Cuncrete

Grey buildings, grey suits, grey skin: performer Rachael Clerke’s drag punk cabaret attacks the grey men—the capitalists and opportunists—who built the concrete cities we live in. Dressed in deliberately bad drag (moustaches and tufts of chest hair drawn on with felt tip) Clerke and her band belt their way through songs about brutalist utopias. Does that sound horrendous? Well, it’s not. It’s silly and over the top and utterly hilarious. 

Clerke and her band, The Great White Males, capture all the bluster and swagger of sad alpha males. Their faces as they play their instruments brashly and loudly are deadly serious. The personae are absolutely convinced of their own coolness and their own importance. 

There’s a bit of Alan Partridge here, a bit of Made In Chelsea. And Clerke is such a naturally comic performer that every dart of her eyes takes the piss. 

Just the idea of equating the unsurpassable smugness of property developers with the masculine brashness of a shitty punk band is inspired. Clerke sees the ridiculousness of phallic buildings, of the desperate desire to be rich and to build more of them, and she exposes it all with abrasive, satirical humour. It’s brilliantly silly.