Checking out the competition

There comes a time in every cabaret artiste's life when one has the hopefully pleasurable task of checking out the competition - which, particularly in Edinburgh, should be of a good standard and (more importantly) all in the same place at the same time. Since what we do is pretty specific, we'd drawn up a hit-list of people whose audiences might go to our stuff and vice versa and yesterday, rain or no rain, was the day of reckoning - mainly because most shows get more expensive on Friday and weekends.

So, my first task of the afternoon was to check out the apparently brilliant, witty, biting, satirical, topical, original cabaret show of last year's Best Fringe Duo, Topping and Butch. Camp as a row of pink tents, they have a huge gay'n'granny following and do two shows - one at 11 (which was obviously out) and a 4pm show called Afternoon Tease. Forgive me, Butch and Topping, you are lovely people with beautiful teeth and decent voices, but Afternoon Snooze would have been more appropriate - I only hope your evening show consists of more than reworked lyrics to Disney songs and tired knob-gags.

Innuendo and nudge-winkery are both fine cabaret traditions we are proud to uphold, but despite being blessed with a massively indulgent audience (and lubricating them with free sherry always helps), Topping and Butch barely raised a titter from me. Of an eight-song set one or two were original and the rest were old tunes with new - and not desperately hilarious - words. I went in really wanting to like them and left feeling rather cheated. Surely it can't be that hard to write something both new and funny? We give it a shot and we've only been going for eighteen months. The glorious gods of cabaret Kit and the Widow (of which more later) have been doing it for twenty years and they still come up with fresh and amusing stuff every time I see them.


(Kit and the Widow shown not actual age - but they do look lovely)

So, onto the next act of the evening, the Soubrettes. These two are a female cabaret duo from Australia who do (thank god) nothing but original songs. Again, lovely voices (and superb costumes, especially the wigs) but when we went the audience of twenty-odd felt lost in the dark and dank environment of the Gilded Balloon Caves. We were a much tougher crowd, too - while Topping and Butch's banter was (to be fair) polished and entertaining, the two girls had much fresher songs but seemed a bit lost between numbers. But again, while a lot of the songs were clever, or funny, or had a good idea behind them, very few managed to be all three at once and only the last (a song about oral sex) is still running through my head.

What was a bit more disturbing was that, looking at their CD (at £8, three quid more than ours - hurry, hurry, buy while stocks last!) everything on it was copyright 2001. This means that have been performing the same set for three years or more and haven't felt the need to add to or change any of the songs, which is a tad complacent given the hit-and-miss nature of the material.

I really wanted to enjoy them more. I really did. On the positive side, it makes me more confident in our own songs and show, and we've not being going long, so we're only going to get better as far as I'm concerned - but on the negative, I paid to be entertained by shows I was told were "hilarious" and, in the case of T&B "original" and was disappointed to various degrees on both fronts.

In conclusion, despite the fact that I had to walk three miles across town to see them, wait for an hour for a return, and have seen them twice before, Kit and the Widow are still the best cabaret in Edinburgh by a bloody long way, and I urge you to catch them before Apollo snatches them up in his golden chariot as being too good for this world. And if you can't get in (and they do sell out every single performance) - well, you know where Beauty and the Bitch are playing ...

I Believe I Can Flyer

A short testament to the power of flyering, which, rather like prayer, occasionally appears to be effective but you have no way of telling if it'll work next time.

Tickets sold for tonight's performance at lunchtime today: 0

We took drastic action. We bought some 2 for 1 stickers from C, attached them to flyers, performed at Best of the Festival Musicals in the Radisson Hotel (only half a crowd, for a change) and targeted our potential audience. We carefully picked out punters, couples and friends walking in twos on the Royal Mile and explained that the flyers we were about to give them were very special, that they admitted two people for the price of one TONIGHT ONLY and that they must use them wisely.

Normal flyering is indiscriminate at the best of times (the only people I avoid are kids, the very old and the very foreign) but with only 18 2 for 1 special flyers to give away, I ebgan to hoard them. I made snap judgements about people's trustworthiness and likelihood of attending the show. I tried to work out if they would take the flyer to get rid of me and waste the 2 for 1 opportunity that another couple might kill for. So, after about eight hours of this nonsense, interspersed with watching a few shows, (shame on you, Four Sets of Lips, for magicking a "technical problem" to cancel the show when you learned you only had 6 audience members) we had allocated all the special flyers.

Back we went to C Venues, where I picked up the show CDs and enquired as to the number of tickets sold now.

Tickets sold for tonight's performance at 10.30pm today: 1

Well, the least we could do was give the poor bugger some company: what the hell, I asked for some complimentary free tickets to give out and managed to persuade a couple of lovely young locals (well, students at Edinburgh University) to come along. When we got to C 02, at about 10.50, the place was heaving. Surely this was not our audience? Ah but yes. It seems that (perhaps even without being flyered) the whole cast of Dracula at Bedlam had decided to come and see us, thus boosting audience numbers by about 400%.

Tickets sold for tonight's performance at 11pm tonight: 20+

How lovely tonight's audience were. Enthusiastic, loving it and so moved by our performance that they gave us a standing ovation, yelled for an encore, bought 5 CDs AND (the Dracula section anyhow) serenaded us with a moving song about necrophilia. After that the two students whom I'd lured in with comps grabbed us after the show and bought us cocktails and champagne all night. Thank you Gregor and especially Nick, you were adorable. And I hope you found your wallet.

A Week in the Life ...

As Dave correctly observes, it's my turn to blog and has been for several days. (We take it in turns so that we don't turn this page into a titanic battle of the egos wrestling for dominance. Plus we have been SO spoiled by broadband that the dial-up here takes a little getting used to).

To be honest, it's not been the grestest of weeks so far, certainly for me, but as schadenfreude is a particularly 21st-century emotion as far as I'm concerned, I think it's only fair that you be allowed to revel in our pain blow by agonising blow, day by day...

So, counting backwards in traditional blog format, let me introduce you to the creeping horrors that lurk within

SATURDAY
Ah, it started so well. Lovely sunny day, twenty booked in to see us, Die Hard II on the TV - what could go wrong? I'll tell you what. Drunk people in the show can go wrong. Horribly wrong. See, the problem with drunk people is that they don't realise (or take any notice of the fact if they do) that they are:

a) not very funny (certainly not funny enough for people to pay to see them, as our audience had done to see us)
b) very loud
c) not supposed to smoke during the show (what with us having to sing and all).

Far be it from me to glare with mature disapproval upon young things taking their first taste of alcohol. I still remember with fondness that illicit Pernod and Black - and precious little thereafter. During cutting-edge comedy cabaret performances, however, I am with the Victorians in believing that they should be seen and not heard. The pissed-up kids in the front started off being a bit rowdy but in a laughing-loudly, enjoying themselves kind of way. They progressed to having loud conversations with each other in the middle of songs, and smoking fags, and annoying fellow punters. We soldiered on, but fuck me, it was hard. We tried embarrassing them and mocking them, Dave cut several minutes of his stand-up section to unleash three generations of schoolteacher genes' sarcasm on them, but they were possessed of the shame-proof incomprehension of the deeply sozzled. I suppose they count as hecklers (whoo! another first!) but hecklers usually have something sensible (if disparaging) to say, and with these guys, it was just ... um ... gibberish really. They had a brilliant time and showered Dave with kisses afterwards, but my apologies go out to the rest of the audience whose enjoyment was impaired.

Like I said at the end of the show, we've been Beauty and the Bitch, you (the rest of the audience) have been very patient, and you (waving the pointy finger of disapproving ire) have been very pissed. Good night!

(Next time, we are so hiring bouncers ...)

Now available in a store near you...

The hallowed list of places that have witnessed a B+B performance now has a new name to add to the roll. Today we added the scalp of Edinburgh's very own Harvey Nichols department store. That is to sazy that I was rudely awakened this morning to the dulcet tones of my mistress screeching that I should "wake up, right now. We're playing in Harvey Nichols in an hour." I rolled off the capacious two-seater sofa that serves as my boudoir and realised that as I would be carrying the keyboard, I had better set off immediately.

Upon finding the shop (thanks to a curiously misplaced Cockney newspaper vendor) I was immediately approached by security. Not impressed by my claims that I was an artiste about to bless their halls with music, I was directed to the goods entrance. Around the back, I was met my another looming goon in a uniform that would have suited a banana republic paratrooper and directed to a security door and camera. Passing through this I was sent deep into the bowels of the building to the 'Security Control Centre' (and you just know that its inhabitants refer to it as the SCC). The Security Shift Supervisor (no less) then escorted me to the Staff Training Centre.

By this stage I was ready to deny I had ever been a member of the Comunist party and to denounce any number of my friends who had talked red at cocktail parties. Shine a bright light in my eyes and I would have freely divulged all I knew about Britains nuclear capability. With a glare, the officer locked me in.

Twenty minutes later I was released by a short, middle-aged lady who in my worried state of mind looked alarmingly like Rosa Klebb. She escorted me out into the store to find Katy sitting calmly in the middle of Men's Casualwear applying her make-up. No strip-search or detention for La Diva. Maybe I should lose the beard.

Anyhow, we delighted the purveyors of quality men's leisurewear, startled the three shoppers who passed through on route forthe discount rack, and proved without doubt that much of our material is ill-suited for busking. A triumph.

Next week I confidently expect to be dragged along to provide mood music for Millets.

Edinburgh Living

There are certain things you don't find out about people until you live with them. Little things. Like, do they clean? Cook? Stay up late? Snore? Do they know how to roll a cigarette? Fix a toaster? Have they ever baked their own bread? Played the harmonica? Hand-washed an item of clothing?

It is only the last that need concern you, dear reader. Today being Fringe Sunday and most of the Fringe taking its traditional one day off, Beauty and the Bitch will plough ahead tonight as ever - and now Dave's much-abused show t-shirt (slogan: Are You Happy With the Size of Your Pianist?) will be sweet-smelling and shiny clean, thanks to an invention we in the civilised world call hand-washing.

See, thanks to the Monday-morning t-shirt printing paper we got from Jessops (shame on you, sirs: it was crap and probably several years out of date the T-shirt has up until now been deemed too fragile for the tender mercies of our washing machine. Fortunately Dave only wears it for an hour a night, but after what amounts to a long day's continuous wear it was in danger of breaking away from B&B and starting its own show. Likewise, the ribbons on my angel wings were starting to shred and have now been replace with sequinned elastic. Happy little homemakers that we are, we completed both tasks in between making lots of cups of tea and watching Spies Like Us on TV. As anyone who's downloaded the 80s Movie video from the main site will know, this is about as close to zen bliss as it gets chez B&B.

And now we're off to watch the allegedly brilliant musical The Translucent Frogs of Quuup at C too, for free! Watch this space for the inevitable review ...

Yes, you may all touch me

Summer has finally rediscovered Edinburgh. The sun is bright, the air is warm, the streets teem with marks (sorry, tourists) and all is sweetness and light. There is a spring in my step and a song on my lips, my arms are spread with to cuddle the world. Yup, we had a good night last night.

Being the naturally shy and retiring type, a delicate social bloom, a wilting wallflower in life's rich dance, I am unaccustomed to unashamed praise, flattery and acclaim. Last night's audience were (amid fierce competition) clearly the most astute, perceptive and intelligent we have had to date. Barely had the applause settled into the dying echoes and we emerged from our dressing hole, when we were mobbed by what can only be described as fans. Real, honest-to-goodness, will-you-sign-my-nipples fans.

Okay, the nipples thing was a lie, but we signed programmes, cds and after several pints I may have signed a permission form for medical testing but my memory is hazy. There were none of the usual signs, no rictus grins, no thousand-yard stare, none of them had to catch a bus back to Broadmoor that night. These were simply people we had made laugh and who wanted to tell us how wonderful we were. Which was nice. Only trouble is, I have yet to decide exactly what to say to that after "Oh good, we're glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for coming."

"Yes, I know. Aren't we the greatest thing since perforated toilet paper" lacks a certain modesty and perspective. "Um, thanks. Er, I'm not much good unscripted" might be honest but it's a little bald and unfriendly. I think I settled for grinning like an idiot and being generally too chuffed to speak. Still, the free drinks were a real bonus.

Grateful thanks must also go to the cast and crew of Life 101 who were almost as good as audience members as they were in their show.

We relaxed afterwards to the late-night band at our venue: "Hexicon". Two young boys from the depths of rural Kent who almost made me too embarrassed to pick up a guitar ever again. Not content with covering all my favourites from the Pixies to P.J.Harvey, their own material was very good as well. Tuneful and complex, melancholy with a bite. To cap it all off, they took a break in the middle of the set for a performance unsurpassed amongst stuffed hand-puppets at this year's festival. A young lion and his 'brother', a penguin, performed with such brio and elan that I shall never be able to hear "500 miles" by The Proclaimers or "It wasn't me" by Shaggy in the same way ever again.

Off out again, gearing up to another show later tonight. Adulation is something I had better just learn to deal with. The hardship...

Rain drain

You know, perhaps it's the eternally cheery memories of my youth: perhaps it's the rose-tinted spectacles we all wear when we come up to Edinburgh as a fresh-faced student, act in a four-star show, make money on it (that never happens more than once in a lifetime) and spend a lot of time with lovely people, but my memories of Edinburgh festivals past have always been sun-soaked. Ice-creams in the park, roasting days on the Royal Mile, jumpers for goalposts; all these fond recollections drove me in a fit of madness to pack my capacious suitcase with nothing but the flimsiest of tops and shortest of skirts - all the better to flyer in, I thought.

Reader, was I nuts? I didn't even bring a coat. Leather skirt - check. Thigh-high vinyl boots (surprisingly comfortable and waterproof) - yup. Angel wings - present and correct. Sensible warm clothing ... er ... no. And although the first week was as predicted, blazingly hot and lovely, since then the Athens of the North has been foggy, rainy, thundery, wet, miserable and drizzling by turns. If it weren't for the fact that our venue is snug and warm as a recently vacated duvet I would no doubt have caught my death by now, given the daring brevity of most of my performance outfits.

Flyering in the rain is a strangely numinous experience. It always reminds me of TS Eliot's line about the businessmen walking over the bridge into the city "so many ... I did not know death had undone so many". People are not in the mood to have a sodden flyer shoved into their hands, and even postering becomes pretty much pointless. The sellotape won't stick, the print comes off and all you're left with is a bag full of papier-mache and squelchy shoes.

But the show must go on, and to make up for my cruel neglect of the blog for the last few days, I'll give you a potted history. Night before last, I was surprised and thrilled to see the lovely Dan in the audience, along with his girlfriend Esther and her friend Johnny - especially as one of the judges for the Perrier Newcomer award was in the audience. It was a big, cheerful crowd overall and despite a slight technical problem I thought it was the third-best night we'd had so far ... but as ever, any individual's response comes down to a matter of taste. Lat night we had the Scotsman in along with a slightly older crowd, and it was a funny mix of those who hooted with laughter at our more tasteless gags (we sold a couple of CDs on the strength of the show) and those who loved the milder stuff but looked a bit stunned by things like a chirpy tune about eating disorders. It's not like we don't set out our stall (the show's on at 11, the blurb says "audio-fellatio for the discerning cynic") but there are definitely still parts of the act that are well beyond Graham Norton style family-friendly innuendo.

I want to print some press quotes for the poster today. (not that they'll survive the rain, but a girl can dream). So, I'm thinking, just to make things quite clear:

"Style and sass, with a dash of venom" (Three Weeks)
"Seduces the audience ... a shamelessly sordid alternative to the traditional cabaret glitz" (Fest)
"Sophisticated show with its mind firmly in the gutter" (Metro)

Ladies and gentlemen, leave your taste at the door. With touching songs about homosexual necrophilia, amnesiac sex and bulimia as a dieting technique, you can be sure we're not covering old ground. Beyond-the-pale pioneers, that's us. See you there .... if you dare. ;)

B+B - now in vision

Slipping gently into a routine of flyering, schmoozing, flyering, watching free shows, flyering, drinking, flyering and chatting up the venue staff, our first week has passed all too rapidly. However, some of you poor readers unable to make it to Edinburgh may be gnawing at your knuckles as you sit at the keyboard, desperate to come closer to the B+B live experience. Have no fear, for through the magic of the cheap digital camera we can now bring you Beauty and The Bitch in living colour!


Mighty Power Duo


Just turn your head and cough...


Let's get ready to RAWK!

No fluffy animals were hurt in the creation of these images, although some squirrels experienced temporary hearing loss.

Cabaret in the afternoon

This morning your hard-working, hard-drinking, PlayStation Who Wants To Be A Millionaire champions (thanks Dave) woke up to the sound of the door buzzer going off like an aroused wasp. Odd, as no-one except the venue and anyone who visits the website knows our Edinburgh address. I crawled out of bed to receive a mystery box from Marks and Spencer, addressed to me. A secret admirer? Our excitable reviewer from Three Weeks, who was kind enough to describe my performance as having a "sexual charge ... style and sass, with a dash of venom"?

Nope: as what remained of a rather nice potted plant and a lot of soil spilled onto the bathroom floor (it's OK, we hoovered it all up) along with a box of Belgian chocolates, I realised it was from my dear old Mum and Dad. Thanks guys. You know what a woman needs after a hard night on the tiles.

So, the hammer fell as predicted by Doomsayer Dave last night: although we had a good-sized audience again, the opening number was a tad compromised by the fact that our loveable man-child of a venue technician was kind enough to unplug the keyboard, which knocked us off our stride a bit; but we manfully struggled on and hopefully by the end had lulled them into a false sense of security. Yeah! You should see us when our instruments are working!

Fortunately the chocolate boost of this morning got us off to a decent start appearing in the Best of the Festival Musicals show at Sweet Venue (2.45 daily), where we shared a stage with the singing sisters of Nunsense the Musical and I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change (also on at C). The venue was fab - a bar, nice comfy chairs and intimate tables, and a baby grand that probably still retains traces of Dave's drool. Even the small children in the audience laughed along to If I Were Gay and our wide selection of innuendo-based gags, and we were quizzed afterwards by an earnest American chap about songwriting. Next year we'll just do a masterclass so that all can worship, sorry, learn at our feet. But until then we'll be appearing in Best of the Fest Musicals again on Sunday 8th and Monday 9th, attention whores that we are.

Topping the bill of today so far, however, was bumping randomly into Bjacques of Barbelith fame, who somehow recognised me from the exceptionally flattering pictures on the site and gave us a miniature of whisky in honour on my online alias. Score!

Before the inevitable crash...

Some day I shall begin to hire the mistress out as a modern seer. The goose giblets may take her some time to get used to, but her track record is improving. Six people she said, maybe as many as nineteen... Close, m'dear. Thanks to a lovely group of people in matching tie-dyed t-shirts, we stormed to a rousing 23 in the crowd last night. Not only that, but they were all, as we say in the trade, 'up for it'. Milady strutted and warbled to perfection, playing the audience like an eight-year-old on a gameboy, dropping bon mots like seasoned old-pro and generally keeping them dancing with delight in the palm of her elegantly manicured hand. For my part, I lost a couple of stones in pure sweat and milked and mugged my way to an ego-gratifying number of laughs. A triumph, my dears. Positively a triumph! And they all paid!

As you can imagine, they self-congratulatory air of the post-show drinks was hardly reduced by the discovery that the bar that serves as our venue was prepared to offer us 2 for 1 cocktails as performers. I basked like a shark in the glory of last night. This morning we awoke and ventured into town to find that our posters were going up and our fabulous flyers were ready for distribution. Life is sweet and I am smug.

Clearly, this cannot last. Cassandra has not been able to tell me what calamity will befall us in the near future, but there can be no doubt that disaster is on the horizon, looming like a fart in a doctor's surgery. However, in the mean time I shall eat drink and make merry with the denizens of this fair town. Be warned, the Bitch is in an expansive, effusive and downright huggly mood. Approach with caution.

Sex, lies and gaffer tape

All right, so I lied about the sex. And, fortunately, the lie about the sex takes care of the lies part of this generally misleading headline, leaving only the gaffer tape, which was definitely available on the night of our technical rehearsal a couple of days ago.

It's a little-known fact that much of Western architecture, and theatres in particular, and theatres hastily converted from the underbellies of bars during Festival Fringe time almost without exception, are lsrgely held together with gaffer tape. Gaffer does it all: stick it up, hold it down, bind it together, wind it round - it will do anything to anything. Even X the Spanish techie (think Manuel in Fawlty Towers, but with dreadlocks) knows the words "gaffer tape", the magic stuff with which 90% of theatrical problems can be solved. In gaffer we trust.

Reader, we had our first night. Despite the thumping bass from the bar upstairs, the low beam in the middle of the ceiling that lies in wait for unwary 6ft-plus heads, and the fairy lights (put up by yours truly, trusting in gaffer perhaps a little too implicitly) crashing to the floor in the middle of the dress, we managed to get through last night without major incident.

We remembered the words of the songs and the punchlines of the gags, (not to mention improvising a few more as the situation demanded) and didn't bump into the furniture, and so even though we started half an hour late (someone had cut off the electricity to the venue or something) our audience of five seemed rather entertained by the show, which is after all the whole point. As they say in showbiz, today five - tomorrow six! Or two, or nineteenL: you never know at the Fringe until the reviews come out, so cross all your digits for your hard-working cabaret artistes and watch this space ...

From our correspondant in the north

So here we are in Edinburgh. Home of my forefathers; land of mists and mellow drunkenness. We have landed in that peculiar lull before the Fringe storm. As one wanders the streets of the capital (searching for a piece of black ribbon since you ask) there are the expected tourists, the busking pipers in their Black Watch finest and every third phone box has a sign outside reading 'Venue 437'. All this is true. And yet, in 36 hours, I have had only one flyer violently thrust at me.

Awake, ye hordes of student thesps! Arise, ye stand-ups formed in array! Stand forth, ye leotarded avant-garde and thrill our hearts once more! Bring me chain-saw juggling and Mormon choirs on the Royal Mile. Fill Princes Street with sunburned casts of rock musicals in suspenders. Come flyer bombs and fall on Cowgate. It's only fit for drinking now.

Actually, things are nice. Flat is lovely. Weather fine. Not missing work. Found nice pub with good beer. Sleep patterns awol. Wish you were here.

P.S.

Have formed a new plan to live exclusively off the free food offered during other peoples performances. Already aranged a deal to exchange use of my keyboard for chocolate cake. Now all I have to do is find a source of free alcohol...

It was all just a beautiful dream ...?

By which I mean that we arrived in Edinburgh yesterday (Sunday) at about 2pm, drank, ate, went shopping for technical stuff (and came back with ice cream) rehearsed, had dinner, and then at the for-Edinburgh-early hour of 10.30pm, trundled down to our venue C o2 for the start of our four-hour technical rehearsal.

But to begin at the beginning. First, the flat. Now, anyone who's been to Edinburgh during Festival time knows that the traditional one-person-per-room sleeping arrangements usually found in the affluent West suddenly revert to the sort of pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap approach common to supermarket shelves, Third World refugee camps and Big Brother. I've now been up here four times and have rarely shared my room with fewer than three other people. Mattresses and air beds are the order of the day, if you're lucky: Four Yorkshiremen squalor one-upmanship and horror stories of flea-infested slums are rife whenever two or more performers are gathered together.

But apparently it doesn't have to be this way. Not only is it possible to rent a lovely one-bedroom flat right on the Grassmarket (Edinburgh's Covent Garden) for a reasonable rate, but if you sacrifice chickens and dance widdershins round the Pleasance, said flat will also come equipped with a lovely, courteous and friendly landlord who leaves food! in the fridge!! and instructions! for the washing machine!!! (exclamation marks mine). If you fall into a laudanum-induced coma and have the sort of visionary experience that inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write "Kubla Khan", you will also find that there is a PC! with free internet access!! and a Playstation!!! and you're allowed to smoke!!!!

And then you wake up.

And realise it's all true.