Articles by Matthew Bradley

The Great Hipster Songbook

Review
★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
The Jazz Bar
20th Aug, 2016

Angus Munro and band offer you a medley of ‘Hipster’ songs reimagined as 20th Century Jazz classics. It’s not entirely clear why they do this, but hey – it’s fun, and they play some great music, music you won’t have heard before, and also Biffy Clyro...

John Hunt Four O'Clock Afternoon Blues and Swing

Review
★★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
The Jazz Bar
19th Aug, 2016

The Jazz Bar is packed for this one, and no wonder: this is music you can’t help but tap your feet to. John Hunt comes on a few minutes early and chats to the crowd; he seems to capture the mood of this dark room – “The Jazz Bar is like a country, it has its own time-zone”...

Mixtape

This is a pleasant little show which deserves a bigger audience. Mixtape is billed as a “cross between a live gig and a lunchtime music club”, and it delivers on this well. Sophie Grant shifts between a different theme for her songs every couple of days – I got Living in the City (inspired by the Stevie Wonder track) – and she plays a range of music around said theme...

Nick Harper

Review
★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
The Jazz Bar
17th Aug, 2016

Nick Harper is a great guitarist and a good singer, but a middling lyricist. This is a real shame, as Harper’s unsubtle and occasionally jarring lyrics detract from his genuinely impressive musicianship...

The Beatbox Collective

Watching beatboxing is fun for most of us in the same way that watching acrobatics is – it’s the enjoyment that comes from thinking ‘I could never do this in a million years’...

The Sorries

Douglas Kay and Martin Philip of The Sorries are likeable, witty, and talented performers, and they put on a great show here. As we take our seats in the steep raked audience at the Quaker Meeting House they enter playing Bodhrans (Celtic drums) and singing I Will Go – a stirring, earnest duet as they walk amongst the crowd...

One Hundred Homes

Review
★★★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
Summerhall
12th Aug, 2016

Yinka Kuitenbrouwer welcomes you into her shed, pours you a cup of tea, gives you a house-shaped biscuit, and the words come out in a torrent. First, just names: the names of all the people in all the hundred homes that she visited for this project...

Gone Native

Review
★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
The Royal Oak
12th Aug, 2016

Gone Native is made up of two Scottish musicians, Kevin Gore and Bobby Nicholson, who decided that there wasn’t enough of a local presence at the Fringe. Their songs are angry, passionate, and decidedly political...

(I Could Go on Singing) Over the Rainbow

Review
★★★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
Summerhall
12th Aug, 2016

It’s a strange and unsettling thing being stood stock-still for a few minutes, gazing into a stranger’s eyes. It’s supposed to be an encounter marked by intimacy, but how close can you get when you’ve bought a ticket and when the stranger across from you shares the same moment every night, with tens of different people? I’m not sure...

An Evening of Ryan Adams With Easy Tigers

A brief introduction to Ryan Adams for the uninitiated - he’s a rock/country singer from Carolina who’s released a new album every year or two since the turn of the century; some of them truly fantastic...

My Leonard Cohen

Review
★★★★
Edinburgh Fringe
Assembly Hall
10th Aug, 2016

My Leonard Cohen is, above all, very, very fun. Stewart D’Arrietta and band run through a medley of Cohen’s hits, but you probably haven’t heard them like this before. Too often when people cover Cohen they can’t help but try to emulate his style – they offer stripped-back, softly sung piano-led tracks which pale in comparison with the original (with a few honourable exceptions)...

Folk at the Fringe

We walk down into the stone basement of the Royal Oak; a tiny room, space for a couple of performers and a crowd of about thirty, all crammed in. The sets are unplugged, and we’re sat a matter of feet from the performers, standing with their guitars...

Ross Leadbeater's Great British Songbook

Ross Leadbeater is an alumnus of the all-male Welsh choir Only Men Aloud!, who won the 2008 television show Last Choir Standing. He’s in Edinburgh singing songs from the Great British Songbook, but over the course of a hit-and-miss hour it proves quite difficult to pin down exactly what this Songbook is supposed to be...

Strange Face – Adventures With a Lost Nick Drake Recording

Strange Face is Michael Burdett’s story; Drake himself is something of a side character. The show opens with Burdett offering a short biography of Drake’s tragic young life. Born abroad, dropping out of Cambridge to pursue a career in music, three astonishing, hazy, sad albums and no mainstream success, and death by suicide at the age of twenty-six...

Epic Love and Pop Songs

This is a pretty great show. It’s about two teenagers, Doll and Ted (Norah Lopez Holden and George Caple respectively), who both have a lot going on in the background of their lives – barely any of it good – but who spend an hour, essentially, telling us the story of their friendship...

The Red Guitar

The Red Guitar is, essentially, the story of John Sheldon’s life. John Sheldon has lived quite a life. And it just so happens to mirror the development of rock music over the latter course of the last century...

Out of the Blue

Out of the Blue are something of a Fringe staple by now. It’s their thirteenth consecutive year here, they tell us, and judging by the roar from the audience when asked if anyone’s seen them perform before, some of the crowd might be here for the thirteenth consecutive year as well...

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