Issue 587

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…

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.

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…

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…

Stereophonics - album review

Indie rock

4 Oct 2007

Although rock’s snootiest critics might have it that The Stereophonics are one of the most blasphemous and superannuated crimes ever inflicted on music, it’s hard to underestimate the value of giving a fanbase what they want. Certainly, the band’s…

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…

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…

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…

Mr Brooks

4 Oct 2007

Mr Brooks (Kevin Costner) works in a cardboard box factory, but also murders women, photographs their corpses, then feeds the pictures into a furnace in his family home’s basement while prancing around naked. Demi Moore is Tracy Atwood, the detective…

Zoey Van Goey

4 Oct 2007

Tomorrow’s music today. This Issue: Zoey Van Goey I was just walking up University Avenue one day and ran into Michael John (McCarthy). He said, ‘I need a drummer.’ I said, ‘Hey, I’m a drummer.’ So we started jamming. He knew Kim (Moore), who had…

Heath Robinson - Heath Robinson’s Helpful Solutions

Humour

4 Oct 2007

Given the relative dearth of books about the brilliant English humour cartoonist Heath Robinson, it’s heartening to see London’s Cartoon Museum publishing a heavily illustrated catalogue (with an informative essay by Simon Heneage, founder of the…

Devendra Banhart - album review

Folk rock

4 Oct 2007

The Devendra Banhart live experience is akin to watching over-excitable teenagers being left in charge for a bank holiday weekend. Listening to him in your home is like being left out of someone else’s joke. While his folkiosyncratic ways have given…

Alex Cornish - album review

Singer-songwriter

4 Oct 2007

Less flamboyant than Rufus Wainwright, less earthy than Richard Hawley, Edinburgh singer-songwriter Cornish here provides a passable debut which suggests he might yet carve out a niche of his own. Orchestral, plaintive and melancholic, the downbeat pop…

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…