Edinburgh, 15/8/14: Oozing Gloop at Dive’s Super-Fringe Sweep at Forest Café, and Ute Lemper, who played an EIF concert at Usher Hall (photos Ben Walters, Wolfgang Stahr)
“Come taste the wine, come hear the band!” As Ute Lemper reaches that line in that song (you know the one), she jerks a thumb over her shoulder to indicate ‘the band’ – though it’s a funny way of referring to the 60-odd classically trained musicians of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. But then Friday night’s concert was cabaret as high art, a showcase event in the prestigious Edinburgh International Festival programme, held amid the white-and-gold columned splendour of Usher Hall for rows of polite, well turned-out concert-goers. Funny how the rib-poking, lapel-grabbing provocations of Brecht, Weill, Eisler and Tucholsky have been canonised into such classy fare…
None of which is to say this is a staid or unfeeling show, or one lacking in provocative power. Lemper is a compelling live performer, dry yet warm, even bordering on goofy at moments, despite her chic black and silver eveningwear, and possessed of a keen physicality. During Brecht and Weill’s Der Song von Mandelay, which opens her set, her hand plucks, swats and claws at the air, her shoulders twitch, she leans in towards us as if the extra inches will make the German lyrics comprehensible to those who don’t speak the language. There’s extraordinary vitality in her renditions of 1934’s Ballad of the Waterwheel, whose crazy rhythms she rides as if navigating a surging river, and 1959’s The Trench, which simply pounds with power.
Lemper can do softness too – her Lili Marlene has the lilting timbre of a lullaby, and there’s real yearning in the dreamlike Youkali – but perhaps not vulnerability. When Meow Meow sings Surabaya Johnny, you feel she’s missing a layer of skin so raw is her hurt; it’s a struggle to believe Lemper has really been wounded by this man, or if she was, it was long ago and she was a different person. Medleys of Piaf and Dietrich standards are almost too big for their own good here; as Falling in Love Again slides into They Call Me Naughty Lola, we get authentically low, Dietrichesque swoops but also scat breaks, big-band brassiness, even mouth trumpet – fun stuff but hardly the sly, innuendo-laden tone of intimacy the material calls for.
Of course, intimacy was no more likely than a real sense of danger at an august 2,200-seater like Usher Hall. But a few minutes down Lothian Road lies Forest Café where, that same night, Edinburgh queer party Dive held its Super-Fringe Sweep, showing off 20-odd local and visiting acts in a cramped, lo-fi space. En route between venues, I bumped into EastEnd Cabaret, who were understandably hoarse having just completed their mini-set at the café without a mic – their fourth performance that evening, I believe, with another to come.
Inside the café, beneath papier-maché stalactites, the stage comprised a few chairs and a supermarket trolley festooned with bunting and balloons, and was frequently traversed by punters while acts battled against dodgy tech. Here was something that seemed closer to that old cabaret scuzz, a seat-of-the-pants venue, an audience ready to shout, sweat and snog in rowdy tension with acts who looked like nothing a respectable dinner party would long endure. There was Ophelia Bitz in fishnets and biker-chick black rubber; Mister Twonkey in deflated chef’s hat and shabby finery, brandishing a stuffed weasel; Oozing Gloop in greenface, blonde wig and gold chain, pink-and-lemon bikini peeking out from under a stars-and-stripes bolero with matching heels.
Our host, Miss Annabel Sings, in green lamé top, pink miniskirt and orange bumbag, used a bullhorn to corral the crowd into the basement for more fun and games. Downstairs, there were songs about beaver and beans from Bludslugs and Lake Montgomery, and performance poet Colin Maguire affirmed the value of himself and of LGBT experience in general.
Yet things weren’t all so very different. The chords of Bitz’s song about sexual liberation echoed those jaunty Weill rhythms and elegant discordances, while Gloop’s psycho-absurdist monologue about a Grand Canyon newlywed widow turned lot lizard shimmered with fantastical Americana whose appeal Brecht would recognise.
Here, though, was intimacy and vulnerability, and a rowdy exchange between those on-stage and off. The true inheritors of Weimar? Perhaps. But where was the politics? There’s much that’s political-with-a-small-p about a polysexual, promisciously expressive event like Super-Fringe Sweep, and there was plenty of work that hinted at the individual anxieties of our late-capitalist world. But just up the hill, Lemper sang about poverty, war, misogyny and anti-semitism, and the words still resonate.
Where are the songs now about the crowbarring inequalities, drums of war and environmental depradations that make 2014 not much less alarming than Brecht, Weill and Eisler’s heydays? They do exist – go hear Reverend Billy at Forest Fringe tonight if you can get a ticket – but there aren’t as many of them as we need. Fancy settings aside, the old tunes aren’t museum pieces just yet.
