Articles

Elvis Costello - Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow, Fri 11 May

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

22 May 2012

‘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’

22 May 2012

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

22 May 2012

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

22 May 2012

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

22 May 2012

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…

First Writes - Elaine Proctor, author of Rhumba

The books tells the story of a Congolese boy’s life in London

22 May 2012

Give us five words to describe Rhumba? ‘They had horns and tails’. Can you name one author who should be more famous than they are now? Mark Gevisser is the brightest, most original witness to the complicated condition of being a global South…

Friends & Aluna George - King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow, Mon 7 May

Disco-tinged set of dazzling pop music

22 May 2012

‘Come closer,’ beckons Friends’ enigmatic frontwoman Samantha Urbani, as the Brooklyn quintet make their Glasgow debut. She means it too: blink and next thing, she’s on the floor, shimmying up to an exhilarated crowd. If the intimate touch hints at a…

Hannah Berry - Adamtine

A disconcerting horror comic from the creator of Britten and Brülightly

22 May 2012

British graphic novelist Hannah Berry’s near-perfect debut, Britten and Brülightly, was a detective yarn inspired by Graham Greene and Carol Reed. But the familiar post-war milieu was given a surreal comic twist with the inclusion of a character that…

Howard Marks in discussion event with MC5 manager John Sinclair

The two can offer different takes on the 1960s counter culture

22 May 2012

Every generation needs a figurehead to accentuate the fun side of drugs. From Thomas de Quincey to Sherlock Holmes and through to Timothy Leary, the Beatles and Bill Hicks, it’s not all been bad trips and cold turkey (if there any wags out there…

Scottish Ballet's Family Challenge Day

A fun event for the whole family to try out some basic ballet steps

22 May 2012

‘When you’re a parent, quite often you’ll do things with your child that you wouldn’t do on your own,’ says Catherine Cassidy, associate director of education at Scottish Ballet. How very true. Or at least that’s what Scottish Ballet is banking on, when…