His Royal Hipness, the dapper rapper, has been touring the UK's festival circuit, dazzling the good people of Port Eliot in Cornwall, the Arundel fringe, the Bath fringe, Battersea Arts Centre and the Edinburgh Festival where he was feted thus in the Glasgow Herald:

Sergio Mendes Brasil '66 is playing on the lounge bar stereo like it's cocktail hour in Heaven. It may be hip for squares, but it's the perfect pre-cursor to Bob Sinfield's solo recreation of one of comedy's great eccentrics. For those who ain't down on all that jazz, Lord Buckley was the creation of one Richard Buckley, who dressed in a pith helmet and had the manners of the gentrified English upper-crust, but who reinvented the classics in a jive-talking semantic head-rush that pre-dated rap by decades.

Pretty fly for a white guy, and something which Sinfield tackles with boundless aplomb in thisfantastical and devoted run-through some of the great man's finest works. From the story of Jesus, aka The Nazz and Vasco da Gama (The Gasser) and even Willy The Shake (Shakespeare)'s Julius Caesar, in which "Friends, Romans, countrymen" are reborn as Hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin' daddies, it's a whip-smart semantic stew in which Sinfield throws in a couple of latter-day props for good measure.

The extended re-telling of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, featuring Old Scroogey Scrooge shows exactly where Buckley's clever-clogs story-telling roots were, and turned into a performance-art routine that's stood the test of time. A classical gas to treasure.

© Neil Cooper, Glasgow Herald, All Rights Reserved

In 2008, His Lordship returned to Edinburgh before taking in the AbbeyFest at Merton Abbey Mills. For further info (including a radio interview), visit www.lordbuckley.com and click on Riffs.

Click here for an article about Lord Buckley from Arts & Leisure.
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