The music itself is very good – hauntingly evocative of the Scottish highlands in which the is story is set.
Bramwell personally welcomes us to his show and explains that this is his own take on the traditional figure who is supposed to have made predictions about the future using an adder stone with a hole in it. Competing against the noise of a bustling bar behind him, he is a one-man band even operating the music off his phone.
The music itself is very good – hauntingly evocative of the Scottish highlands in which the is story is set. Sadly, the poetry is unpolished, meandering and opaque. Bramwell speaks in a monotone. He fails to make eye contact and often mumbles his words. His welcome is enthusiastic and friendly but as soon as the poetry starts he loses all rapport with us, isolating himself in self-consciousness. Worse still are the songs that intersperse the poetry – his voice not strong enough to command the falsetto harmonies he has written.
The story is extremely hard to follow with a flow of obscure references and far too many adjectives. Some lines are horrendously cringeworthy (‘her wrinkly old cunt smelt of mackerel’). Overall his mode of description is so bland – ‘he looks around with his other eye and surveys the crowd’ – that what should be an epic narrative fails to grip.
