Gigs at EIF: An overdue idea or an opportunistic one?

As contemporary dancers twitch and jerk, opera singers warble, drag queens slay, stand-ups crack wise and jugglers crack knuckles, all eyes in the cultural world remain fixed on Edinburgh.

Most of them, anyway. But I end Week One and begin Week Two by dipping into a pool which for many years was not much fished by the Festival generally – and by the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) not at all. I mean popular music.

Sure, the EIF famously hosted The Fall in 1988 for a now-legendary collaboration with Scottish dancer Michael Clark (it’s traditional to also add enfant terrible to his list of descriptors, so consider it done). But it was only really under Fergus Linehan, Nicola Benedetti’s predecessor as EIF director, that we began seeing heavyweights from the world of rock, pop, jazz and world music arriving at venues such as the Playhouse, Queen’s Hall, Leith Theatre and (during the pandemic) a massive, chilly, open-sided tent at the Gyle.

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The Gigs At EIF strand was 50% a good and overdue idea, and 50% an opportunistic trawl through a list of musicians touring within 500 miles of Edinburgh in August. No matter. Ms Benedetti has continued the tradition and this year’s line-up includes Youssou N’Dour, Cat Power, Bat For Lashes and The Magnetic Fields.

And so on Thursday night, as the rain and fog finally start to lift, it’s off to the Usher Hall for the first of those gigs. The previous evening the Bamberger Symphoniker performed Dvorak’s New World Symphony here but tonight it’s something very different: New Zealand producer and multi-instrumentalist Jordan Rakei, recently made composer in residence at the storied Abbey Road Studios.

He brings a five-piece band to the stage – guitar, bass, two drummers and a second keyboard player to augment his collection of piano, Rhodes and synth – and serves up 90 minutes of finely wrought soul tinged with jazz and subtle electronica. Triangulate a mid-point between Curtis Mayfield, Jamiroquai in their less over-the-top moments and Grammy Award-winner James Blake and there you’ll find Rakei. The Kiwi is a forward-looking artist, for sure – but for an old Acid Jazz nut like me it has the pleasant whiff of the early 1990s. And that’s good, right?

On Monday it’s off to the Playhouse for something very different again: personable young gun Declan McKenna, who blends the word-smithery of Jamie T and Billy Bragg with nods to the Clash. On his two most recent albums he also adds glam rock stomp to the mix as well as drawing on the psychedelic pop-rock of acts such as Tame Impala and Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Oh and he’s a huge fan of ABBA, as he revealed recently in The Herald. To demonstrate the fact, he even performed an ABBA cover – the ‘live debut’, as he put it, of his version of Slipping Through My Fingers. You can read the interview here.

Staging posts

The festival reviews continue thick and fast. The Herald’s theatre critic Neil Cooper has been pounding the streets and has recently taken his seat for Please Right Back and The Sound Inside, the first a blend of live theatre, animation and music, the second a tense two-hander involving two novelists from across the generation gap. He also surveyed Douglas Maxwell’s new work, So Young, and gave a five star thumbs-up to Charlene Boyd’s performance in June Carter Cash: The Woman, Her Music And Me, a co-production between Grid Iron Theatre Company and the National Theatre of Scotland.

Elsewhere dance critic Mary Brennan has reviewed Sao Paulo company Grupo Corpo’s excellent double bill, which draws on the music of Brazilian maestro Gilberto Gil and the vivid and vibrant folkloric traditions of their homeland. Finally, while music critic Keith Bruce was at the Queen’s Hall for another performance by the ground-breaking Schola Cantorum De Venezuela, choral wing of the equally ground-breaking El Sistema organisation. There he heard a varied programme of works, many drawn from Latin American composers but including our own Sir James MacMillan.

Turning a new page

The Edinburgh International Book Festival opened for business at the weekend, this year in its new home at the swanky Futures Institute. It’s a re-purposed building which once formed part of the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, the place your correspondent drew his first breath. Back to the present, there’s a packed literary line-up on offer and, though the festival hasn’t had its troubles to seek in recent months (hello Baillie Gifford!), the hope is that a new venue and a new director will provide both a reputational boost and a fresh start of sorts.

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The Herald has already been dipping into the programme to interview a few of the authors who will be attending. Teddy Jamieson offers his rundown of 10 writers not to miss, and has been chatting with veteran poet Roger McGough. “Stringing words together then tightening the knots” is the 86-year-old’s winning description of his craft. Meanwhile I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Anglo-Australian author Evie Wyld. Her last novel was set partly in North Berwick but she has now turned to somewhere even less accessible to mere mortals – the afterlife. New novel The Echoes is a ghost story replete with surprises and family secrets.

Finally, I recently had the pleasure of an hour in the company of Irvine Welsh, the pair of us perched on seats in Topping & Company Booksellers in Edinburgh. The main character in his new novel, Resolution, describes the capital as “a theatre of cowardice” which has failed to “embrace its destiny as a European capital.” Is that what he really thinks? It is, and in this weekend’s Herald Saturday Magazine, you can read more about why.