Top Shelf Jazz

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“Les Enfants Déspicable”,

Direct from Lucifer’s drinks cabinet!

Unmatched in all Europe, This is the Indy-Vaudeville band! All style and louche content: The Top Shelf deliver their own stomping, original tunes, subversive showmanship and miscreant musicality, inciting revelry and irreverent fun where ever they play. A ‘Tour de farce!’, trawling high decadence. The band has shouldered the promethean task of bringing an old-school style back to a popular form. In the process, creating an exclusive genre, distilling their eloquent, gritty spirit and improbable influences into weapons grade.

“Filthy Swing’’

Goodtime profanity. An illicit club. Back-bar Bohemia. A Wicked pleasure. Forbidden fruit. A deviant mash-up of Cab Calloway, The Bonzo Dogs & Queen! An exclusive, rip-roaring, pornographic-pantomime, VIP after-party experience. A band already bridging the mainstream, the underground and the positively “Avante-Gaga”! An open secret: Visual, visceral & often savagely funny. They are adored by a select & rabidly howling number of intrepid music lovers, top Cabaret performers, legendary entertainers, world famous singers and Royalty! The swashbuckling & suave wrongness of The Top Shelf has brought them critical acclaim, reverence, loose women and not a little enmity. They have replaced Jools Holland in his absence, closed Glasto 2011, were hired by Mark Ronson (over cocktails & flu-remedy) and have already supported Paloma Faith, Kid Creole & Lana Del Ray. We won’t bore you with a list of places they’ve been asked to leave. But if you need to know, send an e-mail request. The band has cut its own dark path from international obscurity to celebrated ill-repute. By subversion and inspired confusion, they have tapped the more sinister veins of Jazz, Cabaret, rock, pop and folk genres, cutting it with Rock’n’Roll Stage Front & their Devilish Charm. The band’s music is lewdly endowed with classic themes of betrayal, romance, dark passions, revenge, Brazilian waxing & the dying art of letter writing.

Dirty hot licks & future classics, available for weddings, bar brawls & children’s parties…

Arthur Foxaque, ‘The Great Offendi’, is the band’s heroically ribald frontman, self-forged in the unforgiving flames of festivals and murky back-street clubs. A fiendish Gatsby-esque figure from whose coarse pen the band’s original songs have flown like moonshine gin. Foxaque flamboyantly conducts the artistic (mis)direction with delicious delusion. Songs of the high life in low places!

F*** Jazz! Welcome to the Gilded Gutter of The Top Shelf band!

“Impeccable swing tunes are served up with obscene lyrics, a diabolic mash-up of Terry-Thomas & Al Bowlly.”
Ben Chu, The Independent Newspaper

“Whatever keeps Foxaque off the stage is a great victory for social reformers, but a dreadful loss to London.”
C.J. Lazaretti, The Erotic Review

Highlights & Low Joints
2013
Secret Garden Party; Beaumaris Arts Festival; Brighton Fringe Festival; Troyfest

2012
Bacardi’s 150th Anniversary Celebrations; Privately hired by Charlotte Church (Twice!); Private booking supporting Lana Del Ray (Venice); The Welsh Proms; The Big Dance (Norwich); Give! Festival (Sussex); Cardiff Bay Festival; Marrakech (private booking);

2011
Blysh Festival (Cardiff); Royal Wedding reception party (Rome); Oxford Jazz Festival; Glastonbury Festival (closing band) Bourbon Street Jazz & Blues; Peppermint Candy & Jazz FM; Buskerbus Street Festival (Poland); Balboa Castle Camp (Germany);

2010
Park Lane Ballroom supporting Kid Creole; The Micca Club (Rome); History! - the 1st band to have played all 3 stages at The Royal Albert Hall; Replaced absent Jools Holland (private event); The Big Chill; Blysh Festival (Cardiff); Bath Fringe Festival; Kendal Calling Festival; Old Duke Jazz Festival; Royal Albert Hall ‘In Full Swing’ Festival

2009
Brighton Fringe Festival; Beautiful Days Festival; Linz Pflasterspektakel (Austria);

2008
Jazz Lounge @ Glastonbury Festival (opening band); Linz Pflasterspektakel (Austria); Villach Strassenkunst Festival (Austria); Bastille night, Finistere (France); The Old Duke Jazz Festival (Bristol); Cardiff Jazz Festival; Paul O’Grady’s Book Launch party at Café de Paris

2007
Pontypool Jazz in the Park Festival; Linz Pflasterspektakel (Austria); Fête de la Musique (Bretagne); Melbourne International Comedy Festival (Australia)

2006
Bath Fringe Festival; Edinburgh Fringe Festival; Buskerbus (Poland); La Ghironda (Italy)

2005
Festival De Rua (Brazil) ; Buskerbus (Poland) ;

2004
Buskerbus (Poland) ; La Ghironda (Italy)

They have also made beasts of themselves at:
Café de Paris; The Penderyn Whiskey launch; Hendrick’s Gin Events; Le Quecumbar; The Whoopee Club; The Royal Albert Hall; The Arts Club (Mayfair); The Coal Exchange (Cardiff); Bethnal Green Working Mens’ Club; The Nightjar; The Last Tuesday Society; The Berlin Gutter Scene; Snaresbrook Crown Court; Prohibition Party; Blitz Party; Bush Hall; ‘Gypsy Hotel’; The Village Underground; Camden Centre; Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen; The Millenium Opera House (Cardiff); St. David’s Hall (Cardiff); The Cake Walk Café; Burgh Island Hotel; ‘Stranger Than Paradise’; The Jamboree; Dingwalls; Bloomsbury Ballroom; Vaudeville Rave; Shoreleave

"Istanbul"

"Correspondent"