Swimmer One: Comments

Temporary holiday from real world

I’ve been slightly distracted from the album release lately, having been at the Edinburgh festival pretty much solidly for three weeks. The festival does that to you - it is an enormous bubble, sealed off from the outside world. This is partly because it feels like the whole world is in Edinburgh, so that stepping outside it would feel like stepping into space.

I love the Edinburgh festival. I love the noise and energy of it, the way it’s pretty much possible to get through the whole thing without sleeping - you can sort of feed off the energy of the city, the tangible excitement of so many people that they’re at the biggest arts festival in the world. I get excited about it, and I LIVE here, so it’s a buzz to think how exciting it is for someone from the other side of the world, coming to this beautiful city, where there’s so much STUFF going on. From morning till morning. Just watching and breathing it in. Or participating in it, feeling like you’re in Hollywood (and, for theatre folk at least, it does feel a bit like Hollywood, for those few weeks in summer). Trying to get an early night is pointless, for me anyway. I just lie awake at 3am, thinking: ‘There are about 300 shows I could be at RIGHT NOW.’ Actually it’s probably more like 20 or 30 - and, actually, I’m more likely to be found in a bar at 3am, wondering if it’s ever going to close (and then, when it closes, moving on to another one until THAT one closes) - but still…

My festival top ten.

1. Venus as a Boy - a beautiful, intimate, incredibly moving show, which is travelling on to Glasgow and then London, so go see it if you can. It’s an adaptation of Luke Sutherland’s book, with Sutherland doing live music on stage, and Tam Dean Burn playing Cupid, the book’s sexually confused London prostitute hero. I’ve loved Sutherland’s music for years (his Bows album in particular) and what he manages to do on stage with just a violin, a guitar and a few pedals is extraordinary. Tam Dean Burn was fantastic too, as ever.

2. England. Another very moving show - and full of moral rage, in its quiet way -performed in an art gallery by Tim Crouch, the writer of An Oak Tree and My Arm. This one was about a heart transplant, or rather it was about globalisation, the way it is possible to buy all kinds of things from all kinds of places if you know the right people, from a particular rare painting to a human organ. To be seen again in London soon, I gather.

3. The Film Festival opening party. A lot of fun. Franz Ferdinand did an acoustic set, and were excellent as always. I won’t mention the various famous people there, because name-dropping is never attractive (not that I spoke to any of the really famous people anyway). That said, it was nice to run into Vicky Featherstone and John Tiffany from the National Theatre of Scotland, although devastating to discover that Vicky has vetoed John’s idea for a show about… well, I promised I wouldn’t say, but it’s a hugely talented woman close to our hearts, and John really needs to talk Vicky into it, because it would be brilliant. Suffice to say, if I get to do the cameo that I have now drunkenly tried to make John promise to let me do on more than one occasion, should he ever do the show (it involves saying one line, ‘wake up!) I will be a very happy man.

4. Seriously: Pet Shop Boys, Reinterpreted. A Fringe show performed in a church - fittingly, for a band preoccupied with sin and guilt - in which a group of singers blend together various Pet Shop Boys songs so that they (kind of) tell a story - fittingly, for a band inspired by musicals. At one point, for example, To Speak is a Sin, describing a man’s nervousness about catching the wrong eye in a bar, suddenly segues into I Want a Dog, a song about living a lonely life in a big city, which then segues into Nervously, about tentatively embracing love. I’m still not sure there was a ‘plot’ as such (I got very confused as to how A Red Letter Day and Integral fitted in) but as a fan I really liked it. It was very clever, teasing out new meanings from the songs in the way that Liza Minnelli singing a Pet Shop Boys song once did (Rent was sung by a woman in this show, for example). They also did all the fan favourites - So Sorry I Said, from the Liza album, for example, and even a song from the musical, Closer to Heaven, which didn’t even make it into the stage version. How obscure is that? I wrote a review of the show for the Scotsman, saying I really liked it but that I thought it was, ultimately, a fans only thing. I’m now regretting it a bit (the PR, I heard, was quite cross wtih me, but that’s not the reason); the more I think about it, the more I think it had insightful things to say about the way song lyrics, if they’re well written enough, can mean completely different things depending on how you sing them, who sings them, and which section you use. It made me want to listen to all those songs again, in a fresh way.

5. Eurobeat - Almost Eurovision. The word-of-mouth hit of this year’s Fringe. A very clever, very funny pastiche of Eurovision, which worked because it replicated Eurovision down to the finest detail (complete with a real vote at the end, by text) rather than simply making cheap shots at it, and trusted its audience to get the joke. Most people’s favourite song seemed to be Estonia’s, which is sung by three grinning men who strip down from business suits to glittery shorts, and is basically a string of gay innuendo - “You can come too and we’ll all come together!” and so on - yet manages to sound so innocent you could show it on family TV and not alarm the grandparents. My favourite, though, was Russia’s song about a woman who’s an ice queen. It throws in every terrible ice-related pun you can think of, then adds more ("Now I’m covered in frost, and I know all is lost...") but with such a straight face it could easily be a real Eurovision entry. Like the real thing, it drags a bit towards the end (the voting takes up almost a third of the show’s 90 minutes). But the most ingenious thing about Eurobeat is that even this - much like the ludicrously padded out end sequence of recent action movie spoof Hot Fuzz - is part of the joke. Fantastic stuff.

6. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. By a theatre company called 1927, who formed about six months ago, came to the Fringe this year with their first show, and stormed it, winning five awards (ie: pretty much all the theatre awards they COULD win). It’s a bit Edward Gorey, a bit Tim Burton, a bit Brothers Grimm, with a bit of The Shining and Village of the Damned and early silent cinema thrown in. Wonderful stuff - and touring, hopefully. It’s at the Arches next year, definitely, and in New York in January.

7. Mark Watson’s 24-Hour Show. I was a wuss. I only went for the first three hours and the last three hours of Mark Watson the comedian’s day-long show. But it really dragged in the middle, apparently (how could it not?) so I reckon I saw the best bits - although I was slightly sad to miss the bicycle race. Brendon Burns having a fight with Andy Zaltzman was an obvious highlight. (’You bring your brain, put it in a jar and I’ll fucking drink it.’)

8. The Bacchae. In theory, this was my dream show. A National Theatre of Scotland commission, written by David Greig, directed by John Tiffany, and starring Alan Cumming, on stage in Scotland for the first time in forever. It was the show everyone was talking about before the festival, for obvious reasons. In reality, slightly disappointing. I’m not sure you CAN do an effective modern version of this play - maybe it’s just too simple, too brutal, for the kind of nuances they were trying to put into it (Go on Dionysus, I remember thinking at one point, you stick it to Brian Soutar - sorry, Pentheus - and his buttoned-up, homophobic cronies. Hang on though, doesn’t Brian end up with his head on a stick? Not sure I approve of THAT.)

9. Camille O’Sullivan. A goddess. What more is there to say? You have never heard Nick Cave sung like this, I guarantee it.

10. The Botanic Gardens. To my shame, given that our album artwork is from there, I’d never been to the Botanics in Edinburgh before. I went at the end of the festival, when I needed a rest. A lovely, tranquil place.

I did some other stuff too, including seeing a Fringe show in a tiny venue down a back alley, almost hidden behind a bin (which it took me 20 minutes to find, even though I was standing pretty much right next to it).

If you’re wondering how the earnings of a small independent label paid for all this, well, I get into a lot of stuff for free, for reasons I won’t bore you with. How anyone who can’t blag free tickets manages to afford the festival I’m not sure. I guess they make it their summer holiday. It’d be worth it, certainly. That’s probably what I’d do if circumstances were different. And, encouragingly, there is more and more free stuff on the Fringe - not the really ‘big’ stuff, obviously, but a lot of really good quality stuff (The Lost Tapes of Tom Bell, a sweet, lovely, good-natured stand-up show, was one of my favourite Free Fringe things this year).

Anyway, it’s over for another year, sadly. One of these days, Swimmer One will do a festival show. It is a bit of a dream of mine - and an idea for a theatre show, indoors and outdoors around Edinburgh, is quietly brewing. It may take a while to come to fruition, but I’m quite excited about it.

Meanwhile, back to the real world…

Andrew

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Symbolism in Venus as a Boy is fantastic… only a truly open mind would be able to deal with it all hence why some of you just want her to cook the egg!

Posted by oferte paste on 02/27 at 05:40 PM
I like symbolism very much. It`s great!

Posted by Andrey on 04/18 at 06:52 AM
As home to the most vibrant calendar of international festivals and events, you can be sure that there’s always something to tempt you during a stay in Edinburgh.

Posted by muzica electronica on 05/17 at 06:21 PM

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