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3 Jul 2007
It’s not Cajun or dance music, but their indie rock has given these five smiling north Londoners a rollercoaster 18 months. Aged 17 and still at school, they’ve supported Kings of Leon, Thom Yorke loves them and Bernard Butler is producing their next…
When art exited the gallery in the 1960s, the street outside became a theatre for performances and an arena for installations - a move that simultaneously questioned the sanctity of the art object and the white cube that protected it. Some artists opted…
It’s summer. Well, as close as it gets to summer in Scotland. Sunshine is carefully rationed so when it does make an appearance you’d better be prepared to make the most of those breaks in the cloud. Here we present some of the best ideas for enjoying…
DRAWING, SCULPTURE AND INSTALLATION After a successful exhibition at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice as part of the third leg of his 2005 Venice Biennale contribution, Alex Pollard exhibits his work again, taking over as curator at Stirling’s Changing Room…
2 Jul 2007
Through the side door and up the stairs of a church hall on Great Western Road, there’s a room where people fly and mermaids hang off bars. A trapeze hangs from the rafters by the big stained glass window, stopping about six feet above the floor. On the…
The name conjures the image of a clandestine oasis hidden within the façades of the Trongate. Perhaps in time the Secret Garden will live up to its moniker, but it’s early days and for now it is a semi-screened dining space at the back of a smart but…
• Alexandre Perigot: Pipedream The Parisian artist creates a life-size reconstruction of Elvis’ house Gracelands, creating a stage for various performances and events - a monument to those few short minutes in which The King touched down in Prestwick…
• T in the Park 80,000 folks have over 100 reasons on stage to get down this weekend, from Arctic Monkeys to Wu-Tang Clan (pictured) and all in between. See full running order . Balado, Fri 6-Sun 8 Jul. (Rock & Pop) • The Skids After Green Day and…
INDIE FOLK Glasgow-based Icelandic singer/songwriter Bela’s debut album Ticket for a Train didn’t enjoy anything like the response its fantastically warm, woozy folk pop merited upon release a year ago. Watching him pick away contently at an acoustic…
DRAMA Channel 4 haven’t been too lucky of late with their new British serial dramas what with the dire sub-Footballers Wives romp Goldplated and the wildly overblown and overrated Skins. So, when news arrived of this witness protection drama, it…
HARDCORE While metal is enjoying something of a renaissance as Mastodon and Tool’s esoteric leanings catch the mainstream’s attention, there’s yet to be a group to prove that hardcore is a bona fide art form. A group to attest hardcore is more than…
YOUTH THEATRE It is perhaps the mark of a certain sickness in our society that we pay our policemen more than our teachers, for the priority given to education is certainly the barometer of a culture’s health. So it tells us something about the NTS…
Fessing up that you like to be in small, dark and dirty rooms and experimenting with bunches of strangers might seem an alarming admission. When you add that the folk you are with are liable to get naked at any moment, some rather rum conclusions might…
STRIPTEASE ART In these days of ubiquitous sexploitation advertising and cinematic ‘torture porn’, striptease can seem like an almost quaint activity. Such, indeed, is the thesis of one of the striptease artists in Nightshade, the latest show to be…
How best to describe Lord of The Rings Online? World of Warcraft in the land of Tolkien? Too simple. Perhaps it’s time to find out for certain by setting forth through Middle Earth. So say hello to my character, Snide the dwarf guinea pig. Day One…
Please note times and order is subject to change. 6 FRIDAY • Arctic Monkeys 9.20-10.50pm Sheffield’s all-conquering guttersnipe punk poets get the weekend started in earnest. • Bloc Party 7.50-8.50pm Angular London art rockers Bloc Party…
ELECTRO ROCK The Magnificents were always ahead of the game. Formed seven years ago at Edinburgh Art College, the eccentric but brilliant foursome set about assaulting audiences with a relentless, high-octane blend of post-punk and new wave, at a…
• Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia Since everything released this fortnight is a bit below par let’s kick things off with these one off screenings of Sam Peckinpah’s brilliant 1974 nihilistic road movie about one unlucky pianist’s odyssey to win a…
SUPERHERO Any follower of Marvel’s output over the last year might have found themselves growing tired of the almost relentless, ashen-faced politicking of Mark Millar’s ubiquitous Civil War crossover. In which case, this return to the company’s…
DOCUMENTARY When the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks made an off-the-cuff remark at a concert in London in 2003 about the band being ashamed of President Bush coming from their home-state Texas, there’s no way they could have foreseen themselves…
CHICKLIT If ever a book could carry an accusation of being designed to inspire contention, Girls of Riyadh might well be it. A tale of four young and fashionable middle-class Saudi girls who live under the strictures of Islamic tradition, yet who are…
• Armistead Maupin Back with a sequel of sorts to Tales of the City, Maupin’s Michael Tolliver Lives proves there’s plenty of fight in the old boy yet. Waterstone’s, Glasgow, Fri 6 Jul; Waterstone’s, Edinburgh, Sat 7 Jul. • Janet Paisley In a swift…
MYSTERY THRILLER A story about a stalker is hardly a novel idea, and Brooklyn-born and bred Jason Starr’s unimaginative treatment of the phenomenon brings absolutely nothing new to it. Set in a Manhattan populated with jocular and bimbotic college…
The Meal On paper there shouldn’t be anything particularly special about Sadivino. A relatively anonymous Italian café/delicatessen, hidden away at the quiet end of West Richmond Street, it hardly cries out for attention, probably failing to…
14 SATURDAY • Wilco See preview . • Midlake Glorious 70s folk-rock inspired album The Trials of Van Occunapther was one of the albums of 2006. • The Rapture Scratchy punk funk with a slick disco edge from these hipper-than-hip-New…
CHORAL CONCERTS While the professional outfits take a summer break, it’s the turn of Scotland’s musical youth to take to the stage. First off on the round of summer courses, concerts and tours is the National Youth Choir of Scotland. In preparation…
Suzanne Vega - Beauty and Crime (EMI) Twenty-two years in she’s still innovating in her own subtle ways. The songs remain mesmeric, filled with story and wonder and that she was the first major recording artist to play live as an avatar in online world…
ROCK Apparently, Clinic’s motto is ‘ignoring the tenets and trends of the music industry’. Admirable sentiments, but not really enough when your brand of stomping voodoo surf punk sounds as old as the hills, and feels just as mucky. This b-side…
JAZZ Fraud are making considerable waves on the more experimental end of the London jazz scene at the moment, and have clearly won some influential backers, as this debut album was nominated for album of the year at the BBC Jazz Awards even before it…
JAZZ Kurt Elling has stood out in the current plethora of jazz singers on both sides of the Atlantic. Hailed as a natural successor to Mark Murphy, Elling has developed as an individual and distinctive stylist, and his debut recording for Concord…
(Image: Malcolm Middleton) Think back to when you were 17 or 18. Remember the bands you enjoyed then, when music seemed like the most important thing ever? Now subtract the ones that fill you with toe-curling embarrassment and the ones that somehow…
METAL After splitting up, re-forming, and then losing vocalist Grady Avenell, Will Haven’s continued existence has been in question of late. But with the arrival of long-time friend Jeff Jaworski, the California metal quartet has finally found a…
DRAMA/ROMANCE Divorced, cheerless, well heeled 51-year-old ‘huissier de justice’ (bailiff) Jean-Claude (Patrick Chesnais) lives a life of silent misery. Between repossessions and visiting his cantankerous old dad (Georges Wilson) at the nursing…
• Misbehavin’ Great fun night of glam infused, bootlegs and electro sleaze courtesy of Dolly Daydream and Drewcifer. The Cathouse, Glasgow, Thu 5 Jul. • Luvely You never know it might actually be sunny by the time this Luvely party rolls round, but…
WESTERN Westerns were once a huge subgenre in comics, and with Loveless and Jonah Hex back on the shelves there’s a bit of a resurgence in sequential stories of cowboy folk. Making his first appearance in 1971, Hex is basically a disfigured take on…
BLACK COMEDY Gustave de Kervern and Benoit Delépine - the writers, directors and stars of this odd but strangely heart-warming Belgian road movie - are comedians in their home country, and quite obviously blessed with the blackest and most…
HORROR In this genial, seaworthy but fright-lite low budget British horror film from 1952, a couple purchase an old steam boat with the intention of turning it into a luxury love nest only to find the crate has a history akin to that of the Marie…
No mucking about this issue; the home entertainment selection is just too good. After slim pickings last time the box set market is booming. The Coen Brothers Box Set (Fox, 4 Stars) contains three of their best films - Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s…
Like Paul Auster’s celebrated New York Trilogy, Eric Drooker’s triumvirate of tales set in the Big Apple depicts life in the city as lonely and alienating. As with Auster, there’s more than a touch of Kafka about these stories, which concern a…
RADIO SHOW There’s no such thing as bad publicity, as the old adage more or less goes. So, when the papers got wind of the Franz Kafka Big Band’s proposed radio sketches, the most controversial of which was dreaming up a scenario where Rolf Harris…
SOCIAL ANALYSIS In this bizarre and quite frankly worrying book, Nicholas Guyatt journeys to the United States Bible Belt to find out why 50 million Americans believe that the apocalypse will take place in their own lifetimes. Guyatt’s main goal is…
WORKSHOP With every high street in every town selling the same thing, it’s hard to stand out from the crowd these days. Fortunately, Krista Blake is helping youngsters in Glasgow cut a dash this summer, with unique accessories made with their own…
• Improbabble The crazy gang brings us some more games and skits and general larking about in their own inimitable Whose Line Is It stylee. The Brunswick Hotel, Glasgow, Fri 6, 13 Jul. • Jo Caulfield One of the more solid performers on the circuit…
Name Peter Powers Who’s he then? Dubbed as a ‘hipnotist’ and the ‘Ali G of stage hypnotism’, he has the ability (or, I suppose, power) to have a man standing about in women’s underwear or find a cure for the most acute of phobias. His TV work…
‘He sat us down on the very first day of Motown and he said, “We’re not going to make black music, we’re going to make people music. We’re going to make music for everyone. We’re going to make music with some great beats and some great stories, and…
HOUSE/BREAKS (Image: Utah Saints) When SugarBeat started in Leeds in 2000, it wasn’t intended as any sort of major new career move for the sometime Utah Saints partnership of Jez Willis and Tim Garbutt. The duo, who were described as ‘the first…
TECHNO/HOUSE Organic clubbing is alive and well in the form of the Basement, a night dedicated to house, electro and techno at the Soundhaus. The event literally started in a basement in the Southside of Glasgow and has grown into a club night to be…
Let’s call it the GooGoo Gaga Syndrome. It’s what happens when edgy actors have children and then want to start appearing in films that their younglings can relate to. The result is usually a line of liquid excrement leading from their trailers to the…
• Mendelssohn on Mull Festival Whether heard in the beautiful setting of Iona Abbey, or the Aros Hall in Tobermory, music at this nearly 20-year-old festival takes on an almost magical quality. String players of international renown come together on…
1 We’re talking about icons here OK, one icon, namely Debbie Harry. The rest of ‘em could be picked from a supermarket checkout queue for all anyone cares, but Harry is a worldwide musical icon, and rightly so. She was the sexiest thing to appear on Top…
CLASSIC Just as Freud’s Oedipal theories altered the modern perception of Hamlet, his dream theories exert a powerful influence on this Shakespearean classic. Freud professed that dreams were a manifestation of forbidden thoughts and unconscious…
FAREWELL SHOW When Aereogramme released their aptly-titled third album My Heart Has a Wish That You Would Not Go earlier this year, it was to a certain critical warmth and a gust of commercial tumbleweed. Now that they’ve knocked it on the head…
Rosie Lesso For this exhibition in Glasgow you will be creating a full-scale replica of Elvis’ house, Graceland. Why did you choose to recreate his house in particular? Alexandre Perigot The first time I came to Glasgow by plane I landed in…
• Predictably, our recent Eating & Drinking Guide [pictured], has been another top seller this year. Alas, almost equally inevitable are a few wee errors of fact amid the torrent of accurate information. To set the record straight and with sincere…
JAZZ Elastic Axis got together last year in Dublin, but the five members of the band are scattered far and wide. The core of the group are the three Roth brothers, Alex (guitar), Nick (saxes) and Simon (bass), with Colm O’Hara on trombone and Peter…
• Othello Bard in the Botanics continues with Shakespeare’s classic of ambition, jealousy and intrigue. Gordon Barr’s production sees an appropriately stifling and claustrophobic use of space employed in the leafy Kibble Palace where the drama is played…
Wilco are an important rock band. Not just entertaining, although they are often ass-shakingly so. Not just innovative and intelligent and experimental and heartfelt and unpredictable and honest, although they are all those things. No, Wilco are also a…
INSTALlATION AND DIGITAL ‘Project art’ and ‘web-based art’ sound like something hippies with palm-pads get up to of an evening after a shisha pipe and a banana beer. This anti-aesthetic guerrilla-esque expression appeals to computer geeks, the…
ELECTRONICA Rather than looking to Detroit or Paris, this compilation is a reminder that Edinburgh’s electronic music scene is alive and well. The first in a series of chill-out albums produced by Alex Tronic on his eponymous Leith label, showcasing…
LEFTFIELD HIP HOP As billed this solo outing from Radioinactive and Boom Bip associate Antimc is a freewheeling hodgepodge of avant-garde jazz sensibilities applied to punk, electro, experimental rock and hip hop. As such it can be angular, maddening…
ROCK Ash hit their creative peak blending pure pop and adrenaline rock with the near-flawless Free All Angels in 2001, so, after the heads-down metal reaction of 2004’s Meltdown, where next? Back to basics, it seems, the band ditching Charlotte…
ELECTRONICA There was a time you knew where you stood with a term like techno. Back in the halcyon days of jackhammer beats and painfully minimal backing it meant the true definition of machine music. Now with folks like Torske around it can mean…
ALT.ROCK It’s been years since we last heard from this influential, Idaho-based collective and thankfully we find them on remarkable form sixth record around. Refreshingly at odds with the current glowsticks and guitars-strewn music scene they have…
GRINDCORE Pig Destroyer have always had more to them than your average grinders, largely thanks to the lit-heavy lyrics of JR Hayes. So, while Phantom Limb plays like the illegitimate offspring of early Napalm Death, there’s a deeply unhinged quality…
ROCK Shellac have always played by their own rules. Whether it is their obsessions with pure analogue high fidelity and high quality packaging - this album (that’s vinyl Antique Roadshow fans) is the finest piece of work you’ll see all year, no…
ROCK Plaudits land at the feet of anyone who’s managed to straighten out long enough to make it to the pressing plant these days. It’s not difficult to make music and the internet age has meant it’s even easier to get it out there, but it is hard to…
TRIP POP Hailing from Glasgow, The Fast Camels pay a psychedelic tribute to the 60s in their energetic debut album. Guitar heavy, with mature harmonies and strong rhythms, the band are unashamedly influenced by the likes of Love and Pink Floyd.
FOLK Folk meets jazz and cuts a very acceptable deal in the music of concertina player Simon Thoumire and pianist David Milligan. The pair bring a diverse range of stylistic options to their music. The combination of instruments is an unusual but…
ROCK Imagine a being rising from the primordial quagmire, shaking its thunderous fists in a display of brute strength, conjuring a whirlwind of frothy guitars and emitting an uncomprehending, enraged bellow. This is what Miami sludge rockers Torche…
You often get the feeling TV executives must have decided within themselves that there really are no fresh ideas left and all that can be done is endless recycling, rehashing and resurrection. Yet just when you think nothing new can ever come out of the…
NEW NEW WAVE The whiff of freshly heated maize that accompanies Sellotape’s vocal version of Hot Butter’s 1972 electro-disco hit, ‘Popcorn’ (the first ever totally synthesiser-based single to chart, pop-pickers) may take its subject matter literally…
JAZZ John Coltrane is the most iconic of modern jazz giants, and it was inevitable that the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra would get round to honouring the master. Tommy Smith chose the 40th anniversary of his death, and celebrated Trane’s own…
PHOTOGRAPHY With the Jerwood Photography Awards partnership with Portfolio Magazine, it seems only right that the touring exhibition of the four 2006 winners should come to Edinburgh. Paul Winch-Furness’ series of photographs of Milton Keynes are…
(Image: The Moscow train) Imagine going to Moscow and not seeing Red Square. From behind the police cordon I cursed Condoleezza Rice - not for US foreign policy, but for potentially messing up my trip. She was visiting the Kremlin and as a result…
5 DEBUT NOVELS Xinran - Miss Chopsticks From the author of non-fiction hit Sky Burial comes a novel about three peasant girls trying their utmost to get to grips with life in the big city. Chatto & Windus. John Carbone - Last of the Good Guys…
Die Hard 4.0 (15) 128min, 3 Stars Renegade cop and one man destroyer of municipal property John McClane (Bruce Willis) steps up to the plate one more time. Older, but not much wiser this time out, he has to contend with a bunch of über geek terrorists.
DRAMA Ferzan Hamam: Turkish Bath Ozpetek’s latest film plays a little like a combination of two much better, fairly recent Italian works which haven’t received a wide release: The Spectator and Marco Bellocchio’s My Mother’s Smile (both available on…
WESTERN Although filmed on the expansive plains of the Old West, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard’s 1994 western is a very stagy affair, switching between handfuls of dusty, dialogue-heavy scenes and boasting some scenery-chewing…
SUPERHERO Neil Gaiman, the world’s most populist cult writer, flexes his comic muscles to update the story of Marvel’s Eternals. Originally outed in 1976 by Jack Kirby, the race of superhumans are immortal-ish, god-like creatures with human…
FANTASY/ADAPTATION At over 800 Pages Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was always likely to be the hardest of JK Rowling’s tomes to adapt and true to form this is the worst of the little wizard films. The franchise, which has thus far been…
• West End Fashion Show Edinburgh’s streets are usually quiet in July, biding their time and preparing for the oncoming storm of crazed unicyclists. House of Fraser have decided to liven things up a little by staging a huge outdoor fashion show…
In Die Hard 4.0 Maggie Q is described by Bruce Willis’ John McClane character as ‘The Asian kid that kicks people.’ Although, Maggie Q has become the first chick to kick John McClane’s behind, and was recently seen battling it out with Tom Cruise and…
COMIC TALES Back in the day, the artist formerly known as Allan Konigsberg appeared hell-bent on making one classic comedy movie after another. He also seemed to find time to knock up a trio of books with silly stories, philosophically daft musings…
COMEDY/DRAMA Your familiarity with the work of France’s most celebrated playwright may well dictate how much enjoyment you can glean from Laurent Tirard’s populist fantasy about an unwritten (and untrue) episode in the life of the great Molière.
Earlier this year mammoth record label Columbia sprung the offshoot Music With A Twist, which styles itself as ‘a home for gay artists of all genres to experience mainstream success without having to compromise any part of their identity.’ The label has…
Name Alex ‘Omar S’ Smith aka Omar S aka DJ Snotburger Occupation DJ/Producer What’s the lowdown? Omar S is one of Detroit’s hottest exports. He is the Henry Ford of underground, slightly avant garde techno and house. He is either producing or…
It is always the first thing that strikes you. The song titles. Before you even take the vinyl out of the sleeve or the CD out of its jewelcase, it’s those militant statements of verbosity, those acid-dipped, verbal conjugal visits, those florid…
POPULAR SCIENCE Did you know that sea urchins were the key to understanding the process of sperm/egg fertilisation? Before microscopes came along, the theories of reproduction that reigned now seem ludicrous. In this entertaining history of science…
DOCUMENTARY Two minutes into this documentary about Frank Gehry, America’s most famous living architect, the director Sydney Pollack (Tootsie, The Interpreter) admits that the documentary was Gehry’s idea. When the architect suggested it to him…
(Image: Clockwise from top: Bookashade, Josh Wink, Slam, Hardfloor) Now in its 11th year, the Slam Tent has been as much a fixture of T in the Park since it moved from Strathclyde Country Park to Balado as warm Tennent’s in a paper cup and excitable…
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3 Jul 2007
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