter and trombonist. They mostly sounded like a 20 piece band. They were really powerful, a combination of great players and excellent mixing from the audio expert. It was a really professional show. Apart from being about 30kgs lighter than Elvis must have been in his later Vegas years, you’d swear you were in Vegas as it was such a professional show. Look out for it!

We got out of the show at 5pm and the town was deserted. It appeared the event ended mid afternoon. The stage was already being dismantled, the stalls were mostly packed up and left and the town looked like a ghost had hit it!

We decided we should be heading on to Tamworth as someone mentioned it started next weekend. Given we’d had such an interesting time at Elvis, we thought we’d check Tamworth out. We headed to Parkes’ next door neighbour. Forbes, on our way to Cowra as we’d heard some great things from Wayne and Sharon about it…