Burns & Beyond review: Anna Meredith, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh

For this Burns & Beyond performance, Anna Meredith revelled in the spontaneous joy of analogue music while bolstering it with the structural rigour of the digital, writes David Pollock

Anna Meredith, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh *****

“I used to work here,” said Anna Meredith, amid her Saturday night Assembly Rooms headline show at the Burns & Beyond festival in Edinburgh. The job, she said, involved “scuttling up to people and telling them not to take pictures of the stars.”

Fortunately the South Queensferry-raised composer stands on no such ceremony. Her show built on all her formal accolades – her feting by the BBC Proms, her classical awards, her MBE – with a tower of joyful and very live electropop perfection.

Meredith’s five-piece live band were arranged here in a semi-circle, all dressed in matching, stylised white boiler suits with dynamic black lines scratched across their fabric. She was accompanied by a cellist, a bassist, a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist, with Meredith alternating between keyboard and some flute and vocals. Her set was majestically confident and exciting, in love with the spontaneous joy of analogue music, but bolstering it with the volume and structural rigour of the digital. From the dramatic, continuous escalation of Sawbones to Inhale Exhale’s breathy electropop, the swirling digital atmosphere of Calion and Nautilus’s trademark pulsating horn stab, her band played with the power of a club DJ set as she led with the personality of a pop performer.

Meredith’s self-aware lack of formality is entertaining in itself, from the elevator muzak-aided merchandise sales pitch, to her efforts to get into the spirit of the occasion with a recital of Sandy Thomas Ross’s Scots poem The Auld Broon Troot and an unexpected but excellent closing cover of the Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).

It hadn’t been her plan to play any more shows, preferring instead to “get off my ass and finish this album I've been working on for quite a while”, but Burns & Beyond made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. How fortunate that they did, because it was a great night.