Warren Pegg

“When we first got together there were 15 of us,” says Tragic Roundabout clarinettist Pat Popov. “We went over to a busking competition in Ireland, near Cork. That was where it started from.

“There was a bloke in the crowd who was unconscious. I was saying, ‘If he wakes up, we’ll forget it in a week. I really hope he’s dead, we’ll remember that forever,” says Mark Steel of his last gig in Hove.

“That’s a really hard question,” says drummer Frank Byng when asked to describe Crackle’s sound. “We wanted to explore playing other instruments. It’s kind of a strange, slightly twisted world music. But I usually leave it to the critics to make those kind of comments.”

A few years ago, broken beat legend Quantic was DJing in a New York club and dropped a single by an obscure Louisiana act called the Hot 8 Brass Band into his set. As the New Orleans octet’s cover of Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing ended, the crowd erupted into a spontaneous round of applause.

“As a musician you hope maybe to be part of one great band in your lifetime,” Noel Gallagher once said. “Ian McLagan was in two. The jammy b******.”

“It’s more of the same really,” says magician Pete Firman. “Tricks, jokes and a couple of disgusting things. Is this the best way to sell a show?”

“I’ve had three years off bringing up my two kids,” says three-time Perrier-nominee Dan Antopolski, explaining his long absence from the Edinburgh Festival. “Now I’ve got lots of complaints to make about them and I need an audience to complain to. So I’m going back.”

In 1931, the German composer Richard Strauss formed a crea-tive partnership with a Jewish writer named Stephan Zweig. Two years later, the Nazis came to power and introduced a series of anti-Semitic laws. They soon began to pressurise Strauss into abandoning his Jewish collaborator. These events form the basis of Ronald Harwood's new play Collaboration, which will receive its world premiere at Chichester tonight.

"The individuals in this band are a blessing and a curse, because everybody has", Battles' Tyondai Braxton struggles to find the right words. "very profound voices.

"I'm 27 at the moment and that's the famous age for rock stars dying - Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison," says Tom Bell of his second solo show, The Age Of Rockstar Death. "That was the starting point, to imagine how I'd be remembered if I went the same way.