Thirty years of Fascination

Sarah-Louise Young is a Fascinating Aïda superfan. “Alongside Tom Lehrer and Victoria Wood,” she tells me from across the table, the legendary cabaret trio “were the reason I got into cabaret.” But it's not simple fandom that has the effervescent blonde singer in such ebullient spirits this afternoon – more likely, it's the fact that she was recently asked to replace Liza Pullman as Fascinating Aïda's soprano. So while we wait for her new colleagues to join us in the quiet, wood-panelled environs of Teviot's Library Bar, Young talks with the lightly breathless excitement of someone who just joined their favourite band.

As we discuss the resurrection of cabaret as a standalone genre—Young is an experienced solo performer in her own right—the rest of Fascinating Aïda return from an early-afternoon shopping trip. “Hello, ladies!” Young cries, half-leaping up from her seat to greet founder Dillie Keane and her long-term writing partner Adele Anderson. The three chatter away with the easy humour of old friends, and it's difficult to believe that Young is only a recent addition to the lineup.

It is now 28 years since Keane founded the group, while Anderson joined less than a year later—“I carried her for nine months,” Keane quips—and barring two brief periods of retirement the group have hardly stopped moving since. 'Cheap Flights', a song applying their lyrical daggers ruthlessly to the budget airline industry, proved a viral hit on YouTube last year and spawned a new show of the same name, which debuted at the Gilded Balloon earlier this month.

The song's success is unsurprising, but it has found fans in unexpected corners. RyanAir had a link to the video on their website at one time, says Keane with some pride. “We are to RyanAir what the Book of Mormon musical was to Mormons,” adds Young.

But budget airlines are an easy target. Cheap Flights the show has its satirical eye on more serious offenders. Fascinating Aïda are on bruising form with their choice of opener, the acronymic anti-tax dodger tirade 'Companies Using Nifty Taxation Systems' (spell it out). “Our director chose it as our opening number,” says Keane, “and I nearly fell off my chair. But that's what you have directors for.”

The song is, she readily admits, something of a “fist in the face”, even from a group so notoriously sharp-tongued as they. But Anderson doesn't necessarily agree. “I think that we've taken our audience with us. We've pushed the envelope with each show, and so they're quite used to it.

“I don't know why people assume that older people don't like bad language.”

Moreover, Keane is an ardent believer in the sentiments behind the song. It is, she tells me, “rather unusually written... It's changed the pattern a bit, and I thought it needed to do that to get the audience used to the idea that this is about people who who are rapaciously robbing the country of taxes. And that's what they are – they're cunts.”

The point of the song is not gratuitous obscenity, she says, but rather to make people “aware of the irritation that the song is written in. Actually, it's not irritation – it's fury... These people are taking £50 billion out of the country and never paying a penny of tax. How, if you have something like £5 billion, can you be poorer if you pay 40% tax?”

Despite their creative toil and success over almost three decades, it hasn't always been an easy road for Fascinating Aïda. In 2007, the group sadly lost their pianist and musical director Russell Churney to cancer, aged just 42. It's a tragedy that still haunts them, and Keane chokes back tears. “I can't talk about it,” she says. “It broke my heart.”

Indeed, Churney's death almost spelled the end for the group. “I think if the 25th anniversary hadn't been coming up, we probably wouldn't have started writing again,” says Anderson. “But we've always said that we would celebrate that.”

For all that they have seen and done in 28 years on the road, both Keane and Anderson seem mildly surprised to find themselves credited as a key influence to the current generation of British cabaret performers. “It is slightly startling, isn't it?” says Keane. “I've always felt like we were just this little cul-de-sac called Fascinating Aïda and no-one ever took much notice of us.”

But Anderson seems quietly pleased with the idea. “I don't mind being an elder stateswoman,” she says with a satisfied smile.

“Less of the 'elder',” growls Keane. The two have a playful rapport formed over many years working together, a quick-witted internal dialogue that one suspects was buttressed by what Keane professes was a solitary period in which to be a cabaret performer.

“I'm overjoyed that there are so many cabaret performers now,” she says. “It really has been very lonely, because it's terribly depressing when people say 'oh, cabaret's dead, why do you do it?' I've been in the thick of it—we all have—ploughing a bit of a lonely furrow, but we have kept it alive.”

“That's what I'm most proud of,” says Keane, thoughtfully. “Head down, teeth clenched, into the wind and say 'Fuck off! Cabaret is not dead. We're doing it.”