Issue 697

The Horrors - O2 ABC, Glasgow, Tue 15 May, 2012

Charming and mesmerising set that avoids sharp pop aesthetic

For Essex boys The Horrors, surely redemption has arrived at last. Yes, there were those of us who enjoyed the spooky frightwig garage rock of their debut album Strange House, but it left the sense that here was a band who are overstylised and blessed…

Apocalypse Archives - Nikolaj Arcel

Screenwriter of original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Director of new Danish drama A Royal Affair, Nikolaj Arcel, picks five films he’d rescue in the face of the apocalypse.

Highlights from the 2012 Edinburgh Fringe programme

Daniel Kitson, Billy the Mime and Paolo Bianchi set to appear

The Fringe madness is looming on the horizon and as long as the nation isn’t holed up with Olympics fever, this could well be another record-breaking year. You’ll be less than surprised to hear there’s a massive amount of comedy on show, including a…

Austra set for UK tour

Toronto electro-goth-pop six-piece take Feel It Break on the road

Having rated spine-tingling coldwave-disco banger ‘Lose It’ as one of our favourite songs of 2011, The List are big fans of this Toronto electro-goth-pop six-piece based around one-of-a-kind Latvian-Canadian singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist…

Single of the month: Poliça - ‘Dark Star'

Other releases by Liars, Tribes, Childish Gambino and Hot Chip also reviewed

The pile of pre-summer releases on The List’s doorstep this month was rather intimidating, but here is a round-up of the best (and rest). Liars new track, ‘No 1 Against The Rush’ (Mute Song ●●●), is three-and-a-half minutes of slithering synths and…

Cottier Chamber Project set for West End Festival 2012

Hebrides Ensemble, Scottish Ensemble and Red Note also on bill

Classical music always has a strong presence at Glasgow’s West End Festival these days, but this year is extraordinary. Not only does the Cottier Chamber Project make a big-style return visit with small-scale music, but no less than nine choirs form…

Junior Melting Pot proves kids can be funny

The show features young performers with both established and original material

Perhaps it’s been a side effect of the old showbusiness adage about not working with children or animals, but when you see kids in comedy sketch shows, we are usually asked to laugh at youngsters saying things that adults might say (more often than not…

Parents Like Us offers a new approach to entertaining children

The festival offers free events and de-stress massages for parents

The journey from the box office to the auditorium can be an expensive one these days. Even the most charming children’s shows have a plethora of merchandise to tempt tiny hands (and grown-up purses) as you struggle to take your seat. Since its…

Electro DJ Jimmy Edgar

Detroit DJ Edgar shares the concept behind fourth album, Majenta

Celebrating his recently released fourth album, Jimmy Edgar’s forthcoming Berkeley Suite show is the finale of Palace Promotions’ recent programme of club events aimed at representing the city’s ‘present and future musical character’. In contrast to the…

Clubbers' Decktionary: Electro Swing

Trouble's DJ Hobbes gives us a guide to the myriad genres of clubbing

Electro Swing proper noun: varied tempos, mixing 20s, 30s and 40s jazz and swing styles/samples with modern production; has spawned myriad sub-genres, including Swing House, Swing Hop, Ghetto Swing, Swing Tech, Swing Step. Some crossover with Balkan…

Alan Warner - The Deadman's Pedal

Evocative and personal rural drama from the Morvern Callar author

In a literary career which has played down the overly autobiographical tendency (all that writing from a female perspective malarkey for one thing), The Deadman’s Pedal seems far and away Alan Warner’s most personal fiction to date. We return to the…

Births, Deaths and Marriages

New radio sitcom from Alan Partridge regular David Schneider

The old triumvirate of hatch, match and dispatch will surely prove fertile for the big comedic brain of David Schneider as he launches his new radio sitcom. Set in a Local Register Office, chief registrar Malcolm Fox (not Ian Rankin’s post-Rebus…

Travel books round-up - June 2012

New books from Hardeep Singh Kohli, Samanth Subramanian and Terry Darlington

He may be a man of Glasgow, but Hardeep Singh Kohli knows a thing or two about travelling around London. In The 38 Bus: A Love Song to a Bus Route (Unbound) he pours out the emotions he has for the route which has served the capital for a century…

Crate Digging: Rebecca Vasmant

The young Glaswegian DJ is set to play Ministry of Sound & Mixmag's Warehouse Party

I love jazz music, and as much as I love house music too, I don’t think it has the same timelessness. My first choice is one I got about a year ago, it’s PE Hewitt Winter Winds (Now-Again), a three-LP box set of material self-recorded by a 16-year-old…

Miaoux Miaoux UK dates ahead of album Light of the North

Glasgow-based electronic musician also has live band set

Julian Corrie sighs when you mention a certain fashionable designer drug that people used to swear was ‘plant food’. Come on, counters The List, don’t tell us the name isn’t a reference to mephedrone. ‘Not at all,’ he says, aghast. ‘This project started…

Refugee Week 2012 highlights

Programme of awareness-raising events features King Creosote and Glasgow Girls: The Musical

Scotland’s favourite Fence Records chap and former Mercury Award nominee King Creosote will kick off seven days of events to promote understanding of the experiences of refugees living in Scotland. The gig, which takes place at the Old Fruitmarket on…

5 Reasons To Go See . . . 100% Silk tour

LA Vampires, Ital, Maria Minerva, Magic Touch and Innergaze team up for electronica tour

1. Find out what all the fuss about Run by one-half of the husband and wife team behind the experimental Not Not Fun label, Amanda Brown’s more dance-orientated, LA-based offshoot is barely over a year old but has already enjoyed plaudits from FACT…

Bobby Womack - The Bravest Man in the Universe

A wise yet not world-weary record from the soul legend

‘As a singer grows older, his conception goes a little deeper, because he lives life and he understands what he’s trying to say a little more...’ So said Sam Cooke back in the day, and so opens electro-soul hymn ‘Dayglo Reflection’, the fourth track…

The most infamous Fringe controversies

As the Edinburgh Fringe launches its 2012 programme we recall some of our favourite Fringe scandals

Festival sinners As the Edinburgh Fringe launches its 2012 programme we recall some of our favourite Fringe controversies Kangaroo Theatre raised religious sensitivities in 2006 when the company staged the notoriously scandalous sex scenes of DH…

US drama Revenge suffers from an absence of likeable characters

The drama stars Emily VanCamp and Madeleine Stow

Now here’s a new US show that might well have ideas way above its station with an on-screen quote from Confucius hinting at the multiple tragedies which lie ahead. Revenge (E4, Mon 28 May, 9pm) is populated by characters who take boats down to Haiti for…

Elvis Costello - Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow, Fri 11 May

Three-hour 30-song greatest hits show with patter aplenty

‘She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake’ – has any songwriter anticipated the career ahead of them as clairvoyantly as Elvis Costello did on Watching the Detectives? The song appeared in 1977 but its writer has spent the decades since…

Lil B - Nice N Sleazy, Glasgow, Sun 6 May

22-year-old Berkeley rapper describes himself as ‘an art history project’

It must be the Californian in him, but the BASEDGOD, despite his lyrics about eating white booty, his VIP lifestyle, and his resemblance to Jesus/Michael Jordan/Miley Cyrus and Paris Hilton, is basically a hippie. Top off, shades on, tiny muscled torso…

An interview with Salsa Celtica

For anyone who’s not seen Salsa Celtica play live before, what can they expect? Great music, a really exciting gig with some amazing musicians from two very strong cultures and maybe a baby. I have forgotten how many times people have come back to us…

Ambitious outdoor arts festival Roofless

Artists Olivier Grossetete and Sumit Sarkar to create public art projects over the next year

They say if you’re going to think, think big, and that’s exactly what Roofless, Scotland’s all-new outdoor arts festival is doing, with impressive scale and great purpose. Plotted initially in five locations, and bringing together professional artists…

5 things you might not know about Jeremy Hardy

The Perrier award winner is antagonistic towards the far right

1 Hampshire lad Hardy got into the stand-up game in the early 80s and scooped the Perrier in 1988 beating off competition from fellow nominees such as Doug Anthony Allstars and Robert Llewellyn. 2 His radio show Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation was…