Looking Out To Sea

On Monday evening I skipped off to Glasgow with Martin to see Sun Kil Moon, one of the side projects of US singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek. The gig was at a place called Stereo, which sounds like it might be a nightclub but turned out to be a vegan cafe with a stage in the basement, all situated at the far end of a damp side-street.

The music was proper melancholic Americana. All about unrequited love and dead boxers. The band made sure never to crack a smile during the whole performance, or to accidentally look like they were enjoying themselves.

Kozelek’s voice sounds just like it did on the records, though I’m not really sure how to describe it. A strange smooth, strained quality. It was really apparent on Monday night, though hard to describe. Brilliant show, anyway.

Tuesday night we got into another Nigella that had been hanging over us, though I haven’t got round to blogging it yet. Wednesday we went to The Stand Comedy Club. It was a charity fundraiser night for a cancer charity, but we went to see Emily (and Ella, Francis and some other people who I can’t name right now), who has just moved to Aberdeen.

Comedy was reasonable but not great. Last time we were at The Stand in Glasgow it was a weekend show but was even more variable in quality: the best was better but the worst was terrible. After the gig we went to the pub and I dropped Coke all over the table and my seat. And not even in an amusing Woody Allen way either, just the ordinary sugary fizzy liquid way.

We went out again this Wednesday. Even more frantic than last time, though with more sauerkraut to compensate.

• Pappy’s Fun Club: Funergy

  Matt was late turning up (damn you Matt!) so someone had to wait outside. That was me, in case you hadn’t guessed (damn you Matt!). The show had been going ten minutes by the time we managed to brag our way in. We only got in because our ticket stubs had already been ripped, so the capacity crowd inside technically included us too.

  But like I said, we missed the first ten minutes. (For anyone who’s seen the show, we arrived as The Internet was about to have a “knowledge-off” with a Wise Owl.) It was a loosely plotted sketch show about a kid’s entertainment troupe, like a sweary Singing Kettle. They had a fun-o-meter that was going to solve global warming.

  The jokes were more hit-and-miss than I expected, given the hype Pappy’s Fun Club have been getting for a while. The problem seemed to be, alternately, a lack of coherent ideas and a strange embarrassment at being on stage. Amusing, but I don’t think I will be rushing back.

• Miles Jupp

  This is the second year we’ve seen Miles Jupp doing his stand-up routine. Last year we also saw him with Simon Munnery in Johnson and Boswell. Both were excellent, so we’ll have to see Elizabeth and Raleigh to round everything off.

  Anyway, Jupp was excellent. He does a fine line in barely suppressed British rage — hilariously twattish and sympathetic at the same time. It’s the same kind of social status comedy that Fawlty Towers was so good at portraying.

• Antonio Forcione and Adriano Adawale

  Virtuoso Italian guitarist and Brazilian percussionist. Simply stunning. I can’t stress enough how much you have to catch this one. If you even thought to yourself who’s the successor to Michael Hedges? then you need to see this show.

  Both players were amazing. Adawale does some amazing percussive magic that you have to see. And he has bells on his toes (well, ankle).

  The two of them will be playing in a quartet until Monday, doing different material. I’m keen to see them again.

We finally got our act together and saw some stuff at the festival on Wednesday.

• Aeneas Faversham Forever by The Penny Dreadfuls

  These guys have been steadily building quite a name for themselves, mining the rich seam of Victorian-era comedy. In previous years the show has been sketch-based, but this time there was a reasonably neat plot holding it all together. Lots of opportunity to play up conventions of Victorian melodrama, sinister cults, Holmes detective stories and such. Also, pant-splittingly funny.

• The Rat Pack, Live! (I can’t find a link for these guys anywhere… or at least, not a definitive one. Everyone seems to do these Sinatra et al tribute shows.)

  A reasonably short show, with three guys playing the parts of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr and three gals as the Berelli sisters. It was one of the harder tribute acts I’ve seen, because the three guys looked so incredibly young. When “Dean Martin” came out drunk and dishevelled halfway through the show he looked more like a rebel schoolboy than a Vegas superstar. Music was still helluva fun though.

Between the shows we went to a restaurant, but ran out of time for a final course. Thankfully the jazz show was quite short and there was still time to nip out for pudding later:

• Black Bo’s is a vegetarian restaurant on Blackfriar Street that doesn’t get the popular acclaim of David Bann’s on the next street along. Bann’s is not my kind of place — too cold and severe, I think. Black Bo’s is more relaxed and casual.

  I had a bit of problem deciding which of many dishes to have. (Helen went for two starters in the end, if I recall correctly.) Eventually I trumped for the “baby corn balls” because I couldn’t work out what that meant. It turned out to be breadcrumbed balls of brie with lumps of baby sweetcorn inside. Incredibly good.

• We visited The Outsider after the second show. I had the chocolate brownie with strawberry shortcake ice cream. It was really good. I wish there had been more of it, and more space in my stomach too! Service was a bit sleepy but so was I. A magic portal back to my bed would have been ideal after all that.

We’re just back from an adaptation of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps. I had been a bit lax and hadn’t really noticed that it had received a comedy award rather than a drama award. I was expecting a somewhat-straight rendering of the story, but it was straight in the same way that The Muppet Christmas Carol is an accurate retelling of Dickens’ story.

I had also only read the book, so I didn’t realise that none of the three films were anything like the book. This stage version apparently uses the Hitchcock plot but hams things up to an incredible degree. That’s not to say it’s difficult though; suspension of disbelief is definitely required for the book and it doesn’t take much to highlight the inherent silliness in the story. With a cast of four, including the hero and one woman, the two supporting males have a really hard time of filling out the full cast of policemen, villains, magistrates, theatre-goers and hotel owners.

There was a bit of slapstick and lots of visual comedy, mostly playing on the conventions of drama and bad theatre — sound effects that don’t come in at the right moment, really badly hidden puppeteers and so on. It surprised me, all this humour, but it didn’t take me long to get in to different style.

Tonight was also a signed performance so that added an extra interest, though it was really hard to keep an eye on the visual stuff on stage and the interpreter at the side. But there were bits and pieces I could follow reasonably well.

I’d definitely recommend this version if you can see it — it seems to have been all over West End and Broadway so it might appear near you soon.