Spank's Edinburgh Diary, Saturday 24/08/2024

Reviewed today: Cätlin and Marko Mägi with Finlay MacDonald & Ali Hutton, John Hegley: Do Horses Have Teeth Sir?, LUCKYME: Festival Closing Party, Melanie Bracewell: Attack Of The Melanie Bracewell, Rachel Roddy.

It's Saturday morning, so you know what that means: it's once again time to buy a copy of the Saturday Guardian and throw most of it into the recycling bin. On this particular morning, we have less to throw into the recycling than usual, because the shop we buy it from - no names mentioned - claim that they've mysteriously not been given any copies of the Weekend magazine this week. Hmmm. To be honest, we're not too fussed about that, but if they'd said the same thing about the Feast food supplement we'd have taken our business elsewhere. Feast has become our main source for new recipes to use in the kitchen, and today's Book Festival interviewee Rachel Roddy, the magazine's Italian food expert, has become one of our favourites. It wasn't always the case: The BBG used to frequently skip Roddy's pages because they looked like articles about food rather than recipes. That's probably a hangover from Roddy's past career as a blogger, writing essays about being an Englishwoman living in Rome with a recipe embedded somewhere in them.

Interviewer Caroline Eden is mainly talking to Roddy here about a new edition of Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, which was first published in 2015. The title Five Quarters turns out to have several meanings, from the subdivisions of Rome to the idea that the internal organs of an animal make up its fifth quarter. Eden's key observation is that "it's written as a cookbook, but it feels like a memoir." That's what you'd certainly expect from Roddy's writing in The Guardian, and it's what we get from this interview here: an enjoyable ramble through topics like the history of her time in Rome, an analysis of current Italian food trends, and some cookery tips thrown in.

We toy with the idea of queueing up afterwards to get a copy of Five Quarters signed, but she's actually said in the talk that she's changed her mind on several things in there since she originally wrote them, and also - to quote The BBG - "it's probably mostly about cooking offal anyway." So we make this the last thing we do at the Book Festival this year, noting that the move to its new location at Edinburgh Futures Institute has worked out pretty well, although we question whether having all the outdoor space for socialising is such a good idea given Edinburgh's weather.

When was the last time I saw John Hegley do a solo show? A search through my Edinburgh not-quite-an-index suggests 1995, which seems almost impossible. Twenty-nine years on, he's still performing poems I can almost recite entirely from memory ("I said Pat, you are fat..."), but he's written plenty of other ones too. There are certain themes that keep reappearing - the old classical myths, his time working in education, and horses. The title of this particular show - Do Horses Have Teeth, Sir? - is a direct quote from the second that takes in the third. The show is so horse-heavy that he has to employ one audience member to bash a couple of coconut shells together whenever a horse appears on screen.

Yes, this is a show with audience participation, both working in groups and singly. And as is presumably mandated by law these days, Hegley has to start by saying that anyone who doesn't want to join in with his songs or shout out missing words in his poems can feel free to not get involved. But here's the thing - nobody wants to not get involved. By the end of the show he's doing a song with the audience split into five sections, one section consisting of just one person, and everyone's delighted to join in with Hegley's infectious silliness. I feel sad now that I've spent the last twenty-nine years avoiding his Edinburgh shows for some reason. At the very least, it's nice to see what John Oliver will look like in the future once he's naturally aged (as opposed to the unnatural ageing that ten years of reporting on American news has done to him).

It's time for the last one of our Antipodean Taskmaster contestants performing at this year's Fringe, and it's Melanie Bracewell, New Zealand's reigning Taskmaster champion (until series 5 finishes in a couple of weeks). Six foot two in stockinged feet, it seems almost barbaric to coop her up inside the shipping container that they laughably call Pleasance Baby Grand, but that's what happens when star comedians from a different continent turn up in Edinburgh for the first time.

Her show Attack Of The Melanie Bracewell is based around her long-term fear of confrontation, and how she's working on ways to get around it. (Curiously, she's the second NZ comic after Ray O'Leary to toy with the idea of having a fight with an audience member.) The jokes are pretty good, but what makes Bracewell stand out here are her storytelling skills. The show is basically a one-hour story about losing her AirPods, using the tracking feature to find out where they were, and what happened when she did. It's a beautifully constructed tale with all manner of twists and turns, plus an unexpected guest appearance that's greeted with whoops of joy from anyone familiar with the Kiwi comedy scene. Which includes us by now, I guess.

When you've got four programmes of events from all the Edinburgh festivals to choose from - possibly even five, if you include the Edinburgh Anaesthesia Festival which I only discovered a couple of days ago (I guess we've all been sleeping on that one) - then sometimes all it takes is a key word or phrase in the middle of an event description to sell it to you. And this is the event I've booked for purely based on the phrase 'Estonian bagpipes'. It's an instrument I heard for the first time in 2022, the year that Kristjan Järvi's Midnight Sun was my most played track on Spotify: a splendidly bombastic piece of work elevated even further by Mari Meentalo's pipe work. I'd never heard of any other place where they were used until tonight's concert at the Hub, offering the chance to see Estonian bagpipes and Scottish bagpipes being played on the same stage. Sign me up, please.

It's a game of three halves. To start off with, we get the Estonian husband-and-wife team of Cätlin and Marko Mägi, with Cätlin on pipes and Marko on what they insist is a 'traditional' saxophone. Their short solo set is notable for being infectiously danceable, especially in an interlude where Cätlin breaks out the jew's harp - can we still call it that? - and hammers out a distorted rhythm that sounds like an Aphex Twin outtake. Then the Scots take over, with Finlay MacDonald and Ali Hutton on pipes and guitar respectively. Their set's a slightly more dour affair, with MacDonald not afraid to explore the more melancholy side of his instrument (yet somehow comes close to writing off the Hub's carpet with his heavy stomping), and Hutton providing welcome chordal colour with his backing. 

But what we're waiting for is the bit where all four musicians are on stage at the same time, so they can finally answer the question: what is the difference between Scottish and Estonian bagpipes? It turns out they're very similar, except that the drone pipes on an Estonian rig hang around the player's neck, while the Scottish drones just rest over the shoulder. ("Your neck must be very weak," suggests Cätlin to MacDonald.) It turns out that the four of them have a history of playing together: MacDonald tells the story of his first visit to Estonia, where within two hours of arrival he was in a sauna with the Mägi's drinking beer. The last third of the show is basically a ridiculously jolly showcase for duelling bagpipes, and it's a surprise that the audience managed to sit still throughout and not break into mad dancing. Cätlin has put up a couple of clips from the set on her YouTube channel, presumably legitimately, so check these out.

We head off to old favourite The Outsider for dinner, only to find we've caught them on a night where that dinner ends up lasting about two hours. However, the dicky service does have two fine consequences. Firstly, it means we're still at our table by the window when the Tattoo ends, so we get a splendid view of the fireworks like we did in 2022. And secondly, it means that we get to the LUCKYME Festival Closing Party an hour and a half after it starts, just in time for the dancing to have properly kicked off.

I mentioned yesterday that both the Filmhouse and the Jazz Bar have managed to escape closure by the skin of their teeth this year. The same applies, shockingly, to Summerhall, which was on the verge of shutting down after this year's Fringe, only to get a three year extension to their lease at the last minute. It's not completely out of the woods yet, obviously, but it's good that we still have one of the most eclectic venues at the Fringe for now. But when we were making our initial plans for our week in Edinburgh, it seemed like our last chance of seeing something at the venue would be a five hour closing night discotheque run by artists from the LUCKYME record label. And regular readers will be aware that The BBG and I have set ourselves a target of attending 12 DJ nights in 2024, no matter how age-inappropriate they may be. This would be number seven.

So our final night in Edinburgh this year wraps up with a couple of hours on the dancefloor, accompanied by DJs Eclair Fifi, Dansa, Feena and St. Sunday, all of whom we think have a turn on the decks during our stay. The music policy is described as "joining the dots between club music, hip-hop, jazz and the undefinable space between," which is kind of our jam. In practice, it's actually mostly club music: I only recognise one track played while we're there, which is Stardust's classic Music Sounds Better With You except they've, as I believe the young people say, put a massive fuckin' donk on it. Not a problem for us, we're just there for the dancing, and despite being the oldest ones in the room by some considerable margin we have a great time. Though The BBG is concerned that a few of the younger attendees appear to be using some sort of chemical stimulation. Why would you do that? They make Barney's beer on the premises, for God's sake!