Spank's Edinburgh Diary, Sunday 18/08/2024

Reviewed today: Best Of Red Raw, Cat Power Sings Dylan '66, Guy Montgomery: Over 50,000,000 Guy Fans Can't Be Wrong.

We saw an Edinburgh preview show in London last night, which is the first time we've done that the day before travelling up to the festival. Guy Montgomery's Over 50,000,000 Guy Fans Can't Be Wrong, which opens in Edinburgh on Monday - it's bending the rules a little, but this could be my first review of the year, I guess - is a typically rambly showcase for Montgomery's goofy charm, but I was finding it a little hard to concentrate. Because just half an hour before he went on stage, LNER casually texted me to announce that our train up to Edinburgh the next day had been cancelled. There were eight of us in our group travelling up, and the only option they were offering us was to try and fight for the few unreserved seats on the next train after the cancelled one. So yeah, sorry if I seemed a little distracted, Guy.

We turn up at King's Cross expecting chaos, but underestimate how much chaos there'll be. Aside from all the people trying to get Edinburgh trains at the height of the festival, there's also a large number of young women in Taylor Swift t-shirts trying to get home after last night's Wembley gig. On top of all that, there’s a problem on the line out of Euston, so all their passengers have been rerouted through here. We later find out that if we'd bothered to look outside the station while all this was going on, we'd have found that the street was flooded.

In the middle of all this, we need a plan to get around the cancellation of our 1030 service. We make the tactical decision to try for the 1100 train, having been told that the unreserved seats are in coach C. As soon as they announce the platform, I bolt through the gates, head straight for the coach and bagsy two tables for us. Unfortunately, after a few minutes we discover that only half the seats in coach C are unreserved, and we’ve parked ourselves in the wrong half. As the coach fills up, I pester one of the station staff, and she suggests we grab seats on the just-opened 1130 on the adjacent platform. Stephen bravely hurls himself across two tables on the 1130, while I try to get everyone off the 1100 and onto it. It’s only as the 1100 is pulling out of the station that we realise Diane is still on it. Still, seven out of eight is a decent result.

Of course, it would be nice to report that once the 1130 pulled out everything went swimmingly. It didn’t. A points failure between Doncaster and York turns our smooth run into a stop-start mess. Diane, trapped on the 1100, misses all this and breezes into Edinburgh at half three: we end up getting there a good hour and a half after her (which is two hours after our cancelled train was meant to be getting in). When we eventually get off, there’s massive confusion over where you get taxis from these days, with Diane waiting for us at one rank while we’re directed by station signs to another. The one indication that our luck might be about to change is that both ranks are eerily queueless, and we get cabs in no time at all.

Eight people arrive at our student flats in two taxis, to find Lesley is already there waiting for us. Alan's making his own way, while Noelle should be with us in a couple of days following a family emergency. So we're good to go, finally. We check into the flats, at which point The BBG and I excuse ourselves from the usual first-day shopping duties because we've got first-day shows to see.

We had a table booked at Canadian diner Down The Hatch, which we cancelled in the taxi to the flats because we thought we'd never make it on time - turns out we could, and we still get to walk in and have a decent dinner. This positions us nicely across the road from the Playhouse, where the International Festival has an event with an intriguing one-line pitch. Cat Power Sings Dylan '66 features the singer performing a very specific set of Bob Dylan songs - the ones from his 1966 show at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, mistakenly attributed in the subsequent bootleg to the Royal Albert Hall (typical Londoners, nicking all our good stuff). It's the show where Dylan unveiled his new electric direction to an unsuspecting British audience, and some of them reacted poorly. But is this going to be just an established singer-songwriter paying tribute to a set - two sets, kinda - of somebody else's absolute bangers, or is it going to be a full-blown historical re-enactment? Will we be expected to shout the J-word?

In the end it's more tribute than re-enactment, but it does give you a feel for what the original gig must have been like, because it's very obviously a show of two halves. The acoustic set features Power on vocals and two of her band on guitar and harmonica ("does it really take three people to replace Dylan?" asks The BBG). It's quiet and melodic, with no real commentary from Power herself apart from when she distances herself a little from the subject matter of Just Like A Woman ("I'm just going to sing the lyrics, like a good girl"). But everyone in the room's waiting for the big bait and switch, which comes just after her delicate interpretation of Mr Tambourine Man. Four other musicians come on stage and the volume is cranked way up, and you suddenly realise what a shock this would have been if you hadn't been expecting it.

It's not a slavish copy, though, as Power is keen to make the songs her own. Again, she's paying more attention to the melody than Dylan himself used to (and probably a lot more than he does nowadays), while doing all sorts of unexpected things with the phrasing: Ballad Of A Thin Man feels like she's uprooted every line from the original song and found a new, slightly different place to put it back. As a result, it's a lot more interesting than all the music tribute shows that have been cluttering up the Fringe for the past few years.

And in case you were wondering: in between two songs in the second half, someone in the crowd shouts "Judas!" Everyone ignores him.

Say what you like about Judas Iscariot, but at least he delivered his betrayal within the pre-agreed timescales. Cat Power was advertised as starting at 8pm prompt, but didn't actually kick off till 8.30. As a result, we end up dashing out after the show across to the Place Hotel (currently rebranded as Stand 5&6) for Best Of Red Raw. We try to sneak discreetly into the room a few minutes late, but we're spotted by compere Daniel Downie, who refers to us with genuine affection as "the two old c**ts at the back". To be fair, we get off lightly compared with the couple of Americans in the audience, who cheerfully announce that they come from a town called Bairnville, only for Downie to point out that to a Scottish audience, that makes them sound like paedophiles.

Red Raw is a long standing tradition at the Stand comedy club - it's their weekly show for new stand-up comics. We first came across it during the Stand's year-long series of lockdown livestreams, where it pivoted to become a collection of video clips of bedroom stand-up and home-made sketches. Regular compere Mark Nelson used to have a tremendous time slagging these clips off and suggesting the people involved should get another career instead. Still, now we're back to in-person comedy, the weekly newcomers shows are back too, and each night at the Fringe Best Of Red Raw brings together a different collection of some of the best comics from the last twelve months - most of whom have, inevitably, their own shows to plug this month.

It's a nicely structured 90 minutes, as Downie brings on half a dozen comics to do 10-15 minute slots each, with an interval after the third one. For me, the comics who open each half of the show are the highlight, each one bringing their own type of wild energy to get the comedy started properly after Downie's warmup. Ian TC has so much rage to give that his ten minutes seems over in no time, while Gabriel Featherstone is more surreal and directly confrontational. Headliner Aidan Greene is also impressive, another comic carrying on the long-standing tradition of using their disability - in Greene's case, stammering - to generate massive tension in an abled audience. It's a fun late-night show, and I'm just sorry that we're going to miss this Friday's edition featuring special guest... Mark Nelson. Play nice, Mark.