Edinburgh Festival

I just drove back from Edinburgh, home of the fringe/comedy festival. I’m not a stand up and I wasn’t performing at all this year, but I nevertheless find Edinburgh a very exciting time and very inspiring. Stand up comedy is that purest of art form, where you can take ideas from conception to delivery very quickly. Think a funny thing, say a funny thing. The only constraint is it being funny, which as it turns out it is a fairly broad church. In the day and a half I was at the festival I saw shows encompassing Hieronymus Bosch, fatherhood, sporting trivia, Brief Encounter, human rights, childhood prizes, collecting, cookery, wet dreams, music hall, and even the medium of stand up… and there’s a real feeling of creativity. It can be very easy to be cynical about the world of music, where fashion, money and the notion of credibility can be more important to somebody’s success than talent - stand-up appears to be mostly free of that sort of bullshit, and that inspires me to behave as if music is too.  And get on with some creative heavy lifting.