Issue 650

The best Wi-Fi cafés in Edinburgh and Glasgow

The Wi-Fi try guy

17 Feb 2010

Wi-Fi connectivity has become a staple feature of many handheld and portable gadgets, so you would think that the companies making them would have perfected it by now. Well, of course they haven’t, but is the technology good enough to at least beat the…

Dundee Rep take on Peter Schaffer's pony tale Equus

18 Feb 2010

It’s not entirely down to Daniel Radcliffe’s torso that Peter Schaffer’s 1973 work Equus is undergoing something of a renaissance, but it was certainly the prospect of naked boy wizard that reignited interest in the play. It’s the kind of interest that…

Marina and the Diamonds - The Family Jewels

17 Feb 2010

679 The latest in a long line of new Kate Bushes, Greek/Welsh loony tune Marina Diamandis arrives in a fair blitz of hype, but this debut album is a charmless affair which mistakes self-aggrandising for personality and synth-pop rip-offs for musical…

Edinburgh's Royal High School to be transformed into arts hotel

Developer also behind Odeon cinema project

18 Feb 2010

Following months of speculation it has been revealed that the former Royal High School on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill will be transformed into an arts hotel. The £35m redevelopment, awarded by the city council to Duddingston House Properties, will see the…

Glasgow Guerrilla Supper Club

17 Feb 2010

Local guerrilla gardeners have been leaving messages as well as planting seed bombs in recent weeks, so the time is clearly ripe for some guerilla eating. Based at a large Victorian villa in Pollokshields, artist Hilary Nicoll is running the Glasgow…

The Beauty Queen of Leenane

10 Feb 2010

‘Someone said to me once that Ireland just skipped the 20th century and went from the 19th to the 21st,’ muses Scottish-born, Irish-bred actress Cara Kelly when asked about the ‘Irishness’ of her current role, in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of…

Cabaret Voltaire celebrates fifth birthday

Guests include DC Breaks, Slam, Fenech-Soler, Zane Lowe and Tom Middleton

17 Feb 2010

‘Cabaret Voltaire is one of the most atmospheric spaces you could ever find an underground club. It’s a very rare music-orientated team that work here. We’re a little family that are incredibly passionate about what we do, and I feel that really comes…

The Still Point - Amy Sackville interview

17 Feb 2010

A married couple is asleep in bed. Back to back, knees bending, and feet touching, ‘they form the uneven outline of an urn’. Bizarrely, they are both dreaming of the same freezing cold place, but it means two very different things to them. To Simon, the…

The Lovely Bones

17 Feb 2010

(12A) 135min The problems with Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s popular novel run much deeper than the usual stumbling block of having a macabre subject matter. The casting of Mark Wahlberg as the grieving dad is seriously misjudged…

Bonobo set for Edinburgh show at Departure Lounge

17 Feb 2010

Name Bonobo Occupation Soul, jazz, hip hop and electronica producer of note What kind of monkey business is this? OK, very clever. Bonobos are indeed a species of small Chimpanzees (which are apes not monkeys for the record) but the Bonobo…

Tower of London

17 Feb 2010

(15) 92min (Optimum) This long unavailable (on DVD), deliciously nasty historical horror made in 1939 is all dungeons, manacles, torture and beheadings. But it’s also fairly classy stuff, boasting a fine cast headed by Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff…

Poppy and Dingan

18 Feb 2010

Imaginary friendships are a part of life for many children and, just like real ones, they come with no guarantees. When Kellyanne Williamson, a young girl living in the Australian outback, loses her invisible pals in Pobby and Dingan, life is never the…

Martin Amis - The Pregnant Widow

18 Feb 2010

(Jonathan Cape) On page 395 of this 465-page endurance test, Martin Amis promises the following from one of his characters: ‘Gloria Beautyman, at least, will be giving us something that Life badly needs. Plot’. Life, Martin – and indeed your latest…

Why Lady Gaga is the future of pop

17 Feb 2010

We tried to resist, honestly we did, but Lady Gaga got to The List in the end. It wasn’t the relentless, vom-inducing marketing campaign that did it either. No, no, we survived all that initial fluff; we battled triumphantly against the moneyed barrage…

Padded Cell set for date at Glasgow's Kitty Kat Klub

17 Feb 2010

Richard Sen is being a bit modest when he describes the music he makes alongside partner Neil Higgins in Padded Cell as ‘just dance music, really.’ Asked to elaborate a little further, he’ll concede that the duo are often lumped in with the nu-disco…

Errors set for date at Grand Ole Opry, Glasgow

17 Feb 2010

‘God, I hope it doesn’t get to the point where we all try to outdo each other and turn into Rush,’ shudders Errors’ drum leviathan James Hamilton, talking about the Glasgow quartet’s rousing group dynamic. ‘But the thing about playing in an instrumental…

East Lothian company Chocolate Tree make moves into Edinburgh

17 Feb 2010

Lovers of real, hand-made chocolate will delight at the arrival of another chocolaterie in Bruntsfield. Alastair Gower and Friederike Matthis’ Chocolate Tree started out in East Lothian, where they perfected an organic chocolate recipe that mixed food…

Brassjaw - Deal With It!

17 Feb 2010

(Keywork Records) Although the Glasgow-based quartet launched this album with a gig in Glasgow back in November, it has only recently been officially released on saxophonist Paul Towndrow’s label. The group began life as a conventional saxophone…

RM Hubbert - First & Last

17 Feb 2010

(Ubisano) Once a member of the now defunct Glasgow instrumentalists El Hombre Trajeado, guitarist RM Hubbert delivers his debut solo release and proves that there’s much to be said for working hard on your craft. Here, he flexes his post-rock…

Toro Y Moi - Causers of This

17 Feb 2010

(Car Park) Toro Y Moi is Martian-talk for ‘pissed-up, blissed-out pop’. Or so South Carolinian electro-bard Chaz Bundick would have us believe on Causers of This – his computer-engendered, patchouli-infused and entirely affable debut album. Tipping…

Louise Gray, Holly Fulton and Jonathan Saunders in new ASOS collaboration

17 Feb 2010

Thanks to local fashion experts The Coveted Mag (whoworewhatwhen.typepad.co.uk) for alerting us to a new ASOS collaboration with some of our favourite emergent Scottish designers. The designs are, in true ASOS style, cheap, bright and on-trend: we…

Mick Taylor, Jennifer Batten and Henry McCullough guest at Fifestock

17 Feb 2010

With a capacity of just 50, Fifestock is a truly intimate month of gigs. Focusing on the world of blues, roots and folk and featuring the likes of Mick Taylor, Jennifer Batten, Henry McCullough, Graham Gouldman and more for the ‘ultimate living-room…

First Word - Tom Conti interview

18 Feb 2010

First record you ever bought Stokowski conducting Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which featured in a movie I had just seen called A Hundred Men and a Girl. Last time you were chatted up Last week, in a bookshop. (40, gorgeous, shapely, dark…

Punishment Park

18 Feb 2010

(15) 88min 'Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.' Abbie Hoffman (1936 --1989) American political activist and author; co-founder…

Carl Donnelly set for The Stand

18 Feb 2010

As a jaw-dropping introduction to the mad old world of stand-up, Carl Donnelly’s second ever gig takes some beating. When telly channel Five were putting together a typically sensitive Race Swap show, it might have seemed like a good idea at the time to…