home
|
about
|
news
|
contents
|
gossip
|
photographs
|
venues
|
brighton
|
dublin
|
edinburgh
|
film
|
features
|
interviews
|
awards
|
fashion
|
recipes
|
no more drinks
|
newsletter
|
links
|
contact
Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
Jackie Clune is BOY CRAZY
Verdict: Gloriously funny and gifted
Edinburgh - Assembly Rooms - August 02
Jackie Clune's voice is not indescribable. It's just that one runs short of analogies. Like coffee perhaps - something rich and subtle. Or molasses - smooth, dense and sweet. Vintage port – but it would have to be Fortnum's Reserve, the girl radiates quality. And in perfect, perfect pitch. Singing the most astoundingly filthy lyrics.
Jackie Clune enjoyed her 12 years as a lesbian, but discovered ‘something missing. Cock.’ She’s been ‘cured by aversion therapy – videos of Cell Block H, kd laing concerts and Ladies’ Day at Wimbledon shown back to back’.
BOY CRAZY is Jackie Clune’s joyful account of her first year of heterosexuality. ‘Being gay’s a drag / I’m a heterosexual slag / I am what I am / Lost but now found / (I was) stuck on the lesbian not-so-merry-go-round / They say you can’t change / I tell you I don’t agree / I guess for now I’m going to suck it and see’.
It’s glorious, her fine and gifted voice showing a glint of its full range, as she launches into a rude (‘Never got laid as a dyke / now I’m the village bike’) diary of a year (‘October was Shagfest, my shop was never shut ...’), that stakes out territory some way beyond the naked calendar of the Women’s Institute.
Subtle piano - with consistently excellent arrangements - is by her accompanist and accomplice AL COLLINGWOOD. Clune describes him as ‘like Beethoven. The dog. He dribbles and pisses on the wall’.
Clune says if she really liked a boy at a school disco 15 years ago, she’d tell him she hated him, maybe dead-leg him, sit on a radiator and put on masses of lip gloss. Have boys grown up when she Sapphically wasn’t looking? No. They’re just the same (and the method still works). But they’ve got lots more pocket money.
The touching BEAUTIFUL MAN IN A WHEELCHAIR - ‘Please let me push you around / let’s find a ramp and get rampant’ - comes from seeing and falling in love with a ‘gorgeous’ disabled man in the audience. It never patronises, simply accepts and delights in the reality. ‘You’re legless, you can always get it up / I widened my exits today / Please don’t ever walk away / Beautiful man in a wheelchair, my handicap is you’.
STEVE is about fat boys. ‘I love your tummy / let me be your mummy / I love you, porky’. HORSE is why Clune could never accommodate the larger man in Puppetry of The Penis, whom she supported on tour. ‘The first time ever you dropped your pants / (there was) water in my eyes / (it was the) size of a sucking pig / There’s such a thing as too big’.
Clune’s not keen to have children. ‘I was 10 days overdue. Fortunately it turned out to be cancer’. She doesn’t understand what children are for ‘except to eat, shit and clean chimneys’. She’s appalled by the cost of children’s shoes: ‘£60? That’s a wrap of coke. In some countries you can get a whole child for £60. Fully dressed.’ WARNING TO MY OVARIES is ‘a song to my unborn child’: ‘I’m anti-antenatal / there’s s few bits you should know about me.’ These include getting pushed downstairs if pregnant, and a new use for a Dyson's suction.
YOU LEAVE ME INDIFFERENT is Clune’s lesson in how to recognise mediocrity in a potential lover. ‘You told me you were leaving / and didn’t want to go / you asked if I was grieving / I said I didn’t think so’. OPTIC ON THE DASHBOARD is how to get rid of an alcoholic lover who is also a country and western fan and ‘put the cunt in country’. It’s a great piece of spoof c+w in duet from Clune and Collingwood.
Clune finally meets her match in her current love affair (LEAN ON ME). He’s northern, tuts when she swears, and carries her handbag to the pub. She doesn’t mind: ‘More than I’m a feminist, I’m a fucking lazy bitch.’ She’s in love, and ‘everybody hates a lover’. Friends see lovers as ‘two pigs with ribbons round their neck, walking a plank over a volcano,’ and their former buddy as a ‘spunk-filled simpleton’.
The finale MOST OF MY HEART / THAT’S LIFE / YOU’LL DO is Clune’s funny study of accepting the inevitable:
‘In my time of life / I can’t be a too choosy floozy / Love is like a game of musical chairs / The music stops / Catches you unawares / You’ll do / When push comes to shove / It might not be love, but ...’
The glitter ball whirls into action, and Clune comes into the audience to embarrass long-term lovers, who don’t seem to mind at all. Any gay couples? (‘You just looked quite well-dressed’) Lesbian? She finds Kitty and John who’ve been together 50 years (‘What’s your secret? Any cracks appearing? Wake up feeling undersold? Could have done better?) and David and Sheila, 39 years.
She ends the song onstage ‘... but that’s life / I don’t want to die alone’. There’s rapturous applause.
Clune returns for an encore: a sensitive piece about a platonic affair that never progressed, to her despair and ‘comeuppance’. Strapping on an electric guitar she confides the song shows ‘my vulnerability’. WHY DON’T YOU FUCK ME YOU FREAK ends the night on a high (if not erect) note, with a couple of Clune’s classic lines: ‘I felt the motorcycle of my desire come crashing into the bollard of you / You make me sick, Mr No-Dick.’
Clune gets great applause and a genuinely warm reception throughout the gig. Perhaps the key is her obvious delight in people. It comes out in her songs, and it’s no surprise at the end when she jumps off the stage and stands by the door as people leave. Everyone wants to chat with her and shake her hand, and she makes a point of saying goodbye individually to every member of the (large) audience. It’s a nice touch.
This is a one-off artist able to conjure delight from the unusual corners of life as well as its mainstream. Jackie Clune writes powerful lyrics about them, which are also funny and very very dirty. And she sings quite well too.
Written and performed by Jackie Clune. Piano and supporting vocals by Al Collingwood. Technicals by Assembly Room staff.
END
John Park
reviewed 19 August 02 / Assembly Rooms
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
