Doug Johnstone

Scarce

Not even a coma can get in the way of rock 'n' roll

Rock’n’roll is peppered with hard luck stories, but few bands have had the rug pulled from under them quite like Scarce. In the mid-90s, the Rhode Island trio were on the cusp of great things – signed to A&M, critical acclaim, successful tours including…

Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll by John Harris

Pop miscellany from the former music mag hack

John Harris is best known these days as a face on Newsnight Review and a Guardian columnist, but this knockabout trawl through the world of musical myths and legends owes more to his days as an NME and Select magazine hack. More fun than the author’s…

Lost World by Patricia Melo

Casually brutal and utterly uncompromising, this Brazilian noir thriller is nerve-shreddingly compelling from start to grizzly finish. A sequel to The Killer, Patricia Melo’s 1995 novel, Lost World picks up the story of amoral ex-contract killer Maiquel…

Dizzee Heights - Dizzee Rascal interview

Erstwhile underground sensation, critical darling and now serial chart-topper Dizzee Rascal, aka Dylan Mills, has just notched up three MOBO Award nominations to complement his three consecutive number one singles. Fame has not phased him, however, and…

Five reasons to go and see the Pixies

1 Come on, do you really need this one spelled out? It’s The Pixies, man, alternative rock legends who formed in Boston in 1986 and split in 1993, leaving five studio albums which became hugely influential on shaping music for the next 20 years. 2…

The Leg - What Happened to the Shrunken Tina Turner

Edinburgh-based arthouse indie maverick Dan Mutch has provided flickers of genius in previous bands Khaya and Desc, but latest incarnation The Leg is wilfully obscure to vanishing point. Compared to their recent inventive collaboration with Dawn of the…

Strike the Colours - Seven Roads

(Deadlight Records) Jenny Reeve is a well-kent face in Scottish indie circles, having worked with Idlewild, Malcolm Middleton and The Reindeer Section in the past. This second album from her current project is a subtle and considered affair, a…

Circle of friends: Dot Allison

The muse-for-hire finds her own voice

There can be few better kept secrets in music than Dot Allison. The Edinburgh-born singer songwriter has been involved in exciting new music for over fifteen years, collaborating with all kinds of different artists as well as producing four acclaimed…

Four reasons to go see: Gang of Four

Post-punk, political legends come to Edinburgh

1 They’re post-punk legends Widely regarded as one of the leading lights of the post-punk movement which emerged in the late 70s, the Leeds foursome mixed the visceral energy of punk with elements of disco, funk, dub and reggae before anyone else…

Trust Me by Peter Leonard

Elmore's son serves up his second crime thriller

Having crime-writing legend Elmore Leonard as your dad is a lot to live up to, but with this bristling second fiction outing, son Peter almost keeps up the family name. Set in Detroit, with a cast of hapless, amoral baddies, his relentlessly-paced noir…

Part Chimp - Thriller

Imagine a supernova collapsing into a super-gravitational black hole, sucking in whole star systems, then eating pies and doughnuts for all eternity, and that still wouldn’t be as heavy as Part Chimp. This third album from the London…

J Tillman - Year in the Kingdom

Unknown to most, current Fleet Foxes drummer J Tillman is a prolific singer-songwriter in his own right, and this sixth solo outing is a companionable jaunt through a similar alt.folk hinterland to his day job. With fragile banjo, tremulous dulcimer…

Valerie Martin - The Confessions of Edward Day

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson) Valerie Martin has had great success as a purveyor of historical fiction, most notably with Mary Reilly, her retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde myth, and her Orange Prize-winning American slavery tale Property. This outing into…

Singles and downloads

Your tunes for the week

Sugababes are sexy and, bless ‘em, they want us to be sexy too, so they’re imploring us to ‘Get Sexy’ (Island) ●●. Strange, then, with all that sexy-talk in the air, the single should be an insipid rehashing of that deeply unsexy Right Said Fred song…

Yo La Tango - Popular Songs

Indie stalwarts return

(Matador) There was a time when a new offering from Yo La Tengo was reason to rejoice, but these days the Hoboken indie veterans seem to be distinctly treading water, slowly refining and reworking their past sound without creating anything too…

Money Can't Buy Music - The Universe For Beginners

Sweet and poignant

(Pony Proof) Annoyingly precious band name aside, this is a sweet and poignant little side project from Gordon McIntyre of Ballboy, this time collaborating with Swedish singer and multi-instrumentalist Maja Mangard. There’s no great departure from…

5 reasons to go and see: Fleet Foxes

1 They’re fleet You should see the five band members in their tracksuits, doing the hundred yard dash. Actually, the distinctly un-athletic looking band from the Seattle suburbs look as if they couldn’t walk up a hill slowly without reaching for the…

Brendan Benson - My Old, Familiar Friend

(Echo) After a four-year sojourn as right-hand man to pal Jack White in The Raconteurs, Detroit singer-songwriter Brendan Benson here returns to the day job, creating pristine and boisterous guitar pop influenced by The Cars and The Kinks. This fourth…

Joint Effort: Soulsavers and Mark Lanegan

The blues man joins forces with the electronica outfit

Gravelly voice-for-hire Mark Lanegan loves a good collaboration, from Isobel Campbell to Queens of the Stone Age to fellow grunge veteran Greg Dulli, but how did he come to be singing with English production and remix duo Soulsavers? ‘I’ve been a big…

Singles and Downloads

The good and less good of what's out this week

Art Brut - ‘DC Comics & Chocolate Milkshakes’, Eric Hassle - ‘Don’t Bring Flowers’, Jack Penate - ‘Pull My Heart Away’, Lily Allen - ‘22’, Biffy Clyro ‘That Golden Rule’

5 Reasons to go see: Bill Callahan

The American alt-rocker plays Stereo in Glasgow. Here's why you should see him.

Faith No More

They were true rock subversives and are back to blow our minds.

It’s almost impossible these days to imagine just how bad things were, but rock music was a fucking embarrassment in the early 80s. The collapse of the dinosaur rock behemoths of the previous decade into hopelessly bloated, overblown, self-important…

Chika Unigwe

Learning how much shame there is in luxury

The depiction of prostitutes in fiction can be a one-dimensional affair, but not in Chika Unigwe’s poignant and moving novel On Black Sisters’ Street. Unigwe was raised in Nigeria, but has spent the last decade in Belgium, and it was a culture shock…

James Kelman

Striking deep into the Scottish soul

There can be few Scottish writers as lauded as James Kelman, and rightly so. The Glasgow-born author has spent a career carving out a place as the authentic voice of his generation, his use of stream-of-consciousness prose and vernacular Scots…

Alistair Morgan: Sleeper’s Wake

This is a breathtaking debut novel from a young South African writer which asks deep questions about grief, pain, love and life, and does so in a story that is almost unbearably tense and fraught with unspoken, complicated emotions, yet is also…