David Shrigley (b. 1968) is an artist whose work has become broadly popular via a wide range of formats. At first glance, his stark pen-on-paper drawings seem akin to humorous newspaper cartoons – and, indeed, he’s contributed to The Guardian for years – but there's another layer to his work, something odder, slyer, psychologically attuned to the relationship between the subconscious and the ruthlessness of the human condition.

As well as a long series of books and multiple exhibitions all around the world, including forthcoming ones this year in Shanghai, Stockholm and on the Greek island of Hydra, Shrigley has a strong track record of working with musicians. He has directed videos (Blur, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), designed cover art (Deerhoof, Malcolm Middleton, etc) and taken part in music (Worried Noodles, Music and Words, etc). He also created a strikingly bizarre mascot for Partick Thistle football club in 2015 and had his “thumbs up” sculpture Really Good on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth until earlier this year.

Based in Glasgow for almost three decades, Shrigley moved to Brighton three years ago and is this year’s Guest Director of the Brighton Festival. His new book Fully Coherent Plan is published on 3 May 2018.

THOMAS H GREEN: What is your relationship with Brighton?

DAVID SHRIGLEY: I moved here in 2015. The festival’s been a really great thing to become embedded in the arts scene, a really nice social thing in practical terms of being an artist. My studio’s based here so I stay put in the mornings, unlike a lot of unfortunate people who have to go to London. I’ve enjoyed the Festival ever since coming here. It’s nice to have an obligation to see almost everything. Some years you end up wishing you’d been to things but never quite getting round to it, or they sold out.

How has your involvement been?

I think if I hadn’t chosen to make the performance I’m making [“alt-rock/pop pantomime" Problem In Brighton] it’d probably be pretty easy but actually making a new piece where I’m out of my depth, having a hand in directing music, that’s quite exciting, something I really wanted to do. If I didn’t do it now I wouldn’t get round to it. Everything’s a bit fraught. We start rehearsing in a week [this interview took place in mid-April] so the actors are living in my basement, in my studio.

Why are they in there?

Because otherwise we’d have to pay for them to stay in a hotel. We’re trying to spend the budget wisely so everyone gets paid.

It’s a musical with a mosh-pit, right?

Yes, I suppose it’s really up to the audience whether a mosh-pit is involved.

Presumably some of the music is designed to that purpose?

It’s a bit moshy, yeah, so the fact it’s a standing gig lends itself to a bit of movement. We’ll see. We’ve got that in mind.

Which events at the festival have you particular emotional investment in?

I guess, like most people, I’ve read the brochure and press release. You have to see a few things before you find that one thing that’s an absolute gem, but you never really know what that’s going to be until you’ve seen everything. Last year we went to see ten things, probably none of which we had any prior knowledge of. Swan Lake at the Dome was the thing I really enjoyed last year [Irish dance/theatre company Teac Damsa’s Swan Lake/Loch na hEala]. I really wouldn’t have anticipated liking that. You’d think a modern interpretation of Swan Lake set in urban Dublin, gritty realism meets a ballet… no. But it was fantastic. You have to make the effort.

How did you persuade singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton to perform at the festival? I thought he’d given up doing shows with his acoustic guitar...

[Laughing wryly] I guess he feels he owes me. We’ve become good friends over the years and he knows I’m a big fan of what he does. I think he’s making a special exception for me. In general, with his music he’s restless creatively, always wanting to do something different. There’s the [experimental] Human Don’t Be Angry stuff, the collaboration we did [Music and Words], then there’s Arab Strap as well with Aidan Moffat. He just doesn’t want to have to do the same thing again and again in order to make money, because you’ve got to still love it. If you don’t, it makes it difficult to do it. I understand the predicament he’s in, but I do love his acoustic stuff. I love that performance, just him and his guitar.

Which of your works are you most often asked about by journalists and humans in general?

It varies. I used to get asked a lot about the Fourth Plinth but that’s over now so that conversation is complete. This year I get asked about the Life Model II piece (Shrigely and Life Model II, pictured right). Because it’s a giant female I get asked about gender politics. So I should really try and figure out what my spiel is right now before I embark on the dialogue. Suffice to say I wasn’t thinking about that. It wasn’t a statement about the representation of gender but a statement about drawing and the representation of things rather than people. You hope that nothing too contentious raises its head. The discussions will be interesting and inform the work and your opinion of it. It’s a work in progress. People are asking me a lot about A Problem in Brighton but I don’t know what to tell them because we haven’t finished it yet. That’s a problem for the marketing department. As soon as I’ve got some material, I’ll put it on Instagram. We’ve got to sell tickets. It’s hard to sell tickets for things where you don’t really know what they’re about!

There’s a lot of really juicy music at the Brighton Festival this year, but if you could curate an epic Glastonbury-style green field affair, with money no object, who would be on?

I wouldn’t go to a green field festival. I hate festivals. I’m a bit of a germophobe. I don’t like chemical toilets and I need to wash my hands under running water. I’m a bit of an armchair traveller. I spent my entire childhood on camping holidays and by the time I’d got to 16 I was completely done with holidaying under canvas. That’s another thing I don’t like, the trek to the toilet block in the middle of the night. I gave Brighton Festival a list of things I wanted. I really didn’t expect them to get it all together. Deerhoof is quite a disparate group and Ezra Furman is from the States as well. There was a plan to get Mogwai to play at the Dome but they were busy. Certain acts work at festivals but perhaps don’t work so well at one-off gigs. I always think Sleaford Mods are a really good festival band because somehow their presentation of sound seems to work wherever they play because it’s so sparse and abrasive. In a dream scenario I’d quite like to see Slayer. They’re one band I’ve never seen in my life, although I’m not a particular speed metal aficionado.

I Google Imaged your name and your drawing Drunk Again (pictured left) comes up top – what does that say about anything?

I’ve pondered Google Image many times. I’ve no idea. I certainly don’t feel it’s a seminal image in my oeuvre, put it that way. The thing that annoys me most about Google Image is it turns up pictures you haven’t done that are attributed to you and there’s no way of getting rid of them.

Do you have a favourite colour?

I think it’s probably a very vivid rose pink. It’s the colour that I seem to use a lot when I’m making paintings, a very vivid magenta. There’s a colour you can get called perfect pink that I think probably isn’t very archivally sound, meaning it will fade over time, but, yeah, I’d go for perfect pink.

Where is the oddest place art has taken you?

Aspen, Colorado is a pretty weird place. It’s a small town in the mountains where rich people go skiing. It has a population of 8,000 yet they have an art museum there. It’s like St Moritz in Switzerland which is another place on the art trail. The reason why you end up going there is because rich people live there, so you’re there to hawk your wares to the people who are responsible for the terrible economic situation we’re in.

How do you find having to describe your art to people like me?

I guess it’s become normal. My first moment in the sun was more than 20 years ago now. When you are an artist, you’re constantly having conversations with people who don’t know anything about art. They might ask you, for example, to tell them what conceptual art is – and I think I should be able to tell them. If you’re a professional and involved in the art world for your entire adult life, as well as your education, you should be able to have those conversations and be comfortable. More recently I’ve started to spend a lot of time in East Devon. My wife has a little house there, so we go there and hang out in the village pub. They’ve cottoned on to the fact I’m a well-known artist, looked me up on the internet and say, “That’s rubbish! What’s that all about?” So you have these conversations with people. You can’t insulate yourself from them. Ultimately it’s valuable to talk about the work: the context is half the work.

• Find out more about Brighton Festival 2018

Overleaf: David Shrigley introducing Brighton Festival 2018

Seth Kriebel, 45, is a performer, much of whose work involves audience participation. He is bringing the show A House Repeated to the Brighton Festival 2018 between 6^th and 11^th May. Of American origin, born and raised near Philadelphia, Kriebel moved to the UK in 2001 and, over the last few years, has achieved increasing profile and success with shows such as Beowulf, The Unbuilt Room and We This Way.

THOMAS H GREEN: Was your background in the States arts-orientated?

SETH KRIEBEL: This is always difficult to try and contextualise for a British audience. Where I’m from is roughly equivalent to Lancashire, in that it’s full of straight-talking working people, so mine wasn’t a particularly arts and culture household, but it wasn’t anti that either. The arts just didn’t figure that much.

What pushed you in the direction your career went?

I should clarify that I don’t in any way consider myself to be an actor. Actors tend to pretend to be other people. They play a character whereas the first thing my co-performer, Zoe Bouras, and I do when we walk on stage is announce, “Hello, I’m Seth, hello, I’m Zoe” so we’re performing but we’re not acting. This particular show came out of the fact I liked games when I was a teenager in the early Eighties. I liked computer games before the era of graphics so it was all text. All of the action and environments happened in your imagination. It was very much like reading a book, but it was interactive and the consequences of your decisions would unfold. The show I’m bringing to the Brighton Festival is very directly an attempt to capture that experience live.

When you were in the States, were you also involved in performative arts?

Not so much. My training was actually in film, so I was in film and television. Then I met my wife, moved over to Brighton with her job, phased out the film and TV and moved into the arts. For nine years I ran a company, Rules and Regs, which produced residencies for artists, so they could develop and try new things. It tended to be towards the performance side, whether visual art or a painter doing whacky experimental stuff. That kind of crossed me into doing my own stuff.

What are your thoughts on Brighton?

I love it, a great place to live. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the UK. There’s always lots of energy and lots of stuff going on. It doesn’t feel huge and overwhelming like London can, but it’s close enough to London so you can access all the world-class things London has. Locally we have loads of amazing things too, but it’s still a place you can walk across in about an hour, and you’re always bumping into people you know so it has a neighbourly feel, with the energy of a city.

How many nights a week do you hit the town, then?

Zero, because I have a child.

A baby?

Not any more, she’s actually shockingly old now. When I look at her I go “[SHRIEKS]” and say, “When did you grow up?” But I’m, just sort of emerging from that younger child cocoon.

What was your favourite vintage video game?

I knew you were going to ask that but I don’t have one because I always played these games at my friend’s house. I didn’t have a computer, so I don’t remember the names of these different games. I just remember that feeling of looking at live glowing green text on a black background and how that could evoke such an amazing world to explore.

There were also books where you could choose your own story, weren’t there?

Yes, I had loads of Choose Your Own Adventure books which I loved dearly. They gave you a slightly different sense of interaction. They gave you a choice of A, B and C, whereas in the games you could type in anything and only some would get a response in terms of advancing the narrative. It was really up to you to figure out what you were going to do. I must warn you against using the term Choose Your Own Adventure too freely. A few years ago a theatre used that phrase to promote a different show I was doing and got rapped over the knuckles by the American company who own the copyright. It’s a trademarked phrase.

If you could work with anyone on the planet and money was no object, who would it be?

One of the central ideas behind the company Rules and Regs was imposing restrictions on all artists and then finding creativity in working your way around those restrictions. Restrictions breed creativity. Necessity is the mother of invention. So in my own practice I’m very much a cut-my-coat-according-to-my-cloth kind of guy. Having said that, Brian Eno, a previous Guest Director of the Brighton Festival, is very interesting in that he was one of the architects of Oblique Strategies which is a restriction system where you pick a card and then let that influence your artistic process, so he’d be quite fun to try something with.

You say you’re not an actor but your performance bears relation to stand-up, right?

Yeah, it’s not dissimilar to that. There isn’t a culture of storytelling outside of that for children. So I try to avoid using the word “storyteller” which, in a way, is what a stand-up comedian is, except all their stories are skewed for laughs. When we view something live that’s not comedy it tends to go into this narrative tradition – “I’m going to pretend to be a soldier” or whatever – so somewhere in that cultural gap I tend to sit, storytelling not for children. Like any story it depends very much on the audience. I’ve formalised that. Instead of just tailoring my delivery I actually ask the audience, “Ok what do you want to do now?”

The word storytelling also has connotations of hippies at festivals…

This is why I avoid that word, because it either conjurs a nice guy who’s going to really entertain a six-year-old, or kind of “Hey, man, let’s all sit cross-legged in a circle and just work things out”. Cool if that’s what you’re into but this is something completely different.

So what is it?

A House Repeated is one of those things that makes perfect sense when you’re there. It’s super-easy to understand, but whenever I do any press or write publicity copy it’s difficult to communicate quickly. Without trying to be pithy, here’s how it works. Zoe and I are standing on a bare stage between two banks of audience, so the audience is seated traverse, one half of the audience is facing the other half, and we’re in the middle. After the intro and all that, I turn to my half and I describe a place: “Imagine you’re standing outside. In front of you is a building.” That kind of thing. Then I give some options about where they might go and ask them what they’d like to do: “You can go through the door; you can go upstairs?” Go upstairs. Turn to another another member of the audience: “In that room you’ll find this.” Maybe there’s a bottle on the table, what do they want to do? They can interact. Zoe’s audience are also giving her instructions as to how to explore this imaginary environment. Now, as they navigate their way through, maybe a narrative or an implied narrative starts to unfold. Two different audiences are each controlling a different explorer, an avatar, and might see what the relationship is between them. That kind of thing. It’s hard to get that down in less than 50 words for a brochure.

What was the last thing you saw at the theatre?

Last night when I was in a show! Actually, it’s been a very busy beginning of the year where I’ve been performing a lot myself so the last thing I saw was A Christmas Carol at The Spire in Brighton, a church converted into an arts centre. My family were over from the States so we all went and it was a really enjoyable seasonal thing to do.

•  Find out more about Brighton Festival 2018

The third album from Thomas White under his Fiction Aisle moniker is a match for its delicious, under-heard predecessors. White remains best known for his output with The Electric Soft Parade and Brakes but the prolific Fiction Aisle (three albums since 2016) deserve to gain wider purchase. This time round the mood is more tentatively upbeat than previously, and White’s Pink Floyd-ish tendencies are on the back burner, but, at its core, cosmic easy listening is still the game.

The Fiction Aisle aspire to John Barry’s cinematic orchestrated scope, but tinted with hints of Morrissey’s vocal tics, and a broader electronic palette scoping about underneath. “Memory” even has a touch of late Nineties/early Millennial chill-out about it. However, it’s White’s characterful lyrical pith that sets The Fiction Aisle apart, giving his catchy songwriting extra reach and heft.

The Fiction Aisle prove to be mining original, thoughtful and often lovely territory

Previous outings have broached depression in an occasionally desperate or hedonistic manner but “Ten Years” hints at a newfound peace, or at least looking the issue in the eye (“It’s up to me to find any positivity – do I have the strength?”), while indie-ish opener “Gone Today”, despite its summery vibes, may be about existing in the moment rather than letting the past and future nag at the mind.

Another stand-out track is “Sweetness & Light”, a very straightforward, unembarrassed modern love song that’s also contagious. As the album goes on, White relaxes into it, spreading out, letting the sonic stylings grow ever more blissed, notably on the multi-tracked vocals of “Black River”, which bring to mind sunshine in 1970s LA, and the lusciousness of “Some Things Never Die”, until he eventually ends up drifting off on the final ten-minute “Will I Get Where I’m Going Before I’m Ready?”, with its extended instrumental passages heading into balminess.

Jupiter, Florida is as sunny as its title suggests, but cut through with a realist’s lyrical perspective, albeit a realist with a tendency to dream. Once again, The Fiction Aisle prove to be mining original, thoughtful and often lovely territory with a class that’s a cut above the usual.

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the video for "Gone Today" by The Fiction Aisle

In 1725 a collection of some 50 songs was published by one William Thomson. You might not know his name, or even the names of the songs, but given the first bar of most I’m betting you could hum them from beginning to end. The work? Orpheus Caledonius – the first published collection of Scottish folk melodies and lyrics.

Ten years ago Brighton band 12 Stone Toddler burst onto the scene with two off-the-wall albums of madly inventive pop-rock. They then vamoosed back out of existence. Now they’re back, preparing a third album for the Freshly Squeezed label, and playing a packed home town gig. The second song they do is a new one, “Piranha” and it shows they’re no nearer normal. It’s a jagged, shouty thing with a catchy chorus about there being piranhas in the water, half football chant, half King Crimson. It’s edgy, deliberately bizarre, and oddly approachable, fun by way of musical obtuseness, just like the band who wrote it.

There have been changes. While wry, pork-pie-hatted frontman Chris Otero and ponytailed keyboard whizz Ben Jones remain from their last incarnation, female guitarist Helen Durden (pictured below) is a new addition, as is drummer Robin O’Keeffe. Clad in a red, sparkly sequinned top, Durden maintains a deadpan face until near the end of the gig, even when playing intricate solos, then she finally splits into a grin, recognizing friends in the crowd. Behind the band is a large screen initially showing their logo, which has an eyeball peering from the "O" of "STONE", then a series of suitably surreal film clips throughout the performance. It’s the only adornment and, after a late start, due to soundcheck faffing with the keyboards, they slam straight into “Come Back”, the punchy opener from their 2007 debut album Does It Scare You?

One of the main ingredients of 12 Stone Toddler’s sound is 1970s prog-rock. Please don’t run off screaming, I dislike prog as much as the next ELP-loathing post-punker, but this band take the style’s perverse stop-start dynamics and sudden time signature flips, and mash them into their own, unique, tuneful gumbo of burlesque fairground sounds, Balkan tints, psychedelia, reggae and so on. They are, in fact, more like an experimental version of Madness than they are prime-time Yes. That said, they stack the first half of their set with a more than necessary share of musically awkward material, as well as a run of new songs which means it takes longer than it should to build a mutual groove with the audience.

By the time they do settle, the partisan local crowd is jigging and welcome a catchy selection of tunes that includes a persuasive dub affair, whose title I didn't catch, and the contagious brilliance of “Candles on the Cake”, a joyfully doomed celebration of the descent into old age (“Some people say, we're not getting older, we're just getting better”), before ending with the piano-led stomper “The Ballad of Al Coholic”, which has a celebratory Tankus the Henge-ish air of Glastonbury’s far flung fields about it. By this point Otero is chatting happily with the crowd and indicates that his band are not going to go off properly before an encore. Instead Durden disappears briefly behind the speaker stack, then she returns equally promptly and they dive into their best-known single, “The Rabbit”, a galloping jazz-jive of theatrical rock’n’roll that causes mass outbreaks of enthusiastic leaping about.

12 Stone Toddler’s return is a welcome reminder that predictability is not an essential quality in guitar bands, and that experimentalism can still be pop. They have some work to do before their live show thoroughly welcomes non-fans, but its second half showed they’re well on the way.

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: Watch the video for "Candles on the Cake" by 12 Stone Toddler

Dream palace, cesspit and church; celebrated, mopped (by Marlene Dietrich, no less) and fucked: Brighton’s Theatre Royal has seen a whole lot of history, of both the splendid and the seedy variety. Now it has found a magnificent if unlikely mouthpiece in the form of post-modern cabaret star Meow Meow.

Jeremy Hardy is very happy to mock his audience and they love it. One of the biggest laughs of the night is when a punchline refers to us as a collection of “middle class white people”. Being Brighton, he goes further, explaining how tolerant the city is but that everyone’s frustrated as they have no-one to tolerate. Any immigrants, he explains, take one look and head down to Devon “where they have cream teas”. His “demographic”, as he refers to them, are certainly an older crowd, mostly retirement age, probably Radio 4 listeners who’ve heard him on endless quiz shows, but the comedian is full of political pith and vinegar that would appeal to anyone sick of this country’s ongoing political decline.

It’s a show of two parts (with a 20 minute interval), each around half an hour long, and it truly flies by. He’s not a comic who, as far as it’s possible to tell, has a tightly plotted set that comes to a heady peak at its close. He’s much more of a rambler, interspersing thoughts on a wide variety of subjects, from Jeremy Corbyn to English Sunday lunches in the 1970s, with punchy surreal asides, and oddball flights of fancy. Clad in a blue denim shirt and grey-black jeans, with a small greying quiff, he’s a lean and diminutive presence, but has a wry way about him that’s contagious.

He claims, near the start, that he no longer believes politics can be influenced by a comedian, so he’s going to leave that alone, then proceeds not to for nearly two hours. Whether he’s assessing Jeremy Hunt or UKIP’s Paul Nuttall, his thoughts chime with everyone here, it seems, and, of course, he can’t leave Theresa May alone, relentlessly referring to her miserable presence and general inhumanity. I enjoyed the line where he talks about people being bullish about “our country” with regard to asylum seekers when, in fact, it’s all "owned by dukes, pension funds, the Russian mafia and the church”.

It’s not all politics. He talks a lot of his recently deceased parents, their lives and values, in a way that's both touching and playful. Although, in its way, that does eventually turn out to be socio-political too. They become emblems for the arrival of a more caring society at the end of the Second World War. However, he's also a snappy performer of silly routines and voices. At one point he combines the talents of Nicola Sturgeon with those of the pop singer Kelis for a bizarrely brilliant turn, and later on, his bananas send-up of television hospital drama is a highlight of the evening.

For me, another moment that absolutely clicked early on was a ruthless assessment of the modern middle-aged person’s obsession with publicizing their physical exercise regimen on social media. “If you want to go for a run, just go for a run, you don’t have to tell me about it,” he says, exasperatedly. “I can’t stand the camaraderie around fitness.” From that point this expert raconteur had another listener wrapped around his finger, heading into a night whose chattiness and wit masked a lancet-sharp intelligence with precision topical bite.

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Overleaf: Clip of Jeremy Hardy being funny at the Whitby Festival last year