Skip to main content

Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band

The eternal renaissance of Michael Head has been a wonderful thing to witness. Over a wayward forty-odd year anti career, the Liverpool born song-writer has moved from the under achieving felicities of The Pale Fountains to the urban fantasias of Shack, alighting a decade ago in his current tenure helming the ever changing Red Elastic Band. Judging by 2022 album, Dear Scott, and its predecessor, Adios Senor Pussycat, released in 2017, Head seems to have finally found his time.


The Red Elastic Band’s line-up currently features a superb ensemble bringing Head’s scallydelic kitchen-sink narratives to life with guitar led grit laced with baroque flourishes. This should translate in Head and co’s forthcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe outing into a virtuoso showcase of more recent material interspersed with a pick and mix of favourites from Head’s colourful back pages. 

 

Recently, this has seen Head rewind all the way back to some of the Pale Fountains and Shack’s finest moments, which sit seamlessly alongside songs from Dear Scott. A cover of 1960s band Love – a perennial inspiration for Head – may also feature.

 

As previous Edinburgh visits have shown, Head is in full possession of a renewed focus that sits alongside his impish spirit and easy bonhomie with a devoted audience. With a long mooted status as one of the finest songwriters of his or any other generation finally seeing Head receive the attention he deserves, as the man himself might say, ‘Is right.’

 

Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band, Summerhall, Friday August 11, 7.30-11pm.


The List 2023 Edinburgh Festivals Guide, July 2023

 

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