Wil Hodgson: Punk Rock Tales - Fringe 2009
Live Review

The 2004 Perrier newcomer award winner returns for his sixth fringe with a slight change in tack. Having been described as a fat Julian Cope standing behind the mic by one ungenerous reviewer (actually the jury’s out on whether or not that is an insult or not) he’s decided to adopt the Dave Allen approach and sit down for his latest tales.

To make himself feel at home, Hodgson’s chosen a pub table and chair from which to present his latest adventures from his home town of Chippenham. It’s an hour’s worth of material that will probably change from one night to the next but at the top of the show, for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t seen him before, he offers a little background of himself as a tattooed, pink-haired, leopard-print sporting, Care Bear loving feminist from the West Country who’s an admirer of the larger lady (give him Fern Britton over Cotton any day).

He goes on to paint a vivid picture of the bittersweet relationship with his small town, full of quirky colour, but also small mindedness. Local ‘characters’ loom large: the heavily tattooed Clint, Maverick aka the Black Panther (after the serial killer not the civil rights movement) and The Running Man, who really was in training for the New York marathon.

There are some lovely moments here from his homage to old man pubs to his closing routine of his run-in with a racist from Leeds and his kebab-hurling assault - the denouement of which he raises out of his chair to tell. It’s a story he claims has no punchline, making the analogy that it’s a little like life. But no punchline doesn’t mean it’s not a fine way to close the show.

Punk Folk Tales may be casual in their approach – but you can be sure that they’ll be enthralling, astute and poetic in their execution.