Future Tense, a tense present, and midnight movie past

Future Tense – and our tense present

The grandly-named Edinburgh Futures Institute has finally opened on the site of the capital’s old Royal Infirmary.

Formerly a hellish confection of mismatched buildings which your correspondent remembers with a mixture of affection (he was born there) and dismay (one too many visits to A&E), it’s now a place of swanky glass loft apartments and hipster coffee hangouts. And, from this week, the grandly-named Edinburgh Futures Institute.

Quite what the building itself is for may become clear over time. But come August every year it will definitely be home to the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Consequently, it was on the fourth floor of the building that members of the press gathered on Tuesday to hear new festival director Jenny Niven launch this year’s programme.

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What’s clear is that the EFI provides the book festival with answers to many of its old problems. Gone will be the sound of rain battering on the roofs of the Charlotte Square tents. Gone will be near-death experiences with taxis and Deliveroo riders as festival-goers negotiated the Charlotte Square traffic to access the site. Gone will be the odd tumbleweed feeling attending any book festival held in an art college that would otherwise be closed for the summer.

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And the EFI is certainly a splendid edifice, with a purpose-built main theatre space for 400, more event space on the second floor, a cool looking cafe/restaurant, and a humongous patch of grass out back which is where the returning (yay!) Spiegeltent will be pitched alongside another 200-seater venue and the festival’s bookshop.

Of course 2024 also brings a host of new questions for the book festival (hello protest, goodbye Baillie Gifford!), which may explain why Niven didn’t hang around for a Q&A session following the launch. Statements have been issued and ties severed: perhaps there’s nothing much left to say on the matter. We’ll see.

The programme itself is enticing, innovative and richly populated with big name authors such as Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Laurie Moore. There’s also a bookshelf full of rising stars. Sarah Perry and Babel author RF Kuang stand out here, but there are dozens more. Ideas, as ever, are as central to the festival as words on the page so there are mouth-watering strands devoted to AI, food, the future of economics and politics, and how to live a meaningful life.

There’s also something called Steamy Lit, a celebration of erotica; an ace-sounding political strand called Voterama, which will feature Jess Phillips MP, Andy ‘King in the North’ Burnham, and seasoned BBC correspondent Jeremy Bowen; and in the year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of James Hogg’s trippy existential freak-out novel The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner, a raft of events in keeping with the spirit of that much-admired work.

The festival’s guiding slogan this year is Future Tense (it’s plastered all over the front of the programme). If it delivers as much as it promises, it offers to shine some much-needed light on our tense present.

The Edinburgh International Book Festival runs from August 10 to 25. The programme is out now and tickets go on sale on June 20.

Midnight specials

To another of Edinburgh’s festivals and another unveiling, this time the re-vamped and (hopefully) re-vitalised Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) which will announce its 2024 programme on July 10. Tickets go on sale the following day.

A new strand within the festival is Midnight Madness. It celebrates a cinematic tradition born in the late 1960s at either San Francisco’s Palace Theater or New York’s Elgin Theater (film historians are divided) in which a movie is shown at midnight, often to repeat customers. El Topo, a Surrealist Western by avant-garde Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky is the film which screened at the Elgin and is generally reckoned to be the Godfather of the midnight movie. John Lennon was a regular attendee and loved El Topo so much that he later released the soundtrack on the Beatles’ Apple Records label.

The EIFF’s Midnight Madness strand hopes to capitalise on that same cool, late night counterculture vibe which so inspired Lennon – vital as the festival seeks to re-establish a love of risk-taking cinema in the audiences it needs to attract if it is to thrive.

As an early enticement and a taste of what will be on offer come August, July 11 also sees a special, pre-festival preview of art-house horror flick A Violent Nature. It’s described by new EIFF director Paul Ridd as “a total trip” and “one of the most exciting and original new horror films of the year” – and, yes, it’s screening at midnight.

And finally

Ahead of the arrival in Scotland of his peripatetic Hear Hard project (it’s performed in pubs among other places), the art provocateur legend that is Bill Drummond has been writing in The Herald about his formative influences, among them Gaelic psalm singing. You can read the ex-KLF man’s musings here.

Elsewhere, music critic Keith Bruce has been tuning in to more Perth Festival of the Arts highlights, first the Scottish debut of innovative European string outfit Il Giardino d’Amore and, closer to home, the closing night performance by Stockport’s venerable brass band The Fairey Band.

Your correspondent has a lingering fondness for the second group, having seen them perform their iconic Acid Brass programme at the short-lived Flux New Music Festival in Edinburgh in 1997, a collaboration with future Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller. The band's Perth performance was light on house music classics (what, no Voodoo Ray?) and instead focussed on an arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition alongside arrangements of works by Hector Berlioz and Johann Sebastian Bach.

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Meanwhile the dozen-strong players of Il Giardino d’Amore plucked and bowed their way through Antonio Vivaldi’s famous violin concerto suite The Four Seasons and also performed responses to it by Franco-Argentine tango great Astor Piazzola and Neo-classical luminary Max Richter. For more of that kind of thing, check out Anno, the 2016 collaboration between the Scottish Ensemble and Scottish composer and electronica whizz Anna Meredith.