Greek by Mark-Anthony Turnage. Scottish Opera at Edinburgh International Festival 2017

Review - Greek by Mark-Anthony Turnage.
Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures at Edinburgh International Festival 2017

Hibernian vs Partick Thistle. Incest patricide and plague

Two years ago I combined an afternoon at a Partick Thistle away game in the capital, with an evening at the Edinburgh Festival. Unfortunately that day a 3-0 defeat by Hearts was what preceded an evening of Greek tragedy, with Juliette Binoche as Antigone. Much as the heroes of Greek plays often fail to learn the lessons of their ancestors, I optimistically tried to combine a trip to Easter Road to see Partick Thistle open their season with a match against Hibs, with another Greek tragedy in the evening. The day started much as it did two years ago, with a 3-1 Partick Thistle defeat setting a dark mood for the evening's entertainment. 

Hibernian 3-1 Partick Thistle

The Greek stories persist because they are good stories. They also give us a prism with which to examine our current world. This year at the Edinburgh Festival alongside Mark-Anthony Turnage's Opera, Zinnie Harris's re-telling of The Oresteia, which I saw (and loved) last year, in on show (Oresteia: This Restless House review). 

In Greek mythology Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, her tragic fate set in motion by the history of her father's actions. Tonight we were going to hear about the deeds of the father. Mark-Anthony Turnage's Greek is an opera of Steven Berkoff's play of that name, which re-staged the Oedipus myth in the east end of London in the 1980s. 

Oedipus in Greek mythology, was left on a hillside to die by his father, King Laius, to prevent a prophecy that he would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. Found and raised as their own by King Polybus and Queen Merope he hears the prophecy of what he is fated to do, from the Delphic oracle, and not knowing his real parentage flees Thebes to avoid his fate. In the classic example of  the Scot's phrase "whit's fir ye'll no go by ye" he ends up unknowingly killing his father, marrying Queen Jocasta his mother, and bringing a plague upon the lands by his actions. Discovering the truth he rips out his eyes and lives on forever in the strange mind of Sigmund Freud who believed we all want to emulate Oedipus' complex family dynamics.

The cast of Greek

Scottish Opera have recently become very competent at modern, smaller scale productions, such as their excellent The Devil Inside. Greek has a cast of four artists playing several roles and an orchestra of 18 or 19 musicians, yet it still packs a mighty punch. The co-production with Opera Ventures uses a bare, revolving stage set onto which imaginative projections give a stark, and when necessary, humourous atmosphere to the whole performance. The costumes, often requiring a quick turnover, also give it a distinctive, consistent and crisp feel. Taken from Berkoff's play, it is a story set not among Greek kings and queens, but working class families in Thatcher's dystopian Britain. Coming here straight from Easter Road, the opening scene greeted me with the rhythmic chanting onstage of Arsenal fans in an London pub. Alarmed by the racist chants of his father and his parents' belief in a fairground fortune-teller's alarming prophecy, shell-suited Eddy leaves home. 

Alex Otterburn as Eddy

The cast of Susan Bullock, Andrew Shore, Allison Cook and "Scottish Opera Emerging Artist" Alex Otterburn as Eddy were excellent throughout, both in singing and in the extravagant acting required of their parts. The words are sharp and witty throughout, with much dark humour at times. As London descends into riots and plague (the play was written whilst AIDS was running out of control) Eddy kills a cafe owner in a fight and marries his wife, before inevitably finding out at the end when his parents arrive years later that his true origins mean he has unknowingly fulfilled the prophecy. Oedipus pleaded to be excused his actions because he was unaware of what he was doing. Now Eddy knows what he has done, should the shame destroy everything he has? 

The orchestra keep the story moving along, with brassy jazz sounds at times, and a cacophony of percussion, with truncheons and riot shields at other moments. The 1980s setting feels unfortunately contemporary in a Tory led Britain fermenting division along racist lines and between those that have and have not. Are people responsible for their actions when they know not what they are doing? 

It was nice to see Steven Berkoff on stage at the end to take the plaudits from the audience, alongside Mark-Anthony Turnage and the cast and crew.

A thoroughly enjoyable night out, and I find it bizarre that the audience for this type of thing remains elusive. Opera has got to tear down its elitist image to make people aware of the imaginative and entertaining material it can provide. After a second night at the Edinburgh Festival, Greek will be coming to Glasgow in February 2018. I am planning to go see it again. 

Edinburgh skyline as we head home to Glasgow

Bluebeard's Castle / The 8th Door. Scottish Opera

Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle and The 8th Door by Lliam Paterson.

Scottish Opera, Theatre Royal Glasgow. March 2017. Review

From Scottish Opera website, click here for more info

Scottish Opera combine Bartok's one act opera, Bluebeard's Castle with a new piece composed by Lliam Paterson, The 8th Door. Both are produced by Glasgow theatre company Vanishing Point, who were behind National Theatre of Scotland's The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor Cutler among many other shows. 

The version of Bluebeard's Castle which I know is from a children's book of "Villains In Myth and Legend" that I used to read regularly. It told the story of Bluebeard's new wife who was forbidden from looking behind a locked door in the castle. When she could not resist she found the floor covered in blood and in a corner the bodies of Bluebeard's previous wives. Bartok's version has the newly wed couple arrive at the castle of the title. Judith asks for all the seven locked doors to be flung open to let in light. Bluebeard refuses; some things should be kept private. If she wants the secrets from the past uncovered, she will need to accept the consequences.

The 8th Door is what we are presented with first, a newly produced piece from Lliam Paterson and Matthew Lenton. The six singers are in the orchestra pit, with two actors on stage, seated with their backs to the audience facing cameras which project their faces onto a large screen (Robert Jack and Gresa Pallaska). The pair on stage act out the rise and fall of a relationship, whilst the words of Hungarian poets, in English translations from Edwin Morgan, then as things progress, more often in the original Hungarian. The actors do very well to hold our attention with their everyday misunderstandings and lack of closeness, but there isn't much meat to it. The singing and music follows their mood through harmony and more dystonic turns. It's dramatic and tense, but I would have liked to concentrate on the poetry, or the singing...or the music, or the acting. My focus flitted from one to the other.

As an average, modern couple failing to connect, beyond the Hungarian verse and some musical nods to Bartok, their connection to the mass murderer and polygamist of the second half was maybe a bit loose. Bluebeard's Castle had been rendered as a mundane apartment for bass-baritone Robert Haywood and mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill to wander into. The seven locked and barred doors that Judith demands opened are oddly all metaphorical, and they reveal on stage for each one is done with varying degrees of success. The first door, which reveals a torture chamber, rather dully turns out to be Windows as Bluebeard's laptop screen glows red. Has he been watching snuff videos? The words and music are so incredibly tense and dramatic that the setting and scenery was rather disappointing at times. The lack of castle and lack of doors could have worked fine with more bravado, but felt oddly flat. The orchestra played beautifully, at times the brass coming from up in the theatre boxes, bringing a lot of tension to the story and the singing was perfect, particularly that of Karen Cargill.

Tense and intriguing, just not as grisly as I was expecting from my days reading the story of Bluebeard as a 9 year old. 

Franz Kafka's The Trial. An Opera by Phillip Glass

The Trial by Philip Glass. Review. Scottish Opera, Theatre Royal Glasgow, January 2017.

For many years I have been a fan of Franz Kafka's books and of the music of Philip Glass. Therefore I was obviously going to be drawn to see Scottish Opera bring Glass's opera version of  The Trial to the Theatre Royal in Glasgow this month. The result was, I am pleased to say, a great success.

Happy Birthday Philip Glass

American composer Philip Glass has a diverse body of work behind him. He has written several symphonies, numerous film scores and ballets and twenty six operas, most famously Einstein on the Beach. Among this work is a previous opera of a Kafka story, In The Penal Colony. His second "chamber opera" of a Kafka tale, The Trial, was first performed by the Music Theatre Wales at the Royal Opera House in London in 2014. 

Philip Glass

To celebrate his 80th birthday on 31st January 2017 the Barbican in London have a festival of his music, whilst in Glasgow Scottish Opera are performing Philip Glass's opera The Trial in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Philip Glass has performed in Scotland himself several times in recent years, from his 75th birthday concerts in Glasgow in 2012, to appearances at Glasgow's Minimalism festival in 2015 to playing on stage with Patti Smith at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013.

His music can't be pigeon-holed as he has such a breadth of work from symphonies to film scores, opera and theatre music, to minimalism in the 1970s and string quartets. Repetition and strident pacing often mark his work, which proved to be a good fit for Kafka's The Trial.

The Trial - Franz Kafka

Written in about 1914, though  never finished, The Trial was only published after Kafka's death. He had already written the final chapter and the circular plot means the book holds together despite being incomplete, with the Josef K., the accused main character, jumping off from one point in the story towards his inevitable conclusion. Kafka's express instructions were that the book, and his other unpublished writings, be destroyed after his death. His wishes were ignored by his lifelong friend, Max Brod, and his most famous work was published a year after his death, in 1925. The Trial is Kafka's most Kafkaesque book, a word that has entered our vocabulary to mean a nightmarish complex, bizarre, bureaucratic situation. If you are trying to get through to a telephone help-desk or complete a claim on our welfare system, you will soon understand this word. (Googling "Kafkaesque" and "welfare system" gives over 22,000 hits rather depressingly.)

Josef K. is not a particularly likable character. He wakes on the morning of his 30th birthday to find three inspectors waiting for him. He never knows what crime he has been accused of, but tries to fight his case against mysterious officialdom, secret police and unaccountable courts. He gets drawn into the relationships, corruption, pettiness and bureaucracy of the system.  This faceless, bureaucratic system seems almost stronger today than the version which Kafka imagined.

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 and died in 1924, aged 40, from TB. He was German-speaking and Jewish and lived most of his life in Prague at the time when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He trained as a lawyer, finishing his studies with a year's unpaid work as a court clerk. He eventually took up a clerical post in an insurance business, as he described it, in order to pay the bills, allowing him to keep writing. The overlaps between Kafka's life and K., who works as chief clerk in a bank whilst continuing his frustrating fights through an absurd legal system, are not hard to see. Felice Bauer, to whom Kafka was twice engaged, is often seen as the template for Fraulein Burstner in the book.

There are two cities that I have ran around trying to imagine settings for my favourite books. In St Petersburg I sought out Dostoyevsky's apartment and the flats and streets inhabited by Raskolnikov in his novel Crime and Punishment. On visiting Prague in the 1980s I made sure that I visited Kafka's old house at 22 Golden Lane, and stood like some pretentious arse by his graveside in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague, wearing a yarmulke and reading from one of his books. The apartment block in a Prague suburb that we were staying in on that trip, with its rickety stairs, was just like the apartments Kafka sets his court offices of The Trial in their attics. It is maybe inevitable then that I link these two books in my mind, Crime and Punishment and The Trial.

My fanboy trip to Prague to visit Kafka's house and grave

Dostoyevsky's work was a big influence on Kafka's ideas and there are many echos of Crime and Punishment in the Trial. Has K. committed a crime? Does he consider his actions criminal? If not why does he subject himself to the rule of the authorities? The same questions about guilt and responsibility drive Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and Josef K. in The Trial. Themes of guilt, alienation, angst, surrealism, claustrophobic life, shifting balance of power in relationships run through the books. The thoughts of both authors turn to religion in the final chapters when thinking about guilt and responsibility. Kafka was drawn to some ideas from Freud and also from Karl Marx's theory of alienation, that becoming a mechanistic part of a social class, through endless work, alienates people from their humanity, as it does in the dehumanising world of The Trial.

Many of my favourite contemporary authors are clearly inspired by Kafka's work and there are clear shadows of his writing in the books of James Kelman and Alasdair Gray.

Kafka created a darkly comic, precise world in the book. The confusing geometry of apartment blocks, stairwells and offices, the claustrophobic, stuffy descriptions that give a sense how Josef K. is feeling. There is an Escher-like clarity to this unreal, but very recognisable, world that Kafka creates. Written over 100 years ago, reading The Trial again it feels very prescient. The populace are now increasingly judged guilty until proven innocent, watched and spied upon more than ever and evaluated by unknown observers as we travel through our modern world. Truth and facts are just a matter of opinion and perspective. Secret courts can now pass secret judgements leaving defendants as confused as Josef K. as to why they won or lost their case.

To get very meta about The Trial, here is Scottish post-punk band Josef K.'s video for their song "It's Kinda Funny", made up of clips from Orson Wells's classic 1962 film version of The Trial starring Anthony Perkins (who makes a great Josef K.).

The Trial. Scottish Opera

A Czech beer and all set for The Trial

A co-production between Scottish Opera, Music Theatre Wales (as was The Devil Inside) and Theater Magdeburg The Trial gets its Scottish premier in Glasgow before moving to Edinburgh. It has a libretto from Christopher Hampton (writer of the play and film Les Liasons Dangereuses) that is very faithful to the book and manages to boil down the whole story into ten scenes, just as the book has ten chapters. The scenes all flow one into another thanks to the music and clever stagecraft and set design. The set looks like a prison cell, with secret doors and openings dextrously used throughout, always allowing K. to be observed from different corners. Baritone Nicholas Lester as Josef K. is present on stage almost throughout, but despite physically towering over most of the other seven members of the ensemble cast, he seems to shrink and crumble through the course of the evening.

The twelve musicians create a much bigger sound than their numbers suggest, at times unsettling, at times frisky, particularly when Fraulein Burstner is on stage. There is much variety in the music between scenes but an insistent, marching tempo throughout, swirling towards a dramatic conclusion. The music in the last two scenes was particularly striking, literally in the case of the percussive beats on the anvil. There is black humour in the book, but that is brought to the fore in the staging of the opera, with some acting reminiscent of silent movie performances of Scottish actors Alfred Eric Campbell and James Finlayson. The guards are done up like Thompson and Thomson from the Tintin books (who were NOT twins, that was a pop band) and their excuse of "only obeying orders" rings a few bells.

Alfred Eric Campbell, James Finlayson and Thompson and Thomson

The words being sung are clear and simple, like the book itself, and many of the lines seem lifted straight from Kafka, particularly the priest's parable of law. Others are cleverly arranged in the opera for greater emphasis, such as the last words of the first act matching up to the words that end the book, "Like a dog!". 

The contemporary themes of the book shine through, moreso now in the early days of a Donald Trump presidency. From the first line of the book lies are accepted as fact, making this the most modern of 100 year old stories.

"Someone must have been spreading lies about Josef K. for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning."

The Marriage of Figaro - Scottish Opera

The Marriage of Figaro - Scottish Opera, Review, Theatre Royal, Glasgow October 2016.

Without having any great knowledge of classical music I have enjoyed going to see Scottish Opera at the Theatre Royal since I was a kid. They have always had a policy of having reduced price seats available for young people, so it is always worth just trying something out, with seats starting lower than tickets for a Scottish Premiership football match. With that in mind I took my three kids to see Mozart's Marriage of Figaro last night at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow. Making it a family affair my mother-in-law was there too, and at times she was almost ready to sing along in parts as she had an old, well loved cassette of this opera at home once upon a time. 

Inside the Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Although for many people a night at the opera is a good excuse to dress up, theatre-going in Glasgow is never stuffy and I always think that there is a bigger mix of people and ages here than in theatres I have been to in London and Edinburgh. I do like the new extension at the Theatre Royal, with its twisting stairwell, and roof terrace for admiring the view with a pre-theatre drink. 

View from the Theatre Royal roof terrace

I last saw Scottish Opera perform the Marriage of Figaro in 1995, in what was an English translation and it did feel a bit like a Westend farce as far as I can remember, so I was glad we were getting it sung in Italian tonight, a revival of their 2010 production. As always there is English translation in the super-titles above the stage to help you follow the plot. 

Although it is filled with wild imagined conspiracies I enjoyed sitting down to watch the 1984 Oscar-winning film Amadeus last week to get me in the mood for tonight's performance. The Marriage of Figaro was written in 1786 by a 30 year old Mozart. It is based on a French play by Pierre Beaumarchais. The play had performed amidst controversy in Paris two years earlier, controversial for it mockery of the aristocracy. An earlier play involving the same characters has also become an opera, Rossini's Barber of Seville, which includes the famous "Figaro, Figaro, Figaro.." aria when this character first comes on stage. 

As with any performance by Scottish Opera the production values are very high, with beautiful sets and ornate costumes, which is what you expect from a night at the opera. The Scottish Opera orchestra sounded crisp and perky all night, in keeping with the bouncy music, with the old fortepiano giving an atmospheric harpsichord-like sound for the rhythmically spoken interludes. 

I thought the singing of all the characters was fantastic, with Ben McAteer, who I last saw in Scottish Opera's Devil Inside, a charismatic and knowing Figaro. Eleanor Dennis's voice soared when singing her solos as the Countess and when dueting with Anna Devin (Susanna) together they made a beautiful sound. The acting of all the characters throughout was excellent too, in what is basically a farce.

Personally I find Mozart's operas a bit too close to Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas (which isn't meant as a compliment) which this production plays up to a bit with lots of pinched bottoms and cross-dressing characters, and I do prefer operas where half the cast are dead from consumption by the end of the second act. There are too many gags in this story to make it one of my favourites. However my kids really enjoyed it despite it being three and a half hours long (still shorter than Lord of the Rings and they sat through that quite happily). Everyone else we were with really loved it too. Sometimes I think we can take Scottish Opera for granted. Despite their budgets being pinched they are still turning out high quality productions again and again. 

Scottish Opera - The Devil Inside

Review - The Devil Inside. Scottish Opera and Music Theatre Wales. January 2016

Last night was the premiere at the Theatre Royal Glasgow, of The Devil Inside, a co-production by Scottish Opera and Music Theatre of Wales. Although the name suggests an opera based upon the works of INXS, it is in fact adapted from a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. 

An adaption of "The Bottle Imp" story
 in Classics Illustrated

The author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde wrote the short story "The Bottle Imp" whilst living in Samoa, firstly for a Polynesian audience. Written in English it was first seen in a Samoan translation in 1891, published two years later in English in the collection Islands' Nights Entertainments. The original story, featuring an Hawaiian sailor who buys a bottle containing an evil imp, has been adapted by author Louise Welsh, who wrote the libretto (opera text) for this production. The music is by Scottish composer Stuart MacRae, a contemporary score which is as jarring and unsettling as the story it tells, a good fit.

Louise Welsh as an author can tell tales which start off in a familiar world, then quickly develop into a dystopian Gothic horror. Her last book that I read, A Lovely Way To Burn, has the host of a TV shopping channel heading out on a date at the start, and wandering through a post-apocalyptic world of a viral pandemic by the end. 

The Devil Inside is performed with a 14 piece ensemble of musicians (partly a practical imperative as the opera will be touring venues of various size after being performed in Glasgow). Stevenson's story has been brought into the modern world. A cast of four performers (plus an almost ninja-like stage crew) tell the story. Ben McAteer and Nicholas Sharratt are young men trekking through mountains when they shelter in a mansion. It is home to a troubled old man (Steven Page) who tells them he got his fortune from an imp in a bottle, which can grant your every wish. However there is a price to pay. If you die in possession of the bottle your soul is condemned to eternal damnation, and the bottle can only be passed on by being sold for less than you paid for it. The price is getting low already and starts to fall further.

A simple but effective staging uses shadow theatre. This can conjure up a contemporary world, with the modern cityscape of the young man's wished for property empire, whilst recalling the Gothic terror of the shadowy figure from the film Nosferatu. 

Count Orlok from Nosferatu

The story batters along and the acting by all on stage is excellent. Any happiness gained through the imp in the bottle is tarnished by it, and when one of the young men finds love with Catherine, played by Rachel Kelly, illness threatens to ruin their happiness. Clever changes like this from the leprosy Stevenson's sailor developed in the original story all work well in this telling. Temptation brings them to seek out the bottle imp again. The story and acting conveys the addiction of those using the bottle, despite the harmful effects that they see (cf. alcohol, drugs, gambling). It affects all of them in different ways which reflects their personalities and a Rorschach inkblot hangs over them, a test used to assess personality traits. 

I sometimes struggle a bit with operas sung in English, it just sounds more musical to my ear when you are not listening to the meaning of the words, and just let them wash over you as sounds. So this text, sung in English obviously, has that problem for me. At times it felt like a good play that they were singing to each other. However as the story moved on the music and atmosphere became more immersive and the ambiguities in the ending which the story has been given, gave it a great punchy finale. 

Well played, well written. Imaginative and absorbing. I was left thinking it through after going home, greedy for more.

330 Million Years of Entertainment

That's what I sought out this weekend - 330 million years worth of culture, sport and entertainment and, do you know what? I found it.

Scotland getting beaten by Wales at Rugby 7s

It started on Saturday in Scotstoun Stadium with the Rugby 7s. Scotstoun Stadium has changed a fair bit since I lived in Knightswood when it was a grassy bit of ground with a changing room, overlooked by a railway track. When my son's school class had been dispatched to Glasgow Airport by the city council to welcome the teams to the city he had a great time there and managed to get 21 illegible autographs of Fijian and Kenyan sports stars. So he was keen to see them playing and I was keen to have a nosey around the future home of Firhill's departing tennants, the Glasgow Warriors rugby team. Funnily enough the rugger playing schools of Glasgow hadn't sent children to Glasgow Airport to welcome the teams, but they appeared to have pitched up in numbers with their families at Scotstoun. It was all very jolly and nice. Lots of jolly nice people in fancy dress, but I've never liked rugby and a few hours of this event did nothing to change my opinion. The 7s game is meant to be faster and higher scoring, but so is basketball, and when I've been to see Glasgow Rocks, the score ticks by, but I don't have enough invested in it to care that much. I can watch any old football game and withing 5 minutes I'll have plumped for a team and got into it. Rugby never does that for me. Anyway, my impression was that AUstralia, Fiji and New Zealand seemed too far ahead of anyone else to make it that competitive and Scotland were vaguely disinteresed or rubbish (I don't know enough about rugby to tell).

The 17th hole at the crazy golf

One good thing about being down at that part of Glasgow is that Victoria Park is nearby, which I've always loved visiting. It is a shame that the crazy golf is now a shabby pile of rotting concrete that seem to function as an al fresco drinking venue going by the amount of bottles and cans left lying about. Thankfully the Fossil Grove is still there, and although it hasn't really been updated since I used to come here as a 5 year old. I guess there is only so much updating you can do with the 330 million year old fossilised remains of a forest that was in Glasgow even before a Labour-controlled council, if it's possible to imagine that far back.

The building housing the Fossil Grove

It is open between 10 am and 4pm every day until September, so go along if you've not been for a while. It's a lovely place, if a wee bit shabby and neglected at the moment. 

Fossilised tree stumps

The domestic football season also drew to a close today in the SFL with Partick Thistle playing against Hamilton.  I decided that my season finished 7 days earlier so didn't go, but it sounded like a great game, another decent performance, but another 2 points dropped. Roll on next season.

Went to see Marley at the Grosvenor Cinema on Saturday night. My mum was briefly an usherette here in the sixties, before Mr King brought in his leather seats and bar. (Is it just me, or is it not a bit weird to decide to sit at the back of a cinema on an old cusion and blanket, on a wee leather sofa some other couple were on half an hour ago?) The film is a documentary of his life, and as it has been made with the assistance of his family can't help but being a wee bit of a hagiography, but some of the cinematography in Jamaica was glorious and the music is fantastic. Afterwards I realised that I don't have any Bob Marley on my phone (just some Damian Marley) so I put that right when I came home. It was funny that I'd just read Gil Scott-Heron's memoir of his tour with Stevie Wonder, and in that he comes across Marley a couple of times, and as Marley takes unwell with cancer this is the whole reason Gil Scott-Heron carries on touring with Stevie Wonder.

 In the gods at the Theatre Royal

If you like an opera with a few big numbers, a melodramatic story, beautiful stage sets, a fantastic orchestra, murder, assassination and suicide then you should make an effort to go see Scottish Opera doing Tosca, which is on at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow just now. I've seen this production before, relocated to 1940s Rome under Fascist rule, but I can't remember it being this good. I thought that the orchestra played beautifully, it was well acted and sung and Robert Poulton as the scheming baddie, Scarpia, stole the show. We had great seats up in the gods despite the frizzy-haired, rather self-centred woman in front of me being perched forwards all the way through the last 2 acts when she moved to the the empty seat I was enjoying in front of me.

I am looking forward to hearing Dexys new album, and tried and failed to get tickets for their gig in Cottiers last night, a Big Issue seller and me hanging about at the door asking for any spare tickets (nae chance, apparently). I was able to hear them doing some old song called "Come On Eileen", muffled and from outside, but still sounded good to me.

Right. Off to bring myself back up to date tonight at Grimes at the Berkely Suite, not a venue I've been to before in its current incarnation. I bet there is some frizzy-haired 6 foot tall woman stuck right in front of me waving her hands in the air all night.