Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Before we embark on this exercise, you and I, it’s probably worth acknowledging that this show fills a specific niche, and if you’ve seen its title you probably already know whether or not you’re going to enjoy it. If you like being asked if you remember Kula Shaker, the star rating is irrelevant.

Marc Burrows is a music journalist and occasional stand-up who’s built a career on remembering music from the 20^th century, and now finds himself with a teenage stepson who’s more into anime. This is the loose narrative structure that emotionally justifies a dive into Britpop and his own teenage years, a time when he felt he had the whole world at his feet.

 Obviously that’s a time and a feeling that could never be recaptured (and SHOULD never be recaptured; imagine if you had that teenage mindset for your whole life) so there’s inevitably something a little unwholesome about nostalgia shows like this, but it’s relatively harmless for the audience, who mostly just want to sing along to the hits.

This is a service that Burrows only provides intermittently, and as a result you can hear people in the audience starting to sing spontaneously when various bands are mentioned. The most exhilarating moments are simply when he plays snatches of songs, and the show coasts between the bursts of energy provided by these musical stings. It’s hard to escape the feeling that both audience and performer would probably rather be at a Britpop karaoke night.

The comedic devices that Burrows employs are inoffensive but often shaky. An improv game where he tries to divine an audience member’s personality through their favourite band leads to nothing of worth, and a baffling amount of time is spent trying to litigate which bands Are and Are Not Britpop; a categorisation exercise that will be completely obvious to anyone who’s even a dilettante in the scene. 

I’m personally not sure that I buy into his great man theory of Britpop, but even if I did, I don’t think locating the holy triumvirate as Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker and Liam Gallagher is the kind of insight we should be looking to journalists for. The inclusion of Liam rather than Noel, by the way, is just so Burrows can throw up some of Liam’s tweets on the projector. Never a great sign when your biggest laughs come from reading out someone else’s material.

I’m not saying this show isn’t going to work for its intended audience; like I said up top, you already know whether you’re going to like it – it’s just a ride on rails through Britpop and comedically dull to boot.

Review date: 11 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Underbelly Bristo Square