The Magnetic Fields: Part Two EIF review – 'A deliciously eclectic set'

The first night of their two-part gig, as The Magnetic Fields perform from their landmark concept album 69 Love Songs. | Andrew Perry

The Magnetic Fields: Part Two

Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

★★★★

The magnificent Magnetic Fields picked up where they had left off 22 hours earlier with the second half of their 25th anniversary celebration of the 69 Love Songs triple album. Frontman and chief songwriter Stephin Merritt raised a cup of something and sang deep down in his boots of “love, music, wine and revolution” to a mariachi-style rhythm. One cello-backed swoon claimed, “I could write a song about the way you say goodnight”. Easy peasy pickings for Merritt, who demonstrated he could also write about Washington DC as the epicentre of love, use the language of spiritual love on Kiss Me Like You Mean It and make beautiful music out of safety instructions on Epitaph For My Heart.

He revealed his trick of the trade for maintaining some emotional distance from this clever, heartfelt, charming and sardonic material by imagining Dick Van Dyke singing each song in a bad Cockney accent but the band also offered a bit of bilingual slap and tickle against a quasi-rockabilly riff on Underwear and the jaunty jig of Wi’ Nae Wee Bairn Ye’ll Me Beget (“Scots dialect as interpreted by Americans,” was the excuse). In the second half there were odes to alcohol.

The comparative treatise Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin and the tragicomic Night You Can’t Remember both encapsulated multitudes in around two minutes, while For We Are the King of the Boudoir was a one-minute Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Experimental Music Love was barely thirty seconds of vocal reverberations from keyboard maestro Chris Ewen but received with as much affection as anything in a deliciously eclectic set which climaxed with the subsonic blues of Xylophone Track and the playful key changes of Zebras, a comic ode to love at a price.