Review: Fascinating Aida, Ludlow Festival

Formed by Dillie Keane in 1983, and billed as "a thinking man's version of Bananarama", they are contemporary practitioners of that great British tradition of witty and yet edgy comic songs which stretches back through Flanders & Swann and Noel Coward to W S Gilbert in the 19th century.

Dillie, Adele Anderson and Liza Pulman are superb writers and great cabaret performers.

Their targets are wide ranging – from companies using nifty taxation systems to avoid paying their dues, adherents of pick and mix spirituality, rappers satirised by P Dillie and how the recent vogue for badly written erotic fiction has, in their words, "set the women's movement back 100 years".

In addition to some of their classics including that side splitting anthem for all of us who have been messed about by budget airlines, Cheap Flights, which has had more than four million views on You Tube – "it has gone fungal", as Dillie told us – they performed new material some of which was surprising lyrical and thoughtful. Every lyric was beautifully enunciated so that every joke and nuance could be appreciated.

The audience loved every minute of the show and Fascinating Aida in turn seemed to love Ludlow and their audience. This was a great show which closed the Ludlow Arts Festival programme in the Big Top Theatre on a resounding high.

By Tom Ferris