For the 2013 Edinburgh Festival season The Horne Section performs in the purple belly of the Udderbelly cow. This is where the name “The Horne Section Live in a Cow” comes from.
The Horne Section is led by Alex Horne but the whole band is impressive. We got to see just how good they are during the second guest act for our show. On Thursday the 22nd, the second guest star was a hungover Greg Davies asked the band to improvise a number of backing tracks for his routine and they did amazingly well.
The first guest act was singer Le Gateau Chocolat. He/she is also a performer I imagine who’s had a good Festival. It’s easy to see Channel 4 getting in touch.
I enjoyed the opening very much. The Horne Section proceeds into the Udderbelly from down the same stairs some of the audience took. Alex Horne has a knack for doing interesting things and in this case he’s stuck a GoPro camera on a trombone. Not only that; the camera swivels. This means that we get to see the funny faces Horne pulls until he’s ready to turn the camera on to the audience instead.
The Horne Section is mainly a musical gig with comedy interwoven in. This is a great mixture but I would have preferred more but shorter tunes. This would have offered more variety and changed the tempo slightly. I’m not sure what should have been trimmed and perhaps I’m just asking for a longer show.
We had some cracking audience interaction in our show. There’s one routine in which members of the audience help out each member of the Horne Section. “She’s not a plant!” Alex Horne says, impressed at the performance given by the member of the audience who volunteered to help with his role in the singing. I believe she might have been a real person – after all, what percentage of festival audiences are made up of other performers? As we queued to get out of the Udderbelly and people debated the show I overheard two different couples conclude she was probably a plant.
Overall I think The Horne Section Live in a Cow is for music lovers and comedy fans looking for a change in pace to the stand-up scene. I wish we’d gone to see them mid-way through our festival binge rather than towards the end.