Kevin Bridges

going out

KEVIN BRIDGES

You’ll have to move fast to get a ticket for any of . . . oh wait, no, Kevin Bridges’ near monthlong residency at the enormodome that is OVO Hydro is utterly and completely sold out. Probably has been since 15 minutes after booking opened. No doubt some people are popping along at least twice, probably fearful of being sat next to the kind of professional heckler who has halted his shows in the past. But still, these are mind-boggling numbers which will act as either an inspiration or be utterly deflating to anyone trying to make their way in the stand-up game. (Brian Donaldson) n OVO Hydro, Glasgow, Thursday 1–Sunday 25 September.

With a prized opening slot at Scotland’s biggest techno night, DJ LISALÖÖF is one to watch. She talks to Malcolm Jack about the challenges of making a name for herself and pays tribute to those who have championed her career

‘W hen you get invited time after time to play with Slam,’ muses Lisa Brown aka fast-rising Paisley techno DJ and producer LISALÖÖF, ‘you’re like: “OK, I must be doing something right here’.” And yet you need only wind back five years or so to a time when Brown had never so much as worked a set of decks, much less performed in some of the biggest rooms in Glasgow as frequent guests of, among others, Scotland’s godfathers of electronic dance, producer/DJ duo Stuart McMillan and Orde Meikle (of T In The Park Slam Tent fame and cofounders of the Soma label).

It’s thanks to the tutorship, mentoring and support of an array of wise and experienced heads on the Glasgow scene since 2017 that Brown has advanced rapidly as a purveyor of delectably dark and hypnotic beats. This journey will continue when she opens Slam’s legendary and highly influential techno night Pressure as it makes its return to SWG3. The event is an afterparty for the Soma Skool 2022 electronic music conference and showcase, with a line-up headlined by Spanish old-school rave aficionado Héctor Oaks and young retro-techno German powerhouse KlangKuenstler.

Brown often attended Pressure as a punter back when it was still a regular night at Glasgow’s much-missed underground mecca, The Arches, where it ran monthly from 1998 through to the venue’s closure in 2015; since then, it has become a nomadic and more sporadic affair. ‘It’s just such an important event to me because that was kind of how I started getting into techno music,’ reminisces Brown, whose tastes to that point had flitted from happy hardcore in her teens to post-rock and metal in her student years (she played guitar and bass in a couple of different bands while studying in Dundee). It was at the afterparties that she first got a taste for choosing tunes for a crowd. ‘We were going back to parties and all that, and getting the aux cable on the go, and just playing loads of tunes,’ remembers Brown. ‘Everyone was always really impressed by my songs.’

After hearing DJ friends play tracks in clubs which she knew that she’d turned them on to, Brown decided to have a go for herself. But lacking the confidence to dive straight in, particularly at a time when women were still a relatively uncommon sight behind the decks, she began by attending weekly DJ lessons at Grassroots Glasgow, run by renowned DJ, promoter and disruptor Sarra Wild.

Later, she went to an Intersessions workshop run by Producergirls collective founder E.M.M.A and Glaswegian-Slovenian rave shaman Maya Medvesek aka Nightwave. All of them have been major champions of women and nonbinary DJs. Brown quickly stood out for her instinct and commitment, making connections and friends which still last to this day. ‘I don’t think it would have happened for me without them,’ she admits.

Via a short stint promoting her own club night Moonlight, Brown, who is a social worker by day with a burgeoning sideline in craft beer brewing (‘very middle-aged man vibes,’ she laughs), has gone on to guest and headline at some of the best underground nights and clubs around Scotland. From Nightwave’s Nightrave at Room 2 to Acid Flash at The Tunnels in Aberdeen and Boiler Room’s Open Dancefloors series at Fat Sam’s in Dundee, she has progressed to gigs in bigger rooms, including opening for Charlotte de Witte at SWG3 in 2020.

She can’t seem to recall the very first time Slam invited her to do one of their events (‘I must have been absolutely fucked,’ she jokes, ‘or just nervous and traumatised’). But she impressed enough that she’s been asked back repeatedly, including at Riverside Festival, Return To Mono and last year’s Pressure Halloween special together with Shoot Your Shot and Optimo (Espacio).

‘Lisa is a top party-starter, playing deep and dark,’ says Slam’s Orde Meikle. ‘She’s a real talent; building things up is such an important and underestimated skill. Knowing when to bang it and when to create atmosphere comes naturally to her. It’s great to see her profile building since last year.’

Meikle reveals that the frequency of Pressure nights will be picking up a little again, with another two planned this year as well as a couple at the start of 2023. ‘We are itching for this first big Pressure of the season,’ he says, ‘which for clubs in Glasgow starts when the students return and the nights start getting darker earlier.’

Meikle notes that since lockdown restrictions were lifted, crowds have been very up for it. ‘Togetherness on a dancefloor is tribal and primitive, and humans need interactions like this. Even with the advances of media and online socialising, physical contact and shared experience is vital and fun. The atmosphere has been better than ever. Long may that continue.’

Pressure, SWG3, Glasgow, Saturday 3 September.

Pressure points

‘I'd like to break the 100 metres world record’

Superstar scientist Brian Cox has become the go-to guy for explaining the universe’s mysteries to an awestruck general public. Ahead of his new state-of-the art arena tour, the good professor tells Rachel Cronin about black holes, the meaning of life and outrunning Usain Bolt

Do you feel any pressure when discussing big questions

about the universe? A central part of the show is that we don’t know the answers to many of your questions. I’m always careful to draw a line between what we know is true, and what is my opinion. So, I’m very comfortable talking about my opinion on some of these big questions. That’s the first step on the road to knowledge, to accept that you don't know. And so, when we start talking, for example, about the origin of life, we have some theories. And then the theories are based on interesting observations about life on Earth, and what we know about the evolution of life on it.

How are you delving deeper into these huge subjects since your last world tour in 2019? It’s a very different feel. It’s trying to go much deeper and focus on these questions of what it means to be human in this vast and possibly infinite universe, which I didn’t do before. Since 2019, there’s been a revolution in our understanding of black holes. So, I talk about black holes a lot in the show, because they are one of the most interesting things in the universe, in the sense that we don’t understand them. But we’re making really rapid progress. We’re beginning to ask questions about the nature of space and time themselves. And a lot of that work was done in 2019, 2020 and 2021. So the subject has moved really quickly since I last did a live show. Also, we’re going to have some new results, which are going to go into the show, from the James Webb space telescope. There are new images coming all the time of the surface of Mars that we didn’t have in 2019. It’s very exciting.

Do you think that people are going to be looking for answers, now more than ever, after the past few years

of uncertainty with the pandemic? My friend Robin Ince is in the show and the Q&A to provide some comedic relief. But at the end, he reads a poem that he wrote during lockdown when he was looking at the stars. Like many of us, you know, he had nothing to do but think about the universe. So certainly, for him there was a reflection of life that went on. Maybe that did happen to many people. I think it’s a time that’s affected everybody that went through it, isn’t it? This is a really strange period of our existence.

The show has been described as a celebration of civilisation due to its use of music and art as well as science. Do you believe that music, art and culture are all science? I wouldn’t say that. What I would say is that science is one of the reactions we have to nature. And so I think the right way to look at science is that it’s something that takes place alongside the other human responses to being human. You can’t understand what

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it is to be human without knowing our place in the universe, in knowing how many stars there are in our galaxy, and how many planets and galaxies are out there. So, music and philosophy and art are all in the show alongside the science because we’re trying to make sense of the universe. That’s what humans do. We spend our whole lives trying to make sense of our lives.

Your last arena tour broke two Guinness World Records for the most tickets sold for a science tour. If you could break any other Guinness World Record,

what would you pick? Wow. You know, I think I’d like to break a sporting record, because it’s just so out of the question! I’d love to run 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt. Why wouldn’t you want to achieve something physically, that no one has ever achieved? So, I’d like to break the 100 metres world record. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?

Brian Cox: Horizons – A 21st Century Space Odyssey, Edinburgh Playhouse, Thursday 1 September; OVO Hydro, Glasgow, Sunday 2 October.

CLASSIC CUT: ¡THREE AMIGOS!

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Any fans of Only Murders In The Building who watch this 1986 US comedy will surely experience a special feeling inside as they see the much younger Martin Short and Steve Martin hamming it up deliciously. They play, respectively, Ned Nederlander and Lucky Day, two of the titular trio; the undoubtedly talented Chevy Chase has gone a slightly different route in recent years . . . maybe the less said about that the better.

Then again, was Steve Martin ever considered young? Even in his 80s heyday, he always had the air of an older brother or a slightly eccentric uncle. In this John Landis-directed farce, our threesome are silent movie stars mistaken for genuine gun-totin’ heroes who are tasked with saving a Mexican village from nasty bandit El Guapo (Alfonso Arau).

Cue a series of ridiculous incidents as they themselves believe this is just another film job and are merely playing out a set of fictionalised encounters with pretend gang members. No one is claiming that this is a work of genius (it’s certainly no Man With Two Brains or The Jerk, two of Martin’s finest hour and a halves of the period) but it’s absolutely a fun and silly ride. (Brian Donaldson) n GFT, Glasgow, Monday 12 September, shown as part of the cinema’s Access Film Club programme of monthly autism-friendly screenings and post-film discussions.