Edinburgh Fringe Diary Vol 4: The Final Leg

MONDAY

I wake up early. Kind of early. Early during Fringe, anyway. I've designated today as my tourist blowout; it seems as though it would be a crime to come all the way here and not indulge my predilection for single malt scotch with a bit of distillery-hopping. Not to mention that it's three weeks into the festival and both of us need to get the fuck out of this town, even if it is only for a day. My pal Abigoliah Schamaun and I have booked a hire car; after an hour long wait depot, the clerk takes a shining to us and decides to offer us a shiny new Saab to drive. We gratefully accept, only to find the CD player doesn't work. This is fine, but it means we are locked into listening to the radio the whole way. It also means we probably would have done better with the hatchback I'd booked.

Scottish radio is shit; a thousand channels of commercial dance-pop trash compete for attention on the dial. We end up on BBC Gaelic, where the guiding principle of their programming is a three-way juxtaposition of Gaelic talk breaks, Rihanna songs and choral acapella groups. On our way up, we stop in Perth; its' such a shithole that we only stop at the Tesco to amp ourselves up on sugar before ploughing on to Pitlochry. Once we're there, we head to Blair Athol and Edradour distilleries. The first is a bit shit; the scotch is OK but there's only one to try and not much to do. Edradour blows our minds; they do small batches of whiskey and finish them in pretty much any kind of alcoholic barrel you can think of. Once we're done sipping the most amazing sherry-aged whiskey that has ever been, we head to a nearby sheep-infested paddock for a frolick. The fresh highland air fills our lungs along with the gentle stench of manure.

After missing two seperate turn-offs for Edinburgh on the way home, Abigoliah nearly misses her show. I drop her off and head out in search of a petrol station. I end up distracted by the novelty of being able to drive around the suburbs. I get lost somewhere down the end of Leith Walk, which I remember from a late night conversation a week earlier is a rough 'hood. The GPS bugs out on me somewhere in the depths of suburbia and I have to find my own way back. Eventually, I make it to both a petrol station, the hire car joint and my flat; I power-walk my way to the venue and get there in time to slam out a killer show. A pair of cabaret performers I've met on Twitter are in the crowd; the kind of people who either gush uncontrollably over an act or hate it passionately. Tonight it's the latter and they eventually exit to the bar. It doesn't bother me but it is somewhat satisfying to then be carried past them by my ecstatic night audience.

TUESDAY

I should have written my third blog over the last week, but again, I left it until the last minute and need to spend ages retracing my epic third week. Unfortunately that's not really an option, as everyone in our sharehouse is invited to a function the Australian embassy is putting on for Australian acts. We are lured there by the promise of free alcohol and food, only to discover we are to watch a showcase program tailored to mess with my hungover brain; an acapella choir, context-free theatre show excerpts and, in a hangover-stoking masterstroke, the Australian military band playing brass-infused covers of Kylie Minogue songs. My brain implodes.

I head back to the sharehouse to write but am mega-lethargic. I get two paragraphs in before I have to head to my show. The show ends up being a lot of fun again, and an old pal of mine from Adelaide Fringe, Amy Abler, turns up. Her show Pianodivalicious has just finished its' run, I haven't seen her since April and I have a bottle of scotch open, so we end up drinking until about four in the morning, at which point I realise I still haven't done my blog. I hammer it out and finally collapse into bed at 8am. At least I can sleep tomorrow.

WEDNESDAY

My Mum calls. I wake up enough to grunt amiably into the phone. I go back to sleep.

My wife and son call. I haven't been able to speak to them for a couple of days so I wake up enough to chat; at least with that out of the way, I can sleep for the rest of the day.

An unknown number calls. I answer; it's Ben from the TO&ST Awards. We have a bit of a chat and then he mentions the reason he is calling is that they have decided on a winner for the award. It's not me.

It's Lady Rizo, the current queen of New York's cabaret scene. I am enamoured with her version of Amanda Palmer's tune I Google You, so I shrug it off as much as possible. Stupid as it feels to write in print, I am actually just happy to be nominated in this case. I'll win it next year.

In an effort to shake off the vague air of ego-led melancholy that has its' grip on me, I decide to follow some comedy suggestions from my flatmate Bonnie Tessa-Davies. I head to Michael Workman's Mercy at the Gilded Balloon. I've always liked his comedy, even though it was a bit of a surprise coming from a guy I knew from a local industrial rock band. This is one of those shows I have meant to catch in about four different cities, but have always had something else I've had to do; it's a pity, because it's a pretty jaw-dropping show. Delicately constructed with a mixture of stories, songs and simple projections, it seems like it's not going to piece together as a show until the very end. It hits home with the kind of poignant ending that only really hits you halfway home. I hide behind my sunglasses on and head to my next show, School Of Comedy. It's not the kind of thing I would go to without Bonnie's recommendation; it's the live show of a British TV programme  where children act out sketches about adult situations. It is hilariously adult, full of innuendo and political references that continually surprise.

I finish my run of other peoples' shows with a trip to see Perth expat Jim Jeffries. The guy has one of the biggest venues and advertising spends going around this Fringe, and I'm curious to see what a big room show is like here. For the first twenty minutes, I'm unimpressed. Though I can see the appeal of his comedy internationally, as an Australian myself, it feels like a caricature. I have the oddest sensation of having paid sixteen pound to watch one of my friends' Dads get up on stage to make offensive non-jokes. The crowd lap it up, but I am not feeling it, so I'm about to sneak out when he gets rolling on a couple of stories, culminating in a failed threesome and what he calls a “cocaine wank.” I'm surprised to find these stories are masterfully told and often very funny, but I would've liked another hours' worth of tales and less of the cheap standup gags.

I've got a really fun audience in tonight but I feel like a bit of a spooked horse from the TO&ST thing. It takes me about five songs to warm up. Luckily I have aggressive industrial tune No Reaction as my second last song; it's been helpful through the whole season, but feels particularly good tonight. I wrote it in the midst of a 2006 season in Adelaide that I'd rather forget. Adelaide threw a lot of hate at me that year and I spewed my feelings about that into a vitriolic attack on every crap audience I've ever had. Not that they deserve it tonight, but the more terrified the crowd is at this moment in the show, the greater the release in my final tune, the apology-ballad Cuddle. I crowdsurf rather convincingly.

Some students from Oxford Uni are in the crowd and we end up drinking afterwards. They're in town for a show and I promise to go see it tomorrow.

THURSDAY

I let myself sleep until the afternoon today, as the weekend will no doubt take a lot of energy out of me. Once I get up and suffer the indignity of the afternoon's flyering, I head to see my Oxford drinking buddies The Tragedie Of MacClegg. It's a heavily rewritten version of Macbeth based around Nick Clegg, the leader of British political minority party the Liberal Democrats and current deputy Prime Minister. It manages to take some pretty heady subject matter about the nature of British politics and make it a lot of fun. I'm not completely up to date with the political situation in the UK, but there's still enough in there to enjoy. The packed audience of Oxford alumni agree.

Afterwards I race off to get things ready for my show – a few of my cables have broken, which means I need to spend about an hour in the kitchen at the Jekyll & Hyde, replacing a bunch of wires. Not an easy task when the wiring is hidden in the depths of foam insert, behind equipment and under screens hard-wired to the case. I go onstage and have a lovely show to a crowd that are willing to have fun with me. Scott from Perth band Like Junk surprises me by turning up in the audience unannounced and we end up drinking late into the night at a gay bar near my place. There's been a few random Perth people in this week and it's good for my morale. Particularly in Scott's case, as we've played quite a lot of shows together and had resultantly debauched evenings.

Scott makes the mistake of trying to bum a cigarette in the pub's beer garden, where a Scottish lass tells him to fuck off in no uncertain terms. Etiquette here dictates that one must buy one's own cigarettes, even when there are no shops open. Cultural difference duly noted.

FRIDAY

I wake up insanely early to go see some friends off-broadway musical The Crab House. It's showing here in a stripped-back cabaret performance. It's got a bit of a Repo The Musical vibe to it. Not for the first time this festival, I discover that one of the women (in this case Courtney Pink) I'm living with has a truly killer singing voice. I'm too sleepy to really follow the plot, but it's a dark New York murder mystery with some really well constructed songs.

Afterwards, I hang around to chat to my mate and head with the cast to a nearby pub. Its' walls are covered in books and they make one of the few coffees I haven't been repulsed by on this tour. There's so many nice bars in this city, it makes me wonder what its' like here outside of festival season. I follow this thought pattern away from the festival – the Scottish National Gallery has a Van Gogh exhibit. I don't find the exhibit I'm after in the labyrinthine gallery, but do manage to check out their ludicrously general collection. There's a lot of landscape paintings (not my thing) and hunting portraits paid for hundreds of years ago by people with more money than taste (not my thing either). It's vaguely interesting, but it has nothing on their gift shop. As though designed for fringe artists who haven't had time to wander around endlessly looking at gift stores, it seems to be stocked full of things that I want or that I know somebody else will want. A hundred and fifty pounds later and I leave with plastic bags full of pretty things I am unsure will fit into my suitcase.

I head out to the Royal Mile to flyer, as I am filming tonight and need as many heads in the theare as I can. It's getting hard to flyer; my room is filling up pretty nicely anyway, but I'm not certain that flyering during the day is doing much for my midnight attendance numbers. More broadly, this punters seem to have their final days of the festival mapped out, as things start to sell out. People are finding closure on the festival; they've seen most of the shows they want to see and don't want to receive flyers for things they won't have time to see. It's the hardest days' flyering of the run. 

I head with my friend Nelly White to check out a venue we're both interested in for 2013 and find myself falling in love with one of its' rooms. The room in question is slightly bigger than I was looking at, but the raw potential of what kind of show I could mount in there hits me hard. Talking to the venue manager, it seems like a very possible proposition. My brain starts racing with ideas.

Nelly drags me to see cult Fringe performer Beth Vyse in her free show No Turn Unstoned around the corner. I hadn't heard of her before, but I become a quick convert even amidst an audience who don't fall quite as hard for her charms. It's a bizarre, dada-infused headfuck full of strange characters and hallucinogenic multimedia. I love watching performers who let their weirdest impulses run riot and I walk out with the biggest smile on my face I've had for days.

My brain is still thinking about the venue I fell in love with. I decide to go see a show in the room to see how it works; Loretta Maine's Bipolar is next up when I get there. She's an American musical standup, though I would class what she does as cabaret. She has an alcoholic white trash persona that she uses to great effect in character songs, including the set highlight in which she reels off every chicken shop she can think of. Her interplay with her purposefully dour band is the shows' stregnth... though, if I'm honest, although I'm really into what she's doing, I'm fantasising about the potential for this room and mapping out where I would put everything.

I head home afterwards to prepare for my show. The show itself is pretty weird. My friend Joel is filming on his fancy camera, another gent is recording the audio and a bunch of audience members holding up their cameraphones to get different angles. Resultingly, everyone is either holding up a camera or terrified that they'll do something stupid on camera for the whole show, so nobody in the audience is up for much interaction. This makes for a very difficult show. Luckily when I get the footage home, the show looks fine on film. My Perth pals Joel and Kim end up back at my house and we finish a baby bottle of whiskey together while the footage transfers. It's nice to have so many familiar faces around at the end of the festival.

SATURDAY

Call me the worst roommate ever, but I have to be honest; today's final show of my roomie Sian Choyce's group show Convicted is the first time in its' run I have been awake early enough to see it. It's nice to see her work a room with the confidence a season of performing can give you. Her observational gags are perfect for the afternoon audience. They've got a busy schedule of guests today; up first is Josh Richards, dressed in a koala suit as Keith The Anger Management Koala, brings an enjoyably dark streak to the afternoon. Bonnie Tessa-Davies couldn't have a starker contrast between her deeply personal storytelling show and the laconic gags of her standup set. I'm not sure which I like more, hopefully she finds a happy midpoint between the two. Michael Workman closes with a set that has a similar effect; packed with intricate gags, it's much more laugh-out-loud than his solo show.

I head out with Sian to eat pork rolls (an Edinburgh speciality) and find some second hand threads. We wander into an enormous store with too many clothes. Upon realising that none of them will fit my Australian frame, I make it out of the store with only a psychedelic Christmas paisley tie and some gloves. I womble over to see what's happening at The Hive, one of my favourite Free Festival venues. John Robertson is just finishing up his show The Dark Room with a raucous audience and now regular guest Brendan Burns trying for yet another time to escape the room. John's fringe experience has really turned around this week; rave reviews for his other show The Old Whore have finally had an effect and this show has become a cult hit.

I head in to see Chris Dangerfield's Sex Tourist in the smaller side room; the smutty title has pulled a sizable crowd who pack out the venue. It's based around a supposedly true story of a sex tourism adventure to Thailand. I'm not convinced of the truth of his stories, but it's a smutty and amusing way to spend an hour.

I head home and prepare in advance for the nights' show before heading to my mate Nelly White's closing night. Her One Handed Show tells the story of the history of pornography, culminating in the story of an awkward and uncomfortable sexual encounter. It all hangs together very well and she's a very sharp writer; jokes regularly take much darker turns than the audience expects. She's been complaining about horrible sound bleed for the entire festival and I can see why – the show next door is so loud. Her comedy is regularly interrupted by screams and loud vocal noise; luckily her material is strong enough to work even in this context, but I can tell she's relieved to be through with this season.

My show tonight is a bit odd; being the second last night and a Saturday, I'd expected a big response. Don't get me wrong; I have fun, but it feels a little bit uphill. I guess everyone is getting festival fatigue.

SUNDAY

I wake up early (again) in an attempt to finally see Othello: The Remix as the guys from the show have been along to see me a couple of times and are lovely gents. After running across town and covering my polyester shirt in sweat, I turn up two minutes late to the wrong Pleasance venue and thwart my plans. Instead, I decide to see what I can find around Bristo Square, the unpleasantly commercial heart of the festival. Solo comedy show Significant Human Error by Fran Moulds has the coolest poster, so I decide on that. It turns out to be a series of darkly hilarious character monologues. Her unusual selection of characters, including an Australian extreme sports DVD marketer (with a spot-on accent), Welsh mine tour guide and a teenage convert to Islam, makes for enjoyably unusual comedy. The characters never feel like stereotypes and are all played with a depth and sympathy that makes them relatable. It's a win for the whichever-poster-is-prettiest theory of show selection.

As I'm in Bristo Square anyway, I decide to wander over to check out Hannah Gadsby's show at the Gilded Balloon. I have some ancient history with Hannah, who was nice enough to guest on my aforementioned disastrous Adelaide Fringe 2006 show a few times, the first time she'd been to the festival. It's great to see her idiosyncratic humour in full flight; dissecting classical paintings and constructing an argument for gay marriage. In the latter respect, she's preaching the converted; though there's not many Australians in the house (a rarity here, especially for an established Australian comic), Edinburgh's gay community seem to have embraced her.

I then head to my whisky-hopping friend Abigoliah's final show. She is performing in the smaller of two rooms at The Counting House and when it becomes apparent that the act in the huge main room hasn't turned up, she moves her show in there to play for their audience. It's interesting to watch her scale up her usually initmate and conversational show to a room that requires a more traditional approach. Initially, she talks a little too fast and doesn't leave enough air in the room for people to soak up the gags, but after a few minutes she relaxes into it. I've had similar experiences when moving between different types of shows; in the small room I'm playing at this festival, the audience can see everything, but I really have to scale up my physical presence in a bigger space. She easily wins over the audience in this larger setting.

Before I head to the venue, I get a google alert stating that the Scotsman have listed me in their nine-show list of the best free shows in the Fringe (http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/edinburgh-festivals/all-articles/best-free-shows-at-the-fringe-1-2479932), which is somewhat vindicating. I play my final show to a packed crowd full of beautiful people. Richard, a new fan who has now seen my show ten times in three weeks (and sent me the photos here), hands out party poppers during part of the show where I am out of the room. Three songs later, in the final talk break where I am supposed to be emotional and confused, I find myself covered in streamers and laughing. It's a beautiful way to finish. Afterwards, the audience and (amazing) bar staff buy me a thousand drinks and I can't stop smiling.

Nelly White and I have promised ourselves we will climb Arthur's Seat after tonight's show. It's a huge hill that overlooks much of Edinburgh. I sober up enough to stumble through the streets in its' direction. For such a huge pile of dirt, it's surprisingly hard to find; this may be due to the whisky in my system. Climbing it is difficult; it doesn't flatten out at any point and doesn't lend itself to drunken wandering. We make it to the top just before dawn and Nelly informs me that the long structure we have climbed is probably not the actual Arthur's Seat, which is a big mountain to our left. I tell her that whatever the official thing is, this is the mountain I intended to climb. At least this way I am leaving something to achieve next year. We drink a nip of scotch and start the descent, resting halfway down as the sun comes up. I feel pretty delighted with what I've achieved; but agree with Nelly when she says how weird it feels to know you need to get back here in eleven months but have no idea on how you're going to achieve it. I tell her I hope somebody reading my blog will donate me $15,000.

Contact me directly if this is you.

MONDAY

Freight is a bitch. I wake up at 9am, freaking out about how I'm going to get my gear home. The company I'd booked to send my roadcase back home have sent me an email saying they don't know anything about it; it's a bank holiday in Britain, so the Australian agent gives me the company directors' home numbers to call. Imagine my delight. Eventually everything is sorted and I head back to bed.

I wake up at 4pm and head out to have whisky for breakfast with Joel and Kimberly. For such a whisky fiend, this is the first time I've had time to chill out in one of Edinburgh's many whisky bars all festival. I make a mental note to make this a priority next year.  As my pals have  few plans for the evening, I drag them along to the shows I'd planned to see.

I've been trying to see Felicity Ward's The Hedgehog Dilemma for about eight months in various cities, so it's satisfying to see it tonight. As her closing night, she has decided it's “champagne and donuts” night, which means everybody gets a small drizzle of communal champers. Her show about transitioning from a long term, high-school-romance type relationship back into dating is laugh a minute but is also very tender. She scores a well deserved standing ovation at the end of her set.

The final show of the festival is The New Conway Dimension. John Conway and his offsider Michael Burke are my kind of wierdos and we've crossed paths a fair bit back home. Tonight, they are running their already brain-frying sketch show backwards for a packed house. Many of the bits, like Super Mario Wank (I assume this is its' title) and Time Helmet are familiar from their Australian gigs, and tonight's crowd know them off by heart. The show gets the kind of rowdy reception usually reserved for cult movies like The Room. The audience shout out requests for sketches from four-year-old shows and eventually demand the show plays forwards at its' conclusion.  The pair hose the audience down with champagne and make their exit, wisely deciding it's best to go out on a high.

After drinking for a while in Gilded Balloon's Library bar, about ten of us decide to blag our way into their exclusive Loft bar on one hijacked pass. Despite the bouncers' initial protestations, the bar is basically empty, so we spend the night dribbling shit to each other in the open air and comfortable surroundings. I drink enough to forget that I have to wake up very early to fly to Amsterdam in the morning.

TUESDAY

I am not happy. I don't want to wake up and I certainly don't want to go home. I grump around the flat, trying to cram everything into bags and clean up all my mess. I film a simple bit of a video for a DIY music video I'm planning (luckily it requires me walking around the block in a bad mood) and head to the airport.

Once I'm there, I find an exchange counter and empty my pockets of £130 of mostly silver and brass coins onto its' desk. The clerk laughs at me and helps me count it. A half hour later, I have a fistful of notes. The trip home is pretty uneventful (A torturous transit stop at Denpasar aside - note to self: don't ever transit through Indonesia), but I decide to head into town during my five hour stop in Amsterdam. After marvelling a second time at its' beautiful streets and enjoying the fact that the shops are actually open this time around, I sit in a canalside cafe and reflect on how much more I've achieved than I'd expected. A successful run of shows, a TO&ST Award nomination, amazing reviews, a listing in the Scotsman's best of the free festival and some good groundwork for my season next year. I knew how hard this Fringe would be and so purposefully came here with the lowest possible expectations, so to do this well has blown my mind.

I'm on a huge high. The comedown is going to be a bitch.

An Audience With Tomás Ford will tour Australia over the next year. Listen to the album of the show now on Spotify or at his official website.