The Skinny April 2021 by The Skinny

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April 2021 Issue 183

Living in a Bubble Pictish Trail's year on Eigg

January 2020

Books

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Art January 2020

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The Skinny's desert island discs Marvin Gaye — What's Going On? Sylvester — Over and Over Outkast — ATLiens Pulp — We Can Dance Again TV on the Radio — Golden Age Boards of Canada — Peacock Tail LCD Soundsystem — 45:33 The Velvet Underground — Ocean John Martyn — Solid Air Mary Clark — Take Me I'm Yours Todd Terje — Inspector Norse Weezer — Only In Dreams The Chemical Brothers — It Doesn't Matter America — Sister Golden Hair My Chemical Romance — It's Not a Fashion Statement, It's a Deathwish Listen to this playlist on Spotify — search for 'The Skinny Office Playlist' or scan the below code

Issue 183, April 2021 © Radge Media Ltd. Get in touch: E: hello@theskinny.co.uk

April 2021

The Skinny is Scotland's largest independent entertainment & listings magazine, and offers a wide range of advertising packages and affordable ways to promote your business. Get in touch to find out more. E: sales@theskinny.co.uk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the explicit permission of the publisher. The views and opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the printer or the publisher. Printed by DC Thomson & Co. Ltd, Dundee ABC verified Jan – Dec 2019: 28,197

printed on 100% recycled paper

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Championing creativity in Scotland

Meet the team We asked – What seemingly minor event / experience / thing has brightened your lockdown? Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief "Married at First Sight Australia Season 6. DM to discuss."

Peter Simpson Digital Editor, Food & Drink Editor "My hand-shaped highlighter pen; each of the five fingers is a different colour."

Anahit Behrooz Events Editor "Learning to ride a bike! The world (Edinburgh's cycle paths) are my oyster."

Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist "I had a transcendent moment with a chill fox on the Ferry Road cycle path last summer. I've been carrying a Peperami in my jacket pocket ever since, just in case I run into the wee ginger legend again."

Tallah Brash Music Editor "The lovely lady who served me so patiently in the Murrayfield Sainsbury's one time when I was doing my weekly shop. It sounds ridiculous, but she was like an actual angel in a supermarket of chaos."

Nadia Younes Clubs Editor "The Debenhams closing down sale (sad that it closed but glad for all the cheap skincare)."

Polly Glynn Comedy Editor "We've just got a kitten and he is THE BEST. Also, remembering Milky Way Crispy Rolls exist. Our pal keeps scouring supermarkets for them and sending them to friends in need!"

Katie Goh Intersections Editor "Growing veg. #farmergoh"

Eliza Gearty Theatre Editor "Growing small green things."

Heather McDaid Books Editor "My little one smashing what noise a dinosaur makes."

Production

Rachael Hood Art Director, Production Manager "Swimming in the ice cold sea. I've said it once and I'll say it again, it makes you feel ALIVE!"

Adam Benmakhlouf Art Editor "Cutting a passable fade this week on my second go at selfbarbering. A heady cocktail of feeling clever and looking sharp."

Sales & Business

Phoebe Willison Designer "My dad cleared out his sock drawer and I got about 12 pairs of brand new socks (slightly large)."

Sandy Park Commercial Director "Learning the various cycle paths of Leith and Edinburgh like the back of my hand. If you need directions on a path in North Edinburgh, I'm your man."

Tom McCarthy Creative Projects Manager "Finally defeating my arch nemesis, Logan Ravenclaw!"

George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist "As much as I feel like everything in lockdown is seemingly major, no matter how minor, in the absence of Anything Happening At All... bulk eco-friendly toilet paper from Who Gives a Crap."

Laurie Presswood General Manager "Bagels."

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Editorial Words: Rosamund West

t feels like most of our issues since our return in September have been themed around creativity in isolation, in one way or another. It has been very much the common thread during these successive months of seclusion and separation from the ‘world as we knew it’, and the opportunity to document this weird time of adaptation and innovation has been an interesting privilege. This month we come, we hope, full circle, as our delayed cover star of April 2020 finally graces these pages with a shoot from the before-times. Pictish Trail, aka Johnny Lynch, shares tales of life on Eigg in a pandemic, adapting Lost Map records to a world without live performance and hopes for a return to touring. The second of our longform features produced in partnership with Edinburgh International Festival is a deep dive into the history of Scottish fiddle music and its links with a seafaring tradition connecting musicians from Shetland and Orkney with the Cree of the North American Arctic. The pitch contained probably the most evocative opening lines I have ever received. ‘Picture tons and tons of blubber. Dreary hours at sea, punctured by moments of intense butchery and violence. In this seascape of weary sailors and whale oil – the fiddle, the musical instrument mastered by Scottish whalers.’ The finished piece absolutely lives up to its promise, read it. In another long-delayed feature, this time due to the ever-changing film release schedule, we examine Nomadland and how this tale of contemporary economic migrants interrogates the American dream. As Glasgow Short Film Festival presents another online programme, Film editor Jamie speaks to a selection of this year’s rising stars.

This month we also present the outcomes of our new Food & Drink Writing Competition. The results are four beautiful pieces of writing, one long feature and three short, meditating on different aspects of food, life, memory, and crisps. No one is really sure what this summer will look like. As we await announcements from Edinburgh’s various festivals, we ask a selection of comedians for their thoughts on what a better Fringe could look like after this extended period of reflection and revelation. We also meet Angolan producer Nazar to hear about his last work under that moniker, for Counterflows festival, and his new project, Yaera. As they prepare to release their collaborative album, No Place Like It, we talk to some of the musicians and young people involved in the Glasgow-based, award-winning songwriting project Ensemble. Author Helen McClory introduces her affecting new novel, Bitterhall. And Local Heroes’ design column investigates the creative possibilities of rug tufting, which it turns out is very much A Thing, facilitated by pneumatic tools and Instagram videos. In Intersections, we explore the still-terrible experience of dating apps for trans people. One writer considers the experience of lockdown in their childhood home, and how Top of the Pops reruns offered an insight into who their parents were before they knew them. We are *relatively* hopeful that this will be the last issue of the magazine without any in-person events. Creative isolation has been fascinating and all, but we’d also like a May involving some galleries, an open air gig and maybe a beer garden.

April 2021 — Chat

Cover Artist Fiona Hunter

Fiona Hunter is a photographer and designer. She enjoys telling stories through her images, taking inspiration from colour, texture, vulnerability, and life’s in-between moments. She is a member of the Street Level Photoworks's New Photographers Guild, and currently living in the Netherlands. fehunter.com @bad.girl.fifi

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This month’s columnist explores finding his way through life with the music of Aretha Franklin

Love Bites

Love Bites: On Aretha Franklin Words: Sam Gonçalves

April 2021 — Chat

fell in love with Aretha Franklin when I was 13. The first album I bought was her Greatest Hits collection, which I listened to so much that the case eventually came apart in my hands. Her music helped me find ways of comprehending what I felt, even before I could speak English and understand the words. The melodies would move me from place to place. When I closed my eyes, the ups and downs of her vocal range felt like flying through an intricate landscape. It moved me through exhilaration and anxiety. Through growing up. Through falling in love and out of it. Through anger and inspiration. Aretha’s performances helped pave a path for an anxious kid to feel his way through the world. From the isolation of immigrating to a new country when I was 17, to the isolation of COVID lockdowns when I was 30. It even helped me learn English when I needed it (you’d be surprised at how many of her songs spell a word like R-E-S-P-E-C-T). She became a mother at 12 and then again at 14. She knew grief and she knew oppression, but she also knew how to fight. She offered to post bail for Angela Davis. She sang at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral and Barack Obama’s inauguration. Ms. Franklin knew the world, you could hear it in her voice. But she also weaved the introspective emotional tapestry of living in that world and its soulful melancholia. In my favourite video of Aretha, shot just before she passed, she’s messing about on the piano at home. Her improvisation goes from sacred to silly, in a bid to amuse her granddaughter – who you can hear laugh in the background. A maker of worlds, so late in life, still reaching kids who need those worlds created for them.

Crossword Solutions Across 9. WELLERMAN 10. MUNCH 11. LOG IN 12. GRETA 13. OWL 14. CHEAT CODE 17. HONES 18. THE PICTISH TRAIL 20. TRICK 21. FIDUCIARY 23. LES 24. LEITH 26. NO WAY 28. SHREK 29. HARPER LEE Down 1. AWOL 2. PLAGUE 3. HEWN 4. SMUG 5. UNRELEASED 6. EMPATHETIC 7. INSOMNIA 8. CHILD'S PLAY 14. CUT IT CLOSE 15. THINK ALIKE 16. OUT OF SIGHT 19. EMISSARY 22. AT WILL 25. HERD 26. NEED 27. YVES

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Heads Up

Fingers (and literally everything else) crossed, this is the last month of digital only events, but what a way to go out. From zine festivals to theatre galore, Scotland’s arts scene continues to deliver. Compiled by Anahit Behrooz

Heads Up

Photo: Portis Wasp

Image: Courtesy of Femspectives

Femspectives Online, 23-25 Apr The third edition of Glasgow’s feminist film festival Femspectives revolves around dreaming, platforming hidden gems from contemporary and classic cinema that delve into the dark recesses of the past, and look forward to an imagined, ephemeral future. Highlights include Alanis Obomsawin’s Our People Will Be Healed, a striking depiction of a Canadian indigenous community, and Réka Szabó’s The Euphoria of Being, an intimate exploration of trauma and memory.

The Euphoria of Being

Image: Courtesy of Iberodocs

Online, 1-30 Apr

Map of Latin American Dreams Image: Courtesy of Alchemy Film and Arts

April 2021 — Chat

Photo: Matthew Williams Glasgow Zine Fest

Online Summerhall is turning ten, and lockdown isn’t stopping them from pulling out all the appropriate birthday stops. 10 Years of Summerhall, their new digital exhibition, brings together specially commissioned visual art and writing to celebrate the beloved venue’s place in Edinburgh’s arts landscape: expect poetry by Andrés N Ordorica and Jenni Fagan, a music-video installation by SAY Award nominee SHHE, and a LEGO Summerhall reconstruction by Tammy Watchorn.

SHHE

Glasgow Zine Fest Glasgow Zine Library are going all out this year, with a month-long zine festival celebrating self-publishing and creation from the margins. Their programme is packed full of talks, workshops, and a digital zine fair: learn how to design and make a felt protest banner, explore British-Pakistani migration history through found cassettes, or settle in for a cosy zine making session.

10 Years of Summerhall

Alchemy Softer Ayanna Dozier

IberoDocs Online, 19 Apr-2 May Responding to the current vulnerability of the creative sector, this year’s edition of IberoDocs – Scotland’s Ibero-American film festival – explores the idea of Art As Need through 20 feature-length and short film documentaries that challenge society’s conceptualisation of artists. Highlights include artist’s road movie Map of Latin American Dreams and Nothing But the Sun, a unique portrayal of the longsilenced culture of the Ayoreo people.

Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival Online, 29 Apr-3 May This year’s edition of Alchemy Film and Moving Image features over 171 films, as well as a programme of live screenings, talks, and specially commissioned non-film works from artists including Jade Montserrat and Harry Josephine Giles. Highlights include the world premiere of Charlie Chaplin Lived Here, a new documentary by Edinburgh-based artists Louise Milne and Sean Martin, and a programme of shorts on race and the environment.

Image: Courtesy of Lyceum Theatre

Online, 29 Apr, 7:30pm Photo: Henry Kenyon

Image: Courtesy of Angus Ross

First Light, Scottish Ensemble

Tennis Elbow by John Byrne Sutherland Chair, Angus Ross

Tennis Elbow

Adjust/Adapt

Max Baillie at Scottish Ensemble

City Art Centre, Online, Until 24 Apr — 8 —

Lyceum Theatre, 30 Apr-8 May, Various times

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Tramway, Online, 15 Apr Originally conceptualised as a live choreographic performance exploring gay men’s relationship to capitalism, premiering in April 2020, the events of the pandemic have radically shifted GAYBOYS narrative direction. The result is an experimental 20-minute film interrogating queer exploitation and rainbow capitalism showcased on Tramway TV, followed by a two week stint on Tramway’s Instagram TV channel.

Photo: Gareth Fuller/Press Association, via Associated Press

Photo: Daniel Hughes

Craig Manson: GAYBOYS: THE MOVIE

Modern Natures GAYBOYS, Craig Manson

Online, w/c 26 Apr (date TBC)

Photo: Douglas Robertson

Adura Onashile

Modern Nature #2: My garden’s boundaries are the horizon CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Online, 10 Apr, 11am A newly established reading group and gardening club for the queer community, Modern Nature is organised by Glasgow Artists Moving Image Studios and the CCA’s Glasgow Seed Library and takes inspiration from filmmaker and nature-lover Derek Jarman, delving into his writings and films and exploring the ways in which his garden methodologies – from cuttings and foraging to beachcombing – can be explored as queered.

Heads Up

Written and directed by Adura Onashile in collaboration with Adebusola Ramsay, Niroshini Thambar, Dr Peggy Brunache, and the National Theatre of Scotland, Ghosts is a storytelling app drawing on poetry, theatre, and history to explore Scotland’s collective amnesia of slavery and empire. A uniquely immersive experience, the story leads its audience physically and narratively through the streets of the Merchant City and its legacy of Black resistance.

Image: Courtesy of Rachel Chung

Photo: Eoin Carey

Ghosts

Gallathea, Rachel Chung Image: Courtesy of Amina Muslim Women's Resource Centre

Gallathea, The Show Must Go Online Online, 21 Apr, 7pm Directed by Edinburgh-based playwright and theatre director Rachel Chung, this performance of John Lyly’s Gallathea is part of The Show Must Go Online theatre series – a collection of live digital rehearsed readings of early modern drama – and explores the play’s latent queerness through a bold new direction and majority LGBTQIA+ cast and creative team.

Lizabett Russo

Lizabett Russo and Graeme Stephen: Ensemble Eòrpa

Life in the Time

Online, 15 Apr, 7pm

Edinburgh Printmakers, Online, Until 11 Apr Launched in celebration of International Women's Day, this gorgeous online exhibition features newly created artworks by five of Edinburgh Printmakers' residents: Maya Hollis, Kristin Nordhøy and Jenny Pope, Ruth Ewan and Moyna Flanigan. Collectively, their work explores how to harness the power of printmaking for social justice and reframe the use of photography in print, with all pieces available to buy online.

Traverse Theatre, Online, 13-18 Apr

Created in collaboration with artists Annie George, Katherine MacKinnon, and Raman Mundair and presented in partnership with institutions including Aberdeen Arts Centre, DCA, and Traverse Theatre, this exhibition produced by Amina Muslim Women’s Resource Centre showcases artwork created through a series of curated online sessions, offering a unique snapshot of pandemic life as seen through the eyes of Muslim and BME women.

Sarah Bernstein: The Coming Bad Days Lighthouse Books, Online, 29 Apr, 7pm

Photo: David Wilkinson Empirical Photography

Photo: Robin Irvine

Photo: Marieke Bosma

The Journey

Foxglove, Maya Hollis

Amina Muslim Women's Resource Centre, until 26 Apr

Nazar

Counterflows At Home Scott Silven in The Journey

Sarah Bernstein

Online, 1-30 Apr — 9 —

April 2021 — Chat

An exciting moment in musical performance innovation, this digital gig sees Scotland-based folk-jazz musicians Lizabett Russo and Graeme Stephen and instrumentalists Oene Van Geel, Silke Eberhard, Marius Mihalache and Nedjalko Nedjalkov perform their new collaborative album Ensemble Eòrpa from locations across Europe. Featuring new compositions written during an arts residency with Deveron Projects, details of the performance can be found on Deveron Projects’ website.

Image: Courtesy of Maya Hollis

Choose to Challenge

March 2021

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5 Meet the Team — 6 Editorial — 7 Love Bites — 8 Heads Up 12 Crossword — 36 Intersections — 39 Music — 41 Film & TV 42 Books — 45 Comedy — 46 The Skinny On… Molly Linen

Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Fiona Hunter; Nomadland; Maisy Summer Lewin-Sanderson; Helen McClory; T_U_F_T; Marieke Bosma; Beth Chalmers; Daneielle Rhoda; James Price; Do No Harm; Hide This for Me; Ida Hernich

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16 Pictish Trail aka Johnny Lynch on Dream Wall, Lost Map’s PostMap Club and life on Eigg during a pandemic. 19 How Oscars frontrunner Nomadland subverts the American dream. 20 A deep dive into the history of Scottish fiddle music via the stories of Shetland whalers and Orcadian fur traders who harnessed creativity in isolation at sea, taking their influence across the Atlantic. 23 Helen McClory discusses her chilling neo-gothic novel, Bitterhall. 24 The Local Heroes design column talks to three designers about rug tufting as a form of expression. 26 Angolan producer Nazar speaks about his work for Counterflows festival and his new project, Yaera. 27 We meet with some of the musicians and young people involved in the Glasgow-based, award-winning songwriting project Ensemble. 28 Behold, the results of our Food & Drink Writing Competition! This series of thoughtful and moving pieces includes a meditation on the subtle art of the grocery list; an ode to burnt toast; a celebration of crisps; and a proposal for a Museum of Flavour. 31 Glasgow writer-director James Price on being the Springburn Scorcese. 32 We speak to some of the filmmakers behind our favourite shorts at this year’s Glasgow Short Film Festival. 35 We catch up with Bilal Zafar, Eleanor Morton, Tom Mayhew, Chloe Petts and Sikisa about what the ‘new normal’ should be for future Edinburgh Fringes. 37 Why dating apps still suck for trans people.

On the website... A look at the empowering themes of the Tracy Beaker reboot, more from Glasgow Short Film Festival, and a second chance to watch our Future of Theatre livestream

March 2021 — Contents

Features

THE SKINNY

Games 1

Across

Down

9. 19th century sea shanty made recently popular on TikTok (9) 10. Edvard ___ (d.1944), painter of The Scream (5) 11. Access a device or digital platform (with credentials) (3,2) 12. ___ Garbo (d.1990), Swedish-American actress (5) 13. Spooky-sounding, head-spinning night hooter (3) 14. A secret series of inputs in a video game, usually to make it easier (5,4) 17. Sharpens – perfects (5) 18. Our cover star Johnny Lynch's moniker before he dropped the definite article (3,7,5) 20. Hoodwink (5) 21. Trustee – I, acid fury (anag) (9) 23. ___ Paul, an electric guitar made by Gibson (3) 24. Port of Edinburgh (5) 26. Not a chance! (2,3) 28. Ogre once protective of his swamp (5) 29. Author (d.2016) of To Kill A Mockingbird (6,3)

1. Missing (acronym) (4) 2. Fast-spreading contagious disease (6) 3. Cleaved (4) 4. Self-satisfied (4) 5. Not (yet) published (10) 6. Compassionate (10) 7. Sleeplessness (8) 8. A walk in the park (6,4) 14. Finish just in time (3,2,5) 15. Great minds do this, apparently (5,5) 16. Not visible (3,2,5) 19. Envoy (8) 22. Freely (2,4) 25. Large group of animals (4) 26. Require (4) 27. ___ Saint Laurent (d.2008), French fashion designer (4)

Compiled by George Sully

April 2021 — Chat

Can you find these words in this puzzle? GOODFELLAS ARETHA FRANKLIN ENSEMBLE HINGE RUG TUFTING EIGG WHALES SHETLAND COUNTERFLOWS CRISPS PENNE PASTA SEA SHANTIES THE RAG TRADE BITTERHALL TOP OF THE POPS NOMADLAND

They could be horizontal, vertical or diagonal

Turn to page 7 for the solutions

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April 2021

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Creative Isolation Illustration: Rachael Hood

ictish Trail’s Johnny Lynch was supposed to be on our cover last April, until… everything was cancelled for more than one year. In a very different interview, he talks about a year at home on the even-moreremote-than-usual Eigg, Lost Map Records and adapting to *all of this.* In the second of our long-form Edinburgh International Festivalsupported features, we take a deep and mesmerising dive into the history of Scottish fiddle music and its links to the long isolation of whaling journeys to the Canadian Arctic. As Nomadland finally reaches UK screens, we consider how this tale of solitary gig economy workers travelling the US interrogates the myth of the American dream.

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April 2021 – Feature

Music

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A Good Eigg With a new EP due this month, we catch up with Pictish Trail’s Johnny Lynch to talk about life on Eigg during a pandemic, and how Lost Map’s PostMap Club has been the shining jewel in the label’s crown

Music

Interview: Tallah Brash Photography: Fiona Hunter

“I

“I think one thing this year’s taught me is that we don’t need to do everything at once” Johnny Lynch Luckily, Lynch is gifted when it comes to creating hopeful and joyful sounding music in the face of adversity. He turned anger and grief into hope on 2016’s Future Echoes. In the shadow of political unrest, Thumb World unapologetically leaned into what Lynch referred to as “classic cliches” in our 2019 chat: “Writing about being trapped inside our phones, and being a dad, is such a classic musician who becomes a dad cliche, and I just thought, ‘fuck it, embrace it!’”. But like most things in the past year the phrase ‘thumb world’ has taken on new meaning as we’ve all been forced to stare at screens more than ever, with the word ‘doomscrolling’ having firmly set up shop in our vocabulary. So we take it in our stride when Lynch describes the new music he’s been working on as “quite aggressive” and “quite uptempo”. He tells us that he’s been watching a lot of early 90s wrestling videos on YouTube and listening to a lot of early Chk Chk Chk records (“pining for the music of my early 20s”), and describes his writing sessions as being him screaming into a hairbrush in front of a mirror. “[It’s all] quite angry and frustrated,” he says. ”The songs are all centred around building up tension and then having a big release.” While that sounds ideal for a post-pandemic party, it’s still early days for the fifth Pictish Trail LP. This month, however, he’s releasing his new Dream Wall EP, featuring one all-new track alongside three Thumb World remixes and a remix of Dream Wall itself.

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April 2021 – Feature

t certainly has felt like being in a total bubble here.” Living on the remote Isle of Eigg, with a population of only around 100 people, isolation is something Johnny Lynch is all too familiar with. “In a weird way life on Eigg hasn’t changed that much. The biggest changes have been that the tearoom has closed, and the nursery is closed, so my whole year really has been childcare, which has been great,” he says wryly. Towards the end of our WhatsApp video call in February there’s a bit of commotion in the background. Lynch’s two young children have just left the house, and he enters the room where they’ve been playing and turns the camera around exclaiming: “The kids have gone and look, they’ve left an absolute bombsite! This is nursery life. It’s kinda what it looks like after a Howlin’ Fling except it’s actual people instead of stuffed animals.” This horror scene will be all too familiar for parents up and down the country who have been working from home around homeschooling duties. For Lynch, who usually spends a lot of time at work on the road as Pictish Trail, he’s remarkably calm and accepting of the chaos the past year has brought, welcoming the time he’s been gifted at home. “It’s really good,” he enthuses, “because there’d be times where I’d be away for a gig and I would notice the changes happening in my daughter, and with [my son]. You’d come back and they’d look a bit different, and it’s like ‘Oh wow, they’ve changed’, whereas now I’m living with those changes. “Even with Eigg! Often I’ll be away and I’ll miss the slight changing of the season. [Sometimes] I’ll be away for three or four weeks at a time, and the whole island has changed,” he says. “It’s the first time in ten years where I’ve actually got to witness the slow change.” We initially spoke with Lynch towards the end of 2019, a few weeks after an hilarious wardrobe malfunction in Norwich had resulted in him getting down to his underpants onstage. He was out on one of those many weeks-long excursions, supporting Steve Mason on his UK tour and had just announced that his fourth album as Pictish Trail, Thumb World, would be arriving in February 2020. This news came in tandem with the announcement of his biggest headline show to date at St Luke’s that January as part of Celtic Connections, with an even bigger show announced shortly after as part of a full band UK tour in the spring. While Celtic Connections went ahead untouched by COVID, by the time the other shows were due to happen, the country was in full lockdown. “I would’ve loved to have gone and done the shows, obviously, but there’s also a bit in my brain that activates itself before any tour, and it’s just like, ‘Oh God, you can still pull out. You don’t have to do this’,” Lynch admits. “That was quite a relief to begin with but then as things have gone on, it’s hard to know when the end is in sight. With the tour getting pushed back by another year, am I still promoting the same album at that point?”

April 2021 – Feature

Music

THE SKINNY

But Dream Wall isn’t the ‘screaming-into-a-hairbrush’ number you might expect; it’s actually a really old song. “It even mentions Cellardyke, from the days I was living in Fife,” Lynch tells us. “I recorded it on an old CD-R back in the day and when we were recording Thumb World, we had a bit of extra time.” Despite being thematically linked with Thumb World, Dream Wall didn’t originally make the cut as Lynch felt there were already enough ballads on the record. We’re glad, then, that it’s now seeing the light of day in this concise collection of songs which also beautifully showcases some of the other talents on Lynch’s Lost Map imprint, as well as friends of the label. Callum Easter and Bamboo each give completely different makeovers to the twinkling Slow Memories, while new kid on the block Kinbote reworks Pig Nice, and Good Dog’s Suse Bear masterfully turns Dream Wall into a “weird little hypnagogic hyperpop tune.” The way the remixes came about over the course of a year was organic, and Lynch sees putting them out together as a neat “full stop” on Thumb World. “When I knew the tour was gonna get moved again, and I was gonna start on some other music, I thought this is a nice way to bring the story of that album to a close,” he says, “and it just felt like it was a good way to involve the PostMap Club as well, which has really been the story of our year.” PostMap Club is Lost Map’s subscription club. Each month they post members postcards with download codes for new music, and an actual physical newsletter penned by Lynch (“So you’ve witnessed my breakdown already then through the newsletters,” he jokes when we say we enjoy reading them). The newsletters often include exclusive discount codes on other Lost Map wares via their Bandcamp page, you receive a membership badge when you first join, and there’s even a monthly PostMap Podcast to bring it all together. “The PostMap Club has been really amazing,” Lynch says. “Since lockdown last year, it’s literally doubled the number of supporters, and people are paying higher tiers now as well... For a label [where] a lot of our running costs were covered by the live events we put on, with those live events gone we were thinking, ‘Oh crap, what are we going to do?’, and actually, PostMap Club has come in and filled that gap and showed that there is an audience who are willing to support what we’re doing. “Most importantly,” he adds, “it’s a really great way of involving the musicians on the label.” Throughout our chat, talk often moves to Lost Map artists, something Lynch is passionate about. He lights up recalling the month music arrived in his inbox from Kinbote, Sulka and Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business,

three artists who have now all been introduced to the label through the PostMap Club. “All of it blew me away and it’s exactly the sort of stuff that I really love.” PostMap Club has also been vital for keeping the Lost Map community connected while the nation has been in and out of flux, and for a label like Lost Map, with community at the heart of everything it does, it has proved to be a vital lifeline. For the small community that resides on Eigg, life has remained remarkably unchanged. Lynch tells us they’ve even managed to have some socially distant gatherings – including a ceilidh – in the past year. We ask if he thinks there’s a future on Eigg for Lost Map happenings, primarily their micro-festival (the aforementioned Howlin’ Fling) and their Visitations series, where they invite artists to the island to create new music. “I think one thing this year’s taught me is that we don’t need to do everything at once. And actually it’s been good not to have a Howlin’ Fling happen. It’s been good to have not had to worry too much about having a full set of Visitations ready and all that sort of stuff,” Lynch tells us with a relatable relief in his voice. “Because PostMap Club now is a thing where there’s something happening every month, we don’t have to worry about the other projects happening to a specific schedule and they can just happen when they’re ready.” It’s impossible for anyone to plan ahead right now with tours being rescheduled left, right and centre, but Lynch makes a cautious statement, while offering a glimmer of Howlin’ Fling hope: “I’ve got to think about the vulnerable people on Eigg to some extent, and not upsetting the balance here [...] But it’s such a small event, it’s one of those things we can make a decision on next January if we’re gonna have it next summer.” So maybe it won’t be too long before festivalgoers are once again strewn across his living room, much like his kids’ stuffed toys are now. Dream Wall is released on 1 Apr via Fire Records Pictish Trail plays Summerhall, Edinburgh, 7 Apr 2022; Beat Generator Live!, Dundee, 8 Apr 2022; The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 9 Apr 2022; The Tolbooth, Stirling, 10 Apr 2022 Sign up for Lost Map’s PostMap Club at lostmap.com/postcards/club pictishtrail.co.uk Image Credits: Photography: Fiona Hunter, Creative Direction: Rachael Hood, Editing: Devin Clark-Memler

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Myth Making At last, Oscars frontrunner Nomadland becomes available to UK film fans. We consider the ways in which the film explores the American mythos of work as liberation while offering an alternative way of life outside the shadow of capitalism Words: Anahit Behrooz Film

Nomadland’s interrogation of American self-identity and the fragile construction of the American Dream. The narrative follows Fern, a fictionalised character played by Frances McDormand, who leaves home after the economic depression of the noughties to search for temporary work at Amazon warehouses, campsites and rural farms. Zhao’s depiction of the gig economy has been critiqued as somewhat toothless, her portrayal of Amazon in particular framed as a depoliticised engagement with one of late-stage capitalism’s most destructive empires. And admittedly, compared to Bruder’s book – whose nomads rage at Amazon’s inhumane labour conditions – it is a markedly understated approach. Yet rather than an implicit endorsement of these systems, Zhao crafts an impressionistic examination of Fern’s own entrenchment in the capitalist ideologies that define the American experience. “I need work,” Fern insists at a government employment centre. “I like work.” Shunning offers of help from friends and family, Fern determinedly pursues the American mythos of work as liberation, self-reliance as self-identity. “I think what the nomads are doing is not that different than what the pioneers did,” argues her sister, further cementing Fern’s way of life as integral to the American foundation of individualist progress. Yet against her own protagonist’s expectations, Zhao offers alternatives to a life dictated by these traditions. Striking moments of childlike wonder and play resist the working grind: in one scene, the normally serious Fern giggles like a schoolgirl as she and a fellow nomad discover and

throw around abandoned underwear on a campsite; in another, the nomads explore a luxury RV while Fern sits in the driving seat making engine noises. These scenes act not merely as flashes of respite in the midst of work, but as giddy moments of anti-work, refusals to participate in the valuedriven ideologies that the mundane tasks of the campsite or the wealth of the RV symbolise. It is a determined note of resistance that encapsulates Nomadland’s approach to community – community that counteracts the alienation that capitalism tries to enshrine. Fern joins a nomad retreat in the desert, where the camp leader compares them to workhorses who “have to gather together and take care of each other.” When Fern’s tyre gets a puncture out in the wilderness, her only source of help is another nomad, who asks for assistance with their own van in return. Together, the nomads share stories of grief and loss, forming a support network that extends beyond mere material survival. In doing so, the film moves away from Fern’s individualist journey into a profoundly tender study of the networks of relationships that can exist beyond the processes of work and selfhood, and the incalculable comfort and value that they can offer. There is a marked absence of teleology in Nomadland: the end of the film circles back to the seasonal work at Amazon, and to the start of another New Year. Yet some things have subtly, quietly changed. Fern might continue to be exploited by the gig economy and the impossible realisation of the American Dream, but the small acts of her everyday life have reoriented towards a more emancipatory politics: rather than sitting alone in her van, she walks the campsite holding a sparkler, wishing others a happy new year. Ultimately, it is not through the American pioneering spirit or through work that Fern will find happiness, but through an acknowledgement of her own unprofitable interdependence. Another world is indeed out there. It is just different from the one she seeks. Nomadland streams on Disney+ in the UK from 30 Apr and is in UK cinemas from 17 May Chloé Zhao’s debut film, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, streams on MUBI from 9 Apr

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hen Minari, a Korean-American story set on an Arkansas farm, was relegated to Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, it ignited a fierce conversation about how Americanness in cinema is categorised. Perhaps appropriately in this post-Trump world, the question lies at the heart of almost every film in this year’s awards slate. From Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, a fantasy of white liberal resistance, to Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah, an unflinching examination of anti-Black state violence told through the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, the nebulous idea of the American story – how it is defined and who can tell it – has taken centre stage. It is fitting, then, that Chloé Zhao, director of Nomadland and the first woman of colour to be nominated for a best director Oscar, is emerging as this awards season’s frontrunner. With three feature films under her belt, Zhao has always told distinctly American stories, albeit ones frequently excluded from dominant conceptualisations of American identity. Her first two films, Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider, are set in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and revolve around the Lakota Sioux and their intimate, everyday lives. With Nomadland, her adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Zhao has again turned to America’s margins, depicting the lives of modern-day nomads travelling around the country in search of work. Specifically, it is the exploration of the nomads’ working lives that is central to

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Music

Fiddlers On the High Seas As a sea shanty tops the UK charts in 2021, we take a deep dive into the history of Scottish fiddle music via the stories of Shetland whalers and Orcadian fur traders who harnessed creativity in isolation at sea, taking their influence across the Atlantic

April 2021 – Feature

Words: Armaan Verma Illustration: Maisy Summer Lewin-Sanderson

n old woman was once walking along the coast of Unst, the northernmost of the Shetland Islands, when she spotted the figure of a man lying on the beach. He was a German sailor, washed up after having been thrown overboard by his crew for ceaselessly playing his fiddle, which he clutched even in his unconscious state. His name was Friedemann von Stickle, and he was – well, a fiddler. Following his recovery at the old woman’s home, he started a family, remained in Shetland till the end of his days, and played the fiddle on most of them. Or so the story goes. But more well-known is his son, also named Friedemann, whose fiddle

tunes rose to legendary stature in the Shetland archipelago. He was the father of Robert Stickle and grandfather of the famous fiddler John Stickle. In his lifetime, Friedemann was considered the greatest fiddler in all of Shetland, but this was not without its perils: in his adulthood, he was supposedly forced on board a ship and taken to sea, tasked only with playing the fiddle to the crew in the mess room. All the generations of the Stickle family certainly contributed to Shetland’s musical tradition enormously, but it was Friedemann alone who participated (against his will) in one of the most interesting episodes in the history of Scottish music: the great maritime adventure of the fiddle. — 20 —

The Shetland and Orkney Islands are conveniently located on the nautical routes of ships entering and exiting the North Sea. The fiddle was first brought to Shetland by Hanseatic traders in the early 1700s and soon found its way to the mainland, becoming an integral instrument in traditional Scottish music. The fiddle has been from the very beginning an instrument at sea. It was certainly the most common one on board any vessel in the north. The Shetland and Orkney Islands were both responsible for catapulting it across the Atlantic – but to understand this small, portable instrument, one must first understand the whale, or rather, the men who hunted it.

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concert hall or art studio. Such encounters between different musical traditions allowed unique tunes to find their way back to Shetland, mostly dealing with nautical themes and with fragments of the world embedded within them. Cultural exchange was not limited to Europeans alone, however, and the fiddle, helplessly afloat on the icy seas, did not simply venture out and return home like the men that played it. The greatest lasting impact of the Shetland fiddlers has been on the Inuit population of the polar region. The Inuit of Greenland traditionally performed throat songs and drum dances, but these were later joined by European instruments like the fiddle, whose tunes are still popular in Greenland today. “There are actually documented accounts of Shetlanders going ashore,” Henderson tells us of whalers in Greenland, “and if you were a fiddler and they found out you played the fiddle, you would have a hard time getting away. You would be dragged into the dance for playing.”

“There are actually documented accounts of Shetlanders going ashore [in Greenland]. If you were a fiddler and they found out you played the fiddle, you would have a hard time getting away” Maurice Henderson Although the three whaling tunes discussed above were brought home by Shetlanders out on voyages and had no indigenous influences, many musical pieces from this period appear to be Inuit, or ‘Yakki’ tunes, the only two surviving ones being the listening tune Da Greenland Man’s Tune and the reel Hjogrovaltar. Dr Frances Wilkins, an ethnomusicologist and lecturer at the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen, has done extensive and fascinating research on Scottish ‘musical migration’, and suggests that both tunes possibly contained Inuit words. She argues that,

April 2021 – Feature

pervaded all of Scotland. Gray tells us: “Because of the limitations of writing something down, you turn it into something different. In Shetland, there’s tunes where they would play a note that’s in between C and a C#, for example. So, they didn’t stick to a normal scale.” Much of the music’s vibrancy is impossible to capture on paper. But, once again, it was completely suited to whalers with nothing but time on their hands and wits sharper than harpoons. Sailors who doubled up as fiddlers were especially valuable to a whaling company for sustaining the morale of the crew. But to the historian and musician, they are valuable for the music they created at sea, much of which is still part of the Shetland repertoire. The widely popular reel Willafjord, for instance, was brought home by fiddler Bobby Peterson’s father after a voyage to the Davis Strait. The tune hints at a near-mythic location hidden in the then-unmapped Northwest Passage. Henderson actually visited the eponymous town in Greenland, and chronicled his finds in his book In Search of Willafjord. Similarly, Ollefjord Jack (sometimes called Oliver Jack) is probably named after the coastal village of Olderfjord in Norway. Both tunes not only bring Norse influence into the Shetland repertoire, but also reveal a musical map of Shetland whalers’ journey through the ice. The Shetland repertoire is incredibly diverse, ranging from ceremonial tunes, wedding tunes, Christmas tunes, ‘Trowie’ tunes, and among them, from a particular time and place in Shetland’s history, are the Greenland tunes (or ‘whaling’ tunes). Many of these tunes are vignettes of a period of intense economic and cultural production in Scotland and at sea. The opening lines to Da Merry Boys o’ Greenland, for instance, strikingly describe the call of the sea – the search for wealth and adventure that Shetlanders embarked on when sailing to the Arctic: ‘Da news is spreadin trowe da toon / A ship is lyin in Bressa Soond / Tell da boys shö’s nortward boond / Ta hunt da whale in Greenland’. There, tunes developed by seaborne fiddlers were enriched by the musical and cultural exchanges between mainland Scots, Shetlanders, Hollanders, Norwegians, and Irishmen, who fiercely competed to prove the superiority of their own tunes. The development of fiddle tunes on these ships is testament to the salutary effect of the confluence of cultures and identities. The ships became crucibles of experimentation and evolution, as laden with musical innovation as with whale blubber. Perhaps what is special here is the improbability of the backdrop to this artistic production: the frozen-over, desolate northern waters, a far cry from any comfortably situated

Music

In the 164 years between 1750 and World War I, Scottish whalers returned with the blubber of over 20,000 whales and four million seals. While these figures evoke an image of large-scale, relentless butchery, whaling expeditions were for the most part spent in uneventful waiting, and consequently, extreme boredom, which made these voyages perfectly placed for the making of music and art, all in a blur of sea salt and blubber. Shetlanders were also most suited for whaling; they were traditionally fishermen and seamen and provided cheaper labour than mainlanders. So the men left for the Arctic, taking with them their beloved fiddle. Whaling soon became the defining occupation of the Shetland Islands, which sent men to far-off corners of Greenland and the Northwest Passage. Maurice Henderson, a well-known musician from Lerwick, suggests that the industry became inextricably linked with social mobility, breaking away from the feudal-style Haaf fishing system in Shetland. “The way the system worked with Haaf fishing was that you fished for the merchant-lairds, and you gave all your fish away to them. It was only at the end of the season you were allowed to fish for yourselves. Everything was tied down here. So, if you went to Greenland, you certainly made some independent income coming in and it didn’t go down well with landowners. A lot of folk were threatened with eviction if they didn’t give up the whaling.” It was with whaling that Shetlanders were finally able to acquire their own boats and buy out their freedom. But Shetlanders took on all manner of other marine occupations, too, some in the fishing industry and others in the Merchant Navy. One example is the prominent fiddler Gilbert ‘Gibby’ Gray, whose service in the Merchant Navy landed him in the maelstrom of World War II. He was the grandfather of Scottish fiddle player Vicky Gray. Released at the end of March, Gray’s debut EP Atlaness draws on traditional fiddle tunes played by her grandfather while bringing in newer approaches to record production. “Shetland reels are very short: some of them are only 16 bars long!” Gray explains. “You’ve got the tune, but a big part of the entertainment is telling stories that go with the tune and being a bit of a comedian, trying to make people laugh and have a good time.” The history knitted into Shetland’s music is still imparted today, not only through tunes but also material culture. “A couple of summers ago, when I was in Shetland, somebody loaned me a fiddle that was made out of metal,” she says. “Because wooden fiddles would disintegrate when people were away at sea, it was quite common to have these fiddles that were made out of metal.” Shetland’s fiddle music is only one example of a rich oral tradition that has historically

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Music

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while it is believed that ‘Yakki’ tunes were written by fiddlers too modest to claim authorship, the numerous historical references to indigenous fiddlers indicate a two-way exchange of fiddle tunes between Inuit and whalers. In his book In Search of Willafjord, Henderson expands on his encounters with Inuit music along the way. He finds the fundamentals of Inuit song and dance astonishingly similar to what he experienced and performed back home. “There are definitely similarities [with Shetland tunes] in the sense of the type of music, and the dancing as well,” he says. “Just look at the form of the dance, whether it’s a round-the-room couple dance or a set dance, like a Shetland reel, or a step dance, or a figure-of-eight formation. Where I went, I saw that they do a lot of polka dances, and it’s really high-energy music, very similar to Scottish dancing. There are similarities, but I wouldn’t say they would know our tunes exactly and we’d know theirs.” He adds with a laugh, “But it wouldn’t take long to learn them or join in.” The integration of the fiddle into indigenous musical traditions is by no means limited to Greenland. And here, the music historian must tear her riveted eye from Shetland to Orkney, and from Greenland to James Bay, Canada. Operating at the same time as the many whalers in the Arctic were the fur traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company. At one point, four out of five company servants were Orcadians. Much like Shetlanders in whaling, men from Orkney dominated the Canadian fur trade, partly because of their cheaper labour and excellent seamanship, and partly because it was the last port of call for ships sailing from London to Canada. The earliest fur trading posts were established around James Bay, where Europeans could trade with the local Cree population, who were soon incorporated into the cultural lives of the traders. Dr Wilkins observes that there is no evidence of any stringed instruments used in James Bay before the arrival of Europeans. The Cree musical tradition mainly comprised hunting songs accompanied by drums and rattles. Dr Wilkins writes that, “by the late 1800s the James Bay Cree along with other Aboriginal and Métis groups in northwestern

“Shetland reels are very short [...] a big part of the entertainment is telling stories that go with the tune and being a bit of a comedian, trying to make people laugh and have a good time” Vicky Gray

Canada, northern Ontario and northern Québec, had developed an identifiable ‘Aboriginal/Métis’ fiddle tradition.” James Bay became home to a mishmash of musical traditions, old and new: the fiddle was accompanied by the drum, and British square dancing with indigenous step dancing. Dr Wilkins admits that much of the historical research available is shaped by colonial prejudice, and there are certainly discrepancies between indigenous and Western sources. It would be wrong to ignore the role of missionaries in discouraging the use of drums among the Cree population and settlers’ attempts to subsume native traditions under a broader European musical culture. Nonetheless, this does not take away from the extensive reach of these tunes. Indigenous communities have long cherished and innovated fiddle music, and the accompanying dance forms, like square dancing, which is still performed in Canada today as far north as Pond Inlet and Baker Lake in Nunavut. The last ship bound for James Bay sailed out of Orkney in 1891 and brought an end to the period of intense mixing between Orcadians and Cree. Arctic whaling also finally ended in the 1900s, and South Georgia (a remote island southeast of the Falklands) became the new haunt of Shetland’s whalers. It was a new age for the fiddle, now influenced by country music, played alongside the guitar and accordion, and heard far and wide on the radio. Aidan O’Rourke, a fiddle player and composer of Scottish folk music, offers an insight on the ‘Scottishness’ of music that travelled to places like Cape Breton, Canada: “If you go to Cape Breton, you hear a version of the music that would have been played here before Scotland became this tartan entity.” Scottish musicians who listen to indigenous fiddlers often admire their less formal, more fluid style, that fiddle players like Gray find it so difficult to translate into writing. The fiddlers at sea were perhaps the farthest thing from the dissemination of music today. It is mere clicks away, available for mass consumption and usually made for large audiences, like sea shanties on TikTok. O’Rourke wonders whether anything like the long-lasting and profound cultural imprint of the fiddle can ever be replicated today. “I just think that if there’s enough exchange of people anywhere, music fits into it. Maybe we’ve lost that… That direct exchange, a human exchange, which can happen instantly on the internet – the actual importance of that face-to-face exchange and the nuances built into that.” During the pandemic, geographical boundaries have been replaced by self-imposed, invisible ones, and the newest challenge is to touch upon the local rather than the remote. O’Rourke himself has replaced concert halls for his own backyard, where his neighbours may listen to him, not out of necessity but of a newfound regard for his immediate surroundings. Both he and Gray hope that a post-lockdown approach to music will take place in smaller, more inclusive spaces that connect people more intimately. Art has often been created in the unlikeliest of places, far from the clutches of formal education and ‘civilised’ practices. The Arctic is one — 22 —

such place, whose utter desolation gives no sign of any inspiration for musical creativity. And yet, the fiddle braved these odds and won. One could say that an isolated flat is perhaps an unlikelier place for any sort of artistic endeavour than a whaling ship. We are, perhaps, in a time unlikelier than any other for creativity. Yet it is to be hoped that we seek out the same entertainment once sought by Shetlanders and Orcadians navigating the ice. As is evident in our histories, tunes, and dances, the only known panacea to human suffering is the human spirit. And perhaps a fiddle to cheer it up. Maurice Henderson’s In Search of Willafjord is out now via Shetland Times Ltd Vicky Gray’s Atlaness is out now via Stitch Records Aidan O’Rourke’s The Best of 365 is out now via Reveal Records; the film Iorram (Boat Song), which he wrote the score for, premiered last month at the Glasgow Film Festival This article was produced with support from Edinburgh International Festival

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Most Haunted Books

Helen McClory offers an insight into her chilling neo-gothic novel Bitterhall Interview: Gary Kaill

“A book can be a residence just as a house can”

Bitterhall is out 1 Apr from Polygon Books; birlinn.co.uk/product/bitterhall

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April 2021 – Feature

and tangents to get lost in. I wanted that kind of idea – that there is a narrative to places and a narrative to presences.” Those places and presences do much to colour and shape the book’s delightfully metaphysical sensibilities. Throughout, Bitterhall is genuinely frightening. Crucially, it is Orla who eschews convention, and becomes energised by the possibility that she might actually be experiencing supernatural events. McClory laughs, “I wanted to have that! I wanted to have her being interested in the idea of spirits and in a confrontational way, so that she is saying: okay, this is something on the other side of reality. Conversely, I wanted Daniel, who is quite a dreamy character, to be quite cynical, doubting that ghosts exist — which goes against the way he presents himself.” One of the book’s narrative conundrums is whether Tom, who gradually comes to question whether he himself is haunted, actually is. Readers will form their own view. The ambiguity is delicious rather than frustrating. “Is he actually connected to this figure from the diary, and is he being taken over by them in some way – or is it obsession? Is it something in himself that he is not acknowledging, such as his sexuality? Toxic masculinity: is that what has warped him or is it some sort of mental breakdown that was always going to be inevitable because of events within his life? I didn’t want the book to be like a thriller that is eventually easily resolved. I wanted the reader to have all of the pieces there and the option to build some strong conclusions with them.” Bitterhall, McClory’s finest achievement to date, is many things: a mesmerising neo-gothic yarn; a technically adroit act of storytelling; a showcase for McClory’s poetically rich Helen McClory prose; and a deeply moving story of three broken young lives. It’s the latter element that lingers once the book is closed. McClory is pleased to hear it. “Well, that means it works. Something so satisfying for the reader is what every writer wants: to bring forth compelling characters that have, in a way, haunted you.”

Image: Courtesy of Helen McClory

t’s difficult to know which most frazzles the mind: the fact that it’s the best part of two years since Helen McClory tweeted that her manuscript was now in the hands of her agent and doing the rounds, or that it’s now four years since we last spoke (an illuminating insight into her debut novel Flesh of the Peach). This time around, McClory, with that new work to be published by Scottish independent Polygon Books, chose to set herself a new creative challenge. Bitterhall, a chilling and affecting tale of three friends whose lives are shaken by an apparent haunting, is told Rashomon-style: the same events replayed from three different perspectives. “I do worry,” says McClory, as we catch up by phone on a grey March afternoon. “I wonder if it will reach readers. And then I’ll have to deal with how they enjoy or don’t enjoy it! But I think the biggest worry with the structure is that you’re going to go over old ground and bore the reader. Can I balance story progression but also call back to earlier chapters? Are readers able to follow it because it’s coming from that different perspective? That’s easier with Orla, obviously, but becomes harder with Tom.” Bitterhall is elevated by an irresistible cast of characters, not least the mercurial Orla. She and boyfriend Tom enter the life of the book’s first narrator Daniel as he toils in the basement of an unnamed Scottish university, creating 3D-printed copies of historical artifacts. They each have their own stake in how the present walks in the shadows of the past: not least the troubled Tom, whose closing section expands the scope of the narrative with artful guile. “The book began with Daniel: this sort of unreliable narrator, almost,” McClory confirms. “I then realised that we needed the viewpoint of the other characters to tell that story in a full way. I like the idea of layers of unreliability, so that you get this prism effect and can see what might be a version of the truth coming from the three of them all together.” That truth is undermined by the presence of a book that ultimately comes to obsess all three main characters: a seemingly nineteenth century journal by one James Lennoxlove, master of Bitterhall, who relates the details of a disturbing murder. “There are houses and there are books in this story,” says McClory, “and they function in a similar way: a book can be a residence just as a house can, and there is this idea that the house that Daniel and Tom live in has this sense of an old book – it has many pages, many corners

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Tuft Love Local Heroes interviews Dana Finnigan, Molly Kent, Camila Richardson and Shona MacPherson to find out more about their work and rug tufting as a form of expression

Image: Courtesy of Camila Richardson

Image: Courtesy of Silenzio

Local Heroes

Interview: Stacey Hunter

Camila Richardson

Silenzio!

ontemporary designers and artists in Scotland are pushing the disciplinary boundaries between textile design and fibre art with rug tufting. This is a technique that employs a pneumatic gun to shoot yarn through a fabric base to create a functional rug or a decorative wall hanging.

into forms that resemble viruses or bacteria. This plays on the idea that “doubt can be perceived as a disease that, over time, shifts and morphs to continue its hold over us.” You can see Kent’s work in a new digital exhibition called Adjust / Adapt at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre; a partnership between The Scottish Furniture Makers Association and Visual Arts Scotland, curated by Janine Matheson (until 24 Apr). Kent’s work Doubt Mutates and Spreads will also be exhibited at the Vlieseline Fine Art Textile Award showcase and will soon be hosted and represented for sale through New Cube Art, an exciting new Gallery founded by Bibi Zavieh.

April 2021 – Feature

Molly Kent is an Edinburgh based textile artist who represents aspects of mental and physical health through the mediums of rug tufting and weaving. Her work considers aspects of contemporary existence through the lens of social media and internet living and explores how this affects our perception of self. This stems from Kent’s personal experiences of her mental health condition CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder), but also reflects on wider anxieties and fears that have come to the fore as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Inspired by seeing artist Trish Anderson working with the process of tufting on Instagram, Kent began producing small scale tufting with hand punch needles, before investing in electric, and more recently, a pneumatic tufting machine and air compressor to help speed up the process, and enable her to create larger and more dynamic works. “Tufting for me has very much sparked a love affair with textiles, and I have also begun to produce work through weaving and domestic knitting machines.” Her series Doubt in the Digital Age, which is ongoing, contains pieces that “intend to overwhelm the senses, mirroring the feeling of doubt, through the juxtaposition of colour, phrases and form.” Taking the domestic form of the rug and shifting its presentation, the objects she makes climb walls, or morph

s i l e n z i o ! is led by Dana Finnigan who creates modern craft, art and design pieces including ceramics; hand-printed wallpaper; papier mâché sculptures and vessels; and hand tufted accessories. Finnigan became interested in tufting during her 15-year career working in the interior textile design industry, where she met traditional rug and carpet manufacturers and discovered that this was something that could be created by an individual maker. She now runs tufting workshops from her studio in Glasgow. “About four years ago I became aware of videos on social media of makers working with tufting guns. For many years, I had worked mainly in digital textiles and had a longing to create something more tactile and made with my own hands. I felt that the more craft-based aesthetic you can create with basic tufting guns was in line with the direction I wanted my work to head in. I found you could buy the tufting guns from the USA; I purchased my first gun and my practice began there.” — 24 —

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Finnigan describes her work as a contemporary response to the new craft movement where she can push the limits of each medium in order to create new and unique pieces. “I am heavily influenced by mid-century artists and makers including Lucienne Day, Willem de Kooning and the later works of Pablo Picasso. I try to create work with an abstract aesthetic and that comes from a mindful place and employs a peaceful naivety.”

Local Heroes

Camila Richardson is a multimedia artist who studied Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee and is now based in Edinburgh. Textiles was the first artform Richardson engaged with as a young person and she included a handmade latch and hook rug as part of her degree show. Richardson has spent the last seven years teaching art in a variety of alternative education settings. During lockdown she found herself having more time to focus on her own practice and tufting has been the result. “Rugs have always been of interest to me. The practicality and tactile aspect is something I have always loved. I really enjoy learning new skills, so when I discovered rug tufting during the first lockdown, I knew I wanted to find out more. I found that s i l e n z i o ! were doing a short course in Glasgow so immediately signed up. I loved it from the outset. Dana is an excellent teacher. Themes in my work have always revolved around play and education. I have created a strong childlike aesthetic and have always been intrigued by interactive ways to be around art. I have many influences, but I would say that having fun and humour often take the lead. It’s the best therapy really.”

Shona MacPherson is the designer behind T_U_F_T ‘geological tutfing’ where every rug (or bath mat) is based on a specific place or location, chosen by the buyer or commissioner. “I aim to peel back different layers of geological history and involve them in the design of each bespoke piece. I’m moving towards making larger commissions rather than bath mats, but it was a great starting point.” Her recent piece at Glasgow’s CCA was a collaboration with India Boxall called Growing under Glass, which was presented as a window display for Welcome Home as part of the inaugural Scottish Craft Week by Craft Scotland. Camphill Earthworks is based on a geological feature in Queen’s Park with the same name. The earthwork is thought to be one of the oldest surviving man-made features in Glasgow. Limited private sales can currently be found on Molly Kent’s website mollyhkent.co.uk Dana Finnigan’s rugs and wall hangings are available to buy through the s i l e n z i o ! website as well as at craft marketplaces such as Quality Craft Vision and Tea Green events silenzio.studio Camila Richardson currently takes commissions and sells online via Instagram at @cami.landiya You can contact T_U_F_T via their Instagram at @t_u_f_t for commissions and enquiries about ‘artwork you can walk on.’ localheroes.design

Image: Courtesy of Shona MacPherson T_U_F_T

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Image: Courtesy of Molly Kent Doubt Mutates and Spreads, Molly Kent

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Pushing Forward Angolan producer Nazar speaks about his final work under the moniker, produced exclusively for this year’s Counterflows festival, and unveils his new project, Yaera

Clubs

Interview: Nadia Younes

lot has changed for Nazar over the last year. When we speak it’s just a few days after the one-year anniversary of the release of his debut album, Guerrilla, which came out just before the UK was forced into lockdown. Guerrilla is a deeply personal record, documenting Nazar’s family history and the troubled history of Angola, in particular in relation to the Angolan Civil War. Both of his parents feature on the album, speaking in Umbundu, Angola’s national language. His father, Alcides Sakala Simões – a former general in the guerrilla movement UNITA and now an elected politician – recites a passage from his memoir, Memórias de um Guerrilheiro, on Diverted and his mother’s voice can be heard on Mother. Although largely made between Manchester and London, the album is peppered with field recordings Nazar gathered during a period spent in Angola. These sounds, from the birdsong that opens the album on Retaliation to the helicopter blades

April 2021 – Feature

Photo: Marieke Bosma

that swirl throughout Bunker, all come together to form what Nazar refers to as ‘rough kuduro’. It’s a much darker, more industrial take on the upbeat and heavily danceable genre born in and traditionally associated with Angola. When asked to produce a new sound work for this year’s Counterflows festival – normally taking place in venues around Glasgow but this year made available entirely online throughout April – Nazar revisited many of the field recordings for Guerrilla. The new work will not only mark the end of the Guerrilla era, it will also be the final work released under the Nazar moniker. “For me, it was a good way to extend or summarise most of the themes that I talk about and explore on [Guerrilla] in one single track,” he says. “But also I feel that it’s related to my career, in a sense,” he continues. “While I’ve always wanted to explore these things about my family, I don’t want to be associated just to this, having that political responsibility and weight on my shoulders. I want to explore other things and, I would say, almost make pop music, or reinvent pop music from my African perspective.” With all of his upcoming shows in support of Guerrilla swiftly cancelled and with the situation in the UK rapidly worsening, Nazar made the decision to relocate from Manchester to Amsterdam in March last year, where he currently lives with his girlfriend. The move soon took a professional turn, too, and the change of environment caused him to reassess his musical career.

Realising that his artistic goals had shifted since making Guerrilla, he decided it was time to step away from the Nazar project as he started to explore new themes and began working on music under a new moniker. “Nazar was made when I was like 14 and at the time I was a totally different person and I had other motivations when I was making music,” he says. “I had just moved to Angola [from Belgium], so my views of the world were very Eurocentric... and I would start by having a Eurocentric, almost nonAfrican sounding name so it could sell better, and obviously I didn’t stick to it,” he continues. “But I’ve grown up... so I want to start fresh and put more emphasis into my own identity.” Where Nazar’s focus centred around the exploration of his Angolan heritage, Yaera is more influenced by his current reality. The first single to be released under the new name signifies a distinct shift. Described as “the product of meditation throughout 2020’s pandemic,” Elavoko 1 is a much more tranquil sounding track than we’re used to hearing from Nazar. “It feels weird trying to make club music at home, so that’s why my new thing is centered around other horizons,” he says. “The sound from my EP, Enclave, and Guerrilla is quite distinct, but I also want to do this for myself in the next work because I’ve always been a fan of artists who can reinvent themselves... in each album, so it’s like a mosaic,” he continues. “I’m just trying to push myself and get out of my comfort zone.” The new track also comes with an accompanying video by London-based director and 3D artist Rob Heppell. Having previously directed Nazar’s Bunker video, the pair had been planning to work together on a live AV show for a handful of dates in support of Guerrilla before the pandemic hit. The video was funded through the NTS x Carhartt WIP programme, which supports eight artists each year into the next stages of their careers. As he closes the Nazar chapter of his career, he seems optimistic for the future in a post-pandemic world. “It’s kind of like a reset and it can have amazing consequences... No one knows what’s going to be the next thing that’s going to pop.”

“It feels weird trying to make club music at home, so that’s why my new thing is centred around other horizons” Nazar — 26 —

Counterflows is available online throughout April at counterflows.com

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Yours Forever Ahead of the release of No Place Like It, we speak with some of the musicians and young people involved in the Glasgow-based, award-winning songwriting project Ensemble Interview: Tony Inglis Music

— 27 —

“Experiences are sometimes difficult to process [...] Somehow just having to think about it emotionally in the context of making a song eases everything” Shobhita settings don’t have. And it makes me, as an older musician, and the freelancers and musicians involved, so inspired. That enthusiasm and willingness to be vulnerable is infectious.” Ensemble has persisted with 19 participants since the pandemic hit, with workshops being conducted online. Kay’s experience of the project, which she only knows in this form, shows that none of its effect has been diminished. “It felt so good to just be like well ‘this is me’,” she says about sharing her latest song with the wider group. “It’s something I can be proud of. I keep listening to my songs and smiling – I don’t do that very often.” No Place Like It is released on 30 Apr, available from ensemblesongwriting.bandcamp.com More information on Wheatley Care and the work they do can be found at wheatley-care.com

April 2021 – Feature

involved in Ensemble settled on an uplifting, genre-defying selection of songs for public release, some of which were recorded at Chem19 and others remotely since the coronavirus lockdown. The fact that there is little to discern between the two sets of recordings is testament to the impressive writing and production that has resulted. “You are expressing something personal to you and having that fed back to you in a really professional way, that sounds good,” says Timmons. “The impact of that can’t be understated.” As well as Kay, we speak to two other Ensemble participants: Andrew Sinclair (23), who has gained a reputation as an “omnichord god” thanks to his playing of the instrument at the last St Luke’s gig, and Shobhita (26), who contributed writing on album track Glittery Bums, a tribute to women seeking asylum in Glasgow – in keeping with the collection’s stories of home and community. As with all Ensemble participants, they see the songs they’ve written as an artistic rendering of personal experiences they may otherwise find too difficult to explore. “There’s no pressure on how much you want to say or share,” says Shobhita. “I don’t always even remember specific details – it’s the emotions that stick with you throughout your life. These experiences are sometimes difficult to process and when you think about it deeply, you spend a lot of time overthinking and it doesn’t always work out well. Somehow just having to think about it emotionally in the context of making a song eases everything.” Sinclair adds: “The last song I wrote was my way of speaking about my problems without speaking about them directly. I was doubting myself and the things I can do. It’s taking what problems you’ve got and just throwing them in the mix with other people – it’s like fireworks, it just works.” On working with the young participants, Maciocia says: “There’s a joyfulness. Although each person can be sharing really harrowing, difficult stories, there’s a beauty and uninhibitedness in that sharing. Young people have this courage that older adults I work with in other

Photo: Beth Chalmers

“I

’ve always wanted to have something that’s just mine,” says 20-year-old Megan Kay. Since last autumn she’s been participating in Ensemble, an award-winning Glasgowbased project which engages young people in social care – many of whom have experience of mental health issues and homelessness – with songwriting and music-making workshops alongside professional artists. “When you’ve made a song, it’s yours forever.” Established in 2016 for people aged 16-25, supported by Wheatley Care, and now in partnership with Creative Scotland’s Youth Music Initiative, Ensemble has become something much more, as weekly meet-ups to create and share songs led to two packed live shows at St Luke’s in 2017 and 2019. Now they’re looking forward to releasing No Place Like It, an album of collaborative songs written in three six-week songwriting blocks alongside Jill O’Sullivan, Martha Ffion, Jamie Scott and Jonnie Common among others. “The idea was to provide the opportunity to be involved in something creative, and was established with the help of the young people it would benefit. It was a music-based outlet that came out on top,” says Michael Timmons, a musician and songwriter who helped get Ensemble off the ground, and continues to volunteer on the project. “What we soon discovered was – and this wasn’t surprising – the overwhelming sense of achievement that comes from writing a fully realised song, and being part of a community, far outweighed anything we could ever have imagined.” With 20 years of industry experience, songwriter and musician Donna Maciocia is Ensemble’s current project coordinator and creative lead. Her responsibilities include populating a network of volunteers and musicians and making connections with young people engaged in the process. “A lot of the young people are terrified at the prospect at first, but eventually have the courage to come along to a workshop,” says Maciocia. “We start on week one with nothing, and use tried and tested songwriting exercises that help people with no experience of something like this just suddenly generate ideas out of nothing. We had great success with David Bowie’s cut-up technique, and pinning pictures all over walls in our meet-up space to evoke responses. That’s such a great way to liberate yourself from that voice in your head that tells you you’re not good at things.” After engaging over 50 participants over the course of its last two rounds of funding, all those

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Culinary Delights Food & Drink

Thanks to our Food and Drink Writing Competition, our inbox is stuffed with fantastic new writing. On these three pages, find our winning feature – delving into the personal histories, sociopolitical insights and absurdist comedy that form the humble shopping list – as well as a trio of excellent short pieces on flavour, memory, and the amazing power of crisps...

Bread and Butter Words: Ilaria Casini Illustration: Danielle Rhode

April 2021 – Feature

f a year ago we were told our one and only social activity was going to be grocery shopping, many among us, if not everyone, would have found it appalling. Not me though; I revel in grocery shopping. No activity has the ability to galvanise and simultaneously appease me as much as grocery shopping does. I know it is a fairly unpopular opinion; there is chaos, there is an overabundance of colours, surprisingly unflattering lighting and sudden temperature variations. Not to mention people; a lot of them, usually. Nevertheless, I have always mapped the cities I have lived in according to their supermarkets’ distribution, creating a mental atlas of alternative landmarks, able to know at all times the distance separating me and a litre of milk. In the past year, grocery shopping has acquired a deeper meaning as, sometimes, our only connection to the outside world – a promise of a territory so dearly missed and highly suffered through ever-changing regulations and guidelines. As the lockdowns rolled on I thought of putting my superpower to good use and started volunteering to go shopping on behalf of people most vulnerable to the current health crisis. I won’t lie, the COVID-related regulations made a dent into my idyllic conception of this activity as well, but I remained solid on my principles. Entrusted with strangers’ grocery lists, I pranced among the stocked aisles, picking and choosing on their behalf. I followed close instructions or broad generalisations, deciphered hidden messages, and calculated quantities – never have I wished more for a universal measuring system. Much like a real life treasure hunt, map in hand I ventured into unknown lands of recommended local fishmongers, halal butchers and the elusive fine food and gastronomy boutiques. It dawned on me that, while alone, I was accompanying a plethora of identities through what is usually a very personal choreography around town. All these notes,

envelopes and Post-its, told me stories through their shapes, colours, hurriedness and prolixity. Five toiletries scrawled on an old train ticket rushed me with the urgency of slightly obsessive cleaning (we’ve all been there this year) and pricked me with the nostalgia of my last train journey. A cow-shaped Post-it completely overshadowed its contents – her big pink ears and kind eyes saw me through the pouring rain, and she nestled in my pocket like a wee secret pet, a wise friend whose advice I would gladly follow. I thus started treating the lists as accidental self-portraits of faceless strangers I would otherwise only know through short intercom communications from behind closed doors. It is a peculiar thing to write a grocery list, if you take a minute to think about it. It reveals as much about us as the environment we find ourselves in and it involves a series of interconnected knowledge. It is an action most people perform regularly, probably while putting much thought into its contents but less so on the action itself. This year it took on a ritualistic character, an exercise in style or a correspondence with the outside version of ourselves; an admonition to truly make the most of that limited time, to maintain focus and pick up everything, as much as cherishing in the unpredictability of the spontaneous purchase – Angel Delight exists for a reason. In the case of my volunteering service, the lists became prostheses of their authors, extending towards the forbidden outside. My very presence stood for the absence of other persons, of specific demographic categories that couldn’t even take on the risk of the weekly groceries, of the last remnant of sociability. It truly speaks of the sheer privilege of youth, abled-bodies and good health in the current situation, among many others. As a means of expression in a peculiar situation, the grocery lists piqued my curiosity around the identity of the authors by stimulating my imagination. It was less an enquiry over — 28 —

authentication and more a quest for identification through relation. I related to these lists, I empathised with whomever wrote them. A small particular would have the ability to move me, and I would then create narratives, delineating in my mind specific personalities, which might or might not have been correct.

“A grocery list reveals as much about us as the environment we find ourselves in” A short list, hijacked midway by an author with a different pen and writing impetus urged me to buy fish brains and eyes, as well as chocolate Legos, on top of the other (we agree) boring items mentioned earlier on the list. This big wiggly handwriting, vacillating on the Es with an invincible reversed И, screamed at me with the repressed silliness of months of indoor living and the stinging frustration of the comedian dealing with a tough crowd. I saluted this boy’s resoluteness in broadcasting his comedic talent, and of course his mum’s indifference in leaving such additions, probably symptomatic of an extended exposure to poop jokes. This co-authored grocery list allowed for a glimpse into the struggle of homeschooling and parenting throughout the last year, and it wrestled in my hand with the pressure of an escape valve, for both parties involved. UNESCO’s report on the adverse consequences of school closure due to the COVID pandemic presents itself as a dense page of 13 entries. The interconnected critical effects of remote or halted learning range from confusion and stress, economic strain on families,

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Food & Drink

the worker instead of producing a product (pardon my Marx). This list’s tentative orthography but informed delivery made clear the dislocation and migration of countless people (mainly women) from the global south to take up caring positions for the elder population of the global north. It vocalised the strain of displacement and secludedness; of distance from personal families and closeness to employers’ family; of mutual aid and codependency; of a domain strongly affected by COVID; for the physical, social and economic vulnerability of both parties involved. These lists I carried around became entry points into various broader and more complex discourses. Instead of letting myself slip into the black holes of alarmist news reports and the endless ‘infected-recovered-dead’ figures, I started paying more attention to the lived experiences I was encountering through scribbled paper. I speculated over these people’s lives, fully engaging in a game of free association, where one kilogram of oranges and a precooked meal, in their unbalanced company, spoke to me through an old friend’s voice and their stubborn conviction that citrus could cure just about anything. It comforted me to create these stories; to try through personal histories, albeit fictional in part, to make sense of this past year and all its multifaceted hardships and hopes. When back at home in Italy, next to the ubiquitous and overbearing ‘pasta’ in all lists — 29 —

I engaged with, the common admonition to NOT get penne lisce (smooth penne) amused me every time. It warmed my silly little expat heart to know that nothing in this world, literally not even a global pandemic, would change my fellow citizens’ mind towards this much-snubbed type of pasta. You might have thought the whole ‘singing on the balconies’ last March was the wholesome representation of a country coming together in face of hardship, but truly the strongest form of Italian fraternity has been – and will always be – culinary pretentiousness. It is in these less flamboyant, small cues that we truly portray our collectiveness and interconnectedness. Letting random words like bread and chicken conjure some intricate scenarios, or open up discussions of current societal shortcomings, it didn’t occur to me that by doing this – both the daydreaming and volunteering – I was also leaving some trace of myself. That is, until my own name appeared on one of them, unceremoniously mentioned after “eggs” and “lard”. A way of remembering my imminent arrival as much as the lack of animal produce in the house? Or a way of informing me I was as much part of this grocery game as I was the maker of it? Ilaria Casini is an art historian and Lidl devotee based in Edinburgh byilaria.com

April 2021 – Feature

dropouts and teenage pregnancies to violence or exploitation. The breadth and the intricacy of the impact on kids’ lives feels as ludicrous and aberrant as fish brains paired with chocolate Lego, although far, far less witty. When grappling with a lengthy list riddled with spelling mistakes I noticed its accuracy in describing brands and specificities of products as well as their organisation according to the succession of the shop’s aisles. This was a knowledgeable author in the art of grocery shopping, yet one uncomfortable in its written expression. Mulling over the unusual phrasings I considered the possibility of a foreign identity living in the household of the elder person, who usually answered me through the door phone. And there it was, put literally down in black and white, obvious as ‘black beens’ with ‘Persil sop for clouths.’ The crisis of care, exacerbated by the health crisis, was truly made apparent. By this, I am referring to the crisis of the system’s ability to reproduce itself brought on by governments’ desertion of social reproductive functions throughout this pandemic and long before then. Let me explain. Grocery shopping occupies the paradoxical position of being considered both essential and menial. As an activity it is part of that squad of familial and communitarian work, still strongly presented as a class-specific and gendered occupation, which stubbornly insists on sustaining

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April 2021 – Feature

Food & Drink

Illustrations: Kaitlin Mechan

My Life in Crisps

Burnt Toast

The Museum of Flavour

Words: Marianne MacRae

Words: Caitlin Johnston

Words: Darran Edmond

hen I was five, I trapped my pinkie in the heavy toilet door at McDonald's. This was the early 90s, when there was no such thing as health and safety or trap-prevention mechanisms. At hospital it was recorded as a ‘partial amputation’, but three stitches, surprisingly few tears and a bulbous white bandage later, me and my pinkie left intact. As a reward for being SO BRAVE in the face of my own childish ineptitude, I was given a cuddly toy lamb and a packet of salt and vinegar Chipsticks. I can still recall the unadulterated, strip-the-skin-offyour-cheeks tang of them, so much more flavoursome than they are now, since companies were forced to start regulating how much salt and MSG they pile into their products. A year later, I got pneumonia and entirely lost my appetite. The only thing I can remember eating and not immediately throwing up is a packet of Wotsits. I’m one of six siblings and when my single mother would come home with the weekly shop, we’d dive on the multipack of crisps, each of us slapping and scuffling to make sure we got our rightful flavour before vegging out in front of some corny Friday night sitcom. Just thinking of the eyewatering afterburn of Brannigan’s roast beef and mustard is enough to bring my brother, who loved those ones the best, back from the dead. Crisps have always been there for me. When I was pregnant during the first lockdown last year, one of the things I hankered after was salt and vinegar Walkers. I’ll never be sure if it was really a craving, or just my body seeking a bag full of the starchy, salty comfort that has always soothed me during times of great change.

Marianne MacRae is an Edinburgh-based writer and researcher. She has a PhD in Creative Writing, won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for poetry in 2020 and just really really likes crisps.

icture the early morning rush in 2014; a 12-year-old refusing to get out of bed, an anguished father dragging a duvet from his child’s grasp, then immediate bonding over very different types of toast. Most school mornings started the same – my father would yell and roar, then hunker down in the sunlit kitchen to enjoy two slices of not burnt but blackened toast. The charred smell and thick powdered fog from our tin toaster would encase the kitchen and the shrilling smoke detector would ricochet through the house. My father and I had a dishevelled relationship, but our differences were discreetly quiet in the mornings, and he would often beg for my company at the dining room table. Fatigued and weary, I would drag my feet towards the direction of the bread bin, slot my bread into the toaster for two minutes – no more, no less – until it pounced onto my plate, all warm and golden-skinned. The two central loaves of bread in my life were Warburton’s Toastie and Milk Roll, both served with lashings of creamy Flora. My Glaswegian dad opted for Scottish Plain: a thick loaf with two dark, well-fired crusts, packaged in cobalt and British cherry wrapping. For eight minutes, Dad’s dough would frazzle helplessly inside its miniature oven. When the toast burst from the metal springs, he would slather the scorched surface with jewels of berry jam until his hands were sticky and his shirt-stained rose. Then, one morning, he didn’t join me for toast. Fruitful mornings of teasing, bickering and full bellies were replaced with breakfasts alone in the dark kitchen: my mother’s hushed wails replacing the once-ringing smoke detector. Dad’s half-eaten Scottish Plain rotted in the bread bin for months. Now, more than ever, I miss the smell of burnt toast in the morning. Caitlin Johnston is studying a masters in Multimedia Journalism at Glasgow Caledonian University. Catch up with her work at caitlinjohnston.journoportfolio.com or follow on Instagram @caitlinjohnstn — 30 —

rom 1889 until 2018, an innocuous-looking hunk of metal kept in an environmentallycontrolled basement on the outskirts of Paris served as the definition of a kilogram. It didn’t just weigh a kilogram, it was The Kilogram. Although scientists now prefer to define units using unalterable physical constants, for those of us who aren’t metrologists there’s something unsatisfying about this. It’s far easier to understand, and possibly even comforting, to imagine that out there, somewhere, is the one-true-kilogram. Recently, I’ve been thinking about this in relation to food. Because things don’t taste like the things they’re supposed to taste like anymore. Our taste buds are becoming detached from reality. We require standards anchored in the physical world. In an era of fake news, where nothing is as it seems, our food is no exception. We are offered a lazy retweet of an ice-cold lager, brewed with offcuts of rice. A torrented copy of a ripe summer peach. Deepfake rhubarb. Flavour houses allow food producers to play chemical tricks on us with their essences, reducing the complexity of an explosion of elderflower blossom to a few esters and aldehydes. Supermarkets – unconcerned with the concept of seasonality – disappoint us with insipidly watery tomatoes, which have probably racked up more air miles than us in the past year. Chefs, in pursuit of the avant-garde, will deconstruct and re-construct kitsch school dinner favourites. Wellness gurus will look you square in the eye and tell you that you can make pasta from courgettes. What I’m proposing then, is the taste equivalent of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures: A Museum of Flavour. Where, under little spotlights, in separate glass cases, the flavours of our memory would sit. The strawberry that is the strawberry. The lentil soup your gran made, still steaming in the bowl, thick with unsaid words. Darran Edmond is a distiller and founder of Illicit Spirits, a microdistillery in Tradeston, Glasgow.

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The Springburn Scorsese Improbably, Glasgow writer-director James Price has directed a wild music video for Michael Imperioli’s band, Zopa. Price tells us how he convinced the star of The Sopranos and Goodfellas to let him loose on the promo

Image: Courtesy of James Price

“I’m just trying to inject a wee bit of style into my films and make Glasgow cool” James Price makes the reference apt. In general, Price’s swaggering direction and Tim Currie’s expressive editing richly evoke Scorsese at his most freewheeling. “Oh, 100% we were channelling Scorsese,” admits Price. “Even at the end where Rian’s running away from the fireworks; I was thinking of a young Henry Hill running away from the blown-up cars.” Is this too much pressure to put on a young filmmaker, I wonder? “Nah, man, make that the headline! ‘The Springburn Scorsese.’” [Look up to see if the subeditor goes along with that suggestion.] Price’s belief in his abilities has been hardearned and wasn’t formed in the nurturing atmosphere of film school. “I did terrible in high school,” he tells us. “I left in third year due to ill health. So I kind of taught myself.” His starting point was studying scripts he’d get off the internet. “I started — 31 —

to find scripts for films I really liked,” he says, “and from rewatching the films and reading their scripts, I pretty quickly picked up how to format a script. I still think it’s the best way to learn.” With each passing film, Price seems to be thinking bigger and growing in confidence. “I guess I’m just trying to inject a wee bit of style into my films and make Glasgow cool,” he says. “I definitely think there’s a place for the social realist drama thing, but I love the idea of clashing that with the feeling of the big, stylish American crime films.” Right now he’s juggling the development of several projects, including a feature-length version of Dropping Off Michael, the BAFTA-nominated short he wrote in 2014; a feature film called Street Hustle, which at one time had Peter Mullan attached; and a series with BBC Scotland called Dog Days. But it’s all moving a tad slowly for Price. “I’m addicted to making stuff – just getting out there and doing it,” he says. “That’s what was great about the music video. But as soon as you’re in the legit world, trying to get funding and a commission, everything just moves really slowly. “I still think I’ll probably go out and make a zero-budget feature one day; the way we’ve done the shorts.” We wouldn’t put it past him. Zopa's Diamonds into Dust screened at Glasgow Short Film Festival

April 2021 – Feature

here aren’t too many Scottish filmmakers who could pull off playing a coked-up hardman who’s stripped to the waist, save for an undone coat, and wielding a 5-iron. James Price is one of the few. “I think I was aiming for Alfred Molina in Boogie Nights when I went with the open jacket,” he says. The scene we’re discussing is the cold opening to Price’s knockout music video for Diamonds into Dust by Zopa, the New York indierock band fronted by actor Michael Imperioli, who’s best known for playing Christopher Moltisanti, Tony’s cocky protégé in The Sopranos. How does a young Glasgow filmmaker with a handful of low- to zero-budget shorts under his belt end up shooting the promo for a well-known actor’s side-hustle? “I’m apprehensive to say this,” Price tells me over Zoom, “because I don’t want him inundated with messages, but I just slid into his DMs.” Imperioli was uneasy about it at first – as you would be too if a stranger hit you up on Instagram asking to direct you a music video. Although it turns out his biggest concern was raising a budget. Price eventually sweet-talked him: “I just said to him, ‘Fuck a budget, man! Just let me do it.’ And he was really nice and said yes.” The results are as gallus as the pitch. After the nervy drug deal opening that could come from any self-consciously gritty social-realist film, the video takes a more poetic turn as it follows two young lovers (played by Amy Manson and Rian Gordon), hopped up on adrenaline and their white powder purchase, on a wild night through Glasgow. The filmmaking is as uninhibited and sensual as the Bonny and Clyde-esque couple. “The whole goal was to inject Glasgow with a real sense of Americana,” Price says of the promo. “There are a bunch of references to other films, like Thelma & Louise and Spring Breakers. I just kind of made a big collage of things I liked and put it in a Springburn setting.” During their hedonistic night, the couple gets in hot water after robbing a city centre barber’s owned by a Glasgow crime lord. The name of the barber’s, incidentally, is Goodfellas. Unbelievably, this was a happy coincidence. “One of the producers found that barbershop for us. And he didn’t even realise that Michael was in Goodfellas! I was like, ‘Are you kidding? That’s genius!’” It’s not just Imperioli’s role as the put-upon Spider in that Martin Scorsese masterpiece that

Film

Interview: Jamie Dunn

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Film

Shooting Stars We speak to the filmmakers behind some of our favourite shorts at this year’s Glasgow Short Film Festival

April 2021 – Feature

Interview: Jamie Dunn

The Shift

Laura Carreira The Shift Early in her career, Portuguese filmmaker Laura Carreira became interested in portraying labour on screen. “I found it very strange how so many films avoided work and characters always seemed so much more free than I was,” she tells us, “and so my obsession began.” She studied film at the António Arroio School of Arts in Lisbon before moving to Scotland over a decade ago for a film directing course at the Edinburgh College of Art. “I always wanted to do fiction but at ECA I was introduced to some amazing observational documentaries,” Carreira recalls. “It was

very hard to produce fiction as I couldn’t really afford it at the time, so I started to focus on documentaries instead.” It proved difficult, however, to mesh her interest in portraying work on screen with nonfiction cinema. “Those first documentary projects were valuable experiences but equally frustrating as workplaces never really welcomed me with a camera,” she says. “They were always controlling and suspicious over my intentions and I felt I couldn’t really work freely and was afraid of involving workers to the point where it could affect their jobs.” Discouraged, she stopped making films for two years until she’d saved enough money for her first fiction film. That was the superb Red Hill, — 32 —

which centred on a former miner who’s now a low-paid security guard patrolling the site of the decommissioned mine at which he used to work. Carreira’s similarly deft new short is The Shift, a beautifully fat-free work following Anna, an agency worker, as she visits a supermarket with her dog. We simply follow her as she scours the aisles for discounted products and agonises over what she can put in her basket. Then, while waiting at the checkout, she receives the phone call that every zero-hours contract worker dreads. “I wanted the supermarket to be a space that framed Anna’s experience,” she says, “and that also portrayed other characters, even if in a fleeting way. The sound helped us with this, especially in the moment at the checkout where we wanted to feel the presence of people around her and close to her. It tapped into that element of shame over what she’s going through.” The Shift was written and shot before the pandemic, but its themes of precarious employment and its depiction of the palpable anxiety of being skint could hardly be more timely. “I think [this past year] has really exposed how people are taken advantage of, used when needed and then discarded with no safety net,” she says. “It’s a relationship of dependency when the employer holds all the power and we’ve witnessed these throughout the year.”

lauracarreira.com

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SCUZZ As a teen, Alia Ghafar wanted to be an actor, but the idea of stepping behind the camera slowly grew on her. “I always loved films and as I got older, I started watching more of the classics and ‘weird’ movies my dad was into, which got me thinking about filmmaking more,” she tells us. “I wrote some mad scripts with fellow drama geek pals and my camera-enthusiast mate Andrew shot them. When I left school, I went to study film at Edinburgh

Laura Wadha Isle of Us

— 33 —

aliaghafar.com

Isle of Us

There have been many films over the last few years documenting the war in Syria and the often perilous journeys refugees are forced to take to escape the conflict. Wadha wanted to tell a story of what comes after that trauma. “I think it is important to talk about identity and how trauma becomes something that is lived with while trying to start a completely new life in an unrecognisable place,” she says. “I want to make films which create empathy and make people feel immersed, leaving with a better understanding of what people in Syria have gone through.” laurawadha.com

April 2021 – Feature

While Laura Wadha’s skill as a documentarian are all her own, we should perhaps thank her mother for pushing this talented young filmmaker towards her calling. “When I was 14 my mum signed me up for a week-long filmmaking workshop at the local youth centre,” she recalls. “From the moment I picked up a camera I knew it was what I wanted to do and have been making films ever since.” Her love for documentary was cemented with her first short, 2013’s Saved By Shrapnel, which centred on her grandad, a veteran of the Korean War who suffers from PTSD. “The process of making that film and learning about his life, exploring things we would never normally have talked about, made me realise the power of documentary film.” Her films are characterised by a fine-grained subtlety (“I try not to over-explain things,” she says) and an expressive use of archive. A film that made a great impression on her when she was starting out was 5 Broken Cameras from Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat. “I watched it when I was quite young and it has always been a film I go back to. Other directors who have

influenced me are Laura Poitras, Clio Barnard, Kim Longinotto and Joshua Oppenheimer.” Themes of identity, grief and trauma run through her films. She’s also interested in memory, which she likes to explore in visceral ways. That’s clear from new film Isle of Us, which follows Mounzer, a phlegmatic Syrian barber trying to make a new life for himself and his family on Bute. Wadha is half-Scottish, halfSyrian and has explored the Syrian refugee experience before in her 2017 film Flight, which followed her teen cousins’ move to Sweden after fleeing the war. The idea for a film on Bute came when her dad told her about the large number of Syrians who’d been relocated there. On her first visit to the island, she was taken aback by the atmosphere. “There was a Syrian bakery, a Syrian restaurant and a Syrian barbershop [Mounzer’s]. In each place, it was as if I had been transported back to times I had spent on holiday in Syria.”

scene was really dynamic and had so much cinematic potential.” Ghafar was also attracted to the idea of incorporating a chase scene through town. “I liked the idea of using something traditional to an action movie, then taking it in a completely different direction,” she says. “It was a mix of wanting to capture the atmosphere of Glasgow nightlife and also play with genre elements in an unexpected way – resulting in a story of an endearing, unlikely friendship.” Despite being only two films into her career, certain themes and styles are already starting to emerge: intergenerational friendships, workingclass protagonists with artistic ambitions and greasy spoon cafe settings to name just three. “I do love the aesthetics of old-school cafes and chip shops – I feel they’re our equivalent to a US diner and there’s so many great diner scenes in cinema!” This writer-director is also interested in bringing characters together from different worlds: “I think in life, those chance encounters with people you wouldn’t necessarily seek out are often the most enriching and memorable.” Don’t try to pin Ghafar down though; her influences are eclectic. “SCUZZ has some Safdie Brothers inspo in there,” she reveals. “Salt & Sauce is a slight homage to Chungking Express and the first feature I’m writing is influenced by classic road movies. My top five films include Billy Elliot but also Paris, Texas – so really, I’m a mess.”

Film

Alia Ghafar

College of Art and it spiralled from there!” Ghafar’s films have been described as ‘slice of life’, and she likes that description. “They’re not heavy-going drama, but not full-on comedy,” she says of her work. “I think everyday life is always filled with moments of humour, melancholy, frustration, everything – so I try to keep it all in there!” Ghafar’s graduation film, Salt & Sauce, SCUZZ was about a young woman stuck working in a chip shop after finding herself in a bit of an existential limbo after high school. The followup, SCUZZ, is similarly concerned with a young woman going through a life crisis: Kim is a bassist in a cool art school band, who has to endure the humiliation of performing with her narcissistic ex-boyfriend, the band’s frontman. After a particularly stressful gig, her night takes a turn when a 14-year-old ned steals her ex’s guitar and she takes chase through the neon-lit streets of Glasgow. Attending a lot of gigs in the city was what first inspired SCUZZ: “I thought Glasgow’s music

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Jack Goessens

Commissioned as part of the Scottish Documentary Institute’s Bridging the Gap series, Jack Goessens’ Everyman is a vivid essay film and a rare gender transition story told from an insider’s perspective. “The film was a way of trying to show people what was in my head and what I was feeling,” Goessens says. “When I started living as Jack and introduced myself to new people, I was really aware that I was now experiencing the world from a different viewpoint – a bit like going through the looking glass. Most people are aware of these realities but will only ever experience them from one side so I wanted to share what I was seeing.” The Everyman of the title is the superhero character Goessens created as a kid. Decked out in his father’s old suit jacket and a cap, Everyman’s chief appeal was that Goessens would often be identified as a boy while dressed as the character. The film takes the poetic form of dreamy reenactments of a young Goessens revelling in the transformative power of the Everyman costume, cut together with witty vignettes referencing everything from old sitcoms to renaissance art that explore various aspects of Goessens’ transition. “I find it quite difficult to verbalise the nuances of my experience,” he says. “These pieces of art and film, then, are essentially an alternative but universal language.”

April 2021 – Feature

Film

Everyman

Douglas King Do No Harm Douglas King’s filmmaking career started early: “I made my first film when I was around nine, after borrowing – eventually outright stealing – my grandad’s video camera.” Initially, the stars were made of Lego, although he soon started roping in human actors. “When I went to high school I started to cast my friends and screening the films in the library at lunchtime,” he recalls. “At the time I was editing through my VCR.”

Everyman

Goessens’ filmmaking began at 14, when he taught himself editing by slicing his favourite films and TV shows into music videos. Following a few evening and weekend writing and directing classes, he went on to study film at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. As evident from Everyman and his other shorts, like 2018’s Bouba & Kiki, about a young man who associates the sound of people’s voices with flavours, Goessens’ filmmaking is exuberant and uninhibited. “I quite like to play with form and work with magic realism or hyperrealism,” he says. “I tend to get obsessed with different filmmakers and immerse myself in their work; at the moment that’s Céline Sciamma and Xavier Dolan.”

Everyman isn’t just refreshing in its form. It’s bracing, too, in its focus on the social issues around gender transitioning, which seem particularly under-discussed elsewhere. “The social side has both been the most interesting and the most difficult aspect of transitioning for me,” he says, “and something I found myself talking about a lot. I also like to think it’s a more relatable story, which is important because trans people are still quite misunderstood.”

When a supportive art teacher got wind of these screenings and King’s rudimentary editing methods, he purchased Adobe Premiere for the class. “This was incredible for him to do as he let me come in at lunchtime to practice editing on the Do No Harm computer,” says King, “and even more incredible when I found out years later that it cost half his budget, and no other pupil used the program!” We can thank that teacher, then – and King’s diligent studying of Scorsese on Scorsese, which he first read around 12 and to which he still returns (“I’ve got two editions and they are both falling apart”) – for the nimble editing of his new short Do No Harm. It follows Beth, a top scientist, who, after hours, breaks into the high-security facility at which she works, all to stop her pregnant colleague from eating a possibly out-ofdate cheese and tomato sandwich.

Writer Rosy Barnes brought King the idea for this “OCD thriller” and suggested its breakneck parallel editing structure, which flips between Beth’s night-time raid and the events of that day at work that has lead to such extreme behaviour. Do No Harm was developed through a Scottish Film Talent Network scheme, and King and Barnes had to fight to keep the film’s chopped-up chronology. “That structure was important to both of us as it allowed us to set a pace for the entire short,” says King, “but more importantly, the structure reflects the OCD thought loop that Beth is going through, and how she can’t break free.” Much of the film’s humour comes from the clash between what’s going on in Beth’s head (a Mission Impossible-style heist) and the mundanity of reality. “Beth feels like she is living in a highoctane action movie,” says King, “but when you cut to the CCTV she is running while trying to avoid the cracks in the tiles, which just looks a bit weird.”

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jackgoessens.com

douglaskingfilm.com

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Changing the Culture Comedy

We catch up with Bilal Zafar, Eleanor Morton, Tom Mayhew, Chloe Petts and Sikisa about what the ‘new normal’ should be for future Edinburgh Festival Fringes Interview: Yasmin Hackett

Find more about our interviewees’ work here: - Bilal Zafar on Twitch at twitch.tv/zafarcakes - Eleanor Morton on Twitter @eleanormorton and catch her shows on NextUp - Tom Mayhew on Twitter @tommayhew and catch Tom Mayhew is Benefit Scum on BBC Sounds - Chloe Petts on Instagram @chloepetts and Twitter @ChloePetts - Sikisa on Instagram at @twix_choc87 and @girlcode_chat

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Sikisa

April 2021 – Feature

Photo: Courtesy of Hide This for Me

like mad to do the Fringe. “But in general I would hope the Fringe becomes more diverse,” she adds. “Tom Mayhew was my star of 2019 with his Edinburgh show, but it wasn’t nominated and the wonder is whether that’s because he wasn’t in one of the top three venues.” “I think this year specifically could be more inclusive because it’s unlikely to be a full month,” says Petts, who should have debuted at Fringe 2020. “But, then again, maybe that will just be balancing out the lost income of potential attendees due to the pandemic.” Morton is less confident. “I don’t know how much can change in a year or so, especially as I don’t really feel like we’ve had that discussion as an industry.” Tom Mayhew, though, points toward initiatives making waves: “We have seen things move forward over the past five years, with Edinburgh shows like Best In Class giving a platform for working-class comedians who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford to be there.” That’s not to say the Fringe isn’t sorely missed. “Overpriced woodfire pizza. Seeing 90s comedy legends buying cigarettes in newsagents. Bumping into a teacher from high school and having to explain that you ‘do comedy now’,” is what Morton is yearning for. “The feeling of having written an entire show that I’ll hopefully be proud of and then seeing one of my flyers in a puddle,” muses Zafar. But for Mayhew, it’s about escape from the everyday. “Not everyone will relate to this, but for me, it has always felt like a guilt-free holiday. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a typical holiday, as you are working your butt off! However, it is still time away, in a different scene, doing different things.” Whatever’s in store for us this August, and however much we look forward to the Fringe’s triumphant return, the world’s largest arts festival needs to be better at including, and raising, the voices of people from marginalised communities. Let’s hope that better comes soon.

Photo: Swiss Chocolate Pictures/Adrian Tauss

he Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a sorely missed staple for many comics who look to build on, and in some cases establish their careers. It’s been off the cards since April 2020 but it feels, however tentatively, as though we could see its return this summer, even if it doesn’t look or feel quite the same. Between Fringes comedians have been finding various ways to fill the time over the last year. Sikisa found her platform online. “I was quite lucky during lockdown as I had the opportunity to perform at some of the big online shows like Always Be Comedy and The Covid Arms as well as having the opportunity to perform on stage at the Save Live Comedy events, and having my TV debut.” Also taking their talents online is Bilal Zafar: “Since April I have been streaming on Twitch, a lot! It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.” “I’ve spent most of the year working on my Radio 4 series, Tom Mayhew is Benefit Scum [now on BBC Sounds],” says the eponymous Mayhew. “I really appreciated having that project to focus on, to be honest, otherwise I would have probably gone mad!” For Chloe Petts, writing has offered similar solace: “I’ve been working with the genius Sean McLoughlin on my new show, although it’s very hard to write stand-up when life feels like Groundhog Day.” Eleanor Morton’s kept herself busy with writing, podcasts and online gigs. “I got to be in Adam Larter/ Weirdos’ award-nominated Gary and the Crisp Factory for Leicester Comedy Festival, which all sounds quite exciting until you remember it all took place in my bedroom.” A year of lockdowns has allowed space for reflection on what can be done better. Whether it’s harassment on the Scottish comedy scene, the lack of safe spaces for marginalised communities, or the sheer expense of the Fringe for those from lower income backgrounds, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Zafar is in two minds about Tom Mayhew Fringe inclusivity: “I think it will seem more inclusive because the diversity of acts will continue to grow but I don’t see the cost of venues or accommodation going down so it’ll probably always favour performers with rich parents.” “As a female person of colour who comes from a council estate,” says Sikisa, she knew she’d have to work hard and save

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Pop History Suddenly back at her childhood home during the pandemic, one writer explores how old Top of the Pops clips got her through lockdown – and closer to her parents

here is too much rosé (the Graham Norton brand your mum likes, because all mums love Graham Norton). There is your mum crying while Elvis sways his hips on TV and your dad snoring upstairs, long gone to bed because he thinks you’re both acting too drunk and loutish, screaming at Elvis on the TV and talking about death. Mum cries around this point, because Elvis makes her think of her dead mother and that makes her think of her dead father. And then there is Top of the Pops, and the stories I make out of the threads of the past. TOTP exists in a liminal space between reality and fantasy. We all know no one sang live, like they did on the objectively better, but not quite as campily kitsch, The Old Grey Whistle Test. In this liminal space are the lives my parents led, the dream world I escape to through grainy videos, and the photos of them during their prime: blonde, golden brown, always young. I moved back home during the height of the pandemic. Nights spent in my teenage bedroom are also an existence in a strange in-between space. I am no longer a teenager, but I experience my youth redux, only this time I don’t have to hide any evidence of booze. 2020 had begun in earnest. One day I was walking around the Pont Neuf in a romantic haze, spring raining down on me in a cerulean stupor – and then, all of a sudden, we are washing our hands to the tune of Happy Birthday, afraid to touch

handrails or get buses, and my dreams, along with everyone else’s for the near future, are dashed. I went back to my parents’ home near a secluded forest, where nothing happens. I watched all of Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre and did Jane Fonda workouts. Spring came, and then summer, and the only things that sustained me were Friday and Saturday nights, when we basked in the nostalgic ritual that is TOTP. Nostalgia was invented in the 17th century to describe the literal homesickness of Swiss mercenaries on military duty. In his book Retromania, Simon Reynolds writes that nostalgia “shed these geographical associations and became a temporal condition: no longer an anguished yearning for the lost motherland but a wistful pining for a halcyon lost time in one’s life. As it became de-medicalised, nostalgia also began to be seen not just as an individual emotion but as a collective longing for a happier, simpler, more innocent age.” Nostalgia in the modern sense is an emotion that can’t be cured or resolved; its only remedy is time travel. YouTube is a window into these past worlds. It was where the ghosts of my parents’ TOTP singers lived perpetually, in a world of bleached jeans, teased hair and sultry vocals, never ageing. In this world, it is always 1985 or 1976, and COVID doesn’t exist. There’s only miming into a small silver microphone and pretending to play a synth keyboard. We climb onto the sofa to Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the

April 2021 — Feature

Intersections

Words: Katie Driscoll Illustration: Katie Smith

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“In this world, it is always 1985 or 1976, and COVID doesn’t exist. There’s only miming into a small silver microphone and pretending to play a synth keyboard” World and mimic the dance moves. My parents show me how they danced to Madness, to Wham!, my dad doing the ‘dying fly’ to the Sex Pistols or The Clash, because he was too cool for Wham! The crowd are paid to dance in front of the stage, boundless energy and joy, no homesickness emanating from their bodies. I know which refrains to hit: the way Bryan Ferry, suave in a white suit – not yet the man who supports the Tory party or fox hunting – dances with a Valium sway and mugs to the camera to Roxy Music’s More Than This; the Bay City Rollers, always clad in tartan; how Stiff Little Fingers, zipped up in leather, scream-sing with a false bravado, the screen pulsating blue and black and grainy, an epileptic fit. There’s Pan’s People, and then Legs and Co, skating through British cultural history with skimpier and skimpier outfits, from the disco days of the 70s to the more gaudy 80s. Kate Bush is witchy, emerging out of the gothic night. Mum’s screams of joy lead Dad to tell stories of them dancing at the Top Rank, a club that now only exists in name and mythic status. There are the same beats and rhythms to the same continuing weekends, and that’s where the comfort lies. I know what stories they’ll tell, what dances they’ll do, which videos to play that would get them to tell those same stories. These videos offer a peek into my parents’ best years, and a way for me to get closer to them. They mould meaning out of a time when looking inwards, and to the past, was the only way through seemingly neverending repetition and fear. Instead of regressing to my teenage self, I feel the freedom of getting to know my parents on equal footing. I’ve now moved out of my parents’ house but whenever I feel homesick, or lockdown is getting me down, it’s YouTube I head to and blurry videos of The Human League and Adam Ant and David Bowie on TOTP, as fuzzy as my heart.

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Swipe On Dating apps are tricky to navigate for everyone, but they’re even trickier if you don’t fit big tech’s gender mould. Here one writer reflects on why dating apps need to become more inclusive to transgender and non-binary users Words: Liam Konemann Illustration: Ida Henrich Intersections

Content warning: this article includes discussions of transphobia and references to suicide.

“As someone who identifies as ‘both’ genders, it’s a nightmare trying to work out what category to put yourself in” Andrew doesn’t fit neatly into ‘man’ or ‘woman’, some of the problems are structural. When Tinder introduced more gender identity and sexuality options in 2019, it seemed like a step in the right direction. But it turns out these options are a set of stairs leading nowhere. While both Tinder and Hinge now allow users to select their gender from a wider range including non-binary and genderqueer, once those have been entered you’re presented with another, much more restrictive choice. “Show me to people looking for…” says the screen, and then “men” or “women.” Are you a boy they/them or a girl they/them? Andrew, a non-binary person who uses dating apps, has experienced this on several platforms. “As someone who identifies as ‘both’ genders, it’s a nightmare trying to work out what category to put yourself in,” they say. “You have to pick whether you want to be shown to people who are looking for men or women. So that’s a toss-up, trying to work out what group of people I’m trying to attract.” Another non-binary user, Neve, tells me: “The thing that sucks the most about Tinder is that people are organised by gender rather than by sexuality. Even before I started identifying as non-binary, as a queer person I had a strong preference for dating queer people of my gender. I stopped dating straight people in the 2000s. And on Tinder you can’t filter out straight people.” This was a common theme I found when speaking to other trans and non-binary people about their experiences: it’s difficult to meet other trans and non-binary users. OkCupid was once the leader of the pack for this, but in recent years it has started to slip, pivoting towards a more swipe-based design and away from browsable profiles. Then there’s the text-based personals app Lex, which caters exclusively to queer women and — 37 —

people of marginalised genders but can still feel closed-off to some transmasculine people. It can be disheartening as a masculine-identifying person to feel that the only place you’re welcome is one primarily made for women. Depressingly, one of the better platforms for trans people looking to meet other trans people is Grindr, allowing you to filter by ‘tribe’ – but then we’re back to the bigots again. So what’s the solution? For many trans people, the ideal would be an app truly made for queer and trans people. Surely that’s not so much to ask? In the meantime, though, the power to improve things lies with other users. There are already plenty of things to worry about when we’re swiping – what if, for example, your match really, really likes The Big Bang Theory for some reason? We shouldn’t have to worry about transphobic abuse as well.

April 2021 — Feature

f one more cisgender person tells me how good Hinge is, I’m going to scream. They mean well, of course. They’ve had positive experiences and they want to share them with me, the nearest single person in their vicinity. But their experiences of Hinge and my experience of Hinge are very different, and there’s nothing I can do about that. Dating apps can be unpleasant even under the best conditions. When you’re basically online shopping for people, there’s always the possibility of a bad fit. Like most things, though, it’s even more difficult when you’re transgender. People say ignorant things – and they say deliberately offensive things – and that’s before we get to the problems with the apps themselves. Since the start of the pandemic, more people are using Tinder, Hinge and Bumble than ever before; Tinder alone saw a record three billion swipes on a single day in March last year. But are the experiences of trans users getting any better? Depressingly, no, not really. Unsurprisingly, Grindr is the worst offender. Requests for nudes and generally degrading comments are par for the course there, but every now and then something more sinister emerges. I’ve been using the platform for long enough that I can usually tell who’s going to turn out to be a transphobe from just the way they say hello, but sometimes you feel like you should give them the benefit of the doubt. This is always a mistake. One user I engaged with despite my initial misgivings couldn’t understand why I, a queer trans man, would say on my profile that I wasn’t interested in straight guys. “Surely a gay guy wouldn’t want that?” he asked, somehow managing to not only put every gay man into one box, but also forget that bisexual, pansexual and queer men exist. “Well, some people have more expansive definitions of what a man is than you,” I responded. This was about the point when he started to verbally abuse me, in a way that was so exaggeratedly transphobic that I actually started to laugh. It isn’t funny really, but sometimes it also is. His parting shot was to describe what he saw as the manner and location of my eventual suicide – the way we all go, according to him. The irony is that this guy, knowing I was trans, had already said he wanted to sleep with me. The Venn diagram between these men and the kind of men who ask girls for nudes, then call them ugly skanks when they refuse, is a circle. It’s not just bigotry that’s the issue. For many non-binary users, or anyone else whose gender

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Elevator

Business Talks Fifteen creative companies in Glasgow are currently taking part in the Glasgow Creative Accelerator, a programme to help creative businesses reach their full potential. We find out more from two of the participants Interview: Jamie Dunn

April 2021 — Review

rexit. Pandemic. Economic recession. Suffice to say, these are not exactly ideal conditions for growing your business. But 15 Glasgow companies in creative fields will be hoping to do exactly that with the Glasgow Creative Accelerator, a new 12-week programme from social enterprise group Elevator, which aims to offer targeted support to help creatives reach their full potential. Fifteen creative businesses are currently engaged in the programme, which kicked off in early March. Dubbed by Elevator as the ‘Founders’, these 15 companies represent an eclectic array of disciplines within the city’s creative sector. Among the cohort are fashion brands, graphic designers, filmmakers and jewellery makers. We speak to two of these ‘Founders’ – television and film outfit Scotch! and computer gaming company Chimera Tales – to find out a bit more about their business and hear how their Creative Accelerator experience is going. Scotch! was set up by Peabody and BAFTA award-winning director Don Coutts in 2015, with development producer Alistair Ferguson joining the company to help take ideas forward. “Scotch! was assembled to deliver productions for BBC Scotland,” Ferguson explains over Zoom. “With my coming into the business, I very much wanted to cast the net further afield. So I’m looking at international commissions and other networks.” Right now they have “around 45 ideas on the go” although the focus is a “very meaty history documentary” that’s currently in production. Titled

The Rigs of Nigg, the doc tells how a small village in the Highlands near the entrance to the Cromarty Firth became the hub for a new type of industry when the Forties Oil Field, the largest oil field in the North Sea, was discovered in the 1970s. Extracting the oil was going to be a challenge. “That area of [The North Sea] has some of the most extreme conditions on the planet due to the wind and the power of the waves, and it can change in an instant,” says Ferguson. “So they knew that the structure was going to be big. And due to the size of that structure, they had to build it somewhere close.” After an extensive search by BP, they settled on Nigg. “It turned out this little town, which at that point had only ever been known for its farming, its fishing and its faith, was one of the only places that had the ideal location and a channel of water deep enough to build the enormous oil rig required.” Nigg was transformed – practically overnight. “Five thousand men and The Rigs of Nigg their families descended on this tiny Highland village,” says Ferguson. “So you can imagine, it was a very difficult transition period. So we’re trying to tell that story, but the men and women who were there are slowly passing away. So we have to get in there and get these Hotel Arcanum stories now.” Chimera Tales is a similarly small company with big ambitions. “Our long-term goal is to focus on the development of engaging games with social, political, and historical aspects,” says Máté Tóth Ridovics, Chimera Tales’ creative director and the game — 38 —

artist of the team. They could hardly find a darker aspect of history to delve into than with the game on which they’re currently working. Called Hotel Arcanum, it’s a story-driven game digging into transgenerational Holocaust trauma. “It’s a mixture of dialogue-focused narrative games and deduction-focused detective games,” says Ridovics, “where the player has to gently reveal the personal history of a three-generation family. Despite its topic, it is a game with a strong contemporary narrative focus, therefore we think it could be engaging for a wider audience and contribute to the remembrance culture at the same time.” For Ridovics, the chief reason he wanted to be part of the Glasgow Creative Accelerator is simply to help Chimera Tales grow. “We think it’s a fantastic opportunity for us to widen our business network,” he says. “Also, being able to look at our game from another perspective with the help of business mentors or other creatives is highly useful to see all the aspects and potential of the project you are working on.” Ferguson, meanwhile, is hoping the Glasgow Creative Accelerator will help recalibrate his approach to business. “There are so many things in business that, as a creative and visual thinker, you don’t necessarily think about,” he says. “We can definitely package an idea. We can tell a story. But how do you get the best return for that story? How do you act and deal on it on the international stage?” When we speak to Ferguson, he’s only three weeks into the programme, but it’s clear he’s already thinking in more entrepreneurial ways. “It’s very easy, I think, if you’re, say, a company who cuts hair or sells coffee, to know who your customers are. [Creative Accelerator] has helped open my eyes and to actually start thinking, ‘OK, this channel is our customer; what are their needs and desires?’ So we’re beginning to understand ourselves more as a company, and we’re also starting to understand our buyers more.”

For more info on the Glasgow Creative Accelerator, go to elevatoruk.com/accelerators/glasgow-creative-accelerator

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Music Now This month’s Scottish music round-up highlights new music from Stanley Odd, Post Coal Prom Queen and James Lindsay, plus an exciting experimental project from Edinburgh label Blackford Hill

Stanley Odd

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Post Coal Prom Queen

rhythm-hopping album which expertly combines different facets of jazz, trad and experimental rock. While at some points you find yourself questioning whether or not it actually works, it’s never long before you’re sucked back into its plentiful charms. Listening to this record while staring out the window watching day turn to night, as clouds roll gently by is a strangely satisfying and wildly calming experience. You should try it. Formerly making lovely noises together under the moniker L-space, as Post Coal Prom Queen Lily Higham and Gordon Johnstone sound revitalised. The duo release their debut EP, PCPQ, on 29 April, and to be quite frank, they’ve never sounded better. Instrumentally, the music on PCPQ sounds richer than on their previous work as L-space, and in its tightly-packed four songs it overflows with delightful sounds, textures and tempos. But it’s Higham’s delicate, breathy and feather-light vocals that are the real standout here as they seem to effortlessly bring the whole thing together, Higham sounding more confident and assured than we’ve heard before. Elsewhere, inspired by the conversations she’s had with women about their experiences of impostor syndrome and the negative impact social media can have on their mental health, Jen Athan releases her new EP I Love Me, I Love Me Not (2 Apr). On 30 April, the yellowloving Colonel Mustard and the Dijon 5 release The Difficult Number 2, and Glasgow three-piece Baby Strange release their high-octane Land of Nothing EP featuring the infectious indie-disco cut Club Sabbath.

April 2021 — Review

Photo: Courtesy of Stanley Odd

even on one’, and a hearty chuckle from vocalist Veronica Electronica. On STAY ODD, their first album in over six years, Stanley Odd have levelled up. The dry wit, expertly delivered social commentary and playful cap tips at pop culture are all there, and the music bounces. Just try to refrain from turning the volume up on tracks like Bill Oddy or on midpoint banger Undo Redo; even slower cuts like Exciting Lives warrant a head bob. As well as the music, STAY ODD comes with a lovely wee A5 accompanying ‘Oddio’ book of poetry and song lyrics. Titled The magic of everyday things (A music book), it’s exactly what you’d expect from a book by the band: it’s bold and vibrant, it’s 56-pages filled with graffiti-inspired illustrations, playfully annotated throughout with scribbled handwriting of processes and lyrics. A lovely addition to the old Billy bookcase. Curated by Simon Lewin, with help from co-curator Tommy Perman, one of the most tantalising offerings this month comes in the form of Blackford Hill’s Transmissions Vol. 1 (16 Apr). An evocative collection of 31 tracks across two CDs, its unique throughline of experimental noises, found sounds and sounds in nature, with the collective penchant for musical exploration, help to cohesively bring this project together despite there being many artists involved. Across its two-hour runtime, standouts come thick and fast on this record of exceptional intricacies. Perman’s remix of Andrew Wasylyk’s Adrift Amid a Constellation feels of another world; the propulsive beat of Lomond Campbell’s Piano Stutter is a rush; Jake Tilson’s New York 18/11/95 – Harmonica, E Train 8th Ave Local is transportive; WOLF’s Churchbells (Tideout) is eerily atmospheric; and Hanna Tuulikki’s By the Shoreline (Away from the Birds) is alluring and meditative. Transmissions Vol. 1 is a beautiful record from an exceptional cast of musicians and noise-makers. On 23 April James Lindsay releases Torus, his cross-genre,

Photo: Courtesy of Post Coal Prom Queen

pring is here, hope dangling before us like a slightly past-its-best carrot on the end of a very long stick. Vaccinations are being rolled out, restrictions are starting to ease and a whole host of music festivals have started announcing actual plans for this year. Amid all this, new music is still coming thick and fast, so we’ve done our best to highlight some of the Scottish releases we’re most excited about this month. Following on from releases from Mogwai and Arab Strap, this month is the turn of another of Scotland’s most-loved alt-rock bands, Teenage Fanclub, who release their eleventh album, Endless Arcade, via their own PeMa label on 30 April (turn back a page for our review). “The unofficial King of Scotland”, according to Huw Stephens anyway, Pictish Trail releases his brand new Dream Wall EP on 1 April (find out more in our cover story on p16), and Glasgow songwriting project Ensemble, who work with young people in social care, release their debut collaborative effort, No Place Like It (more about that on p27). On FUWSH (Fuck You We’re Still Here), the opening track of STAY ODD (12 Apr), Scottish hip-hop mainstays Stanley Odd don’t care what you think. In his charismatic signature lilt, frontman Dave Hook delivers lines like ‘Music that makes me contemplate cutting off ma ears’ and ‘In a Scottish accent? How can ah unhear this’ with conviction. It’s a funny, confident, middle-finger-up at the haters, from a band who are just doing what they love, doing it well and doing it on their own terms. The song perfectly concludes with: ‘It’s as if they wanted to get dropped by their label, but they’re not

Albums

Words: Tallah Brash

April 2021 — Review

Local Music

THE SKINNY

Dry Cleaning New Long Leg 4AD, 2 Apr rrrrr Listen to: Scratchcard Lanyard, John Wick

KUČKA Wrestling LuckyMe / Soothsayer, 30 Apr rrrrr Listen to: Ascension, Your World

You’ve got tough competition to stand out as a British band with a deadpan spoken-word vocalist, a bad band name and the obligatory post-punk influence. Dry Cleaning somehow manage it, and their debut album New Long Leg has the wit and confidence to captivate on its own merits. Florence Shaw’s endlessly quotable poetry is built from scrambled conversations and cryptic asides that form a style of everyday surrealism. Yes, it’s deadpan and familiar, but it’s never monotonous. There’s subtlety and warmth, intentionality and rhythm. The calculated placement of breaths and the surprising changes in her vocal quality make her a commanding lead even when she sounds disinterested in the plot. Even the most off-hand lines like ‘that seems like a lot of garlic’ do more than some novels. The band’s impressive interplay and energy make these songs wonderfully replayable, to the point where the lyrics feel melodic and singalong-worthy. After the taut energy of the band’s early EPs, they sound looser and more explorative here, more at one with Shaw’s voice. Like Shaw’s one-liners, and the mundane moments they represent, the songs on New Long Leg become heavy and improbably moving when stacked on top of each other. [Skye Butchard] Laura Jane Lowther has spent the best part of the last decade collaborating with an impressive roster of artists, including A$AP Rocky, SOPHIE and Flume. Now, almost nine years since the release of her eponymous debut EP as KUČKA she’s going solo once again on her debut album, Wrestling. Born in Liverpool, Lowther moved to Perth, Australia as a teenager before relocating to Los Angeles as an adult, where she now lives with her wife – visual artist and creative director of Wrestling – Dillon Howl. The latter two cities are where Lowther’s musical career really took off, and where many of her collaborations were born. Not exactly a debut in the traditional sense, Lowther’s wealth of experience in the music industry is evident and Wrestling is an incredibly accomplished record. Where many debuts act as a means of setting out an artist’s vision, Lowther’s musical identity is already wellestablished and Wrestling only seeks to cement that. Wrestling is entirely Lowther’s – written, produced and recorded herself. It sounds like an artist ready to break out from the shadows and firmly position herself front and centre, and it feels like the perfect time too. [Nadia Younes]

Godspeed You! Black Emperor G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! Constellation, 2 Apr rrrrr Listen to: A Military Alphabet..., GOVERNMENT CAME..., OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (for D.H.)

Teenage Fanclub Endless Arcade PeMa, 30 Apr rrrrr Listen to: Home, The Sun Won’t Shine On Me, In Our Dreams

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Much like Run the Jewels perfectly captured the mood during last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, there are few outfits better suited to produce an album during a global pandemic than Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Barring their seven-year hiatus, for 25 years the Montreal-based, anarcho-punk orchestral group have created music ruminating on what the apocalypse would sound – and look – like. There’s no mistaking this for not being Godspeed; distorted, haunted field recordings, ambient drones and select, reoccurring guitar licks pepper this relatively brief (for them) record. Opener A Military Alphabet... starts as a much darker response to the band’s opus Storm from Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, but alongside the epic GOVERNMENT CAME... it progresses into a stoner metal suite. Meanwhile, the two shorter, more ethereal tracks provide calm – and hope – in both the eye and subsequent climax of the storm. Produced by The Besnard Lake’s Jace Lasek, with socially distant measures in place at Montreal’s Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango studio in October 2020, he’s done a tremendous job making the band’s seventh full-length come to brilliant, vibrant life. On G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! Godspeed has created a perfect soundtrack for these strange times. [Adam Turner-Heffer] There’s a troubled backstory to Teenage Fanclub’s eleventh album, Endless Arcade. Songwriter Norman Blake’s personal circumstances suddenly changed, and founder member, bass player and fan favourite Gerry Love left in 2018. Meanwhile, new boy Euros Childs arrived with a bagful of keyboard tricks and new organ/synth sounds to invade the trademark jangle of the Scottish craftsmen. Not that you’d know it listening to the music. Everything still flows beautifully: guitars chime, drums run on perpetual motion and the singing is top drawer. The lyrics, particularly those of Blake, are a giveaway that times are changing, but the music concentrates on the magic only great songs can offer when explored by a group of musicians with great taste and time to waste. A favourite waste of time on this record appears to have been to allow the music to stretch out more than usual, with guitar wig-outs, synth solos and room to breathe. Conceptual experiments are great for some bands, especially those in need of a restart, but in truth no such drastic action was required here. Teenage Fanclub sound refreshed, renewed and remarkably like themselves as Endless Arcade reveals an old group with some new tricks sounding in rude health. [Alan O’Hare]

THE SKINNY

At Home Black Bear Director: Lawrence Michael Levine Starring: Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, Sarah Gadon, Paola Lázaro

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Black Bear

Spring Blossom Director: Suzanne Lindon

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Just a year after the Roman Polanski controversy at the Césars might seem a bad time to release a film centring on a love affair between an adult man and a teenage girl, but Spring Blossom is more subversive than its synopsis suggests. Less forbidden romance than chaste coming-of-age tale, Spring Blossom was written by director and star Suzanne Lindon when she was just 15, offering a deliberate female perspective on a very timely issue. There is a gentle intimacy that characterises Lindon’s direction, the camera mimicking Suzanne’s every mood. Yet this quiet tenderness nevertheless fails to capture the sense of who Suzanne is, her narrative

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After Fern (McDormand) loses everything in the 2008 recession, she sets out in a van filled with all her earthly possessions for a new life of crosscountry travelling. Nomadland builds on Chloé Zhao’s previous films with a naturalistic style that delicately captures Fern’s journey and friendships without forsaking any of the blistering emotion the characters all try to conceal. It’s a visually gorgeous and deeply moving portrayal of humanity under tragic circumstances. Zhao has cemented herself as a brilliant director of non-professional actors. By hearing directly from real people affected by the issues, the film’s stories of being left behind by the system make for a compelling watch. It’s a real credit to Zhao’s talents how

Spring Blossom

journey largely rendered in cliches. It doesn’t help that the 20-yearold Lindon cast herself as the lead. It’s understandable, given the personal nature of the project as a work of youthful ingenuity, yet the visual discrepancy fails to convey the distinctly adolescent thrust of Suzanne’s tedium and blossoming desires. And, without a sense of the complex authenticity of Suzanne as a character, her fixation with an older man is simply uncomfortable. There is real warmth in Lindon’s script and a distinct creativity in her direction: several musical interludes demonstrate a playful engagement with genre. Yet without more thorough character work, Spring Blossom acts as the herald of a blooming new talent, rather than its own centrepiece. [Anahit Behrooz] Released 23 Apr on Curzon Home Cinema; certificate TBC

Nomadland

Sequin in a Blue Room Director: Samuel Van Grinsven Starring: Conor Leach, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Ed Wightman

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The thriller potential of location-based gay dating apps like Grindr is sharply explored in this stylish first feature from Australia-based filmmaker Samuel Van Grinsven. The app’s GPS positioning is designed for convenience, alerting horny users to their nearest potential sexual partner, but in Sequin in a Blue Room, the number indicating the proximity in metres between you and the nearest user takes on a sinister dimension. It’s the 21st century equivalent of “the calls are coming from inside the house”. As well as operating as an erotic thriller, Sequin in a Blue Room acts as a coming-of-age movie and a rather conservative cautionary tale. The Sequin of the title is a hedonistic 16-year-old Sydney schoolboy (Leach)

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seamlessly the professional actors blend into the ensemble. McDormand’s Fern feels so alive, and as we watch her chirpily deny offers of companionship, we feel her aversion to getting close to others and see her deepest fears of losing what little she has left. But a pointed focus on the smallest of moments sometimes robs Nomadland from making larger points about the situation Fern and many others are forced into. Our view into the Amazon warehouse Fern temporarily works in shows a much less intense and exploitative environment than recorded in Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book on which the film is based, but Zhao is more interested in the interiority of America’s nomadic populace rather than the broader political context they operate within. Nomadland powerfully dramatizes the very human need to find connections in the face of desolation. [Rory Doherty] Streams from 30 Apr on Disney+; certificate 12A

Sequin in a Blue Room

who’s exploring his sexuality, which in this case involves embarking on a string of anonymous, strictly one-timeonly hookups. Sequin blocks each conquest before the bedsheets cool. However, one of these one-nightstands – an older, closeted brute with a wife – takes exception to being brushed off. The plot machinations are old-hat (it’s basically a twink-daddy Fatal Attraction) but Van Grinsven’s woozy atmosphere and formal experimentation make Sequin in a Blue Room worth seeking out. A central sequence set within the eponymous “Blue Room”, a pop-up sex club filled with improbably buff men, is dreamy and seductive, all blue light and woozy sound design, while a fondness for frontal close-ups makes the most of Leach’s expressive face and sly charm. It’s an impressive calling card. [Jamie Dunn] Released 9 Apr by Peccadillo Pictures; certificate 18

April 2021 — Review

Starring: Suzanne Lindon, Arnaud Valois, Frédéric Pierrot, Florence Viala

Released 23 Apr by Vertigo; certificate 15

Nomadland Director: Chloé Zhao Starring: Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linda May, Swankie

At Home

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – a group of friends huddle up together in a lakeside cabin to see what bubbles to the surface once the conversation and the liquor start to flow. Gabe (Abbott) and Blair (Gadon) play the established couple with a baby on the way. The arrival of Allison (Plaza) gives them a fresh audience to tell their story to, battling for control of their relationship’s narrative. Allison herself takes turns playing the edgy contrarian, the partner in crime, the sister in solidarity – morphing herself to match the person she’s trying to impress.

Without spoiling it, Black Bear takes a meta turn halfway through that allows the lead trio to shift roles. But the game remains the same: a battle for narrative supremacy. Workplace abuse is retold as artistic vision. Trauma hides behind irony. Actual emotions are passed off as play-acting. It would be really easy for a film this inward-looking to devour itself completely, but Black Bear is kept ferociously alive by three crackling, protean lead performances that play every nervous glance and veiled comment like a form of sly emotional combat. And it sticks the landing too, with a gut-punch finale that underlines a simple fact: no matter how cleverly we tell or retell the story, at the centre of it all is a real person, real pain. [Ross McIndoe]

THE SKINNY

Books

Book Reviews

Lairies

Fragile Monsters

The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac

The Khan

By Steve Hollyman

By Catherine Menon

By Louise Kennedy

By Saima Mir

Lairies is a visceral examination of masculinity, class and violence in 21st century Britain. The story follows the aftermath of Shaun Taggart’s attack in a local nightclub as told from four different perspectives. What ensues is a gruesome revelation that will irreversibly change the course of each of these connected characters, resulting in a timely and guttural novel which will stay with the reader for days to come. As Shaun tries to piece together the events of his attack, three friends across town try to contend with the bleak reality of their working-class lives. Duncan has found himself at the epicentre of this disaffected rage burning inside so many young men. He watches as his friends, Ade and Colbeck, descend into complete bedlam each night they are out on the town. Their two-man mission is to set right a community plague: drunk, belligerent men displaying anti-social behaviour. They do this by beating the shit out of any offenders. At no point do Ade or Colbeck stop to question their own culpability in all this. The four men represent different sides of the same ticking time bomb in what is an explosive debut. Hollyman deftly portrays the realities of some of society’s most disenfranchised young men. Lairies never reads as a public service announcement but rather a direct indictment on how wider society has let so many young men fall through the cracks. [Andrés Ordorica]

Durga’s grandmother Mary is a difficult woman, so when Durga visits her in rural Malaysia for Diwali she only hopes to see the trip through without major fallout before returning to her life as a university mathematics lecturer. Unfortunately, fire and floods combine to make that impossible. One thing Mary has always excelled in as a grandmother is storytelling, but Durga’s now beginning to notice the holes in her plots. Alternating between the present day and snapshots of Mary’s childhood, life through WWII, and Malaysia’s struggle for independence, familial tales are at the core of this expansive, atmospheric debut novel from Catherine Menon. The tension between Durga and Mary is often foregrounded by the fluidity of their familial history as Mary tells it. The lines between reality and storytelling are blurred, challenging Durga’s very sense of her family identity as Mary refuses to stick to one version of a story. In exposing this inherent untrustworthiness, Menon explores the ways in which recounting family histories is akin to mythmaking: when you can no longer rely on eyewitnesses, who left can untangle history from fiction? For those enamoured by character and setting, Fragile Monsters can be an immersive act of escapism. Though, for a narrative so concerned with the act of storytelling, those spurred on by plot may be left deflated given the lack of resolution in so many of this story’s threads. [Emily Hay]

Having spent almost 30 years working as a chef, Louise Kennedy turned to the craft of fiction. The Northern Irish writer soon earned acclaim for her short stories, winning prizes and featuring in numerous journals, and The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac is her much anticipated debut collection of short stories swathed in thoughtful, downbeat prose. Each tale Kennedy presents is wrapped in a kind of mundane melancholy, tragedies weaved into the background as people attempt to navigate around them. A man prepares a speech for the wedding of the daughter he knows isn’t his, a couple’s relationship breaks at the seams after an abortion, and a pregnant woman agonises about her husband growing cannabis to pay off a debt. Yet these stories are connected by more than Kennedy’s style. Some characters appear in more than one story or are briefly mentioned within others. It’s the way the characters interact with nature, though, that unites these stories the most. Whether it’s landscaping, gardening or foraging, the natural world in all its forms can either be an escape or, occasionally, a window into the past. It’s arguable that not all of the stories have equal emotional heft, some narratives quietly delivering more of a gut punch. Still, this is an engaging introduction to Kennedy’s work, whetting the appetite for her upcoming debut novel, When I Move to the Sky. [Eugenie Johnson]

After years as a successful barrister, moving in London’s elite – and white – circles, Jia Khan finds herself called back to the northern city of her childhood. A flurry of violence directed at her family gives her no choice but to take up the mantle her murdered father set down: that of the head of the city’s biggest crime syndicate. As tensions rise between the white and Pakistani populations, Jia must step into a power vacuum left in the wake of her father’s death and exercise a kind of justice far removed from what she is used to; justice that must succeed where the British legal system has failed. Drawing on motifs and moral lessons from Pukhtun (Pashtun) history and culture, Mir infuses the story with a deep sense of the past, grappling with themes of legacy, sacrifice, and the complicated and ambiguous bonds between parents and children, brothers and sisters. And while the prose relies heavily on extended metaphor, sometimes distancing the reader from the action and occasionally veering towards platitude, the plot threads do tie together into a satisfying final confrontation, and an intriguingly openended conclusion. Mir’s strident authorial voice in calling out injustice, the female antihero protagonist, and the chemistry between the moral grey areas the protagonists occupy and the fundamentally Muslim lens through which the story is told, all combine to make The Khan a unique and compelling read. [Eris Young]

Influx Press, 8 Apr, £9.99

Viking, 8 Apr, £14.99

Bloomsbury, 1 Apr, £14.99

Point Blank, 1 Apr, £14.99

influxpress.com/lairies

penguin.co.uk

bloomsbury.com

oneworld-publications.com

April 2021 — Review

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THE SKINNY

Comedy

April 2021 — Review

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April 2021 — Review

Books

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THE SKINNY

ICYMI

Cerebral Manchester-based comic Sean Morley unearths a little-known feminist gem The Rag Trade Illustration: Seb Westcott

Comedy

is incredibly absorbing to watch a comedy from 60 years ago where the funniest character is a 56-year-old woman. I’m a sucker for sight gags. There’s a golden era of comedy where all the writers and performers had developed instincts from vaudeville and music halls. Gags and props were designed to be seen from the 50th row of an auditorium and are rendered ludicrous by tight shots of BBC cameras working in confined sets. In every episode Reg Varney either falls off a piece of furniture or has a torrent of liquid squirted in his face; each time scaled up into pantomime proportions. In episode one they accidentally steam press a baby’s bottle and it comes out a meter wide and stiff as a board. Characters are constantly repositioning each other by the arm so they just-about-plausibly can’t see the absolute mayhem unfurling in their peripheral vision. The show is fascinatingly, unwaveringly about work. You can watch the whole of The Office and not really have a great idea about what these people actually do. In The Rag Trade, the show and its humour never strays too far away from textiles: Miriam Karlin accidentally sewing a winning betting slip into the collar of a client’s dress, Esma Cannon slicing a loaf of bread with huge fabric scissors, Sheila Hancock sewing a Rizla shut because she’s struggling to make a roll-up. Plots revolve around clients, orders, pay rates, punchclocks, catering, childcare. In one episode the girls go on strike to demand a creche so domestic obligations don’t force women out of the job. This would be considered a radical idea to depict in a sitcom 60 years later! The Rag Trade is a refreshing kitsch classic for clownish 21st century sensibilities. Although, just as I was writing the final draft I watched the series one finale: a Christmas special where the girls start a side hustle making racist dolls. Once again, the long shadow of the British Empire has left a dollop of poo on an otherwise lovely relic. Catch Sean Morley on Twitter and Twitch @seanmorl Watch Escape the North on Twitch every Friday at 8pm

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April 2021 — Review

read about The Rag Trade years ago. A 1960s workplace sitcom about female textile workers with the punchline that they’re always going on strike. It sounds interesting! It sounds risky! Sometimes when delving too far back in the archives of 20th century comedy the best you can hope for is an artifact best viewed with the humorless curiosity of an archaeologist meticulously brushing silt off a cacked glob of bronze, and the worst is a low-res bigotry wince-a-thon. In researching this article I watched the original 1961 series of The Rag Trade, two episodes of On the Buses (episode one, and episode 60), the first episode of The Rag Trade 1977 remake, and one episode of the 1990 Norwegian remake of The Rag Trade ‘Fredrikssons Fabrikk’ (which I didn’t really get a lot from). The Rag Trade is not only a good time, but worth your time. The original unblemished The Rag Trade is purer and better than anything its later incarnations could replicate. It carves out a pristine and undiluted form of the workplace sitcom the likes of which I have not seen before or since. It’s a candle that burnt briefly, before the winds of change brought colour television, content deregulation, and a dismal era of 1970s bawdiness. The show is formulaic. Comfortingly so. Episodes begin with Peter Jones’ character, Harold Fenner, the long-suffering but duplicitous boss of Fenner’s Fashions, assuring a client of his workforce’s dedication. Cut to the factory floor where ‘the girls’ are invariably dancing, gossiping or cooking an egg on an upturned iron. The show’s main strength is the female ensemble cast of the shop floor workers. The writers tried to make all the characters funny and engaging, but as the cheeky underdogs the workforce are clearly the protagonists. We cheer when they skive, and weep when they are caught. Miriam Karlin plays a militant union leader, Sheila Hancock a 60s ‘bimbo’ and Esma Cannon is an easily confused elderly worker. Cannon’s performance steals the show. She’s incredible; imagine Mrs Doyle but fast. Her approach to physicality looks like the sped-up footage from a 1920s hand-cranked camera. It

THE SKINNY

The Skinny On...

The Skinny On... Molly Linen Ahead of releasing her new single, A Lot to Give, Lost Map’s Molly Linen takes on this month’s Q&A. She tells us of her fear of heights, love of trees, and recalls the time she once ate hamster food

What’s your favourite meal to cook at home? I really enjoy making big salads that involve lots of different components, such as roast sweet potato, cucumber and loads of leaves etc. Beans on toast is also a trusty favourite.

What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen and what made it so bad? I think I’m pretty easy going with films and there haven’t been any I’ve watched that I’ve hated. Although, I thought the fourth Shrek film was a bit of a letdown. Photo: Caio Wheelhosue

What’s your favourite place to visit? Pembrokeshire on the west coast of Wales. I love the coastal path that takes you to various beaches and coves. I have camped many times near St. Davids and once hiked the coastal path over five days, which was a pretty challenging experience (due to having a very heavy backpack), but also good fun. What’s your favourite colour? Indigo – I really love the different tones that the indigo plant creates when it is used as a dye.

April 2021 — Chat

What are you most scared of? Heights. Just the thought of possibly tripping or leaning too far over a drop is terrifying. I even get a bit scared standing on a chair. I’m not sure what gave me this fear, but most of my family are also scared of heights, so maybe I inherited it. When did you last vomit? When I swam to the moon and helped myself to an alien buffet. That was pretty tough going on the tummy.

Who was your hero growing up? My mum. When I was a teenager I wanted to dress in the way that she did in the 70s and would often wear her jumper that my grandma knitted for her when she was 16. She is a very inspirational woman and will always be my hero. Whose work inspires you now? I find Cate Le Bon very inspiring; I think the songs she writes are very true to herself. Every new album becomes my favourite, though it is always different to the one before. Her creative work outside of music is beautiful too – she’s made a couple of amazing Bauhaus-inspired chairs. How have you stayed inspired during the multiple lockdowns and various restrictions that have been in place for the past year? I’ve been exploring Glasgow’s numerous parks; there’s a park not far from where I live that has huge pine trees and I love looking up at the tops of them, it gives me a sense of perspective. I’ve also been reading more in the past year than I have at any other time. I read The Hobbit for the first time and I also really enjoyed Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, which is about a woman who goes to an island in Northern Quebec to search for her missing father and starts to go mad.

When did you last cry? Listening to a podcast about mental health. Also when I was watching The Great Pottery Throw Down final – when I see people getting emotional on TV, it always makes me cry.

Tell us a secret? I once bought some chocolate flavoured treats for my pet hamster and ate a few of them. They did indeed taste of chocolate, but they weren’t delicious. Which celebrity could you take in a fight? I find fights pretty scary, so I don’t think I could get into a proper fight with anyone. However, there are a few people I could happily slap. What three people would you invite to your virtual dinner party? My best friend Laura – I cannot wait to cook and eat tasty food with her again. Vashti Bunyan – she seems very down to earth and would make good company. George Harrison – maybe he could teach me a thing or two about guitar. Apart from your own music, what other release are you most looking forward to coming out this year? I hear that H. Hawkline has been working on some new music – really looking forward to hearing that!

What book would you take to a protracted period of governmentenforced isolation? A book of Sudokus – once I’m in the Sudoku zone, there’s no stopping me. They’re really good for your brain and extremely satisfying when you complete them. Alternatively, The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben as I’ve just started it and it’s already taught me some amazing things about how trees communicate. Who’s the worst? Bullies.

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If you could be reincarnated as an animal, which animal would it be and why? A mouse lemur. They have really blobby-ended fingers and so do I, which works to my advantage as a guitarist. Maybe mouse lemurs are shredders. Molly Linen releases A Lot to Give on 31 Mar via Lost Map Records, to be followed by a music video and remix from Tommy Perman in April; the single and remix are both available as part of Lost Map’s April PostMap Club – lostmap.com/club facebook.com/molly.linen

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October 2020

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March 2021 — Chat

The Skinny On...

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