Set aside rising rents, shit flats, mold-flecked bedrooms and 10-a-bed living, now even public space in the city is gone. Your life as a young urbanite might be able to accommodate the cramped houses and living situations of a flat-share world but now your parks and streets are becoming privately owned, marketed and parcelled up, bought and sold left and right and the things that once belonged to all belong to the few. The Great White Males, dragged up as capitalist overlords, provide the soundtrack to the part and parcelling of the city itself like a British Patrick Bateman loving a bit of Huey Lewis before chopping that guy into soggy pieces.

Cuncrete is powered by anger, proper anger that’s punk enough to need gaffa tape markers on its fretboard for each song. An impotent anger shared by any of us who labour under the misapprehension that stability or success has anything to do with labour or perseverance. Why not embrace the capitalist, why not abandon the left in favour of what we know is right (-wing)? Place your bets on the lowest point of Maslow’s pyramid, the base requirement for shelter, and withhold until rich. Celebrate with a raucous speech on the last day of sanity and ride till the concrete mixer end. Rely on money to offset your sense that people can’t live like that. (LC)

Cuncrete ran at Summerhall until August 26th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/cuncrete

Rachael Clerke - http://www.rachaelclerke.com/?section=news

The Great White Males - http://greatwhitemal.es

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs - http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

Will Privatisation of UK Cities Rip Out Their Hearts? - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/feb/20/privatisation-public-spaces-rip-out-heart-britains-cities

American Psycho: Do You Like Huey Lewis and the News? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzN3qO-qc8U

Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) - http://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/programme/space-probe-alpha