The satirical duo Cassetteboy are renowned for digital mash-ups that subvert figures in the public eye by cut-and-pasting snippets of TV footage with a forensic eye and ear for detail and surgical levels of skill and sophistication. Their live show, however, is something else entirely.
The pair of Mark Bolton and Steve Warlin have attracted tens of millions of views on YouTube for their knowing, slickly remixed cultural commentaries which fall between the barbed media satire of Chris Morris and the slapstick surrealism of Vic and Bob. By contrast, the template for their live ‘comedy disco’ gigs appears to be Harry Hill’s TV Burp.
Abetted by an MC in a tracksuit named DJ Rubbish, Bolton and Warlin manipulate a laptop in comedy masks as blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em images flicker across big screens behind them. Dot Cotton lauds Justin Bieber; chuckling ITN newsreaders present a guide to Airstrikes for Dummies; a cartoon Rio Ferdinand dances on the sand to Duran Duran’s Rio.
The humour is more broad-brush than the digital surgery of their online offerings, but Bolton and Warlin revisit their arch remix of The Apprentice that drew six million viewers to YouTube to watch Sir Alan Sugar barking ‘bloody!’ like a Tourette’s sufferer. The lyrics to New Order’s Blue Monday scroll beneath the screen on the Jeremy Kyle Show; Sir David Attenborough murmurs an anthropological commentary to feral scenes from Booze Britain.
Cassetteboy’s finest moment remains their meticulous mash-up of five separate David Cameron Conservative Party conference speeches (“We have the bravery/ To bring back slavery!”) and they end the night with one of the pair, in a pig head, miming fellatio on the other, in a mask of the PM, to the strains of Gettin’ Piggy with It. They must play an awful lot of student rag weeks.
