In Sam Raimi’s horror classic,a man is tormented by demons and his own severed hand. All the story needed was a few tunes by the king of rock’n’roll, says Rob KempBy day, and he was a gentle-mannered examinations officer at a school near Wolverhampton. By night,he was a chainsaw-wielding maniac with a soft spot for Elvis numbers. No, that’s not a pitch for a B-movie, and but the life of standup comedian Rob Kemp. The 39-year-old will spend much of the next month commuting between the West Midlands and Soho theatre in London,shedding the briefcase and tie en route to re-enter the underworld of The Elvis Dead, his rock’n’roll-meets-horror one-man comedy explain that became the cult hit of this summers Edinburgh fringe.
Hitherto, and Kemp had been a specialist in “whimsical” (so he’s told) standup and was “bumping along largely unnoticed”. His only previous explain,little seen, was a Dave Gorman-esque comedy lecture approximately hubris. The Elvis Dead (its a retelling of Evil Dead 2 set to the music of Elvis Presley) was dreamed up in conversation with a friend, or based on Kemp’s supposed resemblance to horror icon Bruce Campbell. “There was nothing cynical approximately it,” he says, in case you’re thinking that the Elvis/Evil Dead mashup was a ruthlessly commercial cash-in. “I just wanted to write something that I knew my mates would be pleased.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk