Book Festival 2025 round-up: One
Performances and performers in the first week at the Futures Institute
By Hugh Simpson
The Book Festival seems thoroughly at home in its second year at the Futures Institute. The simple act of moving the entrance a few yards towards Middle Meadow Walk, together with vastly improved outside catering, has created much more of a buzz around the site.
There are still huge numbers of events that appeal to the theatrically inclined, with some notable performances. A highlight of the first week was undoubtedly one of those one-off cross-genre events the festival does so well – the marvellous The Heartstrings of Poetry, where harpist Esther Swift set the poetry of Jackie Kay to music.
The poems were drawn largely from Kay’s most recent collection May Day, with many dealing with the deaths of her parents. She read some of the poems herself; others were emotively sung by Swift, with other voices provided by Sarah Shorter, Poppy Shotts and Rosie Lavery, and Andrew Robb on double bass.
Jackie Kay and The Heartstrings of Poetry performers
The music was beautifully expressive – combining folk, jazz and classical influences in a wonderfully unforced way. Indeed, while the result sounded nothing like dance music, it was also clearly influenced by the form. This was demonstrated by the backing often resembling a live loop – the harp accompaniment a few repeated bars of traditionally-inflected music, or the three classically-inclined singers, providing repeated cells of melody that underpinned Swift’s vocals.
Many of the pieces, such as Last Night I Dreamt of Peggy Seeger, Expectations of a Lifetime or Cairn, were thoroughly sad but also beautifully uplifting, creating a real sense of belonging and community. The effect of the event was crystallised by the way Swift played a sadly defiant and subtly angry version of The White Cliffs of Dover as a coda to the fiercely political Planet Farage.
Another combination of writing and music came from Malachy Tallack, whose two careers as a novelist and singer-songwriter make him an ideal fit for such events. His Shetland-set novel The Beautiful Atlantic Waltz includes songs written by Jack, one of its characters. After a discussion with Louise Welsh, Tallack then played these songs accompanied by Jenna Reid, Laura-Beth Salter, Andrew Gifford and Cahalen Morrison.
As the songs were supposedly composed by Jack, Tallack pointed out that he was in the unusual position of covering songs he had actually written. There was a feel of vintage country music to the set, which was thoroughly affecting.
subtitles
As Morrison noticed, it’s odd to have the lyrics of the songs appearing on the subtitles behind you as you sing – particularly when so many of them are wrong. Anyone who is worried about AI should note how often the subtitles struggle with anything out of the ordinary. (On this occasion, unfortunately, the words it couldn’t cope with included Malachy, Tallack and Shetland.)
Fortunately, the distracting subtitles were quickly switched off during the well-chosen set of 90s female-led songs by the Hen Hoose Collective’s Cariss Crosbie that followed 1995: Grrrls Aloud. This was a thoroughly necessary corrective to the all-consuming return to Edinburgh of Oasis, and was chaired expertly by Nicola Meighan. It featured Emma Pollock (of the Delgados and co-founder of the hugely influential Chemikal Underground label) who joined Crosbie in the live set, alongside Cora Bissett, Carrie Marshall and Chitra Ramaswamy.
There were, of course, cautionary tales of the music business, as anyone who saw Bissett’s wonderful What Girls Are Made Of (about her time as singer in Darlingheart) would expect. There was also much clear-eye examination of the 90s scene and its similarities and differences to the current climate from all of the participants.
Malachy Tallach and band
It was stressed that Oasis in their pomp were originally welcomed by many largely because they already sounded so old-fashioned (and acted accordingly), and that the current nostalgia for them risks including only those who were already welcome the first time around. And that the smaller venues that nurtured a scene three decades ago (with shout-outs for such under-appreciated figures as Twitch, Trendy Wendy and Craig Tannock) simply aren’t around any more.
There are many writers at the festival who are also good value as performers. A L Kennedy, also a radio host and stand-up comic, started off in street theatre at the Fringe, a subject covered in her new novel Alive in the Merciful Country. Kennedy is such a magnetic reader of her own work that it seems extraordinary that she apparently failed an audition to record the audiobook version. Her anger was clear at a politically self-harming country obsessed with making uncharismatic criminals into heroes, and where ‘comfy white people have gone wrong by not having anyone’s back’.
Harriet Walter, of course, is one of the most renowned contemporary actors, as well as a deep thinker about stage representation. Her book She Speaks! consists of poetry given to Shakespeare’s female characters, giving them the agency and capacity for examination of an inner life that tends to be given only to the male characters in the plays.
The need for this correction is explained clearly by Walter – for example a frustration at Gertrude saying so little while her son expounds at such length – and, as always with Walter, delivered with insight. What probably speaks most highly of Walter is that, when reminded by host Jackie Wylie that she has played a King, a Queen and a Prime Minister, Walter first thinks of her PM role in Revolution of the Daleks rather than her recent role as Margaret Thatcher.
The Book Festival continues until Sunday 24 August.
Some of these events are available online – see EIBF website for further information.
Edinburgh International Book Festival website: https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/
ENDS
