If you, like me, spent 2005 desperately trying to appear cool, you probably spent your summer listening to Test Icicles’ riotous debut LP For Screening Purposes Only. It was an album built on a mellifluous foundation of hip-hop, indie rock and thrash punk – an eclecticism demonstrated in the diversity of the bandmates’ various ventures following the demise of their band. From the limp-wristed anti-folk of Lightspeed Champion to the clamourous racket of RAT:ATT:AGG, the Test Icicles begat a host of solo and joint ventures. Dev Hyne’s incarnation as Blood Orange is their best effort yet.

Almost every song is a microcosm of collusion and disparate influence. ‘No Right Thing’, for example, boasts a vocal feature by Dave Longstreth of new-wave revisionists The Dirty Projectors and the eldritch production witchcraft of Clams Casino, a man up there with Harry Fraud and Lex Luger as one of the hottest hip-hop producers in the world. Lead single and album opener ‘Chamakay’ is also a delight, with Caroline Polachek of Chairlift lending her swooning vocals to a track which evidently owes a lot to Hyne’s acclaimed production work with Solange. It sets the tone for the rest of the album, with an instrumental template straight out of 1987 combined with a hauntingly timeless vocal performance and gentle electronic undercurrents that ebb and flow throughout. ‘Chamakay’ is 21st-century R&B, but with the emphasis on blues over rhythm.

Cupid Deluxe draws together the best of Hyne’s previous ventures. As Lightspeed Champion, his songwriting was bursting at the seams with ideas but overly ramshackle and convoluted. His 2011 debut as Blood Orange, Coastal Grooves, hit upon a winning new-new-wave formula but was a little too timorous. Here, Hynes couples the 80s funk of Coastal Grooves with the lyrical audacity of his misspent youth. This is largely thanks to the guest features, bestowing the album with a mien of urban sophistication and variety. Skepta’s verse on ‘High Street’ is the best thing he’s recorded since 2009, a wistful paean to London meadering in and out of a ghostly beat like a preoccupied youth wandering through the backstreets of Tottenham after dark. Truly urban music.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

★★★★☆
Four Stars

It is safe to say that I was pretty worried about going to see Kvetch; it’s a really hard play to get right on stage. Its characters are consistently repellent, its pace unrelenting, and it insists (and I mean insists) on constant asides to the audience, scrutinizing the characters’ motivations and anxieties in painful detail. I was pretty excited to make a joke about how there was a lot to kvetch (Yiddish for complain) about in Kvetch. So, it was a big ask for these actors to make me like Berkoff’s writing and as I sat down in a BT sparsely set with a lampshade and a few stools, I was worried that I’d made a big mistake by going along—but as soon as the actors got going, I couldn’t help but have an excellent time.

Every actor threw themselves into pitch perfect characterisations with incredibly energy. Jonny Purkiss as Frank and Misha Pinnington as Donna both had a vibrant tension on stage. Purkiss gave a terrifying but also brilliantly comic performance that lurched between splenetic bloodlust and anxiously inspecting his coworker’s imaginary member in a sex fantasy, without descending into caricature- no mean feat. Pinnington’s voice, from the first word, grated and whined and screeched and consistently made me laugh whenever she put her foot in it, which happened a lot.

Add to this Sam Ereira’s flatulent mother-in-law (complete with hair curlers and enormous breast) and the BT became a claustrophobic place to be watching people have such a squirming dinner in their Brooklyn appartment. My highlight came with Frank’s invited co-worker, Ed Barr-Sim’s Hal, whose monologue about whether he ought to start a dinner party at his own house in a kitchen or the living room perfectly captured the overwrought though-processes of this play, and unravelled up to the final perfectly-pitched line ‘I know what I’ll do, I’ll kill myself’. And though Sam Ward’s slimy businessman George had a slightly shifting accent throughout the performance, his comic timing was impeccable and, like all the actors, impressively managed to flesh out what could easily have been a one-dimensional character into a compellingly weird portrayal.

Though this play really is very very funny, the most impressive thing about Ellie Page’s direction is that all the jokes also pack a weighty punch. She has done a terrific job. The play observes the social anxieties that are peculiarly specific and also universal – like spoiling your own joke by thinking halfway through that you might forget the punchline and hating your mother-in-law – but makes the audience complicit and uncomfortable in laughing at these seriously messed-up people. The space was cleverly used in order that the audience could not avoid the actors as they ran through the aisle and this claustrophobia heightened the tragicomedy.

There are some minor problems. I found the lighting bafflingly unhelpful (they kept shining a pink light ostensibly whenever there was an aside but this was inconsistent and proved a distraction when the light’s were ill-timed and the actor’s lines were bang on cue) and there were moments during the long dinner scene where, due to the seating not being raised above the audience’s level, I missed some of the reactions, however these are tiny issues. 

On the whole, I don’t have enough space here to enumerate all the ways that this is a technically brilliant production: just go see it, you’ll only kvetch if you don’t.

The journey from St Anne’s to Cowley is a rather long one but, given how embarrassingly buzzed I am about this gig, it’s a brisk 40 minutes worth walking for. Palma Violets are exciting, fresh, punky and always energetic; they’ve earned themselves a title as one of the best live rock acts around. By the time the double bill of burly support acts finish, I’m a couple of beers down and getting pretty itchy feet. But as the roadies turn on the flashing green, blue and red portable disco lights the band are famous for, it begins.

And it begins with a lot of pushing, crushing, and moshing to “Rattlesnake Highway”. Perfect. I wouldn’t expect anything less from this crowd for this band. It’s clear that their rather devoted fanbase has decided that PV’s mantle as ‘great live band’ needs to be kept intact by matching the group’s onstage antics with wilder ones of their own. But unfortunately, they are not merely matching Chilli and co – they are surpassing them. What happened to the bizarre behaviour and fiery energy the band had before?

Singles like “Step Up For The Cool Cats” and “Best of Friends” are lapped up by the rowdy crowd, but I still definitely don’t feel sticky enough to be watching Palma Violets. New tracks “Gout! Gang! Go!” from the main set and “Scandal” and “Invasion of the Tribbles” from the encore sound like they could be brilliant, but the terrible quality of the speakers turns them into one ball of reverby, overdriven, guitary muck.

And then suddenly I work out the reason why the energy on stage and amongst the audience isn’t clicking, and the reason why I’m feeling so underwhelmed. A good indie rock gig needs three things: Lots of sweat, lots of pushing, and a spontaneous stage dive. These are the materials. However, to get a truly great show, you need a connection with the audience that’s tangible, rough, and physical. Not just two parties who happen to be singing the same thing. And that visceral connection was what this concert was lacking.

What happened to the good old days of Palma Violets, less than a year ago, when they played sweatboxes of 100 people or fewer, no barriers, no limits, but pure, relentless and untamed energy? Spectators crawling or being pulled onstage amidst the smell of greasy hair and beer, with the band and the mad audience absolutely nose to nose. Health and safety, why’d you have to muscle in and put up metal blockades? Publicity, why’d you have to make Palma Violets so big they require a venue that requires safety measures? What the band really need, apart from perhaps a good shower, is to re-establish the bond between audience and artist with a trip back to the grubby little sweat boxes they used to play. Who knows, maybe their second album tour will take place around Oxford’s college bars. We can only hope.

This week, Steven Berkoff’s ‘KVETCH’ is coming to the Burton Taylor Studio. According to the website, this is a play “dedicated to the afraid” – the fear of “impotence, unemployment, losing your hair, getting fat, parking tickets, isolation, learning the piano, telling a joke, sweat, grease, dark cupboards, sex, fear of men, fear of women, fear of fear.” KVETCH explores the anxieties, fantasies and frustrations of a Jewish family in their claustrophobic 1980s Brooklyn apartment. Yet fear not – KVETCH is not a pessimistic play. Cherwell Stage talked to the director Ellen Page who reassured us that the ‘balloon breasts’ and whoopee cushions prevent any misery dampening this comedy.

The term ‘kvetch’ comes from the Yiddish ‘kvetshn’ and means a person who complains too much. Ellen is certain we can all relate to this; in answer to why she wanted to stage this show, she said, “Kvetch is an extremely funny show, and I’ve always thought that Oxford could do with more hilarity and dramatic variation.” Despite the promised whoopee cushion use it is not a frivolous play. The blend of Jewish heritage-based humour, anxiety and sex seemed reminiscent of a Woody Allen script, often held up as an example of dark comedy. We asked Ellen if she thought KVETCH could be classed as black comedy, and why she thought this particular genre was appealing. While asserting that KVETCH was far from the macabre, she replied: “Issues of anxiety, discomfort, and lack of self-confidence are timeless and extremely common.  Comedy provides a platform for problems that are otherwise considered difficult or awkward to talk about.  Knowing that you are not alone in your suffering is often a relief, and being able to laugh with fellow sufferers often puts the issue into perspective and lightens your mood.  All comedy does this, it is not a formula for entertainment related solely to ‘black comedy’.”

KVETCH looks to be light-hearted but not without substance. Ideally Ellen would like the audience to go away feeling cheerful and amused, which, after a play about fear, anxiety and frustration, would be an accomplishment: one it looks very much like she’ll achieve.

KVETCH is on at the Burton Taylor from 3^rd of December to the 7^th. Tickets are £5/6.

Roddy Doyle’s work has always had distinctive touches to it: that gritty focus on Dublin working-class life, that lively patter of dialogue, those dark glints of humour. It would be hard to mistake a snippet of his writing for anyone else’s.

But flicking through his recent books, you’ll find another pattern emerging. Doyle isn’t getting any younger – and neither are his characters. Looming over all of them is a dawning sense of unstoppable age. It tugs away quietly, sometimes breaking through, as it does in Bullfighting: 

I recognise what’s going on in my head, what’s been going on for a while, actually, on and off. It’s middle age. I know that. It’s getting older, slower, tired, bored, useless. It’s death becoming real. The old neighbours from my childhood dying. And even people my own age. Cancer mostly. 

Bullfighting is a short-story collection full of middle-aged men, contemplating what it means to be fifty-something. The reference to cancer is telling: The Guts, Doyle’s latest novel, shows Jimmy Rabbitte coping with a tumour in his (eponymous) bowels.

Is this the same brash Jimmy that formed The Commitments in 1987? Is this the same Roddy Doyle that wrote so convincingly through the eyes of ten year old Paddy Clarke, winning the 1993 Booker Prize?

“Paddy Clarke definitely is a product of my life at that time – full-time teacher, father of a new baby, with another one on the way, writing other things as well.” The classroom and the young family home are certainly the two arenas in which Paddy plays out his battles – but it’s not the only effect that life in 1993 had on the book.

“They’re tiny little episodes, that were written in the tiny little bits of time that I had”, he remembers. “I was writing a script for The Snapper, I was planning a television series that became Family”. That fragmentary, snippet-like style was something he also used in later, more leisurely projects; but it came from a hectic pace of life. “It seems in retrospect – how the fuck did I do all that? I think a lot of people, looking back, wonder.”

Doyle’s early writing experiences were anything but hectic. He started off with a satiric column in “a paper that came out occasionally called Student, believe it or not”, and only tried his hand at fiction after three years as an English teacher.

Even that wasn’t particularly stressful. “Secondary school holidays in Ireland are very generous – June, July and August”. Doyle came to London, to “get into the discipline of writing a bit every day”, away from the temptations of home. “I went down to Wood Green library and wrote, sometimes for just a few hours, sometimes I’d force myself to stay there all day. I’d go five or six times a week.”

“I had that tenacity or bloody-mindedness just to keep at it – which is something that never gets a look-in when you get to talks about writing, or the more academic stuff about writing.”

Any nostalgia? “No, I don’t miss being a teacher – it’s not a part of my life that I miss at all.” In fact, Doyle seems to have a fairly comfortable relationship with his past. “The memories generally are brilliant – fatherhood, the adventure that was, writing all these books, to be involved in films … but that’s lived. And I’m not looking back – there’s nothing about it that I would regret.”

Perhaps critics have been too hasty to attribute the angst that haunts so many of his characters to Doyle himself. “In terms of both my life, and the material that I have to write about, I’m quite content being at the age I am now”. “Material” is interesting; it seems that Doyle can observe the effects of age, and the associated qualms, without being too personally burdened by them. “Being a middle-aged man, watching a middle-aged world: there’s loads of material for writing”.

The interview ends with the sense that Doyle is aware of the passing years, without being troubled by them; keen to explore anxieties of change, but happy in the knowledge that something always remains.

Music and football are two constants that persist through the writing, from Paddy Clarke’s George Best kickabout games and Hank Williams records to Champions League Wednesday nights and the latest Springsteen album.

“I think it’s a good thing – that link back – it’s an enthusiasm”. He mentions dusting off Blood on the Tracks a couple of nights before (“no album I buy now at the age of fifty-five will ever mean as much”), and is a devout Chelsea fan. “I jump up and I shout at the telly – I went beserk went Torres scored yesterday”.

“I’m a fully fledged-adult – but there is that thread, because it’s not that different to my reaction as a twelve-year old”. It’s a comforting consistency, “like a guitar string: you can pluck it at any point in your life and the same note resonates”.

The Guts is published by Jonathon Cape and is available here.  

There is something intrinsically romantic about train travel – the idea of strangers’ lives temporarily touching as they are forced into fleeting contact with one another; all those different stories sitting side by side. Alexander McCall Smith’s latest offering, Trains and Lovers, is built on this notion, centring on four passengers from different backgrounds and parts of the world, who meet on a train from Edinburgh to London. His characters defy the unwritten rule of not acknowledging others on public transport, striking up a conversation that leads to the revelation of intimate details of their lives. The stories they tell are about love in its various forms and also all feature trains in some way, creating a narrative structure that jumps from their conversation into each person’s tale and back again.

The novel has its flaws: the premise feels improbable and occasionally forced, particularly the constant appearance of trains in each internal narrative; the characters aren’t always developed enough in the brevity of each story; the changes in narrative voice are sometimes a little jarring. The book can also seem quaint and old-fashioned at times; despite discussing several love affairs, sex is only alluded to once, and then somewhat prudishly.

However, perhaps this is the novel’s charm. It isn’t representative of the real world, but of a cosy and cushioned existence, painting an optimistic picture of a reality in which strangers on trains can have eloquent and contemplative conversations about love and romantic ideals. It is as sweet and comforting as a cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream and tiny marshmallows and, while sometimes feeling like a Richard Curtis film in book form, avoids sentimentality or triteness. The stories’ endings are never neatly tied up, setting them apart from the happy-ever-afters of most romantic fiction. The tales are told at a gentle pace, focusing on feeling rather than action, and despite our initial impatience for something significant to happen, we soon realise that this is not the point. McCall Smith presents us with the poetry of everyday (if slightly idealised) lives and loves, and implies that this should be enough to hold our interest.

This isn’t a book that will set the world on fire, but it was never intended to be. And while its characters might not stick with you for much longer than the aforementioned hot chocolate, most of us can still take something from it, even if it’s just an awareness that the harrumphing businessman next to us on the train might well have once been in love. That said, I still won’t be striking up a conversation with him anytime soon. 

Trains and Lovers is published by Polygon and is available here.