Skip to main content

Neu! Reekie! #1 - Michael Rother, Lydia Lunch, Fire Engines, The Honey Farm

Light on the Shore @ Leith Theatre
Five stars

A gnomic Michael Rother is sitting in the balcony when Dunbar-based all-female trio The Honey Farm open the first of two nights at Edinburgh International Festival’s Light on the Shore strand curated by Edinburgh’s premiere multi-arts night Neu! Reekie! with a set of potty-mouthed hip-hop. What the veteran pioneer of German kosmiche music makes of them is anybody’s guess, though the entire evening must be pretty bewildering for him. Rother confesses later that the night’s name being inspired by Neu!, the duo he led over three albums in the 1970s alongside drummer Klaus Dinger as being “slightly strange.”

Neu! Reekie! co-founder Kevin Williamson has even learnt German for the occasion. The effect of this as Williamson and fellow mine host Michael Pedersen tag-team their introductions is a little bit Eurovision. With Rother headlining a night that also features New York’s punk spoken-word provocateur Lydia Lunch and the allegedly final reformation by Fire Engines, arguably one of Edinburgh’s most influential bands, this is Neu! Reekie! showing its roots while remaining majestically in the moment.

“Hello, teenage Leith,” says Fire Engines frontman Davy Henderson by way of greeting. Henderson is wearing a silver anorak and not much else, as if he’s survived a marathon and now needs to cover his modesty. Fire Engines’ core quartet is joined in the second of two ferocious fifteen-minute sets by former Josef K and Orange Juice guitarist Malcolm Ross. Playing either side of Lunch, this forms a conceptual bridge between auld reekie and the New York No Wave primitivism that sired Lunch’s angry litany.  

Rother is accompanied by a drummer and a second guitarist for almost ninety minutes of
propulsive sci-fi proto-techno melodies to dance, drive and disco to. There’s an infectious warmth to the hypnotic motorik rhythms that may be old, but sounds forever Neu!

The Herald, August 14th 2018

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

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more