Issue 613

Autumn Music Preview 08 - Mogwai

Is it true that you were asked to be in Mogwai because Stuart Braithwaite thought you were ‘a good laugh?’ I hope I’m still a good laugh; I’ve seen them smile at me a few times, even today. I’m quite an annoying person, really; I’m just very…

Helen Hunt

It’s appropriate, given that Then She Found Me is about mothers, daughters and babies, that the film itself is actor Helen Hunt’s baby, and it’s one that has taken over a decade to be born. The film is April Epner’s story, a tale of a woman betrayed by…

Glasgay! - Tennessee Williams

Some years ago, I attended a conference where a debate about the work of Tennessee Williams came very nearly to blows. The bone of contention involved Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the character Brick confesses an attraction to a friend that surpasses…

Autumn Music Preview 08 - Cibelle

‘Basically Tarzan makes love to Shirley Bassey but they’re in a threesome with a hula girl,’ laughs rising electro folk starlet Cibelle from her East London abode. ‘They have been kidnapped by a UFO from the 1950s and are plonked in the jungle. Monkeys…

Autumn Music Preview 08 - Tennent’s Mutual

Don’t worry if you’re still scratching your head at the concept of Tennent’s Mutual – the ‘experimental’ new ‘co-creative’ music initiative, which launched its first line-up earlier this month – you’re in good company, and even Tennent’s’ Senior…

Autumn Music Preview 08 - Rock’n’roll agony aunt

Dear List, I’ve just bought the tightest keks in Europe and a vest so day glow it could send a Geiger counter wild at 50 paces. Flag me up some how now danceable indie gigs at which to flash my hot new garb. Beth, Maryhill. Flaunt your new dapper…

Autumn Music Preview 08 - Sam Sparro

Oh dear. It’s not like the summer hasn’t been one long string of achievements for Sam Sparro, aka 25-year-old singer Sam Falson, whose ‘Black and Gold’ will be remembered as one of the sleekest dancefloor anthems of 2008, but more or less the first…

Autumn Music Preview 08 - Future music

Limbering up well in advance for the run-up to Christmas (yes, it’s only September and we’ve already dropped the C-word), all manner of superstar acts are crawling out the woodwork to release long awaited albums. Oasis pave the way with their seventh…

John Dolmayan

There are plenty of famous faces who love comics: Jonathan Ross, Edward Norton, Sam Raimi, Jon Bon Jovi, Simon Pegg, Jerry Seinfeld, Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Cage. Even Anthrax wrote ‘I am the Law’ about Judge Dredd. But not many are as passionate…

The Picture House

For gigs of a certain size Edinburgh has long had a gaping hole where a venue should be. Up-and-coming acts love Cabaret Voltaire, smaller touring bands play the 700 capacity Liquid Rooms and then … nothing until the Corn Exchange at almost 3000…

Friendly Fires

ELECTRO SHOEGAZE It’s quite probable that pens and keyboard fingers across the land have been itching to write/type the phrase ‘new wave of new rave’ for at least a year now, so might The List endeavour to jump in before anyone else gets there.

Cristian Vogel and Neil Landstrumm

TECHNO ‘The reason I stretch out into making music through many different avenues’, says Chilean-born, England-raised techno polymath Cristian Vogel, ‘is that fundamentally I’m not a DJ. Of course, DJing’s the quickest way of paying the bills, but…

Tokyoblu

HOUSE ‘It’s a really exciting time for us right now,’ says Tokyoblu founder and DJ John Hutchison. ‘After six years of constant, hard-at-it aiming to get somewhere, we’re only now starting to approximate what our plans were back then.’ Tokyoblu…

Ian Rankin - Doors Open

CRIME NOVEL After 18 novels, John Rebus retired in his last outing, Exit Music. Whether the detective inspector will return is unclear, but in the meantime Ian Rankin is having some fun spreading his authorial wings. This heist story was first…

Velcro Quartet

GLAM POP Many fine young Scots bands are already lined-up to play The Mill, Miller beer’s new branding doohickey come weekly live gig in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and The List can report it’s actually a pretty good night out. The bands are well-chosen…

Art Spiegelman - Breakdowns

BIOGRAPHY Subtitled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@*!’, this was the first collected book of comic art which the Jewish-American Spiegelman had published. Created between 1972 and 1977, the volume is reissued with an illustrated 20-page…

Harry Hill - Tim the Tiny Horse at Large

KIDS STORY You can virtually smell Harry Hill at his keyboard, big collar tickling his neck, tongue flicking in and out (‘hmm, hmm, yeah, hmm?’), eyes blinking maniacally as the ideas bristle through his cranium. There is a chance, of course, that he…

Andrew Davidson - The Gargoyle

GOTHIC TALE With so many books on all our to-read lists, brevity is a virtue. The Gargoyle flouts this with great success. Framed by the sceptical voice of a severely burned car crash victim, events swing from medieval times to the present, from…

Cherry Blossom

What does the word ‘collaboration’ make you think of? Director Lorne Campbell thought he knew until he tried it for himself. ‘You think of something cosy and cuddly,’ he says. ‘But this has been really hard. We’re still friends, still happy and excited…

Six Acts of Love

NEW PLAY The Scottish Government’s Homecoming programme is not until next year, but Ioanna Anderson is getting in early. At the age of 38, she’s planning to move back to her native Edinburgh after spending the best part of 20 years in Ireland, where…

Mogwai - The Hawk is Howling

ROCK The line between familiarity and contempt is drawn thinner than ever currently, but Mogwai, six albums and 12 years in, seem in no danger of wearing out their welcome. Given how limiting the initial wordless loud-quiet-loud grind on which…

Scottish Comedian of the Year

STAND-UP COMPETITION Approaching its third anniversary, the Scottish Comedian of the Year final looms ever more influentially in the stand-up calendar. Inspired by Manchester’s City Life contest – won by the likes of Peter Kay, Chris Addison and…

Mother Courage And Her Children

CLASSIC It’s an austere landscape through which Ann Louise Ross drags her cart, scratching a living in the title role of Bertolt Brecht’s epic. Naomi Wilkinson’s set is a wall of grim metal panels, the stage a carpet of grey. Even the iconic cart is…

Noises Off

REVIVAL Bringing farce to the fore, Michael Frayn’s 80s parody is touring once again, revealing the merry antics of a second-rate theatre company both on and off stage as it struggles with its ludicrous sex comedy, Nothing On. Nestling at the core…

5 Things you might not know about - Jenny Eclair

1 Having left drama school in Manchester, Eclair started her stage career in an ‘alternative cabaret’ outfit called Kathy Lacreme and the Rum Babas. When the act split, she went solo as a punk poet before eventually going all-out on a stand-up…