Column

The Leech

Sucking the blood of popular entertainment

14 Feb 2007

All you need is love. Love and the trademark rights to your music. In a deal that will have at least one soon-to-be divorcee hopping for joy, computer giant Apple and The Beatles reconciled their long-running dispute over the Apple name, with the best…

Five things

Websites where you can get something for nothing

14 Feb 2007

Whoever said you can’t get something for nothing was clearly lying. Here are the websites that should be in every cheapskate’s favourites.

Love!/Hate!

Love!>>Lost

14 Feb 2007

Ignore the criticisms. Lost, which returns to UK screens this month, is the best soap opera on television, the kind that keeps you awake wondering what a polar bear is doing on a desert island. It has more layers than a deep-fried Mars Bar, and always…

Grapevine - showbiz news

Grapevine

13 Feb 2007

Expect many cries of ‘there’s been a murder’ with news that more episodes are to be filmed of ITV ScotCop dramas Taggart and Rebus. Four new 90-minute mysteries of the former start filming in April and further adventures for Ian Rankin’s world-weary…

Dispatch - Roddy Woomble

The Dispatch

12 Feb 2007

Celtic Connections passed by in all its hazy, folky glory. I had a great time during the festival, and managed to see a few concerts I’d been looking forward to: John Martyn performing Solid Air, and Dick Gaughan performing his 1981 folk masterpiece…

Leech

Sucking the blood of popular entertainment

30 Jan 2007

It’s Hollywood awards season, meaning a succession of worthy films and actors acting seriously and actorly. Pictures like Babel, Bobby, Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond and Letters From Iwo Jima represent a grim condemnation of war and political…

Leech - sucking the blood of popular entertainment

Leech

16 Jan 2007

So, farewell then, Magnus Magnusson. You started, you finished and somewhere inbetween you delivered the finest reading of Flaubert this literary Leo Sayer ever heard. ‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to…

Dispatch - Vic Galloway

The Dispatch

15 Jan 2007

In my first column of 2007, it seems only right to join the tipsters of the world and look forward to the remaining 11 and a half months with a selection of ‘ones to watch’. The Scottish music scene is in extremely good health, and as usual, away from…

Leech

The Leech

3 Jan 2007

What do George W Bush, Adolf Hitler, the Leech and you have in common? No, not that. Misshapen or mono-genitalia is a surprisingly widespread condition and there’s absolutely no evidence linking testicular envy to genocidal impulses. Not yet anyway.

Dispatch - Roddy Woomble

The Dispatch

20 Dec 2006

Generally I have no idea what’s going on around me, in terms of new books, film and albums. There was a time, when I was 19 or 20 when I knew what record was coming out on any number of record labels, what was going to be great, the next new thing etc.

Leech

Sucking the blood of popular entertainment

11 Dec 2006

The Leech was in London’s BBC Television Centre when news of Celtic legend Henrik Larsson’s loan to Manchester United broke. Spectacle-wise, the SPL has really suffered since the twinkle-toed Swede left and Larsson has endured the ignominy of signing…

Dispatch - Roddy Woomble

The Dispatch

11 Dec 2006

It’s a wonder this Dispatch made it at all; I thought I’d missed it. Not a very rock star confession I know, worrying about missing your column deadline, but there you go. I’ve been away on tour with Idlewild. Not a long tour - our days of those are…

Leech

Sucking the blood of popular entertainment

28 Nov 2006

Skulking in an underground bunker, monitoring Chinese satellites and decoding Tom and Katie’s wedding vows in all known languages and intergalactic dialects for clandestine instructions to destroy Hollywood, the Leech has little time for conspiracy…

Stage Whispers - theatre news and views

Stage Whispers

27 Nov 2006

For those of you in despair at the lack of theatre other than pantos and Christmas shows at this time of the year, Whispers has glad tidings. If you look long and hard enough, you’ll find that other kinds of theatre are still out there, if largely…

Dispatch - Vic Galloway

The Dispatch

27 Nov 2006

It’s time once again to approach our impending festive doom! Yes, Christmas is upon us and has been so since the Hallowe’en decorations came down. What does this mean for the world of music? A morass of greatest hits compilations, that’s what. Do we…

Grapevine - showbiz gossip

Grapevine

21 Nov 2006

Christopher Walken has played some pretty crazy guys in his time but he’s in for the challenge of his career in The Dirt. In the film based on the book about Motley Crue, Walken will make a cameo as Ozzy Osbourne while, equally as intriguing, Val Kilmer…

Get serious about going green

Choose life

13 Nov 2006

We need to come out of the slumber of inertia that delays action to reduce carbon emission and climate change gases. We are all now seemingly conversant in the language of ‘carbon footprints,’ ‘tipping points’ and ‘sustainable development’.

Leech - sucking the blood of popular entertainment

Leech

13 Nov 2006

Christmas madness started early this year, as retailers across the globe braced themselves for a long, lean winter without a Harry Potter book to flog. The impact of this has already hit the Leech household, with the annual begging letter to Santa to…

Casino Royale - comment

Spybound

13 Nov 2006

‘How many actors have played James Bond on screen?’ goes the old chestnut of a pub quiz question. Barry Nelson was first to play him, on US TV in 1954, and Bob Holness played him in a radio adaptation two years later. Then Connery, Moore, Lazenby…

Dispatch - Roddy Woomble

Keeping fit has never seemed so Orwellian but Rodd

11 Nov 2006

The Dispatch It feels like we’ve going through some sort of food revolution at the moment, or maybe it’s just because I’ve started to notice it a bit more now that I’ve started taking an interest in growing vegetables and reading books about soil…

Grapevine

Plucking fruits from the cultural bush

30 Oct 2006

A busy boy is old Brad Pitt these days. Among his many ongoing projects are a movie about Richard Nixon entitled Dirty Tricks in which he is joined by Sharon Stone, Jim Broadben t and Gwyneth Paltrow while Mr Jolie is also set to star in a movie version…

Leech

Sucking the blood of popular entertainment

30 Oct 2006

It’s been said of Glasgow recently, that ‘when the sun goes down, the feral boys come out’. And the Leech, for one, welcomes our new nocturnal rodent overlords. Readership of this column among Non-Educated Delinquents has ensured fewer List employees…

Stage Whispers

30 Oct 2006

Over the last few weeks, Whispers has detected a recurrent theme to many of the conversations that he's had in the various bars and foyers of the Scottish theatre. The Scottish Arts Council's policy of subsidising "artist based" work seems to be the…

Dispatch

The Dispatch

26 Oct 2006

Apparently it’s a television-commissioner’s nightmare fitting music programmes into a busy schedule, provoking the age-old quandary of whether music actually works on the box or not. Is it just an excuse for twitchy, channel hoppers to search out…

Dispatch

The Dispatch

17 Oct 2006

There has always been manufactured pop. As soon as the business-types worked out that they could market music at all, that art form became fair game for exploitation by those who cared little for art. But in the past a high president in songwriting was…