Issue 587

Good autumn TV to stay in for

4 Oct 2007

Old stories being retold is the thrust of the new season in British drama with Dickens, Kipling, Shelley and the Bible all being dipped into. EastEnders writer Sarah Phelps is let loose on Oliver Twist (BBC1, mid Dec) with Timothy Spall as Fagin and Tom…

Colette: The Secrets of the Flesh

Glasgay!

4 Oct 2007

Glasgay! 2007, Scotland’s annual celebration of queer culture, features four exciting weeks of new contemporary boutique theatre from emerging artists at the new studio space at the Q! Gallery. Opening this mini-season is a new play written and…

Rufus Wainright interview

4 Oct 2007

Late last month, Rufus Wainwright was in Los Angeles, treading the hallowed boards of the Hollywood Bowl, whooping it up as only Rufus can whoop it up. He had brought his acclaimed Judy Garland Live At Carnegie Hall show to town. Just him, an orchestra…

Kate Nash interview

4 Oct 2007

‘It’s a total headfuck.’ Kate Nash is not playing it cool. The 20-year-old pop songstress has had such a sudden rise to fame, she’s still coming to terms with her newfound celebrity status. The paparazzi followed her all summer, while Prince has…

The Decemberists interview

4 Oct 2007

Any band who name themselves after the Russian uprising of 1825 are, you feel, coming from a different place to most other heralded groups for whom the tune’s the thing. The Decemberists’ architect and songwriter Colin Meloy is not so much a tunesmith…

Copying the past

4 Oct 2007

When the Austrian actor Karl Markovics was first sent the screenplay for the Holocaust thriller The Counterfeiters by his friend the director Stefan Ruzowitzky, he spent a week pondering whether or not to accept the central role of Salomon ‘Sally…

Control

4 Oct 2007

Photographer Anton Corbijn took the defining picture of Joy Division a few months before lead singer Ian Curtis took his own life. Since then Corbijn has made a name for himself for his virtuoso music videos for Depeche Mode and U2. A neat circle is…

Black Sheep

4 Oct 2007

It was only a matter of time before an enterprising New Zealand filmmaker made a horror movie about sheep. It’s surprising it’s taken this long for one to reach the big screen, and more surprising still, given the inherent low horror factor of lamb…

Ratatouille

4 Oct 2007

(U) 110min COMEDY/ANIMATION Writer/director Brad Bird’s animated version of The Iron Giant made him the obvious candidate to follow on from John Lasseter’s innovative groundwork at Pixar, where he scored an immediate hit with The Incredibles. So even…

Day Watch

4 Oct 2007

Timur Bekmambetov’s 2004 fantasy Night Watch was grounded in dank layers of impenetrable local mysticism, made palatable by flashes of Matrix-style spectacle. A trilogy was as inevitable with Twilight Watch currently in pre-production and this…

Pop Boutique - vintage and craft community

4 Oct 2007

The latest venture from Glasgow’s hipster craft community brings together alternative therapists, masseurs, stalls punting recycled fashion, vintage clothing and hand-made jewellery from young Scottish designers, and a Vinyl Vault where you can stash…

Why Scotland's writers are talking about Glasgow's sidestreets

4 Oct 2007

Think about the route you take to work every day. Between worrying about the day ahead, checking for your train pass, sorting your hair and laughing at last night’s jokes, how aware are you, actually, of your surroundings? There are spaces like this in…

Kathy Diamond at Trouble Ladies' Night

4 Oct 2007

It’s ladies’ night and the feeling’s right, and those who have been won over by the disco-ball space-funk of Crazy P should brace themselves for celebrated proto-house throwback Kathy Diamond. Debut album Miss Diamond to You is a sparse, intricate and…

Hitlist - the best dancefloor action

4 Oct 2007

All Tore Up Live rockabilly from The Tennessee Hotshots plus killer 50s record hop to celebrate the fourth anniversary of this brilliant monthly rock’n’roll club. Happy Birthday guys. Blackfriars, Glasgow, Sat 6 Oct. Streetrave 18th Birthday Jon…

Boom Monk at the Sub Club

4 Oct 2007

A new weekly venture at The Subby promises a focus on dancefloor action over kicks, threads and haircuts with an already impressive roster of spinners, including the omnipresent Boom Monk Ben who furthers his plans for Glasgow domination alongside Ninja…

Rollerdisco at Sea and Crystal Lounge

4 Oct 2007

Get your skates at the ready folks as Rollerdisco rolls into town. If the shrieks and screams of people passing their colourful street posters is an indication of the overall excitement, then expect to see many grown-ups taking over Glasgow’s skate…

Musique Risquée at Freq

4 Oct 2007

Name Musique Risquée. Occupation Innovative record label run by Akufen and friends. What is so special about the label? That fact that it is run by Akufen is a major part of what makes Musique Risquée so great. The beauty of every Akufen record…

Peer Gynt

4 Oct 2007

For as long as people question their identity, pondering who they are and what role they play in the world, Peer Gynt will occupy a prominent place in the culture. It would, indeed become still more notable were all productions of Ibsen’s classic of…

The Winter's Tale

4 Oct 2007

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until Sat 20 Oct CLASSIC So much of Shakespeare’s work examines the disparity between the rational, ordered world, governed by laws and etiquettes long since agreed and more pre-rational, primal urges and experiences, but…

Hamlet

4 Oct 2007

The widespread belief that society is in deep moral decline is hardly unique to our age – indeed, there have been few times in history when this wasn’t a preoccupation of the public at large. What makes our society a little more unique, and renders Guy…

Nicholas Nickleby

4 Oct 2007

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Tue 9–Sat 13 Oct REVIVAL David Edgar’s celebrated adaptation of Dickens’ novel of class inequality in the early Victorian era must be an intimidating prospect for revival. This vast, sprawling, epic piece of theatre…

Female focused sex shops

4 Oct 2007

This week I’ve been spending time in sex shops. Oh, stop sniggering at the back there. I bet you’re thinking of sticky floors and flickering neon, now, aren’t you? Grubby windows and lone, sweaty-palmed gentlemen who can’t quite meet the cashier’s eye.

Hidden Palms

4 Oct 2007

Hidden Palms certainly starts with a bang with a gruesome fatality kicking proceedings off. But Kevin Williamson’s latest bash at teen drama after previous scripted glories such as Scream and Dawson’s Creek eventually fades to black with a whimper.

Alasdair Gray - art review

4 Oct 2007

To cherry pick from one’s own oeuvre sounds delightfully painful, a self indulgent task requiring sticky fingers and a good eye. It should be someone else’s enviable job, especially when the artist in question is Alasdair Gray, one of Scotland’s most…

Helen Mirren - In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures

Memoir

4 Oct 2007

‘I have a blissfully forgetful brain,’ Helen Mirren informs us in the opening paragraph of her autobiography, which hardly bodes well for a book which demands total recall. But Mirren has dredged the past up from somewhere, or someone, because In the…

Interview with By George author Wesley Stace

4 Oct 2007

Ventriloquism is creepy. From traditional vaudeville acts and their scary wooden schoolboy dummies through to Keith Harris with his hand up Orville’s jacksie, there’s something distinctly unsettling about this mostly defunct form of entertainment. So…

The best new bands to check out

4 Oct 2007

Akron/Family Signed to Michael Gira’s Young God Records in the US – one-time home of such fellow avant-folk weirdos as Devendra Banhart – New York quartet Akron/Family are probably strange enough to even freak out their own stable mates, prone as they…

The best autumn gigs in Scotland

4 Oct 2007

There are literally tons of gigs over the next couple of months but here is just a smattering of the finest examples of live rockingness to savour October The Coral Wirral-based indie sixsome make a return to the live scene. ABC, Glasgow, 20…

Teaching English in Japan

4 Oct 2007

The door slid shut with a bang and all four customers turned and stared. I squeezed my way along the narrow space between walls and stools, perched myself on an empty one and opened my phrase book. ‘Biru...’ Pause to look at book. ‘...

TV Round-up

4 Oct 2007

The state of TV comedy has been a subject of much negativity among critics, audiences and telly executives for a long, long time. Where’s the great sitcom? What happened to the solid tradition of sketch shows? Will we ever see a programme which treats…

Mind your language

4 Oct 2007

It might seem remarkable that a Booker Prize-winning novelist should be available to write for the stage in Scotland, yet hasn’t been asked to do so for well over a decade. Yet this is the situation James Kelman has found himself in, despite a general…

Skream plays Volume! at the Bongo Club

4 Oct 2007

The word ‘dubstep’ might spell out all you need to know about Skream. Much like dub reggae, the genre is borne of a heavy, trembling bassline and a slow rhythm which borders on the sinister. The ‘step’ part refers to the fact that you can still dance to…

Lethal Bizzle interview

4 Oct 2007

It’s sometimes said you know you’ve hit the big time when your song gets banned. London MC Lethal Bizzle might not have reached the notoriety of the Sex Pistols when his infamous track ‘Pow! (Forward Riddim)’ was banished from clubs across the country…

Fifi and Ally - deli and wine bar review

4 Oct 2007

The List’s restaurant reviews appear in a section of the magazine entitled ‘Life & Style’. If you’ve never fully grasped the connection then you’re advised to book a table at Fifi and Ally’s new restaurant, deli and wine bar, located in what’s vaguely…

DVD Roundup

4 Oct 2007

Quentin Tarantino’s exploitation movie homage Death Proof proved to be a damp squib, and Robert Rodriguez’s forthcoming companion flick Planet Terror isn’t much better. In America, the films were released – and flopped – as the double bill Grindhouse…

Singles & Downloads

4 Oct 2007

That’s it. I’m officially breaking up with Kate Nash. I defended ‘Foundations’ long after everyone else had gone right off it, but the bathroom sink drama of ‘Mouthwash’ (Fiction - 2 stars) with its cringily self-aware opener ‘This... is my face’, is…

Glittering Shadows

Glasgay!

4 Oct 2007

Dani Marti studied fine art in Sydney before gaining an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2006. His exhibition, Glittering Shadows, which is being presented as part of Glasgay!, is essentially a series of portraits brought to life through the media of…

Film City Glasgow takes Ibsen play to big screen

4 Oct 2007

One of the Edinburgh International Festival’s most successful productions is set to make its silver screen debut, with the help of a Glasgow film company. DollHouse, based on Henrik Ibsen’s classic text, was showcased at this year’s EIF by leading…

Rupture

4 Oct 2007

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 6 Oct NEW WORK I suppose that in a society obsessed with surveillance and security there’s bound to be a certain level of paranoia among our citizenry, and this itself can turn into neurosis. This certainly…

Feral Kingdom: Group Show

4 Oct 2007

Things are rarely as great as we remember them. But there is a nostalgic ‘vibe’ to the ‘sensory overload of international work’ currently on show at the CCA that eschews the rose tinted perspective, bringing together artists with an interest in the…

Scottish Chamber Orchestra: Cl@six

4 Oct 2007

Something different is on offer from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra this season as they embark upon a new series that makes concert-going incredibly easy. With a venue that could hardly be more central, a start time to coincide with the end of the…

Tord Gustavsen Trio

4 Oct 2007

The Norwegian piano trio have emerged as major contributors to the European jazz scene in the last half dozen years. Only the Esbjörn Svensson Trio have made a greater impact, and both groups share not only a strong and distinctive musical identity, but…

Lazytown Live!

4 Oct 2007

From Jamie’s School Dinners to Honey, We’re Killing The Kids, there’s no shortage of advice on how to feed our children. But perhaps the most successful TV programme to combat rising levels of childhood obesity, is aimed at the kids themselves. Created…

Manu Chao

4 Oct 2007

Manu Chao might just about be a household name in the UK, thanks in the main to 2001’s ubiquitous Próxima Estación: Esperanza, but he has not conquered the hearts and minds of Brits to the same degree as listeners in Europe and Latin America. This…

Gary Fabian Miller & Edmund de Wall

4 Oct 2007

Repetition, when performed by the human hand, will always be peppered with tiny differences. This is evidence of man’s failing against the machine, yet there is, of course, unexpected pleasure to be found in human error. It is a subject of fascination…

Hitlist - The best exhibitions

4 Oct 2007

Duncan Marquiss: The Clay Wall Marquiss has quickly become a respected and influential artist working in Scotland, and has recently received a Scottish Arts Council/Scottish Screen Artists Film and Video Award to continue working in the medium of film.

Susan and Darren

4 Oct 2007

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Wed 17–Sat 20 Oct DANCE THEATRE Reality television may dominate the small screen, but seldom has it found its way into the theatre. And although the creators of Susan and Darren find the term ‘Reality Theatre’ too…

Nick Doody

4 Oct 2007

There’s something oddly familiar about Nick Doody’s sense of outrage with the world around him. Something marginally haunting about the way he attacks the areas of life that really do need a good kicking, whether it’s religious fundamentalism or social…

The Kingdom

4 Oct 2007

The Kingdom of the title is a reference to Saudi Arabia. A potted history in the opening credits boils down everything that’s ever happened to the country to oil or the United States. America, we are reminded, is the number one oil consumer in the world…

The Rezillos

4 Oct 2007

1 They’re a joke OK, maybe not now, 30-odd years on, but when the proto-punk-glam-new wave gang from Edinburgh formed as The Rezillos in 1976, it was meant as a bit of a lark. So much so that when their debut single, ‘Can’t Stand My Baby’ started…