Curtis Eller’s American Circus – 40th Anniversary Month

Curtis Eller is a banjo player, songwriter, and rock & roll singer. The beloved show business veteran started his career at the age of seven as a juggler and acrobat, but has since turned to the banjo because that’s where the money is. The iconoclastic troubadour has spent thirty years relentlessly touring the burlesque houses, beer halls, underground theatres, and punk rock sh*tholes of North American, Europe, and Australia, where his legendary shows once earned him the title, “New York’s angriest yodeling banjo player”.

His band, The American Circus, has developed a devoted international following based on spellbinding stage performances that combine an unsettling vision of American history with silent film style, physical comedy, and explosive rock & roll energy. The band has released a string of strange and compelling, phonograph recordings that present a dreamlike vision of American history where all points in time have collapsed into one. Fans of past recordings have come to expect a hallucinatory, historical landscape populated by corrupt 19th century politicians, faded Hollywood stars, two-bit prize fighters and frequent, inexplicable visits from Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon. The ever-evolving cast of musicians spares no effort in their quest to bring Eller’s historically evocative compositions to vivid, cinematic life.

“A moustachioed, New York, yodelling banjo player, Eller sings for the unsung, rump-shakes for the ne’er remembered, and leg trembles for histories forgotten. He is a theatre of movement: a twitching, twirling time machine whose songs transport you back to the lost annals of history”

“Curtis Eller is a born eccentric, a throwback to a bygone age of Vaudevillian minstrel entertainment, Buster Keaton-esque slapstick humour & circus clowning, boxing rings & showgirls but all delivered with a  contemporary street attitude; a song & dance man for our times”