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Sarah Cracknell, Saint Etienne and Home Counties

Sarah Cracknell is all too aware of the perils of small town life. Having grown up in Berkshire and now living in Oxfordshire, Saint Etienne's smooth-voiced chanteuse for more than a quarter of a century is used to everyone knowing each other's business. Playing last month's Common People Festival in Oxford, she was prepared for the worst. “It will be excruciating for me,” she says a few days before the show. “There'll probably be loads of people there who I know from my kids school or the doctor's waiting room. Everyone knows everyone else.” Some of this spirit has undoubtedly crept into Home Counties, the ninth album by Saint Etienne's core trio of Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, who will appear at the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh tonight leading an expanded eight-piece line-up of the band. There has always been a sense of place to Saint Etienne's work. This has seen them move from an imagined swinging London that bridged the1960s with its

Shackleton

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars There isn't a word spoken in Blue Raincoat Theatre's mesmeric evocation of Irish-born early twentieth century explorer Ernest Shackleton's ill-starred but ultimately heroic Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17. To fill in the back story, Shackleton's attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic on the ship Endurance was blighted when the ship became trapped in ice, was crushed and eventually sunk. This necessitated the crew to man the lifeboats and set up camp on an uninhabited island, while Shackleton led an 800 mile trip to South Georgia to enable a rescue mission. While there may be four people onstage in Niall Henry's dense, slow-burning production, such a complex tale of derring-do in the face of elemental adversity goes beyond words. Instead, over seventy remarkable minutes, the windswept-looking quartet use little more than a handful of sheets, a model ship and a bunch of wooden poles to c

Tricia Kelly and Victoria Yeates - Playing Miller's Wives in Death of A Salesman and The Crucible

If you think of the body of work written by Arthur Miller, what becomes immediately clear is that these are men's plays. The heroes put on stage by this great chronicler of the the post World War Two souring of the American dream are patriarchal and unreconstructed blue-collar figures. As the plays also reveal, they are damaged goods, messed up by the things they aspire to in a system they have no control over. Behind these men who provide such great parts that allow male actors to vent, winning all the plaudits as they go, are far quieter but even greater women. This should be made clear as two Miller productions arrive in Scotland this month. Next week, the ever enterprising Selladoor theatre company brings their co-production of The Crucible to the Theatre Royal, Glasgow. The week after, the King's Theatre, Edinburgh hosts the Royal and Derngate, Northampton's look at Death of A Salesman. The Crucible charts the hysteria that ensues in the seventeenth century puri

Florian Hecker: Synopsis

Tramway, Glasgow until July 30 th Four stars Listen hard, and for a fleeting moment,the cascade of chimes that open Florian Hecker's twenty-five minute sound installation sounds a dead ringer for The Wedding March. Within seconds, however, the four compartmentalised areas of Tramway's main space that hosts Hecker's quartet of variations on a theme explode in a riot of sonic confetti. These sounds fall over and under each other from a network of suspended speakers walled off by a maze of acoustic panels. The starting point for the prolific genre-busting German artist and some time collaborator of Russell Haswell and The Aphex Twin among others is Formulation (2015), a computer generated piece that plays through a trio of speakers at angles to each other. As a composer of space as much as sound, Hecker creates what are effectively three remixes to play simultaneously in the other allotted areas. While three speakers are allotted to each composition, two spaces

Where Are We Now? #1 - Young Fathers / Charlotte Church's Late Night Pop Dungeon / Linton Kwesi Johnson / Hollie McNish

City Hall, Hull Five stars 'Writing was a political act' goes the legend projected on the back wall of Hull City Hall, 'and poetry was a cultural weapon'. These are the words of Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, one of four artists performing tonight, but his mantra may as well be the slogan for Neu! Reekie!, the Edinburgh sired spoken word, music and film night which has taken the capital's underground out into the world. Neu! Reekie'!'s weekend long Where Are We Now? festival that formed part of Hull City of Culture 2017 was a gathering of the counter-cultural clans. With its name taken from David Bowie's piece of late period melancholia and a poster designed by Sex Pistols artist Jamie Reid, the aim of Where Are We Now? was to celebrate oppositional art as much as provoke. Poet Hollie McNish performed a witty and street smart set that covered sex, motherhood and the everyday bigotry of her granny's next door neighbour. Johnson, now as much

The Writing on the Wall – The Last Nights of Studio 24

Last Saturday night, Studio 24 was in full swing. The cottage-like nightclub and venue on Calton Road in Edinburgh was having one of its final flings before it closes its doors forever next month. This follows the club's sale to developers by the family who have owned the club for a quarter of a century. This came about following what Studio 24 say was a series of complaints from neighbours regarding noise from the club and apparent threats to their licence from City of Edinburgh Council officials. CEC say no complaints have been received since November 2016. Studio 24 say otherwise. On Saturday in the main room downstairs, a night called Keep it Steel was hosting a 'Heavy Metal Prom Night'. Upstairs, in the venue's smaller room, Betamax played a mix of post-punk and new wave classics. Among a cross-generational spread of dancers, award-winning contemporary dance artist and choreographer Jack Webb was there at Betamax, as he frequently is, busting some moves inbetween

Hidden Door - Flint & Pitch, Metropolis

Leith Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars To suggest that the Hidden Door festival that filled every inch of a reinvigorated Leith Theatre took a breather following its opening weekend wig-out would be something of an over-statement. It did, however, get the cabaret tables out for some less full-on live fare, that allowed for a Sunday come-down before moving gently into week-day activities. The flag-ship of this was Blistering Mischief, a night of poetry and song presented by Flint and Pitch. This is the new spoken-word and music night founded by poet Jenny Lindsay, formerly one half of the similarly styled Rally and Broad team with Rachel McCrum, who is now domiciled in Canada. Neu! Reekie!'s Michael Pedersen talked about sex and wild-life. Dominic Waxing Lyrical sang a folk-tinged homage of sorts to Susan Sontag. Heir of the Cursed cooed mournful lullabys like a new age Singing Nun, and A New International played waltz-time chansons. It was Ellen Renton's powerful perform