Electro-pop titan Laurie Black is a Brighton Fringe staple, her Bad Luck Cabaret an always-diverse mix of interesting art far from the complacency sometimes seen in this genre of tent-based vaudeville.

A Spiegeltent refugee – Black explaining to the audience how this year’s replacement “Spiegelgardens” is run by a crappy pub chain – a full room enjoys a brilliant show that if anything could have been even longer.

She’s a wonderfully captivating performer and effortless MC, strikingly  dressed in yellow high vis, opening the show with a doom-laden tune that has, sadly, not dated one bit since she first wrote it. If anything, everything has got even worse – which is why it’s so important for people to come together and support free expression, beautiful music and comedy, and ally with the most vulnerable in society as our politics heads in ever-more-troubling directions.

Black makes all this very clear.

Our first guest act is Mr John Robertson, a firecracker Australian armed with nothing beyond a Schrödinger’s ukulele, a complete disregard for the boundaries between audience and stage, and a very fast mind of improvised and charming insults. 

In a non-jarring shift of tone, our next act brings sincere truth and beautifully composed punk-poetry full of black and queer pride, body positivity, and clarion calls for a better world. Erin James: remember the name.

“I had ten seconds so i made a bee’s arsehole”. The next phase of the caberet is danger tape: people making whatever they like from strips of on-brand yellow and biodegradable tape. Strap-on dildos, confetti and an angler fish emerge, all hilariously modelled and succinctly justified by our audience members.

There is one last Laurie Black song, a new one about panic attacks, and our musical journey ends with The Hush Hush, a guitar duo with fragile and delicate songs that are what would happen if Roy Orbison and the theme from Twin Peaks joined forces with the singer out of Beirut.

Both nattily dressed, and with the electric guitarist sporting the glasses of a 1970s serial killer, it’s a gothy, downbeat, and beautiful ending to a memorable hour. 

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️