Erland cooper

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

Good noisy fun: black midi, at the Edinburgh International Festival, reviewed

This year we must love Edinburgh for her soul rather than her looks. The EIF should be commended for making the best of a tricky hand, but the lodgings for its music programme bring to mind a fallen society beauty forced from her New Town villa into a rented bedsit. Edinburgh Park is a cathedral-sized tent in a business park, wedged between the city bypass and a shopping mall. The wooden floor planks buck and roll like a galleon deck. There is a roof but no sides and the Covid-quelling ventilation is, shall we say, robust. So yes, forget the optics. In 2021, content is everything. As it transpires, it

Thursday

Michael Hann

There’s a magic to hearing music in such small audiences: Divine Comedy reviewed

Three shows in a week! Why, it was just like the first week of March. There was, however, little of that last-days-of-Weimar giddiness about these. How could there be, when there were 300-odd people dotted around Barbican Hall’s 2,000 seats, and 50 or so of us at Oslo — normally a packed, standing-only club — sat on stools, unable even to waggle a hip? One felt sad for Working Men’s Club, a young quartet from Yorkshire whose first album — released earlier this month — had critics cheering. They should have been swanning around the country, heading off to Europe, maybe popping across the Atlantic, to play in New York