Henry's Cellar Bar, Edinburgh
Wed March 20th 2013
Edinburgh scene super-groups don't come along every day, yet the
arrival of Et tu Brutus opening a four-band House of Crust bill
headlined by Californian punks, Fracas, is a tantalising prospect.
Initiated by Edinburgh School For the Deaf/St Judes Infirmary/Young
Spooks/Naked auteur Grant Campbell and The Leg's Dan Mutch as a studio
project, the pair have drafted in a rhythm section of Leg drummer Alun
Thomas and former Sara and the Snakes guitarist Andy Brown to put flesh
on the skinny-assed bones of Campbell and Mutch's avant-garage hardcore
template.
With Campbell wielding a microphone/intercom set-up that looks and
sounds like it was looted from a 1950s black cab, the muffled fuzz
gives the words he reads from A4 sheets of paper a rawness that's
accentuated by the band's wilfully no-fi sound helmed by Mutch's
guitar, which is played relentlessly, veering off into all kinds of odd
angles before barraging its way home.
Thomas' intricate guitar patterns give things an equally adventurous
air, while Brown's meat and two veg bass playing recalls Steve Hanley
during classic era Fall. Until he starts playing it with a
cheese-grater, that is, which is when things really start to shake,
rattle and roll.
The six song set is all Et tu Brutus have for the moment, but the
hellfire intensity that pulses them is still worth getting stabbed in
the back for.
The List, April 2013
ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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