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Flat spats
Accommodation is scarce in Edinburgh during the Festival but no matter what happens, don't ever share with a performer.
Words: Jonathan Trew
We all know that your everyday flatmates can be a pain in the arse. If they're not drinking your carefully hidden booze or blocking the plughole with pubesque furballs then they're doing unspeakable things with liver and milk cartons on the living room sofa. Still, none of this is really going to ruin your day. Shed a tear instead for the poor performers who have to suffer each other’s company while they do the Festival.
Imagine the horror of having to crawl bleary from bed and, while you're having difficulty keeping a cup of coffee down, some smart arse stand-up bastard is making sarcastic, yet ever so witty, sallies about your new crop of bruises which have mysteriously appeared overnight.
Actually, comedians probably wouldn’t be so bad. After a gruelling session at Late ’n’ Live followed by some suicudal drinking at the Penny Black, they're unlikely to get up much before midday and they’re not going to be much cop when they do. Even if there is still any residual lippiness left in them then a few well-aimed remarks about how they don’t seem to be pulling as many groupies as in previous years should keep the gags at bay.
Thespians are worse First of all they travel in packs
Fortunately, John 'Prince Of Pain' Kamikaze, leader of the Kamikaze Freakshow and a man partial to sticking fireworks up his arse, has his own place in Edinburgh thus sparing anybody else the horror of having to live with him.
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phone rings they all swoop en masse, convinced that it has to be their agent calling to tell them that they've got that break into the movies and theyll never have to share a flat with other actors again. At night they all mumble under their breath as they memorise their lines. The effect is like being surrounded by a flatfull of Grassmarket alkies.
Fortunately, John 'Prince Of Pain’ Kamikaze, leader
And then, M‘Iud, the soap slipped . ..
Edinburgh thus sparing anybody else the horror of having to live with him. Although on proper consideration it’s a talent that could come in handy when it was his turn to clean the khazi.
Anyway, to get to the long overdrawn point of this article, sharing a flat with any sort of performer is likely to end in tears. The photograph accompanying this article arrived with a big bag of sweeties. They were a bribe to get Front Of House to mention Baby Wants Candy, a one hour improvised musical which is playing at 9.30pm every night at Venue 123.
The sweets and stuff came with a letter which ended with a P5: 'Just in case you don’t like the candy, also enclosed is a photo of one of our cast
and they have this incessant desire to play charades for some reason. More annoying, very time the
of the Kamikaze Freakshow and a man partial to sticking fireworks up his arse, has his own place in
members naked with a dog.’ Would you share a flat with this man?
Laugh? I nearly pissed myself
We've all heard the urban myths about poor unfortunates who laugh so hard that they lose control of their bladders. Finally, we have an eye witness account of one such unhappy incident. Our spies were watching Phil Cool run through his routine when . their attention was distracted by the distinctive laughter of one woman in particular. As Cool spun joke after joke, this woman would greet each quip with a peal of laughter which slowly but surely became louder and stronger, more intense, swelling until it seemed she could laugh no more. And then it stopped. The
26 THE usr 27 Aug—10 Sep 1998
woman in question got up from her seat and very gingerly walked out leaving a small pool of appreciation on her seat. What comedian could ask for a higher accolade? By the time Cool finished his set, there wasn’t a dry seat in the house.
Red right hand
Over to the Queen's Hall, where Nick Cave recently gave two inspired performances. On the Friday night, all was sweetness and light with Cave reading from an essay he had written, then singing some of the more romantic tracks from his glorious (can you tell I'm a fan?) album The Boatman’s Call.
On the Saturday night however, the fragile peace came crashing down as
some fool sitting in the front row decided to heckle Cave during his reading. Now while Cave has mellowed over the last few years, he has never been known as a man to turn the other cheek. As many of his songs have explained, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is more Cave’s style. The heckler, having refused Cave's invitation to fuck off, continued his tirade. Cave, a man who tellingly once wrote an entire album of murder ballads, left the stage and squared up to his tormentor. Just when it looked as though the audience were going to get a lot more of a show than they'd paid for, the bouncers dragged the heckler away.
The heckler got off lightly. Those who remember live shows with the Birthday
Party, Cave's first band, reminisce fondly about the days when one heckler was never enough. Then gigs were less about performance and more about pitched and bloody battles 'twixt Cave and the entire audience.
More Violence
Vinnie Jones, the man until now most famous for grappling Gazza's gonads, has recently launched an acting career in the gangster movie Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. Introducing the movie at the Film Festival, he sent a delicious shiver of vicarious danger down the spines of the assembled arts and media darlings when he started with the words: ‘Right, you lot had better fackin' like this or I’ll break
your fackin' legs'. We may be paraphrasing slightly but the sentiment is the right one.
Rumours that Jones was to replace Barry Norman in the new hardline version of Film 98’ could not be confirmed at the time of going to press. Still, can you guess what his favourite part was in Three Weddings And A Funeral?
Debauch
Front Of House felt that this dreadful tale of debauch could not go unrecorded. We were sitting in a public house last Sunday working our way along the gantry in the vain hope of remembering which bastard mongrel dog had bitten us the night before. The long-suffering barman
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