As someone who is not ashamed to confess to daily gazing with adoration at a poster of a leather clad Justin Young et al, it pains me to say it. It really does. But The Vaccines’ eagerly anticipated follow-up album Come of Age is shit. Admittedly not a purge-it-from-your-Spotify shitness, but suffice to say, it’s not great.

Inevitably it was going to be some feat to live up to the band’s chart-smashing 2011 debut What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? but after Come of Age we’re going to expect a hell of lot less from this west London indie foursome. The riotous vocals and uproariously catchy harmonies in ‘If You Wanna’ and ‘Wreckin’ Bar (Ra-Ra-Ra)’, with their evocation of teenage rebellion and rockabilly tumult are long gone.  Because the Vaccines have grown up you see; They’ve ‘Come of Age’. Yeah deep.

 In ‘Teenage Icon’, Young bemoans ‘I’m no teenage icon…I’m nobody’s hero’. Well, quite. The lowest point though, comes from ‘Weirdo’ with its doleful refrain ‘I don’t want to let it go/ You know I’m not a weirdo’, which after three minutes contrives to make one yearn for the musical equivalent of a restraining order. Always in danger of sounding like a pastiche of a middle-class indie boy band, The Vaccines’ flirtation with parody was a strong component in their meteoric and well deserved rise to official harbingers of cool. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Young declared confidently ‘It scares me how easy I find songwriting’. Yeah? Well this really isn’t a surprise with lyrics such as ‘I’m so self-obsessed/I don’t really care about anyone else when I haven’t got my own life figured out’.

 But that’s not to say glimmers of the band we know and esteem are uniformly absent. The dark, louche crooning in ‘I wish I was a Girl’ sounds gloriously Black Keys-ian while ‘Change of Heart’ has an anthemic, endorphin-pumping velocity reminiscent of ‘Norgaard’. But the gothic-tinged ‘Ghost Town’ with it’s sharp staccato beat and surging hook-lines is the glistening gem in this generally mediocre album.

 Ultimately while Come of Age might signify a volte-face album for The Vaccines, it lacks the coherency and dynamism of their debut. The band’s characteristic chutzpah is still there, albeit underneath the affectation, but the overall effect feels hubristic and static. The Vaccines, Come of Age? Not likely.

THREE STARS  

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Although it may not seem like it to the majority of those thronging the streets of Edinburgh during August, there is a festival outside of the Fringe. The Edinburgh International Festival takes itself a little more seriously than its younger, gurning sibling, which can result in productions of quite ridiculous levels of self-reverential pomposity and pretension. Had you asked me a couple of days ago whether a four hour long play in French by a theatre commune, (on a set that had to be specially created in a warehouse because no theatre’s stage was deep enough) would fit this rather irritating bill, I’d probably have agreed. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Castaways of the Fol Espoir (Sunrises) is exactly such a play, produced and devised by the Théâtre du Soleil. This company are a vaguely anarcho-socialist group who all reside and work in the same disused munitions factory, and all draw the same wage (from director to coffee-boy). They rehearse for months on end, producing shows of unparalleled length and complexity. However, their skill lies in making the complexity rewarding, the length inconsequential, and the near familial nature of the cast their strongest suit.

The Castaways is a play about many things, including commando nuns, Chilean border disputes, and bloodthirsty Cossacks. These elements are all bound up in a narrative relating the experiences of a film crew working in the expansive attic of a restaurant (the eponymous Fol Espoir), attempting to adapt Jules Verne’s posthumously published novel Les naufragés du ‘Jonathan’ in the year 1914. The group are committed socialists one and all, and the silent film which they play out (with much appropriate silent-era mugging) before the audience has all the ideological subtlety of a Soviet broadcast (a genre scathingly described by Christopher Isherwood as typically involving “the usual triangle between a girl with thick legs, a boy, and a tractor.”). However, this is socialism before the souring of the dream, and you could almost believe, as a result of the passion of their performance, that the view of the world which they espouse is a truly positive and beautiful one.

However it is the very souring of the dream that is the point of the play. As the crew attempt to build their socialist vision in the attic, the events of 1914 play out in the outside world. As the world edges closer to war, the film becomes increasingly bleak and pessimistic. Events from the world outside seem to alter the film, and in one scene, the film seems to predict the events that played out in that year, including the assassination of Jean Jaures. This final death provides the crew with the crazed and fanatic energy to finish their film. The message that it ultimately conveys is that of enlightened pessimism. Dreams fail, and will always fail. The world tends to spoil them. However, the true aim of the visionary is not to build a utopia, but to show future fellow-travellers the pitfalls, so that they may avoid them. If this all sounds rather too weighty and bleak, it is only because I have not yet mentioned the fantastic physical comedy that seems to overflow the boundaries of the set. From actors that can barely keep their hands off one another (whether in hilariously passionate embraces or knockabout punch-ups), to a seagull on a stick and a small man in a kilt dancing like an idiot, the cast portray their characters with gusto and energy that often gets lost in such large productions.

I can say, categorically, that Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir (Aurores) is the greatest production I have ever seen. I would urge anyone who has even the slightest interest to try and catch a performance, or if it has finished its run, to see whatever the Théâtre du Soleil does next. They are true theatrical visionaries.

FIVE STARS

What is it about Muse that forever keeps us fatally hooked? ‘Madness’ is Muse’s latest slinky, electronic, soft rock offering, the first single to be released from their eagerly awaited, upcoming sixth album 2^nd law. The band from Devon has certainly had a packed schedule of late, with the busy promotion and performances of the official London 2012 Olympic Games song: ‘Survival’.

With this new EP, Muse have shifted to a more experimental, minimalistic feel. Bellamy sings of a crazy frame of mind, of a “madness that takes control” and not being able to “get rid of these memories.’ Admittedly, this track is a mellow affair and does not carry the usual anthemic signatures that have been employed by the band on previous smash hits like ‘Supermassive Blackhole’ and ‘Hysteria’, but the overall package is compellingly superb and profoundly entrancing whilst lyrically it breaks no boundaries.

The electronic dubsteplike beats are amalgamated with a hypnotic repetitive bass line hook here, coursing through our veins like dopamine and working effortlessly like caffeine, we are instantly addicted. Bellamy’s mellifluous and sensual delivery is an evocation of the alluded symptoms of a dizzying headstrong emotional whirlpool.

We’ve already caught an exhilarating glimpse of what’s to come in October by Muse. With this offbeat intoxicating number, there’s no vulgar ostentatious showing off present, instead, just commanding first class musicianship. ‘Madness’ can sure supply us with chronic pills of pure musical ecstasy. Thank you very much doctor.

When you’ve written a Man Booker longlisted novel which combines Nazis, sexual frustration, teleportation machines and H P Lovecraft’s science fiction stories, and composed an opening sentence as mind-bogglingly long yet undeniably engaging as this one itself, and all by the age of twenty seven, then you can be sure that somewhere along the way you picked up the literary equivalent of the golden ticket. I caught up with Ned Beauman last Friday, just as he was entering the figurative chocolate factory of global recognition, bumper sales and literary awards, to talk to him about his time at Cambridge, his early writing and how he likes the limelight.

 Not too many years ago, you were studying Philosophy at Cambridge and, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, philosophy courses aren’t known for producing authors of your wit or comic capacity. How did you enjoy Cambridge and how did you get into writing?

Well I had a pretty good time there. Cambridge doesn’t offer any creative writing courses so it doesn’t have a bloc of people writing fiction, although there was playwriting – which everyone was doing. But there was this anthology which Oxford shared called the Mays and the occasional magazine which published fiction, so there was a little bit going on. And I wrote a novel while I was at Cambridge which I tried to get an agent for but I couldn’t find anyone who was interested. But that was good practice.

What was your first, unpublished novel about?

It was about an evil theatre company.

And what happened to it?

I finished it and was talking to an agent about it but they didn’t take it on. As the months passed I began to realize that it wasn’t actually a very successful novel anyway so I just put it away and now I would never want anyone to read it.

Could you tell us a little about your first published novel, Boxer, Beetle?

I started that after I graduated and it took me about two and a half years while I was working. It started while I was doing an MA at Sussex and then I was writing while I was working, on Wednesdays and Sundays. The first one is always going to be pretty special to me because it was the first time that I’d written a novel that worked in some sort of way on the level on which I ‘d hoped for. And I think I developed my style, whilst my style didn’t really exist in the one I wrote while I was at Cambridge. I haven’t been back to look at it [Boxer, Beetle] for a while. When I read from it I usually read the opening two pages so I must have read those dozens and dozens and dozens of times, but I don’t know how the rest of it would hold up. But people are still buying it and enjoying it I think.

Your second and most recent novel, The Teleportation Accident, also involves the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. Is there something that you find particularly engaging about that period of history?

Well, there was a lot of interesting stuff going on in Germany in the 1930s. I don’t have any particular preoccupation with the Nazis except in terms of their over-the-top status as the most evil thing in the world as there’s quite a lot of ways to create character by counter poising them to that. So you have a character who doesn’t care about the Nazis and then you ask: can you still like this character; can this character still be funny? And so on. It was also a good job that I wrote another novel on that period because while I was researching the first one I happened to come across City of Quartz by Mike Davis which was a really wonderful picture of LA at about the time of Weimar and I wanted to write about that. But also, in a way, being a bit bored of the 1930s is probably why the novel is so fragmentary.

You are not new to literary awards, your first novel won the Goldberg Award for Outstanding Debut Fiction and the UK Writer’s Guild Award, but how does it feel to have been long listed for the Man Booker, a prize which has been won by authors as well regarded as John Banville and Ian McEwan?

Well obviously it’s terrific. I didn’t expect it to happen so early in my career. Those other prizes are great but the Man Booker is on another level. The impact on sales has been really extraordinary just in the few weeks since the longlist was announced. The novel is already onto it’s third printing which I’m told is quite impressive a month after publication. There has also been so much more attention world-wide. I’m doing a festival in Toronto in October, so I’m going to go up and see Niagara Falls, and that came directly out of the Booker longlist. It’s great, but you’ve got to remember that it is five people that decide, it’s not like the god’s of literature have made any objective declaration about it me: it’s the taste of these five people. Although I’m sure they choose the panel very well and they read the books very carefully so it means a lot to get their commendation nonetheless.

You’ve written for magazines such as Dazed & Conflused, The Guardian and The Literary Review. Do you have further ambitions for your career in journalism?

Well I enjoy journalism although I really don’t do very much of it. I probably only do a few pieces a year. But the type of journalism that I’m interested in now tends to be the type that I’m not very well qualified for. I’d really like to do some more writing about art, but the problem is that I don’t really know anything about art. I’d like to do some more long-form writing, perhaps for some American magazine like Harper’s, but I don’t really have any of the journalistic skills that you need to pitch, let alone write for a magazine like that. In journalism my ambitions tend to outstrip my prospects a little bit. But I do enjoy it.

Can I ask about your future writing? Is there a third novel in the works?

I’m well under way with my third book which I’ve already sold so it will definitely be published, perhaps in 2012. I’ve not told anyone about the plot, but it will be very different in setting to my first two books. It is set in South London in May 2012 over a few weeks. It’s definitely less ambitious and less wide ranging than my first two books but it’s been incredibly enjoyable to write.

And finally, the inevitable question: do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

I’ve actually never been asked that question before. I suppose, read a lot. For instance, when I was at Cambridge I made it a project to read through the Modern Libraries collection of the hundred greatest books of the twentieth century. I haven’t nearly read the whole thing but that was brilliant and if you set yourself tasks like that then you end up doing at least almost as much reading as you need to be doing. I would also say that you can be quite optimistic about it because getting an agent and getting publishers is not just about having connections. They are businesses and they are looking for books that they think will sell. It’s not like they are grudgingly taking on books; they love to find books that they think will do well. People at Oxford and Cambridge in many ways have the right connections already, but if you don’t then you really don’t need to worry. You only need to worry about writing a good book.