The Skinny August 2023

The Skinny's favourite comedy songs

Flight of the Conchords — Carol Brown

Face Your Fears — Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Jamie Dornan — Edgar's Prayer (feat. Amy Keys)

Flight of the Conchords — Business Time

Tenacious D — Tribute

Thumpasaurus — I'm Too Funky

Slime City — Dial-Up Internet Is the Purest Internet

Will Fyffe — I Belong to Glasgow

Jimothy Lacoste — Getting Busy!

Bo Burnham — Five Years

The Lonely Island — Natalie's Rap (feat. Natalie Portman & Chris Parnell)

MC Miker G & DJ Sven — Holiday Rap

The Lonely Island — Equal Rights

Ninja Sex Party — Welcome to my Parents' House

Listen to this playlist on Spotify — search for 'The Skinny Office Playlist' or scan the below code

Issue 211, Aug 2023 © Radge Media Ltd.

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Meet the team

We asked – Top tip for somewhere to go in Edinburgh in August?

Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief "Glasgow."

Peter Simpson Deputy Editor, Food & Drink Editor

"Bedlam Theatre – lovely building, loads of weird late-night comedy, and if past performance is anything to go by, an astonishingly cheap bar."

Anahit Behrooz Events Editor, Books Editor

"My boyfriend Thomas J Walls. Does great coffee, doesn't mind if I spend five hours...inside.....him?"

Jamie Dunn

Film Editor, Online Journalist

"Edinburgh has a beach! Go swim at the beach!"

Tallah Brash

Music Editor

"Best view: Blackford Hill. Best club: Sneaky Pete's. Best late night bar: The Banshee Labyrinth. Best food: Mosque Kitchen – the one at the actual mosque. IYKYK."

Heléna Stanton Clubs Editor

"Soul Vegan, 10/10 Asian vegan food, alright priced as well!"

Polly Glynn Comedy Editor

"The lil dumpling shack in Assembly George Square Gardens!"

Rho Chung Theatre Editor

"Home. Lmao just kidding. I love the woods in and around St Marks Park."

Business

Eilidh Akilade Intersections Editor

"I'd say Nile Valley Cafe has the best falafel wraps and it's probably all you need to get you through the month. I refuse to be hungry amid any kind of experimental art."

Production

Harvey Dimond

Art Editor "Glasgow!"

Sales

George Sully

Sales and Brand Strategist

"You didn't hear it from me, but Salt Horse on Blackfriars St has a small cute beer garden that few people seem to know about."

Lewis Robertson Digital Editorial Assistant

"The crowds at Edinburgh Waverley Station are just lovely this time of year."

Laurie Presswood General Manager "The office."

Dalila D'Amico Art Director, Production Manager "As far away as possible."

Phoebe Willison Designer

"Probably to the Fringe? Silly question xx"

Tom McCarthy

Creative Projects Manager

"Check out that Wild West street off Morningside Road!"

Sandy Park Commercial Director

"Fairly well known but The Blackbird's beer garden. Just on the edge of the chaos, location wise."

Ema Smekalová

Media Sales Executive

"If you're looking for performance art meets literal garbage this August check out the Haus of Cooper Kunt drag collective...Instagram it."

Editorial

Words: Rosamund West

At a mega 120 pages, this here is the bi est issue of The Skinny ever produced! It’s so big in fact, our previous printers’ staples couldn’t have withstood the sheer volume of paper, and would have quite literally buckled under the strain eight pages ago. God bless DC Thompson’s mysteriously superior staples for making our August dreams come true.

There’s a lot in here, so best be prepared – stay hydrated, pack an energy bar, remember to take both raincoat and sunscreen; we’re going deep into the Edinburgh festivals.

Theatre has truly embraced the task of pulling out highlights across the August programmes, kicking things off with an interview with Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland whose And Then the Rodeo Burned Down was one of the hits of last year’s Fringe. They’re bringing that back, in case you missed it last year, alongside new show What If They Ate the Baby?

We meet award-winning Highlands-based playwright and director Jack MacGregor to hear more about his Mali peacekeeping-centred drama Everything Under the Sun and the unusual experience of having a play commissioned by… the army? Jian Yi discusses immersive visual exhibit Weathervanes, while Ong Ken Sen explores the connection between Euripides’ Trojan Women and the story of the Korean Comfort Women at Edinburgh International Festival. Guido Garcia Lueches explains how audience participation can help challenge racist stereotypes in Playing Latinx, while Plague Stone Party (aka Ozzy Algar and Buoys Buoys Buoys) are here to tell you about the growing niche of queer paganism. With round-ups on the programmes from Horizon showcase and ZOO venues, this should provide all you need to get stuck into theatre in the Edinburgh festivals.

Comedy opens with a look at the rise of the Fringe comedy director, talking to John Tothill, Mary O’Connell and Tamsyn Kelly about their respective experiences. We meet Kiell SmithBynoe, who is returning to the Fringe with String v SPITTA, about two rival children’s entertainers on the London kids’ party scene, alongside some dates taking him back to his improv roots. Paul Sinha gives us a sneak peek of his new venture into musical comedy, Pauly Bengali, while stand-up, Drag King and host of The LOL Word Jodie Mitchell shares an insight into their Dream Gig as they prepare for their debut Fringe hour.

Books looks forward to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, talking to British-Palestinan author Isabella Hammad, whose event we’re partnering, about Shakespeare and narratives of identity. Camilla Grudova discusses British class politics and being too dark for children’s literature, while Devorah Baum, Alva Gotby and Sophie K Rosa preview their event on radical intimacy by sharing their utopian visions of love.

Edinburgh Art Festival’s Platform exhibition returns for the ninth year, and we’ve paired each artist with a writer from the EAF x The Skinny emerging writers programme to explore their practice. We also meet artists Sean Burns and Tarek Lakhrissi to explore their contributions to the festival, as well as taking a look through the programme as a whole and its interaction with the context of the city.

After many months of existential threat, Edinburgh International Film Festival returns under the umbrella of EIF. We’ve got a special CineSkinny supplement exploring the programme, including interviews with Babak Jalali on Fremont and Thomas Schubert on Afire, while Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping discuss Femme. We examine the legacy of Bette Gordon’s 1983 feminist classic Variety as it returns to cinemas, and talk to Jeanie Finlay about her intimate portrait of author Aubrey Gordon, Your Fat Friend

Music takes a look through the August programme, pulling out a few highlights before catching up with Aurora Engine to find out more about her work incorporating landscape and wildlife into her music, which she’ll present in the Made in Scotland showcase. Beyond the Fringe, Devo’s guitarist Jerry Casale looks back on their 50 boundary-pushing years as they set out on a farewell tour. Liturgy talk black metal, ahead of their appearance at Glasgow’s Core. festival, and Welsh DIY punks Panic Shack talk hard graft, nepo babies and meal deals ahead of their slot at Connect. Finally, sadly, following The 13th Note’s shocking closure, we celebrate its legacy, talking to some of the people who’ve made it what it is over the last quarter century.

Closing the magazine, Sofie Hagen takes on our monthly Q&A, leaving us all asking the immortal question – in which reviewer’s mouth would she like to take a dump?

Cover

Katie Forbes aka KFRBS

Originally training as an architect, Glasgow-based artist, illustrator and mural artist Katie began working as a full-time artist in 2020 and since then has painted murals in California, Las Vegas and various locations in Scotland.

Finding humour and beauty in the monotony of everyday life, Katie enjoys illustrating her own experiences and unique views in a way that is relatable to all. Having been diagnosed with severe ADHD, Katie was always told that she was going to stru le through life because her brain works differently to others'. Instead, she’s turned that disadvantage into a positive and uses it as a driver for her creativity.

IG: @kfrbs

TikTok: @kfrbsart

Love Bites: To Gather & Gossip

Words: Trisha Mendiratta

In 2008, Kristen Bell began giving voice to the notorious narrator of Gossip Girl with the salacious “xoxo Gossip Girl” sign-off. The back-biting nature of gossip forms the undercarriage of the show, with the elite community bickering about nothing meaningful with wealth exuding from every corner of the screen. Their designer clothes and idle chat fulfils something truly escapist. It encapsulates our opinion of gossip: a vacuous act filled with malice.

This depiction however doesn’t align with my experience of gossip. My gossip sessions take place in-between regimented time – in club toilets, library lunch-breaks, and hungover Sunday afterparties. In these spaces, we connect: we intimately trust one another with our most private thoughts or we’re upheld by a large group of women and their beautiful chorus of opinions and judgements. My best friend Sylvie rings me from London once a week and our gossip feels like an entry into each other’s material worlds, and the characters in them. “Edinburgh is my personal soap opera,” she says, “which you let me watch.” When something particularly dramatic happens, we claim it as a season finale.

It’s not an activity based on malice; rather one of bonding. The negative connotations of gossip are rooted in the practice’s synonymisation with ‘women’s talk’ and all the misogyny bound up with this. Feminist-historian Silvia Federici traces the history of the word, asserting that its understanding has continuously changed in relation to women’s position in society. Originating from ‘god-sip’ (meaning godparent), it held a neutral moral understanding while also more specifically speaking to female friendships of solidarity. The shift to the idea of idle backbiting came about in parallel to accusations of witchcraft and a concerted effort to damage women’s solidarity, both politically and personally. Though the comfort of watching others’ gossip on TV is perhaps a voyeuristic indulgence, the practice of gossip in my own life feels closest to the original ‘god-sip’, a truly treasured and joyful act of solidarity.

This month’s columnist reflects on our attachment to gossip, retraces its history, and celebrates the intimacy of a secret shared

Heads Up

Vi o Venn: British Comedian Monkey Barrel Comedy Club, Edinburgh, 16-27 Aug, 12:05am

This might be the first and (almost certainly) last time we big up a Britain’s Got Talent winner, but we adore Norwegian clown Vi o Venn so much that we’re willing to make an exception. Find him at Monkey Barrel this month at the witchy hour of just past midnight with his usual mad antics — who knew hi-vis vests could be so funny.

Connect

Royal Highland Showgrounds, Edinburgh, 25-27 Aug

It’s a bold move to stage a relatively new music festival on the edges of Edinburgh at the end of August (your honour, we will all be so sleepy), but Connect’s programme is too good to miss, no matter how festivalled out you may be. Split over three days, headliners include Primal Scream, Fred Again.., and boygenius, with slots also by the likes of Young Fathers, MUNA and TAAHLIAH.

Edinburgh Art Festival

Various venues, Edinburgh, 11-27 Aug

Some of the best exhibitions of the year are culminating at Edinburgh Art Festival, running through the second half of the month. Don’t miss the ninth edition of the early-career artist exhibition Platform, the world premiere screening of History of the Present, an opera film directed by Maria Fusco & Margaret Salmon, and a residency by Lebanese feminist collective Haven for Artists.

Happy August! There’s so much on! Too much for just two pages! Get stuck in to our four-page special Heads Up, with our favourite picks of the festivals, and cute things in Glasgow and Dundee for good measure.

Compiled by Anahit Behrooz

Nicolas Party: Cretaceous

The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until 23 Sep

In his sixth solo show for The Modern Institute, Swiss artist Nicolas Party explores themes of deep time, geology, and climate crisis through a series of pastels and oil on copper paintings. Taking its name from the last geological period to end in mass extinction, the exhibition is a symbolic yet frank confrontation of our relationship with the planet.

Edinburgh International Film Festival

Various venues, Edinburgh, 18-23 Aug

We can’t quite believe we’re saying this but Edinburgh International Film Festival is, despite the odds, back in business, this year running under the umbrella of the Edinburgh International Festival. It’s a stunning programme too — all wheat, no chaff — from Babak Jalali’s closing film Fremont to screenings of the highly anticipated Passages, Past Lives, and Femme (sponsored by us).

Horizon Showcase

Various venues, Edinburgh, 20-27 Aug

Listen, we don’t know if you’ve noticed but there is so much on at the Fringe. If you’re looking for bangers only, head straight to the Horizon Showcase, a curated selection of some of the best theatre produced in England — highlights this year include Javaad’ Alipoor’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and acclaimed choreographer Ray Young’s Bodies held in a swimming pool in Livingston.

Zoë Coombs Marr: The Opener Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, 14-27 Aug, 9:20pm

Chapter 3: The Brutal Journey of the Heart Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 13-14 Aug, 9pm

Subculture with Harri & Domenic + Ash Lauryn Sub Club, Glasgow, 19 Aug, 11pm

Grace & The Flat Boys Broadcast, Glasgow, 16 Aug, 7pm

Grace & The Flat Boys

Zoë Coombs Marr

Ash Lauryn

Chapter 3

Image: courtesy of artist

Image: courtesy of artist

Image: courtesy of Sub Club

Photo: Stefan Dotter for Dior_

Haven for Artists at French Institute, Edinburgh Art Festival boygenius

Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World

Red Forest Nicolas Party

Passages EIFF

Vi o Venn

Photo: Myriam Boulos

Photo: Matt Grubb

Photo: Piers

Allardyce

Photo: Patrick Jameson

Photo: Stano Murin

Image: courtesy of MUBI

Funeral

ZOO Southside, Edinburgh, 4-27 Aug (not 7, 14, 21), various times

The ritual of performance meets the ritual of death in this gorgeous immersive mediation on mortality. Devised by experimental Belgian company Ontroerend Goed, whose previous ecological elegy Are We Not Drawn Onward to New ErA won the Fringe First award in 2019, Funeral breaks the traditional confines of performance and stage to examine the ways we are all drawn into grief and memorialisation.

Phaedra/Minotaur

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 18-20 Aug, various times

A tale of two sisters, Phaedra/Minotaur delves into Greek mythology in this astounding double bill. Phaedra tells the tragic story of the eponymous heroine who fell in love with her stepson Hippolytus through Benjamin Britten’s powerful cantata, while Minotaur tells through breathtaking choreography the story of Phaedra’s sister Ariadne, caught between her lover Theseus and half-brother, the Minotaur himself.

Chef the Rapper

King Tuts, Glasgow, 11 Aug, 8:30pm

Chef the Rapper heads to Glasgow from Aberdeen as part of King Tut’s Summer Nights, King Tut’s somewhat self-explanatory seasonal celebration of all things local music. Blending deft and complex lyricism with stunning storytelling and infectious beats, this rising star of the Scottish rap scene is one to catch before his star, well, gets much much bi er.

Jupiter Rising

Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, 19 Aug, 6pm

Book Fringe

Various venues, Edinburgh, 12-28 Aug

There’s plenty of bookish fun to be had in Edinburgh in August, from the hallowed halls of the Edinburgh International Book Festival to the scrappy grassroots Book Fringe programme, this year organised and cohosted by indie bookshops Lighthouse Bookshop (non-fiction events!), Argonaut Books (fiction events!), and Typewronger Books (poetry etc!). Find the likes of Harry Nicholas, SPAM zine and Akwugo Emejulu at lunchtimes across the bookshops.

So You Think You’re Funny

Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh, 5-24 Aug, various times

HIGH STEAKS

Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2-13 Aug (not 7, 8) 4:30pm

Not one for the squeamish (or maybe one exactly for the squeamish — face your fears!), HIGH STEAKS combines performance art and high-concept clowning to explore themes of body image, cosmetic surgery, and the labia. Taking as its start point the increased demand for labiaplasty, HIGH STEAKS strings up and butchers two bloody steaks, interrogating the relationship we have with our supposed imperfections.

Free Fringe

Various venues, Edinburgh, 4-28 Aug

The Fringe, god bless it, can be expensive, but there’s cheaper and pay-what-you-can fare to be found at the Free Fringe every year. Our top picks this year include delightful queer comedy duo Shelf (who also have a children’s show at the Pleasance this year), the AI-influenced Soulmates: (Not) Found and plenty of drag and cabaret. Just remember to tip!

Amyl & The Sniffers

Fat Sam’s, Dundee, 22 Aug, 7pm

Edinburgh International Book Festival

ECA, Edinburgh, 12-28 Aug

Mikaela Loach

Photo: Steve Ullathorne

Photo: Amelia Claudia courtesy of Jupiter Artland Jupiter Rising 2022

Previous So You Think You're Funny winner Maisie Adam

Photo: Jamie Wdziekonski

Image: courtesy of Edinburgh

International Book Festival

Amyl & The Sniffers

Phaedra/Minotaur

Funeral

HIGH STEAKS

Chef the Rapper Shelf

Harry Nicholas at Book Fringe

Photo: Claire Egan

Photo: Ans Brys

Photo: Matja ž Ru š t

Photo: Alice Moitié

Photo: Matt Crockett

Image: courtesy of author

Huge Davies: Whodunnit Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, 2-27 Aug (not 16) 9:40pm

There’s just something about a man who can play an instrument, especially if he has it strapped to him at all times. Edinburgh Newcomer Award nominee Huge Davies returns with Whodunnit, a musical comedy and stand-up extravaganza about *checks notes* murder. If you like your comedy deadpan, dark, and unexpectedly lyrical, then this is the show for you.

Small Town Boys

Kings, Dundee, 8-12 Aug, 7:30pm

A mesmerising exploration of the escapism and freedom of queer nightlife during the 1980s AIDS crisis, Small Town Boys, staged by Dundee Rep, uses dance and spoken word in the immersive space of Kings nightclub to tell the tale of a young man escaping his small hometown to discover the warmth and community of the queer city scene.

Taiwan Season: #Since1994

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, 2-27 Aug (not 7, 14, 21) 1:30pm

Every year, Taiwan Season at the Fringe showcases some of the most groundbreaking theatre and dance emerging from Taiwan. This year, catch their programme of four shows across Assembly and Summerhall including #Since1994, a spectacular feat of circus and dance by an all-female troupe exploring ideas of female socialisation.

Sofie Hagen: Banglord Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, 3-27 Aug (not 8, 9, 15, 16, 22, 23) 2:50pm

Marjolein Robertson: Marj

The Stand Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 3-28 Aug (not 14) 5pm

With the impressive title of Shetland’s only female comedian (if there are others, she doesn’t want to hear about it), Marjolein Robertson is well-versed in standing out in the landscape (in Shetland it’s remote, in the Fringe it’s crowded…you get the idea). She returns to the Fringe this year with Marj, a surreal and introspective blend of storytelling and stand-up.

As Far As Impossible Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 11-14 Aug, various times

The personal meets the political in this remarkable exploration of crisis and care. Drawing on true stories from workers in the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, As Far As Impossible depicts the doubled lives of humanitarian workers, and the strange experience of being caught between war and peace.

Anoushka Shankar Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 27 Aug, 8pm

Anoushka Shankar’s music transcends genre, blending classical and contemporary influences with acoustic and electronic practices. The Grammy Award-nominated sitar player has been studying and playing with the bounds of traditional Indian classical music for years; with an already impressive career behind her, she returns to the International Festival with a quintet of cutting edge London musicians.

JM Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, 4-27 Aug (not 14, 21) 12pm

The Virgin Suicides (4K Re-release)

Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow, until 5 Aug, various times

Ethel Cain SWG3, Glasgow, 29 Aug, 7pm

Ethel Cain

Sofie Hagen

The Virgin Suicides

JM Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K

Photo: Matt Crockett

Photo: Helen Kirbo

Image: courtesy of Park Circus

Photo: Fiona MacPherson

Marjolein Robertson

As Far As Impossible at EIF

Since 1994

Small Town Boys Anoushka Shankar

Huge Davies

Photo: Trudy Stade

Photo: Tiago Rodriguez

Photo: Eye Catching Circus

Photo: Maria Falconer

Photo: Vikram Kushwah

Image: courtesy of artist

Stereo Presents: Ariel Zetina

Stereo, Glasgow, 5 Aug, 11pm

Glasgow may not have the extra late night licensing that Edinburgh does in August but what it lacks in a couple of extra hours it makes up for in equal star power. Find Chicago-based producer and DJ Ariel Zetina in Stereo this month, infusing traditional techno beats with notes of Chicago house, Brazilian punta, and queer club influences.

Party Ghost Assembly Checkpoint, Edinburgh, 2-27 Aug (not 14, 21) 2:55pm

In the immortal words of Barbie: do you guys ever think about dying? The folks behind Party Ghost, the awardwinning macabre circus production that deals with all things death and afterlife, certainly do. Come for the high-flying high jinks, stay for the darkly funny and surprisingly incisive takes on this life and the next.

One Way Out

Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh, 3-27 Aug (not 14, 21) 2:15pm

Four friends teeter on the edge of adulthood against the backdrop of the Windrush crisis in this equally gutting and energising exploration of modern-day Britain. Presented by Theatre Peckham's first ever resident company, One Way Out is an inquiry into the social and political landscapes that form our most intimate and human moments.

Rachel Eulena Williams: Hair and Body DCA: Dundee Contemporary Art, Dundee, 26 Aug-19 Nov

The first major solo exhibition by New York-based artist Rachel Eulena Williams, Hair and Body comprises painting, drawing, and printmaking pieces that come together to create bricolage works that spread across the gallery’s walls, exploring the bounds of representation and meaning-making.

Femmergy Summerhall, Edinburgh, 12 Aug, 11pm

One of the gems in Summerhall’s music and nightlife programme this year, queer femme DJ collective Femmergy play all the good tunes — an irresistible mixture of pop, disco, R’n’B, and — if their last few nights are anything to go by — a sizable dose of Kylie Minogue’s Padam Padam. Come dressed in your gladdest rags: glitter, corsets, drag, and friendship bracelets highly encouraged.

First Aid Kit

O2 Academy Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 16 Aug, 7pm

Acclaimed folk duo (and real life sisters) Johanna and Klara Söderberg head over from Sweden on tour for their latest (and fifth) studio album Palomino. Known for their spellbinding lyricism and ethereal harmonising, their live performances are filled with the kind of yearning intimacy that characterises their music.

All details were correct at the time of writing, but are subject to change. Please check organisers’ websites for up to date information.

Fool’s Paradise

Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2-27

Aug (not 14, 21) 5:50pm

EHFM’s Festival Party Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 5 Aug, 11pm

Munya Chawawa: Work in Progress

The Stand Glasgow, Glasgow, 5-6 Aug, various times

And Then the Rodeo Burned Down

And Then the Rodeo Burned Down

Various venues, Edinburgh, 4-26 Aug (not 13) various times

Photo: Celine Antal

Image: courtesy of Britt Plummer

Feena for EHFM's Festival Party

Image: courtesy of The Stand

Photo: Morgan Mcdowell

Munya Chawawa

Party Ghost

First Aid Kit

Watered Down, Kind Expressions Rachel Eulena Williams

Ariel Zetina

One Way Out

Femmergy

Photo: Hamish McCormick

Photo: Olof Grind

Photo: Adam Reich

Photo: 3 Feet Hi

Image: courtesy of

No Table Productions

Photo: Alexander Smail

What's On

Music

As August kicks into gear, gig series in Glasgow like King Tut’s Summer Nights, Endless Summer at The Hug & Pint and Summer Nights at the (Kelvingrove) Bandstand continue, while the end of the month sees Connect return to Edinburgh (25-27 Aug) with a stacked lineup featuring everyone from Confidence Man and boygenius to Young Fathers and Róisín Murphy, ensuring there’s big-festival-in-a-field energy not far out of reach this summer. If you’re looking for something a little smaller but with that same outdoor energy, on 19 August, Jupiter Rising returns for one day to Jupiter Artland with their Late Night Stage curated by queer workers’ co-op BONJOUR.

On the same weekend, Glasgow has two very different festival options for you: Core. (18-20 Aug) and Pitch Scotland (19-20 Aug). Core. is a brand new venture and festival of noise from the 432 Presents lot. Taking place between Maryhill Community Central Halls and The Hug & Pint, they’re set to welcome noise acts from near and far, so while you can catch international faves like Deafheaven, Chat Pile, Rolo Tomassi and Liturgy, you can also enjoy local noise-makers like Moni Jitchell, Goth GF and Void of Light. The antithesis of Core., Pitch Scotland has its focus firmly on Scotland’s burgeoning hip-hop scene. Between venues like Saint Luke’s, Many Studios and the Drygate Brewery, get key insight into the industry with talks and discussions during the day, while artists like Supemann on da Beat, Queen of Harps, P Caso and Eyve will entertain at night.

Also in Glasgow this month, catch Michael Gira and co as Swans play Saint Luke’s (16 Aug), Nashville’s Be Your Own Pet play Broadcast (20 Aug) a few days before releasing Mommy, their first album in 15 years, while, following a ten-year hiatus, New York post-punks The Walkmen play SWG3 (21 Aug).

Meanwhile at the other end of the M8, the festivals have a chokehold on the capital. Edinburgh International Festival bring the likes of Lankum (The Queen’s Hall, 17 Aug), Ichiko Aoba (The Queen’s Hall, 19 Aug), Alison Goldfrapp (Edinburgh Playhouse, 25 Aug) and John Cale (Festival Theatre, 26 Aug) to town, while Summerhall’s Nothing Ever Happens Here programme is packed with some of the best in Scottish talent as Kathryn Joseph (12 Aug), Pictish Trail (16 Aug), Constant Follower (19 Aug), Rebecca Vasmant Ensemble (20 Aug), Withered Hand (24 Aug) and Maranta (27 Aug) all play, while in the Cowgate our favourite sweatbox Sneaky Pete’s also has a strong local lineup. Highlights include Fourth Daughter (5 Aug), comfort (13 Aug), Siobhan Wilson (15 Aug), BIN JUICE (17 Aug), kitti (26 Aug) and Bemz (31 Aug). [Tallah Brash]

Film

It looked a bit touch and go there for a while but Edinburgh International Film Festival will return this month (18-23 Aug) for its 76th edition. Turn to page 74 to read our supplement picking out some highlights.

If you’re in Glasgow though, don’t worry, there are plenty of cinema happenings too. At GFT, there are two CineMasters retrospectives to keep you occupied. First up, there’s a seven-film retrospective of Danish maverick Lars von Trier. The season kicks off with his harrowing fable Breaking the Waves (4-10 Aug), followed by other masterworks like Dogville (11 & 13 Aug), Dancer in the Dark (29 & 30 Aug) and Melancholia (4 & 5 Sep) – the latter two screen on 35mm prints.

All details correct at the time of writing

Photo: Gareth Goodlad

Photo: Zindzi Hudson

Photo: Sean Patrick Campbell

Fourth Daughter

Moni Jitchell

Melancholia

Queen of Harps

The second retrospective is dedicated to the mighty Bill Forsyth, who’s having a busy summer. Local Hero was rereleased in May, and now GFT screen his scrappy debut That Sinking Feeling (13 & 15 Aug), his coming-ofage high school gem Gregory’s Girl (17-24 Aug) and his lesser-spotted Comfort and Joy (25 & 27 Aug).

GFT also serve up a quartet of big-screen epics this August that demand to be seen on the big screen. The lineup includes the director’s cut of Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (2 & 8 Aug), Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (12 & 15 Aug), and two films for the Russell Crowe heads: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (20 & 23 Aug) and Gladiator (26 & 28 Aug); both screen on 35mm.

If it’s local talent you’re after, seek out The Difference Between Us, the debut feature from Etienne Kubwabo, who’s best known for his comic Beats of War. The film runs at Glasgow’s CCA until 5 August. And staying at CCA, there’s the Scottish International Short Film Festival (11-13 Aug), which will be showcasing shorts from all over the world across four programmes.

A look ahead too to CINEMA DESPITE (Tramway, 1–3 Sep), a great looking one-off festival attempting to survey the history of artists’ film and video in Scotland. Set over five episodes – the documentary, imperial legacies, protest, cultural identity and sexuality – screening over three days and featuring 30 works made over a 70-year period, the festival includes work by a who’s who of Scottish artists, from Margaret Tait and Enrico Cocozza to Margaret Salmon and Luke Fowler. More info next issue. [Jamie Dunn]

Clubs

Starting off August we have Bristol’s leftfield legend Bruce at Sneaky Pete’s for haptic in Edinburgh (2 Aug). Following on from this, Overground has a huge lineup for the Fringe’s ‘opening night’ over at The Mash House, while over at Summerhall, Optimo Espacio returns with Eyes of Others fresh off the back of releasing his self-titled debut (4 Aug).

Meanwhile, over in Glasgow, Missing Persons Club welcomes Funk Assault, for what will be a fast-paced evening with multi-genres and excellent vibes at The Berkeley Suite (4 Aug).

Back in Edinburgh, Headset heads for Leith for a festival special at Lost In Leith (11 Aug). The lineup boasts several local' and huge DJs, including Bleep and Break legend Neil Landstrumm for a live performance – something for those who are into analogues and synths! Other highlights include Skillis, Proc Fiskal, Alliyah Enyo and more.

Also catch Skillis this month at Agora as they go back to back with LWS all-night long at Sneaky Pete's until 5am on Thursday 17 August. Meanwhile, FLY hosts a very special Fringe night with club hours staying open till 5am –all-female trio Disco Tits take control for the evening at Cabaret Voltaire (18 Aug). Club Sylkie are hosting a very special edition of their usual club night at Summerhall in Edinburgh, with Manuka Honey, LVRA plus local support (19 Aug).

Celesté hosts a huge party at the floating Glasgow venue: The Ferry. The lineup includes Elanda, Inez, DJ Suzie (27 Aug). Meanwhile, outside Edinburgh another edition of Connect takes place at the Royal Highland Showgrounds (25-27 Aug), acts include Róisín Murphy, Fred Again.., Slam, TAAHLIAH, Loyle Carner, plus many more. [Heléna Stanton]

Comedy

Want wall-to-wall bangers to keep you laughing until the (big purple) cows come home? HWFG!

It’d be rude not to start with comics bringing their first shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, and as per, this year has ‘em in droves. If you’re looking for straight-up stand-up, you don’t want to miss reigning BBC New Comedy Awards champion Dan Tiernan (Monkey Barrel (MB2), 31 Jul-27 Aug (not 14), 10pm), Priya Hall (Monkey Barrel (MB2), 31 Jul-27 Aug (not 11), 420pm) or Tadiwa Mahlunge (Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker 2), Aug 2-27 (not 14), 9.25pm). After more musically-minded acts instead? Try Leila Navabi’s mischievous punk musical hour Composition (Pleasance Courtyard (Attic), 2-27 Aug (not 11), 9.45pm) or the indie-parody stylings of Matty Hutson (Pleasance Courtyard (Attic), 2-27 Aug (not 14), 7.15pm). For something more alternative, give Funny Women award-winner and Sean Lock Comedy Award nominee Lorna Rose Treen (Pleasance Courtyard (Attic), 2-27 Aug (not 14), 4.35pm) a go, or Bill O’Neill’s Natalie Palamides-directed daredevil feat

Photo: Adrian Samson

Photo: Drew Forsyth

Róisín Murphy

Gregory’s Girl

Sneaky Pete's

Dan Tiernan

Master and Commander

The Amazing Banana Brothers (Pleasance Courtyard (Beside), 2-27 Aug (not 14), 10pm).

Mainstays of The Skinny’s list are Olga Koch (Monkey Barrel (MB1), 31 Jul-27 Aug, 7.35pm), sure to be back with another corker, double-act Max & Ivan with their first show since 2019 centred on fatherhood (Pleasance Courtyard (Above), 2-27 Aug (not Saturdays), 5.20pm) and pioneering Luisa Omielan who breaks her lengthy Fringe hiatus with Bitter (Monkey Barrel (MB3), 3-27 Aug (not Mondays), 5.40pm) and God is a Woman The Musical (WIP) (Laughing Horse @ Counting House (Ballroom), 3-27 Aug (not Mondays), 8.30pm).

Cult favourites we can’t wait for include word-of-mouth sensation Mr Chonkers (Monkey Barrel, 14-15 Aug (MB1), 16 Aug (MB2), times vary) who also brings unhinged late night delight Pi y Time to the festival (Monkey Barrel (MB1), 17-19 Aug, 11.55pm). The brilliantly madcap Foxdog Studios are here with Robo Bingo (Underbelly Cowgate (Delhi Belly), 3-27 Aug, 8.25pm), a frenetic, techy take on the classic pensioner game. Elf and Duffy are also big on our radars with their show Heist (Monkey Barrel (Tron), 2-15 Aug, 8.40pm), a non-verbal hour of physical comedy with Visual Vernacular, blending innovative d/deaf-led creation from Duffy, with Elf Lyons’ knack for charming clown work.

At the Free Fringe, we’re really excited to see Baby Trains from Rob Duncan (PBH’s Free Fringe @ Legends (Upstairs), 5-23 Aug (not 12), 2.20pm), who you might recall from the bonkers Legs and Logs with Julia Masli. There are also two unmissable lineup shows between the free venues. One is Best in Class (Laughing Horse @ Three Sisters (Ma ie’s Chamber), 3-27 Aug, 8.15pm), Sian Davies’ Edinburgh Comedy Award Panel Prize-winning compilation show of the funniest acts from working class backgrounds. The other is A Show for Gareth Richards (PBH’s Free Fringe @ Whistlebinkies (Binkies Lounge), 5-27 Aug, 4pm), a daily tribute to comic Richards who we sadly lost earlier this year. The cream of the comedy Fringe are set to perform with 100% of the bucket going to Gareth’s family.

And finally, we must shout about the brilliant Scotland-based acts at this year’s fest. Stuart McPherson (Monkey Barrel (MB2), 31 Jul-27 Aug (not 16), 5.45pm) and Christopher Macarthur-Boyd (Monkey Barrel (Tron), 1-27 Aug (not 14), 7.15pm) are back, with CMB’s run hot on the heels of supporting Frankie Boyle and a nomination for Channel 4’s Sean Lock Award. Adopted local Krystal Evans (Monkey Barrel (Hive 2), 2-27 Aug (not 15), 7.35pm) debuts with her soon-to-be ™ mix of sarcasm and trauma while the brilliant Kieran Hodgson (Pleasance Courtyard (Forth), 2-27 Aug, 7pm) returns with his first solo show in five years, all about his new home. Other home-birds include Marjolein Robertson (The Stand (Stand 1), 3-28 Aug (not 14), 5pm) who steps away from her usual brand of Shetland whimsy in Marj, Chunks favourite and viral Real-Sexy-Elliott-Gould-and-Grover tweeter Chris Thorburn (Just The Tonic Mash House (Attic), 10-27 Aug (not 14), 12pm), alongside a chronic illness-themed hour from Liam Withnail (Monkey Barrel (MB2), 2-27 Aug, 7.10pm) and MC Hammersmith (Monkey Barrel (MB1), 2-27 Aug (not Tuesdays) 12.30pm) with more hilarious lyrical gymnastics straight off the dome. [Polly Glynn]

Art

Edinburgh Art Festival begins on 11 August, opening with the screening of Maria Fusco’ and Margaret Salmon’s History of the Present from 8pm at The Queen’s Hall. The following day, between 2-3.30pm, the festival’s keynote speech at the National Gallery of Scotland will be delivered by 2021 Turner Prize winners Array Collective and Beirut-based cultural feminist organisation Haven for Artists. Highlights over the ensuing two weeks include a new performance by Alberta Whittle at Parliament Hall on 13 August; Lindsey Mendick’s SH*TFACED at Jupiter Artland; Sean Burns’ Dorothy Towers and Jesse Jones’s The Tower (currently on display at Talbot Rice). Many exhibitions continue well into September and October, including Christian Noelle Charles’ WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I at Edinburgh Printmakers and Leonor Antunes’ the apparent length of a floor area at Fruitmarket.

At The Modern Institute in Glasgow, new paintings and pastel drawings by Nicolas Party will be on display until 23 September. Titled Cretaceous, after the ancient time period that culminated in a mass extinction event 66 million years ago, Party reflects on both the destruction of the natural world and the destruction being wreaked by the climate crisis. Around the corner at Street Level Photoworks, Moira McIver’s exhibition Migration Memories

Photo: Rachael Sherlock

Photo: Emily Durham

Olga Koch

Foxdog Studios

Jesse Jones, The Tower. Production still.

Marjolein Robertson

Photo: Trudy Stade

Photo: Marion Bergin,

courtesy of the artist

examines the history of migration between Donegal and Glasgow. The exhibition continues until 8 October.

At the tail end of the month, Rachel Eulena Williams’ first major solo exhibition in the UK will open at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Williams’ fluid works release painting from the formal rigidity of the canvas, operating between sculpture, collage and painting. Hair and Body will open on 26 August. [Harvey Dimond]

Theatre

This August, it won’t be hard to find live theatre in Edinburgh. However, theatres located outside of the capital city also host a variety of offerings this month, from new work to old favourites.

In addition to Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s many long-running offerings, Scottish playwright Isla Cowan’s new play, To the Bone, premieres this month. The play is an incisive drama about a woman confronting her past and reckoning with her future (18 Aug-29 Sep).

In Glasgow, Tramway hosts Aya Kobayashi and Monika Smekot’s Wheel See, which is an offsite, outdoor performance as part of Tramway Beyond Walls. This free show features 20 dancers and their bikes (13 Aug).

Dundee Rep has several enticing offerings this month. In association with Gardyne and Dundee Rep, Shaper/Caper presents Small Town Boys, an immersive, site-specific piece exploring the escapism of the queer nightlife scene through the AIDS crisis (Kings, Dundee, 8-12 Aug).

At the end of the month, Scottish Dance Theatre brings their research and performance project, Every Map Has a Scale (Chapter 3) to Dundee Rep. Led by choreographer Joan Clevillé, the cast of dancers will travel by foot, bike, or public transport to spontaneously pop up across the region (28 Aug-10 Sep).

For more information on theatre and live performance happening in Edinburgh this month, read on! [Rho Chung]

Books

You know it’s August when there are officially Too Many good things to fit into a column, even when your word count gets extended. So without further ado – book events! There’s so many! And where better to start than the Edinburgh International Book Festival (12-28 Aug), which boasts even by its own standards an incredibly, ridiculously, packed programme. Find the likes of Nikesh Shukla (22-24 Aug), Bernadine Evaristo (25 Aug) and Leïla Slimani (24 & 25 Aug) dropping by the festival’s home at Edinburgh College of Art. There’s also the festival’s star-packed and timely Climate Strand with the likes of Ben Okri (13 Aug), David Farrier (14 & 21 Aug), and The Greta Thunberg (13 Aug), close reads where you can delve into works by the likes of Saidiya Hartman and Joni Mitchell with the likes of Jess Brough (14 Aug) and Amy Key (17 Aug), and gorgeous gorgeous events with gorgeous gorgeous local authors (we can’t wait for Eleanor Thom and Wiz Wharton (20 Aug), Heather Parry, K Patrick and Camila Sosa Villada (21 Aug), Amber Husain and Daisy Lafarge (19 Aug), and Hannah Lavery and Marjorie Lotfi (16 Aug)). And don’t forget their newly brought-back lates strand, including a celebration of Scotland’s arts scene curated by Arusa Qureshi (26 Aug).

For more Edinburgh book festivals, head to Book Fringe (12-28 Aug) – this year organised by indie bookshops Lighthouse Bookshop, Typewronger, and Argonaut Books. They have a gorgeous radical programme of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry – our highlights include Harry Nicholas of A Trans Man Walks Into a Gay Bar, and Akwugo Emejulu’s Fugitive Feminism. There’s also non-festival events (gasp), including T.L. Hulchu launching the third book in the spellbinding Edinburgh Nights series, The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle at The Portobello Bookshop (2 Aug), and a new Lovecrumbs Reading of poetry (11 Aug).

While Edinburgh does get all the limelight in August, that doesn’t mean the rest of Scotland doesn’t have things going on (we promise). Jenni Fagan and John Niven launch their new memoirs (Ootlin and O Brother, respectively) in Waterstones Argyle Street (22 Aug). Govanhill International Festival (113 Aug) has a book strand including authors such as Harry Josephine Giles, while Glasgow Zine Library hosts Boxing Day, an hour-long poetry performance by William Keohane exploring dissociation, anxiety and the mental health impact of indefinitely waiting for gender affirming healthcare (6 Aug).

[Anahit Behrooz]

Moira McIver, Bainin Dearg

Small Town Boys

Photo: Maria Falconer

Features

26 Edinburgh festivals special! Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland on returning with 2022 hit And Then the Rodeo Burned Down plus new show What If They Ate the Baby?

34 Ong Ken Sen connects Euripides’ Trojan Women with the story of the Korean Comfort Women at Edinburgh International Festival.

44 We explore the rise of the Fringe Comedy director with John Tothill, Mary O’Connell and Tamsyn Kelly.

47 Kiell Smith-Bynoe on returning to his improv roots.

52 Isabella Hammad brings her Palestinian Shakespeare novel Enter Ghost to Edinburgh International Book Festival.

62 Edinburgh Art Festival’s Platform exhibition returns with a fresh cohort of emerging talent.

64 An exploration of the EAF programme with Sean Burns and Tarek Lakhrissi.

71 Aurora Engine on TERRE, showcasing at Made In Scotland.

74 Edinburgh International Film Festival supplement — Babak Jalali discusses the closing film, poignant imagination drama Fremont

76 Thomas Schubert on playing the self-obsessed writer at the heart of Christian Petzold’s Afire

88 We meet Devo guitarist Gerald Casale to reflect on their 50 boundary-pushing years.

90 In light of Glasgow institution The 13th Note’s abrupt closure, we reflect on its indelible legacy.

On the website...

A new podcast (Not Your Usual, interviewing exciting Scottish creative folk)! Another podcast (The Cineskinny, film reviews and patter)! Loads of Fringe reviews! Loads of non-Fringe reviews! And all the latest from across the Edinburgh Festivals (well, not all of it, but as much as we can…)

Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Morgan McDowell; courtesy of the artists; Rebecca Need-Menear; The Other Richard; Van Loan; courtesy of the artists; Sean Burns; Laurence Winram; Fremont Christian Schulz, Schramm Film; courtesy

the artists; Dalila

Shot of the month

Bob Vylan @ TRNSMT, Glasgow, 9 July by Roosa Päivänsalo

Across

7. Prize (5)

8. Dame (b.1934) appearing at the Fringe this year (4,5)

10. Undertake (5,3)

11. Board – begin (6)

12. Scary place – olden sin (anag) (5,3)

14. Performed (as) (6)

15. Title of Norwegian clown (and Britain's Got Talent 2023 winner) Vi o Venn's Monkey Barrel show (7,8)

19. Pretending (6)

22. Cast – outfit (8)

24. Bro, sit (anag) (6)

25. Parties (8)

26. Fringe venue Underbelly's home for acrobatics (6,3)

27. Dilly-dally (5)

Down

1. Wet raise (anag) (8)

2. Rehearsal (3,3)

3. For two (4)

4. Form a queue – schedule (4,2)

5. It makes words – it makes music (8)

6. Build up (6)

9. Masses (6)

13. Narrow appeal (5)

16. Set of three – crypt hit (anag) (8)

17. Nonconformist (6)

18. Parable (8)

20. Reviewer (6)

21. Shiny (6)

23. Hare-brained (6)

25. Rebuff (4)

Turn to page 9 for the solutions

Compiled by George Sully

How do I respectfully be a fuckboi (gender neutral)?

Hello and welcome to Ask Anahit, mysterious stranger and person who I almost certainly do not know and whose question I did not look at and immediately say: “wait, you again???” Thank you for picking the most efficient way to discuss this, that is, an advice column in a national magazine instead of a 27-second voice note direct to my WhatsApp. People say print media is dead but surely this is as alive as it gets. Next we’ll be making dinner plans by carrier-pigeon.

Anyway, I’m answering this here for two reasons: 1) you submit questions every month and I worry not answering them might start to take a toll on our friendship and 2) maybe the general public would also benefit from a quick Ethics 101 of fuckboi-ery, especially as the Fringe descends and Scotland’s datable population explodes (numerically, not like… you know). Webster’s Dictionary (fine, Urban Dictionary) defines fuckboi as ‘An insignificant shit that comes into your life, ruins it, and leaves’ (lmao), and it’s true that over the years fuckbois have got a bad rep! They lie to you! They use you! They’re only interested in sex!

The thing is though, only two out of those three things are ethically wrong. And the very gendering of the fuckboi figure is maybe part of the problem: we’ve spent so long thinking that men only want sex – and that’s bad – and women want sex and feelings – and that’s good. But the thing is, neither of those are inherently true, and maybe we need to stop conflating no-strings sex as some kind of emotional neglect, and healthy sex as some kind of gender essentialist rom-com starring Freddie Prinze Jr. How do you be a fuckboi respectfully? You communicate your desires from the start, you gently don’t let those boundaries get overridden, and you shed whatever latent Catholic guilt we all carry (sorry but we didn’t dissolve the monasteries for nothing!) for finding sex purely enjoyable. You owe people clarity, kindness, and mutual consent. You don’t owe them anything else.

In this month’s agony aunt column, one person asks how to ethically conduct That Fuckboi Life

Festival City

Illustrations: Katie Forbes

This August we’re celebrating all things Edinburgh festivals with our bi est ever issue! We’ve taken a deep, deep dive into the theatre offering across the Fringe and Edinburgh International Festival, opening with Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland, whose And Then the Rodeo Burned Down set the 2022 Fringe alight. We’ve got a wide array of interviews and

programme overviews, from Trojan Women to Weathervanes via the Horizon showcase.

Comedy explores the rise of the Fringe director, and meets Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Paul Sinha. We delve into the Book Festival programme, with our sponsored event Isabella Hammad followed by Camilla Grudova and Sophie K Rosa, Alva Gotby and Devorah Baum. As the Art Festival

returns in exuberant form, we pair writers from our collaborative emerging critics programme with the artists exhibiting in Platform, the emerging artists showcase, and explore the programme as a whole. And, as Edinburgh International Film Festival returns after a turbulent year, we mark the occasion with a special supplement.

Rodeos, Cannibalism, and Reproductive Rights

2022’s breakout Fringe stars

Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland return with an old favourite and a zany new offering

Words: Anahit Behrooz

Imagine the figure of the cowboy and something lawless might emerge from the mist, all leather chaps and fast-shooting guns and wanted posters stuck up in dust-stricken towns. Yet think of the rodeo – the theatre where the cowboy performs his tricks and sells his craft – and a much stricter state of affairs comes to mind. The rodeo has a hierarchy; a fixed way of doing things: a place where cowboys reign, rodeo clowns scramble to fulfil their desires, and cattle find themselves at the mercy of rope and saddle. It is a place of contradictions, where order thrives and underdogs – human and animal – can muscle their way to the top of the audience’s affections: where

the hierarchy exists only to, ever so briefly, be broken down.

It is fitting then, that this world of simultaneously unforgiving order and scrappy dreams found expression last year in the unexpected runaway success of And Then the Rodeo Burned Down, a queer, absurdist play that started August as a tiny show with a tiny run in a tiny SpaceUK venue, and ended the month by winning its New York theatremakers Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland a prestigious Fringe First award.

“It was crazy,” Rice gushes, “and it still feels crazy. We’re still pinching ourselves.” They and Roland are calling from a small theatre in New

Photo: Morgan McDowell

And Then the Rodeo Burned Down

York where they are deep in rehearsals for this year’s Fringe – returning with And Then the Rodeo Burned Down and new show What If They Ate the Baby? – petticoat-ed up and spending the Zoom call passing a plant filter between their faces. Their Fringe dreams, it turns out, had been in place for a while: the two were registered to attend with another show – an apocalypse piece about two people who, in the face of the world ending, shutter themselves inside – right before the pandemic hit. “We accidentally manifested COVID,” Rice laughs. When everything opened again, their original idea’s latent plague narrative felt too on-the-nose, so the pair put pen to paper, passing a new script between them until the shadows of the rodeo began to take shape.

“Our process of writing together is like… it’s beautiful but very chaotic,” Roland laughs. The play was inspired by a true story that had long obsessed them: the 1944 Hartford circus fire, down in history as one of the worst fire disasters seen in the US, and whose origins remain a mystery. Yet the beauty of And Then the Rodeo Burned Down lies not only in the charming clowning that Rice and Roland have immaculately choreographed (“We get bored if we don’t move,” Roland laughs again ruefully), or in the foot-tapping Dolly Parton-filled soundtrack, but in the beguiling complexity of its writing – a tidy, lessthan-an-hour script that, mid-play, turns the whole story on its head, crafting a mediation on the very act of making art.

“It was so accidental,” Rice says of the play’s meticulously clever twist (too clever to spoil here). “We never go into anything with an idea of what it’s about. We’re very image-based or characterbased.” Rather, the play’s metatextual bent emerged from Rice and Roland’s own experiences, as they stru led to fit playwriting and rehearsals around their day jobs and scraped together savings for the Fringe’s registration fees.

“And Then the Rodeo Burned Down is so much about not being able to afford to make the art that you want to make,” Roland says. “We just want to tell stories because we truly believe we have something to say – the only reason people are not listening is because we can’t afford to tell them.” The play, in this way, takes on an almost Brechtian character – a Verfremdungseffekt that draws attention not only to the artificiality of play-as-performance, but to the material circumstances that it, and all art, are made under.

And Then the Rodeo Burned Down was Rice and Roland’s first major career success – the Fringe First Award allowed them to bring the show to London in February and return to Edinburgh this year. Yet the two have been making theatre together for years under the most determined of conditions; having met in high school and immediately starting to write and perform together, Rice and Roland have fought tooth and nail to make the art that they love, rehearsing in parks and sneaking backstage in the face of the precarity of New York’s theatre scene.

“We started producing and putting together fun little stuff at our schools kind of secretly…” Rice explains. “Like really secret,” Roland adds. “Like against the rules secret,” Rice says. “Like they tried to shut us down,” Roland laughs. The unmitigated enthusiasm they have for making art and for each other is irresistibly guileless; they tell the story of their friendship (Roland was Rice’s high

school tour guide, they immediately resolved to be best friends) with the adorable fluency of one of the elderly couples from When Harry Met Sally; they fall over each other to finish the other’s sentences. The depths of their chemistry, tender and brash and always in sync, is the secret ingredient of their theatre-making – whip-smart writing married with something that is, at its core, deeply sincere.

It is heart-warming, then, that after so long fighting for a place at the table, the two have finally edged onto a seat. The Fringe seems to suit Roland and Rice: a space where their experimental, absurdist theatrical shenanigans can meet the needle-sharp point of their social critique. And Then the Rodeo Burned Down is, at its heart, a play about industrial precarity; their new show, What If They Ate the Baby?, is a timely inquiry into themes of surveillance, control, and reproductive rights, told through an encounter between two housewives that occurs again and again on stage. It imagines, Rice explains, the way the same scene could unfold if the audience happened to only hear the conversation rather than see it.

“The Rodeo are characters that we fall into relatively easily,” says Roland of their shift to the new show, “the rough-and-tumble clowns that have that funny physicality. [Here], we’re challenging ourselves a bit.”

“We’re not used to exploring our femininity quite as much,” adds Rice. “The performed hypermasculinity is a big element of the rodeo… it’s different and more knife-in-the-heart when to be feminine is to already be performing.” In its aesthetic, What If They Ate the Baby? could not be further from the DIY grit and grime of Rice and Roland’s rodeo; yet both pieces inhabit the same formally and politically subversive space, using a dramaturgically ridiculous approach (their new show is pitched, they tell me, as the “queer cannibal housewife” show; the rodeo clowns, meanwhile, spend half the runtime wondering if they should kiss) to speak to urgent moments of contemporary crisis. What If They Ate the Baby? was written before the fall of Roe v Wade but has only accrued more significance in the intervening year, something into which both Rice and Roland are unflinchingly leaning.

“I wouldn’t say that we’ve ever sat down and tried to write a political piece,” explains Rice. “But in many ways, existing in non-normative identities, existing as someone who is seen as a woman – especially in America right now – is just political by existence. I don’t think we have the privilege to be apolitical.”

As the Fringe continues to transform into an unwieldy and capitalist behemoth, it is beautiful – and encouraging – that such underdog stories can still happen; that a plucky two-hander with no institutional producing structures or money can create such waves in the ways the Fringe was originally intended. With such buzz around them, this year’s edition will hopefully look somewhat different for Rice

and Roland, who arrived last summer to “the darkest, dankest room you’ll ever see,” Roland laughs, “in like a nine-person room with bunk beds and a slamming door.”

“We loved it!” Rice grins. “But we’re being put up in an apartment this year.”

“We’re sharing a room,” Roland adds. “But still.”

And The the Rodeo Burned Down, theSpace @ Niddry St, 4-17 Aug (not 13); theSpace @ Venue45, 18-26 Aug (times vary)

What If They Ate the Baby?, theSpace @ Niddry St, 14-19 Aug, 5.50pm; theSpace on the Mile, 21-26 Aug, 9.15pm

Photo: Morgan McDowell

“Existing in nonnormative identities, existing as someone who is seen as a woman – especially in America right now – is just political by existence”

Xhloe Rice

Collective Peacekeeping

We meet award-winning Highlands playwright and director Jack MacGregor to discuss his upcoming drama Everything Under The Sun

Words: Maya-Rose Edwards

Jack MacGregor is a fresh and future-facing talent who walks the line between sci-fi and contemporary history through provocative storytelling. The highly anticipated political narrative, Everything Under The Sun delves into imperialism, peace, and the contested values of global institutions. A drama born from the heart of one of the deadliest UN peacekeeping missions in history – the war in Mali. Ultimately, this is a play about peace – and what it means to keep it.

The Skinny: I’m interested in how this commission came to be, would you be happy to share the origin story of the work?

Jack MacGregor: After Nightlands at Summerhall last year, I wanted to explore new themes and places. I started writing before I was even contacted for the commission. I was drawn to Northern Mali as a space for drama; the epicentre of a truly international peacekeeping mission. The whole world contained within one country, that was the hook for me.

How was your relationship with commissioner Army@TheFringe when writing critically about military operations? I’m wondering how you have tackled the politics of the relationship while maintaining the integrity of the piece?

It’s something you have to confront head-on. Ask questions of any institution, even if they’re commissioning you. What I will say is that I have had the same process of writing this play as any other. At no point did anyone say “you can’t write that” – the play doesn’t pull any punches. Army@TheFringe allowed me to interview service members, some served in Mali, or were involved in the United Nations more broadly. The shadow of Iraq and Afghanistan frames British understanding of the deployment in Mali, that’s a big part of the story.

As a white person from Inverness, what brought you to tell this story? What aspects of yourself lives through the narrative?

This is something that needs direct chat... I am exactly that: a white person writing about a place I am not from. I do not write to offer solutions, I’m not that guy. I understand where my voice is helpful and where it isn’t. What I will say is that there is a narrative vacuum around the MINUSMA (United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali), it isn’t being discussed in the English-speaking world, the only major coverage is through the French lens and that’s not great given they once controlled Mali as a colony. Mali has been devastated by colonialist

economic structures, it’s important that dramas critique this because it is ongoing. We are connected to this.

As a writer from the North of Scotland, I have a fondness for peripheral places – and understand that these places are never peripheral to the people that live there.

What do you think the role of the arts are in addressing global socio-political issues?

Theatre is the last form of the living idea. In a political landscape as weird as Britain’s, the patient empathy of theatre invites genuine interrogation of our values, our histories and present injustices.

The military situation in Mali has shifted during the development of the work, making this a very timely piece of theatre. Can you tell us about your experience working with such a live situation?

This is the trick with writing about something that’s ongoing, it’s like trying to sketch lightning. When writing Nightlands, which was first drafted in 2020, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was still confined to Donbas and Crimea. By 2022 the world was a different place.

It’s useless trying to future-proof your writing. My hope is that people will see a story that feels human. I don’t write to explain the intricacies of the Malian Civil War, it isn’t that. It’s a story about a young guy called Ibrihim (Thierry Mabonga) who is

a translator with the UN. It’s a play that also goes deep into PMC Wagner’s operations in Africa; Mali is a confluence of competing imperialists, old and new.

It’s not a play about the British Army, rather the collective peacekeeping structure that Britain and the rest of the world contribute forces to. How do we keep peace? What is the future of peacekeeping in a world like ours?

What does peace mean to you?

Feeling safe in the present and having hope for the future. It’s more than just an absence of violence.

Do you have any future projects on the horizon that we should keep an eye out for?

I’m actually looking for new projects. If anyone wants to talk leads then find me on Twitter or write me an email, I’d love to hear from you. A theatre in Zurich is putting on a production of Nightlands so I’ll be there in September.

First international work, I’m dead excited!

Everything Under the Sun, Army @ The Fringe, Drill Hall, 4-27 Aug (not 7, 14, 21), 6.45pm

This article was produced as part of Diverse Critics, a talent development programme for disabled and/or Black and people of colour arts writers delivered in partnership between Disability Arts Online and The Skinny and supported by The National Lottery through Creative Scotland

Photo: Ellie Welford

Jack MacGregor

Soul Connections

We speak to Jian Yi about their inspiration and motivation behind Weathervanes, and the journey it has undergone to produce what is sure to inspire Fringe audiences this year

Words: Isabella Thompson

Journey to the East Productions presents Jian Yi’s Weathervanes, which will be transforming Summerhall this August at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It began as a solo piece of performance art, but Weathervanes’ latest manifestation takes the form of an immersive visual exhibit and ritual dance-theatre experience, creating an otherwordly living sculpture garden. Yi seeks to question what Western society has historically considered beautiful and holy by shifting the focus from cis, white bodies that have traditionally dominated the Occidental art space to people of colour and queer figures. Weathervanes provides a collaborative, dream-like space that invites the audience to join in the queer-naturist ritual activism taking place.

The Skinny: I’d firstly love to hear a bit more about what inspires you as a creative and how you discovered your love of dance.

Jian Yi: I think I’ve always been interested in the

relationship and connection that performance has to our lives, society, and the times that we live in.

I’m definitely inspired by avant-garde performance art, experimental theatre, dance, and the ways in which performance explores the human condition. I’m very much interested in how we can explore and experience transformational aesthetic encounters through performative ritual and how it can change us on some level. We’ve gone through different periods of history, like the 1960s and 70s, where there were more utopian ideas about how art is able to change society, but I still feel there is something powerful in art whether it overthrows capitalism or not. On a personal level, there’s an encounter that happens with artwork, and that’s what I always try to envision and explore.

I agree – so much changes over the centuries, but one thing that seems to stay at the core of human nature is the desire to create, to make art, to perform in some way – whatever form that takes. Are there any artists in particular who you take your inspiration from?

I have a background in Asian dance traditions such as Southeast Asian Trance and Japanese Body Weather. Weathervanes definitely draws on these choreographic traditions as an exploratory, slow, meditative exploration of movement. These non-Western traditions of dance in particular reflect a sense of ritual, something more sensual, extending beyond bourgeois society towards questions of afterlife, ancestral memory, and our elemental connection to nature.

You have spoken about focusing on queer bodies and groups who have historically been marginalised. Is this what motivated you to take it from a singular, personal piece to something much larger and more collaborative?

It’s developed stage by stage, unraveling all of these issues. Weathervanes is an immersive, ritual experience inspired by Western statuesque sculpture gardens where we see these beautiful white sculptures of bodies. We are trying to re-envision these traditions in art history and what they considered beautiful and holy by creating living sculptures with new queer POC figures. The work sort of channels focus on the living, full-bodied sensuality of the queer performers who are raised on elevated platforms and move through light and sound in a trance-like state. We’re trying to create an architecture of queer futurity, inducing a dream-like state of mind for the audiences. I also believe that this is about connecting with the timelessness of ritual, queer ancestors and decolonial futures through our ongoing intersectional

stru les. We’re advocating for radical self-acceptance and queer body image positivity. So yeah, I’m hoping that Weathervanes can really platform different perspectives while promoting psychic healing through dance intervention.

When we look at a statue, we inherently have a concept of who that person is while simultaneously putting them on a pedestal. The typical Western statue is of a white, cis body. I think that what you’re doing is so beautiful because it radically questions that idea, using the physical form itself rather than words. For what feels like the first time, you actually encompass the global majority with a new perspective on non-cis bodies. Could you elaborate upon your view of the physical form and its connection with nature – why was it important for you to specifically place the body on this platform in such a way? We call it Weathervanes because the performers’ bodies become these abstract weathervanes. This is conveyed through the slow moving performance in conjunction with the visuals. The performance installation asks the question of how to consider the human body and non-sexual nudity in a way that restores our connection to ourselves. That’s why we advocate for radical self-acceptance and queer body image positivity. Weathervanes as a project resists English puritanical impulses which associate the body with shame, fear and denial, inviting us instead to celebrate our corporeal nature. The show seeks a new standard and conception of what is beautiful and what is holy about ourselves.

Because the audience’s participation and response is so integral to the piece, is there any demographic or community in particular you would like to share it with? Is there anywhere that would really benefit from something so striking? What’s so great about Weathervanes is that it’s a piece without dialogue so it doesn’t involve any prior cultural understanding necessarily. It’s about a universal human experience really, through the movement, music and dance. So we hope to be able to reach people in different contexts and environments. Mainland Europe tends to have a bit more of an openness towards nudity, for example, in comparison to the UK. At the same time it does important work when it challenges stereotypes and the conditioning that we have around shame and denial of the body.

Weathervanes, Summerhall Lower Cafe Gallery: live performances 3-6 10-13, 17-20, & 24-27 Aug, 7.30pm & 9pm; visual arts exhibition 3-27 Aug, 11am-5pm

Photo: Brian Hartley

Events Horizon

This year's Horizon showcase offers a broad range of immersive, experimental, and impactful theatre

Words: Catherine Renton

Featuring work that looks at new ways of encountering technology, history, politics and identity, the third Horizon showcase commissioned by Arts Council England is not to be missed. Check out the nine works in a series of traditional and unusual venues across the city; all you need to bring is an open mind (and, in one case, swimwear).

Birthmarked

Assembly Ballroom, 3-27 Aug (not 9, 14, 20) 7.15pm

Birthmarked follows the story of Brook Tate, a young, gay Jehovah’s Witness, on his journey from door-knocking to the stage. The joyful, colourful show is full of heart and features tap dancing, glorious costume and song, with Tate supported by a five-person band.

The Talent

Summerhall, 22-27 Aug 2.35pm

Featuring a virtuoso solo performance from Gemma Paintin, The Talent probes the roles of voice, human presence and capitalism in the 21st century. The piece poses many questions, asking you to consider the legacy of the human voice in a non-human future and challenging you to come to your own conclusions.

TOM

ZOO Southside, 21-27 Aug (not 23) 6.25pm

A fresh, stylish dance work that explores working class and queer identity in relation to pop culture. Loosely inspired by the opera Orpheus, TOM sees six performers draw on their experiences and influences from drag pop ballads, rave culture, and TikTok to investigate notions of gender identity and power.

Little Wimmin

ZOO Southside, 21-27 Aug 10.20pm

This anarchic, feminist adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel starts as a straightforward retelling but soon descends into unrecognisable chaos. The latest piece from genre-bending collective Figs in Wigs, who combine live art, theatre, comedy, cabaret, and dance into their work.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World Traverse, 15-27 Aug (not 21), times vary

A theatrical investigation into the unsolved murder of Iranian

singer Fereydoun Farrokhzad takes a thrilling ride through the rabbit hole of the internet via Wikipedia and murder mystery podcasts to examine a clutch of competing theories about the final days of a charismatic entertainer murdered in exile.

Always Already

Summerhall offsite @ Edinburgh LifeCare Centre, 23 & 25 Aug, 11.30am-7.30pm

An eight-hour performance installation using materials, text, song, sound and movement to bring together plant, human and machine. The room becomes a loom, where songs and dances encapsulate themes of patience and perseverance, with the audience having the option to come and go throughout the day.

FORGE

Lyceum Theatre Workshop, Roseburn, 23-25 Aug, times vary In 2014, somebody stole the iron Welcome Gate from the Dachau concentration camp. A replica was created to stand in its place. Over three days, Rachel Mars will ask you to bear witness as she creates her own replica gate. Join her in welding gear to take part in the cathartic experience.

BODIES

Summerhall offsite @ Deans Community High School, Livingston, 20 & 26 Aug, times vary Ray Young’s work BODIES is an immersive water, light and soundscape experience that takes place in a swimming pool. The audience is invited to an active sensory experience of water, discovery and rest, led by Young’s narration and exploring our bodily and sensory connection with water.

A Crash Course in Cloudspotting

Summerhall offsite @ Institut Français d’Ecosse, 22, 23, 24 Aug, times vary

In this piece, you are welcomed to lie down in a specially designed immersive environment where an intricate soundscape unfolds. The audience listens to collective stories from across the country of people’s experiences of needing to lie down in

Photo: Kirsten McTernan

Always Already

Photo: Rosie Collins

Little Wimmin

Psychic Translation

Director Ong Ken Sen sought emotional resonances across Euripides’ Trojan Women and the story of the Korean Comfort Women

Words: Rho Chung

In the final days of 2015, Japan and South Korea reached a landmark agreement about the recognition of Comfort Women, promising 1 billion yen (5.6 million pounds) in reparations. The euphemistically named Comfort Women were abducted from their homes in Korea (and China) under Japanese occupation during the Second World War and forced into sex slavery by the Japanese military. Such an acknowledgement by the Japanese government has been decades in the making – however, just weeks after his government reached an agreement, the then-Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, publicly denied any evidence that these women were taken without their consent.

No one seemed all that surprised. The government of Japan had persistently taken a hard line on insisting that the Comfort Women came along willingly – that they were sex workers, sluts, and degenerates who deserved what happened to them (as if, because of who the Japanese government claimed they were, their consent was implicit). A vanishingly small population of these women are still alive, and with each year, foregrounding their story becomes ever more critical.

Ancient Resonances

Singaporean director Ong Ken Sen says that he was drawn to the stru le of the Comfort Women against a government superpower. Ong’s long-time project, a Korean-language production of Euripides’ Trojan Women, will run at Festival Theatre this August as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Connecting the Korean Comfort Women to the story of Trojan Women, he says: “There’s a stru le like in Trojan Women against an oppressive reality. Now they have no more voice. They have no country. They have nothing except their individual bodies, their individual memories, their individual traumas, their individual experiences.”

Throughout his long and illustrious career, Ong has dedicated his energy to highlighting resonances of oppression across borders. He was particularly moved, he said, by the conflict over a bronze statue of a metonymic Comfort Woman, positioned facing the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. This Statue of Peace has become the physical manifestation of the ongoing conflict. While some factions seek her removal, others adorn her with clothes and goods to keep her warm. In 2015, the Japanese government even went as far as to threaten to withhold their reparations until the statue was removed. Ong recounts being in the final month of rehearsals for Trojan Women while Korean university students were organising to protect the statue from defacement or removal. Passing the statue and demonstration every day on his way to work, Ong says that it evoked the critical question: “How do you forgive, but not forget?”

Image: courtesy of the artist

The story of the Comfort Women isn’t overtly present in Trojan Women. Rather, Ong says, “there’s some kind of density of material, some kind of hovering memory… It is still Trojan Women, but it’s a way of layering the work. We don’t express it overtly.” These resonances act as an “entry point, a portal, for the performance.” Trojan Women crosses borders in more ways than one. It uses a reference point that may not be as familiar to viewers from the West, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a familiar story.

Ong says that the text of Trojan Women was initially distant for the performers. But as they rehearsed, he says, “It just tapped into some kind of cultural vein – the stories of mothers and daughters and aunts and granddaughters and grandmothers. They say that Korean culture is held by the spine of women, that the women are the ones who hold the entire community together. And so it was a bit like I harnessed it to tap into some kind of emotional space that was initially not rationally present, but it was instinctive. And then it grew and grew, and for these women it finally became their stories.”

The right to “own” one’s story comes up particularly strongly in survivor narratives. In Trojan Women, the female survivors of the Trojan War are captured and subjected to sex slavery – body and narrative intertwine to construct agency, or lack thereof. The story encodes memory as something tangible and real. Violence is enacted and repeated first by assault, and then by the routine, structural effacement of emotional memory by oppressors.

Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration

The parallels between this story and the ongoing stru le of the Korean Comfort Women are all too evident. This connection is made multi-dimensional by Ong’s collaborations with music director and composer Jung Jae-Il and pansori composer Ahn Sook-Sun. In addition to a soundtrack inspired by K-Pop, Trojan Women incorporates the traditional Korean art of pansori. Pansori is an ancestral Korean art form in which one (female) vocalist

performs with one instrumentalist. The vocal style is raw and highly demanding, and the performances can last hours. There are only a handful of professional pansori singers remaining, including Ahn, who was named an Intangible Cultural Heritage holder last year. “Every time she sings,” Ong says, “it’s like gold dropping from her mouth.” The performers in Trojan Women learned the pansori lines by listening to recordings of Ahn, and her creative voice is prevalent throughout the piece. The show is punctuated by this deeply treasured and unique art form. It seems like a perfect fit for the story of the Trojan Women to be told through an art form that depends on women to preserve and perpetuate oral memory.

something that happened to Homer, and then Homer to Euripides… and then, finally, all the way to Edinburgh, with these Korean women. These stories are eternal, and they are kept alive by the storytellers.”

Ong refers to a “psychic translation” between the many languages and histories of the piece. “When I’m invited to work with traditions, I try to find something which is more like an archetype or lodestone. There is some power of a kind of lodestone, or a kind of something that unlocks everything, and suddenly you understand as you’ve never understood before.

At the very least, Edinburgh festival audiences can expect to see a rare art form performed at the highest level. But Ong hopes that the impact of the production will be farther-reaching. He was attracted, he says, to pansori because of its locus in the working classes. Ong says that, in the earliest days of pansori, performers travelled the Korean countryside, singing their stories. What interested Ong was the interplay between myth and reality – pansori preserves and embodies myth, while it is simultaneously a living art form. Pansori, like classical Greek theatre, chronicles history and reflects culture. “War is perennial,” Ong says, “and we are still stru ling with this reality daily. The idea that this is passed on from

“We are so entrapped by the realities,” Ong says, “and then we cannot get into a dream space, or a space of nightmare.” He stresses the function of distance: “Trojan Women was, in a way, a vacuum in which a lot of emotions could then be explored without it [falling] into certain fault lines…Sometimes I feel like we don’t have enough distance to then reimagine or to reconfigure the imaginary so that we attract insight.” Talking of the difficulty of making documentary theatre about contemporary conflict, Ong says, “It’s so concrete. So we just fall into these fault lines and these knee-jerks.” Exploring Korean traumas through the text of Trojan Women “allowed a lot of these fears to be kept at a distance.” It isn’t that the grim realities of conquest and sexual violence are held at arms’ length by the production – rather, these parallel flashpoints are connected on a deeper resonance. They are held in the nebulous space of cultural recollection.

War, Ong continues, is gendered. Sexual violence is an essential tool of subjugation. The strongest (and often the only) recourse survivors have is the expression of memory. In Euripides’ time and now, hegemonic powers rule by enforcing silence. They deny and discredit; they cast doubt on embodied narrative. But memory has deep roots – by giving voice to ancient women, Ong proves that oral tradition is more resilient than any regime.

Trojan Women, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 9-11 Aug, 7.30pm

“They say that Korean culture is held by the spine of women, that the women are the ones who hold the entire community together”

Image: courtesy of the artist

Laughing Through Your Casting Type

Guido Garcia Lueches’ new one-human comedy challenges racist stereotypes through audience participation

Words: Rebecca Crockett

Guido Garcia Lueches has gotten very good at doing the stupid accent, the one posted in casting calls and audition briefs seeking Latin-American talent. Now he is bringing his one-person comedy show, Playing Latinx, to the Edinburgh Fringe with the question – why are you laughing?

“It came about from me realising I was getting cast as the exotic one in any kind of project,” Garcia Lueches tells me over Zoom from their home in London. “I had to kind of learn how to put on a very stereotypical Latino accent to go into some of these audition rooms. The second I did that I started getting hired.”

This idea is at the centre of Playing Latinx Originally from Uruguay, Garcia Lueches has been working in the UK for almost a decade and is familiar with the perils of the audition room. For him, it is not about sitting on the sidelines and screaming at the referee but acknowledging your part in the game.

“The very day we opened this show for the first time, I went to audition for a thing where I put on a stupid accent, and made people laugh with it and was very good at it to be honest.” He admits, “I think that’s also the problem. I have gotten good at doing the terrible thing. I think that’s a lot more interesting of an introspection than just storming in and shaking your fist at the ‘big bad white casting director’ who has maybe put a stereotype in their call out.”

Blending poetry, music and stand-up, Playing Latinx is not just a lecture, either. The audience participates in the show, creating new hilarious and uncomfortable moments every night. It is silly, fun and for a good reason.

“If you are laughing at whatever I’m saying or doing, then you’re more or less already on my side. Then we can start talking, then I can ask you why you’re laughing, or I can charge you for the laugh and tell you, ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been laughing at that.’”

This isn’t the first time Garcia Lueches has dabbled in breaking the fourth wall and by the sounds of it, this won’t be the last. According to the performer, audience participation is more than just a way to engage; it’s a shared project.

“I think [with] the things that I make, I’m like, okay, we are here so we might as well acknowledge that we’re here and have this collective experience together. It’s not just me doing something at you. What can we build together in this hour that we’re going to spend together?”

The use of audience participation grew from a shared vision with co-directors Mariana Aritstizábal and Malena Arcucci. The creative duo are the founders of MarianaMalena, a female-led theatre company based in London which champions Latin-American stories. With their help, Playing Latinx became what it is today.

“We were all drawn to a similar kind of vibe, to a certain silliness, and to a certain kind of political intent. I think it was that realisation of we’re saying something important but also, we want to be as stupid as we can with all of this.”

Playing Latinx can be difficult to pin down. Is it stand-up, or a play? Is it silly, or serious? Should we laugh, or look away? When asked, Garcia Lueches wasn’t confused as to where his priorities lay.

“I am an entertainer, first and foremost. So, if you’ve laughed for an hour, then great. If you take nothing else than that, my job is still done… Laugh first, then let’s have a chat.”

Playing Latinx, Summerhall (Cairns Lecture Theatre), 2-27 Aug (not 14, 21) , 6.55pm

Photo: Charly Monreal

Artists First

This year’s Zoo programme features multidisciplinary, artist-first work

Words: Hannah McGregor

“If you’re looking for a straight retelling of Romeo and Juliet, you’re not gonna find it with us,” says James Mackenzie, Artistic Director of ZOO Venues, and that statement seems to reverberate along what promises to be a riskier Fringe than we have seen since pre-lockdown. Risk has been a part of ZOO’s programming since the beginning – started twenty-two years ago, what was meant to be a one-year experiment has now turned into a multidisciplinary, multi-venue company which has solidified itself amongst the weird and wonderful of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. However, this experiment began to fill some rather large gaps in the festival scene, as Mackenzie explains: “Those [big] venues were kind of like massive factories where companies were literally thrown in one end and churned out of the other. And we wanted to try a slightly different view, to be a bit smaller and be a bit more artist-focused, make it about them… not just selling more pints of beer at the bar.” This artistfirst way of running a venue has certainly found its place in a changing Fringe landscape, as ZOO aims to “back [artists] up in whatever way it is that

they need,” including the little things like “making sure you’re there when they’ve had a crap review or something, to give them a hug and a cup of tea.”

But more than cups of tea, ZOO is recognising the current issues facing artists, which nowadays means that the Fringe is becoming make-or-break for more companies since the return of the festival after 2020. “We’re in a very different world to the one we were in in 2019; the industry has been completely ravaged,” says Mackenzie, a fact which does not escape ZOO: “The shows just can’t afford to come, so we’ve got to try and help them in any way we can; and that’s doing favourable splits, or paying all their tech hires, or whatever it may be to get that show there.”

And ZOO has certainly gotten the companies here; with the return of the Fringe First-winning company Song of the Goat Theatre and their production Andronicus Synecdoche, promising a powerful hour and fifteen tackling war and cruelty, and Beasts (Why Girls Shouldn’t Fear The Dark) from Mandi Chivasa examining spirituality and street harassment, the lineup is “Very relevant to now.” Amongst this international set also lies the likes of CREEKSHOW (Jenny Witzel), a love-letter

to Deptford and a look at British gentrification. Mackenzie hopes that this year, “We get those people who want to see the kind of work that they will not see in the UK; this work does not tour the UK, this is quite literally their one chance to see it.” At ZOO, this means the highly visual, physical, and often transformative worlds of the creations that are present this year – from the audience’s journey onstage, encased in a death ritual in Funeral (Ontroerend Goed) to a “giant frozen margarita dildo” in Little Wimmin (Figs in Wigs) – promise something for every eclectic taste, with ZOO’s signature technical specialties to deliver them.

This year at ZOO venues is one to reinstate the artist-first, multidisciplinary approach – as Mackenzie says, “I think we’re slowly breaking that battle of the rest of the country thinking that Edinburgh is a comedy festival. The BBC quite regularly refer to is as ‘The Edinburgh Comedy Festival’, and every time I wanna throw a brick at the TV.” ZOO lives up to its name in what promises to be the wilder yet extremely topical side of the Fringe – with a bit of risk, too.

Photo: Ellie Welford

CREEKSHOW

Queer as folk(lore)

Plague Stone Party (aka Ozzy Algar and Buoys Buoys Buoys) are bringing their ‘freak folk comedy’ Farewell, Tor to the Fringe. We talk to them about the show and the growing niche of queer paganism

Words: Zinzi Buchanan

The Skinny: I read that plague stones are places where people with the plague and outcast from society would congregate. Can you tell me why you chose this for your name?

Buoys Buoys Buoys: We chose it because it encapsulates the irony of a place of desperation and hope. And we love the idea of going there just to have a great big party. Growing up in Swansea, you’d always be going out to ancient sites and having parties. It was completely normal back then. But in hindsight, it’s such a fascinating combination – raves around Neolithic burial sites.

Ozzy Algar: Yeah, one of the most easily recognisable features of Celtic, Pagan and Druidic culture is people partying at Stonehenge and partying in ancient places is something that on a deeper level still makes total sense to people. A plague stone was a place where you went to try and heal yourself when disease was rife. And something of this image really captured me – of people from all over history and now needing that place of healing.

Absolutely. It makes me think about gathering on the dance floor as a popular queer ritual. But there’s something missing there, don’t you think?

O: It’s perhaps the difference between pleasure and delight. But I think investing in both is important in resisting the machine that really wants you to not have either. In the show it’s the rave stuff that’s more about pleasure, but telling little stories with jokes is just such a delight.

How do you connect existing as queer to Celtic and folkloric traditions?

B: The connection I find in my mind is there’s nothing clear about folklore. It’s the facets of anti-establishment mentality, carnivalesque presence and alternative means of recording stories. Folk traditions not existing as a single doctrine has space inside for many experiences to happen (like queerness!)

What got your hearts beating to make this show?

O: A major part of it is just we were so excited to work together.

B: Yes! We have a shared passion for making something magical happen, which links so powerfully to folk performances and storytelling, parades and carnivals, which come into your life and community, and then vanish again. But it’s the vanishing that makes the presence a lot sweeter.

I love that. The eclectic mix of genres that you bring together to make the show leave me unable to predict what to expect. Is there any moment, atmosphere or aesthetic you would be willing to reveal pre-show?

B: Yes! How much do we give away? How sneaky do we be?

O: We’re trying to create an atmosphere of two strangers meeting and bonding over a shared love of folktales with humour, fear and hope. The narrative of this show is based on the Irish myth of Morrigan, who is the goddess of the Other World. She lives in the Cave of the Cats in County Roscommon, which is a real cave – a Hellmouth. The story goes that if you go to the cave and spend three days and three nights there, you leave having absolved your past and able to fulfill your destiny. And we thought it would be really funny if two

people accidentally showed up in the cave at the same time…

Thank you for sharing that. What a gift! Could you say a little bit more about comedy and what it brings to your lives?

O: I mean, on a factual level, I went to clown school. I became more serious about myself as an actor and performer there. Comedy for me is about sharing a moment with someone that brings something out of them. And I just think we’re the funniest people in the freaking world.

B: We are so funny! We’re both trying to work against the idea that comedy is an utter frivolity. If something isn’t necessary in the world, it will just stop being and comedy will never stop being. Our show has elements of tragedy as well as comedy and I don’t think we could have one without the other.

I agree! Is there anything you’d like to say before you come to Edinburgh – to the people, the hills or to your future selves?

O: If you see the tag ‘queer’ or ‘LGBT+’ on a show, and you’re not a fan of cabaret or drag don’t assume that you won’t like it because it could be like this show we saw last year called The Stones It was one man sitting in a chair telling a queer horror story. There was no set, nothing! He was just sitting in a chair telling the story and it was so evocative and amazing.

B: Hmmm, something to say to our future selves: stretch, do vocal warm ups, stay hydrated. Yeah! Take care of yourselves! I look forward to seeing you in Edinburgh on 18 August. It’s been delightful talking to you both!

Plague Stone Party, Fforest Gather festival in the Teifi valley in West Wales 31 Jul-6 Aug, Bread and Roses Theatre, Clapham 15 Aug, and Blundagardens, Edinburgh, 18-22 Aug, 8pm

This article was produced as part of Diverse Critics, a talent development programme for disabled and/or Black and people of colour arts writers delivered in partnership between Disability Arts Online and The Skinny and supported by The National Lottery through Creative Scotland

“One of the most easily recognisable features of Celtic, Pagan and Druidic culture is people partying at Stonehenge and partying in ancient places”

Ozzy Algar

Plague Stone Party

Image: courtesy of the artists

The Rise of the Fringe Director

What is a Fringe Director? What do they even do? Three emerging comics explain how directors have helped shape their Fringe shows this year

Words: Laurie Presswood

The role of stand-up director is a bit of a Fringe mystery, like who’s still going to see Shit-Faced Shakespeare, or Jack Whitehall’s success. The average Fringe audience member probably couldn’t tell you what they do – in an ostensibly solitary artform, the role might seem redundant.

John Tothill is making his Fringe debut this year, having cut his teeth in character comedy and university sketch groups. His hour The Last Living Libertine (Pleasance Courtyard (Below), 2-27 Aug (not 15), 8.30pm) was directed by Adam Brace: playwright-turned-dramaturg, multi-award-winning standup director and Associate Director at Soho Theatre, who died unexpectedly in April. He confesses that, taking his lead from Brace, he refers to his onstage persona in the third person. “[Adam] conceived of these personas as characters that need to go on a journey across the course of an hour. The truth is obviously that the persona is an exa erated version of me... It’s what I would be like if I was a small doses person.”

Fellow debutante Mary O’Connell agrees having a director has made her show more robust: “I know that I can coast on my personality for a bit, but maybe not for an hour.” Her first solo Edinburgh appearance, Money Princess (Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Three), 2-27 Aug (not 15), 6pm), is one of four Fringe shows this year directed by Elf Lyons, clown extraordinaire who studied clowning at École Philippe Gaulier. The school is semi-revered in comedy circles, but focuses equally on theatre. This training lives on in Lyons’ directing: she approaches O’Connell’s script as a dramaturg approaches a text, asking probing questions about feelings and motivations, and giving homework (O’Connell generously shares a playlist she made after Lyons asked for five songs that described her relationship with money – Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, Bi ie’s Juicy and Millionaire by Kelis all feature).

A director can be any friendly external sounding board (there’s a reason so many young comedians have their shows directed by friends and partners). Tamsyn Kelly points out that a director can do what the performer cannot: tell what the audience is thinking.

Kelly’s show Crying in TK Maxx (Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker One), 2-27 Aug (not 14), 8.40pm) is being directed by Amy Gledhill, of Delightful Sausage fame. She says a large bulk of Gledhill’s feedback has been to rework stories so they’re less truthful but more streamlined. “It’s hard for

you to see past what actually happened to you.”

Comedy is an inherently risky business, but a director is there to push you. For O’Connell, not a natural risk-taker, Lyons’ background in clowning is key, whether that’s as basic as encouraging her to use props, or use the stage more. “Clowning is kind of about joy in failing and I’m like, ‘failing? That’s not success.’ She really pushes me into doing stuff that’s kind of scary for me.” O’Connell feels lucky to be working with Lyons, but highlights that her director’s style of comedy comes with barriers for some: “There isn’t enough space for Black and brown people to do alternative comedy. It’s still something that I think comes from a place of privilege.”

It would be impossible to talk about the Fringe and risk without immediately thinking about finances. The festival is a loss-making exercise for all but the most successful performers, and things are only getting harder. Tothill rolls his eyes at the idea of a 26 year-old having ‘life-savings’, but nonetheless that’s what this run is costing. “So I’m putting a lot on the line, which is fine. I would not have done that without someone like Adam – well, actually specifically Adam – saying that it’s worth doing.”

Kelly says she needs a huge push to spend any more money on the show. Historically she’s had bold ideas, but hasn’t had a trusted voice to tell her they merit the risk. This time around, Gledhill’s pushed her to believe in her ideas: any day now she’s expecting the delivery of a life-size Mr Blobby suit which one lucky audience member will get to wear every night.

Because the situation (cost, accommodation and everything else) is so dire this year, Kelly is seeing a lot of working-class people in the industry banding together to help each other. She says her relationship with Gledhill is particularly special because of her director’s motivation. “She’s doing it because she wants to help other comics, workingclass comedians especially, rather than it just being transactional.” She also singles out Alison Spittle as an incredible source of support and advice – they have a wealth of shared life experiences, both having grown up on rural council estates. Spittle is the only other woman in comedy Kelly knows with that background.

This shared background dictated how Kelly selected a director; she knew from the very beginning that she needed to ask a working class woman. “One thing I hate doing is unpacking every single thing in my life and having to explain it you know, like having to explain growing up on benefits and what that was like. Those are such minor details to me”.

Shared history is also crucial for Tothill, whose friends and long-term collaborators Daniel Emery and Molly Stacy stepped in as co-directors in April. “Molly and Dan have been godsends because they know instinctively what it is that I want and what I find funny”.

Tothill was such a fan of Brace’s previous shows that there had never been any question of who he wanted to work with (“I was always going to bite his hand off”). But he doesn’t think there are any obvious similarities between him and Adam’s other acts. “It’s like how a good chef uses salt. It’s like he makes food taste more like itself, you know. He made shows feel more like themselves.”

Looking for more?

Adam Brace made an indelible mark with his attentive Fringe oversight. Two other shows with input from the much-missed director are String v Spitta (Pleasance Courtyard (Above), 18-26 Aug, 8pm) starring Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Ed MacArthur plus alternative comedian and performance artist Ben Target’s Lorenzo (Summerhall (Anatomy Lecture Theatre), 2-27 Aug (not 14, 21), 11.55am) which straddles the realms between storytelling, theatre and yes, standard of the genre, live carpentry.

Elf Lyons has quite the busy August. As well as Mary O’Connell’s show, Elf directs the sophomore solo outings of Amy Matthews (Monkey Barrel (Tron), 2-27 Aug (not 9, 16, 23), 3pm), Sian Davies (Assembly George Square (The Box), 2-27 Aug, 3.45pm) and Cerys Bradley (Laughing Horse @ Bar 50 (Alcove), 3-27 Aug (not 26), 3.30pm). Someone we’re yet to mention in the directing sphere is Edinburgh Comedy Award winner Jordan Brookes. While trying out material under the guise of one of the best show titles at this year’s festival, Snakes for Cats to Watch, (Pleasance Courtyard (Baby Grand), 2-8 and 21-27 Aug, 10.50pm), he lends his astute, absurdist eye to one of last Fringe’s smash acts, Ania Magliano (Pleasance Courtyard (Baby Grand), 2-27 Aug (not 14), 4.35pm), musical sketch-duo Crizards’ second show This Means War (Pleasance Dome (10 Dome), 2-26 Aug (not 14), 5.50pm) and Edinburgh newbie Benji Waterstones (Pleasance Courtyard (Below), 2-28 Aug (not 12, 21), 4.30pm).

Several other acts who’ve previously won high praise from the big Edinburgh Comedy Award turn their hand to directing this year. Best Newcomer winner Natalie Palamides, best known for her incisive, big-themed clowning shows, is behind the scenes for Bill O’Neill’s Edinburgh debut, The Amazing Banana Brothers (Pleasance Courtyard (Beside), 2-27 Aug (not 14), 10pm). Celya AB (Pleasance Courtyard (Beside), 2-27 Aug (not 15), 7.30pm) returns to the festival with her second hour, guided by the wonderful Mike Wozniak, while yellow t-shirted Tom Parry, who reached success with big-hearted solo shows and sketch group Pappy’s, directs Matty Hutson (Pleasance Courtyard (Attic), 2-27 Aug (not 14), 7.15pm), who bursts onto the Edinburgh scene with his multiinstrumental musical comedy.

Photo: Matt Crockett

Photo: Rebecca Need-Menear

Mary O'Connell

Tamsyn Kelly

Not Your Usual is a new series from The Skinny and Glayva highlighting interesting and exciting artists from across the Scottish scene. To kick things off, we meet comedian, animator and lover of miniatures, David Callaghan

Words: Peter Simpson

David Callaghan is not your usual comedian. Instead, he pulls elements from stand-up, theatre, lm, animation and technology together into shows that defy straightforward explanation. When we meet up with him over a Vamillion – a shaken cocktail, or Glocktail if you will, of Glayva whisky liqueur, vermouth, Scotch whisky and blood orange juice – he’s just returned to Glasgow from a month of touring his unique brand of storytelling comedy around Europe.

His latest show – Everything That’s Me Is Falling Apart – won the ‘Take My Breath Away’ panel prize at last month’s Reykjavik Fringe. It’s a multimedia comedy theatre show, with augmented reality, complex technology and handmade miniature sets arranged in boxes on stage, and at the centre of it all is… a small toy train.

“There’s a part of my PhD that is about auratic technology and how it’s really enjoyable to play with a typewriter or watch cogs or look at a train set,” he tells us. “Technology that is analogue has a real aura about it and it’s enjoyable to be in a room with it.”

As Callaghan enthusiastically tells us, the show combines physical sets with projected visuals – he completed a Master’s degree in animation during lockdown – to help tell a series of interwoven stories about love, loss and connection. It’s a long way from Callaghan’s early experiences of the classic stand-up paradigm, where “combative” gigs often feel more like a sport than an artform. “It’s often about winning,” he says. “It’s not about the communal experiences. You’re almost versus the audience, and you have to beat them.

“I always went to see club comedy in Edinburgh when I was a kid,” he says, “but over the years, I think I’ve just become softer. As a teenager, I loved how combative it was; the heckling, the real sweaty, bear pit experience of it. But the joy of that fell away.

“I started doing comedy in 2012, and I was a club comic all the way up until the pandemic, but I started to change how I’d make shows in 2016.” This began a period of experimenting and pushing boundaries, with mixed initial results ( he o ers an apology to anyone who came to see him “before about 2019”)

He says: “I certainly would take bad experiences doing comedy really to heart. They happened a few times in the early days, but as I was doing pretty likeable club comedy, people would like it, or they would go ‘oh well, he’s trying to do whatever’... they found it relatable.

“When I started doing stu that was stranger, 2016 onwards,” he laughs, “that’s when real distrust set in. Getting through that was the hard bit, but now I think I’ve got a way of working where the work doesn’t de ne me in the same way as it did anymore. I’m much prouder of it.”

That pride comes partly from the sheer time and e ort required for shows of this kind. “I’d

already had this idea for this new show and that was supposed to go to the Fringe in 2020,” he tells us, “but I’m really glad that it didn’t because it wouldn’t have been ready. Now, I can animate, I’ve built my own augmented reality comedy theatre show. I’m really proud of it, and I can take it out to Reykjavik and when it wins an award, I can go ‘Yeah, because it’s good!’”

In the heat of the Edinburgh Fringe, where thousands of shows compete for your attention and the temptation is to go big and loud, David Callaghan o ers a chance to immerse yourself in a handmade world. He describes the show as creating that sense of community he felt he was missing in other forms of comedy. “That’s really enjoyable, and that’s kind of what I wanted to make. It’s nice to see people look at the boxes, and then look at the big screen and understand that there is proper love at work here. You know, everyone wants to look at miniatures and I’m giving them the opportunity to look at them really, really big!”

Everything That’s Me Is Falling Apart, Greenside @ In rmary St, 4-12 Aug, 12.40pm

Follow David on Twitter @davidcallaghan and on Instagram @callaghandlethis

Listen to an extended chat with David Callaghan on The Skinny and Glayva’s new podcast, Not Your Usual, at theskinny.co.uk or wherever you get your podcasts

Discover delicious glocktail recipes at glayva.com, and turn to the inside front cover for the recipe for the Vamillion Glocktail

Photo: Thomas Jackson at TyneSight

Photo: Dan Zerin

Cool Story Bro

Best known for his TV roles on Stath Lets Flats, Ghosts and the latest series of Taskmaster, Kiell Smith-Bynoe brings a chaotic kids party to the Fringe and goes back to his improv roots

Words: Polly Glynn

“Igenuinely think it’s probably the best show I’ve done live, and I’ve been doing live theatre since I was like 11,” says Kiell Smith-Bynoe, describing String v SPITTA as it heads to Edinburgh Fringe for the very first time. The show, about two rival children’s entertainers on the London kids’ party scene, has been in the works for the best part of a decade. “We actually started doing it in 2016. That’s when we first performed it,” and when the legendary, late director Adam Brace first saw it and took it under his wing.

String to Smith-Bynoe’s SPITTA is Ed MacArthur, recently seen in the Bad Education reboot and Dreamland alongside Smith-Bynoe and Lily Allen. The pair met through a mutual friend and hit it off after discovering a shared history of working in children’s entertainment and both being musically-minded. “We just knew every time we met up we’d make a REALLY good song so we just kept doing that,” developing the show around the music they made. Modestly, Smith-Bynoe pins the show’s previous successes (sell-out runs at Soho Theatre, five-star reviews from national newspapers) on “a mixture of talent and working with an Eton Boy. Ed’s definitely got a lot of things that I don’t and one of them is not getting bored or giving up when things get uninteresting.”

The pair have also had to persevere with

audiences getting a little out of hand. As a kids show for adults, some crowds regress more than others. Their press night audience in 2021 “were probably worse than any children that I’ve dealt with. There were two women in particular that were incredibly drunk, talking to us as if it was like Go lebox or something. It’s probably the worst heckling we’ve ever got.” Smith-Bynoe looks on, the trauma flooding back. After “a masterclass in dealing with an audience... some newspaper gave us this quite nice review, four star review, and at the end they put ‘and they dealt with hecklers quite well’. I was like ‘QUITE WELL?’. They nearly took over the whole show. There was gonna be a riot. What do you mean ‘quite well?!’”

Luckily Smith-Bynoe has been training for situations like these for years after finding improv comedy in his early teens. Aarawak Moon, a theatre company run by actors Jo Martin (Doctor Who, Fleabag, Back to Life) and the late Josephine Melville, had significant success with Bla ers, an improv show boasting Black British talent like Richard Blackwood and Robbie Gee. Junior Bla ers was born shortly after, with Smith-Bynoe joining the group aged 12 or 13. Several improv groups and a stint at an improv-led drama school later, he came to the Fringe with BattleActs! who he’s rejoining this August, as well as leading his own improv show Kool Story Bro. “We’ve never

done it before,” he cackles, “and we actually don’t have any time to try it out in London before we go to Edinburgh, so the 21st [of August] will be the first time I ever do it.”

Improv, he says, has “always been part of what I want to do and what I do and I’d like to do more of it on TV as well,” lamenting the lack of the format being broadcast outside of repeats of Whose Line is it Anyway? “That’s another thing I’m trying to do at the moment, trying to figure out how we make improv work on TV. I haven’t got the answers yet but hopefully one day.”

There’s a definite trace of improv in the Kiell we see on the latest series of Taskmaster, where he’s the epitome of competitiveness. Like many previous contestants, he’s quick to sing the show’s praises. “It’s the best. You forget that you’re at work. The organisation that goes into that show is unbelievable. It’s like military or something. It’s like if everyone in the military was like, a joker.” But unlike improv or his TV work, he was never tempted to make the onscreen Kiell more of a caricature: “It’s very different for me and quite scary to show the world the real me in its truest form.”

As for the real-life Kiell, he’s delighted to return to Edinburgh, even if for a few days. Even when he’s performing in four separate shows on a couple of days. “I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be fun.” He waits a beat. “I’m gonna be so tired”.

String v SPITTA, 18-26 Aug, Pleasance Courtyard (Above), 8pm

Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Friends: Kool Story Bro, 21-23 Aug, Pleasance Courtyard (Forth), 10pm

BattleActs!, 21-27 Aug, Laughing Horse @ The Counting House (Ballroom), 11.30pm, free

Sounds Like..., 21-25 Aug, Underbelly Bristo Square (Ermintrude), 10pm (Kiell guesting 24-25 only)

t: @kfRedHot i: @klayzeflaymz

“Taskmaster is like if everyone in the military was a joker”

Kiell Smith-Bynoe

Kiell Smith-Bynoe

Photo: The Other Richard

Dream Gig

As they come to the Edinburgh Fringe with their debut hour, stand-up, Drag King and host of The LOL Word (a queer women, trans and non-binary comedy collective), Jodie Mitchell takes on August’s Dream Gig

Illustration: Holly Farndell

My best ever gig was over the coronation weekend. I hosted a night called Not My King as my macho alterego John Travulva with my Drag King family ‘Pecs’ at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. It’s an iconic queer venue complete with carpets that no-one has or should ever use a UV light on. The bar staff asked us if we wanted to use a prop someone had left there – a 2/3rds actual size full working replica of the Diamond Jubilee State Coach. To this day no-one knows why it was there, how it got into the building or who left it. We, of course, decorated it with flames and put cardboard cut outs of our new overlords inside as we sensed it was what the coach wanted.

I’m a stand-up comic but on this particular evening I was convinced to dress up as the devil so that we could do a full drag homage to AC/DC’s Highway to Hell in honour of the terrifying madness that had gripped the nation. I imagine it’s what the Catholics of my family think I do every gig so it felt important to manifest it at least once. The venue was rammed and the audience was absolutely wild – someone threw a Meghan mask into the crowd and the person that caught it screamed “I think I’m pregnant now” repeatedly. My (and I think everyone’s) highlight of the night was a rare performance from Mama Hale, our legendary producer, who dra ed up as Emily Maitlis and sprayed the audience with Andrew’s tears. The Drag line-up were 100% the only royalty I will ever acknowledge – Cyro, Beau Jangles, Sigi Moonlight… all true Kings. I love stand-up gigs but Drag King nights are something else.

My dream gig would of course be held in the giant Gre s in Birmingham’s Primark. A Gre s inside a Primark is honestly just high camp, making it the perfect location for a drag/ stand-up fusion show. The night would naturally be hosted by Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan, a character that was one of the best Drag performances I’ve ever seen. The commitment to the emotion, the looks that were served, the raising of a demon child that looked like the Teletubbies sun baby had really gone through something – all incredible drag moments. Kristen would deliver monologues from the original film between acts.

The line-up would be my favourite Drag Kings and standups, the audience would be anyone that’s ever bought a casual shacket from Uniqlo. This is a good way of manifesting an audience made up of mostly queer women and non-binary people. First on would be Loose Willis, my drag brother and hero, who’d perform his renowned ‘Bard-core’ routine. Dressed as an Elizabethan King, he serves up his phenomenal stand-up as per before a stunning strip to a bard-core remix of Get Low ft. some astonishing prancing. Maybe that should be ass-tonishing as he ends in nothing but a merkin and a smile. My pal (and icon) Kemah Bob would make a special appearance as her alter-ego Lil’ Test Ease and rap until everyone else is as obsessed as I am.

Everyone would then stop for a mandatory Sausage, Bean and Cheese Melt or Vegan Sausage Roll (know your audience). Comedy venues always have really crap food and someone needs to be the hero that puts a stop to this issue.

Post-break, Shardeazy Afrodesiak would take to the stage – talent personified, Shardeazy is the King of every single person’s heart that has ever been lucky enough to see him.

Then it’d be my friend (and essentially my life-coach) Sofie Hagen, who apart from being one of my favourite comics and the director of my debut hour at Fringe this year, always has the best reactions to drag so I’d also get to enjoy watching them watch the night. To finish, I’d run on to provide important scene support for Kristen – she’d force my face into a disco ball to symbolise a vampire caught in the sun, and then languish in the dappled light radiating from my entrapped head until everyone assumes they should go home.

Jodie Mitchell: Becoming John Travulva, 2-27 Aug (not 16), Pleasance Courtyard (Below), 9.50pm

Socials: Twitter: @jodiemitchell_ / Insta: @jodiemitchetc

Going Big

TV’s Paul Sinha on his new, light-hearted musical comedy Fringe show Pauly Bengali

Words: Andrew Williams

“What’s the word I’m looking for, Olly?”

Paul Sinha shouts over to his husband and Celebrity Go lebox co-star, Oliver Levy.

“’Exponential.’ That’s it. The show is at a primordial stage at the moment, which is exciting and terrifying in equal measure. This is not something that I have been lovingly curating since last September. For me, it’s a bit like coal mining. And I feel like I’ve been mining autobiography for quite a long time, and this time I’d like a lighter tone to the show, so it’s not just me hectoring the audience for an hour about how dramatic my life is.”

The show in question is Pauly Bengali, which he describes as “a light hearted, pathos-free, mixture of songs, jokes and stories,” and which Sinha brings to The Stand from 2 August. This time, he promises even more musical treats.

“I’ve done two shows where I have taken a look at Parkinson’s disease, and this show is very different. But one thing it will have in common with the previous two shows is that it will have plenty of music. I never thought I’d have the energy to do musical comedy, but I’ve been doing it for four years now, and it’s really exciting. And it is about taking a gamble.”

While he may be most familiar from his role as a sarcastic teatime quizzing machine on The Chase, Sinha is clear that his new stand-up routine is anything but middle of the road.

“Of course, it’s a balancing act. And the most important thing is that I’m the comedian that I want to be. This year is perhaps going to be one of the more political shows that I’ve done, with everything that has happened over the last two or three years. I think the politics obviously creates a disconnect with the traditional Chase fan who is coming to see ‘the nice man off the telly.’ But I can’t live my life stressing out about that.”

Politics and the state of the nation are clearly issues which inform the comedy that Sinha brings to the Fringe, and he’s not afraid to speak out. In fact, he comes across as positively defiant at the idea that he should ‘stick to the jokes.’

“I look at Twitter sometimes and see people who you may not expect to be political, and anyone who doesn’t agree with their politics says ‘stay in your lane.’ I don’t think any of us should be expected to do that. None of us should be defined by the one thing we’re best known for. And that’s perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of my comedy – I can’t be all things to all people. I mean, if you hate left wing comedians, do not come and see my show. If you’re one of those people who thinks an elite wokerati have taken over the entertainment industry, I’ve got nothing for you.”

In a world where diversity and inclusion are increasingly seen as part of the mainstream rather than a niche concern, Sinha ticks a lot of boxes – a gay, Brown son of immigrants, living with Parkinson’s. Do those definitions mean anything these days, either to him or his audience?

“I mean, I don’t do a survey on why people come to see me. And I know most people may be coming to see me because of The Chase – it gets three million viewers a day. But my priority is to be funny, and honest. And despite everything, I find it very hard to portray myself as a victim. The self-pity button that I could easily press when it comes to Parkinson’s disease has been punctured by four years of relentless bleakness across my social media, of people bereaved, and ill. And you realise that we’re all fighting battles, and while it’s fine to talk about your own demons, it’s a mistake to make out that that’s what makes you special. I know that one day, my Parkinson’s will get worse. By then, it’s unlikely I’ll be doing stand-up. But for now I feel almost blessed to be able to continue my career, where I can talk honestly about what life is like with a neurological illness.”

In that spirit, this year Sinha is playing his bi est ever shows at Edinburgh. At 400 capacity, the Grand Hall at the New Town Theatre is a big step up from his previous Fringe outings.

“It’s a gamble, I know that. But I decided to go big this year. My years of playing at Edinburgh are ebbing away, and I wanted, just one year, to play in a massive room. And it has advantages – when people ask if there are tickets, you can say yes with confidence! So it’s go big, or go home.”

Paul Sinha: Pauly Bengali, The Stand’s New Town Theatre, 2-27 Aug (not 3, 15), 5.40pm

This article was produced as part of Diverse Critics, a talent development programme for disabled and/or Black and people of colour arts writers delivered in partnership between Disability Arts Online and The Skinny and supported by The National Lottery through Creative Scotland

Paul Sinha

Hamlet on the West Bank

The author of Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad sits down to talk about Shakespeare, political theatre, and narratives of identity ahead of her appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

Words: Tara Okeke

Legend has it there would be no ‘skim milk’ without Shakespeare. No ‘puppy dogs’, either. These are just two of the nearly 2000 words whose invention is commonly credited to the Elizabethan dramatist. Such an outsized influence on language (and, by extension, its literary canon) is certainly unprecedented; it can, however, also be overstated. With ‘puppy’ finding its roots in Old French and ‘skim’ and ‘milk’ having Old High German derivations, it would be more accurate to say Shakespeare was – lexically – more a smooth innovator than an originator. Still,

the objective of any legend is not to be exact but to cast an image that rouses and draws you in, remaking you in its shadow. The fact that such an image tends to fracture under scrutiny is, largely, irrelevant.

For British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad and her second novel Enter Ghost – a homecoming tale with a production of Hamlet on the West Bank at its crux – such image-making was never far from mind. In one indelible passage, the novel’s protagonist Sonia admits to being “haunted” by the thought of playing Ophelia, a role “trailing significations… like flower petals.” Did the author feel similarly apprehensive about embedding a Shakespearean work and its attendant images within her own?

“I actually found it kind of fun to deal with,” Hammad demurs, smiling. “There’s a way in which Hamlet, like all of Shakespeare’s plays, becomes so close to cliché. So one of the things I did was use the Arabic translation [of Hamlet] by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and then translate it back into English.” This was essential, she explains, to “defamiliarise” the original Shakespearean lines and position the language “off-centre” – toying not only with the “foregone conclusions” of the play but also the images that are typically conjured.

This spirit of extemporaneity – of language in translation and life in perpetual motion – pulses through Enter Ghost. It is an ambitious and remarkably accomplished work, not least because Hammad manages to maintain this momentum across narrative levels, from the intradiegetic to the metadiegetic. There is a deep knowing to this – to lines like, “Basically, right, Hamlet is a guy who thinks too much and talks too much and can’t get it together” – which offset facile wit with fourth wall-breaking and result in a novel with as much shades of Molière as mockumentary.

“I’m obviously interested in the mixing of literary cultures,” Hammad says, on how she, like her characters (particularly the production’s

director, Mariam) sought to mediate “high art” with the homespun. What about her interest in theatre? “I’ve been interested in theatre, in Palestine specifically, for a long time. There was a film by [Israeli-Palestinian filmmaker] Juliano Mer-Khamis about his mother called Arna’s Children… I watched that when I was very young.” This 2004 feature chronicles the working life and legacy of Arna Mer-Khamis, an Israeli communist activist who founded ad hoc theatre group Stone Theatre and an alternative pastoral care system for Palestinian children whose lives had been torpedoed by the Israeli occupation during the First Intifada. It won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival.

“It’s a really great film,” Hammad confirms. However, it was what Mer-Khamis turned his attention to next and what he did with what remained of Stone Theatre – its site destroyed by an Israeli bulldozer during the Battle of Jenin, its significance living on in a generation of survivors – that left the clearest imprint on Enter Ghost and its author.

“Juliano turned it into the Freedom Theatre [a Palestinian community-based theatre and cultural centre on the West Bank]. I became really interested in the Freedom Theatre and theatre that’s close to the populace – or the polis – in some way.” Hammad goes on to cite the late British theatre director Peter Brook – renowned not only for his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company but also his championing of multinational troupes and productions with international reach – as another cynosure. Brook’s notion of an “immediate” category of theatre – which is characterised in his 1968 book, The Empty Space, as “involving the bringing together of tradition and innovation” – was especially resonant.

“In looking at Palestinian existence – and [impulses like] cooperation, coordination, resistance and making beautiful things under the conditions in which they live – theatre made all

sorts of things available to me,” Hammad continues. “I wanted the putting on of a play to be an opportunity, a cipher for other kinds of organising as well. One of the elements of the architecture of the Israeli regime is to fragment – and to solidify the fragmentation of – the Palestinian body politic.” Through Enter Ghost’s all-Palestinian heritage ensemble, Hammad explains that “you get a look at the social drama of these different people who have these different political and social experiences and legal statuses, and yet are unified by it.”

Squaring protagonist Sonia’s unvarnished recollections of her life back in London (“Everything seemed provisional, everything was a proposition”) with the undulating frisson between the assembled cast in Ramallah (“Get outside the frame. This was just the play, bleeding… Everyone is suspicious of each other”) was another way to unify the central characters’ voices, by turns accentuating and attenuating the legibility of their intentions. And focusing on voice – on the ways it can be transmitted, projected, suppressed – allowed Hammad to eschew the folkloric (another type of foundational image that tends to fracture over time) and instead be more “playful” with symbolic constructs.

“I think if you grew up in just one culture – with one language, one heritage – you don’t necessarily notice the edges of it,” Hammad says, alluding to her mixed background and the understanding it gave her of “the constructiveness of identity and language.” Hammad no longer spends a great deal of time in London – or, even, in the UK. In fact, on the day of our Zoom, she is in Greece following spells in France and Palestine earlier in the year. In April – the same month in which Enter Ghost was published – she was announced as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, a now-storied list compiled every ten years to showcase the next generation of British literary talents. Hammad was “really happy”

to be selected – “I think anything that encourages a writer, especially early in their career, is really valuable” – and, in reference to the commentariat and column inches spawned, acknowledges it is “good for making literature newsworthy.” She does, however, have reservations about “list culture and prizes” more generally and, reflecting on her own positioning within her work as well as within the world, is inclined to believe this particular list “shows the arbitrariness of national identities.”

Even the most arbitrary of ideas and images – especially those that owe their existence to legend – have real staying power. Questions of whether these fractured images could be reframed, whether related injustices could be redressed – whether the world could be remade – are all questions posed, implicitly, by Enter Ghost. They are also questions without definitive answers. Much of Enter Ghost brings to mind Jacques Derrida, who theorised a kind of apparitional despair that, unlodged from the past, unsettles the present and unseats the future. Hauntology, Hammad admits, was not expressly considered when writing Enter Ghost. But there were other texts she revisited after writing the novel, only to realise they had been on her mind all

along. Toni Morrison’s Beloved – a book Hammad claims, having first read it as a teenager, “made her mind, in a way” – was one, and Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters another.

Both works incorporate “the spectre of motherhood”, broken down in Enter Ghost into its constituent parts and corresponding lines of enquiry (“How might mothering be construed differently?” Hammad asks. “What might the role of the woman be in a collective resistance effort? How might it be made anew?”), and both books capture the stru le for power against forces of oppression. “When a stru le exceeds the span of a single generation’s lifespan, there’s a kind of haunting that occurs: we are haunted by the people who fought before us and we will haunt those who come after us,” Hammad says. “There’s a kind of mass haunting that’s going on – it means there’s still work to be done.”

Enter Ghost is out now with Jonathan Cape

Isabella Hammad is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in conversation with Raja Shehadeh on 16 Aug (sponsored by The Skinny) and in conversation with Cecile Pin on 17 Aug

Isabella Hammad

“I think if you grew up in just one culture – with one language, one heritage – you don’t necessarily notice the edges of it”

Isabella Hammad

Workplace Horror

We chat to Camilla Grudova, author of the creepy Children of Paradise and upcoming short story collection The Coiled Serpent, about capitalist horror, British class politics, and why people can’t flush the toilet

Words: Anahit Behrooz

“Ioriginally wanted to be a children’s book writer,” Camilla Grudova says, swirling her straw around her iced coffee, “but I was a bit too dark.” It sounds like the set-up to a joke, the kind that would be told in a grainy 90s sitcom or stand-up set (“I wanted to be a cardiologist, but I didn’t have the heart”), but the Granta Best Young Novelist is, in spite – or perhaps because of – the squeamish body horror that she is known for, deadly serious. Her books may be perverse inquiries into wealth, power, and capitalism, yet the Canadian-born Edinburgh-based Grudova has never quite shaken the blatantness of children’s

literature: the ways it can speak frankly to injustice, the ways it does not shy away from the bawdry nature of the body and its resistance to socialisation. “One of my favourites is The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford,” Grudova continues, beaming. “It was a hit in the Edwardian era and is written by an 11-year-old girl and she’s so perfect at describing like, perverted, pathetic men.”

Grudova and Ashford share a perennial fascination with the perverted, the pathetic, and the childlike; yet the moniker of “too dark” that Grudova now carries around is also very wellearned. Her books – the critically acclaimed short

story collection The Doll’s Alphabet, the Women’s Prize for Fiction-longlisted Children of Paradise, and her upcoming short story collection The Coiled Serpent – are by turns creeping and shocking, revelling in the rot and fluid and collapse of the human body and its surroundings, compromising our imagination of ourselves as clean and contained beings. Children of Paradise, Grudova’s breakout book, follows a group of cinema ushers in a decrepit cinema and was inspired by the treatment of staff by a major cinema chain during the pandemic; in her hands, the bowels of the cinema become a Hadean journey into the horrors of the

Camilla Grudova

Photo: Christina Webber

workplace, and the visceral, undignified imposition of waged labour.

“I truly feel that when you go to like, clean a bathroom, you realise no one is in control of the world,” Grudova says. “Capitalism is out of control. Humans think that they can solve all of these problems we have, like climate change, but they can’t even flush the toilet.” In Children of Paradise, ushers find human fluids pressed into cinema paraphernalia and between seats; they are asked by their bosses to undertake increasingly repulsive tasks, all to maintain the paying customer’s illusion of their transcendence beyond the flesh. Abjection is a theme that runs through Grudova’s writing; capitalism and disgust are entangled bedfellows, as the slow creep of the former opens up space for the latter, the boundaries of her characters constantly imposed upon by the demands of their work.

“I remember at one job I had, we had to do these work videos,” Grudova says, “and in one of them they said: ‘Don’t think bad thoughts about the customers’. And I was like, that’s my intimate space. My notebook and my mind are precious spaces – those need to be private.” There is certainly an intimacy to this kind of abjection, an obligatory porousness of the boundaries between the self and work, that Grudova is fascinated by.

“I guess it’s a forced intimacy, where, especially in lower paid jobs, everyone has to set their dignity aside. But there’s also the unwanted intimacy of customers, where you can become a vessel that they can put their anger or sadness or horniness into.” In her writing, this ontological breach finds expression through the abjection of the body; its proximity to decay and disgust articulating the slow death that capitalism itself engenders. “I’ve been described as scatological, which I find a bit reductive,” Grudova continues, “because I think we ignore the body and what happens to it in capitalism, but it’s very present. And I think we need to acknowledge it.”

Grudova is appearing in the Edinburgh International Book Festival this month alongside author Olga Ravn in a panel aptly titled ‘I Do Not Dream of Labour’; yet strikingly, labour in her books also extends beyond the workplace, taking in the conditions of systemic precarity that enable this abject exploitation. Having moved from Canada to the UK, Grudova is as captivated as she

is repulsed by British class politics, and the stratification of money and labour that is felt in every aspect of society. “I feel there’s something really dark to the system here, something very cannibalistic or vampiric,” she says. She talks about once visiting her agent’s office in Knightsbridge, where men stood smoking cigars in broad daylight, before pulling out her phone to pull up Raya, a dating app for the rich and famous. “It’s really addictive,” she laughs. “There’ll be like celebrities on it as well, it’s so insane. I don’t come from that background, so I think I have this fascination with it all.”

This fascination finds particular expression in her upcoming short story collection The Coiled Serpent, perhaps her most British book to date. Narratives of workplace horror sit alongside tales of rented rooms swallowing up inhabitants, clusters of tenants who are declared dead as the story begins, and boarding school vignettes that mutate the sugar-sweetness of the Enid Blyton tradition. One particular story, titled Ivor after its much admired central character, follows a group of boys at a boarding school who mysteriously never leave – upperclassmen are pushed around in wheelchairs, while the younger boys curry favour for them in the suffocating tradition of the British public school system. The story was inspired, Grudova explains, by the early Alfred Hitchcock film Downhill, which follows a young man who is kicked out of boarding school and lives a tearaway life – moving to Paris, getting married – before being allowed back in.

“I was just like: ‘Wait, how old is he?’” Grudova laughs. “I think there are certain types of men in the UK who just look like they’ve never left boarding school. And so I wanted to write about that in a tangible way.” It is difficult to think of a more apt comment on the British political system than this magical realist fable of its origins, as the boy-men abuse each other, inhabit increasingly disgusting conditions and, in one memorable scene, have their face chewed off by a monstrous bug they raised from a small louse found on someone’s head. Capitalism, The Coiled Serpent understands, is a

system that is found not merely in the workplace but in all of life, intervening on people’s intimacies and bodies and upbringings, degenerating any sense of separation between the public and private.

“I’m always interested in institutions of some sort, whether a school or a workplace or the home and family and housing,” Grudova explains. “It’s probably just because those are things in my own life – I’m constantly anxious about housing, for example, and so it comes up a lot in my work.”

It is strange, perhaps, to think of writing that is so generic – so heavily influenced by the Gothic, horror, and children’s literature – as also deeply personal, but Grudova’s writing is just that. Children of Paradise was inspired by her own time working as a cinema usher, and gained even more significance in the local community following the unceremonious loss of jobs in the wake of the Filmhouse’s closure; The Doll’s Alphabet and The Coiled Serpent are informed by her own ongoing relationship to precarity and work.

“For writers, there is a pressure to not be private and to give parts of yourself away,” Grudova says. “But I definitely feel like there have been times when I’ve overstepped the line of what I can use and what I can’t use, and I think that’s an ongoing stru le for every writer. There’s that Jean Rhys quote about how she would have rather been happy than to have written all these books. But it’s like a compulsion I have to write about everything that happens to me – I can’t help it.”

Yet there is also a sense of community building that such writing can have, that creates an intimacy between author and reader by articulating the conditions that we all labour beneath. “The best thing has been when people come up to me at events and just say: ‘Oh, you know, I had to clean up the worst shit for someone the other day,’” she laughs. “It’s just horrendous.” Art may not be tantamount to activism, but perhaps literature can, in this way, be an act of worker solidarity – of revealing the proximity we all share to capitalism’s gut-churning fallout.

The Coiled Serpent is out with Atlantic Books on 2 Nov Find Camilla Grudova in conversation with Olga Ravn at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 13 Aug, 1.45pm

Love Life

Ahead of their event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, we ask authors Devorah Baum, Alva Gotby and Sophie K Rosa about their most utopian imagination of what love can look like

In three of the most striking non-fiction works of recent times, Devorah Baum (On Marriage), Alva Gotby (They Call It Love) and Sophie K Rosa (Radical Intimacy) explore new ways of being together, thinking beyond traditional structures of relation to consider the radical potential of our most vulnerable desires, and the ways in which love, attachment, and care are profoundly political things. Ahead of their event, Close Encounters, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, we asked each of the writers: What can radical love look like to you?

Perhaps the most radical thing about love is that we fall into it. Marriage can be plotted, but love? An accident. Love is folly, lack of control, vertigo. And also, as fall, sinfulness, criminality, insubordination. We look for love in all the wrong places, says the song, and then fall for someone we may not even like, let alone admire. Or maybe it’s someone we do admire, but (truth be told) that’s not why we love them. Love isn’t creed or politics. Love is impolitic. We aren’t passionate about those we have the measure of. We’re hurtled instead towards those who remain frustratingly, tantalisingly, unknowable – even if we marry them. Might we rethink marriage, then, not as an institution for possessing and mastering, but as the long practice of learning how to love through dispossession and unmastering? And might we rethink love not as a means of overcoming differences – by turning two into one – but as the rupturing force that multiplies our differences, not just with each other but within ourselves? Love as the pleasure to be taken in our differences. Indeed, if the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference, would we even, without love, be capable of perceiving our differences at all?

[Devorah Baum]

I think we need to challenge currently dominant understandings of love, in which romantic love and love within families are seen as the only ‘true’ or meaningful relationships. Many of us are already part of different relationships that don’t fit into narrow understandings of love and romance, but which offer us warmth and joy. Queer people have also experimented a lot with more communal ways of supporting one another, which are oriented towards pleasure as well as care. Building on that, I hope we can work towards more open and expansive forms of being together, in which the differentiation and hierarchy between different

types of relationships are dissolved. I want a world in which we take joint responsibility for caring for children, the sick and disabled, and the elderly – and for able-bodied adults as well – and can share the joys and intimacy of those caring relationships, regardless of ‘blood’ ties. People would still choose who they are close with, and in fact would have more ability to choose the people around them. That way, we could build intimate and loving relationships that are actually able to meet our shifting and multiple needs and desires, rather than just conforming to normative ideas of what love should look like.

[Alva Gotby]

Radical love could be a project of transformation; it could be what takes us from who we are and where we are now, to who and where we might be in ten minutes, or tomorrow, or in ten years, or far beyond. It is a long exhale, it is endurance, it is forgiveness, it is refusal. How about we ask ourselves what we need ‘in love’? That is to say, in our ‘love life’ – whatever kinds of relationship(s) that means for us. Me? I need care, I need enjoyment, I need pleasure, I need commitment, I need patience, I need safety, I need freedom. I need to know we are going to love each other through conflict and fight in ways that make us more alive; I need our being together to bring us hope. All that to say (I’ll just put it plainly): I think that what we need in our relationships can give us a good idea of what we need in the world. We face crisis and precarity on our planet, in our societies; as well as in interpersonal love, we need to build secure attachment with our neighbours, communities, ecologies. Radical love is the promise that, between us, we will find a way.

[Sophie K Rosa]

Devorah Baum, Alva Gotby & Sophie K Rosa: Close Encounters is at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 17 Aug, 12pm

“Radical love could be a project of transformation”

Sophie K Rosa

Lady in

Blue Josie

KO.

Photo: Julie Howden

Platform

Edinburgh Art Festival’s Platform exhibition returns with a fresh cohort of emerging talent. This year, each artist has been paired with a writer from the EAF x The Skinny writer programme to explore their practice

Words: Shalmali Shetty, Rachel Ashenden, Maisie Wills and Laura Baliman

Rudy Kanhye

A word in the title of a previous project by Rudy Kanhye captures my attention. ‘Goni’, meaning gunny, both in Morisien (Mauritian Creole) and in my native language spoken in the south-western coast of India, resonates with a history of transoceanic travel, passage, trade and the intermingling of cultures across the Indian Ocean and beyond. This particular history of indentured labour goes back to between the early 1800s until 1920, when European nations instituted the transportation of people largely from India after the abolition of slavery in 1833. These people worked on the sugarcane plantations of Mauritius and elsewhere as cheap substitutes.

The small island nation of Mauritius is situated to the east of Africa and has undergone a long history of occupation and colonisation by the Arabs, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the British, until gaining independence in 1968. As a result, the society today is a mixed group of people coming from diverse cultures and geographies, practising various food systems and speaking different languages, but identifying as Creole. Rudy supposes that his ancestors came from the northern region of India – traces of this memory are retained not in family records, but in the intangible flavours of a homeland, contributing to the tangible food cultures passed down through generations.

References to Mauritius and what was historically branded as its ‘Coolie’ cultures is central to Rudy’s research and practice. He employs storytelling, engages in archival histories and facilitates conversations around food through community-sharing as approaches to decolonising the art space. As part of Platform, Rudy will be showcasing his project within the premises of a church – a space for quiet contemplation. Titled Don’t be scared of Red, Yellow, Green, Blue (a reference to the colours on the Mauritian flag) the showcase will include a large digitally-printed banner of eyes encompassing the wall outside – indicating a feeling of being watched. Inside the

church, two framed digital prints of historical Mauritian stamps will be displayed, embellished with the portrait of the British queen alongside the image of the dodo – the national bird of Mauritius. The dodo’s extinction in the late 1600s serves as a reminder of the violent consequences of colonialism on native ecologies.

The last day of the festival will witness Rudy’s food participatory performance entitled Composition of Red and Yellow – the red symbolising a past of stru le, and the yellow of the sun a hope for a better future. The artist will be cooking and serving a vegan meal of red and yellow curries to visitors, in memory of the coconut fish curry he relished with his family on the beach at the age of eight – the taste of the sea, the sand, the heat, the smoke, the spices, the community.

[Shalmali Shetty]

Crystal Bennes

In her playful condensing of 17th-century Irish history, artist and researcher Crystal Bennes will foreground colonial histories and gendered labour for Platform this year. Through an array of materials and objects – including linen, a milking stool, and rolls of lawn – the installation combines domesticity with graft, upending the spatial separation of living and working.

On the morning I speak to Bennes, her afternoon plans sound messy and engrossing in equal parts. Weeks before the opening of Platform, Bennes divulges her continued search for a dairy product to sculpt a bust of the English political economist William Petty (1623-1687), the figurehead of her installation. Out of respect to the three other contributing artists, as well as the visitors, she has been on the hunt for an ingredient which won’t degrade into a rancid pool during the threeweek exhibition run. She found that butter was a “pain in the arse” to work with, although it would have been the ideal material to communicate her meticulous research into Petty and his perpetration of English colonialism in Ireland.

Contrastingly, Bennes welcomes degradation to the lawn, as it naturally wilts on display. Inspired by a passage in Lars Iyer’s novel Wittgenstein Jr., the lawn’s deterioration speaks to the satirisation of Englishness as neat, constricted, and controlled. Opting for slow and careful archival research to shape her artistic output, Bennes integrates text into her installation to communicate the complexity of the issues she confronts. In the British Library, she came across a paper disturbingly titled About Exchanging Women. Inside, Petty sets out a proposal to ‘civilise’ Irish Catholic women through ‘transmutation’. Noting that Petty employs alchemical language, Bennes describes how Petty believed that ‘civilization’ could be achieved by shipping poor Protestant English women to Ireland and marrying them off to Catholic men. In this way, Bennes observes that the proposal rendered the women oppressed but also as ‘agents’ of Petty’s colonialism. Contemporarily, 17th-century Ireland saw a rigorous expansion of its butter industry which was not without socio-political tensions. For Bennes, the significance of the butter is a “material connection with women’s domestic labour.” While she has resorted to milk in the end (because of its stable properties), the dairy-based bust will grant 17th-century Irish women a “small revenge against Petty by rendering him in the fruits of their labour.” Bennes’ contribution to Platform has been years in the making, simmering since her PhD on the culture of the sciences, yet continuously sprouting into unconventional and provocative directions. For exhibition purposes, her art-making has sped up. The passage of time, symbolised through disparate, decaying materials like grass and dairy, figures so consciously in her installation. [Rachel

Ashenden]

Aqsa Arif

For Platform, Aqsa Arif will exhibit a film, the screen set within an architectural façade inspired by South Asian folk stories and the pre-colonial architecture of the Heera Mandi. The central film

Richard Maguire, not everything fades away, 2023,

Aqsa Arif, Spicy Pink Tea 2022

Rudy Kanhye, Dodo-Raphus-cucullatus

Image: courtesy of the artist

Image: courtesy of the artist

Image: courtesy of the artist

work captures a traditional Indian dancer as she reinterprets South Asian folk tales. Arif is specifically influenced by The Seven Queens of Sindh, the story of the Suhni Mehar, and the archetype of the moral woman who sacrifices herself in many South Asian folktales. She has also been researching the profession of the Tawaif during the Mughal Empire – once an elite role for women, but one which has since lost much of its value due to the imposition of colonial moralities. She implores viewers to confront difficult questions surrounding culture, identity, race, and colonialism. These complex central themes may make some viewers uncomfortable, while providing a source of empowerment and validation for others. Arif is acutely aware of this powerful dichotomy, and relishes the fact that her work will elicit a divided response.

The work is ambitious and confrontational, requiring that the viewer enter a bounded physical space, unable to escape difficult questions surrounding history, culture, colonialism and identity. Arif’s desire to unravel her own sense of self and relationship to her dual Scottish/ Pakistani heritage manifests itself in her interdisciplinary practice – she encourages us not to think in singularities, but rather to understand that our identities and psyches are composed of various, disparate threads. In particular, Arif is committed to understanding her own identity and embracing its complexities, irregularities and confusions through her interdisciplinary practice.

Arif notes that many of her inspirations are film-based, ranging from exquisitely colourful, often kitsch, Bollywood music videos to the installation films of Pipilotti Rist and the digital art of Ed Atkins. Cinema takes a front seat in Arif’s

artistic approach, however it is always displayed with a variety of other mediums. There is no escape in the cinema. Depending on your inclination, that is both a comforting and unsettling thought. We sit in a darkened room, with nothing to distract us from the moving image. Manipulated by the filmmaker, we are suspended in a dreamlike space. In relation to her installation for Platform, Arif has created an architectural space audiences will enter to view her film. They will be immersed, their normal environment temporarily on hold, existing in a new realm drawn from a pre-colonial past. [Maisie Wills]

Richard Maguire

This summer, Richard Maguire will show a series of drawings and objects as part of Platform: 2023, Edinburgh Art Festival’s Early Career Artist Award. The work builds on research into Pe y Hall, a child sent to Scotland from India alongside an enslaved woman (perhaps her mother), who was then ‘returned’ to India, as she was considered by the British government to be an ‘illegal object’. What is so magnetic about Maguire’s practice is his interest in materiality – particularly in his drawings depicting photographs from various archives. Each of the drawings layer two photographs together with the effect of double exposure, creating more detail and more content, and simultaneously less clarity. Where the edges of the neat frame and mount are sharp and clean, the line work and material effect of the graphite is fluid and undefined. These aspects of Maguire’s works speak to the obscurity faced when engaging with misunderstood histories: indeed, he found it very difficult to find concrete information on the

life of Pe y Hall, whose records were destroyed in a fire.

Pe y’s story will also be present in the objects on display at Platform: imagined recreations of her jewellery that were recorded in a shipping log. Through these objects, Maguire thinks about people’s status as objects, but also what objects Pe y herself may have owned. Jewellery plays a huge part in South Asian matrilineal heritage, and it is where a woman might find autonomy through those objects passed down from her mother. Placed next to the drawings and their commentary on hidden histories, the shining physical presence of the jewellery will add a visible and tangible weight to Pe y and her story: seen and felt and found in the room.

Maguire cannot (and does not try to) totally resolve Pe y’s pain or repair a heavy history of colonialism, but he does offer a gesture of repair and healing: an effort to see Pe y and her intimate reality. Archives can easily be active acts of colonial othering: information is hard to find, and people are spoken about in callous numerical terms of their inventory or monetary worth. But Maguire’s intervention of the archive brings emotion, intimacy and warmth to how we engage with history and its people. Time and colonial erasure might stand in the way of us knowing each other fully, but Maguire’s work brings us a little bit closer. [Laura Baliman]

Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023, Trinity Apse, 11-27 Aug, 10am-5pm

Crystal Bennes, When Computers Were Women, 2021

Image: courtesy of the artist

Queering the City

As Edinburgh Art Festival returns this month, The Skinny meet Sean Burns and Tarek Lakhrissi to discuss their artistic contributions to the festival

Words: Harvey Dimond

With a new chair, Gemma Cairney, and new director, Kim McAleese, 2023’s rendition of EAF sees a change in pace, with the festival condensed down into just over two weeks, from 11-27 August. Maria Fusco’s and Margaret Salmon’s History of the Present will open the festival on 11 August at 8pm at The Queen’s Hall. The film, which was also shown at Art Night in Dundee in June, reflects on Fusco’s experience of life in Belfast during the Troubles –but moves away from the familiar visual and aural tropes most people are accustomed to from the news coverage that screened in the 1990s. The festival’s keynote speech takes place the following day on 12 August (2-2.30pm) at the National Gallery of Scotland. The lecture will feature provocations from Belfast-based Array Collective and Beirut-based feminist organisation Haven for Artists (who will also be in-residence in Edinburgh throughout the festival). The lecture will reflect on one of the key aspects of the programme – how international exchange and collaboration can operate in contexts of crisis.

The following night, on 13 August (from 7pm), Alberta Whittle’s performance The Last Born –making room for ancestral transmissions will take place at Parliament Hall. The performance will explore themes of abolition, rebellion and ancestral knowledge, building upon her current exhibition create dangerously at National Galleries of Scotland’s Modern One. At Edinburgh

Printmakers’, Glasgow-based artist Christian Noelle Charles’s exhibition WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I will discuss racial identity, love and community care through the lens of a Black woman. Moving through printmaking, video and performance, Charles will explore the movements, rhythms and body language of women of colour. Her screenprints – intricate, richly textured portraits of friends and collaborators – are a highlight. Meanwhile, Australia-based artist Keg de Souza has filled Inverleith House with branches of eucalyptus, alongside batik prints and an audio work developed while in residence at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens. Shipping Roots continues until the end of the festival. At Collective, DANCE IN THE SACRED DOMAIN is a new commission by Glasgow-based artist Rabindranath X Bhose, part of the Satellites programme for emerging

Image: courtesy of the artist

Christian Noelle Charles, GESTURE I, 2023

practitioners working in Scotland. Bhose, working with the full height of the exhibition space, meditates on Scotland’s bogs (historically used as burial sites) as metaphors for ‘passing on’, both in terms of queer identity and death.

Bhose’s exhibition is one of many queer practitioners featuring in the festival: one of the key strands of the festival this year examines how queer communities and creatives resist amidst a climate of government and media attacks on trans rights. Earlier this year, the UK Government blocked Scotland’s Gender Recognition Bill from being legislated – the first time this has happened in regards to equality laws. Although the bill has its own limitations, it would have made a significant difference in improving the health and wellbeing of many trans people in Scotland, by removing the requirement for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria as well as lowering the age to apply for a gender recognition certificate from 18 to 16. This intervention signals both the Conservative government’s contempt for trans people and for Scotland’s devolved parliament. The government in London is currently also stalling a bill which would ban harmful conversion therapy – with some 400,000 people in the UK alone having experienced some sort of attempt to ‘change’ their sexuality or gender identity. This is just one instance of the Conservative government using queer and trans people as political pawns. More widely across Europe, right wing governments are unleashing a wave of anti-LGBT+ sentiment, with Italy voting in a right wing party into power last year. Finland currently has a far-right party in its coalition government, and the far right are making gains in Spain, Sweden and Austria.

So, against this backdrop of growing institutional and everyday transphobia and homophobia, how do creatives respond? Many artists and collectives in this year’s festival make timely interventions into this particular contemporary cultural and political landscape – looking both at historical methods of resistance, but also dreaming of divergent futures.

Sean Burns’ film Dorothy Towers, which is being screened throughout the festival at The

French Institute, lovingly and nostalgically looks at the Clydesdale and Cleveland tower blocks in Birmingham’s city centre. The two residential towers were a crucial queer social space during the 1980s and 90s (partially due to their proximity to the city’s gay village) against the backdrop of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Burns’ film recalls the experiences of some of their residents, which move between elation, joy, love, trauma, loss and heartbreak. The microcosm of the tower blocks speaks to analagous queer, largely working-class experiences in the UK during this period – although it is deeply indebted to the city of Birmingham and its unique characteristics. For the artist, this history is very much part of our present – and our future. Burns says he is interested in “how the lives of past queer people influence the worlds we inhabit and the behaviours that we enact today – the film grows out of and is a form of archiving, inherently containing a legacy dimension.”

Burns decided to shoot the film with 16mm –an intentional move he says, to ingrain a physicality into the work: but one with higher stakes. “With 16mm, you have one opportunity to catch the shot, which inherently creates tension – I want tension and vulnerability, blur and mistakes. Similarly with people: how something/one deviates from convention is where the character resides. You enter a dialogue with the technology, in which its erratic will co-authors the outcome. I like it when certain decisions are determined by limitation.” On a physical level too, analogue film also operates as “an imprint of experience in physical form – it introduces a tactile element accordant with the work’s surfaces: concrete, bodies, flesh, tires, tarmac and tiles.”

I ask Burns about the translation of this specific, microcosmic history into that of Edinburgh – a city whose history and demography is vastly different to that of Birmingham’s. He hopes, for one, that the screening of the film will draw attention to queer-led and focused collectives and resources currently operating in Scotland’s capital. A public programme will accompany the screening, and will include collaborations with Lavender Menace Queer Book Archive, Lothian Health Services Archive and

Image: courtesy of the artist

Sean Burns, Dorothy Towers

Image: courtesy of the artist

Sean Burns, Dorothy Towers

Cole Collins, an academic at Edinburgh College of Art. Burns hopes that the film“will catalyse deeper conversation for connections and disparities to emerge. I also want these events to function as something of an alibi for people to meet one another and learn about the incredible resources, for example, Lavender Menace has to offer.”

Burns acknowledges the complexity of displaying this microcosmic narrative on a national scale and he purposefully leaves space for further narratives and conversations to grow and flourish: “Making legible a local history raises interesting political questions: what happens when the experiences of individuals becomes material for an artwork viewed on a national scale? Although the film somewhat packages the narrative – albeit directly told in the residents’ words – it felt important to retain an obfuscated atmospheric element, a feeling that there’s infinitely more to tell.”

Meanwhile, Tarek Lakhrissi, who is presenting an exhibition and accompanying performance for the festival, works with sculpture, performance and filmmaking – all bound up in his love of poetry and prose. I wear my wounds on my tongue (II), currently on display at Collective, is as curious as it is enchanting. Three fleshy, luminous pink and orange sculptures lie on squat, black metal plinths in the centre of the City Dome space. They are at once appealling – almost irresistible to touch – but also threatening, with their sharp ends casting the tongues almost as da ers (a recurring symbol in the artist’s practice as of late). The ambient, richly textured sound work which accompanies the sculptural works was made in collaboration with composer Victor da Silva and references, at once,

French cloud rap, the FKA Twigs song Meta Angel and an excerpt of the soundtrack from the early2000s TV show Dark Angel. The artist’s voice, rendered deep and distorted, gives way to pulsing, heartbeat-esque thuds that rumble the City Dome. An ambient hum then mutates into something more melodic, short flourishes of a melody appearing then seemingly fizzing off into the ether. The fleshy sculptures and heartbeat-like rhythms of the sound create a particularly internal, bodily experience.

The exhibition is inspired by, and dedicated to, the late Malaysian-American poet and activist Justin Chin, who passed away in 2015. Lakhrissi was first introduced to Chin’s poetry two years ago while in Brussels, and his exhibition at Collective is named after one of Chin’s poems. The artist describes Chin’s poetry as a combination of “political statements against racism and heteronormativity, despair and hope, philosophical reflections, raw emotions and gay sexual encounters.” The current political rhetoric and language used to talk about queer and trans people is deeply concerning, and I ask Lakhrissi about how language can be used to resist. He reflects, “I think for many centuries queer, but not only, people of colour, women and/or trans people have been using different ways to resist norms and violences that are based on gender, sexuality and race. Language is one form of resistance, but the idea is to not become a symbol, or to simplify things that are too complex to resolve or to answer. I just want to argue that language is, personally, a fluid space where I can play, question and confront myself.”

On 26 August, Lakhrissi will perform BEAST!, which has previously been shown in Berlin, Zurich,

Basel and Paris. A collaboration with singer and friend Makeda Monnet, he describes the performance as a “ritual to call a ghost.” The work is inspired by French-Arab thinker Louisa Yousfi’s text Rester Barbare. The artist says the text works to recentre discourse around “the question around threat and empathy towards Black and Brown ‘masculine bodies.’” Victor Da Silva, joining Lakhrissi on the night, will create a soundtrack to accompany the performance, which will make calls to the ancestors as part of a ‘cleansing ritual’. BEAST!, along with the many other facets of the artist’s practice, is a ‘celebration’ of how queer, trans and people of colour can not only adapt, but flourish in situations of danger.

I ask Lakhrissi about the relationship between the exhibition at Collective and the performance later in August: “I would argue that BEAST! is where I am more directly connected to the magic of spoken word, music, and singing. It’s two different facets from my own practice. Performing is definitely where I feel much more connected to the audience because I am present, because we are sharing the same space and time. The universe we can create can be so cathartic.”

Edinburgh Art Festival, various venues across Edinburgh, 11-27 Aug

Sean Burns, Dorothy Towers, The French Institute, daily 10am-5pm, 11-27 Aug

I wear my wounds on my tongue (II), Collective, until 1 Oct, daily 10am-5pm. Tarek Lakhrissi will perform BEAST! at The French Institute, Sat 26 Aug, 6pm

Tarek Lakhrissi, BEAST!

Tuning In

Ahead of her run as part of this year’s Made In Scotland showcase, we catch up with Aurora Engine to find out how she incorporates Scotland’s landscape and wildlife into her music

Words: Tony Inglis

Deborah Shaw has been preoccupied with the climate crisis. It has informed her artistic practice, the way she engages with the environment, the way she works, and the way she acts as a mother. As part of Made in Scotland’s familiarly socially-conscious Fringe programme, this will manifest onstage as TERRE, a series of audiovisual shows where Shaw, as Aurora Engine, attempts to electroacoustically transpose the Scottish landscape into music and sound.

“I’m all about how we can address climate anxiety as artists that works with our practice. It’s got to be a natural process,” says Shaw over a video call, surrounded by a harp, piano, and other instruments that she’ll appear with during TERRE “I wanted to explore it through my work in a way that would bring me closer to nature because that inspires you to want to make small changes. In my activism, and my call to action, it’s more about making those small changes that we can do every day.”

Shaw, who is originally from County Durham but has worked as a musician and an educator in Edinburgh for well over a decade, has landed on particularly novel methods to make a tangible connection between humanity and nature which addresses climate unease in a more physical way than other music focusing on the subject – The Weather Station’s emotional Springsteenian calls for hope; ANOHNI’s pained missives of regret and anger. Instead, she sought to translate and interpret wildlife and landscape into a sonic map initially based off field recordings gathered from around the Water of Leith where she lives.

“I have this immersive world right here in the city and the work is a product of me being here,” she explains. “The accessibility of nature in Edinburgh and the rest of the country is very special. And I really wanted to listen to what animals were doing, how they were making sounds, and how that made me feel and connect with the animal.”

While some of these were worked up into more traditional songs, others take a textural,

experimental tact, looking to bring the sounds of animals and the elements to the listener. On one piece, SYRINX, Shaw took birdsong, pitch-shifted it down to her vocal range, studied the intervals and tones and different patterns, and mimics it using her own voice live. On another, D R O N E, recordings of bees in various moods and habitats are layered until their buzz becomes an ambient soundscape.

Shaw has had to overcome a number of barriers to pursue her art – as a woman, from a working class background, who wanted to learn classical instruments. Another was becoming a new mother. “I was a single parent to a very tiny baby. I found this entry into motherhood was quite sudden for me,” she says. “I was on my own, which meant that I couldn’t do that anymore, I couldn’t access music making in the way that I was used to, I couldn’t attend rehearsals or be part of an ensemble. I found this to be quite a loss. What I did do was take a lot of walks, as you do when you have a small child, and I just started tuning in to what was around me: the sounds of insects, birds, water.”

While the ongoing climate disaster can create a great deal of anxiety when future generations connect it to the prospect of parenthood, becoming a mother gave Shaw an insight. “I’m conscious of strengthening children’s relationship with the world and nature as opposed to putting a lot of catastrophe, guilt and dread on their shoulders. There’s a fine line between caring and anxiety overtaking. Engaging healthily with nature deepens your connection and makes you care and want to act.”

A number of creative projects are coming to fruition for Shaw. Later in the year she’ll release a new album, Secret Knock, which mixes pop songwriting with the environmentalist sound art that populates TERRE. On one track, Horde, Shaw

used the sounds of an Aeolian harp – an instrument that is played as the wind catches it – on a beach paired with whispered voices from over 100 contributors expressing themselves about their desires and life, which she collaborated with sound recordist Chris Watson to turn into a collage-like composition. The two projects, says Shaw, speak to a meditative realisation of terrains both external and internal.

“I felt quite boxed in for many years as an artist, unable to actually perform and unable to get things out for various reasons,” she says. “If TERRE is about the physical landscape, the album is about how my landscape evolved as a musician during that time of incubation, about the loss, and eventual recovery, of creative voice, this growth and how I had to change the trajectory I was on.”

Aurora Engine plays The Glad Cafe, Glasgow, 4 Aug and brings TERRE to Summerhall,

Edinburgh, 16-19 Aug as part of this year’s Made In Scotland showcase auroraengine.com

“Engaging healthily with nature deepens your connection and makes you care and want to act”

Deborah Shaw, Aurora Engine

Photo: Lawrence Winram

Sounds of the Fringe

From immersive audiovisual feasts and K-pop to comedian DJ battles and DJ Yoda’s love of Tarantino, we pick out some music highlights from the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe

Words: Tallah Brash

August in Edinburgh is always overwhelming, with music often taking a backseat to comedy and theatre. While the Edinburgh International Festival has a few big names worth your time (Alison Goldfrapp, Lankum etc), elsewhere in the city it’s all kind of ‘business as usual’. There’s a handful of big shows from the likes of Devo and Amyl & The Sniffers happening at the O2 Academy, a huge array of international and local talent playing Summerhall’s Nothing Ever Happens Here programme, and Sneaky Pete’s Central Belters run has a firm focus on Scottish up-and-comers.

But what about the less obvious music choices? We’ve dug deep into the 2023 Fringe programme to pull out some interesting-sounding options, especially of interest if you’re a music fan looking to try something different this August. First up, there are extensive local offerings to be found across this year’s Made In Scotland showcase. At St Vincent’s Chapel in Stockbridge, accompanied by some exceptional talents, Modern Studies frontwoman Emily Scott presents CHRYSANTHS (14 & 15 Aug). Across its three shows, you’ll also find support slots from more of Scotland’s cherished talents: L.T. Leif, Faith Eliott, and C Duncan.

From 15 to 20 August, Katie Armstrong presents SKETCHES/GLISK at Dance Base. This hour-long double bill features experimental turntablism, acoustic piano, dance and visual art,

inspired by the dramatic landscapes around Aberdeen and the North East. Also drawing inspiration from her surrounding landscape, as Aurora Engine, Deborah Shaw brings TERRE to Summerhall (16-19 Aug). A sonic exploration of nature found nearby her home on the Water of Leith, you can read more about her practice on page 71.

Outwith the Made In Scotland programme, Edinburgh musician and producer Fraser Lawson, who performs and makes music as Pharos, is bringing late-night immersive experience Rave to Just the Tonic at The Caves. Running every Thursday, Friday and Saturday through the Fringe, by use of pulsating rhythms and mind-bending visuals, Rave promises to offer “a multi-sensory experience that engages the body, mind and spirit.” Meanwhile, Glasgow-based Sonia Killmann brings Là-haut (Up There) to The French Institute (25-28 Aug). Much like Pharos, this saxophonist and multimedia artist promises to delight with an audiovisual show that will immerse audiences in a “one-of-a-kind-world.”

Still with an audiovisual bent, we were surprised to find renowned turntablist DJ Yoda hidden deep in this year’s Fringe programme. Performing for five nights in The Voodoo Rooms’ Ballroom, this show is sure to sound as good as it looks as Yoda mixes soundtracks and audio clips, sound effects and video from his favourite Quentin Tarantino flicks in DJ Yoda’s Tarantino AV Show (9-13 Aug). And for more big audiovisual energy, head along to Dynamic Earth for Planetarium Lates: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (Tue-Sat, 1-26 Aug (not 22)). Celebrating its 50th anniversary, experience this iconic album like never before, in surround sound and set to a cosmic interplanetary backdrop in the venue’s 360°, 6K planetarium.

More immersive music experiences can be found in Summerhall’s Lower Church Basement this month with KlangHaus: InHaus (3-27 Aug (not Mondays)). With three performances each day, the collective continue their mission of turning the gig-going experience on its head. With this show performed in a dramatic domestic setting, the audience are integral to the show as they’re invited into the band’s own personal space, getting up-close-and-personal with them as well as the lights and sounds of a gig.

For a dose of comedy with your music, we have it on good authority that Vroni Holzmann is not to be missed. Accompanied by Joey Sanderson, you’ll find Vroni & the Seppls:

Bavarian Traditions at Bob’s BlundaBus (23-27 Aug) as they explore Bavarian traditions and Oktoberfest through song, maybe even with some yodelling. For another international taste, as part of Assembly’s seventh Korean Season at the Edinburgh Fringe, seek out Kokoon (Assembly Checkpoint, 2-13 Aug (not 9)). This five-piece boy band effortlessly combine K-pop with K-comedy for a show that we’re sure will be scores of fun.

Comedy and music continue to come together at a handful of other Assembly shows too, with a few, perhaps, well-known names. First up, be sure to check out Jazz Emu’s Pleasure Garden at Assembly George Square Studios (17-19 & 24-26 Aug), where backed by The Cosmique Perfectión, Emu will perform his own songs alongside sets from some special guest comedians. In the same venue, for four nights of the Fringe, Ivo Graham will pit comedians against each other in Comedians’ DJ Battles, a competitive club night where the winner stays on (4, 11, 20 & 27 Aug). And how could we talk about comedy and music without mentioning the D.O.D., aka David O’Doherty. Find this loveable Irish comedian and musician armed with a small keyboard and a whole sackful of jokes and funny songs in David O’Doherty: Tiny Piano Man (Assembly George Square, 2 to 28 Aug (not 15)).

Photo: Andi Sapey

DJ Yoda

KlangHaus

Photo: Flore Diamant

THE CINESKINNY

Looking for a Home

This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival closes with Babak Jalali’s poignant imagination drama Fremont. Jalali tells about his desire to make a film with empathy and compassion, but without the schmaltz

Words: Anahit Behrooz

The city of Fremont in northern California is an innocuous place – quiet, everyday, nondescript. It is not, perhaps, a particularly cinematic place; or if it is, it is the cinema of Lady Bird and The Virgin Suicides, where the uniformity of American suburbia seeps into every frame. Yet Fremont has, in one way, made its mark in the sweeping expanse of the United States: its metropolitan area is home to the largest AfghanAmerican population in the country, waves of immigrants having arrived since the 1979 Soviet invasion. It is in this city, in the monochromatic world of Babak Jalali’s quirky, deadpan comedy Fremont, that Afghan translator Donya (played by newcomer Anaita Wali Zada) lives and works and doesn’t sleep, plagued by insomnia that punctu-

ates her nights and bleeds into her days. Stories of refuge and displacement have increasingly taken centre stage in recent years; from Ben Sharrock’s Limbo to Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee and Frank Berry’s Aisha, this new wave of cinema pushes back against endless news cycles, recovering the complex subjectivities of those caught – perhaps forever – between two impossible places. “I for sure didn’t want this to be an American Dream film, because I don’t believe in that,” says Jalali – the British-Iranian director is calling from LA, where he is staying briefly before returning to his home in London. “[But] there is a sense that: ‘OK, now I’m here. Or rather, I’m not there. How am I going to move forward with my life?’” Fremont’s Donya inhabits this exact

liminality: her new home of Fremont is almost uncanny in its mundanity, the familiarity of the American suburbs made suddenly strange, while her old home of Kabul exists only as memory.

More than displaced in space, Donya is displaced in time, caught between past and future as her present – working in a fortune cookie factory, visiting her impassive psychiatrist (played by On Cinema’s Gre Turkington) – takes on increasingly improbable proportions. Time in Fremont operates in a quietly paradoxical way: it creeps by with the eccentric monotony of a Jim Jarmusch film, even as the past suddenly drops back and the future hurtles forward. “I feel like I’m losing time,” a gentle Afghan café owner tells Donya on one of her visits there. All the characters

THESKINNY.CO.UK / CINESKINNY

in Fremont, from Donya’s displaced Afghan community to the quietly hunky mechanic she meets (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White), are attempting to negotiate the slow ache of life passing them by, possibly forever.

Yet Fremont, Jalali stresses, is a film as much about hope as it is about loss. Even Donya’s job working in the tedium of a fortune cookie factory speaks to a world that exists beyond hers, one that maybe hasn’t even happened yet, but that is within her grasp. “The idea for the fortune cookies came from my co-writer Carolina Cavalli,” Jalali says. “As a director, I was struck by the visuals, but for Carolina... what’s written inside most fortune cookies is complete nonsense. But sometimes there are these things that linger. Most of all, what’s written inside is about possibilities.”

The wide-open possibility of the future can be terrifying for anyone: it can be especially overwhelming when the past, and everything and everyone that have been left behind, still loom large. While Fremont was originally ready to film before the pandemic, its eventual shoot took place in 2022 after the reinstatement of the Taliban the previous summer; a weight that is rarely explicated but is writ large in Donya’s present. Throughout Fremont, Donya grapples constantly with her guilt – guilt at having left, guilt at having worked as a translator for the US army while in Kabul, despite there being no other work available to her – a heaviness that Jalali well understands.

“I was eight when I moved to London, and of course at eight, it’s not a choice. No one said: ‘Hey, would you like to move to London?’” Jalali says.

EIFF 2023 picks

“And when I went back at the age of 22, my memories from when I was seven were far stronger than my memories of when I was 16. Because when I was in London, I wasn’t clinging onto memories. But from the age of eight to 22, I thought about Iran constantly.”

The persistence of memory can be a doubleedged sword – our only defence, perhaps, is the gentleness of those around us. Fremont was written, Jalali explains, during a time of particular political cruelty in the wake of Brexit, the 2016 American election, and the demonisation of refugees and vulnerable groups across the globe. Yet in Jalali’s film, characters treat each other with an understated, offbeat, yet strikingly deliberate kindness which works to undo, ever so slightly, the hostility emanating from their contexts and from themselves. “I didn’t want it to be saccharine or cheesy,” Jalali says, “but I do think there is room for empathy and compassion without being sentimental.” It is, he explains, sometimes the only thing we have left in our arsenal. “I don’t think this film is going to change the world,” he laughs. “But I think it is the only way I have to say something.”

It goes without saying that you should seek out the EIFF films previewed in this supplement and featured elsewhere in this magazine, but here are five additional titles we’d urge you to see

Passages

19 & 20 Aug

A narcissistic filmmaker (Franz Rogowski) flits between his husband (Ben Wishaw) and new lover (Adèle Exarchopoulos) in this smart and extremely sexy ménage à trois drama from Ira Sachs.

Orlando, My Political Biography

21 & 22 Aug

Philosopher Paul B. Preciado tells Virginia Woolf how important her book Orlando has been to generations of transgender and gender non-conforming people in this irreverent and politically charged documentary.

Words: Jamie Dunn

Showing

Up 22 & 23 Aug

Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams only make great films together (see Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and Certain Women). Word is this study of an artist dealing with the messiness of life ahead of a major survey of her work is another banger.

Trenque Lauquen 1 &2 21 & 23 Aug

What is it with missing Lauras? There’s Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, Laura Hunt from Otto Preminger’s Laura, and now the Laura in this beguiling mystery from Argentina. At

four-and-a-half hours, you won’t get more bang for your buck at EIFF than this two-parter.

Is There Anybody Out There?

19 & 20 Aug

Ella Glendining was born with short thigh bones and no hip joints. In this intimate and inspiring doc she goes in search of someone with the same rare condition, and along the way challenges the pervasiveness of ableism that’s all around her.

Fremont closes the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 23 Jul and is released 15 Sep by Modern Films

“I for sure didn’t want this to be an American Dream film”

Babak Jalali

Burning Creativity

Thomas Schubert is fantastic as Leon, the self-obsessed writer at the heart of Christian Petzold’s Afire. We speak to Schubert about his affinity with his character and the experience of working with Petzold

Words: Carmen Paddock

Since his debut in Karl Markovics’ Breathing, Thomas Schubert has been attracted to difficult characters who may not fully understand their own motivations. In Christian Petzold’s Afire he plays Leon, a writer who goes with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) to Felix’s family home in the woods to work on his manuscript. When they arrive, however, Felix’s mother has double-booked the place, offering it to her friend’s niece Nadja (Paula Beer). This irritates Leon, who is determined to put himself through the solitary stru le he believes will create a great novel. Meanwhile, news of nearby forest fires drips through the summer idyll.

To Schubert, the script’s tonal lightness was initially a surprise in comparison to Petzold’s earlier films, but that does not replace narrative and thematic depth. Its layers drew him to this portrait of the artist as a prickly young man. “I like it when I can’t figure out a script right away,” Schubert says. “I really enjoyed reading Afire for the first time and not knowing what direction it was going.”

Before shooting, Petzold gave each actor literature, music, and films relating to their individual character before sitting back and letting his actors work. Schubert describes Petzold’s technique as being “like a scientist who puts chemicals in a tube and creates life. He is really interested in what we have to offer and creates an environment where your imagination can thrive.”

Petzold also took his actors on a tour of shooting locations after the table read. “We all clicked immediately,” Schubert says. “The chemistry really speaks to the casting and the choices Christian made. But it’s interesting how the dynamic changed throughout shooting because the camera was always next to [my character] Leon. The friends were always further away, where they would have some sort of action and Leon would be on the other side with the camera. That longing naturally occurred.”

Despite Leon’s standoffishness, his determination to make something of himself is familiar, even sympathetic. “I knew Leon right away,” Schubert says. “I was 17 when I started acting, and my first movie was a success. After that, you ask yourself, can I follow that success? You have this idea of who you have to be to thrive, and huge imposter syndrome. Leon reminded me of that phase in my career.” Schubert sees Leon drawn to the “idea of perfection” and the “idea of the wounded artist”, which he defines from Leon’s perspective: “I have to draw my artistic energy from some pain I hold in myself and I cannot enjoy things around me.” It is a seductive, but unhealthy, concept.

Schubert is not worried about losing viewers. “Since everything is told from Leon’s perspective, you don’t have to worry about being nice for the

audience – they see everything through your eyes,” he says. Indeed, Leon is a sort of self-awareness test. “What I’ve found is that whether you like Leon tells more about yourself than it does the character,” Schubert says. Films allow a level of voyeurism and vulnerability into strangers’ lives. “In real life, you rarely watch somebody be so openly and honestly disgusting; how you react when somebody is so vulnerable says something about yourself,” he notes. “Many people hated it – they said, ‘I hated it so much because it was so close to me.’”

Afire was conceived during the pandemic, and physical and emotional isolation impacts Leon’s mind. “Observing and not interacting with people makes Leon’s fantasy go AWOL,” Schubert says. “He comes to all these false conclusions about people.” The actor sees further significance in this: “We all have the feeling that Leon’s manuscript is very bad,” he says, “because we watch him make up stories and bad opinions.” But Schubert su ests this isn’t necessarily a nasty streak in Leon. Rather, it’s a longing, or as Schubert puts it, “a jealousy of people being able to enjoy themselves”.

In Afire’s striking late scene, which Schubert remembers as one of the longest to shoot with its

many simultaneous actions, Leon’s priorities are all-consuming but startlingly myopic, which fits Schubert’s acting ethos. “I don’t believe there are many rules in acting, but you can’t act multiple things at once,” Schubert says. “That doesn’t translate. Leon’s priority was his book. The choice to make him not see the ashes [from the fires] felt best, and the way it was edited amplified his blindness.”

Leon’s journey centres on the idea of suffering and sacrificing for art that he fetishised, as well as the openhearted life he shunned. “Leon wrote his manuscript for his ego and career,” Schubert says. “In the excerpt you hear, you can feel this cynicism and disrespect for people. After that,” he says, alluding to a conclusion he cannot spoil, “Leon writes for other people. His art gets better because you write for somebody out of love, not spite. I think that’s the source of artistry and creativity – not pain, because you only have the pain. It’s rather love for somebody else.”

Afire makes its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 22 Aug and is released in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema on 25 Aug

Photo: Christian Schulz, Schramm Film

Femme Fatale

Directors Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping explore myriad modes of masculinity in their bristling queer thriller Femme, which sees a drag artist out to exact revenge on a homophobic thug

Words: Jamie Dunn

In Femme, the electrifying London-set debut feature from Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, every character is playing a role. When we first meet Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), he’s onstage at a gay nightclub as his alter-ego, Aphrodite, a fierce drag queen who doesn’t take shit from anyone. Jules’ demeanour notably shifts when he ventures outside the confines of the club in his Aphrodite getup to buy some cigarettes, his glamour and confidence evaporating when he encounters a group of thu ish young men. After a tense exchange of words, the gang’s ringleader, Preston (George MacKay), proceeds to beat up Jules in a shocking homophobic attack.

What initially seems like a familiar queer drama dealing with LGBTQ+ trauma soon takes on Hitchcockian dimensions. It turns out Preston’s display of hyper-masculinity isn’t all that it seems. Jules spotted Preston eyeing him up outside the club earlier in the night, and suspects his macho demeanour is a disguise to conceal his closeted homosexuality, a theory that’s confirmed a few months later when Jules encounters Preston, by chance, in a gay sauna. As he eyes his glistening body, Jules sets a plan in motion to exact his revenge by allowing himself to be picked up by his attacker. As the men continue to meet for sex, different modes of masculinity are worn and discarded like changes of outfits.

“That’s why drag was so important to us,” says Freeman when I chat with him and Ping over Zoom, “because we wanted to explore the performance of gender. In the beginning, Jules’ drag was simply a plot device. We were like, ‘Oh, Preston won’t be able to recognise him; that makes sense.’ But then we came to realise that drag is the key word of the whole film. Whenever we were writing the characters, or even discussing the characters with the actors on set, we would always talk about ‘What is this character’s drag?’”

This concept of gender transformation will

feel familiar to many gay people. At some time in their life, they’ll likely have had to shift their identity in some way, whether consciously or unconsciously, as a form of defence. “Definitely,” agrees Freeman. “I’ve walked down streets and had to think about holding my boyfriend’s hand, thinking, ‘What area are we in? Does it feel safe here?’ You often create stories based on the things that frighten you or things that preoccupy you, and I think that’s definitely a big part of where this story comes from.”

For Ping, it was crucial that Jules’ performances of masculinity weren’t solely based on hiding. “What was important to us is that it’s an active thing,” he says. “That’s what we hope is the unique offering of this film. It is not just about trauma, it is not just about hiding your true self to be saved from something, but it’s about putting on a façade, or a drag, to infiltrate a different world – it’s almost like Jules is going undercover.”

Freeman and Ping have been friends since 2015, and were flatmates for three of those years. It was during this flatshare that the idea of collaborating on a film first came up. “I was working as a screenwriter,” explains Freeman, “and Ping was working as a theatre director, so it felt like a film project would be the middle point for the two of us.”

The right idea wasn’t forthcoming initially, but while watching the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time one night, inspiration struck. “The neo-noir genre is something that we really enjoy,” says Ping “but we felt like, as queer people, we never saw ourselves represented in it. So the original aim was just to do a sort of queer inversion on the crime thriller.”

There is no shortage of directing duos, although they tend to fall into two camps. There are the siblings (the Dardennes, the Wachowskis, the Coens or the aforementioned Safdies) and there are the couples (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Straub-Huillet, Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy). This makes sense. The level of trust and

honesty required to collaborate on a project as gruelling as a feature film is enormous; it helps if you share blood or a bed. Freeman and Ping are the rare case of co-directors who are neither related nor romantically entangled, but their collaboration seems to have run smoothly.

“I think what really worked for us was that, because there were two of us, it meant that before anything could happen, we had to talk to each other extensively and rigorously and question every single thing, to the point that by the time we got to execute the vision, the vision was pretty much shared between us,” explains Ping. “It was interesting hearing other people on set speak about how we worked together. They said that it was kind of like there was just one person doing directing, because there was no friction or obstacles. You hear about people fighting on set, but that totally didn’t happen.” He pauses before laughing. “We did all our fights off set.”

Femme has its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival on 20 & 21 Aug, presented in partnership with The Skinny

“The neo-noir genre is something that we really enjoy, but we felt like, as queer people, we never saw ourselves represented in it”

Ng Choon Ping

Femme

Partner Up

With tango, it’s all about trust. It takes a lot to take another’s body into yours, to let your arms unfold in theirs. Trust, afterall, opens us up to a lot – a person, a promise, a politics. But how do we offer trust and how do we receive trust? One step at a time.

Over the summer months, Rebel Tango has begun to make its home in the CCA. Led by Carolyn Wilson and Rastko Novaković, the drop-in sessions and short courses preach a plainly brilliant ethos: anti-capitalist, feminist, queer tango for all. The duo met in London, about 10 years ago. On moving to Glasgow, they both felt the absence of a queer tango scene; until, that is, they started to form one themselves. The hope is to build the foundations of a queer, Scottish partner dance community – for tango and beyond.

Their sessions begin with light stretching, grounding participants and allowing their bodies to relax into the space. And then there’s the walking: around the room, in circles, forwards and backwards. It’s a welcoming start, signalling that, actually, tango begins with simple movements and builds from there.

“It’s very improvised. It’s very intimate,” says Wilson, who came to queer tango some 15 years ago. “And unlike some of the ballroom dances, it’s not about learning sequences of steps. It’s more about learning how to dance with somebody, how to be connected to another person.” Tango is rooted in the moment – and celebrates sharing that moment with someone else.

But queer tango also calls back to a certain history. “It wasn’t always this heteronormative gendered thing,” says Wilson. The duo explain that, in the early days of tango, it was often danced by men from Spain, Italy, and other countries who had migrated to Argentina for work. Quite simply, there weren’t always a lot of women around. And so, men would often dance with men. “It was probably the only kind of physical intimacy and contact they have with other human beings on the dance floor.”

Its politics has always been far from sidelined. Hugely popular with working class and migrant communities, tango held a certain

proximity to revolutionary work in Argentina throughout the country’s political troubles. “There is a tendency to make tango a safe space of pure pleasure,” says Novaković. “But that pleasure is also political.”

To lead, to follow – there’s pleasure in both. “In our classes, we teach people both roles, and that means you’ve got the freedom to dance with anyone you like,” says Wilson. A binary exists but the movement between that binary ensures it does not constrain.

In terms of gender, tango hasn’t always had the best reputation. It’s often portrayed as an oversexualised, somewhat seedy dance. And, unfortunately, women can sometimes experience sexist, predatory behaviour in mainstream tango spaces. Rebel Tango is clear: a feminist approach is crucial in creating a safe space for all genders.

Of course, there’s often a financial barrier also, with many classes fairly expensive. The duo is conscious of this, opting to offer all sessions for free or on a sliding scale. Amid images of ruffled, red dresses and sleek black shirts, there’s always this sense that tango is a glamorously pricey dance. But, in reality, no sequins or stilettos are necessary. “You can dance in any shoes – although it does help if your shoes are slippy enough that you can swivel on the floor,” says Wilson. “But you could wear just socks.”

Tango can meet you where you’re at – and the music is part of that. Its lyrics are rich, a story gently spun between each note. Partners are

encouraged to move to it as they please. “There is a relationship that you all have to the music. And we just propulse it,” Novaković says. “So it actually moves you around the room.” With tango, music is as much a force as the dancers.

Certainly, Rebel Tango is keen to emphasise that this is a social dance. We often envisage a singular couple under a spotlight, an empty floor theirs to conquer. But, in reality, it’s usually danced in a circle formed by multiple partners. “As you’re dancing, you’re looking after the couple in front of you and behind you – with both your decorations and with the forwards movement and the backwards movement that you make,” says Novaković Heedless kicks or elbows in the face have no place in this etiquette of care. “Tango can fit in with your anarchist politics of mutual aid and cooperation. It only works because you want it to work and because you’re cooperating with each other,” continues Wilson. Intimate body movements – steps and taps and spins – translate into something much greater. “Your support brings all these other partnerships in the room to make it work for everyone.”

Tango isn’t a singular thing: what happens on the dance floor has potential off the dance floor. Collective dance is a collective action – coming together, learning to lead and be led is crucial for joy as well as social change. It’s a dance for us all – and a dance that Rebel Tango wants us to trust in.

Find out more about Rebel Tango @rebel_tango on Twitter

Clear the dance floor – we’re learning the tango. We speak to the duo behind Rebel Tango about fostering intimacy, open-role dancing, and making radical moves

Words: Eilidh Akilade

“It’s more about learning how to dance with somebody, how to be connected to another person”

Carolyn Wilson, Rebel Tango

Demand A Daydream

Fed up with affirmations? It’s time to stare out of a window indefinitely and let our minds wander into artistic practice. One writer unpacks the power of daydreaming and letting go of productivity-based approaches to creativity

Words: Mayanne Soret

Illustration: Ione Rail

Every so often, my Instagram explore page will be witness to a siege of motivational quotes. You know the ones: therapy language-infused Canva posters to help me defeat procrastination and dream my desires into existence; recommendations for life-coaches and manifesting accounts handing out advice on how best to use my inner world to my own advantage. “I am motivated to manifest my dreams into reality through inspired action,” reads one. “I overcame the habit of procrastination by doing the needed inner work,” reads another.

In this sterile view of our minds, our dreams are tools, our imagination only valuable when it wields material results. But what happened to daydreams! To yearning! I want to drift off to the next beach holiday, think of the swimsuit I’ll wear and the books I’ll bring. Pick out tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch. Imagine the speech I’ll give for that one award I don’t even want to win (we’ve all done it), and build on the years-long saga that will only ever exist in my mind. Everything, from mundane distraction to endless daydreams.

Maybe I am being too harsh – I too use affirmations, and I might have benefitted from that procrastination advice. But when we cannot conceive of the value of our own minds beyond the lens of self-improvement, we risk losing out on creativity, joy and connection.

Being lost in thought is a common phenomenon; in 2020, a Journal of Business and Psychology study found that we spend between 25% and 50% of our waking time mentally drifting off from our immediate activity. Yet wandering minds often suffer a bad reputation. Ahead of her upcoming Fringe show, Why Am I Like This?, writer Nicole Nadler reflects on her ADHD diagnosis and her relationship to daydreaming. “I was always chastised for it,” she tells me. “Usually it was airhead, ditzy, away with the fairies… It makes it sound like there’s nothing in your head, that what is in your head has no value – which for me, makes me feel like I have no value.”

But all that daydreaming might actually benefit our creative work. Dr Julia Kam, Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Calgary, researches internal attention – the process commonly known as mind wandering. In 2012, she was one of several authors on a study featured in Psychological Science, investigating its effects on creativity problems. She tells me about the research’s outcome: “We found that mind wandering, specifically the type that involves turning our attention away from an ongoing task, benefits an aspect of creativity called incubation – a subconscious process dedicated to solving an ongoing problem.”

The daydreaming in question here is more akin to distraction than complex fantasy; think jumping off from a memory of last night’s party to a missing item on your grocery list, and back. “Letting your mind roam free, you are placing yourself in a state that facilitates incubative processes,” says Dr Kam, comparing it to the moment inspiration strikes while out on a walk or in the shower.

Although indirectly, the research also highlights the time required for creativity to meaningfully flourish. This time can be challenging to find for many creatives, especially for those existing on the margins of a normative art world. As a disabled artist, Edinburgh-based photographer Louise Mclachlan tells me she has learned to honour this time. “I’ve learned to embrace my Crip time through looking and listening quietly in moments of recovery before letting things settle,” she explains. “Over time, these thoughts and ways of seeing build into a fuller project.”

In her 1995 essay Women Artists: The Creative Process, author bell hooks describes the joy of “spending uninterrupted time with my thoughts,

dreams, and intense yearnings, often the kind that, like unrequited love, go unfulfilled.” In it, hooks centres the kind of consuming, intricate daydreams that would otherwise be seen as unproductive. Beyond joy, she argues that this time of contemplation is as necessary to creative work as the time spent writing or making art: when an artist’s time is forcefully consumed by a patriarchal society, they cannot create freely. Decades later, between a cost of living crisis and the ever-demanding digital-first gig economy, the absence of time for creation is only worsened by a climate that demands constant productivity. As Nicole Nadlers notes, this ultimately shifts the aim of art: “If you’re just creating to be a cog in a machine, it really starts to change the way that you look at things, because you are doing this for the sole purpose of surviving.”

We must resist the urge to see our minds as spaces for optimisation and control, and instead, celebrate the endless potential of our own imaginations. Embracing the time that our creative process needs to flourish in a world that always demands more of our attention is a difficult task, but it is necessary to create truly good, meaningful art.

“When we cannot conceive of the value of our own minds beyond the lens of self-improvement, we risk losing out on creativity, joy and connection”

Sustainable Ceramics

We talk to Studio Frostwood, an Edinburgh-based ceramics studio led by contemporary designers Hazel Frost and Natalie J Wood, about crafting a sustainable practice

Words: Stacey Hunter

“As potters we have a natural urge to experiment by putting things in the kiln just to see what happens”

Photo: Susan Castillo

After initially meeting through the Craft Scotland Compass programme, Hazel Frost and Natalie J Wood co-designed a bespoke studio environment in the historic environs of a former lemonade factory in Leith. Soon after expanding their combined practices to include classes and a membership programme, the duo found themselves overwhelmed by how much waste material they were generating.

“This was the stuff that would build up in our cleaning buckets and be washed off of tools. We were unwilling to throw this material into landfill, so we had to find a practical use for it. Running our own studio meant that we had the power to implement new practices in a way we hadn’t previously in university or in other shared studio spaces. Also as potters we have a natural urge to experiment by putting things in the kiln just to see what happens.”

While there was information already available on this topic, Frost and Wood found much of it was either too vague or not applicable to their specific studio. They saw an opportunity and became excited to experiment in a way that was practical, and where long term outcomes were possible. A research project was born, and after receiving funding from Creative Scotland, months of testing, experimenting and adjusting commenced. Now Studio Frostwood are primed to share their insights with their peers and encourage a wider shift within the ceramics community towards a more sustainable way of making.

“With climate change becoming an inescapable reality and with an increasing focus on improving all sectors, sustainability is incredibly important to us. Through running a studio, we should constantly be analysing what we are doing and improving on it, and sustainability is absolutely part of this.”

What to do with waste material had been a common question throughout their many years as practising ceramicists where often surplus clay would be thrown away or forgotten about on a studio shelf.

“This project allowed us space to explore and play in a way that is often not feasible when you are busy running all the aspects of a small business. From the beginning of just looking purely at waste in the studio, we expanded into looking at other aspects of sustainability, such as the carbon impact of our kiln firings and where our materials came from. Just by analysing these areas we have been able to make informed decisions, such as switching clay suppliers, that affect the overall carbon output of the studio.”

“For us ceramics is a lifelong pursuit, so while this project was a year-long endeavour, it really feels like the foundation for a longer

exploration and optimisation of our studio practices. We also want to create community awareness around ways to process and use ceramic waste so that others can build upon our work.”

The designers have brought their own unique interests, histories and experiences to the research. Wood grew up in the industrial town of Kirkcaldy, Scotland. Her great-great-grandfather was a kiln man and worked for one of the many Kirkcaldy potteries. As a child she would run up and down the aisles of the tile store her mother worked at for over 20 years. In 2015 she graduated with a degree in Three Dimensional Design with a specialism in ceramics, before moving to Edinburgh to establish her own practice.

Frost is originally from Newcastle upon Tyne. Having graduated from Central Saint Martins with a degree in Ceramic Design, she then worked for other studio potters and artists, developing her skills before moving back north to start her own practice. Specialising in throwing and hand building, her work is deeply influenced by history, Japanese and Korean ceramics as well as the landscapes that surround her in Scotland.

“We recognise that fundamentally, through making and creating ceramics we are having an

impact on the environment, but by analysing our studio we are able to minimise some of the harm that can come from this.”

Studio Frostwood will soon share their research and methodologies demonstrating their approaches and how they dealt with different aspects of waste in the studio. Their hope is that this practical and accessible document helps anyone who wants to make steps towards a more sustainable practice. An exhibition and talk at Whitespace Gallery is planned (1-3 Sep) where Frost and Wood will present their research during an informal talk chaired by yours truly.

“We have had a very positive response to the project and obviously there are lots of questions and we try to be as open and honest as possible while also letting people know that this is a journey for us and we are not experts and that you don’t need to be an expert to make a start!”

The exhibition Sustainable Ceramics is open from 1-3 Sep. The talk is at 1pm on 2 Sep, both at Whitespace Gallery, 76 East Crosscauseway, Edinburgh, EH8 9HQ

@studio.frostwood_ @localheroesdesign

Photo: Susan Castillo

U Got the Look

On its 40th anniversary, Bette Gordon’s 1983 feminist classic Variety is back in cinemas. Let this subversive, sensuous neo-noir take you to the most uncomfortable places

Words: Stefania Sarrubba

Power is in the eye of the beholder. At its most compelling, cinema toys with the electrifying balance of camera, audience and characters, flipping the dynamic connected to the act of looking. Subverting the relationship between object and looker is the core of Bette Gordon’s underground cult film Variety, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year with a UK rerelease and a screening at Edinburgh International Film Festival.

“Variety didn’t ever disappear,” Gordon says over Zoom when we chat about her 1983 film, a genre-bending liberation parable set in New York’s seediest, most delicious underbelly. An ever-relevant tale on the pleasure of looking, Gordon’s neo-noir, co-written with punk author Kathy Acker, continues disrupting the status quo.

Eight years before its release, Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema included a feminist reflection on the male gaze as a systemic, all-encompassing vision. Her argument sowed the seeds for overturning conventional narrative cinema which often reduced women to objects to be looked at. Gordon certainly shares Mulvey’s sentiment. Mulvey ushered in a repositioning of the idea of looking, which Gordon translated into her story for the screen. “I’m a viewer too. And I like to watch,” is Gordon’s defiant response to the onscreen ramifications of the male gaze. “There has to be a place for my looking. And so I said, ‘What if I switch things around?’”

A “child of cinema”, Gordon was influenced by Hollywood films of the 1930s and 40s (think Alfred Hitchcock and Dorothy Arzner) and later in the 60s and 70s by the avant-garde filmmakers coming out of Europe (in particular Antonioni and Fassbinder) to push the boundaries of what could be shown and seen. Thus Variety was born, a tale of sexual awakening revolving around a Times Square porn cinema, a former vaudeville theatre that gives the film its title. The film centres on aspiring writer Christine (Sandy McLeod), who gets a job at Variety as a ticket seller. Her streetside booth “allows us to watch her looking back at those who are looking at her,” says Gordon, as the film grows into a conscious reflection and re-framing of power and lust by way of windows, doorways and mirrors.

Christine becomes increasingly obsessed with one of Variety’s older patrons, Louie (Richard M Davidson), a charming gangster type who may or may not be involved in criminal affairs. In a reversal of noir’s gender conventions, Christine is the detective following the enigma, controlling the narrative and the space. The character is from Michigan and finds New York an inspiring place,

as the city was for Gordon, who found a buzzing avant-garde scene where her filmmaking could thrive.

“Everybody was free,” says Gordon of those early days making films in the city. “We did not know the word ‘business’. It was pure fun. Really, we made things to show each other.”

Inspired by the director’s own NYC late-night wanderings, Christine follows Louie through male-dominated spaces. It’s the very masculine geography of the city that the filmmaker challenges here. Her camera enters Yankee Stadium, a fish market and a porn store in a documentarylike fashion. Even Wall Street, the setting of Christine’s hazy montage of men shaking hands, isn’t spared. Shot after shot, the protagonist dissects those unidentified men’s bodies, virtually shrunk down to the ultimate male gesture of authority and connivance.

There’s not an ounce of vulnerability in Christine. She doesn’t sneak into those places; she parades through them, on the receiving end of weirded-out looks from men. But she looks back at them, breaking the cycle. In her determination to access conventionally closed-off environments, Variety’s lead is a “classic heroine”, as Gordon puts it. A maledominated space in itself, the porn theatre allows Christine to observe both the women on the screen and the men looking at them. The film displays a very neutral attitude towards porn at a time when it was the heated subject of feminist debate.

“I was looking at pornography as a mechanism to explore female fantasy,” says Gordon. “In porn, the touch is substituted by the look. It sustains this desire for something that’s out of your reach.” What shocked audiences back when Variety was released wasn’t so much its explicit content, but that it somehow didn’t fulfil its erotic thriller premise. “Sex, death and violence are not just the purview of men,” says Gordon, and one can argue that Variety exists at the intersection of these elements. There’s the promise of all three in the film, but the credits roll on an exhilaratingly open-ended finale, which elated half of the audience at its world premiere at Cannes and enraged the other half.

Reception has warmed over time, Gordon says, though she can’t explain why. Modern viewers may have become more comfortable with uncertainty. We’ve learned to sit with those feelings in the back of a cinema, a prerequisite to “the most essential experience you can have,” as the director defines visual storytelling. Representation doesn’t ever satisfy desire, but it certainly fuels it, Variety su ests. The film’s spellbinding resonance proves how commanding that unfulfilled yearning can be 40 years on.

Variety screens at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 20 Aug and is rereleased across the UK on 11 Aug

Just Say Fat

Jeanie Finlay’s intimate portrait of author Aubrey Gordon aims to make us rethink our attitude to the word ‘fat’. The filmmaker explains why she wanted to document Gordon’s life and activism ahead of Your Fat Friend’s Scottish premiere at EIFF

Words: Connor Lightbody

Jeanie Finlay’s documentary Your Fat Friend is a wonderful, empathetic film chronicling the journey of author and activist Aubrey Gordon. It follows Gordon from her first post about the ‘fat experience’ in 2016, under the pseudonym Your Fat Friend, to emerging as a powerful new voice in the advocation of overweight people, a New York Times bestseller and co-creator of podcast Maintenance Phase

Finlay, the documentarian behind Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, Sound it Out and the BIFA-winning Seahorse, describes the moment she decided to follow Gordon: “When I was researching for a film on fatness, I read a piece Aubrey wrote while anonymous called A request from your fat friend: what I need when we talk about bodies, and I was like, ‘this is brilliant’. It was heartfelt, intimate and poetic, and I just really wanted to talk to the person who wrote it.

“It was so interesting to meet the person behind the words, after I’d already formed an idea of her from her writing,” Findlay says about her first in-person encounter with Gordon. “The gap between something you experience once removed and then experience in reality, that’s where your films lie. I found my film; here she is.”

Continuing, Finlay says: “Sometimes there’s a poetry in who you want to make a film about. Aubrey’s highly skilled anonymous writing and her history with political organising was a unique set of circumstances. These films take a long time and cost a lot, so you have to be certain. When I met Aubrey, I just knew she was the right fit.”

Finlay initially hoped that the arc of the film would follow Gordon’s coming out story as she revealed to the world she was Your Fat Friend, but that didn’t go to plan. “The film took six years instead of two, with Aubrey filming herself [for much of the shoot] due to COVID-19,” explains Finlay. As revealed in the film, Gordon was doxed in 2020, and with her anonymity removed, she began to suffer abuse on social media. Findlay works this online hate into the film. “If people are calling you a fat bitch online, it seeps into your life,” she says. “You’re looking at it while you’re at home and sitting on your sofa scrolling your phone, so I actually projected those comments onto Aubrey’s wall.”

Finlay removes the abusive trolls’ power by facing their comments head-on. She does something similar with the word ‘fat’ itself. “I wanted to make a film about fatness as it’s a word I’d heard all my life as a fat lady and I wanted to interrogate that,” Findlay explains. ”It wasn’t a word you were allowed to say. You had to say fluffy. My daughter was 13 when I started, and I wanted to make a film

that I wish I had when I was her age, to posit the idea of fat being a neutral descriptor.”

Finlay makes sure to note that she does not use the term ‘fatphobia’ as we’re not scared of fat people. “I’m a smaller fat lady. There’s a privilege in having a smaller fat body, so I might get called out on the street if I’m running but I can still buy some clothes in shops. I also don’t end up worrying if the doctor’s table can hold me, like larger fat bodies experience.”

In Your Fat Friend, we see Gordon collecting diet and cookbooks, one of which is titled Help, Lord, the Devil Wants Me Fat. “We based the poster for the film on that very diet book,” says Findlay. “I love it. They’re all so ludicrous. Aubrey says that once you have distance to them, they’re just kind of funny. Same with The Fabulette’s song Try the Worryin’ Way.” For those uninitiated with this catchy ditty from 1966, its lyrics advocate worrying about your boyfriend cheating as a great

method of losing weight. “It really tickled me. We didn’t tell Aubrey that we got the rights to it until I showed her the film. She played me that song thinking it would never be put in the film.”

Finlay says her views on fatness have also changed throughout this process but that “this is a journey for everyone and even hearing that audiences like yourself are saying the word fat more is really exciting.” Excited is exactly what Finlay is, as she jumps up from the Zoom to retrieve stickers that have ‘Just Say Fat’ embossed on them. Discussing the negative connotations of the word fat, Finlay says: “You think about what you want audiences to take away from this and a simple one is to just say fat. Language is important, and we have the power to change the way we use the word fat.”

Your Fat Friend has its Scottish premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival on 21 & 22 Aug

Time Out For Fun

As new wave pioneers Devo set off on their farewell tour, we catch up with guitarist Gerald Casale to reflect on their 50 boundarypushing years

Words: Peter Simpson

“Clearly, we didn’t want to be right.”

We’re about 60 seconds into our Zoom chat with Gerald ‘Jerry’ Casale, and the Devo guitarist and lyricist is off and running. Our opening topic: the band have spent the last five decades worrying about the direction of society, the way that we view media and listen to music, and the systems we exist within. Turns out, they may have been onto something.

“We were taking a kind of smartass, satirical, ironic approach to things,” Casale tells us, sitting in a living room in a red sweater and leather waistcoat combo in front of a newsreader-style backdrop bearing the group’s central concept of ‘de-evolution’. “You know, being subversive. It was like canaries in a coal mine; we were warning people about the worst parts of human nature and if you gave into them, here’s what would happen, right?”

The origins of Devo sit not far from those worst parts. Casale was working as a student liaison at Kent State University in May 1970, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a group of students during a protest against the expansion of the Vietnam War and killed four people. Casale knew two of those killed by the National Guard that day – Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause – and has described it as both the day he “stopped being a hippie”, and the catalysing incident that would lead to the formation of Devo.

“I thought I lived through the worst part of my life,” he tells us. “I thought that was over, and that it couldn’t ever get worse than that. And I was wrong, because that was like kindergarten, compared to now.”

Devo – founded by Casale with Bob Lewis and Mark Mothersbaugh, before later being joined by both Casale and Mothersbaugh’s younger brothers (confusingly both also called Bob!) – were born from the creative community around Kent State, and powered by a sense of disdain for the politics, media and social graces of the United States. They were also adept from the off at melding high and low culture, or rather smashing the two together at top speed.

Their response to the America of the 70s and 80s was a multimedia whirlwind of DIY music videos, elaborate costuming, weird internal lore and some very very good riffs. Even though their first album hit shelves 45 years ago, the band’s combination of jerky, freaky post-punk and deliberate, confrontational visuals feel strangely suited to the current moment, and not just because Rishi Sunak and Ron DeSantis’ slick haircuts are dead ringers for the rubber pompadours on the cover of 1981’s New Traditionalists album.

As Casale puts it: “All the elements that are in play now were evident then. You see it with the authoritarianism, the disinformation campaigns, the media participating in mass propaganda, the public being willing to conform and repeat mindless slogans, ‘America, love it or leave it’… Everything that gets attributed to Trumpism, those forces, that proclivity and human nature was alive and well in 1970. Now, it’s just a full on viral pandemic of the mind. We’re living now in an upside down Black Mirror reality, an alternate reality wormhole that we went through.”

Web 2.0 and Web3’s accelerationist zeal and uncanny ability to amplify some of the worst elements in society feels rife for Devo’s commentary. At the same time, the whole idea of ‘reality’ has arguably changed in the half-century since Devo formed – bear in mind, this satirical avantgarde art-rock band in strange matching hats

would regularly get on the actual telly four decades ago. Tech has brought unimaginable choice in art and media, and allowed for so many new voices and stories to be given a platform. It has also created a world where there is very little we can agree on, and enormous buckets of content to choose from but often created in unfair conditions to serve corporate interests. Freedom of choice, to quote the lads, is what we’ve got.

Casale is punchy in his views on the modern political elite. He says: “They want to destabilise society. They want to kill the middle class, destroy public education. They want a vast pool of spuds who can’t think, who are eating terrible food, who just will do whatever you tell them, and then you have a one-half-of-one-percent in control. And that’s what they’re doing because they didn’t want to pay taxes. They didn’t want to be accountable. They didn’t want regulation. Now they’ve got this destabilised world they want, full of unstable, needy, radioactive people.”

If changing the world has fallen just outside of the band’s purview, the one thing Devo were constantly changing was… Devo. Their back catalogue is littered with hits – dropping Whip It remains one of the most surefire ways to get a room moving – but a few misses as well. Their embrace of technology saw them evolve from riff-heavy artrockers in 1978 to what was essentially a synth-pop act (admittedly, an odd one) five years later. That same desire for progress also saw them try to present the world’s first live 3D broadcast of a gig on pay-per-view in 1982, complete with visuals on 12-foot-high video screens. The operative word there, in case you missed it, was ‘try’.

In many ways the story of Devo is a story of glory, failure, and glorious failure, of a band whose very first gig ended with Mark Mothersbaugh unable to get his synth to stop producing a highpitched drone for several minutes. The band were billed as ‘Sextet Devo’ to convince the university that they were serious musicians; while trying to fix his keyboard, Mothersbaugh was wearing a large rubber chimpanzee mask.

When we ask Casale about any regrets or missteps he wishes the band had revisited, his

“We gave in to machines, and that’s exactly what we were warning people about”

Gerald Casale, Devo

answer is by turns unsurprisingly grand and refreshingly honest: “You’d have to be dishonest to say, ‘No, there aren’t’.

“There should have been a Devo feature film. There should have been a Devo video game. There should have been, you know, a musical. Devo should have started a communications ad agency – Devocom.

“There was a certain point where machines took over. We weren’t using them; they were dictating to us. We gave in to machines, and that’s exactly what we were warning people about. We had to include ourselves in the mix, because we did exactly what we told people not to do.”

Coming from a band as experimental, oblique, and frankly cheeky as Devo, the industrystandard 50th anniversary farewell tour feels like bait, but that’s not the case. This is a genuine, honest-to-goodness Farewell Tour from one of the pioneering bands from the US new wave, heading across Europe this August and taking in a headline slot at Green Man between shows in Edinburgh and London. In speaking to Casale, there’s a sense

that the band are taking the chance to grab their flowers while they can. As Casale says, with a lilt in his voice: “This may be the end of subversion. And I’ll say this – it’s not a strategy. It’s not like Kiss, where it turns out that the farewell tour was about ten years long. If people are looking for, you know, some kind of subtext or secret whammy, maybe we’re going to disappoint them.”

So if this tour isn’t some avant-garde windup, and it really is the end of Devo, what lies in store? “Just playing songs that span the breadth of our existence,” Casale says, “and trying to present some of the visuals that we did, and remind people of the context of ‘look what we did when we did it.’”

It’s the final lap from a band who pushed boundaries and made us think, an oddity from a different time in music history, and true pioneers in mixing the high and low, sublime and ridiculous. That, says Casale, is the real call of this tour: “I think that’s all we can really do, to help people frame us in terms of history. We can’t be, you know, a South Korean boy band. We’re Devo, and now we’re senior citizens! But we can still go out there and do it. That’s probably the whole point. It’s like – Paul McCartney can still do it. Mick Ja er can still do it. And Devo can still do it.”

Devo play O2 Academy, Edinburgh, 17 Aug clubdevo.com

“We’re living now in an upside down Black Mirror reality, an alternate reality wormhole that we went through”

Gerald Casale, Devo

What is a venue without its workers?

In light of its recent closure, to understand the legacy of The 13th Note, we speak to a handful of musicians and workers who have passed through its doors over the years

Words: Tony Inglis

What is a venue without its workers? Many in the Scottish music scene were asking this question about The 13th Note on Glasgow’s King Street, long before the announcement on 19 July by its owner Jacqueline Fennessy that it would close. The decision came in the middle of a protracted dispute with the majority of its staff over fair pay and improved working conditions, leading to historic industrial action: the first strike by hospitality staff in Scotland in over 20 years. The closure brought the strike to an end just as it was getting going, signalling the loss of all staff members’ jobs, and of a venue that has a legacy for supporting underground and DIY acts since the 90s.

From its previous home on Glassford Street, where its music programming was once managed by Alex Kapranos, who would go on to front Franz Ferdinand, The 13th Note had a reputation for being a place that was affordable enough for fledgling acts to get a foot in the door, and well known enough for it to give them a decent rub. Seminal bands like The Delgados, Idlewild, and Mogwai played important early shows there. To understand the venue’s legacy, we speak to musicians and workers who have passed through The 13th Note’s doors over the years.

“We played our first gigs at The 13th Note and I’ve a lot of very fond memories of the venue,” says Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite. “These venues outwith any kind of corporate music structure are really important. Even though it’s important these places exist for the cultural landscape, I also think there can be a tendency for the owners to take people who are invested in that for granted. People have a responsibility – it’s possible to run small venues attached to bars and cafes and treat everyone fairly.”

Michael Kasparis, who makes music as Apostille and worked at the venue at the turn of the millennium, reminisces: “I booked my first gig there in my first band. It was pretty cool to be working there, meeting and becoming friends with people who I admired and had done so much for a scene I was finding my feet in.

“The staff made that place happen and, from what I can see and know, continued to make it happen. Like us, they wanted to create a space where people could have transcendent experiences or feel welcome.”

Kay Logan, who makes music as Helena Celle and Free Musick, was The 13th Note’s venue manager and head engineer, and part of the striking staff. “There’s been zero respect for the artistic, cultural aspect of the matter, let alone those whose labour the owner profits from,” says Logan, who explains that essential equipment required to run the venue needed updates and repairs. “The party line being pushed in Britain towards artistic endeavour is one that not only callously indicates such matters are trivial, but they should not be the purview of the working class. Nobody living off a part-time contract at a venue is living comfortably. I am from a traditional working-class background and without financially accessible venues such as The 13th Note, I would never have formed bands and be doing what I am doing today.

“Ultimately, it’s about recognising that human aspect – are we here to make money, or to make meaningful experiences? I think if your inclination is the former, then you’re in the wrong industry for a start. If you create precarious working conditions, and if the artists who play your venues are financially, functionally, or ethically unable to do so, then what happens to the culture? What happens to your venue if there’s nobody to labour, nobody to perform? Without workers, such venues are unable to function.”

The dispute between The 13th Note’s staff and its owner (who did not respond to our request for comment) jibes with the idea that culturally significant spaces – places where progressive, creative ideas germinate – are normally run by owners that share that stance. Is it important that these spaces are in the proper hands?

“Since all of this happens within the framework of neoliberal capitalism, venues are benefiting from leftist, DIY credentials and catering to that sort of clientele whilst exploiting their workers at every turn,” one former employee, who worked there from 2003 to 2008 and asked for anonymity, says. “I thought working at The 13th Note would be egalitarian and fair-minded because that’s the politics of most of the events and people there, but the truth from the inside was the opposite. I wonder what these legacies are worth sometimes.”

Bryan Simpson, Unite Hospitality’s lead organiser, adds: “The workers of The 13th Note made this venue, and they will be doing everything they can legally, politically, and industrially, with the support of the union, to keep the venue going, under workers’ control.”

Following strike action and a dispute with workers over contracts, safe working conditions, and a living wage, The 13th Note closed its doors on 19 Jul

If you’re financially able, you can support the 18 workers that lost their jobs via crowdfunder.co.uk/p/support-the-13th-note-workers

Read an extended version of this article at theskinny.co.uk/music

“There’s been zero respect for the artistic, cultural aspect of the matter, let alone those whose labour the owner profits from”

Kay Logan, The 13th Note Venue Manager & Head Engineer

The Space In-Between

With the release of their recent album 93696, Liturgy are still pushing themselves into bold new spaces. Ahead of their set at Glasgow’s new Core. Festival, we speak to the band’s Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix

Words: Joe Creely

Liturgy spent their early years provoking as much ire as they did acclaim. For every time they received glowing reviews in spaces unprecedented for black metal, they received outright condemnation from others with their manifesto-cum-statement of intent essay

Transcendental Black Metal acting as a lightning rod of controversy in the metal scene of the time. It was messy, and kind of contradictory, but it showed a conviction that entirely came through in the music. Crucially, it also wasn’t boring, which, given the early part of the 2010s’ propensity for hyper-irony or faux-lumberjack tedium, really set them apart. It did not endear them however, to a certain strain of black metal diehard.

On the one hand Haela Ravenna HuntHendrix’s open faith has been taken against by those committed to the genre’s initial anti-Christian rhetoric (“Liturgy came of age in a very secular time”, she later notes in our conversation), while others decided, due to the band taking a broader influence from minimalists, noise rock and classical music, that they were posers and didn’t make black metal that was ‘pure’ enough. That strain of the fanbase hadn’t taken into account that maybe an obsession with purity isn’t the best look given the genre’s history of prominent Nazi-sympathisers.

so much irony,” Hunt-Hendrix notes of the era they burst into. “It was after grunge and alt-rock were over, but it was during the rise of the ‘hipster’ where people in the underground or counter-culture wanted to distinguish themselves from ordinary society, but didn’t really have any faith or hope in anything, and also, weren’t that upset.”

Liturgy by contrast, no matter what you thought of them, clearly meant it when they said it. 93696 is no exception, full of forceful, totally unaffected sincerity but executed flawlessly. ‘‘It does feel like the record to silence the haters once and for all,” Hunt-Hendrix accepts. “I wanted to make a record that was as metal as [our 2011 record] Aesthetica was on its own terms, whilst also incorporating everything from the more experimental records.”

mediums seems to be a forebear of her overall artistic vision. “I like the space in-between, I really am drawn towards the margins between different cultural silos. I like having a bit of interface with a lot of different genres, regimes of judgement. I don’t imagine a future where I’m just writing symphonies.” When asked where this may lead she has as ever grand plans. “I do like the idea of multimedia, opera, maybe even like a role-playing game. I’ve been learning Unreal Engine. It feels easy to imagine a digital opera, with characters I create in it, it has our music, maybe it’s an album too.”

But over the years with every passing album their sound has grown more and more broad; initially with a heavier experimental electronic influence on 2015’s The Ark Work, before HuntHendrix’s classical influences became ever clearer, reaching a peak on 2020’s opera Origin of the Alimonies This year’s 93696 marked a consolidation of all these things, exploring the concept of heaven by merging all of the band’s previous work into an 80-minute whirlwind of electronics, battering black metal crescendos and gorgeous, romantic classical moments. It’s far and away the finest record of their career and it has inspired a near unanimous rapturous reception.

Such unanimous praise didn’t feel like it would figure any time soon when Liturgy initially broke through amid such controversy. “There was

This sense of going full circle, collecting and consolidating what Liturgy has been up to this point leads to the question: Where to from here? While there is no intention of ceasing work with the band, Hunt-Hendrix notes that she is “more and more interested in visual art, film and opera.” Also a multimedia artist, with recent sculpture show As the Blood of God Bursts the Veins of Time at Gern en Regalia in New York (works from which constitute 93696’s cover), and the aforementioned 2020 opera, as well as an accompanying but unreleased film (“I guess I got kind of shy about it,” she says by way of explanation), Hunt-Hendrix shows a sense of someone with a very free concept of what the band can be, incorporating as many elements as are needed to get the point across.

We discuss William Blake as a key influence, and his pursuit of an idea through multiple

As for what to expect at Core., Hunt-Hendrix says the band have captured the spirit of the initial DIY warehouse shows they were playing when they started out. “These shows have been the most powerful of any shows we’ve ever done. I think with the songs being so long, people really go into a kind of trance. There’s people being all over the place when we’re playing. Sometimes I’m crying.” Hunt-Hendrix gives the sense that Liturgy are a band who have finally pushed through controversy to where they should have been all along, accepted as a group more akin to Throbbing Gristle or The Residents. Rather than pigeonholed within the black metal community, left to be a cross-medium pursuit of a personal idea, and in the process making some of the most ecstatic guitar music around.

Liturgy play Core. a celebration of noise, Maryhill Community Central Halls and The Hug & Pint, Glasgow, 18-20 Aug 96396 is out now on Thrill Jockey liturgy.bandcamp.com corethefestival.com

Photo: Jessica Hallock

“I really am drawn towards the margins between different cultural silos”

Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Liturgy

A Class Act

With more and more bands being called out as industry plants and nepo-babies, Welsh DIY punks Panic Shack are a refreshing dose of humble meal deals and hard graft

Words: Cheri Amour

With a name like Megan Fretwell, it should have been a giveaway that she might make a perfect punk guitarist. Despite racking up slots at Primavera and Glastonbury this summer though, Fretwell and her punk peers that make up Welsh DIY fem group Panic Shack only began playing together a few years ago. She dials into our call with a brew alongside fellow bandmates Romi Lawrence and Em Smith (the latter is considered the group’s ‘real’ musician having played bass in bands since she was 18). The trio are lined up on Smith’s leather couch like the opening credits of Friends

Completed by Sarah Harvey on vocals and David Bassey on drums, the band deserves a bit of a sit down after a whirlwind ride since forming at the tail end of 2018. The last few years have seen them appear on the BBC Introducing stage at Reading and Leeds, supporting Northern lot Yard Act and earlier this year they sold out their own string of headline dates across the UK. But it was Worthy Farm that made the bi est impression so far. “We felt lucky to be able to go to Glastonbury and then the fact that people turned up!” jokes Fretwell. “We weren’t mentally prepared. We went on for soundcheck and they were like, ‘Okay, just start!’” jokes Lawrence, clearly flummoxed.

It was in a different verdant setting that the catalyst for the group sparked after years of feeling frustrated watching their male peers perform. “It was the first time that the four of us had gone to Green Man Festival together,” explains Smith. “When we got back, we had a buzz going on [our] group chat. We were like ‘Shall we do it?’”

Like the 70s spirit of punk, Panic Shack channel that do-it-yourself resourcefulness in spades. Even if Lawrence was tentative about fully embracing the role. “I used to get shy and nervous, especially about playing guitar. But then I thought, ‘There’s no way I can watch my best friends be in a band and not be in it!’”

hefty dose of satire. Who’s Got My Lighter? conjures up balmy evenings passing the Amber Leaf pouch around the pub garden. While the touring band service station staple gets a nod in Meal Deal, as Harvey exclaims: ‘I’m going out for a meal deal because my flat is fucking freezing / I can’t stand it any longer / Can just about afford my heating’.

Even with the band’s obvious hard graft and modest incomes, their workingclass credentials have been criticised in the past. “We had this thing on TikTok, where people were saying that we were private school girlies [and] that we were cosplaying the working class,” says Smith. “You can call me an ugly slag and I’ll be fine. Yeah, whatever. If you call me posh, I’m like ‘No.’” The Britpop era of the 90s boomed with working-class heroes like the Gallagher brothers and Madchester kingpins Happy Mondays. In the noughties though, certain pop artists (looking at you, Jamie T and Lily Allen) were called out for their hammed-up cockney characters only to confess they’d both attended private schools. So where are we with the middle-classification of music in 2023?

Getting to grips with bar chords, the foursome quickly began songwriting together. Early single Jiu Jits You was a BBC 6Music mainstay with its Kill Bill cool wandering basslines and scrappy guitars. Alongside their kung fu capers, Panic Shack’s Baby Shack EP sketches relatable stories of young adults scrimping and saving, even if it’s dressed up with a

“Now more than ever, the playing field is off balance. Everyone gets a leg up,” believes Smith. But the tension is being magnified as rising artists are facing a whole new level of background checks, not unlike the towering touring policies for bands in a post-Brexit EU. “The discourse has changed now where people have to prove that they’re not posh. Like with the whole nepotism discussions, it’s starting to become a little bit nasty.” (See the recent comments on Picture Parlour’s NME cover or the now-notorious ‘industry plants’, The Last Dinner Party).

There’s nothing more telling of the band’s current situation though than their output so far.

There’s a reason why they’ve spent close to the last 52 weeks on the road. “Class is a much harder barrier to get into music,” reflects Lawrence. “It’s why we’ve still not released an album yet,” interjects Fretwell. “Everyone’s like, ‘Where’s the album?’ Do you know how much it costs to put an album out? We’ve got rent to pay!” So much so that when Panic Shack packed down the rigs from their heroic set in the Shangri-La fields this summer, they headed home to Wales the next day and back to work. “You need a lot of money to be able to do this and we don’t have anything we can fall back on,” says Fretwell. “We’ve got to work our arses off to do this [but] we’re at this tipping point where we can’t stop now. And I don’t want to.”

Panic Shack play Connect Festival, Royal Highland Showgrounds, Edinburgh, 27 Aug

linktr.ee/panicshack

Photo: Ren Faulkner

“You can call me an ugly slag and I’ll be fine. If you call me posh, I’m like ‘No’”

Em Smith, Panic Shack

Album of the Month

Buck Meek — Haunted Mountain

Buck Meek is too often done the disservice of being referred to solely as the guitarist of Big Thief. Naturally, being undoubtedly one of the greatest and most consistent bands of the last ten years, one could hardly complain, but his own solo records are comparably gorgeous and rich in lyrical poetics, as Haunted Mountain further consolidates.

This release engages a wider dynamic variety than either of Meek’s two prior solo records, reaching further towards both jolting rock arrangements and lullingly mesmeric minimalism. Mood Ring evokes the stylised production of Phil Elverum (The Microphones; Mount Eerie); a gentle rustling throughout, a warm piano sound that seems to contort itself, only to find higher beauty in each reformation, and dainty vocals hanging imperfect but stunning amidst a slow-blowing swarm of sound.

From the heavier cuts such as the distortionladen Cyclades to the tip-toeing of Lullabies (aided by bowed violin, raw and tragic), the intimacy and openness of Meek’s songwriting is unfaltering. Tracks like Where You’re Coming From and The Rainbow are tastefully layered with instruments of all sorts, exploring space and harmony. The opening moments of Undae Dunes

Find reviews for the below albums online at theskinny.co.uk/music

explodes into a Cobain-esque mimicry of the noodly-shredding endemic in ‘cock-rock’, before later repurposing the moment as an abrasive but texturally pleasing addition to a high-energy number collaged with wonderful imagery such as: ‘Two full moons lighten up the evening / The undae dunes soften breathing’.

Meek’s vocals have always been quality, but on this release he has truly reached another level. The soft breathiness is used to the greatest emotive evocation yet, and the controlled manner in which his voice breaks cleanly into the following note in a way inimitable to few others than teenagers (certainly with less class than Meek) is impressive to the point of awe.

Across Lullabies and Lagrimas, Meek provides a masterclass in the specific vein of vocal performance that is almost entirely unique to him. Under the lilting expression of ‘Take my words little birds to call upon the mother of clouds’, is a set of guitars, pianos and drums, each evoking the slowed-down dying thrum of a recently plucked elastic band as it slowly resumes staticity. Haunted Mountain must stand as a masterful achievement, even within the catalogue of unequivocally magical records Meek has already had a hand in. [Jo Hi s]

Girl Ray Prestige Out 4 Aug via Moshi Moshi

Listen to: Mood Ring, Lullabies, Lagrimas

Reneé Rapp Snow Angel Out 18 Aug via Polydor / Interscope

Hiss Golden Messenger Jump for Joy Out 25 Aug via Merge

The Hives waste zero time getting down to the nitty gritty of rock’n’roll on The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, using opening track and single Bogus Operandi to remind the world exactly what they’ve been missing for the last decade. A blistering statement of intent, Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist and co. have refined their musical stylings down to an outrageously danceable science.

The other two singles on the record, Countdown to Shutdown and Rigor Mortis Radio, provide further evidence of The Hives’ uncanny ability to make music that is impossible to stand still to. Swa ering and supremely catchy tunes permeate the album, with The Clash-esque Smoke & Mirrors, a particular standout alongside Crash Into the Weekend, an old-school ode to one of the true pillars of rock’n’roll, a little bit of weekend excess.

Clocking in at less than half an hour, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons is a breathless exercise in how rock music should be played. It’s fun, frenetic, and full to the brim with that trademark Hives humour. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait another 11 years for the next album by one of this generation’s greatest rock bands. [Logan Walker]

Since announcing herself with a beautifully accomplished debut album in 2009 as Blue Roses, three EPs followed. But only now is Laura Groves finally releasing another full-length, one that fittingly is fascinated by communication and its mercurial nature. Musically, it feels as if she’s re-announcing herself to the world with a pitch that falls somewhere between classic pop songwriting (Karen Carpenter; Christine McVie) and more modern alt-pop contemporaries (Cate Le Bon; Bat for Lashes).

What results is a collection of meticulously crafted pop songs, with Groves working from a spare instrumental palette, based subtly in synth, to produce thoughtful sonic meditations on love, friendship and the power of human connection. Her cleverly layered vocals do much of the heavy lifting, particularly on the atmospheric Sarah and the redemptive Make a Start, but even when she’s backed by Sampha on D 4 N and Good Intention. Often, artists return from long lay-offs between records sounding as if they’d been trapped in amber the whole time, but Radio Red bears all the hallmarks of a carefully constructed labour of love, one rendered all the more elegant by the glacial pace of its gestation. [Joe Go ins]

Nyege Nyege Tapes’ ever-broadening palette of central African experimentalism has pulled the total unknown prospect of Congolese multi-instrumentalist Titi Bakorta into the fold, bringing his beguiling collages of stuttering drum patterns, spindly guitar loops and arcade machine electronics. His work doesn’t have the sense of being at the genuine outer limits of forward-thinking dance music that a lot of the label’s other output has, but it has an atmposphere like little else.

A truly eccentric record, unpredictability is its defining strength. The way he drifts between guttural, strangulated groans and effortlessly clean Mr Showbiz vocals on lead single Molende becomes indicative of the record at large. It mutates through moods and textures in a way that feels completely impulsive, but always carries incredibly smoothly. Kop in particular feels like two or three songs jostling for attention, but all of it is reined in by his gossamer vocals, while Nyonso Epesameli Nga has a remarkable, coiled energy that constantly feels at threat of spilling over, but is always wrestled back under control, be it with a belt of Bakorta’s sharp guitar playing or a blast of saxophone. It’s an implacable, utterly bewitching record.

[Joe Creely]

Listen to: A Parking Lot by the

To state that Lebanese multi-instrumentalist and producer Charif Megarbane is prolific would be an understatement – he’s worked on over 100 projects under various monikers, most notably as Cosmic Analog Ensemble. His extensive back-catalogue draws on everything from jazz to funk, Middle Eastern psychedelia to hip-hop, Indian sitar to West African. Marzipan is the second album to be released under his name. A self-ascribed ‘cartographic feat’, Megarbane draws from all of these genres and more in a style he calls ‘Lebrary’ – “a vision of Lebanon and Mediterranean expressed through the kaleidoscopic sonics of library music.” Indeed, you can imagine the album soundtracking the busy city streets of Beirut, frenetic energy pulsating in tracks like Abou Boutros and Souk El Ahad. Elsewhere, laidback funk and disco ooze in Yara, while meditative calm and ambient noise nonchalantly interpose tracks A Parking Lot by the Sea and Ya Salam. Cinematic dreamy soundscapes are evoked throughout, each track so wondrously distinct they piece together worlds unto themselves. Distilling his kaleidoscopic influences into 17 tracks with expert hand, while maintaining his characteristic DIY spontaneity, Marzipan is a standout even amidst Megarbane’s teeming back catalogue.

[Anita Bhadani]

The Hives The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons Fuga, 11 Aug rrrrr

Listen to: Bogus Operandi, Smoke & Mirrors, Rigor Mortis Radio

Titi Bakorta Molende Nyege Nyege Tapes, 25 Aug rrrrr

Listen to: Molende, Kop, Nyonso Epesameli Nga

Laura Groves Radio Red Bella Union, 11 Aug rrrrr

Listen to: I’m Not Crying, Sarah, Silver Lining

Charif Megarbane Marzipan Habibi Funk, Out Now rrrrr

Sea, Chataranj, Yara

Ratboys

The Window Topshelf Records, 25 Aug rrrrr

Listen to: Morning Zoo, Empty, Black Earth, WI

There’s a couple of moments in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy when combustible teenager Steve appears to literally push the aspect ratio into widescreen. He’s finally able to breathe, the scope of his hopefulness turning into a vista. If the frame is a window, then Ratboys replicate the trick on Black Earth, WI with an unexpected five-minute guitar solo – the breadth of their capabilities unfurling in high definition.

The Window is indicative of a newfound assuredness for a band which itself has stretched from a two-piece to a full foursome. There’s the scrappy pop-punk of Crossed that Line, which follows the dad rock choogle of Morning Zoo. Ratboys call Chicago home, so it’s no surprise that the aesthetics of Sky Blue Sky-era Wilco looms large on this record, with virtuoso playing combining into sweeping soft rock anthems.

But it’s Julia Steiner’s unmistakable voice, her lines the real windows, that connect it all. ‘I could tell that we’d be friends from the first moment we walked around and started talking all about our favorite bands’, she remembers on I Want You (Fall 2010). ‘We’re so lost, but it’s whatever, and I’m working up the guts to say that’. [Tony

Inglis]

Andrew Hung Deliverance

Lex Records, 11 Aug rrrrr

Listen to: Find Out, Too Much, Love Is

As you’d expect of someone who spent a decade in anthemic noise legends Fuck Buttons, Deliverance is an incredibly muscular record, dense with pulsing basslines and hammered drums. It’s not reinventing the wheel but there is interesting details all over, like the dra ed scrapheap of mangled metallic tones in Find Out or the crescendo of accumulated synth debris of Love Is that closes the album. The instrumentals carry the brunt of the record’s finest moments, managing to siphon his trademark noise into something momentous and emotive.

The sonic scale of these instrumentals means his singing and lyrics need to match this intensity, but his voice, always a Marmite thing, is pushed front and centre and doesn’t quite stand up to the task. There’s a keening, desperate to emote quality that is so oversold it ultimately feels disingenuous: think am-dram Phil Oakey. This, when combined with the mire of lyrical clichés that fill Soldier and Changes, really sinks the central stretch of the record.

While Deliverance does have instances of real bracing power, it equally finds itself faltering in its most exposed moments where it really needs to connect. [Joe Creely]

Shamir Homo Anxietatem Kill Rock Stars, 18 Aug rrrrr

Listen to: Oversized Sweater, Crime, Obsession

Shamir defies categorisation. Throughout his near-decade-spanning self-proclaimed “anti-career”, his music has forayed from dance-pop to punk rock, 90s house to country. It feels less like reinvention and more that his artistry draws from his eclectic influences, intuitively finding the right genre to convey its subject matter. On his ninth album, Homo Anxietatem, themes of anxiety, survival, and coping through it all find voice through guitar-laden alt-pop, with folk-tinged lyrical sensibility. Confronting anxieties with tender vulnerability, there remains an understated persistence that reveals itself throughout. Yet as a cohesive whole the album feels somewhat weighted, with the latter half overstaying its welcome. With the exception of riotous track Obsession, where Shamir belts out: ‘I’m my own oppression / And I don’t know what to do / I am your obsession / But you forget I’m human too’ – the lengthy tracks here lose their momentum and oeuvre, dra ing wearily toward the end. But when it's good, it’s great – similarly lengthy tracks in the first half, Wandering Through and Our Song feel varied and forceful enough to keep us on our toes. After all, Shamir’s artistry shines brightest when it does just that.

[Anita Bhadani]

The XCERTS Learning How to Live and Let Go UNFD, 18 Aug rrrrr

Listen to: Ache, Lovesick, Blame

The fifth album by The XCERTS, Learning How to Live and Let Go, opens with prior-released single GIMME, which could be considered bold. There is a lot sonically jampacked into it – it’s brash and in your face. The upbeat chaos travels throughout the first couple of tracks, and a feature from Architects’ Sam Carter is a welcome and fun addition to the song Ache. The album title finds its way into some of the songs’ lyrics, repeated like a battle cry.

There is an incorporation of piano, brass and strings in some of the slower songs like Drag Me Out and My Friends Forever which gives the listening experience more dimension; the latter is the bi est departure, with frontman Murray Macleod crooning to the sound of background rain accompanied by what we can only describe as a soft jazz instrumental.

Overall, Learning How to Live and Let Go fluctuates in tone. But this doesn’t negate the clear effort the band have put into making this record a lot more experimental than any of their previous releases, and it’s still chock full of heart and vulnerability in its lyrical content.

[Alisa Wylie]

Music Now

This month in Scottish music, summer concludes with a deluge of debuts that will keep us bright and beaming once the autumn rains roll in

Words: Lewis Robertson

An assortment of Scottish artists were hard at work while we were queuing outside Cineworld in our Barbie pinks, turning out a backlog of bops to keep the existential dread of the A-bomb at bay. For singles we missed in July, check out Disco Mary ft. Nova (The Once & Future Me), Kohla (One and Only), Nati Dreddd (Stay), Berta Kennedy & Man of Moon (Weigh Me Down), LECKI LECKI (Grow Your Girlfriend), Blair Davie (Found My Person), Julia’s Bureau (Island), Rosie H Sullivan (Fragments), SILVI (Possessed), Raveloe (Rustle In the Leaves), and the psychedelic debut single from Lost Map supergroup Lost Map Presents Weird Wave (Astral Difficulties / Weird Wave). For longer listens, seek out the debut album Music For People We Like by Machine Speak, or Hyperreal, the latest dance-fueled EP from Fourth Daughter

Start August right with the full tank that is Water Machine, whose debut EP drops on the 4th via Upset the Rhythm. Raw Liquid Power is named after the band’s work ethic; grassroots, hardcore, absurdist and anti-authoritarian. The EP opens with a sketchy, droning synthesiser, before the piecemeal punk-rock riffs that give RLP its attitude kick in. With delinquent delight, Water Machine chant ‘Don’t be late, hydrate!’, showing that rules are for fools, but pools are cool. Other stylish subversions involve songs about stray cats – the whole EP is wonderfully weird. Dehydration and wayward pets are rare topics to encounter in punk records, but it rounds off with a middle finger to the privatised transport companies that profit off of subpar services in the magnificently titled Bussy. I’m never on time either, but Water Machine knows exactly who’s to blame for that.

On the same day, new Glasgow producer Sulci emerges with Before the Echo via Glasgow label Bricolage. After an early-age diagnosis of tinnitus and partial deafness, Sulci sought solace in sounds of her own creation, composing techno from her bedroom that paired syncopated beats with a fuzzy, muddled atmosphere. The soundscapes on this record are immersive, ethereal, and wholly unique. Her layered vocals are abstract, almost occluded by the cosmic ambience that gives this album its setting of a stranger world – but her voice is intertwined with the elaborate electronica, and the result makes for an enthralling introduction to her career.

On the 18th, several interesting releases arrive, starting with art-rock electro-opera Hope, by Edinburgh-based Vilde The themes of transience and impermanence, which come from

the fact that Vilde has moved countries eight times in the last 12 years, are characterised by nebulous drum loops, erratic synth beats, and Vilde’s falsetto dancing over the composition. Beautiful Daydream is Liv Dawn’s self-released love letter to Country with a capital C. Lyrics of pastoral euphoria and rustic love are bolstered up by full-body, guitar-and-drums instrumentals. It’s the kind of music you’d like playing when your hair blows in the wind, preferably while you happened to be riding a horse at the same time. Also on the 18th, contemporary classical composer Kim Moore releases A Song We Destroy to Spin Again via Blackford Hill, a 23-minute monolith of eerie string solos, analogue tape loops, and dark, disquieting orchestration, performed by award-winning chamber duo GAIA – violinist Katrina Lee and cellist Alice Allen.

The following week, Magnus Kramers’ Waking Mind EP (25 Aug) uses complex instrumentation and editing to present living, breathing rains, percussion intermingling with distant birdsong, and an easy-listening ecosystem reminiscent of Ibiza’s Cafe del Mar. On the same day, Finn Brodie releases his Home Run EP, giving the summer a suitable send-off.

We first encountered Brodie’s poetic lyricism back in March, when the opening track Birthright made for a capturing single. Over the full record, the collaborative efforts of Frightened Rabbit’s Andy Monaghan uplift Brodie’s heart-rending imagery, achieving a production value superior to other bedroom indie albums while preserving a pared-down authenticity, and letting the introspective songwriting shine through. Brodie paints a world of dysfunctional relationships and harsh, east-coast landscapes, where you grow up watching people disappear into the snow. Brodie started writing at 15, and though he’s moved to Glasgow and come out as trans during his 20s, his evocative tunes make you empathise with a long-gone adolescence and vulnerability. Capturing the complex kind of homeland that you recognise, the kind that doesn’t recognise you back, this eulogistic EP makes for a beautiful, bittersweet entry into autumn.

Other albums worth checking out include the eponymous debut by Snows of Yesteryear (4 Aug), Soft Riot’s tenth album No. (25 Aug), and Learning How to Love and Let Go, the most recent release by Aberdonian alt-rockers The XCERTS (which we cover in full on the previous page). For singles, there’s No Gravity by Gefahrgeist & PINLIGHT (11 Aug), Imaginary Friends by neverfine (11 Aug), and Brace by Dutch Wine (9 Aug).

Photo: Alice Smoth

Finn Brodie Water Machine

Film of the Month — Afire

Director: Christian Petzold

Starring: Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel

RRRR R

Released 25 Aug

Certificate 15

theskinny.co.uk/film

“It’s misfiring” are the first words we hear in Afire Something isn’t quite right and so the car has stopped; it has missed, only just. It’s something of a prognosis for the characters of Christian Petzold’s latest, gorgeous film.

Writer Leon (Thomas Schubert) joins his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), who’s a photographer, on a trip to Felix’s parents’ holiday home by the Baltic Sea. Leon’s idealised quiet is halted by the presence of surprise co-guest Nadja (Paula Beer) and her companion David (Enno Trebbs). As the four intertwine, navigating their mutual yet conflicting desires, forest fires arrest their surroundings. Afire is not a romance; rather it is concerned with desire in emergency – that is, desire at the time of a crisis and desire as crisis.

The protagonist, Leon, is overly concerned with his creative work, with this focus lending to a shortsighted view of everyone and everything else around him. He is a type, here burned anew for the ecological demise that defines our times. Afire’s interrogation of such a type in the present tense is truly a feat.

Leon is always watching, always somewhat detached from the main event. “My work won’t allow it,” he says, choosing pretence over joy and desire. But he’s aware of his aloofness, admonishing himself when he has said the wrong thing yet again. Schubert carries such discrepancies with ease, all frustrated emphases and tense, heavy posture. And yet, there is room for sympathy. Leon’s turmoil is not a peculiar, unidentifiable thing. And this somehow makes him and all his apprehensions bearable.

Such apprehensions are noted by Nadja, a character who unfolds at her own pace. The film is very much told from Leon’s point of view, but at times Nadja’s perspective would have

offered Afire a further depth that wouldn’t have gone amiss; certainly, Beer’s seemingly effortless footing within each scene begs for it.

And naturally, Uibel carries Felix with real warmth and charm, even when condemning or criticising Leon. Their relationship is perhaps Afire’s most noteworthy. Care exists even in conflict and it’s something that both Uibel and Petzold seem acutely aware of. Meanwhile, the introduction of Leon’s publisher (Matthias Brandt) midway offers another lens upon the narrative; we are reminded of the foursome’s youth and uncertainty, in stark comparison with the publisher’s assured, mature approach.

Comedy is used sparingly and it works. With Leon, life is serious and proper and there’s little humour to it. The few moments of comedic respite are easy and laid back, primarily a necessary opportunity to have a laugh at Leon’s solemnity. Music is minimal too, with only one song on the soundtrack, which bookmarks each end of the film. Instead, banal, everyday sounds take precedence: a returning fly, the packing and unpacking of bags, washing dishes, an aeroplane or helicopter that is never seen. The characters’ reality continues loudly as it is simultaneously displaced.

Petzold has constructed a thoughtful, slow-burn watch that asks urgent questions amid a tight, personable narrative. It certainly does not misfire. [Eilidh

Akilade]

Released 25 Aug by Curzon; certificate 15

Screening as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival at Vue Omni Centre, 22-23 Aug

Scotland on Screen: Rodger Griffiths

Kill, the debut feature from Rodger Griffiths, sees three brothers plan to off their abusive dad while on a hunting trip. Griffiths talks to us about shooting this lean, mean thriller, which has its world premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival

Words: Rory Doherty

It feels odd calling a film about brothers murdering their abusive dad on a hunting trip ‘accessible’, but any film about parents and children benefits from an audience bringing along their own complicated experiences. It helps that Kill’s familial dynamics are so well-observed by writer-director Rodger Griffiths, not to mention his brilliant Scottish cast. “Siblings have a real shorthand with each other,” Griffiths says. “There are no niceties, they do each other’s nut in, but they love each other. It’s different from friends.”

When the film begins, the three brothers, Henry (Daniel Portman), John (Brian Vernel) and youngest Vince (Calum Ross) are all committed to dispatching their domineering father, Don (Paul Hi ins), but there’s a sense that none of them are psychologically on the exact same page. To establish their relationships, Griffiths got the actors to improvise backstories between the brothers and sometimes their parents, sketching out psychological relationships that the audience didn’t need to see.

“After their mum died, we thought we’d have Vince trying on one of his mum’s dresses and the brothers discovering that,” Griffiths explains. “A lot of what happens on the screen, there’s been talk about before between the characters. I thought it would be good to do those off-script improvisations so they can live in the characters’ skin for a little bit.”

Kill is based on Griffiths’ short Take the Shot from 2017, which, like Kill will, premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival. The short was shot with Irish actors in Northern Ireland (where Griffiths is from), but the shift to Scotland felt natural.

“Northern Irish and Scottish people have very similar traits and senses of humour – quite macabre and self-deprecating,” says Griffiths. “There’s a warmth there as well. I think if you put a Scottish person in Ireland or Northern Ireland, they’d be just fine, and vice versa.”

Griffiths speaks from experience – he’s lived in Glasgow for over 20 years – but still stresses his film’s broader resonance. “I still think that Kill has universal themes. I feel it could be set in the deep south of America, or South Korea. Because of this whole idea, can you escape from an abusive upbringing or

do you become that person? So I’m looking forward to the Australian remake.”

Griffiths has been waiting to shoot Kill since before the pandemic, and when they got the go-ahead to roll cameras in Kilmarnock’s Craufurdland Estate they had to contend with a reduced 21-day shooting schedule. “That’s what we just had to do,” he says. “We just had to simplify certain things; instead of getting so many setups and angles, we had to work within our parameters. You could spend ages on one scene and not get the two scenes at the end of the day – we didn’t want to do that.

“The circumstances for making a film, especially an independent film, are never perfect. It’s rare to get the opportunity to make an independent film, so if that opportunity arises you dive in and just give it your best basically, and see what happens in the end.”

Griffiths credits his cast and crew for pulling it off, always discovering ways to lighten the load of shooting a 90-minute feature in three weeks. “[The estate] had big forests, but each part had a different vibe and feeling to it. In terms of practicality, you can’t move a unit about that much, it just kills time,” he explains. “So we said, ‘Right, we’re shooting this scene at this angle, we’re shooting this scene 20 metres away, just move forward and move forward.’ We wanted to create the feeling that the brothers have been on a journey, so the forest is wide open at the start, but then as you get in and in, it becomes more claustrophobic.”

It wasn’t just practical alternatives Kill benefited from on set; the actors offered narrative ones too. “An example would be the scene in the barn, where the brothers all get drunk,” explains Griffiths. “We had written the entire scene where Henry was jumping about doing impressions of his dad, sla ing him off and everybody was [laughing]. But when we shot the scene, Daniel, just before he was toasting his mum, burst out crying. I even felt emotional there and then, and it just felt that that was the moment of the scene.”

These shooting circumstances seem to all add to Kill’s overall vibe: it’s a lean, bare-bones thriller packed with incisive character drama. “We have such a contained cast, we had the wilderness as well – I think they complement each other,” Griffiths says. “We could really focus on performance and, although it is an action thriller, it’s very much a character-driven piece. We wanted to explore deeper themes really, while still having this thriller narrative.” It’s not just a bracing watch, but marks an unignorable turn for Scottish genre cinema.

Kill has its world premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival 22 & 23 Aug

Filmography (shorts): Take the Shot (2017), Peter’s Room (2013), Wiped (2010)

“It’s rare to get the opportunity to make an independent film, so if that opportunity arises you dive in”

Rodger Griffiths

Passages

Director: Ira Sachs

Starring: Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, Adèle Exarchopoulos rrrrr

Ira Sachs has long been one of the most exciting voices on the American indie scene but he hasn’t quite broken through to a wide audience. Passages might just be that breakthrough. It’s an incisive relationship drama set in Paris centred on a maddeningly narcissistic film director, played wonderfully by German actor Franz Rogowski. You’ll love to hate Tomas from the opening scene, when he has a tantrum on set after an actor fails to understand his vague directions.

It turns out Tomas is as capricious a lover as he is a director. At the wrap party, he gets talking to Agathe (Exarchopoulos), a school teacher who seems to be helping out on the project, and they spend a passionate night together. The only

problem is that Tomas is married to the sweet Martin (Ben Whishaw) – at least it would be a problem if Tomas cared a jot for anyone else’s feelings. He blurts out his infidelities over morning coffee, too excited by his own sexual self-discovery to notice he’s cut his husband to the quick.

The film follows Tomas as he flits between his two lovers while agonising over the reception of his new film. The miracle of Rogowski’s performance is that we sympathise with his plight as selfishness comes home to roost, while also finding comic delight as he scrambles to avert his downfall. Genuine pathos is saved for Agathe and Martin. Despite being a deliriously sexy and passionate film, their ruinous experiences make a great case for avoiding love at all costs.

[Jamie Dunn]

Released 1 Sep by MUBI; certificate 18

Passages screens at EIFF on 19 & 20 Aug

Kokomo City Director: D. Smith

Starring: Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell rrrrr

Kokomo City, a documentary built on the testimonies of Black trans sex workers, feels intimate and confessional from the opening anecdote, where Liyah, one of the central subjects, recounts an altercation with an armed client.

Violence underpins these women’s lives: threats of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, but also the terrifying cost of constant societal alienation.

But regardless of these pressures (or perhaps because of them) the women speak with a pride and confidence that moves, compels, and provokes. These trusted subjects, through necessity and experience, are the most proficient and articulate about issues of Black transness, sex work, and inequality, and director D. Smith has found a brilliant rhythm to guide us through their wisdom.

At times, her camera rests among glasses on a bar table, watching her subjects’ physicality as they talk; at others, she cuts from cis men (some empathetic to trans identity, others less so) to her subjects, who wipe the floor with them with their informed, articulate perspectives. The film’s lo-fi feel is due to unfortunate circumstances, as Smith was homeless when she started the project, but the completed work has a sparky intimacy. Playful recreations, crude but pretty animations, and an eclectic soundtrack feature throughout, occasionally undermining the sheer vulnerability of the women’s testimonies.

Straightness, male shame, the hypocrisy of cis female allyship – these women have a vital vantage point on a society that values their bodies but won’t promise them safety. It’s hard to imagine a more urgent and worthy documentary out now. [Rory

Doherty]

Released 4 Aug by Dogwoof; certificate 18

Scrapper

Director: Charlotte Regan

Starring: Lola Campbell, Harris Dickinson, Alin Uzun, Ambreen Razia, Olivia Brady, Aylin Tezel, Freya Bell rrrrr

Scrapper puts a joyous spin on working-class stories with a tender fatherdaughter dramedy that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Closing in at 84 minutes, Charlotte Regan’s debut is a charming and funny, if not particularly original, tale of meeting in the middle and coming of age. Twelve-year-old Georgie (an impressive Lola Campbell in her first film role) is raising herself after the loss of her mum, living on a pastel estate and getting by by stealing bikes with her friend Ali (Alin Uzun).

Wise beyond her years, Georgie doesn’t allow herself to grieve, physically confining her pain to a mysterious room in her yellow house. She’s confronted with old and fresh sorrows, however, when her estranged father, Jason (Harris Dickinson), shows up. But Scrapper rejects a bleak social

drama narrative, balancing reality with vibrant magical realism.

A tight-knit community, the estate serves as a microcosm shielding the protagonist from all external incursions, from social services to disgruntled teachers, characters we mostly see in mockumentary-style interviews. The film could have benefited from a more focused direction, because these departures from the main narrative, visually and tonally, weigh Scrapper down at times.

The movie’s secret weapon, though, is its leading duo: an old soul trapped in a young girl’s body and a 30-year-old who’s a teen at heart. It’s a potentially flammable combination sustained by an effortless chemistry between Campbell and Dickinson. Both breathe warmth into every comedic line, finding levity and hope in the most unexpected places. [Stefania Sarrubba]

Released 25 Aug by Picturehouse; certificate 12

Scrapper screens at EIFF on 19 Aug

The First Slam Dunk

Director: Takehiko Inoue

Starring: (Voices of) Syugo Nakamura, Jun Kasama, Shinichiro Kamio rrrrr

Prepare for whiplash in the basketball drama The First Slam Dunk, and not just from the hyperkinetic editing of the action on court. There’s a rather jarring mix of animation styles, which skip from flashbacks rendered in beautiful hand-drawn animation to a cruder computer-generated style set in the present day. We can only assume this is intentional, but the effect is like watching two movies smushed together – one, a beautifully tender story of grief and heartbreak, the other a meat-headed sports movie.

The First Slam Dunk is based on the epic 31-volume manga Slam Dunk created by Takehiko Inoue, who also directs here, and his approach to structure doesn’t favour people coming to his story afresh. The film’s two-hour runtime is concerned with a

big high-school basketball game between underdogs Shohoku and elite team Sannoh. Inoue then begins to drip-feed us character information, sporadically cutting away from the three-pointers, trash talking and bone-crunching injuries to show us the players as children and what brought them to this moment. It’s a novel technique that’s not always successful. Because we don’t initially know the players or why this game is so crucial, it’s hard to get invested in the outcome, and by sporadically leaving the high-octane match for a gentler human story, the tension is continually being deflated.

The film is certainly resonating with audiences, though; it’s been a ju ernaut hit in Japan. I suspect, however, your enjoyment of The First Slam Dunk might be dependent on your familiarity with Inoue's manga.

[Jamie Dunn]

Released 1 Sep by Anime Ltd; certificate TBC

The First Slam Dunk screens at EIFF on 22 & 23 Aug

Scrapper

Passages

The First Slam Dunk

Kokomo City

CAPPUCCINO, MUSTAFA’S DERA & DIZZY IZZY’S, EDINBURGH

We try out a trio of new spots across Edinburgh, opening their doors just in time for those festivals everyone’s been talking about

Cappuccino

25 Jeffrey St, EH1 1DH 8am-6pm daily

Mustafa’s Dera

161 Dundee St, EH11 1BY 11am-11pm daily

Dizzy Izzy’s 3 Bristo Pl, EH1 1EY midday-1am daily (until 3am in August)

Coffee

We begin, as so many days do, with a small dog barking at us for trying to go through a fire door. Cappuccino (25 Jeffrey St) is a brand-new coffee shop between Waverley Station and the Royal Mile, and the first thing to report is that the staff are absolutely lovely. Unprovoked nice comments about our jumper will always sit well with us, but they’re very nice and personable, which is what you want first thing in the morning.

As for the coffee, it’s pretty damn good. Is it going to trouble The Skinny Food Section’s Edinburgh Specialty Coffee Leaderboard? Probably not (food@theskinny.co.uk if you want the goss), but our cortado (£2.90) is well-made with a nice, chewy kick. It also comes in an achingly trendy Huskee cup and saucer, made from recycled coffee husks. This cup is incredibly light, it’s very early, we don’t realise this right away and very nearly yeet the whole thing across the room.

The whole place is a blend of terracotta paint (and a lovely handwritten sign outside), brushed concrete and lovely chairs. For a chilled, on-trend spot just off the Royal Mile – grab a seat, enjoy the plants and try not to launch your cup in the air – it’s well worth a visit.

Dinner

From the outside, Mustafa’s Dera (161 Dundee St) is a lot to look at, with its bright pink walls and handwritten notes all over the windows. Inside it’s equally active with artwork posted up everywhere, and the menu of Pakistani and Indian dishes is similarly full. There are some fantastic hits in here; the kebab roll (£2.99) is a spicy, juicy sikh kebab rolled up in naan dough and will make you wonder why you’ve been tolerating boring old sausage rolls all this time. The gol gappay (£5.49) are fantastically crisp puffs ready to be loaded with sauces and fillings, then eaten in one big mouthful hopefully without covering yourself in tamarind.

So that’s a tick for crunchy stuff. As for curries, the lamb achari (£10.49) is excellent; good levels of pickle, and impressive commitment to spice. The Yakni (£7.99) is billed as a ‘meat stew’, and that’s what you get – lots and lots of meat, in a deliciously spiced sauce – while the keema aloo mutter (£12.95) is just a great example of the genre. Big chunks of lamb, tasty gravy, occasional peas for health, love it.

It’s a tiddly little space with six or so tables, and a real family affair in both the front and back of house. It is also, as the table behind us proved,

possibly too spicy for some. But a small, family-run restaurant doing tasty, home-cooked food that won’t break the bank? We’re on board.

Drinks

Time, as Matthew McConaughey once said, is a flat circle, and tonight we’ve stopped at the bit of the circle you might know as ‘the late 2000s’. Dizzy Izzy’s (3 Bristo Pl) is a dive bar-inspired spruce-up for the surprisingly spacious bar unit that previously housed Checkpoint, and before that the Forest. Think big comfy chairs, Chesterfield sofas that you can sink into, loads of leopard print, and a suspiciously high level of alleged graffiti for a bar that’s only been open for a weekend when we pop in.

In fact, forget ‘surprisingly spacious’, this place is enormous; if you need a place to take the various pals who’ll be crashing on your sofa this Fringe, this feels like a solid bet. And it’s a great bar – attentive staff, a great drinks list filled with interesting cocktails and dive bar classics (a boilermaker for £6, in this economy, let’s roll), nice touches of detail and one shuffleboard table for everyone to fight over. How it’ll fare in the raging pool of August remains to be seen, but on a first visit it looks like Dizzy Izzy’s should be a welcome addition to town.

Words: Peter Simpson

Image: courtesy of the venue

Dizzy Izzy’s

Cappuccino

Photo: Peter Simpson

Trouble

By Lex Croucher RRRRR

When prickly, angry-at-the world Emily Laurence takes on her sick sister’s identity and shows up to Fairmont House as their new governess, she has just three things in mind: 1. If she can save her wages and steal a few things along the way, her sister Amy might just be able to see a doctor. 2. She absolutely isn’t going to be drawn into the family’s warm, eccentric dynamic, no matter how much they try to include her. 3. There is no way she could be interested in the gruff, brooding Captain Edwards…

Lex Croucher possesses some kind of magic when it comes to making historical romances feel modern, without losing all the trappings and tropes we love from the genre. Class, wealth, and society’s expectations are all explored, and it is so fun to read a heroine who doesn’t care about being liked, argues just to be contrary, and absolutely freaks out at the idea of having feelings. Trouble is a delight, and one to pick up if you want to spark joy in your heart; full of found family, slow burn romance, and characters who adore and accept each other for who they are. There is space for everyone in Croucher’s books, no matter their ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, or gender, and representation is purposeful, inclusive, and thoughtful. The romance genre is richer for having them in it.

[Sim Bajwa]

I Will Greet the Sun Again

By Khashayar J. Khabushani RRRRR

The protagonist of Khashayar J. Khabushani’s I Will Greet the Sun Again is named, much like his author, after a great Persian king – the only one of three brothers to bear an Iranian name. He wears it uneasily, going by K in school and at home, his embarrassment thick under the hot beating sun of 90s California where his parents have relocated. Iran, in many ways, means very little to him – a hazy past from which he comes, but only finds expression in the broken Farsi and discomforting unbelonging of his present.

There is an intricacy to Khabushani’s debut that belies the frankness of its prose and the close-quarters intimacy of its coming-of-age. Starting out in the quiet claustrophobia of childhood, where a nine year-old K feels the tightness of burgeoning queer desire in his stomach and navigates the unpredictable moods of his father and brothers, the narrative breaks open midway through, as the boys’ father steals them away to Iran before they return to an America on the brink of 9/11. A tale of diaspora that is as gutting as it is tender, I Will Greet the Sun Again is an inquiry into what we can lay claim to: the collective haunting of a lost country, queerness that is barely allowed to take shape, grief and fear that can, at any moment, explode into violence. Every word, deft and unassuming, shatters.

[Anahit

Behrooz]

Traces of Enayat

By Iman Mersal RRRRR

Enayat al-Zayyat was an Egyptian writer who, in 1963, killed herself four years before her only novel would be published – briefly celebrated and then for decades, forgotten. In the 1990s, poet and scholar Iman Mersal finds Enayat’s book and is captivated, journeying to find Enayat, wresting her from the cultural, patriarchal and bourgeois logics that have written and rewritten the meaning of her life and death. Traces of Enayat is the culmination of this search, originally published in Arabic in 2019.

The journey to Enayat is not linear. While existing in official archives and newspapers, Mersal finds her personal archive destroyed, and conflicting narratives held by her closest friends and family. Mersal navigates this loss through deft understanding of archival and biographical theory, and rich empathy for Enayat’s stru le through depression, and for her independence as a woman, mother and writer. What originally is conceived of as an impossible search becomes the premise of the book: a search for traces of someone lost to history. Mersal’s writing is as organic as her journey through these traces; accordingly, the book does not follow a simple chronology of Enayat’s life. Biography and memoir are blended, with some chapters sitting as standalone essays on the literary scene in post-revolution Cairo, and reflections on motherhood. Enayat emerges and breathes, independent, in the expansiveness and freedom of this structure and Mersal’s compelling, tender writing. [Riyoko Shibe] And

The Baudelaire Fractal

By Lisa Robertson RRRRR

Hazel Brown – penniless neophyte seduced by literature into leaving home – wakes in her hotel room one day feeling that she has written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. While Lisa Robertson’s debut might sound like science fiction, it is a study of somebody experiencing a sensation beyond their cognitive limits. Hazel finds her own story reflected in Baudelaire’s biography: a young artist discovering their autonomy within the inadequate confines of cheaply rented spaces.

An acclaimed poet herself, Robertson navigates novel emotions with ease. Some of these Hazel feels herself; others, she finds in books. She reads Edgar Allen Poe and learns that Poe haunted Baudelaire like Baudelaire haunts her; he too awoke one day with the haunted sense that Poe’s work was his. Yet Hazel wears her realisation uncomfortably; Baudelaire’s work, now her work, is full of mendicant girls that are as scorned as they are lusted after.

Still, Hazel feels an affinity for his circumstances. Like her fellow artists in fugue, Hazel seeks freedom from her ordained place in the world, looking for a life lived outside money – one that may barely reach beyond survival, but will allow her to “not be bored and to experience grace.” So precisely rendered is Hazel’s situation that no doubt someone out there will one day wake up feeling that they have written the complete works of Lisa Robertson. Many more will simply wish they had.

[Louis Cammell]

Peninsula Press, 24 Aug

Bonnier Books, out now

Glasgow Music

Tue 01 Aug

THE DIRTY NIL

KING TUT’S, 20:00–22:00

Rock from Canada.

HMW & THE UNION (CHELL & THE VETOS + HEY, LONELY PLANET) NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:30–22:00

Noise punk from the UK.

BILLY NOMATES

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00

Indie from the UK.

WILLY MASON

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from the US.

Wed 02 Aug

IGLU & HARTLY

KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Pop rock from LA.

MY RUSHMORE (BLUSHLESS) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:30–22:00

Indie lineup.

CALVIN MCKEE (THE SINGING GINGER + BRONWYN STORRIE + ROBBIE MCTAGGART)

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Indie from the UK. HOMEWORK

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Rock by Scotland.

Thu 03 Aug

SCRATCHCARD

WEDNESDAY (UNDER REVIEW + BRIDE + THE BRAES) KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Indie from Scotland.

THE INSOMNIACS (THE MORELLOS + QUAINT) BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Power pop from New Jersey.

PEACH CRUMB (MARI SUTHERLAND) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:30–22:00

Indie from Glasgow.

CARLA J. EASTON

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Synth pop from Scotland.

Fri 04 Aug

RAZZ MATTREEZY (VIOLET MONSTERA + WEATHERMAN + JOE

GOODALL & THE FREE RADICALS)

KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Aberdeen.

THE NEW ROUTINES (THE MODERN KIND + THE GLASS KEY + SUB VIOLET) BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Alt indie from Scotland.

THE VINTAGE EXPLOSION

OLD FRUITMARKET

GLASGOW, 19:30–22:00

Rock ‘n’ roll from Scotland.

Listings

Looking for something to do? Well you’re in the right place! Find listings below for the month ahead across Music, Clubs, Theatre, Comedy and Art in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. To find out how to submit listings, head to theskinny.co.uk/listings

THE VAPOUR TRAILS (THE CHEESE + DROPKICK)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:30–22:00

Indie from Aberdeen.

LOS CHICHANOS (FEMME 45 + VARDI)

THE RUM SHACK, 20:00–22:00

Psychedlic jungle from Edinburgh.

BIN JUICE

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Indie from Glasgow.

Sat 05 Aug

FLAIR (THE SHAHS + THE OVERALLS + TORRS)

KING TUT’S, 20:30–

22:00

Indie rock from Glasgow.

DANCER (SMALL GAUGE + ESSEN)

THE FLYING DUCK,

19:00–22:00

Post-punk from Glasgow.

SUNSTINGER (T-A + TRANSMISSION SUITE)

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Shoegaze from Scotland.

HIGH RISE RECORDS

PRESENTS

MODERNISTIC (P

CASO + RINGU)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:00–22:00

Neo-jazz from Scotland.

HANA JANE (JOSIAH

KENNEDY )

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Scotland.

Sun 06 Aug

VIGILANTI (TIARA FILTH + WISHBONE + HOME FOR JOY )

KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Punk rock from Glasgow.

EVERY WAVE

PRESENTS (CROCODILE TEARS + FROG COSTUME +

SLOWMOVE + OCHRE + BRASSER + PARK SAFELY + SALT JAR)

BROADCAST, 14:00–22:00

Eclectic lineup.

ROSS WILCOCK +

FRIENDS: LOGIC BOY +

OLIVER ROBERTSON +

MEAGAN JENNETTE

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Eclectic lineup.

Tue 08 Aug

SCUNNURT (TIDAL END) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Post-punk jazz from Paisley.

Wed 09 Aug

THE GIRL UPSTAIRS + TONI FAULDS + THE PISTOL DAISYS +

LIZABETH BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Eclectic lineup.

THE YUMMY FUR (SIMONE ANTIGONE + THE CRAILS) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Indie rock from Glasgow.

Thu 10 Aug

LITTLEST CHICKEN (LECKI LECKI + EACH

CONFIDE + BECKI

RUTHERFORD)

KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Scotland.

UNDETERMINED (THE LATITUDE) BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Edinburgh.

AVOCADO HEARTS (THE MICRO BAND + HOWLING HOME) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Indie from Glasgow.

Fri 11 Aug

CHEF THE RAPPER (CYRANO + JAAD & SHERLOCK + CHELSEA

KEIR) KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Rap from Aberdeen.

SPUNK VOLCANO & THE ERUPTIONS BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Alt rock from the UK.

DIVING HORSE STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Alt rock from Glasgow.

FORMER CHAMP (JILL

LOREAN + HOUND +

HOLY SNAKES) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00 Indie from Glasgow.

FORTITUDE VALLEY (ADULTS + GET WRONG + COME OUTSIDE) THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00 Indie punk from London.

Sat 12 Aug

BOTTLE ROCKETS (MILANGE + FIGURINES + BAD

NEWS)

KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Indie rock from Scotland.

EVERYDAY PHARAOHS (COWBOY HUNTERS + SIGOURNEY ) THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Glasgow.

COLONY HOUSE

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Indie rock from Tennessee.

LA MANTRA BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Indie pop from Dunfermline.

DARK PLACES: A MINI-

FESTIVAL

STEREO, 18:00–22:00

Eclectic lineup.

THE FILTHY TONGUES

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 18:00–22:00 Eclectic lineup.

ROSIE H SULLIVAN

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Indie folk from Edinburgh.

Sun 13 Aug

ONE NINE EIGHT

KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Alt rock from East Kilbride.

BOY NORTH (KINTRA + NEVERFINE + SCHOOL OF PARIS)

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Deep house from Scotland.

MEGA BOG (MAIJA SOFIA)

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Avant-pop from the US.

Tue 15 Aug

JOEY VALENCE & BRAE

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Rap from the UK.

Wed 16 Aug

GRACE & THE FLAT BOYS (STOCK MANAGER + ROBIN

ASHCROFT + MADS

SAYCE)

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Jazz funk from Edinburgh. ISLAND OF LOVE (MIDDLEMAN)

THE FLYING DUCK,

19:00–22:00

Rock from London.

SWANS

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

Punk rock from New York.

THE CABINET NOIR (FAILED SUSTEM TEST + LUCIAN FLETCHER)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 20:00–22:00

Eclectic lineup.

JOLIETTE

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Post-hardcore from Mexico.

Thu 17 Aug

MORNING MIDNIGHT

KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Bedroom pop from Glasgow.

JOSH KELLY

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Eclectic lineup.

JUNK PUPS (QUEEN CULT + SWEET BLEACH)

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Pop rock from Glasgow.

Fri 18 Aug

SPIRAL CITIES (THE INVAINES + THE ZEBECKS + WEEKENDS

AWAY )

KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Alt pop from Glasgow.

THE SRB (KATE MCCABE)

THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Birmingham.

PINCH POINTS

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Post-punk from Melbourne.

PROJECT SMOK STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Trad from Scotland.

DILLON SQUIRE

THE RUM SHACK, 19:30–22:00

Pop rock from Glasgow.

CORE: A CELEBRATION OF NOISE

MARYHILL COMMUNITY CENTRAL HALLS, 18:00–22:00

Noise, punk and hardcore lineup.

LIV DAWN (LUNA NEPTUNE + JODIE ELIZABETH KING)

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Pop folk from Scotland.

Sat 19 Aug

RODEO CLUB (CANONGATE + LEISURELAND + SKYLOUNGE) KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00 Rock from Glasgow.

PICKY BITS (VELVET + SISTER MADDS + ESCHER + WEATHERMAN + TWO

ODD CAT + BLUSH CLUB + PAT MOON KISS) BROADCAST, 14:00–22:00

Eclectic lineup.

EASY DAYS STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Indie pop from Glasgow.

Sun 20 Aug

PEDALO ( YOUTH FOR SALE + ATTIC DAYS + SHEP)

KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Indie from Scotland.

CAT CLYDE SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Canada.

BE YOUR OWN PET

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Punk rock from Nashville.

Mon 21 Aug

THE WALKMEN SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Post-punk from New York.

SNAIL MAIL ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

Indie rock from the US.

CABLE TIES

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Punk rock from Melbourne.

Tue 22 Aug

DELTA GOODREM SWG3 19:00–22:00

Pop from Australia.

IAN SVENONIUS BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Rock from the US.

ETRAN DE L'AÏR

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Blues from Niger.

Wed 23 Aug

MAGNOLIA PARK (THE BOTTOM LINE) KING TUT’S, 20:00–22:00

Alt indie from Florida.

BONOBO SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Electronica from the UK. COPPER LUNGS + OCEXNS + FUZZY + DANIEL ANTONIO AND THE LOST BOYS BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Indie lineup.

BO NINGEN

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Noise rock from Japan.

Thu 24 Aug

RORY JAMES KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Alt indie from Scotland.

CHINESE FOOTBALL BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Math rock from China.

TV GIRL BARROWLANDS, 19:00–22:00

Indie pop from San Diego.

Fri 25 Aug USUAL AFFAIRS (THE SQUINTS + FOREIGN 2 + INTO YESTERDAY ) KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Indie from Edinburgh.

NEW TOWN SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Alt rock from Scotland.

THE PHANTOM PROJECT (LAYAWAY + VANSLEEP) BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Edinburgh.

THE POACHERS (TOM DAVIS TRIO + AGHAOZHOR) THE RUM SHACK, 19:30–22:00

Indie from Glasgow.

Sat 26 Aug

THETA (DH-REES + PHARMACY HOUSE + THE MANNAS) KING TUT’S, 20:30–22:00

Rock from Glasgow.

THE BUG CLUB (THE WIFE GUYS OF REDDIT) MONO, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Wales.

ANT THOMAZ SWG3 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Glasgow.

DAVEY HORNE (PEAKS & VALLEYS + DANIEL MCGEEVER) BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Fife. SHED SEVEN BARROWLANDS, 19:00–22:00

Alt rock from York.

COFFIN MULCH ALBUM LAUNCH STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Death metal from Scotland.

JOSEPHINE SILLARS (PEACH CRUMB + ZERRIN) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Pop from Scotland. GLASGOPOLOOZA (BOYS ON THE RADIO + NECRONIC + DEAN MACK + SOPHIE BELLA) ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00 Hard rock lineup.

Sun 27 Aug

THE ACES

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Alt pop from the US.

DINOSAUR 94 (CREAMY LIPS + FORGETTING THE FUTURE + THE LUTRAS) BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Alt indie from Edinburgh.

BUCK MEEK STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Indie from the US.

FRIENDSHIP THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Indie rock from the US.

Mon 28 Aug

CHASE ATLANTIC O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Alt pop from Australia.

JON PARDI (ELLA LANGLEY ) OLD FRUITMARKET GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Country from California.

B. DOLAN THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Rap from the US.

Tue 29 Aug

CHASE ATLANTIC O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Alt pop from Australia. ETHEL CAIN SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from the US.

LIME CORDIALE SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Surf pop from Australia.

JESSE JO STARK

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Indie from the US.

Edinburgh Music

Tue 01 Aug

CLICK CLACK: BUTABAGA + DAVE SERIES + CHINWAG BANNERMANS, 19:00–

22:00

Eclectic lineup.

VRA + MOTHER FOCUS + ORCHID FOX

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Post-rock from Edinburgh.

Wed 02 Aug

THE FU’S (WARCHRIST + AT THEIR MERCY ) BANNERMANS, 19:00–

22:00

Hardcore punk from Boston.

HARRY MILES WATSON & THE UNION SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Folk rock from Edinburgh.

Thu 03 Aug

GIN ANNIE BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00

Hard rock from the UK.

Fri 04 Aug

TYLA (DOGS D’AMOUR) BANNERMANS, 19:00–

22:00

Blues rock from London.

MULL HISTORICAL SOCIETY SUMMERHALL, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Scotland.

WUKASA + FEELS LIKE PLUTO + MOSAICS SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Indie pop from Edinburgh.

Sat 05 Aug THE LONDON ASTROBEAT ORCHESTRA SUMMERHALL, 19:00–22:00

Experimental afrobeats from London. FOURTH DAUGHTER + BETA WAVES + SACUL SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Electro pop from Scotland.

Sun 06 Aug

THE BAD DAY

BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Rock from the UK.

EXAMPLE O2 ACADEMY EDINBURGH, 19:00–22:00

Rap from the UK. GOOD FUTURE + EARTHMELON + SISTER SISTER SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Synth pop from Manchester.

Mon 07 Aug

PORNO MASSACRE

BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Brazil.

WE WERE PROMISED

JETPACKS SUMMERHALL, 19:00–22:00

Indie rock from Edinburgh.

Tue 08 Aug

YANN TIERSEN THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00

Composer from France.

CANONGATE + HOSPITAL CORNER SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Alt indie from Edinburgh.

BETH NIELSEN CHAPMAN THE QUEEN’S HALL, 20:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Nashville.

Wed 09 Aug

DREAMS OF DEAD FLOWERS (NEW DIMENSIONS + I WILL TAKE YOU HUNTING) BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Scotland.

JACOB ALON SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Edinburgh.

Thu 10 Aug

CUD

BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00

Indie rock from Leeds.

YABBA + LLOYD’S HOUSE + NIGHT CALLER SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Sleaze disco/punk from Dumfries.

National Museum of Scotland

BEYOND THE LITTLE

BLACK DRESS

1 AUG-29 OCT, 10:00AM – 5:00PM

Deconstructing the often radical history of the iconic fashion fit.

RISING TIDE: ART AND ENVIRONMENT IN OCEANIA

12 AUG-14 APR 24, 10:00AM – 5:00PM

An examination of our relationship to the natural environment told through responses to climate change by Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists.

Open Eye Gallery

JOHN BELLANY: THE ITALIAN CONNECTION

1-26 AUG, TIMES VARY

A series of bright, figurative paintings.

JOANNE THOMPSON: NEW JEWELLERY

1-26 AUG, TIMES VARY

An exhibition of jewellery pieces by contemporary jewellery-maker Joanne Thompson.

Out of the Blue Drill Hall

OVERBLOWN EXHIBITION

1-12 AUG, 10:00AM –

4:00PM

Exhibition of inflatable structures and installations, created by Drill Hall artists and makers.

Royal Botanic Garden

KEG DE SOUZA: SHIPPING ROOTS

1-26 AUG, 10:00AM –

6:00PM

Tracing narratives of displacement through alien plants such as eucalyptus and prickly pear in order to explore the ecological weight of colonialism.

CONNECTING HISTORIES

1 AUG-13 APR 24, 10:00AM – 6:00PM

An extraordinary survey of Indian botanical drawing.

Royal Scottish Academy RSA

ELIZABETH

BLACKADDER + JOHN HOUSTON: A JOURNEY

SHARED

1 AUG-10 SEP, TIMES

VARY

A major exhibition of two key Scottish Academicians focusing on their travels, research and studio practices.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

ALBERTA

WHITTLE: CREATE

DANGEROUSLY

1 AUG-7 JAN 24, 10:00AM – 5:00PM

An immersive exhibition exploring compassion and collective care as a mode of anti-racist resistance.

DECADES: THE ART OF CHANGE 1900–1980

1 AUG-7 JAN 24

10:00AM – 5:00PM

A dramatic journey through 80 years of art and moments of significant artistic change.

Scottish National

Portrait Gallery TAYLOR WESSING

PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PRIZE 2022

1 AUG-10 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM

Drawing on over 4000 entries from 62 countries, this prize exhibition showcases the groundbreaking, shifting landscape of modern portraiture.

Sierra Metro

HAEIN KIM: PAIN 2

POWER

13-27 AUG, 10:00AM –2:00PM

A playful, subversive exhibition by Australian-born artist exploring representations of female interiority.

Stills MARKÉTA LUSKAČOVÁ

12 AUG-7 OCT, 12:00PM – 5:00PM

The first exhibition in Scotland dedicated to the work of Czech photographer Markéta Luskačová, focusing on her tender, intimate portraits of children.

Summerhall

OWEN NORMAND: STILL MOVING

1 AUG-24 SEP, 12:00PM – 5:30PM

Pulling from both Eastern and Western paintings traditions, this exhibition explores still life as a space in which to explore impermanence.

THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE WAY

1 AUG-24 SEP, 12:00PM – 5:30PM

A diverse exhibition of female artists responding to the research theme of Women, Art & Inequality.

MAKESHIFT

1 AUG-24 SEP, 12:00PM – 5:30PM

Three artists examine makeshift approaches to minimalist artistic practice.

CHARLIE STIVEN: KIOSK

1 AUG-24 SEP, 12:00PM – 5:30PM

Investigating the street kiosk space as a metaphor for social circumstance and condition.

SYNTHESIS

1 AUG-24 SEP, 12:00PM – 5:30PM

The first annual SYNTHESIS exhibition sees an international cultural collaboration between two Scottish and two Japanese artists.

Talbot Rice Gallery

LAWRENCE ABU

HAMDAN: 45TH PARALLEL

1 AUG-30 SEP, TIMES

VARY Turner Prize-winning artist presents their first Scottish exhibition, examining politically liminal spaces.

JESSE JONES: THE TOWER

1 AUG-30 SEP, TIMES

VARY Film, performances and installation come together to explore the intersection between heresy and gendered oppression.

HEPHZIBAH ISRAEL: THE NATURE OF DIFFERENCE

1 AUG-30 SEP, TIMES

VARY

A series of specially commissioned text works exploring ideas of displacement and belonging.

The Scottish Gallery

WONDER WOMEN: DAME ELIZABETH BLACKADDER (19312021) | A CELEBRATION

1-26 AUG, TIMES VARY

Part of three exhibitions

spotlighting three remarkable artists.

WONDER WOMEN: WENDY RAMSHAW, CBE, RDI (1939-2018) | THE EARLY YEARS

1-26 AUG, TIMES VARY

Part of three exhibitions spotlighting three remarkable artists.

WONDER WOMEN: BODIL MANZ AT 80

1-26 AUG, TIMES VARY

Part of three exhibitions

spotlighting three remarkable artists.

Trinity Apse

PLATFORM: EARLY

CAREER ARTIST

AWARD 2023

11-27 AUG, 10:00AM –

5:00PM

The 9th edition of Edinburgh Art Festival’s celebration of early career artists - this year featuring groundbreaking work by Aqsa Arif, Crystal Bennes, Rudy Kanhye, and Richard Maguire.

Dundee

Art

DCA: Dundee

Contemporary Arts

ZINEB SEDIRA: CAN’T

YOU SEE THE SEA CHANGING?

1-6 AUG, TIMES VARY

Working across photography, installation and film, Sedira draws upon her personal history to explore ideas of identity, mobility, gender, environment and collective memory.

SAOIRSE AMIRA ANIS: SYMPHONY FOR A FRAYING BODY

1-6 AUG, TIMES VARY

Informed by Black queer literature, this exhibition by Dundee artist looks at rituals of personal and collective memory formation.

RACHEL EULENA

WILLIAMS: HAIR AND BODY

26 AUG-19 NOV, TIMES VARY

Generator Projects

ELINOR O’DONOVAN: THE IMMEASURABLE GRIEF OF THE PRAWN

3-6 AUG, 12:00PM –

5:00PM

A wry, dreamy moving image piece exploring ideas of memory and approximate knowledge through the surreal figure of the prawn.

The McManus

HIDDEN HISTORIES: EXPLORING EQUALITY, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION IN DUNDEE’S ART COLLECTION

1 AUG-30 DEC, 10:00AM – 5:00PM

Exploring the McManus 20th-century collection through different positionalities, to examine the responsibility of the museum as institution in responding to history.

CASTS AND COPIES

1 AUG-30 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM

Examining the artistic and historic significance of copies, fakes, and forgeries.

V&A Dundee

TARTAN

3 AUG-14 JAN 24

10:00AM – 5:00PM

A major new exhibition looking at the social, political, and aesthetic history of tartan.

OSPAAAL: SOLIDARITY AND DESIGN

3-27 AUG, 10:00AM –

5:00PM

A display of revolutionary posters by the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Dundee Venues

Everything from the old to the new opens in Dundee this month, including the refurb of a beloved old pub and a gorgeous new vintage shop

Words: Rebecca Baird

STAR AND GARTER 42 UNION STREET, DD1 4BE

This iconic Dundee pub has been brought back from the dead this year by father and son duo, John and Thomas Justice. The Union Street watering hole was a city centre fixture for decades before its five-year hiatus began in 2018. Now it’s back, revamped in a luxurious racing green exterior with its original fixtures, fittings and signs all reinstated. Having been taken over by craft brewery Dynamo, the new-and-improved Star and Garter now offers a mix of traditional pints and craft beers, as well as a clean and classy environment filled with city history. At just a stone’s throw away from the railway station, it’s the perfect place for visitors and regulars alike to drink, relax and reminisce.

WEST VINTAGE DUNDEE

55 PERTH ROAD, DD1 4HY

Expanding on its already-booming premises in Glasgow and in St Andrews, West Vintage has landed on Dundee’s Perth Road in a pop of unmissable orange. This vintage shop is the opposite of rummaging flea markets, with sleek, well-lit and most importantly wellorganised rails full of anything a retro clothing fan could dream up. From fluffy suede and leather jackets that would made Daisy Jones jealous to designer denim, patterned headscarves and dreamy 60s minis, this is a place to find the outfit staples of years gone by – for a very reasonable price, which is handy for the many students who live in this trendy part of town.

ARLENE PETERS ART 26 BELLFIELD STREET, DD1 5JA

A hidden gem, tucked away in the industrial Blackness area, this independent art studio is an exciting new addition to the city centre’s thriving arts scene. Founded and run by Dundee artist and interior designer Arlene Peters, the studio offers art and upcycled furniture for sale for those looking for something extra special to adorn their home. As well as a wide range of abstract painting pieces, they also run art classes, crafting workshops and paint-and-sip nights throughout the year, allowing enthusiasts to tap into their creative side in a lively group setting, with a range of talented local artists helping to guide and offer their expertise to clients.

BLEND BAXTER PARK BAXTER PARK PAVILION, 15-16 BAXTER PARK TERRACE, DD4 7BF

Popular city centre coffee shop Blend has added a new venue in Stobswell, at the iconic Baxter Park Pavilion. This adorably tiny park-based pit stop is perfect for dog walkers (and their furry friends), with a condensed range of coffees and goodies on the go for humans and canines alike. Where the city centre venue is ultra-cosy, squishy and study central, the new Baxter Park Blend is a quieter, airier set up, with fewer seats but just as much abundant hospitality. If you’re looking for the opposite of a fast-paced, conveyor-belt coffee shop, where personal touches and stopping to chat are the norm, take a walk in the park and see for yourself – but be warned, you may be queuing out the door!

West Vintage Dundee

Blend Baxter Park

Image: courtesy of venue

Image: courtesy of venue

The Skinny On... Sofie Hagen

We challenge Sofie Hagen to the Q&A as she returns to the Fringe with Banglord, ‘a sexy, sleazy, sweaty, frisky show about sexual frustration’

What’s your favourite place to visit and why?

The Edinburgh Fringe. It sounds like I’m giving you a slick PR answer, but it’s genuinely my favourite place and time in the whole world. I never want to spend an August not in Edinburgh.

Favourite food and why?

I think there is too much focus on what the food is. Most food is great. What really matters is portion sizes. If I told you my favourite meal (Danish Christmas food) and you gave me one spoonful of it, I’d kick off. I’d ruin your life. It would be the worst thing ever. And likewise, if you gave me a buffet of it, I’d eat all of it and have a stomach ache. But a perfect portion would make me so happy, I almost don’t care what the food is. A burrito the perfect size, with the perfect proportions of each ingredient? Yes, absolutely. I have eaten in two Michelin star restaurants in my life and each time it was, like, 12 course meals. But the ‘meals’ were all the size of a finger nail and I’ve never been more stressed in my life. I’d take a 12 inch pizza over that, because that’s the perfect pizza size.

Favourite colour and why?

Purple. I will also accept red. I will actually accept all colour (not orange) as long as they’re jeweltoned. I need the colours dark and rich. I think it’s because I wasn’t allowed to paint my walls as I was a child and I only wore black till I was 22. So now I’m overcompensating.

Who was your hero growing up?

I was really into Malcolm X when I was like, 5 or 6 years old. I’d watch Fresh Prince of Bel Air on TV and I loved Will Smith. And Will Smith looked up to Malcolm X. I didn’t understand why but I knew that now I loved Malcolm X too. I’d write little letters to Malcolm X, who was very much dead, telling him that I liked his work. I think I thought his work was just featuring on Fresh Prince of Bel Air, as a poster. But I did like that work.

Whose work inspires you now?

Richard Gadd. It’s everything I love and crave in art. It’s dark, it’s honest, it’s funny, it’s beautiful, gripping. It’s next level stuff. I appreciate Richard Gadd so much, it’s unreal. We’re lucky to have him.

What three people would you invite to your dinner party and what are you cooking?

Aubrey Gordon, Lindy West and Jes Baker. I’ll just make that TikTok recipe with feta and tomatoes in a baking dish. And a bunch of pasta. I’m not much of a cook and I don’t want to spend too

much time in the kitchen. I want to hang out with the cool people.

What’s your all time favourite album? Oh, but that’s impossible. I want to say The Ark’s In Lust We Trust. Or Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Or Thomas Dybdahl’s Stray Dogs. Maybe the Original Cast Recording of Les Miserables. I can’t choose.

What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen? I really enjoyed Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher until the guy shat out an alien into the toilet. Then I left the cinema.

What book would you take to a desert island? Anna Karenina. I’ve been trying to get through it for years but I get too easily distracted, and for too long. On a desert island, surely, I should be able to get through it. And memorise it?

Who’s the worst?

My friend once dated a DJ who gave her, for her birthday, a poster of himself. He wasn’t famous or anything. And they were just dating, they weren’t even a couple or anything. He wasn’t even a professional DJ, he worked in a Wilko’s. He’s probably one of the worst people I’ve ever had the misfortune of meeting.

When did you last cry?

Yesterday. I watched the episode of Spin City where Michael J. Fox leaves the show. Even writing

that down makes me tear up. The last episodes of US sitcoms always get to me.

What are you most scared of?

Probably fascism.

When did you last vomit and why?

I’ve never vomited. That’s not true but if I try to remember the last time, I will vomit now. So let’s say it never happened.

Tell us a secret?

I’m not falling for this again.

Which celebrity could you take in a fight?

I’m very weak, so it would have to be a child or an animal. I once did a TV show with a very famous cat. It must be really old now. So, that old, famous cat. I’d give it my best shot.

If you could be reincarnated as an animal, which animal would it be?

Well, not that old, famous cat.

Where’s your favourite place to take a dump at the Fringe?

It’s taking every ounce of effort in my body to not mention the mouth of my least favourite reviewer.

Sofie Hagen: Banglord, Monkey Barrel 3, 3-27 Aug (not 8,9,15,16,22,23), 2.50pm

Photo; Matt Crockett