Morna Young’s very Scottish adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen is a delight from start to finish. We watch as if through a mirror to a beautiful rendering of the Lyceum’s Grand Circle recreated on stage into a clever two-level set crafted with much detail (we were in row A of the stalls so got a pretty close up view). The costumes are beautifully crafted too.
The tale is a pretty closely followed retelling of the classic fairy tale, but moved to Scotland which affords us a grand opportunity to mix modern and auld Scots with a fair bit of the Doric. This leads to several good one liners in what is a funny but not pantomime script.
In fact it’s not panto at all, which is the way with the Lyceum’s Christmas shows, but this, more than most, is primarily concerned with storytelling and performance than ‘she’s behind you’ and lewd innuendo, although Richard Conlon gets a chance to successfully air his comedy chops as a camp unicorn in act 2.
It’s directed by Cora Bissett but doesn’t particularly feel like a Cora show. I don’t know why I say that because she has a pretty broad repertoire. It somehow feels more constrained than I’d expected Cora to be with this. That’s not to say her work is not up to scratch because it very much is. She teases excellent performances out of the entire cast, led by a newcomer to me, Rosie Graham as Garda.
One young child sitting next to us was clearly scared to bits by Clare Dargo as the Snow Queen and had to leave after 20 minutes, but it’s not a scary show and should be good for most kids, although it is quite long. Maybe a touch too long if I’m honest.
It’s really quite a lovely performance. Touching and sentimental without being gushy and I for one would highly recommend it.
The day started at the Amplify Festival event by the Marketing Society at Assembly where the main speaker was Frank Cottrell Boyce. He of children’s book writing, the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and The Queen x Paddington fame. He gave a talk about humour and its value that was interesting, seemingly pretty spontaneous, totally self-effacing and utterly charming. His best line, being a staunch Catholic, was that he thought the Ogilvy Lecture – that he was delivering – was about St John Ogilvy. (It’s not, it’s in memory of advertising super hero, David Ogilvy).
He made being Catholic with seven children seem pretty cool.
The main draw of the day was the first of two excursions to the wonderful Festival Theatre to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater of New York – founded by the now deceased eponymous dancer in the late 1950’s. The main event was his global phenomenon Revelations which closed a triple bill of 30 minute pieces (Programme 2). The first (Memoria) was unremarkable, save for the introduction of a large group of young Scottish dancers who had been trained by the troupe for two weeks, surely a life changing experience for these youngsters who looked every bit as accomplished as the main dancing corps.
The second piece (the River) was way too episodic for me and felt almost like individual or duet/trio audition pieces.
What struck me about both of these openers was the highly dated lighting, with a square speckled gobo effect that I really didn’t like and a lack of overall modernity. So far so meh.
But Revelations was to change all that.
You could say it was, indeed, a revelation.
An 18 strong piece about the history of black America (to 1960 when it was conceived, although I feel the music may have been updated since then) so it’s not a complete history, but does track the story from slavery to a degree of gentrification, at least in one demographic of the black struggle against oppression.
It’s stunning, ranging from one gorgeous male solo to a rumbustious finale when the full corpe is resplendent in golden dresses and dinner suits.
The gospel and spiritual music that combines in this ultimately joyous, but initially oppressive, dance is glorious in itself and the finale brought the house down and up on its feet. Me included.
It was even better on my second visit.
(But hey, that’s a spoiler alert and me looking into the future).
I’ll start with a disclaimer. If you don’t like musicals walk away now ‘cos you ain’t gonna like this.
If you DO like musicals you are in for one helluva treat when you tune into this baby.
Jeana and I devoured this last night in one big juicy helping. Howling with laughter and wide mouthed in astonishment at the quality of this brand new musical by Cinco Paul (writer of The Lorax and Despicable me).
It’s a full on demolition of (but really adulation of) the musical theatre genre, specifically the 40’s and 50’s (Oklahoma, Kiss Me Kate, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Music Man) and the sixties (Godspell and Sound of Music).
The quality of the music throughout is outstanding, as is the choreography, but what makes the difference is to drop in a musical theatre hating character in one of the two central roles.
Built around the construct of Brigadoon (get the name? nice Jewish take on it) a musical in which two American tourists stumble upon a mysterious Scottish village that appears for only one day every 100 years.
In this take on it the tourists are Josh and Mellissa two doctors who are falling out of love and are on an outdoors course to reconnect.
They get lost in a forest and, sure enough, in the mist is a bridge to what turns out to be Schmigadoon. Once over the bridge they cannot return to the real world until they have found true love. Will it be with each other or each with an inhabitant of Schmigadoon.
The opening song is a pure rip on Oklahoma’s title song and a basket auction later in the series is a direct take on the key scene in the same. It’s hilarious.
Every principle in this is outrageously funny, the script is camp and there’s no shying away from the gayness of the genre and its leading men (not all male MT singers are gay, I should point out as a further disclaimer, but the odd one is known to be, including Alan Cumming who revels in his role as the coming out mayor).
Barry Sonnenfeld, director, looks like he’s died and gone to heaven with this lavish production.
Everything, but everything in this pastiche is crafted with love. Even though it’s an absolute pisstake at its core it’s still reverential to the genre and, boy, if this made it to the stage it would sell out.
(Freely encouraged to capture the action on stage at Work.txt)
I was delighted to attend the Scotsman Awards in the morning at The Pleasance Beyond and to see Manic Street Creature pick up the Mental Health award.
Later I popped over to Summerhall yet again, (my 11th Summerhall show) to see another great production called Work.txt, in which there is no cast and the audience become the performers. So it’s immersive and participative but not much of it is improvised as a very clever and funny script, projected onto a large screen, tells us as audience members, those who love/hate their work, earn more or less than 30k, are Geminians and so on (there’s a lot of ways of slicing and dicing the 100 or so in the room) to read out the next line, build a Jenga city out of oversized Jenga blocks (at one point the entire audience/cast were on stage beavering away.) It’s hilarious. 4 Stars.
(hard at work)
Next up, two Edinburgh Festival shows, The first is by Leith’s Grid Iron Theatre Company, who specialise in site specific work. This one was in Leith Academy and called Muster Station. It’s an immersive show in which the audience are moved around the school (the muster station of the title) as evacuees. Scotland (Fife specifically) has just hit 45 degrees and is about to be hit by a massive tidal wave that threatens our very being. Our destination is Finland. In the opening scene we are herded through an immigration check by a variety of (some kind, some brutal) immigration officers and put into a holding pen whilst some of the characters (some plants) are revealed to us. It’s a high point of the show and promises a great deal more over the next two hours, sadly it didn’t materialise. What we are treated to is five 20 minute plays within plays that fall short of scaring us, lack believability and are actually all a wee bit dull if I’m honest. A great concept that doesn’t quite come off. 3 stars.
Next Up The Jungle Book Reimagined, Akram Khan’s bold multi media show, taking the old jungle book story and again setting it in a post climate apocalypse. The cast are all dancers but there’s also a huge amount of projected animation and a rather cod script played through the PA which the actors lip psych to. The music for the show is diverse but not very joined up so what I felt I was witnessing was an embarrassment of riches, but not much dance (movement sure and very fine movement at that). Act 1 dragged and was frankly a mess. The interval, however, reset the show. Better music, more dance, less animation and a more striking and clear storytelling arc. It’s beautiful, for sure, but it fell way short of my expectations. 2 stars for Act 1 4 for act 2 so a 3 star experience overall.
You know that feeling? You’re in that sub-Brechtian shizzazzle, but the crowd choice for tonight is either heavy drag or Irish hip hop improv mood.
Sure you do. To be sure.
As the vote is cast I’m in a 20 minute queue for a George Square Guinness (£6.50. Actually fuck off), quietly praying that the Irish hip hopper wins the day.
He does.
Abandoman it is. (At Udderbelly. Or is it Underbelly? Who knows.)
So, nine of us, fresh from good chat and burgers, head off to the Udderbelly/Underbelly tent to meet the darling of Edinburgh’s hip hop improv scene; Mel, clutching her comfortable wooly grey gloves, like her Gran would have adored her for. Little would she know they’d be minor stars of the show.
I’m girding my loins to confess that I once lied to my daughter on a 10k time boast or that the best thing I could come up with on things I’d lost was, “my virginity”. But these secrets remain as I wasn’t thrust centre stage.
Abandoman is a Fringe favourite, and for a reason, he’s great. He does all that Showstopper and Baby Wants Candy do, but he does it on his own. Naked. High risk. It’s a monumental achievement to hip hop night in, night out with no back up. Just him.
(BWC and Showstoppers just do it better though.)
Did I like it? Yes, I laughed out loud many times but there’s something missing in it for me. Some of it in the diction and clarity of the performance and a lot of it in the slightly contrived AI concept behind it. I’ll take Baby Wants Candy first, Showstopper next.
It’s cool. It’s funny. But I’m a fussy twat and this couldn’t clamber over the three star bar for me.
The truly beautiful Larkhall. Miss it at your peril.
Two more really great shows and couldn’t have been more different.
Let’s start with Larkhall – Piano and Creative Coding at, yup, you guessed it, Summerhall.
It’s a beautiful show by astounding pianist and, eh, creative coder, Larkhall in which he, a variety of collaborators and a computer called Otto wire up a piano, via some effects pedals and a hard disc, to a screen. What Larkhall plays, and it’s really quite something – systems music-based with elements of Penguin Cafe Orchestra in there as a reference point if you need one – is linked, via his coding algorithms, to a variety of video installations that create images in real life, like fractals (although nothing as obvious as fractals) labyrinths, great American highways at night, mysterious sea creatures and more in response to his heart felt and glorious piano playing. I promise you have never seen the likes before and its truly wonderful. Four, edging five, stars.
Liz Kingsman: One Woman Show at The Traverse comes here full of London glory. Winner of a South Bank Award for comedy and a darling of the Guardian, her ‘meta’ show (yes another one) is brilliantly conceived with layer upon layer upon layer of rug pulls, verbal trickery, storytelling genius, character play and nods and winks to popular culture that she slags, but in a playful, not horrific, way. It’s glorious laugh out loud, but deeply enthralling stuff. Don’t laugh too loud though, you might miss the next plot twist, if indeed there is a plot. It’s very, very funny and very, very clever. Another 4 stars for me.
Liars, cheats, self-centred blowhards with empty promises and corrupt motives.
Each and every last one of them.
Right?
Well, actually, no.
Not if you have political ambitions in Leith that is.
First off, you have Deidre Brock, the sitting SNP MP for Leith and North Edinburgh and then there’s her closest competitor, Labour’s Gordon Munro.
A long term Councillor for City of Edinburgh Council I had the great pleasure to build on my Dad’s friendship with Gordon when I first met him as a fellow Board Director at The Royal Lyceum Theatre Company, one of Gordon’s many Council responsibilities (funnily enough that’s where I first met Deidre too).
I was immediately impressed with Gordon’s enthusiasm and contribution – so many of these posts are really statutory and lead to disinterested contributions, if any at all. Not Gordon.
It helps that he is a passionate lover of so many art forms, not least theatre. (Oh, and the mighty Hibees.)
But as time went on I started to stumble upon him all over the shop. In art galleries, at gigs, in the theatre. And then I called on his help to find a new home for Forth Children’s Theatre.
Boom!
He was straight in there, scouring Leith for us, putting forward all sorts of suggestions (including a disused car park under the Banana Flats).
I read some of his work in The Leither. I chatted to him in corridors. I quickly formed a deep respect for a man who wears his heart firmly on his sleeve and makes no compromises with his political beliefs.
To say Gordon is left of centre would be to downplay his passion for the Labour movement. An all-consuming passion that manifests itself in all the values of Labour that I love (although I vote SNP).
This is what politics should be about. A man of the people who cares wholly in his rage against the machine.
I love that about him. I love that about great politicians of any hue (and actually there are a lot of them that aren’t what I painted in my opening paragraph).
But, if you want to see what integrity looks like in flesh and bone, look no further than Gordon Munro.
An actual hero in my book. (And the only other person on earth I know that likes the outstanding Yasmine Hamdan.)
Now read about his heroes.
And, come the revolution. Back Gordon.
My Favourite Author or Book
Victor Serge. I first encountered Serge in 1983 when I bought a battered second hand copy of his ‘Memoirs of a Revolutionary’ published by Oxford books in 1963. It’s a great read and a fantastic insight into the tumults of the first half of the 20th Century. When the New York Review of Books brought out an edition which included material omitted from the edition I knew I bought it right away. I was not disappointed its still a great read. NYRB have also brought out his notebooks which cover 1936-1947 and his humanity shines through despite recording the murder and deaths of several friends. A threat that he constantly lived under too as Stalin’s GPU kept him under observation. They also publish some of his fiction too. His writing is superb and his volume of poetry ‘ A blaze in the desert’ is worth seeking out . “ All the exiles in the world are at the Greek informer’s café tonight,” is a line from his poem ‘Marseilles’ written in 1941 and a film script in one line. But don’t take my word for it here is what Susan Sontag thinks of Serge : “ Serge is one of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes”. She’s right.
The Book I’m reading
As always I have several on the go. ‘Paint Your Town Red – How Preston took back control and your town can too’ by Matthew Brown & Rhian E Jones’ is essential reading. ‘The Divide – A brief guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions’ by Jason Hickel infuriates and illuminates in equal measure.’To Mind your Life- poems for Nurses & Midwives’ is life affirming. ‘ The way to play – coaching hints and technique’ by Inverleith Petanque Club is to hand as I’ve taken up this sport during Covid. ‘ Fixture List season 2021/22 Hibernian FC is essential year round reading for me as a lifelong Hibs supporter.
The book I wished I had written
Is still locked in my head and unlikely to make it out .
The book I couldn’t finish
Funnily enough I had a conversation recently with Ian Rankin where we both said we started but could not finish ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’ by Thomas de Quincey. Turgid.
The book I’m ashamed I haven’t read
‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ by James Hogg. I know, I know it inspired Stevenson , it’s a classic etc but life gets in the way. Maybe one day.
My favourite film
Too many but if its one only then it has to be ‘Casablanca’.
My favourite Play
It has to be Peter Brooks ‘ Mahabarata’ in Glasgow . 3 nights in a row of the most sublime theatre I’ve ever seen. The whole audience, which included a chunk of Scottish Actors, were on our feet shouting for more.
My favourite podcast
I don’t do podcasts but I do recommend the blog ‘Stand up and Spit’ by the poet Tim Wells. Great stuff and always interesting.
The box set I’m hooked on
‘American Gods’. A great cast and a good realisation of a favourite book.
My favourite TV series
Tiswas. It just broke all the rules and was great fun too. Chris Tarrant , Sally James , Spit the Dog and the Phantom Flan Flinger along with some cool music . What more do you want.
My favourite piece of Music
‘Teenage Kicks’ by the Undertones. Perfection. When Peel left us and Hibs adopted it for a while as our tune part tribute and part due to the boy band look team we had at the time I was chuffed.
My favourite dance performance
I’ve been lucky enough to see Nureyev, Wayne Sleep, Ballet Rambert, Michael Clarke but it has to be Carlos Acosta with ‘On before’. He has this amazing ability that some football players have of being able to hang in the air. His company will be worth catching when we get the chance to enjoy live performance again.
The last film/music/book that made you cry
Film – Motorcycle Diaries – Walter Salles. I know that’s Guevara’s companion in the last scene watching the plane take off. Alberto Granado at 84 was not allowed in to the USA for the premiere at Sundance despite Robert Redford’s best efforts.
Music- Kathryn Joseph at Pilrig Church Hall. Go see here at Edinburgh Park in August.
Book- Notebooks 1936-1947 Victor Serge. So many deaths.
The lyric I wished I had written
‘Happy Birthday’ – not the Altered Images one. Imagine the royalties (and yes I know there’s a story to this lyric).
The song that saved me
Not a song but a request to dance the Gay Gordon’s at a wedding in 1985. We’ve been together ever since.
The instrument I play
The voice. Badly.
The instrument I wish I’d learned
The piano.
If I could own one painting it would be
‘Nighthawks at the Diner’ – Edward Hopper. I have had a print of this up on the wall since 1983.
The music that cheers me up
A whole bunch of 45’s from season 1977/78. Punk Rock shook things up and even Bowie upped his game with ‘Heroes’. We were lucky.
The place I feel happiest
Home with our family our two daughters , son in law and the best thing to happen during lockdown our granddaughter Ada.
My guiltiest cultural pleasure
Alcohol. It’s got me in and out of trouble. Seen me on my hands and knees outside a nightclub in Tangier. Arrested in Burnley. Stealing a Police hat from the back of a Police car outside a Police station. Chased by a knife wielding pimp in a Miami hotel. And I keep coming back for more.
I’m having a fantasy dinner party. I’ll invite these artists and authors
Dead – David Bowie, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart , Frida Kahlo, Jesus so the wine would flow , Oscar Wilde.
Alive – Brian Eno, Marianne Faithfull, Annie Lenno , Jan Gehl, the Singh Twins, John Byrne.
And I’ll put on this music
Bessie Smith, Yasmine Hamdan, Calypso Rose, Ludovico Einaudi, Max Richter.
I’ll start by confessing that Tim Minchin has done nothing. NOTHING for me in his fairly long and, largely, highly succesful career, so when it was suggested I watch this I doubted I’d get past episode one.
How wrong could I have been?
By the end of episode eight, binged in two days, the tears rolled down my cheeks.
It’s bawdy, ballsy, rude, ridiculous, hilarious, breathtaking, touching, sincere and is based on a largely unpredictable storyline that twists and turns like a Tasmanian Devil.
It also features a stand out, frankly equal footing, performance by 19 year old Australian actress, Milly Alcock, remember that name, she’s the next Margot Robbie.
A truly excellent TV series, right up there with Succession, Fleabag and Chernobyl as my favourites of 2019.
I was thrilled to see the original of this movie by Dario Argento at Summerhall in Edinburgh during this year’s Fringe with the original score performed by Goblin, live on stage.
It was a great experience but, in my view, it’s an overhyped movie with little to recommend other than the astonishing score and the remarkable cinematography in its vivid, over-saturated colour.
The film itself is pretty unremarkable.,
But it was enough to tempt me into seeing the remake which is, in my view, much more remarkable.
It’s an incredibly odd follow on from director Luca Gaudanino’s “Call Me By Your Name’ – a touching and sentimental coming of age gay romance set in Italy and starring the incredible Timothy Chalomet.
This leaps genres like I’ve rarely seen a director do.
Gaudanino’s remake has none of the zing of the original, indeed the colour palette is quite muted. It’s also dull throughout as a result of the endless rain (then snow).
It’s set in 1977 West Berlin with the Baader-Meinhoff (RAF) gang in full flow and providing a sinister backdrop to what is already a sinister movie.
Guadanino casts Dakota Johnson (50 Shades of Grey) and a malevolent Tilda Swinton brilliantly, but I also liked the performance of Mia Goth as Johnson’s best friend in a crazy dance school.
The award winning dance school that Johnson seeks and gains entrance too after a remarkable audition is actually a witches coven and Johnson appears to be the next sacrificial lamb to the God the witches worship.
But it’s not that straightforward.
It’s a long, slow, considered movie with an inevitable Sixth Act (yes it’s presented in six acts) denouement that’s a fantastic gore-fest.
The movie is getting mixed reviews and I understand that. It’s really slow. It’s arthouse not shock mall theatre. If you want Halloween forget it.
But it’s great.
Really well directed and acted and Thom Yorke’s score is great although less intrusive than Goblin’s.
The first thing to state about this beautiful movie is that it’s monochrome. So stunningly so that at times you feel you are in a photographic gallery rather than a cinema. The quality of the cinematography is quite extraordinary thanks to Lucas Zal.
It’s also in 4:3 format. Not the square format of Instagram, but close.
We don’t see 4:3 very often these days but Wes Anderson used it to immense effect in Grand Budapest Hotel and so did Lazslo Melis in Son of Saul.
It’s an engaging format that draws you in. It suggests a time before cinemascope (16:9 etc) and only really works in period cinema of a time.
This time.
But it also lends itself to incredible framing, such as when our female protagonist floats down a river gradually disappearing out of shot, and later in the movie when the chief protagonists leave a bus and walk out of frame in a composition that Henri Cartier Breson would be proud of.
It’s one of the most beautiful movies I’ve seen in many years.
In truth that’s probably its biggest strength.
It is, but it isn’t really, narrative driven. More episodic than story, but it does tell a tale about director Pawel Pawlikowski’s parents’ love affair set against the Cold War backdrop in his native Poland.
It’s fairly sordid in a way (his mother was abused by her father as a child) but without anything shocking to see.
Imagine, yes.
The two leads ( Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot) are magnificent. Brooding, beautiful (although unconventionally so) and real.
Lucas Zal has a great time dwelling on three particular things. Crowd shots. Amazing, Dance sequences. Amazing. Joanna Kulig (the lead). Amazing.
In particular, Joanna Kulig has a stand out performance. She’s not one to show her enjoyment in life. Sullen most would say. But it is an immense performance.
It’s a love story, set against the challenges that Cold War Poland put in front of people of artistic belief where communist doctrine made creativity very difficult.
What Pawel Pawlikowski achieves is a mood piece of exemplary, peerless really, detail.
And it’s a musical.
I was constantly drawn to comparing it to La La Land, yet it is so NOT La La Land. Partly it’s down to Kulig who shares the unorthodox looks (beauty) of Emma Stone. Partly it’s the framing of scenes by Zal.
And the music fuses from Polish country folk to French basement jazz (which La La Land would have been so comfortable with).
This is an Oscar nomination shoe in. It’s absolutely brilliant.
And, at 88 minutes, certainly does not outstay its welcome.
I first fell in love with Anna Meredith when she supported Anna Calvi at the, now defunct, The Caves in Glasgow. It was a bonkers performance and I adored it. I bought her SAY award winning Varmints soon after and saw her live at Leith Theatre last year opening Hidden Doors Festival. The best gig I saw in 2017.
My appreciation of her was actually behind the curve because she had already established herself as a highly regarded composer in modern classical circles and that is one of the reasons she will open The Proms tonight and the Edinburgh Festival in August with a commissioned piece about WWI called 5 Telegrams.
Even though I consider myself a big fan nothing, NOTHING, could prepare me for this. This awesome, really nothing short of awesome, performance in the Tiny Desk Concerts series. I thought Penguin Cafe had kicked it out of the park a couple of years ago in this series but this kicks it out of the park next door too.
Sit back, relax and enjoy Nautilus (surely the greatest piece of music ever written for the tuba), Ribbons (she even sings, who knew?) and The Vapours.
19 minutes and 4 seconds of utter bliss. Thank you Anna.
Is Intelligent Finance the dumbest bank in the world?
0845 xxx xxxx. Intelligent Finance’s Home Page and Security Page contact number.
This morning I thought “It’s champagne time – Intelligent Finance [sic] have, after 3 years of constantly asking them, updated their customer phone number”.
But no, only on 2 of their 3 customer facing pages.
The one when you are actually looking at your account is STILL WRONG.
They’re still Dullard Finance.
Incompetence beyond comprehension frankly.
0345 xxx xxxx. Intelligent Finance’s Accounts Page, where you can see your balance etc and might decide you need to call them to query something – by now you are through security and, of course, failed to write down the correct phone number while you were there on the assumption that the number would be correct throughout the site. But, you know when happens when you assume. Yes, U make and ASS out of ME
So, as I entitled this elegant thought-piece, Three. Is the magic number. As I will leave De la Soul to prove.
Andrea Arnold’s debut movie, Red Road, is a shocking social documentary style movie that is breathtaking in its boldness and unflinching in its depiction of a Glasgow underclass that most of us do not know. American Honey does a similar job of depicting an American class that’s seldom caught on screen and was cast mainly from the street.
It too is pretty unflinching in its depiction of drug taking, young sex and the unwinding of an American dream; of sorts.
It’s a road movie that follows the fortunes of 18 year old abused runaway, Star, and her relationship with a group of young magazine salespeople touring the country looking for door to door sales in a variety of American housing schemes (both rich and poor).
It leads to an episodic series of events that range from amusing to totally horrific.
Arnold’s style is uncompromising. It, like Grand Budapest Hotel, is shot in square (Instagram) format which gives it a certain contemporaneity and the photography, that is mainly cinema verite, occasionally bursts into beautiful, glorious, rich warmth such that it takes your breath away.
It’s a compelling performance by Sasha Lane as Star and Shia LaBeouf also impresses as her mentor and, later, lover. Riley Keogh is also excellent as the aloof, slightly terrifying team leader who lives a separate life of relative luxury while her band of stoner sales people rough it in hostels.
But it’s an uncomfortable ride that rewards your patience.
Having been unable to get tickets for Glastonbury for a few years now I am about to experience the Catalonian equivalent with a cheeky wee trip to Barcelona for Primavera Sound.
Top of my list of, and possible, just about, ‘to see’ are…
Solange
Bon Iver
Kate Tempest
Aphex Twin
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
Sinkane
Magnetic Fields (Playing the ED Fest in August)
Arab Strap
the xx
Sleaford Mods
Jamie XX
Songhoy Blues
Van Morrison
Metronomy
Teenage Fanclub
Grace Jones
Arcade Fire
Wild Beasts
Japandroids
Of these my number one pick is King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Check out Gamma Knife, their best song. They have many best songs.
Not to be confused with The Penguin Cafe Orchestra that disbanded upon the untimely death of its leader Simon Jeffes in 2007, the Penguin Cafe is actually a different band, although it includes some of the previous members and is led by Simon Jeffes’ son, Arthur.
Live, The Penguin Cafe play many of The Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s favourite pieces and it has been my privilege to enjoy them live twice (Usher Hall, Edinburgh and Glastonbury) but they record in their own right and The Imperfect Sea is their third, and best, album.
I read that Arthur was concerned that this latest recording was taking them to new places and ran the risk of disaffecting long term PCO fans. I can reassure you Arthur that you have done no such thing.
It’s a bobbydazzler. It really is.
It’s far from imperfect.
The sound, as my good friend and long term PCO aficionado, Jon Stevenson, said to me the other day lacks some of the humour of the PCO and he is right. The Penguin Cafe are a more serious bunch of musicians and their output is perhaps more orchestral than the PCO which was more folky in totality, but this matters not a jot when the quality is so high.
I’ve listened to The Imperfect Sea 5 or 6 times in the last few days and there is nary an off note. Sure, the first time I listened I was riding my bike and the constant ‘ping’ of cycle bell on Cantorum was a mite discombobulating, but it’s endearing also and hearkens back towards the PCO’s playfulness. (It has a small debt to pay to the mighty Telephone and Rubber Band).
Ricecar, the opener, is a classic of sequenced music and is certainly of the PCO school.
Overall this is a mighty addition to the PC/PCO canon.
To regain full use of one’s hi-fi is a first world delight.
My turntable has been operating on a semi-functional basis for some time until I bit the bullet and took it to Hi Fi Repairs – a one man operation on Clarke St in Edinburgh.
£48 later.
The man is a genius.
He can repair anything; including my 30 year old Castle speakers and now my 30 year old Ariston Q Deck. (It seems it does go on and on and on and Ariston.)
So I have christened it with Talking Heads, Remain in Light.
gibberish 