Edinburgh playhouse

Fun, frenetic and only a little gauche: Declan McKenna, at the Edinburgh Playhouse, reviewed

Towards the end of Declan McKenna’s snappy, enjoyable 90-minute set at the Edinburgh International Festival, something quite powerful occurs. The English singer-songwriter returns alone to the stage for the encore and proceeds to play a version of ABBA’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ with only his electric guitar as accompaniment. It becomes a strange, emotionally layered moment. A young musician singing from the perspective of a parent ruefully reflecting on their child growing up, away and beyond reach; a predominantly teenage crowd singing those words back to him; and the older members of the audience, many attending with their own kids, staring blurrily into the middle distance. The first song is

Banal and profound, bent and beautiful: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis at Edinburgh Playhouse reviewed

Nick Cave has always been drawn to parable and fable, but more than ever these days he is engaged in the necessary work of mining magic from the base metal of day-to-day existence. The key lines in this show came early, during ‘Bright Horses’: ‘We’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are,’ Cave sang in that hollow, sorrowful baritone. ‘This world is plain to see/ It don’t mean we can’t believe in something.’ Cave’s recent songs have a terrible and powerful context: the death of his teenage son, Arthur, in 2015. As an artist he has confronted this personal tragedy side on, acknowledging its profound impact