Issue 575

Reader Offer - Win tickets to a Knockengorroch Festival

9 May 2007

Knockengorroch, famous for its folk roots line-up and grass roots ambience, presents a double bill of festivals in 2007; The World Ceilidh from Fri 18-Sun 20 May, featuring Transglobal Underground with special guest Natacha Atlas, Mr Scruff…

Eat - Bijou

8 May 2007

The Meal In the previous issue of The List we announced this year’s Eating & Drinking Guide Awards. One of the places we looked at long and hard this time round when judging the hotly contested Newcomer of the Year category was Bijou, located on the…

Travel

Life & Style

8 May 2007

(Picture: © Anne Pinniger) ‘Tropic of Capricorn’. It’s just there, written clearly on a road sign in the middle of nowhere. Dirty yellow sand in the air, the track ahead glittering with fool’s gold as though it had been chucked away. The landscape…

South meets West

News

8 May 2007

A cunning fusion of Brazilian and British musical skills is being showcased at a series of gigs in Glasgow this July. The series of gigs, in association with TrocaBrahma beer, are the result of an exchange programme where UK artists travel to South…

Dance

8 May 2007

David Hughes Dance Company David Hughes knows a thing or two about pain. As one of the most interesting dancers of his generation, Hughes has performed with the UK’s finest companies, from Rambert to DV8. But with his 40th birthday on the horizon…

Travis

8 May 2007

New album The Boy With No Name is more of a grower than your other ones. Have you had time to go back, reflect on it and enjoy it? Fran Healy We’re beginning to get a bit of distance from it so you get an idea of what it’s about. Dougie Payne…

Hitlist - The best exhibitions

8 May 2007

Roderick Buchanan: Histrionics As part of the Blind Faith: Contemporary Art and Human Rights series of events at GoMA, Roderick Buchanan takes a personal view of the sectarian past and present in Glasgow, representing both sides of the abominable…

Interview - Keren Cytter

8 May 2007

Alexander Kennedy Can you tell us what you’ll be showing at the Collective and about the work’s subject matter? Keren Cytter I’m showing seven videos in one room called ‘The Dates Series’ and three videos in another room with wall text. The subject…

Roderick Buchanan: Histrionics

8 May 2007

FILM AND PHOTOGRAPHY. The new work by Glasgow-based artist Roderick Buchanan on show at GoMA forces the viewer to face the anti-Christian hatred that some Catholics and Protestants still revel in in Scotland. His work is a response to the sectarian…

Alex Pollard: Black Marks

8 May 2007

SCULPTURE AND WORK ON PAPER Major Tom’s a junkie, and John Wayne Gacy’s a serial killer - it’s no wonder that clowns get a bad rap these days, and that bozophobia is apparently running rife amongst the seemingly sanest of folk. But in Alex Pollard’s…

Fiona Jardine: Moltke’s Eye

8 May 2007

INSTALLATION Although Fiona Jardine claims to be influenced by everything from TS Eliot’s high literary Modernism to the pagan iconography of the Green Man (via Francis Rabelais, Brett Easton Ellis, Weiner Werkstatte, and Dagobert Peche among many…

Peter Liversidge

8 May 2007

‘It’s kind of like when you are a child, and you really want a certain toy, but can’t have it, so you make your own version instead,’ says London-based artist Peter Liversidge of his own homemade versions of everyday and perhaps not-so-everyday things…

Gavin and Stacey

8 May 2007

SITCOM With ITV and Channel 4 still flailing around from one comedy outrage to another and dishing out sitcom calamity after sitcom calamity, it’s BBC3 who can proudly wear the telly crown when it comes to making this digital nation laugh. And main…

Remote Control

8 May 2007

What on earth could be funny about a man who slaughtered millions of people and influenced many a nutter in the post-cyanide years? Quite a lot, according to Jacques Peretti in his very fine Hitler: The Comedy Years (Channel 4, Thu 10 May, 11.05pm, 4…

The Patriot

8 May 2007

NEW WORK In selecting Grae Cleugh’s The Patriot as the first production of his reign, the Tron Theatre’s new director Gregory Thompson clearly had the zeitgeist in his sights. Unfortunately, the only thing he has shot is his own foot. Cleugh has…

Home Hinderance

8 May 2007

NEW WORK In our current state of hyper reality the boundaries between the real and fiction have lost their clarity. We have an obsession with reality made fiction and problems differentiating between the two, issues addressed by David Leddy in his…

Sunshine On Leith

8 May 2007

MUSICAL The joyful, if slightly fanciful tone of the Evening News banner ‘Beckham Signs for Hibees’ combined with the more sobering ‘Posh Spice seen in Jenners’ that appear early on in Dundee Rep’s stunning Proclaimers musical by Stephen Greenhorn…

Leave To Remain

8 May 2007

NEW WORK Anyone who has experienced grief will be aware of its immense power as an emotion. This is often magnified by the fact that at least in Western society, it’s not a subject we’re encouraged to talk about. After losing his wife Susie Innes…

I of The Needle

8 May 2007

NEW WORK Foucault saw identity, who and what we think we are, as something fluid and changeable, a product of cultural circumstances. It’s a similar concept Adrian Osmond seeks to explore in his new one man play directed by Paddy Cunneen, for this…

Hansel and Gretel

8 May 2007

CHILDREN’S THEATRE The launch of the National Theatre for Scotland saw a series of ten events staged over a few days through the length and breadth of the country in February 2006, and left, no doubt, a lasting impression on many an audience. For all…

Carthage Must Be Destroyed

8 May 2007

NEW WORK It is incontestable that politicians aren’t held in high esteem these days, but what is often missed by those who criticise the political classes is that it might be the system itself that dehumanises our leaders, rather than their…

What I Heard About Iraq

8 May 2007

VERBATIM THEATRE On a brilliant and sunny July morning last year, I sat opposite Eliot Weinberger in a downtown café in Manhattan. A small, balding man, perhaps in his mid 50s, he spoke in that New York accent that reminds the outsider irresistibly…

Kindertotenlieder

8 May 2007

NEW WORK Literally translated as Songs on the Death of Children, the title of French performance artist Gisèle Vienne’s latest piece has a long artistic history. It first appeared as a collection of 425 poems by German poet Freidrich Rückert in 1834…

Once Upon a Dragon

8 May 2007

CHILDREN’S THEATRE For over a decade now, Grid Iron has produced some of the highest quality site specific theatre in Scotland. Yet, their new piece, an adaptation of Pauline Mol and Moniek Merkx’s Dutch play, represents the exploration of new…

The Bad Drive Well/Tongue Lie Tight

8 May 2007

NEW WORK Interesting idea: take two half-hour plays by young writer-directors who happily admit that they’re accustomed to ‘an above-average level of control’ over their own work. Give them a rehearsal room and a shared cast of two, and have them…

Hitlist - The best theatre & dance

8 May 2007

Sunshine on Leith Stephen Greenhorn’s immense, joyful and sometimes sad musical brings the songs of The Proclaimers to life in theatre, in a musical that shows that working class life is just as fit for representation in this genre of theatre as the…

Angels in America

8 May 2007

Theory without practice, like sex without love, is a pretty barren affair. But a combination, in both cases, is problematic in a secular age. This seems to be the bottom line of Tony Kushner’s mighty, epoch-defining epic, a sprawling theatrical poem of…

Hitlist - The best rock, pop, jazz & folk

8 May 2007

Patti Smith More than 30 years after her debut ‘Piss Factory’ helped ignite the flames of punk, Smith is older, wiser but her passion live remains unabated. The intimate poetry shindig she hosted last year was just a taster for this, a full band show.

A taste of Scotland

News

8 May 2007

Words: Allan Radcliffe Tickets are now on sale for the Taste of Edinburgh festival, which aims to celebrate and promote the capital’s culinary talent as well as Scotland’s world class food, drink and produce. The festival, which runs from Thursday…

Chloë Sevigny

8 May 2007

Britney and Madonna, you may want to take note. That young kook Chloë Sevigny shaved her head while she was still in high school and had a contract with H&M before she was out of her teens. It seems there is not much that this remarkable young actress…

Six Cities Design Festival

8 May 2007

We don’t often stop to consider the impact design has on every aspect of our lives. This month, a Scotland-wide festival aims to encourage us to do just that. The Six Cities Design Festival, www.six-cities.com, features established and up-and-coming…

Scottish Opera: Lucia Di Lammermoor

7 May 2007

OPERA They have been described as wild, cheerless and bleak, but it is the landscape of the Lammermuirs, these low, rolling hills that characterize the area bounded by the Berwickshire coast, that provide the setting for Sir Walter Scott’s gothic…

Also Released

7 May 2007

James Yorkston Roaring the Gospel A compilation album of off-cuts, outtakes, covers and traditionals that are of a quality that most artists would have as singles, not in their archive. (Domino) Seefeel Quique Welcome reissue of the drifting…

Singles & Downloads

Singles & Downloads

7 May 2007

(Picture: Asobi Seksu) Yob poseurs the Kaiser Chiefs turn soothsayer this fortnight with ‘Everything is Average Nowadays’ (B-Unique, 3 Stars) forecasting a slew of unoriginality in singledom. They have, however, stepped it up from the workaday…

Wilco

Album

7 May 2007

ROCK With their last two albums Wilco rewrote the book on what rock bands could do, so where next? The answer is they’ve reined in the experimentalism a tad and are indulging in exquisitely crafted, plaintive country-soul which manages to be…

Young Gods

Album

7 May 2007

ELECTRONIC ROCK The hassle with being pioneers - which this Swiss trio are, having invented the kind of theatrical but mechanical electro rock parents and families that are just taken for granted nowadays - is that you rarely get the credit you…

God-Fearing Atheists

Album

7 May 2007

COUNTRY ROCK With two ex-punks, one indie-boy and a drummer who plays in jazz bands at a tennis club, it was an obvious career move to form an alt.country band together. Not only that, but a really quite good one - the Glaswegian God-Fearing Atheists…

Julie Fowlis

Album

7 May 2007

FOLK Ever since she won the prestigious New Horizon award for 2006 at the BBC Folk Awards, Julie Fowlis has been landed with the unenviable expectation that she might succeed in taking Gaelic singing to a wider audience than it currently reaches…

The Twilight Sad

Album

7 May 2007

INDIE Rarely can a band have managed to sum themselves up so well just within their own name. Glasgow’s Twilight Sad are, let’s not beat about the bush, a band who make sad music - yet it’s that particular Scottish sadness which finds itself couched…

The Cinematic Orchestra

Album

7 May 2007

SOUL JAZZ Orchestra leader Jason Swinscoe’s genius is his lightness of touch. Rather than labouring the point with the same hooks, his music ebbs and flows like music has a simple plaintive beauty that is too often forgotten in an attempts to…

Butcher Boy

Album

7 May 2007

INDIE You won’t read about them in hype-hungry magazines or find them bombarding Myspace profiles with friend requests, and as a result Butcher Boy may well be one of the most exciting discoveries you’ll make this year. This debut album from the…

Kenny Werner

Album

7 May 2007

JAZZ Pianist Kenny Werner forsakes the comfort and familiarity of his customary trio setting for a more ambitious conceptual approach to his music on this recording, his first for Blue Note. A row of lawn chairs upturned by the wind near his home…

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Album

7 May 2007

ROCK You know what you’re getting when it comes to BRMC. Straight ahead, no frills rock’n’roll delivered with a degree of calculated nonchalance. Loops, samples or a ten-minute long jazz jam are not concepts these guys are familiar with. But…

Nasty P

Album

7 May 2007

HIP HOP REVISITED Love or loathe them, it looks like the blend trend that combusted spontaneously in both indie and hip hop scenes two or three years ago is set to burn on unabated. Here, Edinburgh’s own Nasty P casts in his own tuppence worth. The…

Led Bib

Album

7 May 2007

JAZZ Another burst of rock-influenced musical mayhem from the experimental fringes of the London jazz scene. Led Bib are probably not for jazz purists - their energised, in-your-face music explores the kind of edgy, raucous musical direction…

Von Sudenfed

7 May 2007

INDIE ELECTRONICA This first-time collaboration between The Fall’s mouthy frontman, Mark E Smith and German electronic maestros, Mouse on Mars sounds like the imaginary soundtrack to an after-party for the 1990s. Andi Toma and Jan St Werner do a good…

Orkestra Del Sol

7 May 2007

WORLD They say this was the launch of Orkestra Del Sol’s new EP The Road to Thermosa, but copies of it were being dished out free at the front door to anyone who did a silly dance for the staff. It was that kind of a night, and one suspects the EP…

Stopstarts, LR Rockets, Kid Canaveral

7 May 2007

(Picture: Stopstarts) First rule of gigging: make sure your guests don’t steal the show. Kid Cananveral are in danger of doing just this. It’s amazing how even their brand new pop-punk songs embed themselves in the brain, while single ‘Smash Hits…

Duloks

COMEDY POP

7 May 2007

Having almost been driven to throw himself out of a moving vehicle by all girl London trio the Duloks prior to this gig (long story), it’s your List correspondent’s duty to inform you that the band do come with a health warning. They’re crude. They’re…

The Be Be See

7 May 2007

INDIE POP