Skip to main content

Saint Etienne/Scritti Politti


Liquid Room, Edinburgh
4 stars
Questions may be asked about who the real head-liners were in this glorious double bill, though in the end it was the songs that mattered. Seeing Green Gartside's revitalised Scritti Politti live at all is a thrill, even if a bottle of cough medicine is on standby to help Gartside's honeyed tones. Opening with the slow skank of The 'Sweetest' Girl's deconstruction of the love song set the bar high, but, coming so soon after providing the live soundtrack to dancer/choreographer Michael Clarke's latest work, Gartside's four-piece band were happy to go through the Scritti back-catalogue without too much analysis.

Technology has made it easier to play shiny 1980s hits like The Word Girl and Wood Beez, which sit seamlessly alongside more recent wonders like The Boom Boom Bap. There's one new number, which apparently references Kant's response to cultural relativism, and only Gartside can think his eponymous countrified homage to French philosopher Jacques Derrida “really dumb.”

Saint Etienne's recent Words and Music album, written in part with former members of Girls Aloud production-line writing team, Xenomania, is a series of middle-aged love letters to pop. Live, the core trio's mining of sixties girl groups, seventies disco dolly electronica and eighties indie and Eurovision Hi-NRG oddly works better without a full band. With just Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs skulking at the back on assorted electronics while sparkly-frocked singer Sarah Cracknell trades vocals with long-term foil, Debsey Whykes, they too opt for a greatest hits set peppered with the odd new number. The result, even with a guitarist joining them, is a euphoric form of post-modern cabaret on a night of pure pop joy.

The Herald, December 13th 2012

ends





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
1 comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more