Edinburgh
graeme.thomson
Rick Redbeard has a pirate’s name and a voice like deep, dark water. Behind the colourful alter ego stands (or, as was the case last night, sits) Rick Anthony, singer of The Phantom Band, the Scottish six-piece whose two albums – Checkmate Savage and The Wants – have recently stretched the admittedly painfully limited parameters of contemporary rock music to thrilling extremes.The Phantom Band's sound is a manic tangle of folk, krautrock, doo-wop, post-rock, operatic excess and electro-pop kitsch. Anthony is not nearly as ambitious or eclectic when it comes to his own music, but the results Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There is a problem with every single Richard Thompson concert and it is one of omission. With a songbook to rival the best in the business, every triumphant rendition of one song comes tinged with the knowledge that some other gem has been elbowed out of the way to make room for it. If you’re not careful you can spend the entire night curating an alternative, shadow concert in your head while failing to enjoy the evidence of your own ears or eyes.There was a bit of that last night in Edinburgh. Perhaps a little more than usual. There were times, when the likes of “Sidney Wells” and “If Love Read more ...
graeme.thomson
What is truth? Is it fixed or fluid, personal or universal? Does it require hard evidence or merely faith? These are the areas of interest poked and prodded in this co-production between the Traverse and Peepolykus, the company which previously brought The Hound of the Baskervilles to the stage. The result is an eccentric romp through the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, a famously ridiculed figurehead for the spirit world in his later years, which ponders – none too deeply, but with immense good humour – the conflict between fideism and rationalism.Doyle’s story is presented here as an Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The idea of making the princely hero of Cinderella a preening, vacuous lead character from some BBC Three-style reality show is a good one. These days the notion of a smart, self-respecting young woman limiting her horizons by playing accessory to a standard-issue posh bloke is ripe for subversion. Best to turn the entire concept on its head and have a little fun with it.Which is precisely what Johnny McKnight’s retelling of the classic Cinderella story attempts, to sadly limited effect. It begins with a young Cinders scattering her Mum’s ashes around a blossom tree, and throughout is weighed Read more ...
graeme.thomson
We surely all know the story of Sixto Rodriguez by now. The Detroit-born singer-songwriter made two fine albums in the early 1970s, Cold Fact and Coming from Reality, before swiftly vanishing. As he descended into obscurity his music slowly rose to find its audience, most notably in South Africa, where he became a star in absentia and a blank canvas upon which numerous outlandish myths could be projected: he was in jail for murder; he was a heroin addict; he was dead; he had committed suicide on stage.The recent documentary Searching for Sugar Man tells the story of his musical resurrection Read more ...
graeme.thomson
English singer-songwriter Steve Adey has taken six years to follow up his excellent debut album, All Things Real, and at first it’s hard to tell why. These 10 songs, simply constructed, are executed without any great fuss or ornament, but slowly their sense of depth and unhurried devotion to quality reveals itself. The album is aptly named. Adey doesn't do party music. “Are we laughing?” is the question posed during the second song, “Laughing”. Not on Adey’s watch, we’re not. Recorded in a 19th-century Edinburgh church, this is relentlessly downbeat midnight music. When a (terrific) Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s all becoming a bit “water is wet“, isn’t it, saying how brilliant Lau are. But what else to do? Their name means “natural light” in Orcadian, which seems about right, except their vaulting, endlessly innovative take on contemporary chamber folk evokes every conceivable shade of darkness, too, and all the colours in between. Last night in Edinburgh they were simply extraordinary.The trio are in the foothills of a national tour in support of their third album Race the Loser. On record Lau are never less than compelling, but live they operate at an entire other level. And it wasn't Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“When I was a teenager even I had a period when apparently I was quite morose,” Jack Dee tells the Edinburgh crowd, his hangdog features projecting various extremes of existential agony. “But, hey, I got through it." This may be Dee’s first standup tour for six years, but it’s very much business as usual in terms of perpetuating his role as comedy’s Mr Grumpy, eternally exasperated, irritable, acerbic. And, truth be told, these days a tiny bit predictable.Apparently Dee decided to tour again because he figured someone had to keep the magic of 2012 going. He does indeed take a brief frolic Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The 1989 production at the Tron in Glasgow of Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman’s translation of Les Belles-Soeurs, the 1965 play by Québécois writer Michel Tremblay, has become a landmark event in Scottish theatre. This new co-production between the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company and the National Theatre of Scotland marks a major and very welcome revival of a work which, although initially written to challenge the prevailing cultural constraints of Canada in the 1960s, retains a real contemporary kick.The themes of The Guid Sisters – economic desperation, the politics of language, religion, the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
James Acaster: Prompt, Pleasance Courtyard *** James Acaster has certainly been studying his craft since he made his Fringe debut with an unmemorable show last year, and it shows in Prompt. Lots of comedy tropes are utilised, some of them to great effect, while others feel simply mechanical. He uses repetition, callbacks, audience participation in a show full of whimsy and the most surprising subjects for comedy.The callbacks - lots of them – join seemingly unconnected stories, such as his study into different kinds of bread, taking one's partner to a club - “like taking an apple to an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tony Law: Maximum Noonsense, The Stand Tony Law, Canadian by way of Trinidad and Tobago, has been kicking around the comedy circuit for several years with a style of madcap humour that many have delighted in but others have found self-indulgent. But with Maximum Noonsense he has retained all the free-flowing joy of his comedy while reining in some of the slacker elements. It's a marvellous concoction of silliness and sly humour.He starts with his “banter” section, wherein he ignores the women in the room and talks only to blokes about women and their weird attitudes to things such Read more ...
Susannah Clapp
Eighteen months before her death from lung cancer at the age of 51, Angela Carter talked to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. She had just edited The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), a rich stew of stories – Eskimo, Swahili, Armenian – which she had grouped in provocative sections: "Brave, Bold and Wilful"; "Good Girls and Where it Gets Them". She talked about the difference between the work undertaken by "chaps" – the novel and the epic – and the kind of stories often referred to as "old wives’ tales". She suggested it was time for the power of female heroines to be not just reclaimed but Read more ...