Festival Music
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Vickers is a Scottish music scene mainstay, who fronted John Peel favourites Dawn of the Replicants, and now performs with The Leg. He sings a heartfelt song about failing to get a cat from an ‘arsehole’ at an animal sanctuary and ends with a rousing number from a 1918 Broadway musical. There’s no hint of affected quirkiness throughout. Vickers is just a good, honest weirdo, and very funny to boot. (Jonny Ensall) ■ Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, until 29 Aug (not 26), 12.10pm, free.
THE A BAND Broken toys make music in a back garden ●●●●● In the front room of a rough and not very ready shop-front, a man is reading the classic cut-ups of William Burroughs’ Nova Express by way of that day’s Metro into a microphone while two or three people manipulate a chaos of kids’ toys and old radios on the floor. This is a version of the Edinburgh wing of The A Band, the UK’s longest serving free improv collective, who make a virtue out of their lack of conventional musical ability as well as a random approach
NICK KEIR (McCalmans/ Tolkien Ensemble)
“...skillfully-wrought songcraft, intelligent lyrics and fl avoursome delivery” (Sunday Herald)
29 August. 17.00 (1Hr) £8 (£6)
Acoustic Music Centre Acoustic Music Centre @St Brides @St Brides 10 Orwell Terrace 10 Orwell Terrace 0131 668 2019 0131 668 2019 Photo: John Need
40 THE LIST 26 Aug–9 Sep 2010
list.co.uk/festival
Phoenix These Frenchies love putting a bit of slap bass guitar over disco beats, and sit at the funkier end of the rock spectrum. Phoenix, who are pals of Air and Daft Punk, are supported by 25-year-old
Hebridean radio-friendly folkster, Colin McLean, aka The Boy Who Trapped The Sun. ■ Phoenix, HMV Picture House, Lothian Road, 08444 999 990, Tue 28 Aug, 7.30pm, £17.50. Part of The Edge Festival.
(non-)appearance takes place over several hours, primarily in a tent in the gallery’s back garden, where broken xylophones and plastic Fisher Price pianos are bashed and battered with abandon. All summer camps should be like this. (Neil Cooper) ■ The A Band, Change X, Komachi Gallery, 19 Aug. Change X exhibition and events, until 3 Sep, noon–6pm, free. See komachi162.wordpress.com for news of other events.
SMOKE AND MIRRORS Vaudevillian talent show in the Spiegeltent ●●●●● There are magic tricks in this cabaret show that might leave your brain short circuiting in an attempt to understand them. Even the next day. Just because they’re old school (the severed man in the box, pictured; the white doves
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conjured from up an illusionist’s sleeve), doesn’t make them any less impressive. There’s an old-timey, vaudevillian
tone to the show, made by the producers of La Clique, and a sell-out hit at this year’s Sydney Festival. While it fails to fill the sadly missed shoes of La Clique; never quite nailing that subversive, original edge or humour that made it so special, Smoke and Mirrors does offer up some excellent Victorian spectacle and magic – presided over by Donnie Darko-style giant bunnies. Moustachioed, stripey-panted
strongmen create human towers and pose gracefully in one-arm handstands; a tiny dancer is expertly flung about like a ragdoll in fishnets; a trapeze is dangled upon; and a tap- dancing crying man has a Bojangles breakdown. Bawdy music hall singalongs, and a wobbly back-story about the dark side of showbiz, perhaps push things too far towards adult panto, but for up-close, whites- of-the-eyes circus tricks, it’s old fashioned entertainment, in one of cabaret’s best possible venues. (Claire Sawers) ■ The Famous Spiegeltent, 667 8940, until Aug 30, 10pm; and 28–30, 7pm, £20 (£15).
to who turns up at a show to clatter out their gleeful child-like racket as pure, naive expressionist fun. The pop-up guerrilla gallery Komachi in Fountainbridge is spending August creating an ever- mutating Change X strand for Edinburgh Art Festival. Change X has already featured an appearance by electronic pop princess Her Royal Highness (formerly Heatherette) and a trip in a rowing boat along the canal with The Leg’s Dan Mutch and Alun Thomas in full panda regalia, like some post-punk Edward Lear creation (pictured, left). The A Band’s NEXT ISSUE OUT WEDNESDAY 8 SEPTEMBER