Rob Deering: The One

For this, Rob Deering's eleventh Fringe, the Edinburgh veteran has brought his Stratocaster and a whole bunch of other instruments along with him to deliver an hour of musical comedy in the company of his one man band.

While The One is perfectly pleasant, it fails to break any new ground. Silly and inoffensive, its vaguely-articulated premise is simply to play "all the music." Learned pastiches of classic rock—"putting the cock back into rock," apparently—singer-songwriter stuff and the 90s "Manchester beat" follow, with Deering showing himself to be entirely proficient at using a loop pedal and making jokes rhyme. 

The show is a step up from many comedians with guitars (he's also got a piano and more than one type of drum, don't you know?); its charm lies in Deering's commentary and the way he opens up the music making process to the audience. Laughing at the act of creating music, rather than the music itself—because keeping to a rhyme scheme, however many words you know, is somewhat limiting—serves to highlight the pomp and posturing of much commercial rock and pop music. You can't help thinking, though, that Deering could have found some more original targets: he is hardly the first person to suggest that music can often be taken far too seriously. 

Nonetheless, The One is polished but not to the point of being sterile. Deering manages to interact with the audience without embarrassing anyone too much, and the songs don't stick in your head until you wish you'd never seen the show at all; for which, if nothing else, it seems reasonable to be grateful.