Salty Brine on channelling joy through theatre: ‘The world is horrible and beautiful’
You can’t accuse cabaret artist Salty Brine of lacking ambition. His latest show is an improbable fusion of cult indie album, the writings of a Holocaust victim and his own adolescent musings. Brine chats to Jo Laidlaw about unexpected joy, confused Annie Lennox fans and the ‘madness’ that led to his trademark style
‘Yes, it is my real name,’ explains Salty Brine, who was so called after a character played by his grandfather in a 1950s kids’ TV show. It’s a fitting origin story for the writer/director/performer whose 2024 show These Are The Contents Of My Head, based around Annie Lennox’s album Diva, took the Fringe by storm. Like all his Living Record Collection body of work, Brine’s latest creation, How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show), is inspired by an album.
‘I’d been working in New York for many, many years, throwing things against the wall and seeing what stuck. Ten or 11 years ago, I started to play with albums. I remembered falling in love with whole albums and I felt that they were kind of disappearing with the digital world. I’m a storyteller and I could hear stories and albums mixed together, so I started playing with that.’
‘Playing’ doesn’t seem quite the right word as he recalls early years of creating a brand-new show every month to perform in a 30-seat space each Wednesday. ‘I truly didn’t understand what I was signing myself up for. And no one asked me for it! I did it to myself. I said, “this will be fun”. But I made a show and made a show and made a show. There was no time to think: first thought, best thought, put it up. Some were amazing. Some were good. Some were real bad. But it was a playwriting bootcamp and, after two years of churning them out, I came out strong. It was madness, but part of the fun was that people would come see me try.’
Madness or maybe even magic, this apprenticeship led to a trademark style that blends cabaret with theatre, densely layering music with story and finding new meaning in songs (it’s no surprise to find out Brine is a musical theatre obsessive). Importantly, his takes on songs are reinventions rather than mere covers, which led to some confusion in 2024. ‘We had a lot of people expecting an Annie Lennox tribute show. We don’t really have that in the United States; we didn’t realise it was a thing. But we won people over,’ he laughs.
How Strange It Is weaves together a cult 1998 album by Neutral Milk Hotel (In The Aeroplane Over The Sea) and Anne Frank’s The Diary Of A Young Girl (the album contains many references to that iconic book, some hidden, some obvious) alongside Brine’s own diaries. His take emphasises Frank’s humanity and the universality of her journal which, of course, is one of the reasons it has had such an impact across generations. ‘I did think, “oh, now I’m making a show about Anne Frank. This is a terrible idea because she’s utterly important; I can’t fuck this up, I have to honour her”. But what has emerged, very unexpectedly, is theatre of joy. We’re talking about Anne, her family, the boy she’s falling in love with. And you’re hearing my diary entries from the first time I fell in love and they are extremely embarrassing and very funny. That gives us this levity.’
After the slight audience confusion over his Annie Lennox show, Brine is careful to avoid a repeat with this new one. ‘The little dance I’m doing is not to say, “I’m like Anne Frank”; rather, “Anne Frank is like us”. Remember what it was like when you fell in love, how silly you got? Her too, and that can happen even in the most horrible circumstances. The show’s title is taken from a lyric on the album: “how strange it is to be anything at all”. How is it possible that we are here, how is any of this possible? Let’s take a moment to wonder. The world is horrible and beautiful; there’s no explaining it, but here we are. We are here.’
Salty Brine: How Strange It Is (The Neutral Milk Hotel Show), Summerhall, 6–30 August, 9.30pm; Main Picture: Alex Brenner.