Edinburgh review: Putting the Band Back Together (Summerhall)
© Richard Lakos
It might be a clarinet in a cupboard or a boxed-up accordion. The world is full of out-of-use instruments: once loved, now dumped. Practice gets squeezed. Bands break up. Life just gets in the way.
Annie Rigby and The Futureheads’ Ross Millard are out to reverse that. Putting The Band Back Together is a gig-theatre show determined to get us playing again; one that cuts through excuses and makes musicmaking look like the most fun in the world. At once an anthem for lost youth and a reminder that you’re never too old, it celebrates the have-a-go punk spirit and the friendships that can form out of it.
In a way, it’s a tribute act. When Mark Lloyd, a friend of the company, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he decided to get his old bands back together. That was how he wanted to spend his last six months: working towards one last gig – not a comeback, but an encore. Stepping up to the mic, Alex Elliott steps into his old mate’s shoes – a tender act in itself – and talks us through the prognosis, through tricky emails to old friends and the difficulty of starting again. Mostly through the medium of song – a ten-track album of Lloyd’s life.
Millard’s tunes range from rock to pub sing-a-long, not only telling Lloyd’s story, but riffing on our relationships to old instruments. A clenched punk number yells with frustration: "It never comes out the way I want it." Another, "Happiness", surges into a contented chorus.
It’s a rough and ready thing, and all the more loveable for it, but sometimes it doesn’t trust its style or its story. Larky routines enacting emotions and instruments fall flat and detract.
What you take away is the joy of playing together – and that’s all Putting the Band Back Together need do. The company’s spirit of celebration and self-mockery is infectious and opened out to an audience that claps and sings along. Moreover, each day, they’re joined onstage by a new house band; a lovely part of a piece that practices its preaching. Anyone can turn up early, learn the songs and join in. If they can do it, why can’t we? Time those clarinets came out of the cupboard.
Putting The Band Back Together runs at Summerhall until 27 August (except 10, 17th and 24).
