Issue 621

Scotland The Great - We are good

Bin the shortbread tin! Trash those Runrig albums! Here are, in The List’s humble opinion, some real reasons why Scotland is worth shouting about

Scotland The Great - Homecoming

Four skinny boys stare up at a mountain. The mountain stares back at them. The hairiest one throws his arms out and roars: ‘Does it not make you proud to be Scottish?’; the prettiest one looks up from his vodka bottle, and hurls back bile. It’s been…

Scotland The Great - Franz Ferdinand

You’ve basically built an entire studio complex in the bowels of this beautiful old building in Govan? Bob Hardy, bass Yeah, its a great place. Nick [McCarthy, guitars and keyboards] found it. David MacKenzie the filmmaker has his office down here.

Guilty Lily

Guilty Lily is not, nor does it aspire to be, a gastropub. That label, for many good reasons (not least the ugliness of the name), hasn’t really made much headway north of the border. Guilty Lily is a local pub serving real ale, bowls of olives, decent…

Taste Test - Water

Highland Spring - Still Spring Water ••• Various stockists, 330ml glass bottle around £1.30. Filtered through land certified as organic by the Soil Association, this is pleasant without being remarkable. While being a refreshing drink, it didn’t…

Edinburgh Drum & Bass

Manga may no longer be with us but drum & bass heads still have plenty to celebrate in Edinburgh. This fortnight sees two exemplary events taking place across the city. First up is Xplicit, which makes its mark with a huge night of hard and dark jungle…

Chris Killen - The Bird Room

As with many readers of a certain young age, Chris Killen made formative connections with the cult fictions of Charles Bukowski, John Fante and Richard Brautigan. When he started writing seriously at the age of 18, though, he imitated his heroes with…

Bob Dylan’s Art

‘My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking had said, “Isn’t an artist a fellow who paints?” when told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist. It seemed I’d always been chasing after something, anything that moved – a…

The National Theatre of Scotland - Dolls

Cinema and theatre have a long history of sharing stories. Plays are adapted into films, and every second blockbuster seems to flip easily into a Broadway musical. However, what tends to happen is a straight transfer of plotline and character. In…

Celtic Connections - Branford Marsalis

Celtic Connections has never been overly troubled by any lack of an actual Celtic connection in the artists who visit the festival, but Branford Marsalis must surely qualify as one of the furthest stretches so far from any perceived Celtic-ness.

Valkyrie - Assassins

There’s nothing like an assassination to stave off boredom. From Ancient Rome to modern day America the fundamentalist agenda of the man with the deadly plan has found support in the disparate philosophical writings of Voltaire, Molière, and David…

Revolutionary Road

DRAMA Age of Anxiety writer Richard Yates’ first and arguably finest novel gets a Titanic big screen makeover courtesy of reunited stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and director hubby Sam Mendes. It’s 1955 in suburban Connecticut; the…

Out at the Movies

With Gus Van Sant’s Milk generating significant Oscar buzz and the latest big budget gay-themed movie I Love You Phillip Morris about to hit the silver screen, Steven Paul Davies history of gay cinema is timely. Working chronologically from the 1920s…

Of Montreal

INDIE POP Although Athens-based concept-poppers Of Montreal have been active for over a decade now, their ninth and latest album Skeletal Lamping has seen the group reach their highest watermark yet. The record was a top forty entry in America, and…

Martyn

DUBSTEP While Dutch producer Martyn Deykers does not strictly consider himself a dubstep artist, his innovative combination of the throbbing, soulful chord progressions of early Detroit techno and the percussive intricacy of 90s drum & bass have…

Celtic Connections - Michael Nyman

CELTIC CONNECTIONS Despite his ongoing frustration at being shunned by the BBC Proms, Michael Nyman remains the most widely heard of contemporary ‘serious’ composers in the UK. An early experimentalist in the 60s avant-garde, Nyman is one of the very…

Celtic Connections - Follow That!

CELTIC CONNECTIONS The title of this latest round of commissions inspired by the music of the late Martyn Bennett underlines the far-reaching influence of his eclectic, open-minded approach to traditional music (while simultaneously suggesting that…

The death of budget travel?

We must have known that it wasn’t going to last, and that future generations would look back on the early years of the 21st century as a lost golden age of rock-bottom-cheap travel, when you could zip to Paris for a weekend in almost less time, and for…

Scotland The Great - Robert Crawford: The Bard

‘One of my friends said to me that a new biography of Burns is the least necessary book in the world, but actually quite a lot of the previous biographies aren’t up to scratch, either because they aren’t all that well written or they didn’t have much…

Couchsurfing

What if I said you could travel anywhere in the world and not pay for accommodation; that you could leave your Lonely Planet at home and be given a personalised itinerary of everything to see and do? Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, no…

Scotland The Great - Nine Inch Will Please a Lady

The Burnsian band I am in, with Malcolm Ross and my brother Russel, The Bum-Clocks, has a version of ‘Nine Inch’, a witty ditty in celebration of quantity. We usually locate it in our mash-up of the poetry of Burns and Iggy Pop which kicks off with ‘A…

Burns Night

The man of the moment is not, as you might mistakenly be thinking, Barack Obama (guh! We’re so over that inauguration shizzle!), but a 250 year old womanising ploughman from Ayrshire. Here’s our guide to the best ways to mark Burns Night. Why not…