The Skinny January 2020 by The Skinny

.CO.UK

BIG DECADE ENERGY The Skinny Food & Drink Survey 2020 Scottish Albums of the Decade Terry Gilliam Robert Eggers & Willem Dafoe Isobel Campbell Gerry Cinnamon SPAM Poetry Maisie Adam manipulate

Welcome 2020 with our new-look magazine

January 2020

Books

THE SKINNY

— 2 —

THE SKINNY

Art January 2020

— 3 —

THE SKINNY

We've been listening to... Sea-Watch — Floating Points Haenim — Kim Jung Mi 10% — Kaytranada (feat. Kali Uchis) Watermelon Sugar — Harry Styles Come Down on Jupiter — The Orielles Texas Sun — Khruangbin (feat. Leon Bridges) Dead of Night — Orville Peck Indigo Plateau — Psychic Type Ton Wah (Jerome Hill Remix) — Wevie Stonder Stitch Me Up — Plush I Stole Yer Plimsoles — International Teachers of Pop (feat. Jason Williamson)

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

Issue 172, January 2020 © Radge Media Ltd. Get in touch: E: hello@theskinny.co.uk T: 0131 467 4630 P: The Skinny, 1.9 1st Floor Tower, Techcube, Summerhall, 1 Summerhall Pl, Edinburgh, EH9 1PL The Skinny is Scotland's largest independent entertainment & listings magazine, and offers a wide range of advertising packages and affordable ways to promote your business. Get in touch to find out more. E: sales@theskinny.co.uk

January 2020 — Chat

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the explicit permission of the publisher. The views and opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the printer or the publisher. Printed by DC Thomson & Co. Ltd, Dundee ABC verified Jan – Dec 2018: 26,342

printed on 100% recycled paper

— 4 —

THE SKINNY

Art

Championing creativity in Scotland

Meet the team We asked – what are your hopes for 2020? Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief "A night's sleep."

Tallah Brash Music Editor " That people stop being a bag of dicks."

Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist "To not be such a pie."

Nadia Younes Clubs Editor, Events Editor " The fall of capitalism. Vive la revolution!"

Peter Simpson Digital Editor, Food & Drink Editor " To suddenly become good at playing the keyboard."

Adam Benmakhlouf Art Editor " Stop the Government's mass murder of the most vulnerable groups of society."

Production

Polly Glynn Comedy Editor " That the hellscape we're all hurtling towards isn't as bad as we think."

Eliza Gearty Theatre Editor " The planet suddenly renews itself. The world rejoices and pushes through The Green New Deal anyway."

Rachael Hood Production Manager " A huge revolution followed by world peace."

Tom McCarthy Creative Projects Manager " To be able to hope again."

George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist "Hope is dead."

Laurie Presswood General Manager " To not get my period on Hogmanay this year."

Sales & Business

Sandy Park Commercial Director " To learn to drive, visit somewhere I haven't been before."

— 5 —

Fiona Hunter Designer "A dry summer." September 2019 — Review

Katie Goh Intersections Editor, Acting Books Editor " That everyone gets their shit together."

THE SKINNY

Editorial Words: Rosamund West

The turn of the decade is a natural time for reappraisal, even if we’re not entirely sure what the last ten years have been called. The teens? The tens? Even the ridiculousness of the ‘noughties’ seems enviably straightforward. Our Music editor trawled through the archives to create a longlist of Scottish albums from 2010-19 and polled the writers (alongside some familiar faces from the wider music industry) to create a rundown of the best releases of the decade. This has of course been a decade of change for the music industry as a whole, from the shifting of traditional revenue streams to the rise of vinyl and renewed reliance on touring – we look back through ten years of impact on Scotland’s electronic music scene with Optimo and Huntleys + Palmers. After all the appraising, we look forwards with a degree of hopefulness sparked by creative community activism in spite of the abject venality of our elected overlords. Theatre meets the people behind the Youth Theatre in Polmont Young Offenders whose programme treats crime as a public health issue and is part of a range of work contributing to an overall drop in violent crime in Scotland. We meet Glasgow’s SPAM Poetry, publishing some of Scotland’s brightest poets, to discuss the meaning of a post-internet age. Film talks to Willem Dafoe and Robert Eggers about meticulously detailed period horror The Lighthouse, and meets Terry Gilliam mere hours after his gammon-like outburst at Karlovy Vary film festival to discuss his long-gestating, probably-cursed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. At the back, we unveil a new regular Q&A format. First to run the gauntlet of questions are album of the decade finalists Stina Tweeddale (of Honeyblood) and James Graham (of The Twilight Sad). Find out everything from when they last vomited to who they could take in a fight on our final page. Welcome to the 20s.

January 2020 — Chat

ew year, new decade, new design. Welcome to our new look magazine. This redesign has been running in the background for much of 2019, an expansive yet highly detailed process involving team-wide consultation led by designer Fiona Hunter in collaboration with production manager Rachael Hood. They’ve gone deep in terms of assessing what we do and why, and how we can best communicate with our readership (aka you). At the heart of this new template is a drive for greater readability, easier navigation of the different areas of the magazine, and clearer communication of the thematic underpinning of each issue. More blank space gives our amazing imagery the space to shine, a higher point size on the type increases legibility, and new regular features allow us to share a little more of the personalities behind the magazine (hopefully without becoming too much of an in-joke circle jerk). Ultimately this process has been a labour of love – for magazines, for readers, for the Scottish culture we aim to platform, for the people who make The Skinny what it is. We hope you like it too. Our theme for this month hinges on the turn of the decade. Our annual Food Survey results are in, and are explored with a nod to the huge changes that have taken place in the culinary landscape since 2010. Were we even eating, all those years ago, when there was no Instagram on which to share a carefully composed aerial shot of our poached egg-strewn tabletop? Alongside our modes of consumption changing there has been a geographical shift in eatery location as the market shifts with a tide of urban development. A core of much-loved (and voted for) establishments line the parallel roads of Pollokshaws and Victoria on Glasgow’s Southside. Our Food editor takes a tour. This is also the decade of street food’s ascendance, as lower overheads and greater business flexibility tempt chefs into the food truck. The Buffalo Truck represents the pinnacle of Scottish street food – we sing their praises on p21.

Cover Artist Lesley Imgart Lesley Imgart came to the UK for art school and ended up staying for the people, the pubs, and salt & vinegar crisps. She is based in Edinburgh and makes illustrations and comics about anything that feels important to her, which is compulsive, ever changing, and often personal. i: @lesleyimgart — 6 —

THE SKINNY

Intersections

Love Bites: Cyber Queers This month’s columnist considers what makes up online queer communities Words: Ayoola Solarin

“H

January 2020 — Chat

ow’s today going?” “BAD...You?” “ALSO BAD.” And so goes an online conversation between friends, each feeling a little better after the mutual confession that both feel like shit. Over the years, I have found that so many of my friendships are sustained online, especially the queer ones. Though more privileged persons would like to forget, it’s a fact that for queer people, the audacity to live as your true self in the real world isn’t always greeted warmly. The digital world can act as a safer space for self-expression, which leads to conversation, which in turn becomes community. In whatever capacity that suits you best. For me, queer community is not large scale. It is a collection of individual friendships, folded neatly into messenger inboxes that belong to me and a handful of people that live thousands of miles away. In these inboxes we bridge a gap. “Did you watch…?” “How did it go?” “Are you safe?” “Yes, 4pm your time is good for me.” I send messages to Cairo, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong. Whether instantly responded to or left for days, unread, they are evidence of care and consideration. Queer community, in all its iterations, isn’t just about figuring out the mechanisms of identity, it’s about reliability. Providing stability for one another in the most destabilising of societies. A message, even an unanswered one, is proof that we are here, in it together. “I think I could be...” “I told her I was…” “When did you know you were…?” We trade in the crypto-currency of “extremely personal” and “deeply intimate”. A long list of digital timestamps act as a tracking graph of therapies and trauma. Now shared, cybernetically. The point is to share. And to share again. And again. And again. I am becoming well versed in turning the cybernetic into symbiosis. “Will you be awake in 30 mins?” “Yes.” “I need you to read something.” … “Still awake?” “Yes.” “Thank you.”

— 7 —

THE SKINNY

Heads Up

Before getting stuck in to the shiny new design of the magazine in the coming pages, plan your month with our events highlights for January (and early February)...

Photo: Karen Pauline Biswell

Heads Up

Compiled by Nadia Younes Celtic Connections Various Venues, Glasgow, 16 Jan-2 Feb, times & prices vary

Burns&Beyond Various venues, Edinburgh, 21 Jan-9 Feb, times & prices vary This year, Burns Night falls on the same day as Chinese New Year, which won’t happen again for another 76 years. To commemorate the occasion, 400 Chinese lanterns will be set up in Edinburgh’s St Giles Cathedral as part of Burns&Beyond, a Culture Trail and more.

The clue’s in the title with Celtic Connections, a festival celebrating Celtic music and its connections. And its connections spread far and wide, with gigs from the traditional to the obscure. Our top pick on the massive programme would be Les Amazones d'Afrique at Tramway (25 Jan).

Les Amazones d'Afrique

Burns&Beyond

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Seized by the Left Hand DCA, Dundee, until 22 Mar Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness, and the ideas within it, is taken as the starting point for this group exhibition. Contributing artists include Harry Josephine Giles, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa and Ming Wong.

Red Thread Film Club: Lynne Ramsay – Gasman and Ratcatcher CCA, Glasgow, 18 Jan, 7.30pm Red Thread Film Club follow up their Taika Waititi showcase with a double bill from one of Scotland’s finest filmmakers. Lynne Ramsay’s short film Gasman and her debut feature Ratcatcher will both be screened back to back.

Ming Wong, Bloody Marys, film still, 2018 Credit: Vero Navarro Ratcatcher

Cage-a-rama

Big Burns Supper

CCA, Glasgow, 3-5 Jan, times & prices vary

Various venues, Dumfries, 23 Jan-2 Feb, times & prices vary

Morcheeba

The Burns Night celebrations continue in Dumfries at annual multi-arts festival Big Burns Supper. Iconic musical duo Morcheeba are just one of the musical acts set to perform and wonderful burlesque troupe Le Haggis make a return, promising to be “more theatrical than ever”.

Cage-a-rama

Photo: Andy Ross

First Footing The Hug and Pint, Glasgow, until 14 Jan, times & prices vary

Kayus Bankole

The Snow Queen

Message from the Skies: Shorelines

Scottish Ballet: The Snow Queen

Various venues, Edinburgh, until 25 Jan

Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 3-18 Jan, times & prices vary Pocket Knife

— 8 —

King Tut's New Year's Revolution King Tut's, Glasgow, 3-25 Jan, times & prices vary Photo: Cameron James Brisbane

January 2020 — Chat

Matchbox Cineclub’s annual Nic Cage celebration is back, and bigger than ever. This year, Cage-a-rama will close with the UK premiere of Cage’s latest film, Primal, before embarking on a UK-wide tour, heading south to London’s Genesis Cinema and Bristol Improv Theatre.

The Van T's

THE SKINNY

Photo: Yassine El Mansouri

Independent Venue Week Various venues across Scotland, 27 Jan-2 Feb,

Lower Dens

A Wire Apart

Visual theatre, puppetry and animated film are at the heart of manipulate festival, taking place at Summerhall and The Studio in Edinburgh. The festival showcases the work of many Scottishbased companies, including Tortoise in a Nutshell and Paper Doll Militia, as well as those of international artists. Photo: Joe Armitage

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 23 Jan-15 Feb, times & prices vary Blood of the Young founding member Isobel McArthur reimagines Jane Austen’s literary classic in this unique stage adaptation. In it, a cast of six young women, including McArthur herself, take us on a journey through 200 years of romantic pop history.

Various venues, Edinburgh, 31 Jan-8 Feb, times & prices vary

Photo: HKA Productions

Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic

Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of)

manipulate Heads Up

Photo: Paper Doll Militia

times & prices vary Many of Scotland’s independent and beloved music venues, from Inverness to Galashiels, will participate in Independent Venue Week. Each venue will host a series of gigs, with highlights including Lower Dens at The Blue Arrow in Glasgow (28 Jan) and Cloth at Sneaky Pete’s in Edinburgh (29 Jan).

Wasteland

Wasteland Dundee Rep, Dundee, 31 Jan-1 Feb, times & prices vary While Beats documented the 90s rave scene on screen, Wasteland is documenting it on stage through the medium of dance. The production by Gary Clarke Company is brought to life by its unique soundtrack and artwork by Jimmy Cauty, co-founder of The KLF.

Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) Photo: Glasgow Women's Library Readers of Colour

Readers of Colour Lighthouse Bookshop, Edinburgh, 29 Jan, 6pm If your New Year’s resolution is to read more then joining a book club is a good place to start, and Readers of Colour is a pretty great option. Each month the group meet to discuss literature by women writers of colour from Scotland and beyond.

Jordy Deelight: The Honeymoon Period

Jordy Deelight: The Honeymoon Period Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, 18 Jan, 8pm Drag artist Jordan McKinley, aka Jordy Deelight, suffers from cystic fibrosis and, as a result, spent much of his childhood in and out of hospital. That experience is channeled into his latest show, in which he performs as Hayley, a 24-year-old woman with cystic fibrosis.

Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, 18 Jan-22 Mar

Al Kent

ScHoolboy Q

January 2020 — Chat

Photo: Andy Hollingworth

Alexandra Haeseker: The Botanist's Daughter

O2 Academy, Glasgow, 25 Jan, 7pm

Maisie Adam

Million Dollar Disco

Maisie Adam: Hang Fire

The Berkeley Suite, Glasgow, 18 Jan, 11pm

The Stand, Glasgow, 22 Jan, 7.30pm Alexandra Haeseker: The Botanist's Daughter

— 9 —

ScHoolboy Q

THE SKINNY

Shot of the month

Paddy Steer, QMU, Glasgow, 6 Dec by Martyna Maz

16 17

23 24

28 31

32 33

January 2020 — Chat

41 44

39 42

40 43

45 46

Compiled by George Sully

Across 1. You might run through these as a child if you're feeling naughty but also conservative (6,2,5) 9. Listens to everything you say, probably (5) 10. Your mileage may do this (4) 11. The only controller button not used in the original Konami Code (8) 13. De toilette (3) 14. American test measuring scholastic aptitude (3) 15 Straight white man directs movie about teenage girlhood, doesn't fuck it up (6,5) 16. Equal to about 15ml (abbrev.) (4) 17. Hashtag not all of them (3) 18. The home of Slam (4) 22. Unlike his hands, Trump's is massive (3) 23. Ryan Reynolds played this gruff detective with a coffee habit (7) 24. Little bear folk, so far nowhere to be seen in the new trilogy (4) 27. Microsoft's Halo machine (4) 28. Funny (7) 29. Thanks for coming to my talk (3) 31. ID number for magazines, rather than books (4) 32. ‘Silly little boy,’ sing Young Fathers (3) 33. Where the Beast came from that one awful, awful winter (4) 36. Mental health charity (RIP Scott) (4,7) 40. The master behind The Master (initials) (3) 41. AOL's messaging client, discontinued in 2017 (3) 42. Like a jumpsuit, but with shorts? Idk (6) 44. Their 2015 report basically said the planet's screwed unless we act immediately (4) 45. The boys in blue, the 5-0, the pigs, the old bill (Scots slang) (5) 46. Terrorist whose assassination inspired a sex analogy in Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping (5,3,5)

Down 1. Cultural phonemenon, feat. a hot priest (7) 2. Non-native English speakers need this to study at an anglophone university (5) 3. Program filetype on Windows (3) 4. An untitled goose might untie this (4) 5. Michelle Obama, Keanu Reeves and Courtney Love will all turn this age in 2020 (5, 3) 6. This is the first time The Skinny has had a crossword since then (4) 7. Just four A's. Seriously (4) 8. Handsome Canadian (7) 9. As seen in Bojack Horseman season 6, this particular type of employee in Hollyoo has been revolting (abbrev.) (4) 12. Looks like candy? Challenge accepted (4,4) 19. Whatever you say, old person (2, 6) 20. Founded the People's Republic of China (3) 21. Where you go to get your audiobook produced by a tax-dodging tech giant (3) 24. Massive label conglomerate, dissolved in 2012 (3) 25. Diplo's other, off-stage nickname (3) 26. Biblical inspiration for Moby Dick's protagonist (4,4) 28. Where the 2010 Chilean mining accident occurred (7) 30. Didn't kill himself (7) 34. Tried suing Samsung for billions (5) 35. Had the most charisma of any of the characters in Interstellar (4) 37. As if tax and student loan repayments weren't enough, you probably pay these every month too (initials) (4) 38. It's fun to stay here (4) 39. Google and Wikipedia went dark to protest this US bill in 2012 (4) 43. Q uadrophenia is a popular film within this subculture (3)

Turn to page 61 for the solutions

— 10 —

THE SKINNY

Photo: Jon Pountney Photo: Daniel Blake Heavy Rapids

January gets off to a flying start in Glasgow with a pair of showcase festivals taking place on different sides of the M8. Both celebrating local talent, The Hug & Pint’s First Footing series runs from 2-14 January, with highlights including the woozy electronics of Charrette, the dark pop of Goodnight Louisa (4 Jan), the biscuit-loving synth-pop duo Pocket Knife (5 Jan), indie-alternative duo Lemon Drink and experimental singer-songwriter Katherine Aly (12 Jan). Meanwhile, across the motorway, King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution (3-25 Jan) features some of our favourite Glasgow noise merchants: Heavy Rapids (4 Jan), CRYSTAL (24 Jan) and The Van T’s (25 Jan). Staying in Glasgow, on 16 January the annual Celtic Connections festival gets underway with their opening night event at the Royal Concert Hall featuring The GRIT Orchestra, while the following night, ahead of releasing his new Thumb World record in February, a collaboration with Lost Map Records brings Pictish Trail to Saint Luke’s. Yorkston/Thorne/Khan later play the Drygate Brewery (22 Jan), you can catch the incredible Les Amazones d’Afrique at Tramway (25 Jan) and Field Music play Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum (1 Feb). If you can’t wait until then to see the Brewis brothers, Field Music also play an intimate date in Edinburgh at The Mash House (11 Jan), which you can get tickets for if you pre-order their new album, Making a New World, via Assai Records. Also at The Mash House this month, be sure to catch the excellent Black Country, New Road (19 Jan). At Sneaky Pete’s, an already busy month comes to a head with a stacked line-up for Independent Venue Week, featuring Kettle of Kites and Kapil Seshasayee (27 Jan), Cloth and Annie Booth (29 Jan), and Carla J. Easton and Broken Chanter (31 Jan), among others. Elsewhere in Edinburgh, Hailey Beavis launches her new EP, Whatever You Feel I Do Too, at the Traverse Theatre Bar (25 Jan) and Vic Galloway’s band Check Masses launch their new single, Dripn Angel, at The Voodoo Rooms (31 Jan). [Tallah Brash]

Hailey Beavis

Film In 2020, you’ll probably feel like escaping into fantasy, and there’s no better brainmelter in all of cinema than Alejandro Jodorowsky. The Chilean visionary is crowned GFT’s latest Cinemaster this month, with a trio of his hallucinatory films screening: there’s wild acid Western El Topo (15-16 Jan), his jaw-dropping fantasy The Holy Mountain (29-30 Jan), and his first feature Fando y Lis (12-13 Jan), which caused riots on its premiere in 1968; expect a more civilised response at this GFT screening. Similarly playful and imaginative are the films of Federico Fellini. This year marks the centenary of this Italian master and Filmhouse will be celebrating in style with a retrospective running till February. This month there are chances to see, among others, the heartbreaking La Strada (24-26 Jan), which follows the trials of a young woman sold to a brutish circus impresario; Fellini’s Roma (29 Jan), a heady love-letter to Italy’s capital; and the dreamy Amarcord (30 Jan-2 Feb), the director’s exuberant dive into childhood memories of his hometown. Like Amarcord, Lynne Ramsay’s films explore evocative moments from childhood, as should be clear during Red Thread film club’s double-bill of the Glasgow director’s debut feature Ratcatcher alongside her incredible short Gasman (CCA, Glasgow, 18 Jan). Both are emotionally bruising films set in 70s Glasgow and told from the point-of-view of kids whose bubbles of innocence are about to burst. German Cinema is on the menu at GFT and DCA as Fokus: Films from — 11 —

The Holy Mountain

January 2020 — Chat

Her

Music

Photo: Greg Ryan

Yorkston/Thorne/Khan

What's On

THE SKINNY

Germany continues to tour, with newly minted work sitting alongside films from Germany’s past. Also at DCA in January is Hello, Robot, a season exploring the uneasy relationship between human and machine. Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (12 Jan), James Cameron’s The Terminator (16 Jan) and Spike Jonze’s Her (28 Jan) are among the techno-sceptic gems on offer. [Jamie Dunn]

What's On

Clubs

Sicaria Sound

Photo: Martyn Flyn

Clubland gets off to a typically slow start in January while promoters and DJs recover from their NYE/NYD antics. Starting early though are Edinburgh promoters Wack, who are bringing Hessle Audio and Timedance affiliate Ploy along to The Mash House in Edinburgh on 10 January, and Shoot Your Shot, who throw their first party of the year with former Panorama Bar resident Prosumer at The Berkeley Suite in Glasgow on 11 January. Everyone’s favourite small club, Sneaky Pete’s have a bit of a scheduling shake-up for the new year and welcome new party Cultur to the club on 23 January. For their first show in the new slot, they’re setting the bar high and hosting Glasgow DJ and producer extraordinaire S-Type. Edinburgh-born Bobby Perman recently soundtracked 2019’s Edinburgh International Film Festival opening movie Boyz in the Wood and released a new EP Beat – his first in four years – on LuckyMe. Perman is rarely spotted on the club circuit these days though, so make sure you get your tickets for this early to avoid disappointment. Right at the end of the month, on 31 January it’s a big night across Edinburgh. First Edition welcome London-born Joe Seaton, aka Call Super, to The Mash House alongside residents and local support. On the same night, SSL XL host another 140bpm special at The Bongo Club with Sicaria Sound and Riz La Teef. Take your pick or jump between the two and enjoy both; the clubs aren’t that far away after all. [Nadia Younes]

S-Type

Art

Photo: Courtesy of Tuesday Smillie and David Getsy

Jeanne Tullen

Two new exhibitions open in Tramway this month, the first coming from artist France-Lise McGurn, whose descriptive lines span the floor, ceiling and walls, as well as canvas. In the painting-drawings she intuitively makes, limbs and bodies overlap and interact, suggesting ‘intimacy, ecstasy, sexuality, violence and loss’. We interviewed her back in 2015 for her show in Collective in Edinburgh. Later in the month, Hardeep Pandhal opens Confessions of a Thug: Pakiveli, as he mashes together the title of an Orientalist writer’s pulp fiction from 1839 and a spin on 2Pac’s alias Makiveli. Across video, drawings, painting, sound and sculpture, Pandhal’s sometimes disturbing, sometimes funny cartoon style slides between layers of controversial histories and disputed identities. Jeanne Tullen is In Transit in the CCA from 11-30 January, as she shares the GIFs and performances she makes in dialogue with selfie and Snapchat culture. Throughout January, there is also an exciting programme of events in Dundee Contemporary Arts as they expand on their current exhibition, Seized by the Left Hand. Building on the renowned work of sci-fi fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin, a workshop on Radical Transfeminism takes place on 18 January, followed by a reading group and a round table on 20 January. [Adam Benmakhlouf]

Seized by the Left Hand

Photo: Pearly Oyster Productions

Drummer (as part of manipulate)

In Edinburgh, the Royal Lyceum are kicking off their 2020 season with Blood of the Young’s Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), directed by Paul Brotherston and (re) written by Isobel McArthur (23 Jan-15 Feb). Another interpretation of the done-todeath classic? But this one truly does sound different, drawing on ‘over two-hundred years of romantic pop history’ to tell the story of Jane Austen’s beloved romance through the eyes of the servants. The dynamic and innovative manipulate Festival returns this month, showcasing Scotland’s best puppetry and visual and physical theatre at Edinburgh’s Summerhall. They’re hosting the creative lab residency Rough Mix, featuring puppetry artists from Magnetic North and Québec’s Festival de Casteliers. Rough Mix will open its doors to audiences on 6 Jan, and, best of all, it’s free. Also on offer is Cirqulation, a special edition of the ongoing circus cabaret night, featuring Scottish and international guest performers (31 Jan, 9.30pm), and the brilliantly boundary-pushing Jordan & Skinner’s critically acclaimed theatre piece, A Brief History of the Fragile Male Ego (31 Jan, 8.30pm). There’s another chance to catch choreographer Emanuel Gat’s The Circle as part of the Scottish Dance Theatre event at Festival Theatre (29 Jan). The evening also includes Process Day, by renowned choreographer Sharon Eyal – a ‘sensory experience that transforms the dancers into sleek, nocturnal beings veiled by haze and shadow’. Over in Glasgow, family-friendly shows at The King’s Theatre in Glasgow this month include Billionaire Boy, based on David Walliams’ best-selling story (15-19 Jan) and The King & I (28 Jan-8 Feb). Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award-winning play God of Carnage hits the Theatre Royal on 27 January. Oor Wullie, Dundee Rep — 12 —

Photo: Nicola Selby and Eve McConnachie

January 2020 — Chat

Theatre

The Snow Queen

THE SKINNY

Ensemble’s production of the adored comic strip, will transfer to the Theatre Royal from 20-25 Jan. Glaswegians will also get their chance to catch Scottish Ballet’s The Snow Queen at the same theatre (3-18 Jan). Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Scottish Ballet, it’s sure to be a spectacle, especially considering it’s designed by the award-winning Lez Brotherston. [Eliza Gearty]

Photo: 432 Presents

A new decade calls for a new favourite brewery and/or bar. Here come Bellfield Brewery, with a free chance to find both. Check out four of their beers at their still-fairly-new taproom in Abbeyhill, tour the brewery, and ask all the questions you like about the brewing process. There’s still space on the tours on 19 Jan and 2 Feb, book in via bellfieldbrewery.com If you’re more into whisky, but don’t want to deal with lads in tweed shouting at you for ‘drinking it wrong’, Faffless Whisky bring a laid-back tasting to Summerhall on 18 Jan. Four whiskies, a nice room, and a lot of chat in the blurb about making fun of each other. This ain’t your grandad’s whisky tasting; in fact, in the words of Limmy, fuck yer grandad. Tickets are £20 via Eventbrite. Want a slightly different whisky experience? The National Whisky Festival is back at SWG3 on 25 January – 40 whiskies to try, masterclasses, an extensive non-whisky selection, and live music throughout the day. Given this is tied-in with Celtic Connections, we’re gonna go out on a limb and suggest there may be some folk music. Tickets £35 via nationalwhiskyfest.scot Or if your New Year’s Resolution is to help make our food more sustainable, head to Feeding the City’s ideas workshop (30 Jan, The Melting Pot, 5 Rose St, Edinburgh). Feeding the City is a 12-month project aiming to help get social food businesses up and running, with funding and help available. If that sounds up your street, register via Eventbrite; it’s free, and there’s a free lunch. [Peter Simpson]

What's On

Photo: 432 Presents The National Whisky Festival

Food

The National Whisky Festival

Poetry Photo: Kat Gollock

New Writers Award Showcase

Comedy

— 13 —

Micky Overman

January 2020 — Chat

Had your fill of staying in and staring into a Netflix void not knowing what to watch next? Us too! How about... you leave the flat? There’s comedy outside and that’ll keep you warmer (and will probably cost you less) than your central heating! First up, if you’re doing Dry January (or you’re ‘aff the drink’), then The Stand are here to keep you right. They’ve got shows in Edinburgh (11 Jan, 4-6pm, £9-10) and Glasgow (29 Jan, 8.30-10.30pm, £5-6) where they’re not serving any booze. The Edinburgh show even has the fantastic Paul Sinha on the bill. The Glee Club are celebrating their one year anniversary at their Renfrew Street home with a stellar line-up including Angelos Epithemiou and Marcus Brigstocke (31 Jan & 1 Feb, 7.45pm, £11-17). And, don’t forget to catch Micky Overman’s Work-InProgress gig as she preps for her third Fringe run (Monkey Barrel Comedy, 12 Jan, 5pm, £5). We also reckon Maisie Adam (21 Jan, Gilded Balloon Basement Theatre, 7.30pm, £12) and Vision Board (26 Jan, Flying Duck, Glasgow, 8pm, £5) are solid shouts, but you’ll find out more about them in this month’s features. [Polly Glynn]

Photo: James Deacon

Photo: Andy Hollingworth Maisie Adam

Photo: Kat Gollock

New Writers Award Showcase

January emerges as a sleepy month for new publications and events. But, on the plus side, at least there will be plenty of time to get those 2020 submissions calendars at the ready. The annual Scottish National Slam Championship rolls round once again, this year taking place on 12 January in Glasgow’s Tron Theatre. It’s usually a sell-out gig, so well worth pre-booking tickets ahead of time. Slam winners from 2019 will take to the stage to fight for the title of National Slam Champion and go on to represent Scotland in the International Championship in Paris this summer. Another highly anticipated annual event in the literary calendar is the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Awards Showcase. With a line-up of exceptional talent from both poets and prose writers, the winners of last year’s New Writers Awards will be reading short excerpts of their most recent work. This year, the showcase will be hosted in Assembly Roxy on 30 January. Spoken word pamphlet publisher Stewed Rhubarb is looking to have an incredibly busy year, with four upcoming pamphlets announced before 2019 drew to a close. Poets Chris Boyland, Colin Bramwell, Carly Brown and Bibi June will be releasing ‘shiny, lyrical, visceral’ pamphlets. Stewed Rhubarb has launched a new initiative for preordering their poetry pamphlets: becoming a paid member of The Fellowship of the Stewed Rhubarb. With two payment options available (£30 or £60), all Members of the Fellowship will have the four pamphlets posted to them post-publication. There are lots of extra goodies attached to the top-tier membership, including your name printed in each pamphlet and a signed limited-edition art print made by Stewed Rhubarb’s founder and designer, James T. Harding. [Beth Cochrane]

THE SKINNY

Features

Contents

18 Our Food and Drink Survey begins in the culinary hotbed of Glasgow’s Southside

6 Editorial — 8 Heads Up — 11 What's On 43 Albums — 48 Film & TV — 52 Theatre — 53 Art 54 Books — 55 Comedy — 56 Listings — 62 The Skinny On...

21 In praise of street food greats The Buffalo Truck, and forging your own path with Bakery Three.14 25 Your favourite pubs, cafes and restaurants from this year’s Survey, and a list of all-time greats from years past 26 Reappraising the 2010s in Scottish clubbing, with help from Huntleys + Palmers and Optimo

30 Glasgow’s own SPAM Poetry on publishing some of Scotland and the UK’s best and brightest poets 32 Cast your eyes, minds and ears back at the best Scottish Albums of the 2010s 36 We delve into the intense monochrome of The Lighthouse with director Robert Eggers and star Willem Dafoe 38 Terry Gilliam on his very, very, very overdue adaptation of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote 39 Maisie Adam talks panel shows and comedy creativity ahead of tour dates in Edinburgh and Glasgow 40 Millennials are the houseplant generation – we take a look at the reasons why 41 From asteroids to zombie attacks, what does our obsession with apocalyptic stories say about us?

January 2020

45 He’s headlining Hampden one album in, so we assess the grassroots rise of Gerry Cinnamon, and what it means for music On the website... Chats with Dan Deacon and Poliça's Channy Leaneagh on their new albums; the films we’re most excited for in 2020; our Films of the Decade round-up

Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) The Skinny; Kaitlin Mechan; Kaitlin Mechan; Sensory Works; Courtesy of SPAM Poetry; Cameron Brisbane; The Lighthouse; The Man Who Killed Don Quixote; Maisie Adam; Brina Blum on Unsplash; Edith Ault; Miranda Stuart

— 14 —

THE SKINNY

January 2020

— 15 —

January 2020

THE SKINNY

— 16 —

2020 Vision Illustration: Kaitlin Mechan

t the turn of the decade, we dedicate some time and space to reflections on the 2010s. The results of our annual Food and Drink Survey throw up some of the key developments of recent years – the Southside of Glasgow is full of great scran, street food is a fantastic force, and authenticity is more important than ‘how good something looks on the grid’. That need for authenticity spills over into our Albums of the Decade list, with one Edinburgh trio in

particular dominating the discussion. A recap of the 2010s in Scotland’s clubs looks at the impact of the three Bs – Boiler Room, Bandcamp and big-money bookings. And to point a possible way forward, a pair of exciting, evolving projects. The team behind SPAM poetry zine on embracing a post-internet world with the tools of the preinternet days, and Polmont Youth Theatre on a forward-thinking approach to help communities and offer hope for the future.

January 2020 — Feature

— 17 —

Food

THE SKINNY

Locavore 349 Victoria Road When you care about the environment you live in, caring about your food – where it comes from, how it got to you, the ways in which it was procured – is an obvious next step. And as we become more and more interested in ethical and sustainable eating, shops like Locavore are going to become more important and widespread. Locavore is Scotland’s first social enterprise supermarket; the Victoria Road shop opened its doors in 2018 and is a mostly organic foodie haven filled with packaging-free staples, and hyper-local fruit and veg grown in community gardens around the city. There are nut butter machines, and there’s even the country’s first milk vending machine to help further wean us all off our plastic addiction. Locavore’s grown a lot over the course of the 2010s, from a small community hub to the thriving shop and cafe that’s actively changing how we think about our food. You have to suspect that its story is nowhere near finished.

MILK 452 Victoria Rd “MILK is a social enterprise set up to empower and support refugee and migrant women living in Glasgow.” This is, unequivocally, a good thing we should be supporting. The past decade proved, in a very real and often slightly-too-literal way, that everything is political. The places we shop, the company we keep, the people we give our time, attention and money to – these aren’t just moments to idly pass us by while a dodgy capitalist system demolishes our society and burns the environment to a cinder. We can make a difference if we want to, and that means using what privilege and power we do have to help others. As for MILK, the cafe provides its staff work, training and the chance to bed into their new communities, and its events programme constantly sheds light on food traditions and cultures from around the world. Sharing this knowledge, supporting one another and showing unity in the face of hardship – that’s the Big Milk Energy I want to see in the 2020s.

glasgowlocavore.org milkcafeglasgow.com

Southside Stories We journey down Victoria and Pollokshaws Road to look at some of the key developments in Scotland’s food scene

January 2020 — Feature

Words: Peter Simpson

et’s start with a pointless sentiment – things have changed a lot in the last decade. But in the world of food, that apparently super-obvious statement is actually super-true. Ten years that began with no-one having the faintest idea about an ‘Instant Gram’ ended with a pal of mine at a restaurant launch where entire tables were standing on their chairs to take photos of their dinner for the clout. Throw in the endless march of food festivals and experiential stuff, and it’s been a bit like walking through an non-stop culinary funfair crossed with that one episode of Black Mirror where everyone’s

constantly got their phones out. Yet Scotland’s food and drink scene has changed in a number of other, less hype-dependant ways in the past ten years, and a pair of streets in Glasgow’s Southside prove to be a handy encapsulation of the key trends and changes from across the 2010s. They’re packed with excellent restaurants, cafes, shops and bars, in a pair of perfectly straight lines that make for an extremely handy narrative device. From locallysourced veg to extremely funky beer, these six places are a microcosm of a sparkling Scottish food scene.

Ranjit’s Kitchen 607 Pollokshaws Rd Were the 2010s entirely positive? Nope, but the growing visibility of community action was one of the shining lights of the last ten years. Tools to start a campaign, find funding for an idea, and offer support have all become part of our daily lives. Ranjit Kaur’s cafe serves up the kind of Punjabi dishes she served to members of the city’s Sikh and Hindu communities for years before launching the Kitchen in 2016, and it’s quickly built a hefty local following of its own. Kaur told the Observer last February: “I often look out from the kitchen into the busy restaurant [and] see customers enjoying the food and it makes my heart melt.” That’s the kind of connection that good food can create, and it’s a connection well worth celebrating. ranjitskitchen.com

— 18 —

THE SKINNY

Food

Julie’s Kopitiam 1109 Pollokshaws Rd For all that talk earlier about the way that capital-E experiences have taken centre stage in food, it’s only half true. Some of the best food to be had in Scotland today is being served up in dinky, lovely, homely places like Julie’s Kopitiam, where space is at a premium and failing to prepare means preparing to wait 40 minutes for a table. That’s because the Kopitiam has that vital attribute that no amount of fancy marketing can provide; the thing we all crave in an unpredictable and unknowable world – authenticity. It comes from the recipes, inspired by Julie’s Malaysian mother and packed with warming flavours and exciting ingredients. It comes from the one room set-up, where the chefs work together like occasionally competitive siblings behind the counter as first dates and long overdue catch-ups carry on all around you. And it comes from the ambience; the steaming windows, the candle light, the genuine buzz of people excited to be here. Julie’s Kopitiam feels like a real neighbourhood restaurant, at the heart of a real neighbourhood; it’s no wonder it’s so popular. facebook.com/julieskopitiam

Cafe Strange Brew 1082 Pollokshaws Rd If one meal is synonymous with Instagram’s impact on food, it’s brunch. Visually decadent plates loaded with colour and shape, which almost always feature an oozing egg for you to snap for the Stories, are the ideal dishes for our snap-happy times and Strange Brew’s are some of the best. There’s endless invention in both sweet and savoury, with waffles and eggs offered in new and exciting forms on an almost daily basis. The dishes look incredible, the ingredients are top-class, and Strange Brew is now an established destination for Glasgow’s brunch crowd. “I scrapped my first menu after one week,” Strange Brew’s Laurie Anderson told us back in 2017. “It was too ‘cheffy’... now I have built a trusting clientele, they are round to my way of thinking.” Not only have they come round, but they’re telling everyone and their dog about it.

koelschipyard.beer

instagram.com/cafe_strange_brew — 19 —

January 2020 — Feature

Koelschip Yard 686-688 Pollokshaws Rd Visually, Koelschip Yard is pretty much what you’d expect from the words ‘pub in Scotland’. Wood everywhere, nice detailing, barrels for standing around… it’s lovely, but not exactly remarkable. The selection of beer on offer, though, pushes this place to a whole new level, and acts as breathing, musty proof of our love of weird fermentation. Koelschip’s ever-changing beer list is loaded with funky, fantastic sour beers from small-scale breweries across Scotland and beyond. It’s a bar where the craft of brewing is showcased, and the slightly unexpected things that can happen when you get some hops and yeast are celebrated. Sour beers, kombucha (from the likes of Clever Kombucha, whose taproom has just opened in Dalmarnock), sourdough bread and kimchi – if it’s a bit funky, we love it.

January 2020

THE SKINNY

— 20 —

THE SKINNY

Food

Cluck, That’s Delicious Scottish street food has gone from strength to strength in the past decade, and one matte black van serving fried chicken is leading the way Words: Peter Simpson Illustration: Kaitlin Mechan

t’s a pretty drab Saturday afternoon on a back street off Ferry Road. Underfoot, the cobbles are a mass of matted weeds and mulched-up litter; shutters are down, white walls have been whiter. In one of Pitt Street’s car parks are a slightly disconcerting number of bright yellow buses, definitely more than you’d expect to see at once. In the next lot over is a scuffed, matte black van with a flat tire and a folding drivers’ side door that, for some reason, has a post box built into it. This goth cousin of the Scooby-Doo mobile is The Buffalo Truck, and it’s responsible for the best sandwich in the country.

“ If The Buffalo Truck somehow breaded your hand, you’d still try to eat it”

The Buffalo Truck is at the pitt every Sat and Sun, 125 Pitt St, Leith — 21 —

January 2020 — Feature

The 2010s were the decade when street food really became ‘a thing’ in Scotland. It’s a success story with a number of different strands, the first being cost. Running a small business is hard, and keeping that business ticking over in a time of long-term wage stagnation and general economic malaise is harder. Then there’s our mutually dependent loves for ‘events’ and the post-industrial aesthetic – why eat somewhere that merely looks like an abandoned factory when you could freeze your nuts off in the real thing? Make a day of it! Conversely, street food’s popularity speaks to our love of seeing simple things done well, and markets and halls like the pitt and Big Feed bring together enough different traders so there are options for even the pickiest or most specific of eaters. Of course, when you get a bunch of options together, there are going to be favourites. At the start of the day, even as the bar is still being unpacked and it looks for all the world like it’s going to piss it down with rain, there’s a queue forming in front of an ominous black van with the words ‘FRIED CHICKN’ on the side. The Buffalo Truck’s namesake Buffalo burger is fairly straightforward – half a bread roll, lettuce, a craggy, crunchy hunk of deep-fried chicken thigh, a pair of sauces and the other half of the roll. The Buffalo sauce is a salty, tangy lip-puckerer purpose-built for waking up the tastebuds of someone who’s been spending their Saturday afternoon drinking outside. The homemade blue cheese mayo balances out the savoury buffalo and the spicy chicken, and throws in a funky note or two. The breading on the chicken, packed with herbs and whole fennel and cumin seeds, is simply incredible. It’s a crunchy, spicy exoskeleton that you could coat almost anything in and you’d be on to a winner. If, by some tremendous Laurel and Hardy-esque accident, The Buffalo Truck somehow breaded your hand, you’d probably still try to eat it. You’d just make a remark about it being ‘finger lickin’ good’ between screams. The end result is a salty, juicy, spicy and saucy delight that makes an absolute mockery of its £6 price tag. Seriously, six pounds. This is what street food is all about; one dish, and a fairly simple one at that, perfected over the course of months and years. Strip back a restaurant setting, take away table service, even get rid of the heating and roof, and what are you left with? An incredible piece of food, and a gaggle of people standing around in the cold to try it out. If you don’t like the rain, wear a jacket. If you don’t like big events, sneak in early before the queues. And if you don’t like fried chicken... well you’re out of luck. But for those of you who do, you won’t find any better.

THE SKINNY

Food

Photo: Ashley Heaton

Bake ’Em Away The last decade was a big one for the micro-venue, from food trucks to one-person cafes. We catch up with Ashley Heaton of the much-loved Bakery Three.14 to learn some of the ins and outs Interview: Peter Simpson

January 2020 — Feature

eople actually quite like other people. In a time when anything and everything you want is ready to be drone-delivered to you at a few hours’ notice, it’s the personal touch that can make a big difference. Food hasn’t been immune to the demands and machinations of big tech – if you’re reading this while out and about, please look left and right for the Deliveroo cyclist about to mow you down – but small and well-curated cafes and bars continue to provide the extra intangibles we all want. One such cafe is Bakery Three.14, the small but well-formed one-woman bakery and cafe headed up by Ashley Heaton. It was a big votegetter in this year’s Food and Drink Survey, and a sample of your comments shows just why. “The cakes are always so original... really nice atmosphere and the woman who owns the shop is lovely”; “it’s so homely and the baker is so welcoming”; “cosy little cafe, with delicious homemade cakes and savouries (pies!).” We didn’t embellish that, they really did write pies with an exclamation mark. We caught up with Heaton over email to find out a bit more about the bakery, and the realities of setting out on your own.

restaurants, bakeries and cafes around eight years ago with a view to gaining hospitality experience and one day opening my own place. I lost sight of that for a while because I was just enjoying the work that I was doing. Things started to get a bit stale and I always like to challenge myself, so one day I just kind of woke up and remembered that I wanted to have my own place and felt like I’d reached a point where I had gathered most of the necessary skills to do that. I looked into getting some funding and it seemed possible so off I went. Usually when I get an idea in my head I tend to run with it – at all costs!

How did Bakery Three.14 come about, and what was the spark that made you want to have your own place? Being self-employed has always appealed to me. I changed careers and started working in

A lot of people who voted in the Survey talked about how welcoming the cafe is and how it feels like part of the community to them. Is that something you’ve consciously tried to build into the bakery, or has it just naturally come about

What’s it like having ‘your own place’, where you have to handle everything yourself? It’s challenging. I especially miss having colleagues sometimes because I had such an amazing team in my last job. Taking on all the pressures of running a business can be really tough but I’m quite resilient and my parents and partner have been incredibly supportive. But I think it’s a big part of why people enjoy coming to my place. It’s always me behind the counter and every item enjoyed there has been made from scratch by me, the owner. That’s not a very common experience.

— 22 —

that way? I always had it in my mind that I really wanted my place to be welcoming and unpretentious. Initially I wanted to host community events and workshops and make a useful space for charity groups. The space I ended up taking on unfortunately hasn’t allowed for that because it is just too small. However, the small size has helped contribute to that idea in other ways and from the day I first opened people have commented that it feels so homely to them and like they’re just catching up with me in my kitchen. I cannot tell you how happy that makes me. So I am absolutely thrilled that despite not being able to host events then at least by creating an honest, welcoming and inclusive environment the people in my community are happy with that contribution. Obviously there are lots of little indie cafes/bars/ producers etc in Edinburgh; how important is the camaraderie and support of your peers? I have a small network of support among local businesses but it rarely extends beyond likes and encouraging words on social media. We’re all so busy running our businesses most of the time! I’m an introvert so I’m quite happy just doing my own thing tucked away in my little corner of Newington. My customers are absolutely amazing and give me so much support and encouragement. Bakery Three.14, 38 Dalkeith Rd, Edinburgh, bakery314.com

THE SKINNY

January 2020

— 23 —

January 2020 — Feature

Food

THE SKINNY

— 24 —

THE SKINNY

Winners, Winners In no particular order, your favourite cafes, bars, restaurants and scone festival hosts from across Scotland GLASGOW William Cafe 94 Queen Margaret Dr Charmingly-named Kelvinside cafe. The Hug and Pint 171 Great Western Rd Good gigs and great vegan scran.

Stereo 22 Renfield Ln Always-great vegan bar, diner and gig venue.

Errol’s Hot Pizza 379 Victoria Rd Excellent BYOB pizza joint.

Ranjit’s Kitchen 607 Pollokshaws Rd Bustling, family-run Panjabi restaurant.

Bramble Cafe 205 Fenwick Rd Locallysourced and lovingly prepared brunches.

Cafe Strange Brew 1082 Pollokshaws Rd One of the greats on Glasgow’s brunch scene.

Koelschip Yard 686-688 Pollokshaws Rd Experimental and exciting beers a-plenty. Dennistoun Bar-B-Que 585 Duke St Texas-style barbecue joint.

KAF Coffee 5 Hyndland St Great coffee, inventive food, A+ tableware. Durty Vegan Burger Club 994 Argyle St As it says in the title – dirty burgers that are vegan.

The Buffalo Truck 125 Pitt St and pop-ups The best chicken burgers in this or any other town. Three.14 38 Dalkeith Rd Great cakes as far as the eye can see. The Stockbridge Tap 2-6 Raeburn Pl Expertly-run and surprisingly bright pub.

The Flying Duck 142 Renfield St Super-cool subterranean bar with a vegan menu. The Calabash African Restaurant 57 Union St Late-night West African fare.

Lowdown Coffee 40 George St Relaxing Scandi-style coffee bar. The Lioness of Leith 21-25 Duke St Equal parts ‘trendy bar’ and ‘unfussy local’.

Paesano Pizza 94 Miller St & 471 Great Western Rd Delicious Neapolitan pizza at low, low prices. Julie’s Kopitiam 1109 Pollokshaws Rd Delightfully cosy Malaysian cooking.

EDINBURGH

El Perro Negro 966 Argyle St & 152 Woodlands Rd Brilliantly meaty and perfectly-formed burgers.

Alby’s 8 Portland Pl Excellent hot sandwich shop with a laid-back vibe.

Tasty Buns 67 Bread St Home to Sconefest – yes, it’s a scone festival. Salt Horse 57-61 Blackfriars St Cool craft beer bar with a great hidden beer garden. Kim’s Mini Meals 5 Buccleuch St Family-run Korean bistro; get there early to beat the queues. Century General Store 1-7 Montrose Ter Great coffee amid waves of extremely hygge homeware.

Roots 18 William St Salads, sandwiches and breakfasts with loads of veggie options.

Food

Black Pine Coffee 518 Great Western Rd Artisanal coffee in a great West End location.

Athletic Arms 1-3 Angle Park Ter Cask ales, low-cost whiskies and big wooden benches. Bross Bagels Bruntsfield, Leith, West End and Portobello Fresh and endlessly interesting filled bagels. Fortitude Coffee 3c York Pl Excellent small batch coffee; their piccolo is incredible.

The Ventoux 2 Brougham St Cosy bar with lots of German beers and a very good fish tank.

Harmonium 60 Henderson St Vegan comfort food in a trendy setting.

Noto 47a Thistle St Minimal but mind-blowing restaurant from the Aizle team.

Tanjore 6-8 Clerk St South Indian realness, featuring enormous dosas. [Peter Simpson]

Best of the Best On a dig through the stats of the last eight years of our Food and Drink Survey, we highlight 20 of the most popular choices over the years Port, Edinburgh). You’ve long been fans of Taco Mazama (various locations) and Los Cardos (224 Leith Walk, Edinburgh), so clearly burritos are staying on the menu for a while yet. As for beers, there are a selection of breweries who pop up in the voting most years – the crisp German-style beers from WEST and the left-field riffs of Drygate are perennial favourites. You also love Leith murk merchants Pilot and the now-ubiquitous Williams Bros, and you’re big Brewdog fans but not as much as you used to be. There’s a clear favourite trio of shops – Real Foods (8 Brougham St & 37 Broughton St, Edinburgh) for all your organic staples; Roots, Fruits and Flowers (451 Great Western Rd, Glasgow) for brilliant fresh produce; and Lupe Pintos (24 Leven St, Edinburgh & 313 Great Western Rd, Glasgow) for — 25 —

amazing hot sauces and Mexican treats. Five restaurants pop up again and again – Ting Thai Caravan (8-9 Teviot Pl, Edinburgh) and Mother India’s Cafe (1355 Argyle St, Glasgow & 3-5 Infirmary St, Edinburgh) when you want to stay chill; Ox and Finch (920 Sauchiehall St, Glasgow) and Timberyard (10 Lady Lawson St, Edinburgh) when you’re feeling fancy; and Hanoi Bike Shop (8 Ruthven Ln, Glasgow) when you’re somewhere in the middle. And when you just want to go for a pint, you’re fans of three distinct options – the riverside chill of Inn Deep (445 Great Western Rd, Glasgow), the sour-powered schoonerfest of The Hanging Bat (133 Lothian Rd, Edinburgh), and the charm of Roseleaf (23-24 Sandport Pl, Edinburgh). [Peter Simpson]

January 2020 — Feature

ince 2012, 247 places have been awarded the Food and Drink Survey stamp of approval. On a dig through the stats, we found two interesting trends – firstly, 18% of our past winners are now shut, reminding us that (at least a fifth of) everything you know and love will perish. Yay. Secondly, nearly two-thirds of our champs have been repeat winners. In fact, there are a hardcore of places that have been winners four or more times over the years. The following 20 are some of the Best of the Best of Scottish food and drink; they won’t let you down, trust us. When it comes to cafes, the smoothies and various bowls of Hula (103-105 West Bow & 94A Fountainbridge, Edinburgh) have long been popular, as have the great cakes of Lovecrumbs (155 West

THE SKINNY

Clubs

Dance Dance Revolution As we enter a new decade, we look back on the last ten years of Scotland’s electronic music and club scene, with help from Optimo’s Keith McIvor and Jonnie Wilkes, and Huntleys + Palmers’ Andrew Thomson Interview: Nadia Younes

January 2020 — Feature

Credit: Andrew Beltran

With the Band(camp) As demand for vinyl has increased, though, we also saw the collapse of major high street music chain HMV. And, while there are still plenty of record shops around (and HMV has since been revived in a smaller form), the increase in vinyl demand has meant that there has simply not been enough space for all these new records to be stocked. Countering this problem has been digital music platform Bandcamp, which has become an invaluable asset for labels and artists. In 2019, one half of legendary Scottish DJ duo Optimo, Keith McIvor celebrated ten years of his Optimo Music label. Founded in 2009, the label has released music from a broad range of artists from Scotland and beyond. McIvor credits the personal element of Bandcamp as its most appealing factor. “It’s a joyous way to buy music,” he says. “I was always selling digital music through all these other outlets but it was always somehow very faceless and at a distance, whereas there’s something

more tangible about Bandcamp.” Another key record label in Scotland over the last ten years has been Huntleys + Palmers, founded in 2011 by Andrew Thomson. He agrees that Bandcamp has been an important platform for independent record labels over the last decade. “It’s really encouraging when you see people on Bandcamp buying all the different releases, so it makes you feel like they’re trusting you,” he says. “In the age of Spotify I think it’s really nice that it’s not really an algorithm, it’s still people trusting humans in their taste.” Lock Down Your Aerial As well as celebrating ten years of his Highlife party series with Brian d’Souza, aka Auntie Flo, this year, Thomson recently announced the launch of his new Glasgow-based online radio station. Clyde Built Radio will begin broadcasting out of the Barras Market this month, with the intention to showcase Glasgow’s bright club scene. In the last ten years there has been a boom in community radio stations, and just about every DJ nowadays has their own radio show. McIvor and Thomson have both had experience on stations like Rinse FM and NTS, and Thomson hopes to recreate that sense of community with his own station. “Something I’ve felt Glasgow is missing is being able to shine a spotlight on the scene, which is already very strong, but it almost feels like a well-known secret in some ways,” he says. McIvor believes radio is a good method of showcasing the diversity of your musical taste as a DJ outside of a club setting. “It’s always been part of our mission to turn people on to what we think is great no matter what genre it is,” he says. “So doing a radio show was pretty liberating because we could literally play whatever we wanted. It didn’t have to be dance-focused.” Stream If You Wanna Go Faster It’s difficult to imagine, given how ingrained live-streaming has become in the electronic music community, but ten years ago Boiler Room was only just finding its feet. The online music

— 26 —

Credit: Sensory Works

Credit: Al White and Jamie Johnson

t will come as a surprise to absolutely no one when I say that a lot can happen in ten years. In 2010, audio and video streams didn’t contribute towards chart position – that didn’t happen until 2014 and 2018 respectively – and people still listened to music on iPods; imagine that! Since then, the music industry has experienced significant changes. Streaming has taken over as the lead method of consuming music, meaning artists often don’t make much money from their releases and instead rely on other avenues to sustain their careers. The traditional album release model has also become somewhat obsolete as output has increased and surprise releases have become the norm. At the same time, physical products have been increasing in popularity. Vinyl has seen an unexpected resurgence over the last ten years and, in a recent report by the Recording Industry Association of America, it was predicted that vinyl would outsell CDs for the first time since 1986 by the end of 2019. The sales of cassettes also grew in the UK in the first half of last year, with almost double the amount sold over the same period in 2018.

THE SKINNY

Clubs

world – but there are downsides to it in the travelling side, the lack of sleep, mental health issues, and I think sometimes the Instagram side of things can gloss over that.”

huntleyspalmers.com

— 27 —

January 2020 — Feature

optimomusic.bandcamp.com

Credit: Andrew Beltran

A Little More Conversation McIvor’s DJing partner Jonnie Wilkes opens up about his struggles with depression and addiction issues over the years, partially a result of the pressures of touring. He has now been sober and clean for two and a half years. “I do think that there’s an intensity to the nature of our touring life, which some people manage better than others,” he says. “I thought I managed it through drugs and alcohol for a long time when actually I wasn’t managing it at all,” he continues. “I think it’s great that people are talking about it and I think that it’s really helpful for some people just to simply express it online or even the first step of declaring it. I think it’s very brave.” The sober lifestyle is something that has become much more normalised in DJ culture, even just over the last few years in particular, and rightly so. The nightlife community is often unfairly branded as one in which young people only participate in to drink or take drugs; a narrative that does a disservice to the passion and hard work of those involved in it. But the tides are shifting and clubbing is now more popular than ever. However, with such a great deal of political uncertainty in the UK at the moment, it’s anybody’s guess where the music industry will go over the next decade. Judging by the trends of the last decade, we’re likely to see the interest in electronic music continue to grow and reach wider audiences, hopefully developing upon that sense of community it’s done so well to nurture over the last ten years.

Credit: Selwa Abd

Credit: Sensory Works

All I See Is Dollar Signs This ability to achieve such rapid viral success, teamed with the surprising rise of EDM, has turned dance music into an international moneymaking machine. Leading the EDM brigade over the last ten years has been the likes of David Guetta, Skrillex, Diplo and Calvin Harris – all now multi-millionaire, multi-award-winning global superstar DJs. At the highest level, DJ fees can reach the millions. Take Scotland’s own Calvin Harris, for example: he was named the highest-paid DJ in the world by Forbes for six years in a row (2013-2018), and when he announced the extension of his Las Vegas residency at the Omnia nightclub in Caesars Palace into 2020, he was said to have signed a £200 million deal for 25 gigs – that’s £8 million per show. Obviously, these kinds of fees aren’t offered to everyone and not even in their wildest dreams could most DJs imagine being paid millions per show. But even on a lower level, DJ fees have sky-rocketed and it has made it almost impossible for smaller promoters and clubs to book certain DJs. Part of this can also be attributed to the glamorisation of the DJ lifestyle through social media, particularly Instagram. “It’s only social by name, but there’s nothing sociable about it,” says Thomson. “It makes people feel more isolated than involved.” The view portrayed on social media, too, is not one that’s entirely accurate. While it may seem all glitz and glamour, champagne and sunny beaches, touring can take its toll on many DJs. “I think it can give a very false view because it’s very seductive,” says McIvor. “I love what I do – it’s the greatest job in the

Credit: Grampian Mountains

Credit: Katie Shannon

Credit: T. L. Clarke and Tim Dalzell

broadcasting juggernaut was founded in March 2010 and has since gone on to become one of the biggest online platforms in the music industry. While it obviously has its downsides, Boiler Room has allowed an array of previously unheard DJs and underrepresented music communities to reach a global audience. “I think, especially for people who live in places where they can’t go to a club every week, it’s a revelation,” says McIvor. The extent of its reach is something Thomson says he has noticed much more when DJing further afield. “It allows people to be as far removed from what you would consider a sort of central hub… It’s definitely opened up the scene a lot more,” says Thomson. “A good example is Sherelle. She just went viral and now she’s got a Radio 1 show, through a really short clip of a spinback on a Boiler Room video… new faces can just get propelled and it would have taken them years to get recognition through traditional channels in the past.”

THE SKINNY

Theatre

Beyond the Bars The Polmont Youth Theatre, established in 2019, was the first youth theatre ever set up in a Scottish prison. The Skinny speaks to its co-founder, Jess Thorpe, about drama as healing and why reframing crime as a public health issue has been so important Interview: Eliza Gearty

MYOI Polmont is Scotland’s national holding facility for male young offenders. Located in Falkirk, the institution’s residents are between 16 and 21 years of age. Their sentences range from six months to life – the average sentence being served is between two and four years. Polmont is just over 20 miles to the north-east of Glasgow, a city once so notorious for its high rates of knife crime, particularly among young people, that it was once dubbed ‘the murder capital of Europe’. It is also home to the first ever youth theatre based in a Scottish prison. “It just seemed strange that Scotland’s national facility for young people didn’t have a youth theatre,” says Jess Thorpe of its conception. Thorpe is a lecturer in the Arts in Social Justice at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and co-artistic director of the theatre company Glass Performance. She founded the Polmont Youth Theatre with her Glass Performance co-director Tashi Gore in 2019, following the success of MOTION – the show devised with Polmont residents for the National Theatre of Scotland’s Year of The Young People programme, Futureproof. When the show recieved glowing feedback, Thorpe saw an opportunity to create something more sustainable. “What we did was propose an all year round performance arts group that young people could attend every week,” she says. “We put on two shows every year with full production values.” When participants are in Polmont’s performing arts centre, Thorpe tells us, a huge number say they forget they are in prison. “That’s the goal: to give them a voice and a sense of what they can be beyond this serial number.” She suggests that accessing the ‘idea’ of freedom through creativity is a hugely powerful thing for the incarcerated: “participating in the arts is a way to transcend the walls. You can [escape] the caged moment to find a sense of freedom.” Arguably, the ethos of the Polmont Youth Theatre – focusing on maintaning consistency and sustainability, running participant-led workshops and using drama as a method of healing – reflects a wider attitudinal shift towards youth crime and young offenders; one that has taken place in Scotland over the last decade. In 2005, a UN report revealed Scotland was the most violent country in the developed world. Much of the blame was directed towards high levels of gang membership among young people in the country, particularly in Glasgow and the surrounding areas. Ramping up the ‘tough on crime’ shtick hadn’t really improved matters, so the Scottish Government took a different approach. They formed Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit, an independent body from the police that sought to redefine crime as a ‘public health issue’. Recent statistics show that violent crime in Scotland has reduced by nearly half since 2009. Knife crime

continues to rise in England and Wales, but the number of incidents in Scotland are consistently dropping. It’s a switch of mindset that seems to have worked. If violence is ‘a disease infecting our communities’, as described by the SVRU, then it’s crucial that we understand enough about the condition to treat it. For Thorpe, recognising the psychological roots of criminal behaviour among young people is key to breaking the cycle. An overwhelming 91% of the young men she works with at Polmont have experienced bereavement. “What we start to understand when we look at things like that is that this is absolutely a public health issue,” she explains. A youth theatre offers ‘a place of care, a place of healing and place of moving forward’. “We know that the young people we work with in Polmont are some of the most traumatised in Scotland,” she says. “They have caused a lot of harm to other people – but they’ve had harm caused to them too. A lot of the time, their behaviour is a direct emotional response to a repressed culture where there isn’t a way for them to explore their own trauma about the harm that’s been done to them.” The regular sessions at the youth theatre provide participants with an environment to express and process emotions on their own terms. The devising methods used are cross-explorative; if young people want to play with music, they can – if they’re more into writing, they can go down that path, too. The young men devise the show, with only a vague prompt. 2018’s MOTION was a response to the question ‘what does it mean to be a young man in Scotland today?’ Providing a consistent, creative space for young people is beneficial, not only for participants, but also for communities. The PYT gives participants experience in something that isn’t associated with the ‘offender’ label, and Thorpe supports them to seek out other youth theatres in their area, if they choose to, after leaving Polmont. “It’s about sustainable, long-term opportunities, addressing that stigma and keeping young people with difficult, chaotic lives in our communities,” says Thorpe. “As much as these young people have done things that may be difficult to understand or contextualise within our own lives, they are a part of our community. We have to work positively with people, otherwise the future won’t look any better. We’re not trying to reduce the impact of any of the behaviours here, but we are trying to go ‘what next?’” She pauses. “Because they’re young people. And if you can’t be hopeful about young people, what can you be hopeful about?”

January 2020 — Feature

“They’re young people. If you can’t be hopeful about young people, what can you be hopeful about?”

glassperformance.co.uk/polmont-youth-theatre

— 28 —

THE SKINNY

January 2020

— 29 —

Books

THE SKINNY

Make Poetry Cool Again SPAM Poetry are publishing some of Scotland and the UK’s best and brightest poets. Over Google doc, we chat about their origins, the internet and why Glasgow is the perfect home for poetry

January 2020 — Feature

Interview: Katie Goh

What was the inception of SPAM? SPAM was founded in 2016 by Denise Bonetti and Maebh Harper, but the editorial team now consists of Denise, Max Parnell and Maria Sledmere. Denise and Max met studying English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Maria joined shortly after submitting work to our issue #2, Glitch, and Max in 2017 after we adopted his pamphlet of tasty meal deal poems, And no more being outdoors / And no more rain. Denise and Maebh started SPAM because none of the poetry or literature publications they saw around resembled what living in the 21st century is actually like (i.e. immersed in internet ectoplasm). Doing or promoting good literature also always seemed to go hand in hand with taking oneself very seriously, which we weren’t comfortable with: we wanted to have our high theoretical cake and eat it with Love Island on mute while, like, Tom Raworth is rattling away on another open tab. So we thought – let’s just do it ourselves. Did the name come from the literary subgenre spam poetry or something else? I guess the ethos is similar to creating poetry from whatever you get in your Junk inbox. We just loved the idea of starting a magazine for the leftover discourse, the uncategorised rubbish, the glitched or absurd, the things that normally get filtered out and no one has room for. Spam email

is precisely that, but it’s also very much a post-internet concept, a corollary of information overload (which we’re all about). It’s also a brand name, of course (ironically most of the editors are veggie), and as editors we’re all fascinated with today’s corporatespeak, the impersonal textual detritus that submerges absolutely everything. Calling ourselves SPAM is like eating late-capitalism from the inside out, or something. SPAM is this cheap ‘readymade’ food with a complex political history, and maybe we’re reclaiming that to say something about millennials, the bloat of content and craving for cultural nutrition… How has SPAM evolved over time into being one of the UK’s best poetry publishers? OMG that’s so nice of you to say! I think sheer hard work, the lucky combination of having two Geminis and a Capricorn at the helm. Partly a commitment to doing things our own way: we could have bumped our prices or tried to go more mainstream, but we always wanted things to feel a little bit trashy, even while considering what we publish as high quality poetry. We started off hemorrhaging Glasgow Uni library print credits and bribing a Byres Road cobbler to stitch together our first issue, and now we’re publishing poetry goddesses like Helen Charman and

Daisy Lafarge, so it’s really nice to see how far we’ve come! I think initially it was the community we built around our launches, which always drew from poetry and music enthusiasts, that cemented a more local fan base. Since then, our online presence has developed and a lot of people now know us from the reviews content we publish, as much as from the press and the zines. Have you seen a change from starting SPAM to now with how poetry is distributed and perceived? In the three-plus years that SPAM has been going, we’ve seen the small press and indie publishing scene in the UK especially grow a lot. Publishers like Guillemot, HVTN, The 87 Press, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Partus Press (to name a handful) are putting out amazing work. We like to be optimistic (our slogan is Make Poetry Cool Again) about the democratising of poetry via the internet, club nights and affordable publications. It seems experimental poetry of a post-internet flavour is becoming much more critically and academically respected, in the sense that zines, blogs and small press pamphlets are even cropping up on university reading lists and academic journals. There is the cynical, monetising turn in Instagram poetry, but saying that, Instagram has always been a really important medium for us. And many of the best contemporary poets are on the ‘gram. Another

— 30 —

THE SKINNY

Photo: Courtesy of SPAM

Books

“ What is time? What is poetry? What is the post-internet?”

thing we’ve noticed is the birth of more amazing poetry nights, from The 87 Press (London) to No Matter (Manchester) and our Edinburgh comrades at Just Not. Why pamphlets? We love zine culture, the urgency and play and subversiveness inherent to it. Plus the cognitive dissonance of seeing like Web 2.0 architectures/ aesthetics reproduced on a lo-fi, black-and-white page. Pamphlets are so easy to swap and distribute, they become a kind of conduit for new friendships, collaborations and moments in time. We wanted our press to be affordable, while publishing quality and challenging works. There’s something about the ‘timeliness’ of the pamphlet that feels post-internet, but also the sense that

as an IRL object it’s a cleaving back of thought from the endless streams of the virtual. We believe that value is inherent to the poems we publish, but also the pamphlet can itself be a beautiful object: some of our favourite designs so far have included Daisy Lafarge’s capriccio (designed by Ane Lopez), Sam Riviere’s Darken PDF, Ryan Jarvis’ Tesseract Life and Anna Danielewicz’s An orca is way too big to attach, unless as a JPEG.

Photo: Courtesy of SPAM

You say that “it’s time for poetry to enter the post-internet age.” Do you think poetry has done that yet? What is time? What is poetry? What is the post-internet? There’s a long-read in The New — 31 —

January 2020 — Feature

You’re based all round the UK but I want to ask about Glasgow. Do you think there’s a reason why there’s such a flourishing indie literary scene? Glasgow is, as everyone says, the perfect combination of big enough and small enough: cosy enough to foster a community around arts projects, but big enough that you can get decent venues and outlets for your work. Even when you see the same faces, the scene still feels dynamic. For us, the English Literature and Creative Writing departments at the University of Glasgow have been a kind of hub for meeting like-minded folk, but also just our mutual involvement in the music scene here has helped make that natural cultural crossover (Denise, Maria and Max are/have been nightclub managers, music journalists and musicians themselves). There’s always been a DIY spirit in Glasgow, completely apart from its institutions, and we like to think SPAM is built on that bedrock. Nobody takes themselves too seriously here, which can’t be said for all avant-garde poetry scenes and it’s nice to feel the warmly abrasive bath of Glasgow humour sometimes (academia by day, Wetherspoons by night – both with varying degrees of irony).

Yorker from a few years back called ‘Post-Internet Poetry Comes of Age’. More recently, a lot of controversy and backlash has come out of the alt-lit scene and Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘uncreative writing’: the way its use can, for example, be an abuse of privilege. Part of our interest in the post-internet’s endurance as a literary mode and ontology is the ethical questioning that arises from this way of being. We’re not just interested in flarfy remix poems; we also want to provide a space for serious creative-critical interrogation of where we are in the world right now, as networked, mediated and desiring beings but also bodies still defined by class, race, gender, geography, (dis)ability and sexuality. Providing an online space for essays and critical discussion has helped develop that, but we’ve also always tried to avoid our publication output weighing too heavily on like indulgent, ‘~fascinating textual junkspace~’ as I think Sophie Collins once put it. Flirting with the weird, facilitating formal experimentation and collaging online detritus around lyric poetry has, we feel, always involved political gestures of value, dissent and challenging aesthetic hierarchies. Making memes is a mode of study, of processing the affective and tonal afterglow of the discourse we encounter at various levels. Basically, we see ourselves as belonging to the resistant space, sociality and ‘play’ of zine culture (whose heroes are surely punk, transfeminism and queer communities) and the confessional, disseminating and emojifying (lol) force of the tumblr/ LiveJournal/MySpace/MSN generation. As Colin Herd says, ‘The embarrassment of this poem is this: / We forgot for a while how to be sweet and funny.’ To even claim the post-internet mantle is embarrassing! It’s like, Denise, Maria and Max – such nerds! But we think the outcome, as much as the gesture, has produced something sweet and funny.

Music

THE SKINNY

Top of the Pops

Young Fathers / Photo: Cameron Brisbane

As the decade came to a dramatic end, we polled our music team one last time to find out what the best Scottish albums of the last ten years were

January 2020 — Feature

#1 Y oung Fathers Cocoa Sugar [Ninja Tune, 2018]

“If we try and put ourselves in a box, it’s gonna end up with spikes coming out,” Alloysious Massaquoi, one third of Young Fathers, told The Guardian in an interview ahead of the release of their album Cocoa Sugar in 2018. It’s a neat summation of the trio’s undefinable work across all their albums. Uncompromising and unpredictable, it’s music that has elements of familiarity, but tinged with danger; get close enough and you might prick your finger. Or, as Massaquoi later adds: “Aesthetically pleasing, but fucked up.” Not only is Cocoa Sugar a decade-defining record for Scottish music; it is the pinnacle (so far) of a decade-defining band. We should use that word advisedly. As whenever trying to describe Young Fathers, pinning them down doesn’t come easily. Are they rock stars? Rappers? A boy band? It’s the same when it comes to their music, and no more so than on Cocoa Sugar. Genreless. Borderless. Uninterested in being contained by human con— 32 —

structs like gender and race, they are just as happy to play about with vocal effects (Fee Fi) and pronouns (Wire) to wrong-foot, to play characters, as they are to use production that is fluid and kinetic. It’s political, though not always obviously so, allowing the unexpected rhymes and gnomic lines from their songs to remain pliable, while its members – two black men, one white – give voice to urgent causes and issues and rail against injustices. The ambiguity ends up imbuing any one of their phrases with potential meaning, while their initial motivations remain known only to them. Even the album title works like this: for some it’s a comment on the history of slavery, while for Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham ‘G’ Hastings, it’s just a reference to their ability to make music filled with contrasts. You can almost see them winking. Cocoa Sugar is the culmination of a vision, a late decade work that shows the diversity and life still left in Scottish music. It has translated to critical and widespread commercial success, a signal that there is value in making something new and modern and wild and filled with ideas. This album and this band are the perfect reflection – in their actions and in their art – of the progressive country Scotland is trying to be. [Tony Inglis]

THE SKINNY

#7 F rightened Rabbit Pedestrian Verse [Atlantic Records, 2013] In one of his final interviews, Scott Hutchison claimed Pedestrian Verse was the finest Frightened Rabbit record. It is not a popularly-held opinion but with the passage of time it’s one that more people might come around to. Scott was Frightened Rabbit and Pedestrian Verse is Scott: full-throated, warm-hearted, bitingly witty. It’s littered with idiosyncrasies and peculiarities and yet it still sounds every inch the kind of album that carries bands to arenas. It’s their masterpiece, and it’s still here. It’s ours to keep. [Joe Goggins]

#3 K athryn Joseph Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled [Hits the Fan Records, 2014] Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled is the 2015 SAY Award-winning record that first introduced Kathryn Joseph to our radios and record players. Joseph channelled her discomfort during emotive and intimate early performances to sublime effect, leaving audiences transfixed by her defiant, almost accusatory stare. Bones... – primal, delicate and visceral – is almost too human to bear, as Joseph bravely and formidably opens herself to articulate some of the most overwhelming emotional responses a person can endure. [Fraser MacIntyre]

#8 S OPHIE Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides [Transgressive, 2018] While LA has arguably been the most influential city in music this decade thanks to the likes of Kendrick Lamar and the Brainfeeder stable, Glasgow can make a bold claim too. SOPHIE, the now LA-based producer is the jewel in Glasgow’s electronic music crown thanks to her groundbreaking and emotionally striking debut LP. Her 2018 release skyrocketed her as one of modern electronic music’s most exciting producers and composers along with being a proud transgender icon. [Adam Turner-Heffer]

Music

#2 A nna Meredith Varmints [Moshi Moshi, 2016] It’s fair to say that no other album on this list sounds quite like Varmints. But then few of the musicians featured here will have benefitted from such rigorous classical training as Anna Meredith. A former composer-in-residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Meredith’s high cultural background makes her an unlikely pop star. But her award-winning debut LP is an enthralling, joyous experience. The immediacy of ambitious tracks like Nautilus mean it can be enjoyed by all. [Chris McCall]

#9 H oneyblood Babes Never Die [FatCat Records, 2016] If there’s one thing that’s shaped Stina Tweeddale’s output as Honeyblood to date, it’s female friendships. From early demos with Shona McVicar to recent single The Third Degree, Tweeddale knows the good and bad of having a strong girl gang. And there was no better testament to that than 2016‘s Babes Never Die, with drumming force Cat Myers. An intoxicating brew of singalong punk, Honeyblood’s sophomore release showed Tweeddale’s unwavering grit and undeniable talent as a songwriter. Watch her fire burn bright. [Cheri Amour]

#4 B oards of Canada Tomorrow’s Harvest [Warp, 2013] Like the ghostly view of San Francisco on its cover, Tomorrow’s Harvest is both looming and transitory. The reclusive pair’s first release in eight years is full of dystopian anxiety and environmental worry, anticipating the cultural shift towards panic that marked the second half of the decade. But, in true BoC fashion, there’s always majesty and solemnity lurking amid the darkness, as subtle, ambient grooves and gorgeous washes of arpeggiated synth ensure that existential dread can still sound beautiful. [Lewis Wade]

#10 H appy Meals Apero [Night School Records, 2014] Free Love, fka Happy Meals, launched their debut record in 2014. Formed off the back of the NEET Green Door Studio course the duo completed in the same year, it was an early indication of the act’s huge promise. With a running time just shy of 30 minutes, Apero steadily builds an absorbing spectrum of layered electronic soundscapes and ambiguous lyrical imagery. The release would prove to be a highly enjoyable early experiment of one of Scotland’s most exciting electronic acts. [Niamh Carey]

#6 K ing Creosote & Jon Hopkins Diamond Mine [Domino Records, 2011] Diamond Mine combines the delicate songcraft of Scottish singer-songwriter Kenny Anderson with the atmospheric production of Jon Hopkins. Produced over seven years, the record is a love letter to the East Neuk of Fife, Anderson’s home. Interspersing his romantic observations with Hopkins’ field recordings – traffic, birdsong, dull chatter in a cafe – familiar, mundane details are beautified, immortalised. Soft and haunting, almost siren-like in its beauty, Diamond Mine makes the heart ache for home – wherever that may be. [Katie Cutforth]

#11 The Twilight Sad – It Won/t Be Like This All the Time #12 Camera Obscura – Desire Lines #13 Rustie – Glass Swords #14 Young Fathers – DEAD #15 Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat – Everything's Getting Older #16 Sacred Paws – Strike a Match #17 Golden Teacher – No Luscious Life #18 Honeyblood – Honeyblood #19 The Twilight Sad – Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave #20 Belle & Sebastian – Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance

— 33 —

January 2020 — Feature

#5 C HVRCHES The Bones of What You Believe [Glassnote Records, 2013] When CHVRCHES released their debut album in 2013 it was clear they were going to reach the heights of global pop stardom. The Bones of What You Believe came at a time when electro-pop was thriving, and showed that it can be clever as well as catchy. It’s rough around the edges in the best possible way, combining gritty, erratic beats with Lauren Mayberry’s squeaky clean vocals to form a collection of no-nonsense synth-pop hits. [Nadia Younes]

THE SKINNY

Music

Tens Across the Board We asked some of our music industry pals for their favourite Scottish albums of the decade too, and while nobody could agree on one album, there was a lot of love for the first half of the decade, with 2014 being a standout year

Rustie Glass Swords [Warp, 2011]

Rustie’s debut album came out the year I started Uni so it definitely soundtracked a very particular time in my life, which makes it all the more special. Glass Swords is the ultimate peak-time dancefloor record; it’s theatrical and colourful but at the same time, impressively complex and carefully pieced together with undeniable bangers. It’s a record that will forever be representative of how incredible electronic music is and always has been in Scotland. [Arusa Qureshi, Editor, The List]

January 2020 — Feature

eagleowl This Silent Year [Fence Records, 2013] I’ve spent the majority of this decade living in Edinburgh and eagleowl have always represented everything that is good about the DIY music scene here. They’ve been key players in some of the most joyous and memorable moments... Dune: The Musical anyone? The eight heartachingly beautiful songs on This Silent Year remind me of all that, while simultaneously making me feel like I might burst into tears at any moment. A perfect combo. [Kate Lazda, Lost Map Records] CHVRCHES The Bones of What You Believe [Glassnote Records, 2013] I love massive pop hooks and I’m a pure emo, so it’s this record. It soundtracked what was a blur of somehow finding myself as a Radio 1 DJ in my early 20s, as I watched

some good humans find their voice. Since then, this record has acted as a regularly-deployed, euphoric kick up the arse. I take it as a call to be a better man; to be bolder, to be less of a dick, to aspire, to adventure, to check my fucking privilege, and I guess, believe in that. [Ally McCrae, Producer, BBC Music] Mogwai Rave Tapes [Rock Action, 2014]

I think this has actually become my favourite Mogwai record. They’ve been around for such a long time I wasn’t sure where it would go musically, but it’s perfect. Rave Tapes is a really eclectic summation of everything they’ve done before, and a brilliant offering to their fans old and new which illustrates that they are still very much a force to be reckoned with, and without a doubt, one of Scotland’s finest musical exports. [Gráinne Vedamanikam, Synergy Concerts] Young Fathers DEAD [Big Dada, 2014]

I’ve loved all their recorded output, but DEAD put the Edinburgh trio on the map. It balances their own unique take on pop and soul with avant-garde and industrial textures, proving how original they are, and demonstrating how diverse and vital Scottish music has become. With lyrical dexterity, off-kilter melodies, oddball production and an avalanche of ideas, DEAD is extraordinary and set the bar high for what they continue to do. [Vic Galloway, BBC Broadcaster, Author, Journalist and Musician]

The Amazing Snakeheads Amphetamine Ballads [Domino, 2014] When the Glasgow band released Amphetamine Ballads it fuelled all my conversations and all my thoughts. The much-adored Dale Barclay tragically passed away in 2018 and I was devastated. Dale made you feel something alien when you saw him live; sometimes these songs are just too much to take, they cause you too much discomfort and emotion. But that’s what I long for in a debut. Thank you Dale for this perfect snap of genius that we’ll never forget. [Nadine Walker, Director, TENEMENT TV and TENEMENT TRAIL Festival] Kaddish Thick Letters To Friends [MTAT/Black Lake Records/Barely Regal/Boslevan Records, 2014] From immiseration comes desperation, the need for catharsis and the need to expel demons. One of the most important documents in the Ecossemo canon, Kaddish’s Thick Letters To Friends may be the genredefining LP of the decade. There is no emo like Ecossemo; bleak black-metal influenced hardcore from the grim north-east. Invigorating, vital, essential listening. [Derrick Johnston, Make-That-A-Take Records] We Were Promised Jetpacks Unravelling [FatCat Records, 2014] What a hard decision! However, my favourite Scottish LP in this period would have to be We Were Promised Jetpacks’ Unravelling. I know their

— 34 —

debut gets all the plaudits but I think this record is hugely underrated, flawless in its production and songwriting and I still listen to it on repeat. [Steven Milne, Aberdeen Performing Arts] Young Fathers White Men Are Black Men Too [Big Dada, 2015] People often wonder if an artist who has made such a cultural impact on their lives is able to continue their legacy but Young Fathers have managed to do that while still standing out from the crowd. White Men Are Black Men Too created a shift for me and felt like a complete work of ancestral interpretation, dynamic fervour, rich production and vocal sublimity. Nothing else was touching it in terms of creative vision and that continues to this day. [Halina Rifai, Podcaster and Music Writer at Podcart] The Spook School Try To Be Hopeful [Fortuna Pop!, 2015]

The Spook School are a testament to Scotland’s music scene, and no better is that displayed than on this poignant but hopeful record. Socially imperative, politically challenging and catchy songs that both move people and bring them together. Dreams of a boy in the back of my brain. The Spook School forever. [Robert Kilpatrick, General Manager, SMIA / SAY Award]

Turn to page 43 for this month's album reviews

THE SKINNY

January 2020

— 35 —

THE SKINNY

Film

Salty Dogs The Witch director Robert Eggers returns with The Lighthouse, another meticulously detailed period horror. We sit down with Eggers and one-half of his cast (the legendary Willem Dafoe) to hear about the arduous shoot and Robert Pattinson peeing his pants Interview: Iana Murray

January 2020 — Feature

he chairs at London’s May Fair hotel feel too comfortable. You could probably sink into the cushions if you leaned back far enough. As I sit with Robert Eggers and Willem Dafoe to discuss their new film, The Lighthouse, the atmosphere around the room is almost cosy. The luxury of a central London hotel feels completely at odds with what we’re here to talk about; The Lighthouse is anything but cosy. You get the sense that both Eggers and Dafoe sincerely love talking about this film despite the immense number of questions they’ve fielded on the topic since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Eggers will happily speak at length about any aspect of production. His words usually run away from him before he catches up, and he’ll often restart a sentence to really get the point across. Dafoe, likewise, is completely engaged, staring right into your eyes and hanging on to every word. The director’s follow-up to his blisteringly assured debut, The Witch, pulls no punches in shocking (and traumatising) viewers with audacious imagery. The film follows two lighthouse keepers (played by Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) and their descent into madness when they become stranded on an island off the coast of New England. Its fairly simple premise leaves room for visual bravado: the exaggerated shadows and boxy aspect ratio recall German Expressionism, but the sheer chaos on screen is wholly original. Dafoe remembers seeing The Witch completely blind (no critic reviews to sway his opinion), and left feeling so impressed by what he had seen that he immediately got in touch with Eggers. “It builds your confidence when Willem Dafoe sees The Witch and his team contacts you for a meeting and says ‘I want to be in whatever you’re doing next’.” Eggers jokes, apparently still in disbelief that it even happened. After their meeting, a potential collaboration manifested into one of the actor’s most eccentric performances in his long and prolific career. Dafoe’s Thomas Wake is a hell of a role: a flatulent, bitter seaman with a pipe perpetually hanging off his lip. The actor is thankfully the furthest from the aggressive seafarer he portrays. “It’s nice to be a nice guy, but it’s also nice for [people] to be a little afraid of me,” he says, with a smirk on his face. The actor reveled in the chance to play around with the screenplay’s period-accurate language (“It’s very unusual”) and the world Eggers created. Coming from a theatre background, he also expressed his excitement at carrying an entire film with only one scene partner. “I’m 64 years old,” Dafoe says. “I want to keep on doing interesting things and have demands put on me, and with

a two-hander, you have some work. I have enough boyhood seafaring myth fantasies that are still alive for me.” Eggers speaks about his writing process like he’s embarking on a PhD dissertation – and in some ways, he is. He’s truly obsessed with researching history. For The Lighthouse, literary giants like Sarah Orne Jewett, Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson aided the screenplay, and journals from real lighthouse keepers informed everything from the dialogue to the costumes and production design. His dedication to research suggests he’ll stick to making period films. In his mind, making a contemporary movie would be “incredibly boring”. “I’m very obsessed with the past and I prefer to hang out there, but clearly I’m trying to find out where we come from and where we’re going from the past,” Eggers says. “Of course, I am still influenced by the zeitgeist even though I try to stay locked in darkness in my study, but I can’t help but be influenced by the world because my dungeon isn’t vacuum-sealed.” With that in mind, Eggers’ films are perhaps like their own little museums. The set of The Lighthouse was filled with careful reproductions of the beds, lamps and plates that you would find in a lighthouse in the 1800s. He cites Guillermo del Toro as a filmmaker who takes the opposite approach by sourcing props and locations for the story’s needs, not concerned with anachronisms. It works for him, but to Eggers, that interpretative method is “crippling”. The hard work it takes to get the exact chair from a photograph he saw is integral to his method. “I find that if the material world and the language are super-specific and dialed in, things just are a little bit credible,” Eggers says. “You don’t run the risk of anyone saying, ‘Yeah, I don’t really buy it’.”

“Was the weather punishing and brutal? 100%. Did we have fun? Yeah. But was it a jovial set? Not at all” Robert Eggers Luckily for Dafoe, the painstaking hours spent on meticulous research made his job a lot easier. “Robert had so much stuff to give me and he pretty much turned me on to everything I needed,” Dafoe says. “But you can only prepare so much. You don’t know until you get there, until you — 36 —

THE SKINNY

Willem Dafoe

— 37 —

January 2020 — Feature

The Lighthouse is released 31 Jan by Universal

Film

“You’re like two guys going to war. Is it unpleasant? Yes. But unpleasant is sometimes good”

get those clothes, until you put those teeth in, until you start to speak the words, until you start to deal with the other actor. There was a lot of research in terms of just knowing that period, but you also can’t play period. It’s just for fun.” There’s a lingering emphasis on the word ‘fun’. Much has been said about how arduous the Nova Scotia shoot was, but Eggers and Dafoe add the caveat that it was, in fact, enjoyable... sometimes. “I didn’t have to push Willem and Robert because they signed up for this,” Eggers says. Every horror film seemingly has its own horror stories from the set, but instead of supernatural hauntings, the cast and crew faced gruelling conditions on the rough coast. Pattinson didn’t make it any easier. He threw himself into the role that sees him do everything from obliterating a seagull to having sex with a mermaid. At one point, Pattinson wanted to punch Eggers in the face, though the director admits he was unaware that he felt like that. Pattinson has also spoken of the torturous lengths he went to in the name of getting into character, such as eating mud and pissing himself, but there is one thing Eggers wants to clarify: Pattinson did not get drunk on set. “I think some people interpret the fact that he was talking about being unconscious and pissing his pants as him actually being drunk, but as far as I’m aware, he did not drink a drop when we were shooting the movie,” he explains. “When we wrapped for the day, he drank plenty, but that’s another story. But was he gagging himself and potentially urinating in his pants because of the fact that he was so into the performance? Sure. Was the weather punishing and brutal? 100%. Did we have fun? Yeah. But was it like a jovial set? Not at all.” While Pattinson was going close to full method on set, Dafoe wasn’t quite as intense about his performance. Their acting styles are on opposing ends of the spectrum, and Dafoe is able to turn off the character when the camera stops rolling. Instead, the most pressing worry for him was getting sick on set. Dafoe wasn’t urinating in his breeks, but he has his own nightmarish stories from Nova Scotia. He speaks about one scene in which he chases after Pattinson with an axe as he tries to escape the island. It was raining; water cannons were being used to mimic the crashing waves. They had to shoot the scene over and over again because of the unpredictable weather. “We were so cold that we were shaking,” Dafoe recalls. “We were practically hugging each other just to stay warm. Yeah, that’s hard but also that pushes you. It’s that you have to suffer but it’s a little bit like that takes you there and makes it stick. That’s the bonding thing. You’re like two guys going to war. Is it unpleasant? Yes. But unpleasant is sometimes good.” Before our time is up, Dafoe has some thoughts about his beard. According to him, it’s the biggest beard he’s ever grown, and if you’ve seen The Lighthouse, you’ll agree. It’s a real, bushy sailor’s beard that protrudes from his chin and more often has food stuck in its hairs than not. He’s clean-shaven now. “I like my face better,” he says smiling. It’s a relic of the past, much like The Lighthouse, though unlike Dafoe’s gnarly beard, the film is the type of artefact kept closely guarded, always remembered with admiration – and a little fear too.

THE SKINNY

Film

Quixotic Journey Former Python and maverick filmmaker Terry Gilliam speaks to us about finally finishing his long-gestating, possibly cursed magnum opus, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and tells us he’d rather be toiling with no money than working at the Marvel factory Interview: Jamie Dunn

erry Gilliam has big uncle energy: he is quick to laugh, wears garish shirts and is on the precipice of saying something off colour at any moment. A few hours before our interview at Karlovy Vary Film Festival in Czechia, the former Python had a major embarrassing uncle moment. During the press conference for his new film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the 79-year-old lamented how tough he has it in this day and age. “I no longer want to be a white male,” he said. “I don’t want to be blamed for everything wrong in the world. My name is Loretta and I’m a BLT, a black lesbian in transition.” As the kids say: OK, boomer! When we meet Gilliam later that day, he’s not exactly remorseful for his daft comments, but does seem a tad sheepish. “I’m in trouble,” he chuckles. “I was not supposed to reveal to the world that I’m Loretta. My wife is going to kill me. It’s going to be unbearable when I get home.” It’s a shame that Gilliam would go full gammon today of all days. After all, he’s finally – after decades of setbacks – getting to show his passion project to one of its first public audiences. Gilliam fell for Cervantes’ 17th century masterpiece Don Quixote in the late 80s and his trials to get it made have been well-documented. The first production in 2002, starring Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort, was scuppered by flash floods and Rochefort’s failing health – all elegantly detailed in tragicomic documentary Lost in La Mancha. Further attempts with John Hurt, Robert Duvall and his old Monty Python mucker Michael Palin in the Quixote role also stalled.

The project became a byword for a cursed production. “The press loved that idea,” Gilliam says. “And it’s a better story than just saying, ‘they’ve some trouble, they don’t have this money, the weather is bad’. The curse is better.” His obsession to get the film made against the odds is to be admired, although he doesn’t see it in those terms. “I didn’t see it as an obsession. I’m just pig-headed, and once I say I’m gonna do something, I’m determined to try to do it.” He admits to loathing the process – “I hated Quixote,” he blurts out several times during the interview – but the adversities seem to be what kept him going. “Everybody said, ‘Oh, it’s time to stop, give up, let’s do another thing’. And I said, ‘That’s much too reasonable’. I didn’t want to be reasonable. I’d rather be on the edge of madness and see what happens.” If the making of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was a toil, none of that hardship has made it on screen. It’s a scrappy beast, like all Gilliam films, but it’s also full of the energy, wit and invention that characterises his best work. Rather than a direct adaptation, Gilliam has used Cervantes’ epic story of an ageing Spanish nobleman who believes he’s a gallant knight saving damsels in distress and battling giants as a springboard for his own wild imagination. Gilliam’s skew-whiff fantasy centres on a cynical advert director (Adam Driver) returning to the small Spanish town where he shot his student film (a Don Quixote adaptation) to find that its lead actor, a local cobbler (played by Jonathan Pryce), has stayed in character as the eccentric 17th

century knight ever since. No one should be surprised that Gilliam’s take on Cervantes isn’t straightforward. “I know, my fingerprints are in everything; it’s very bad,” says Gilliam when we mention his film’s wild idiosyncrasies. “Whatever I get interested in, and I start doing it, somehow, without even being aware of it, I’m bringing myself into it. Maybe it’s a kind of egotism, but I never know I’m doing it until the final result and I say to myself, ‘What have I done?’” So what now for Gilliam? What does Sisyphus do once his rock reaches the top of the hill? “I just want to do something simple where the money’s in place so I just go to work,” he says with a smile. We look at him sceptically, and he soon retracts the statement. “I do enjoy difficulties,” he admits. “Difficulties focus my mind because I’m very greedy. I want to do everything and then suddenly the restrictions of time and budget keep me contained, and let me work more instinctively.” One thing is for sure, he’s not interested in jumping on the superhero bandwagon. “Why would I do what everybody else is doing?” he scoffs. “If it was 15 years ago, 20 years, I would’ve jumped at the chance. But it’s too late now. It wouldn’t be a challenge because those are going to work in a factory.” Shame. The Marvel and DC conveyor belts could do with a dose of his handcrafted madness.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is released 31 Jan by Sparky Pictures; preview at GFT, Glasgow, 23 Jan

January 2020 — Feature

Photo: Diego Lopez

— 38 —

THE SKINNY

Comedy

Making Assumptions Photo: Andy Hollingworth

Maisie Adam had a fantastic 2019 – making appearances on Mock the Week and Have I Got News for You as well as returning to the Fringe for her sophomore hour. This year the SYTYF 2017 winner is stepping back on Scottish soil, touring her second show Interview: Polly Glynn

got to stop saying things like that’, so if I know them well I’ll just say it straight to their face.” With the public, her tack is slightly different. “At the end of the day, they think they’re being really nice and they have come to give you a compliment so you don’t want to be too cutting.” Instead she kills them with kindness before “actually laying out the problem with someone like yourself [some sort of journalist] in the hope that they read it.” Particularly with the Beeb’s ‘at least one woman’ panel show policy, it can be heightened even more. Being the only woman on a recent episode of Have I Got News for You, Adam wondered whether she’d “get a foot in the door... but Ian Hislop was lovely at bringing me in and was very welcoming.” However, it’s not just gender tokenism Adam has been faced with; class too. Because of her northern accent and observational style, people often make assumptions about Adam. “I have to give them a polite ‘I think it’s great what you’re doing but I’m actually not the sort of person that you’re doing this in aid of’.” Adam is all for upping diversity in the public eye, but “sometimes [the — 39 —

broadcasters] want more northern accents on because it represents, to them, a working class background but it’s not the case.” Particularly for a new(ish) kid on the block, it makes Adam wonder. “Am I being offered this because they need a female voice or a working class voice or do they genuinely just think I’m funny?” An insecurity that the industry-dominating swathes of white middleclass males don’t seem to have. “They’re getting asked because they’re definitely good.” However, Adam meditates, “that’s maybe more a reflection on me that I need to start backing myself a bit more.” And she certainly should.

Maisie Adam: Hang Fire plays Edinburgh’s Gilded Balloon Basement, 21 Jan (£10-12); Glasgow’s The Stand, 22 Jan (£10-12.50)

January 2020 — Feature

aisie Adam’s second Fringe show Hang Fire is currently on a UK tour, stopping off in Edinburgh and Glasgow before landing in Leeds for a homecoming gig. “My mum and dad are coming to that because they’ve not actually seen my show yet,” Adam reveals. She’s even played her old Youth Theatre room in the past 12 months. “To go from spending every Tuesday evening doing drama classes in there with my mates to then having two back-to-back sold out shows in there, that was really quite special.” As for the content of Hang Fire, Adam is loath to give too much away. “In a nutshell, it’s all about people making a mistake in the moment,” and the public’s judgement of error, instead of taking a step back and offering a smidge of empathy. Acknowledging your mistakes and taking ownership of them goes a long way in Adam’s eyes, “but in the current climate, we love to cancel these people, point the finger and say what a terrible person they are when actually everybody makes stupid errors in the moment.” Adam refers to the writing of Hang Fire as very much “difficult second album syndrome”. She continues: “I was aware that with Vague,” Adam’s Best Newcomer-nominated Fringe debut, “no-one really knew who I was.” While 2018’s audience or those enticed by her nomination cements that “there’s more of a standard to meet and a pressure to deliver”. She can’t quite fathom other comics who can sit and write new content for hours: “I do not understand how that happens.” Her method’s far less disciplined. “I just wander around and when something pops into my head or something happens, I’ll think ‘oh, there’s probably a bit in that’.” Commentary on people and situations is her bag. “Sometimes I need to see it happening in real life, and then really over-exaggerate it and go in-depth with it rather than just invent it from scratch.” As with most female comedians, Adam isn’t unfamiliar with the old ‘I don’t normally like female comedians’ rouse. She recalls one instance with a close friend. “I just had to say to her ‘look, you’ve

THE SKINNY

Intersections

Growing Pains Millennials are buying more houseplants than any other generation. This self-identifying plant lover reflects on her – and her generation’s – obsession with indoor jungles Words: Liv McMahon

scattered across my desk signifying failure. Soon, I found that leaving my flat only to feel completely lost and unanchored from the wider world confirmed, to me, that I was unfit for living, too weak to reconnect with the outside and too worthless to warrant being alive. My penultimate year of university was marked by an extreme sadness, disillusionment and suicidal ideation as these illnesses took over.

“Watching something thrive and survive, gradually and rarely smoothly, helped me want to live again” Turning to houseplants forced a welcome rupture from my isolation. Their demands for water, light and love slowly overtook those of my depression urging me to give into dissociation. Their hardiness and perseverance declared itself immune to the draughts blowing through the permanent gaps in my window-frames. Their fragility and diversity would steadily and tantalisingly reveal itself in the unfurling of new leaves. Fingers previously hell-bent on pulling out hairs instead found solace getting entangled in the dangling stems of philodendrons.

When I tell people that I own near 100 houseplants, the response is understandably mixed. But I’m never surprised when people respond to my explanation for my slightly out-ofhand obsession with stories of their own; about how they, too, have found more worth in plants than them looking great on the ‘gram. Some struggling with bereavement, seasonal affective disorder, anxiety or related mental health issues have likewise celebrated houseplants for their ability to bring the outside in, having felt encouraged by their presence to explore their local parks, gardens and glasshouses. My hoard of houseplants will always be my home, moving with me wherever I go, precariously piled into Ikea bags and carried up endless flights of stairs. It’s maybe excessive to own as many as I do, but each plant recalls a moment of getting better, feeling worse and the varied, uneven steps taken to recovering from an all-consuming mental illness that threatens to take your life away. While undeniably #aesthetic and beautiful, there is more to be said for our blossoming interest in houseplants. Their presence represents our collective hopes to make somewhere temporary, and often stressfully obtained, feel homelier and happier. Watching something thrive and survive, gradually and rarely smoothly, helped me want to live again, and to embrace a metaphor of growth and selfacceptance which, despite its obviousness, has been nonetheless inspiring. Photo: Brina Blum on Unsplash

January 2020 — Feature

n accumulation of concrete, high-rises and an all-consuming digital world have combined to distance us from the natural world, with the climate crisis accelerating our planet to a point of no return. In response, the NHS offer ‘nature prescriptions’ urging citizens to seek out green spaces proven to improve our mental and physical health. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Royal Horticultural Society found that four in five 16-24 year olds own a houseplant, along with three-quarters of the British population on the whole. The proliferation of leafy butterfly palms and Swiss cheese plants now adorning many of our windows is being served up as yet another token millennial habit, but is there more to our growing fascination with foliage? For me, there is certainly more to my love of houseplants than meets the social media-immersed eye. I would be lying if I didn’t confess that my plant obsession was propelled with the discovery of Instagram accounts like Philomemedron, Jamie’s Jungle and Botany Geek. Rarely will I stan an algorithm, but at a time when I retreated from the world around me and watched messages, notifications and missed calls compile on my phone screen, Instagram presented me with the glistening gardens of the global village. Yet, unlike the well-lit London flats dripped in exotic plants from ceiling to floor that I could never hope to afford, crumbling, single-glazed tenements have become second-nature to me. My adult years stretched across Scotland’s Central Belt are strung together by memories of the many times I’ve cried, chain-smoked, cackled and spilled cans out of their grimy windows overlooking busy city streets. Those of us who go through the stress and strain of finding an affordable flat amid rising rent prices must reckon with an increasingly troubled sense of home – losing sight of where this actually is, or whether it even exists, with each chaotic relocation. The many houseplants I’ve hoarded over the last few years have provided a sense of home, and indeed self, which faded from my field of vision as my punishing perfectionism eventually caved to depression and trichotillomania while studying. Under the umbrella of Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviours (BFRBs), trichotillomania is a frighteningly literal translation to the idea of ‘pulling your hair out’ over something. It has been so trivialised in popular culture, and dismissed as a real disorder, that I didn’t notice it build in intensity until it became impossible to ignore. My hands proved increasingly incapable of resisting the urge to pull and snap my hair, strand by strand. My love of writing no longer materialised in words on a page but instead manifested itself in heaps of hair

— 40 —

THE SKINNY

Intersections

Apocalypse Now Mainstream culture loves a good apocalypse story, but what exactly does our fascination with the end of days say about us? Words: Katie Goh Illustration: Edith Ault

seem like fear of a far away future, a kind of cultural dramatisation for when the Doomsday Clock finally strikes midnight, but most societies and cultures have already experienced something apocalyptic. Humans have been through a lot: war, famine, extinction, genocide, epidemics. Entire cultures have been decimated, with colonialism being humanity’s most recent alien invasion narrative. Imagine this: an unknown race turns up on your shore, intent on committing horrific acts of violence with the firepower to do so. In fact, it was the British invasion of Tasmania in the 1800s and the catastrophic impact colonialism had on the island’s indigenious population that inspired H.G. Wells to write the most famous invasion novel, The War of the Worlds. So, why are we all obsessed with the end of days? It seems irrational that humans, a species neurologically incapable of even thinking about their own deaths, would devote so much time and energy to thinking up different ways we can be wiped out. In her 1965 essay, The Imagination of Disaster, Susan Sontag famously wrote about the influx of disaster movies that were appearing in cinemas. She propositioned that they were a response to the trauma of living through the 20th century. Movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Godzilla were cathartic fantasies, in which “one can participate in the fantasy of living — 41 —

January 2020 — Feature

he only recurring dream that I can remember having as a kid is this. I’m walking on a neverending pavement covered in cracks. If I step on a crevasse then, oops, I cause a nuclear bomb to go off and it’s the end of the world. I would wake up in sweats, thinking I was responsible for humanity’s survival and the cause of its annihilation. Since then, I’ve become obsessed with the end of the world, or rather, fantasies about the end of the world. What’ll get us first: nuclear fallout or mass starvation, a poisonous sea or outer space asteroid? And I don’t think it’s just me. As a culture, the end of the world has proven to be an endless source of fascination. From misinterpreted ancient myths (shoutout 2012) to a string of disaster movies where The Rock or Gerard Butler is our last hope at preventing a climate catastrophe (God help us), different apocalyptic visions have become a source of both entertainment or terror, most often at the same time. Historically, a collective enthralment about the end of the world has developed with and from political and social turmoil. In the Victorian era, advances in technology inspired an influx of apocalyptic sci-fi. Jump forward to the 20th century and World War I and II, the Cold War and 9/11 are responsible for each consecutive generation’s paranoid pop culture. Our fascination with the end of days might

through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.” Through witnessing the end of days – safely in cosy cinema seats – we’re able to project ourselves into these apocalyptic possibilities. Nearly 60 years on, Sontag’s words are still resonant. Whether it’s aliens, zombies or climate disasters, we’re still obsessed with disaster. The most popular mass entertainment at the moment – superhero movies – all feature threats to Earth and the annihilation of metropolitans. The government and the army aren’t the ones who save us in those movies; instead it’s a couple of powerful and gifted individuals in capes who take matters into their own hands. These recent on-screen fantasies perfectly epitomise our contemporary stance on the end of the world: lulled into a false sense of security, the end of the world might be coming but someone will turn up at the last minute to save us. We’re allowed to switch off and become apathetic to the threat of actual annihilation, most likely the side effects of climate change. In my opinion, the best apocalyptic stories are the ones that take place after the end of the world. The Handmaid’s Tale, The Walking Dead in its early days, and The Leftovers are all popular explorations of life after the apocalypse. These stories go beyond cathartic extinction and ask how we maintain our humanity after everything collapses in on itself – for better or worse. As Sontag wrote, we want to imagine “living through” our collective death. We want to be the ones who survive, the protagonist who somehow makes it through the end of days. Everything ends except you. It makes sense that we love a survivor; every single person on Earth is the descendent of people who made it through everything that’s already happened. It turns out the end of the world isn’t coming. Whether in the form of war or famine, the end has already happened and this is what we’re left with, our post-apocalyptic world. Everything around us is a desperate attempt to hold on to what we had before as we’re left to gather around the campfire, telling our stories of survival, and asking was all this worth it?

January 2020 — Review

Showcase

THE SKINNY

— 42 —

THE SKINNY

Album of the Month

Album of the month GEORGIA — Seeking Thrills Released 10 Jan by Domino RRRRR Listen to: About Work the Dancefloor, Ray Guns georgiauk.com

‘W

of her life), as its name suggests, this is an album that provides an aural adrenaline rush, thrust forward by her characteristically propulsive drumming and sweeping synth flourishes. It would be easy to think that such a flurry of energy would leave the listener feeling breathless. Yet, while it’s very easy to get swept up into the bluster of her effervescent dancefloor-fillers, Georgia doesn’t fall into the trap of becoming monotonous. Indeed, she liberally peppers the record with nods to her wide range of influences. Mellow, featuring singer and DJ Shygirl, is creeping, oddly sinister and bass-heavy, providing a stark contrast to the brightness surrounding it, while Ray Guns, which reproduces the percussive nature of Balinese gamelan, is a blast. Elsewhere, Ultimate Sailor is a sweet lullaby all of Georgia’s own. As closer Honey Dripping Sky breaks down into a steady groove before finishing climactically with triumphant brass, it’s hard to resist instantly wanting to experience the ride all over again. Seeking Thrills is an album that delivers on its initial promise, proving that the upward trajectory Georgia currently finds herself on can only continue. [Eugenie Johnson]

January 2020 — Review

hen we started out I never believed it’ is the first line Georgia sings on her new album. For an artist who has risen so astronomically since the release of her debut back in 2015, it’s hard to think of a more apt way to begin. The north-west Londoner’s whirlwind of success began with the track that line comes from, her new album’s first single, Started Out, which was catapulted to Radio 1’s A-list. Following it up with About Work the Dancefloor proved that feat was hardly a fluke – its tender, honest vocal performance (‘I don’t have much in terms of money now / I don’t have material gifts for you’) combined with its soaring hook was another hit. Though Georgia had already completed most of her latest record before this duo propelled her into the consciousness of a whole new fanbase, she took time to revise it in light of the singles’ success. The results don’t disappoint. Started Out and About Work the Dancefloor front-load Seeking Thrills, which is heavily inspired by early-80s Chicago house and Detroit techno. It’s an album filled to the brim with dance touchstones but maintains a polished pop sheen. Although it’s shot through with strands of melancholy (the record follows Georgia’s emergence from a turbulent period

Read more online: theskinny.co.uk/records

Aoife Nessa Frances Land of No Junction RRRRR "textured and tangible"

Black Lips Sing In a World That's Falling Apart RRRRR "country influenced"

Yorkston/Thorne/Khan Navarasa : Nine Emotions RRrRR “a vibrant, conceptual rollercoaster” — 43 —

Alexandra Savior The Archer RRRRR "dreamy desert quest"

Twin Atlantic Power RRRRR "quite different"

THE SKINNY

Local Music

Photo: Ashely Osborn

Unapologetically Me Isobel Campbell is moving on from label woes and legal struggles, from Belle & Sebastian and Mark Lanegan, finally releasing her first solo album in 14 years. She talks about her recent turmoil and finding peace in mindfulness Interview: Tony Inglis Isobel Campbell There is No Other [31 Jan, Cooking Vinyl] Isobel Campbell plays Celtic Connections: The Mackintosh Church, Glasgow, 30 Jan

January 2020 — Review

isobelcampbell.com

oot canal treatment must be excruciating. A stranger consciousness with an attempt at replicating what has the biggest gouging around the nerve endings of a decayed tooth; it guarantee of success. “I just wanted to make something that I liked sounds uncomfortable, to say the least. But for Isobel and be true to myself, unapologetically me. When I was a lot youngCampbell, who has just had the procedure – “sorry if I sound fun- er, I would get a bit of grief for being soft. Now I’m like fuck that, ny, my mouth’s a bit sore,” she understates – it wasn’t quite as this is what I am.” torturous as the path leading to the release of her first set of reA cursory search of old reviews shows the negatively implied cordings in over a decade. (‘twee’, ‘fey’), and in some cases subtly gendered (‘winsome’), voFinished over three years ago, There Is No Other finally sees cabulary used to describe Campbell’s art and demeanour. There Is the light of day this month. It’s been a turbulent process of dashed No Other leans into those adjectives unapologetically, tying in hopes, sudden label closures and legal battles for Campbell to Campbell’s “complete commitment” to meditation and mindfulgrapple back this record. The Glasgow-born, now LA-based, sing- ness, incorporating ancient Mayan teachings and the five precepts er-songwriter and sometime cellist seems relieved, though wrung of Reiki, and a smoothed out but relaxing cover of Tom Petty’s out now that the wait is over. “It feels like it has taken forever,” she Runnin’ Down a Dream. If cod-philosophy and pseudoscisays. “There were moments when I “When I was a lot ence seems off-putting (is it any differthought it was never going to come out. from an artist’s faith or spirituality I’ve talked about it so much and it’s so younger, I would get a ent driving their work?), Campbell has no fucking depressing. I’ve known easier desire to be preachy. “It’s not something things.” bit of grief for being Perhaps best known for her work in or new: wifeys in Scotland have soft. Now I’m like fuck strange the early years of Belle & Sebastian, and been doing it since before I was born. I last heard from around the release of that, this is what I am” love what it’s done for me. I come from a 2010’s Hawk – the finale of a triptych of long line of worriers – it’s been really Isobel Campbell collaborations with Mark Lanegan – helpful, and I want to be open about it. If Campbell has a significant body of indesomeone else decides they’re into it, pendent work, which There Is No Other was set to add to before that’s good for them.” The album is only holistic in a general sense, an antidote to she was plunged in the midst of problems that were no fault of her own. “I’ve been doing this since I was 19. I’m now 43, and I’ve had what is most prevalent in the world. “I think a lot of the time, good art focuses on this darkness,” says Campbell. “This was just me only a tiny purple patch with this stuff. It’s always been a fight.” Understandably, Campbell is keen to talk about the music saying there’s so much dark already – let’s have a bit of light.” The west coast, Campbell says, has cultivated her interest in she’s been forced to sit on rather than the tussles with her former label. “I feel like I have PTSD,” she says, which would be flippant the practice, and helped her take stock of what was going on were it not for the sincerity and world-weariness with which she around her. Many of her observations – on ever visible and unadrecounts her traumatic last few years. The record that it’s led to dressed homelessness in the city (Boulevard) and the constant contains none of the anger and vitriol you might expect. That’s velocity of a society that never sleeps (Ant Life) – populate the because it has gone untouched since completion but, when she songs that resulted. While LA is her home now, she pines for Scotland. speaks, it would be difficult to imagine Campbell making music “Homesickness is pretty brutal. It’s funny how it manifests. When infected with angst. There Is No Other permeates levity, positivity and calm. I first moved over here, I would crawl over broken glass, like I was Recorded with Campbell’s husband, studio engineer Chris Szczech, a total alien and tried to fit in. But now I’ll use Scottish words no sonically it glows with a surprising benevolence. Compared to one understands, like scunnered. I don’t care.” Even though the album predates it, after the turmoil, it’s a Campbell’s recent experiences and popular music’s willing embrace of gloom, it is a total balm. It would be easy enough for even reflection of where Campbell is at in her life now: at peace with a practised songwriter like Campbell to return to the public herself and living in the present. — 44 —

THE SKINNY

The music industry has changed a lot over the last decade, and one of Scotland’s greatest musical success stories, Gerry Cinnamon, is a perfect example of an artist thriving in a changing musical landscape

Local Music

The Curious Case of Gerry Cinnamon Words: Nadia Younes Illustration: Miranda Stuart

embarked on a tour of Australia in December. As well as this, his recently announced 2020 stadium and arena tour has already sold out dates at Cardiff Castle, Manchester Arena and three dates in Ireland. All of this has happened with him only having ever released one full-length record.

Gerry Cinnamon has developed somewhat of a cult following; a loyal and passionate fanbase who will go see him every time he announces a show, regardless of whether it’s in support of new music or not. This is another telling trait of the modern music industry, where fandom is rife and a musician or band’s success is often gauged by how — 45 —

obsessive their fans are as opposed to how many records they sell. None of this is to say that what Cinnamon has achieved is a total fluke. He came around at a time when the whole ‘lad with a guitar’ busker vibe was increasing in popularity – another thing we have Ed Sheeran to thank for. Just take a look at the winners of the British Male Solo Artist award at the Brit Awards over the last ten years: Ben Howard, James Bay and George Ezra all bear a striking similarity in their musical styles, as well as in their appearances and backgrounds. But Cinnamon has existed outside the mainstream, and that is where he’s developed his cult status. He’s painted as an anti-folk hero and often referred to as a ‘people’s poet’, much like Billy Bragg before him, and has chosen to shun the traditional structure of the music industry. Throughout his career, he has remained largely DIY, operating without a record label and with little to no PR output. Instead, Cinnamon releases all his music through his own label, Little Runaway Records, and therefore maintains complete creative control, not to mention the majority of the profits from record sales. There’s also very little in the way of production costs involved in his live shows – Cinnamon generally performs solo just himself and his acoustic guitar – so it’s safe to say he’s definitely making bank. With his second album, The Bonny, due for release in April this year, a massive run of shows lined up for the summer and a continuously growing fanbase, Cinnamon’s success is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. While existing in his own independent sphere may be limiting in some ways, it’s also the reason he’s been able to thrive. And with fans as dedicated and passionate as his, who’s to say where he will go from here.

Gerry Cinnamon plays Hampden Park, Glasgow, 18 Jul

January 2020 — Review

erry Cinnamon is a mystery to me. And to many who have witnessed his rapid rise over the last few years, having never heard any of his music. But for the sake of investigative journalism – which really rests on my shoulders here – I have elected to use him as a case study to detail some significant shifts in the music industry over the last decade. I first became aware of Gerry Cinnamon from an A&R for a major record label (and I mean major) while at a music festival. At the time, I had heard his name but knew little about him. It came as a surprise to me then that someone working at a record label in London knew of Cinnamon and I, a music journalist in Scotland, did not. In many ways, it was quite embarrassing on my part to have such little knowledge of a Scottish musician who was quite clearly gaining massive success. Whatever you think of Cinnamon and his music, his rise over the last few years has been significant. The 35-year-old singersongwriter from Castlemilk, Glasgow, born Gerard Crosbie, first gained notoriety performing his songs at an open mic night in his hometown. In 2017, he released his debut album Erratic Cinematic, funded through the PledgeMusic platform. Since then, he’s only released a handful of singles, yet continues to sell out massive shows up and down the country. Cinnamon’s success demonstrates a massive shift in the music industry over the last decade. Record sales no longer matter, but ticket sales do, and Cinnamon sells a lot of tickets. In fact, he ended 2019 having sold out two consecutive nights at Glasgow’s SSE Hydro – a venue with a capacity of 13,000 – and announced and consequently sold out the biggest show of his career at Hampden Park this summer, making him the first Scottish artist to headline the venue. But it’s not just in Glasgow where Cinnamon has seen success. Last year, he was booked to play at a number of festivals in the UK and Europe and

Albums

THE SKINNY

Frances Quinlan Likewise [Saddle Creek, 31 Jan]

rrrrr

isten to: Your Reply, Rare Thing, L Now That I’m Back

Wolf Parade Thin Mind [Sub Pop, 24 Jan]

January 2020 — Review

rrrrr

isten to: Under Glass, L Wandering Son

The distinctive sound of Hop Along is inseparable from the startling voice of Frances Quinlan. Yet Quinlan’s debut solo release achieves something that is quite distinct: Likewise operates mostly in major keys. The soundscapes are lively and bright, and moments of despair are gorgeously balanced. Quinlan is a remarkable and intimate storyteller, her unpredictable narratives illuminating even the most ordinary of details. Piltdown Man recalls camping in a friend’s garden, while Your Reply describes the novel Quinlan is reading. On Rare Thing, she examines an unsettling dream she had about her baby niece, addressing the beloved child as her equal. The joy she finds in their bond is unbounded, bringing with it a new understanding of the power of pure, unconditional love. ‘We should try again to talk’ is Quinlan’s imploration on Now That I’m Back, as she yearns for a human connection in relationships that have been neglected, lost or simply never formed. ‘We are torn between our love and our shame’, says Quinlan, asking people to communicate better with their loved ones. Likewise is an empathetic nod to the listener; an invitation to openness. [Katie Cutforth] Thin Mind is mostly back to basics Wolf Parade. Under Glass opens the album with a mission statement: we’re still ‘free in our minds’ but ‘nobody knows what they want anymore’. It’s a sharp, polished song with typical Wolf Parade chords and Dan Boeckner’s paranoid croon. The album is a little more experimental than previous efforts, especially in their liberal use of synths. In Julia Take Your Man Home, Spencer Krug imagines a more toxic version of himself in various ‘drunken jerk’ situations, and it’s kept chugging with some kooky percussion and wacked-out synth work. Despite the synth prevalence, the band manage to avoid sci-fi pastiche until Against the Day goes all in while telling a story of ‘Lovecraftian, geological love’. It was hinted at throughout, particularly the outro to Forest Green and on Wandering Son, but they throw caution to the wind here. It’s a striking pose for a band with such a consistent sound, but they pull it off well and it’s a welcome jolt of energy before Town Square ends things in more familiar territory. Overall, Wolf Parade have carefully crafted another winning record. Maybe not one to win over new fans, but Thin Mind is a solid addition to a sparkling oeuvre. [Lewis Wade]

Isobel Campbell There Is No Other [Cooking Vinyl, 31 Jan]

rrrrr

isten to: The Heart of It All, Hey L World, The National Bird of India

Destroyer Have We Met [Dead Oceans, 31 Jan]

rrrrr

isten to: Crimson Tide, It Just L Doesn’t Happen

— 46 —

There’s a story behind Isobel Campbell’s first solo material in 14 years: her record company closed and it took a year to take back the rights to her album. Another couple of years passed before she signed to Cooking Vinyl and waited for the legalities to be completed. “It felt like I’d retired or was in prison,” she has said. “But if you’re lucky to live long enough, there are always going to be peaks and troughs.” There Is No Other is a career peak. A record full of shimmering indie folk and shaky synths, its wobbles lull you into a false sense of security that all is right in the world. But, lean in closer, and you can hear the hard miles travelled in the making of this lilting and lullabydominated music. Those hard miles can be heard in the clipped electric guitars and stacked vocals of Hey World, while The National Bird of India fades in on swooping strings, Campbell whispering secrets in your ear. It’s not all warm and tender, however, as the taut and tough Below Zero reveals. There Is No Other is a gentle masterpiece, but there’s leather located behind the silk and the record packs an emotional punch. [Alan O’Hare]

The original concept for Dan Bejar’s latest album as Destroyer was ‘Y2K’ and, though it was scrapped, there is a sense of paranoia and dread in his second-guessing lyrics. ‘Look at the world around you / Actually don’t look’, he advises on The Raven, before a pretty kooky synth arrangement busts in, almost an impromptu bridge that arrives after the first line. Sometimes this sort of unconstrained ‘whatever goes’ attitude works, but there’s also a lot more repetition on the album, as well as songs that feel undercooked. Bejar is in full lounge-lizard mode on Have We Met. His signature vocals sound as good as ever, but his lyrics walk a fine line between intriguingly inscrutable and just plain nonsense. Cue Synthesizer is a nice experiment, the lyrics providing a meta-commentary on composition in real-time, but it still feels disconnected from the whole. The two singles – Crimson Tide and It Just Doesn’t Happen – are fantastic, vintage Destroyer. But much of the album feels like it was cobbled together from odds and ends, Bejar relying on his ability to freestyle ideas and come up with gold. It’s a surprisingly spotty album from an artist who rarely puts a foot wrong. [Lewis Wade]

THE SKINNY

Deleter [Holy EF Music, 17 Jan]

rrrrr

Listen to: Free Gloss

Dan Deacon Mystic Familiar [Domino, 31 Jan]

rrrrr

isten to: Weeping Birch, Arp III: Far L From Shore, Become a Mountain

Silver Tongue [Merge, 31 Jan]

rrrrr

isten to: Good Scare, Last Forest, L Good Grief

Vukovi Fall Better [VKVI Records, 24 Jan]

rrrrr

isten to: All That Candy, I’m Sorry, L Run/Hide

— 47 —

Fall Better is a dish of many cut-infury ingredients, all served with a reappearing computerised framing narrative. Aura is a knockout blow of down-tuned chords and punchy choruses. Behave is a charged dancerock number that jigs with synth-driven pulses. Closer Run/Hide is playfully pissed off and ripping with guitars and snarling melody. Much of the album’s dialogue details front woman Janine Shilstone’s recent struggles with OCD, having been diagnosed with the disorder in between records. ‘I’m twisted, manic, crazy’ begins the battle cry of All That Candy, a song that exonerates a visceral frustration at the singer’s own mental struggles. Yet, even outside of the lyricism, the musicality itself is warping and squirming between hard-rock and electronic mayhem that symbolically takes the shape of Shilstone’s exiled demons. Shilstone’s pain is sketched on every corner of this record, and there’s no let-up from her powerful and fearsome vocals that are just dripping in character. Colourful in both aesthetic and style, Vukovi’s 2017 debut album was a breath of fresh air that fused a hamper of meaty riff goodness, fierce attitude, and a sickly-sweet melodic quality into their own blend of chaotic, raging belters. And on their follow-up, they’ve levelled up. [Dylan Tuck]

January 2020 — Review

Dan Deacon has always cut a unique figure in the world of experimental electronic music, where he’s constantly sought new ways to push sheer joy and giddy exhilaration upon his audience. Here, he retains that, delivering a colossal yet tender call to push on through in unbearable times. It isn’t exactly new terrain for Deacon, but after a period working in film soundtracks, it’s a return to more traditional pop structures. In particular, lead single Sat by a Tree is Deacon at his most accessible and streamlined, leaving behind the homemade skronk of his early work but keeping the gift for absolute euphoria in tact. At the album’s centre is the breathtaking suite of Arps I-IV, which is only bettered by the truly sublime Weeping Birch that reaches levels of sheer undeniable beauty beyond anything Deacon has ever done. Mystic Familiar is a superb return to the traditional album for Deacon, in which he’s clearly learned a great deal making soundtracks, producing a record of a grand cinematic scale with a clearer eye on creating emotionally shifting tracks. But he maintains his constant look towards salvation and joy and retains an almost incomparable gift for conjuring them in a listener. [Joe Creely]

TORRES

Where Mackenzie Scott’s last record as TORRES, Three Futures, felt cohesive, Silver Tongue is a little more willing to run the gamut. Entirely self-produced, she dips in and out of styles previously explored, with call-backs and recurring motifs from as far back as her 2013 debut. It begins with Good Scare, one of the most forlorn songs about first love you’ll find – a truly melancholic banger. TORRES has never been a project given over fully to indie rock and singer-songwriter fare. Last Forest’s twitchy drum machine and foamy synths are testament to that. Scott is adept at articulating the struggles in complicated romantic relationships. On Three Futures’ Skim, she sang of jealousy and insecurity. On Silver Tongue’s companion piece, Two of Everything, she talks again about being entangled in a tricky dynamic. She seems to come from a place of acceptance, if not understanding, but can still deliver scathing lines, offset by the beauty of her voice. Silver Tongue may prove to be a bridge, between a time of turbulence and a period of renewed creative independence. However, even in that, this record is proof that she can remain uncompromisingly herself. [Tony Inglis]

Albums

Holy Fuck

Holy Fuck’s fourth LP comes in the form of an electronic rollercoaster, incorporating different genres, tempos and moods to create an impressively seamless record. Boasting an equally impressive list of guest spots, it includes contributions from Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, Pond’s Nicholas Allbrook and Liars’ Angus Andrew. From first listen it becomes quickly evident that there’s much to explore on Deleter, finding new and subtle nuances on repeat listens. With many genres being teased and explored throughout, it takes the listener up and down on more than one occasion, from the tense-sounding, bass-heavy moments found in Luxe and Moment to the slower, synth-laden, more chill vibes in Near Mint or Endless. Free Gloss, in particular, will make you feel like you’re basking in the neon glow of a sunlit dancefloor. Deleter is an album that takes on many forms. It’s a release that fans and newcomers alike will be able to mould into whatever they need it to be. Quite honestly it’s a difficult record to find fault with, as each listen offers a slightly different interpretation. A creative triumph for any artist, Deleter is well-rounded and a welcome return for the Toronto outfit. [Paul Sinclair]

Film of the Month

THE SKINNY

Film of the month — 1917 Director: Sam Mendes Starring: George MacKay, DeanCharles Chapman RRRRR Released 10 Jan by Curzon Certificate 15

January 2020 — Review

theskinny.co.uk/film

et’s get this out of the way first: 1917 isn’t a single-shot movie. A more accurate number would be two shots, or three if we’re stretching it. There’s a startling cut to black at the midway point of Sam Mendes’ war epic when a soldier is knocked unconscious. It’s the most distinguishable cut but, of course, there are more cleverly disguised edits peppered throughout to give the impression of a seamless take. Regardless, acknowledging that the film features double the number of shots than what’s being advertised doesn’t do anything to diminish the staggering achievement of what’s being told. 1917 is a triumphant piece of filmmaking, all bravado and ambition expertly realised at the hands of Mendes and his cinematographer, the always superb Roger Deakins. The First World War has inspired countless tales of heroism and sacrifice, each offering filmmakers the chance to showboat their technical prowess. Mendes bases his story on anecdotes told by his great-grandfather to craft an audacious thriller that moves through the battlefields of France. Two soldiers, Schofield (MacKay) and Blake (Chapman) are tasked with delivering a message across enemy lines to a battalion of troops who are unaware that they are heading into a deadly ambush the next morning. Among those in danger is Blake’s brother, amping the stakes for the race against time. Their journey takes them through the claustrophobia of the trenches and the life-threatening terrain of the front lines and No Man’s Land. The camera glides along with their hurried steps, actor and equipment syncing together in perfect chore-

ography. It’s a mind-boggling endeavour to wrap your head around, as every line, movement and gunshot seem perfectly timed for the lens to capture. Grounding the action is MacKay: his character is a blank slate for the generation of young men who sacrificed everything, but the fear and uncertainty that paints his face elevates Schofield above being simply an everyman. Apart from its visual gimmick, 1917 is disappointingly lacking in anything that distinguishes it from its contemporaries. It’s propelled by time, much like Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and the gritty warfare recalls Saving Private Ryan. And for all its technical achievements, almost all of the emotional weight is dropped in favour of impressing the audience. The film is completely absorbing, but there’s the infinitesimal doubt that perhaps you’re so immersed because it’s too seamless. The confident filmmaking, as spectacular as it is, ultimately betrays the reckless brutality of combat. Despite the spectacle on screen, Mendes does take time to contemplate the futility of a war that cost the lives of millions. So much of the film is about moving forward and the journey through its magnificent setpieces. Then, in the quieter moments – a slow transport job, a morning spent in the rubble – Schofield takes those ephemeral chances to reflect, to look back on the damage and destruction left in his wake. It would be a disservice not to applaud the stunning accomplishment from Mendes. Only a filmmaker with complete command of his craft could pull off such a feat. [Iana Murray]

Five great “one-shot” films Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) Hitch ratchets up the tension by never turning his camera away from the sitting room in which a murder has just taken place.

Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967) Canadian avant-garde genius Snow strips cinema back to a single, stuttering, super-slow 45-minute zoom across a New York room.

Victoria (Sebastian Schipper, 2015) This German thriller is the most elaborate one-shot movie, taking us from a Berlin nightclub to a police shootout via a bank robbery.

— 48 —

Who Killed Brown Owl? (Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, 2004) A single crane-shot surveying a seemingly idyllic summer afternoon, ending in a macabre twist.

Timecode (Mike Figgis, 2000) Figgis goes three better with a quartet of interlinking mini-dramas playing out simultaneously across four screens.

THE SKINNY

In Cinemas Jojo Rabbit

rrrrr

New Zealand filmmaker and comedian Taika Waititi has a knack for getting genuinely funny performances from child actors. With Nazi satire Jojo Rabbit, he succeeds once again. Roman Griffin Davis is genuinely funny as the young Jojo Betzler, a Hitler Youth fanatic with the Führer himself (caricatured by Waititi) for an imaginary friend. Jojo’s beliefs are thrown into disarray, however, when he discovers his mother (a playfully good Scarlett Johansson) has been hiding a Jewish girl in their loft. Hitler’s regime proves a great

Jojo Rabbit

The Lighthouse Director: Robert Eggers Starring: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe

rrrrr

arena for the Kiwi’s oddball comedy, with the film peppered with sweetly funny moments as his young protagonist navigates his own emotional growth. Despite the dark subject matter, Jojo Rabbit is breezier than Waititi’s previous work, but his directorial hand is always kind, making us laugh with – not at – his tender and sincere characters. Jojo earns his nickname because of his softness; his idea of an insult is “you’re as weak as an eyelash”. His fanaticism is a product of his environment – learned wrongs, not an innate evil. Waititi sensitively shows this world through the eyes of a child who faces the realisation that the imaginary – and the ideological – cannot and should not last. [Caitlin Quinlan] Out now via Disney; certificate 12A

rrrrr

Uncut Gems glows from its opening seconds as directors Josh and Benny Safdie guide us down a glittering rabbit hole. Adam Sandler takes the lead as Howard Ratner, a New York jeweller who deals in rare gems and dabbles in various suspect tradings across the city. He’s spinning an endless number of plates; what bills are owed, which bets are placed, what collateral he has stored and where. The Safdies are adept at creating such intensely stressful environments and interactions. As Howard’s business operations become even more perilous and his blind fearlessness gets the better of him, the directors never pause for their protagonist to take a breath, and it’s so cleverly and frustratingly

The Lighthouse

two of the best actors working today go toe-to-toe. They’re like a pair of Daniel Plainviews with pipes hanging off their lips and axes to grind. Eggers and The Witch cinematographer Jarin Blaschke conjure a grisly vision in the square-ish 1.19:1 aspect ratio. There are shades of German expressionism in its lighting, stretching the possibilities of its monochrome palette to riotous extremes. Oppressive shadows are cast, projecting the internal monstrosity of the duo. The camera focuses so intensely on its actors, exposing every scar, pore and drop of saltwater on faces perfect for silent cinema. The eponymous structure is a rickety beast, home to secrets that fuel devilish obsessions. The reveal of its luminous beam suggests a heavenly rise, but it more resembles a descent into hell. [Iana Murray] Released 31 Jan by Universal; certificate 15

Uncut Gems

The Personal History of David Copperfield Director: Armando Iannucci Starring: Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi, Ben Whishaw

rrrrr

Armando Iannucci’s latest is something of a left-turn. Leaning more heavily on the costume drama than the satirical side of his previous work, David Copperfield is a softer, more charming and (perhaps for some) disappointingly sentimental turn for the king of UK comedy. Dev Patel is the titular hero, the film’s beating heart and a casting stroke of genius. Often underused in previous comedic roles, here Patel gets to stretch his comedy muscles. Overall, the cast – who are having the time of their lives – are the film’s strongest asset. Tilda Swinton plays David’s donkey-chasing aunt, Hugh Laurie is a Charles II-obsessed kite

— 49 —

done that it’s enough to make you want to scream in your seat. With their previous feature, Good Time, the Safdie brothers established some stylistic trademarks that carry over to great effect here. Notably the brothers work again with Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) for the score that brings a similarly mystical grit to Uncut Gems. Grainy close-ups and their taste for greentinted lighting are employed again too, which create a satisfying visual language for the film of criminal grime. It’s a great performance by Sandler, with Idina Menzel also standing out in a slightly limited role as Howard’s wife, and a star turn by former professional basketball player Kevin Garnett. The result is sharp and maniacal filmmaking that manages to be intelligently controlled in its hysteria. [Caitlin Quinlan] Released 10 Jan by Netflix; certificate TBC

The Personal History of David Copperfield

flyer and Peter Capaldi’s debt-dodging eccentric seems to have fallen out of a Doctor Who episode. The film opens with David on stage, presenting the story of his life, which follows a riches to rags to riches and then rags again trajectory. Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell have skimmed the surface of Dickens’ 900-page novel, choosing to tease out the story’s comedy and then rattle at full speed down cobblestoned streets to get to the final page. It’s fun for the first half but, by the end, it’s a relief to get off. More a refreshing take on Dickens’ novel than a radical reinvention of the costume drama, The Personal History of David Copperfield is a crowd-pleasing comedy with a brilliant cast. But you can’t help wondering, would it work better as a television series than a movie? [Katie Goh] Released 24 Jan by Lionsgate; certificate PG

January 2020 — Review

Lock two people in a room for weeks on end, and they will probably go mad. The same can be said for the two lighthouse keepers (Pattinson and Dafoe) stranded on a secluded island in Robert Eggers’ nautical nightmare. Embarking on a month-long stint off the New England coast, the seven seas are unforgiving territory for these two ‘wickies’ as tensions rise in claustrophobic conditions. The end credits inform us that dialogue in The Lighthouse is taken directly from journals belonging to 19th-century lighthouse keepers, lending an authenticity Eggers also extended to his sinful debut The Witch. Dafoe gets most of the meat with a vernacular full of salty jibes hurled at Pattinson; it’s thrilling to see

Director: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie Starring: Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett

In Cinemas

Director: Taika Waititi Starring: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, Taika Waititi, Scarlett Johansson

Uncut Gems

THE SKINNY

At Home

Watchmen

The Witcher

rrrrr

Creator: Damon Lindelof Starring: Regina King, Don Johnson, Tim Blake Nelson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jeremy Irons

At Home

Creator: Lauren Schmidt Hissrich Starring: Henry Cavill, Freya Allan, Anya Chalotra, Jodhi May, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson

rrrrr

Full of sex, gore and nudity, Netflix clearly has its sights set on The Witcher becoming the successor to Game of Thrones. We follow a white-haired warrior (mutant monster hunter Henry Cavill) who wanders the land slaying beasties for a price, eventually crossing paths with a witch called Yennefer (Chalotra) and a young princess called Ciri (Allan). At its best, The Witcher suggests an adult Lord of the Rings; at its worst, Xena: Warrior Princess. Unlike GOT, politics aren’t the show’s narrative driving force. Instead, it’s interested in questions of what makes a monster – the answer usually being a very human crime. Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich is clearly aware of The Witcher novels’ (and subsequent video games’) huge fanbase. Unfortunately, the result is a show too eager to please those who are already au fait with the material. The series’ greatest strength is its broader, non-linear narrative arc, particularly when it focuses on Yennefer, whose story is the backbone of the series. However, like much of the fantasy genre, you can’t help feel this is skewed towards a certain demographic of men, especially given the gratuitous levels of female nudity. The Witcher is an enjoyable romp, with spectacular effects and impressive battle sequences, but as it stands it doesn’t have the same grip as its recent predecessors. [Joseph Walsh]

January 2020 — Review

Streaming on Netflix

The Witcher

His Dark Materials

His Dark Materials Writer: Jack Thorne Starring: Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, AnneMarie Duff, Clarke Peters, James Cosmo, James McAvoy, Georgina Campbell

rrrrr

With Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, generally, you either love the books, or you haven’t come across them yet. Adaptation, however, has proved tricky. We’ve already had Chris Weitz’s stillborn first attempt, 2007’s The Golden Compass, so it’s odd to see this HBO-BBC co-production hit so many of the same stumbling blocks. For those not versed in the story, HDM follows Lyra (Dafne Keen channelling much of the bristling energy she showed off in Logan), a remarkable young woman from a world similar to our own, if you imagine we never quite escaped the 1950s and we all walk around with an animal companion best thought of as a living embodiment of our souls. After a friend of Lyra’s is abducted, she sets out to find him and stumbles upon a dark and dangerous plot. Keen and much of the rest of the cast are excellent (although Lin-Manuel Miranda is sorely miscast), but the show feels shackled by its pre-watershed timeslot. It’s right that the series be aimed at the whole family, but there is a regal poise to the endeavour which results in an oddly cold and distant tone. There are brief moments when it comes fully to life, usually when Lyra and the enigmatic Mrs Coulter (Wilson) face-off. There’s still time for the series to course correct – it has the majority of two books still to adapt – but Jack Thorne (the sole scriptwriter) needs to get the blood pumping through this pretty, but all too often lifeless, world. [Tom Charles]

Watchmen, the continuation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ seminal comic book series, is an engrossing watch, particularly through exceptional episodes such as This Extraordinary Being. This instalment – sixth in the series – is a breathless, masterful exploration of race, justice, homosexuality, masculinity and fatherhood, and some of the best TV of the decade, let alone the year. The show also features powerful performances from Regina King, Jeremy Irons and Tim Blake Nelson, who at times not so much chew the scenery as drown it in their characters’ sorrow and burn it in their rage. While the show’s quality is felt throughout, it’s only truly savoured at the end, because it’s only then when you realise how fully you’ve been sucked into its world. The Watchmen you start is about law and order in the age after superheroes, and race relations in the age of resurgent white supremacy. It’s a show with exceptional world-building: the yellow police masks, the tick-tock of the clock, the quotidian alien squid rain. As the show progresses, these elements are revealed to be intricate parts of something much bigger. The Watchmen you finish is less about the tick-tock of the clock and more about how you experience it. It’s about the liars and the deceived. It’s about law and disorder; conspiracies and control; an absent blue god and the people he abandoned. The Watchmen you started watching is not the Watchmen you’re finishing, and it’s so effortlessly, seamlessly done you barely even notice. [Benjamin Rabinovich] Broadcast on Sky Atlantic and available on NowTV

Broadcast on BBC1 and available on iPlayer

Watchmen

Streaming Highlights in January 2020

AJ and the Queen 10 Jan, Netflix RuPaul stars in this comedydrag series.

The Outsider 12 Jan, Sky/NowTV Stephen King is, like, so hot right now.

Sex Education 2 17 Jan, Netflix More sex therapy antics from Otis and Co. — 50 —

Star Trek: Picard 24 Jan, Amazon Prime Video Jean-Luc has a few more Captain’s logs to log.

Bojack Horseman 6 (Pt 2) 31 Jan, Netflix Final visit to Hollywoo and our depressed equine hero.

THE SKINNY

CCA Highlights A feast of imaginative and innovative art, music and film starts CCA’s new decade in style Words: Ben Venables Art

ith careful pen and pencil drawings, Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona depicts everyday life and landscapes in colourful and folkloric ways. Her latest exhibition, Holding on to Universes (7 Feb-22 Mar), brings some of her lesser known works to CCA. These graphics convey the complicated nature of modern living which followed Arctic colonialism, highlighting the changes from life on the land and ice to contemporary communities – including pictures of Ashoona’s hometown Kinngait, Cape Dorset, in today’s northern Canada. Those with great taste will know that how we perceive food teaches a lot about social life, the environment and global food systems. In Steph Marsden’s food/play/food event Bubble Bubble: Fermentation and Feminism (4pm, 15 Feb) the gastronomer explores the culture and rituals of preservation through a hands-on

workshop. Algorithm is a dancer for LA-based trio YACHT, as they bring data driven dance-pop to Glasgow (7pm, 9 Feb). YACHT’s latest machination is to remodel their 82-track back catalogue through artificial intelligence, creating the neurally networked and innovative album Chain Tripping. No easier to categorise is Kindness (7pm, 18 Feb). Their versatile and ambient sounds defeat attempts at genre. Back from gigs in America, Paris and Berlin, they return to Glasgow with a four-piece band and new album Something Like War. Film fans will find CCA’s new year programme especially panoramic. Pity Party Film Club (15 Feb) are hosting an all-day screening of classic films about female friendships. Mike Leigh’s Career Girls (1997) centres on two former university roommates reuniting as city careerists. How, or how much, have

Bubble Bubble: Fermentation and Feminism

the two friends changed? Released a year later, Clockwatchers focuses on inter-office politics, combining comedy with nuanced characterisation. Then there’s Tangerine (2015), a film with a budget about the size of the iPhone it was filmed on. The story follows two transgender sex workers through LA as they seek revenge. And, of course, there’s perhaps the most iconic portrayal of female solidarity in Thelma and Louise (1991). Along with its smart and sharp script by Callie Khouri, it’s possibly one of Ridley Scott’s most beautifully shot films. As part of LGBT History Month Scotland 2020, the Scottish Queer International Film Festival (6pm, 8 Feb) present a raft of short films

looking back into obscured and unfound elements of 20th century queer Scottish representation, showcasing archival documentaries among other films by queer filmmakers. Panel discussions asking if these films are a fair representation of the past take place along with the screenings. Glasgow Film Festival’s (27 Feb-8 Mar) full programme is announced on 29 January and will include local and international films from all genres. Films grouped under the theme Crossing the Line again find a perfect home at CCA, highlighting the avant-garde and artistic works of vision. cca-glasgow.com

January 2020 — Review

— 51 —

THE SKINNY

Theatre

No Strings Attached Puppet Animation Scotland’s manipulate festival returns this January and February with its biggest programme to date Words: Peter Simpson Photo: manipulate Old Stone (as part of A Taste of Quebec)

January 2020 — Review

he manipulate festival brings some of the best and brightest from the worlds of visual theatre, film and puppetry to Edinburgh in the depths of winter, and the 2020 edition is the festival’s biggest yet. More than 70 performances, screenings, workshops and events – featuring artists from Scotland, England, Europe, North America and Australia – are packed into the programme, which runs from 31 January to 8 February at Summerhall and the Festival Theatre Studio. Scottish theatre at manipulate The festival kicks off with A Brief History of the Fragile Male Ego (31 Jan, 8.30pm) from feminist theatre company Jordan and Skinner and Cirqulation: Other Worlds, a special edition of Scottish circus cabaret night Delighters (31 Jan, 9.30pm). The Edinburgh-based Tortoise in a Nutshell begin their 10th anniversary year with new production Ragnarok (7-8 Feb, 7.15pm). Tackling the climate crisis and taking influence from Nordic myths, it’s a co-production with Norwegian theatre company Figurteateret i Nordland. Fellow Scottishbased company Visible Fictions present Up (6 Feb, 6pm), a new work looking into the 29.4 million-toone odds of dying in a plane crash. Cheery. Two Destination Language premiere their new production, Fault Lines (6 Feb, 9pm), a new large-scale show about “the constricting roles and identities contemporary society places on women,

a caustic fashion show on the fracture between feminism and fabric”. Paper Doll Militia, creators of the five-star Egg, return with new production A Wire Apart (5-6 Feb, 7.15pm), looking at our obsessions with technology and the ways in which we communicate. International theatre Collectif AÏE AÏE AÏE, touted by manipulate as one of France’s most revered and successful visual theatre companies, present a pair of works in this year’s programme. Ma Biche et Mon Lapin (1 Feb, 2pm and 3pm), “a puppetry duet about the misadventures and misunderstandings of love and life”, and Ersatz (1 Feb, 5pm and 6.30pm) which promises to flit between light humour and deranged farce. French/Russian company Samolœt present After Chekov, inspired by the work of the Russian playwright (3-4 Feb, 7.15pm). Nataly Lebouleux’s company Improbable Dolls tackles issues of conversion therapy and gay exorcism in Mina (3 Feb, 6pm and 7.45pm). Short Film, Cabaret and Workshops The manipulate short film programme features curated programmes from a pair of film festivals. The Edinburgh Short Film Festival present a selection of Animated Highlights from their 2019 programme (1 Feb, 2pm), and Festival Stop Motion Montréal – the world’s first stop motion animation festival – bring a selection of films to Edinburgh in — 52 —

A Taste of Québec (1 Feb, 3.30pm). Award-winning animator Emma Calder presents a retrospective of short films from her Pearly Oyster animation house, followed by a Q&A (1 Feb, 5.30pm). For those of you looking to dip your toes in the programme, manipulate’s free cabaret events (3-8 Feb, 7.45pm) offer the chance to catch some of Scotland’s best physical theatre artists in an informal setup. The festival also present Critical Response Process: A Primer (8 Feb, 2pm), a workshop on engaging with new work led by theatremaker and producer Tashi Gore. Simon Hart, director of the festival’s organisers, Puppet Animation Scotland, says: “The growth of Scottish companies presenting world-class work at the festival has really made programming our 13th festival incredibly special for the whole team, and we look forward to another exciting, stimulating and thought-provoking celebration of the very best of Scottish and international visual theatre, puppetry and animated film.”

manipulate, Summerhall and The Studio at Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 31 Jan to 8 Feb Full programme and tickets at manipulatefestival.org The Skinny is a media partner of manipulate

THE SKINNY

Art Reviews myth is a take on the vicissitudes of technological advancement. Across the room, there’s a A drawing from the Glasgow drawing on the wall made from nails. University archives begins -GNOSTIC It’s a complicated network of lines, CAUTERY, showing an illustration of and its twin is down a facing corridor. the mythical thief, who stole fire from The arrangement of the nails follows the Gods, nailed to a mountainside a diagram produced by software that and having his liver pecked out. The predicts the movement of grassfires. The crisp shadows they cast draw attention to the four bright gallery lights above, as the constellation points to the noisy vent and plug sockets that would otherwise go unnoticed. Around the corner, and also installed at the top of the wall, there is a sculpture of a nest made from the waste from a metal burning process. Underneath, there’s a large metal sculpture that the leftovers come from. It’s a straight-cut geometric rack, holding metal casts Alex Impey, Exta, Nickel on electroformed copper, elements from Orangutan (2012), steel, fibres, 2019 of unidentified arm or leg The Hunterian, Glasgow

GoMA, Glasgow

Hal Fischer, Handkerchiefs

subcultural communities into shifting (Fischer’s are already long out of date) nuances and subtleties of identities. [Adam Benmakhlouf] Hal Fischer, Gay Semiotics and other works, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, until 30 May

— 53 —

January 2020 — Review

Fischer’s 1970s works are black and white photos showing a man demonstrating how to sniff amyl nitrite (or poppers), another wearing a ball gag, some heavy-duty large S&M equipment – the cross and the meat hoist. Carefully posed and arranged, they’re deliberately uncandid, unspontaneous and feel more formal than titillating. Fischer annotates them in a deadpan tone and divulges some of the visual codes of 1970s Castro, an area of San Francisco that was known as a centre for gay male culture. He superimposes these texts – tongue-in-cheek academic explanations of the significance of different accessories, styles of grooming and garments – on to the photos. If a guy’s ear is pierced, does it mean he’s a gay top? Probably yes, according to Fischer’s pantomimed voice of authority. There is also a touching series of framed photos and separate short texts that provide brief anecdotes of Fischer’s relationships with different men over a few years in the late 70s,

titled Boy-Friends. His sexual CV is a range of meet-cutes and various kinds of relationships: a best friend experimenting, “Disneyland on Quaaludes”, a waiter pressing his knee between Fischer’s legs, a Harvard dropout bunking at a pal’s house. They have sex, but the stakes, lengths of encounter and outcomes are decidedly divergent: a friendship supersedes romance, a climatic break of a tumultuous affair as one Boy-Friend hits him. In the final room a series of hourly photos of a bus bench is accompanied again by Fischer’s diaristic writing about what the photos show hour-by-hour. In these, and across the different bodies of work, Fischer implicates himself as documented and documentarian simultaneously, as he breaks down any monolithic ideas of

Alex Impey: -GNOSTIC CAUTERY, The Hunterian, until 23 Feb

Photo: Glasgow Museums

Hal Fischer

bones, a cold and richly abstract hyper-museological ordering of metal reproductions of specimens held by the university. As the physical works flit from representations of fire, to nests, to animal limbs, a slideshow of digital images shows a rush of different industrial surfaces like grilles and large vents, as well as animal skin and greenery. Shown on a complicated fake wall left hovering impressively by about a metre, the projector stand can be seen behind. From abstraction to images and back again, the works point to their own materials and surroundings, such as metal and its waste, the gallery context, the air droning through a vent. Subtly adjusting the perception of the viewer to include these inelegant excesses, small dints are made in the powerful invisibility that obscures the workings of social and technological infrastructures. [Adam Benmakhlouf]

Art

Alex Impey

THE SKINNY

Books

Book Reviews

My Dark Vanessa

Dark Satellites

Hotel du Jack

A Good Man

By Kate Elizabeth Russell

By Clemens Meyer (trans. Katy Derbyshire)

By Dan Brotzel

By Ani Katz

German writer Clemens Meyer is no stranger to writing about those on the fringes. In his era-spanning, Man Booker International Prize-longlisted novel Bricks and Mortar, he examined the sex trade in a big city in former East Germany. In his latest collection of short stories, Dark Satellites, which has been translated by Katy Derbyshire, Meyer places focus on a series of characters and narratives in contemporary Germany that might not usually be in the spotlight. Whether it’s a train driver struggling to come to terms with running over a laughing man, a roaming man unable to return to his flat after a break-in or a guard patrolling outside a home for immigrants who falls in love with a refugee, Meyer’s collection of characters and narratives are imbued with a sense of humanity without ever tipping over into sentimentality. The Beach Railway’s Last Run, in which an old man reminisces about a particular incident during his youth, feels particularly poignant. Despite the evocative passages though, Meyer’s prose, which borders on stream of consciousness with its liberal use of commas and meandering sentences, can sometimes upend the emotion buried within by leaving the reader little room to breathe and reflect on what is taking place. Settle into its style and pace though and Dark Satellites gradually discloses its own sense of beauty in these seemingly small yet revealing stories. [Eugenie Johnson]

Hotel du Jack is convinced, deep in its pages and soul, that it is a better book than it actually is. Promising hilarious and moving short stories that engage with the everyday of contemporary life, the resulting collection is patchy at best, seeming to have confused wittiness with mean-spirited disdain. One story unveils the strange antics of a neighbourhood through their communal social media group, another shows the disintegration of a relationship through a lesson on the active and passive voice, while another charts a LaDbible disciple blurring the lines between his own life and a chick lit novel. Dan Brotzel’s narrative frameworks are frequently innovative, but sadly the same cannot be said about the stories themselves: supposedly tongue-in-cheek references to Brexit feel simultaneously trite and dismissive, the melancholy of the everyday is depicted with a banality that feels almost sneering, and women are frequently portrayed as nagging, uptight, or victimised by men, their tales told with a self-aware smugness that decentres and reduces any female perspective. Unfortunately for these stories, profound social commentary and humour cannot only cleverly observe sadness and trauma – they also need to wrestle with their depth and complexity. Ultimately, Hotel du Jack is intended to be laughed at, not with: an attitude that is deeply, uncompromisingly unfunny. [Anahit Behrooz]

Ani Katz’s debut novel is about a man called Thomas Martin. As the scene is set by Thomas – who tells his story in the first person – it becomes quickly clear that the ‘good man’ being referred to in the title is Thomas. He is passionately in love with his French wife Miriam, has a top job at an advertising agency in Manhattan and is devoted to his daughter Ava. He provides for his eccentric mum and twin adult sisters who still live in the family home, a ‘crumbling Victorian dollhouse’. Parts of the book are truly gripping, although there are dry spells that leave you wondering where the story is going. But as the protagonist’s ugly upbringing is slowly unravelled, he becomes a little more interesting as a character, appearing not so ordinary and more like the rest of us, despite still appearing relatively unaffected by his experiences. We discover why Thomas had such a strong desire to become a husband and a father so quickly, desperately wanting to make a better life than the one he was born into. After years of routine, he messes up at work and is unable to deal with the guilt of letting down his family. It turns out power and success can come at a price. Ani Katz has created an edgy debut with a disturbingly unforgettable ending. [Tina Koenig]

January 2020 — Review

rrrrr

Books are called timely so often it becomes almost flippant. But when it comes to My Dark Vanessa, its timeliness is an impactful one, scrutinising how shifts in social and cultural conversations can force us to revisit and better understand past events. It’s 2000. 15-year-old Vanessa Wye is (in her eyes) drawn to a kindred spirit in her 42-year-old English teacher Jacob Strane. She is his one and only; she eases his guilt over ‘falling in love’ with a teen. It’s 2017. The conversation is shifting. A rising wave of allegations brings a long overdue reckoning for abusers. Strane has been accused of sexual assault by a former student. When Vanessa is reached out to, she faces a choice: stand firm in her belief that she willingly engaged in a relationship, or redefine not only some of her most formative events, but herself too. My Dark Vanessa is troubling but necessary, laying power dynamics and the insidious methods of grooming on full display, and diving into the subsequent decades of psychological manipulation. Scrutinised years later through the lens of the #MeToo movement, Vanessa’s story proves a challenging but compulsive read; no one wants to observe real darkness unravel, but it’s impossible to tear away. Forcing readers to reckon with reality, this is an astounding debut circling power, abuse and manipulation. A powerhouse. [Heather McDaid]

rrrrr

Sandstone Press, 23 Jan, £8.99

4th Estate, 23 Jan, £12.99 Fitzcarraldo Editions, 20 Jan, £12.99

— 54 —

rrrrr

William Heinemann, 16 Jan, £12.99

THE SKINNY

ICYMI Comedy

Stand-up and host of Glasgow’s Vision Board night, John Aggasild takes a look at early-noughties hidden gem Marion & Geoff Illustration: Julija Straižytė

arion & Geoff is a sitcom starring Rob Brydon as divorced minicab driver and loving father Keith. The show follows Keith driving around between fares and regularly driving from his home in London to visit his sons who live in Cardiff with his ex-wife Marion and her partner Geoff. As a stand-up, I love monologues and character studies from The Office to my favourite film of last year, Thunder Road. If you like this stuff too, Marion & Geoff might be up your street. Set entirely within Keith’s car, he gives his optimistic musings on life and chronicles his divorce to a dashboard camera which serves as a sort of video diary, and definitely as company. Surprisingly, the comedy is not restricted by its singular setting. This is likely down to the realistic dialogue, despite the less-than-realistic situation, and Brydon’s excellent character work. As is the aim of any TV programme, the creators want you to invest your precious time in the lives of these characters, and with Marion & Geoff’s first series it’s made even easier. Each episode is less than ten minutes and with only one real-life character to focus on, what’s not to love. I watched it in one sitting and believe it to be a masterpiece. However, Series 2 is made up of six 30-minute episodes which puts me off, considering the deliberate structure of the first series. There is also a one-off special on the Series 2 DVD which

takes place at the barbecue described in episode six, The Second Hottest Day, co-starring Steve Coogan and Tracy-Ann Obermann in the titular roles. As tantalising as this prospect of ensemble and drama may seem, I’m not interested in seeing the world beyond Keith’s car and Keith’s perspective, because that’s where the success of Marion & Geoff lies. There are fantastic lines throughout but much of the comedy (and tragedy) of the central plot is what is not said. Keith’s view of his marriage and fatherhood through rose-tinted glasses/windscreen is what makes him so endearing. To include any conflicting views would spoil the tone. Visual and verbal jokes come big and small, subtle and less so. No jokes feel easy or cheap – only those true to Keith’s character and circumstance, as his ramblings pivot between an open book and a man convincing himself that his position is precisely not where he fears. One could draw comparisons between Marion & Geoff and the popular mockumentary format of the early 21st century – The Office, Parks & Recreation, This Country – but thanks to the courage of its convictions, it feels different. The honest lighting throughout the day, the subtle difference in action between a static and moving car, noises of the gearbox and handbrake all create a very real piece of television about a man who won’t accept his reality. That could make it seem very dark, and in places it is, but not depressingly so. And although Keith is deluded, he’s a different beast to Brent or Partridge – you do actually feel sympathy for him. Driving the show is Rob Brydon’s incredible performance. One character carries the entire weight of the story and its protagonists, as well as diffusing the tension in a split second with masterful delivery. The scene where Keith recounts the barbecue is some of the best acting I have ever seen. Find it and enjoy it. Vision Board, The Flying Duck, Glasgow, 26 Jan John Aggasild: Spring/Summer 2020, The State Bar, Glasgow, 22 Mar

January 2020 — Review

— 55 —

THE SKINNY

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

Glasgow Music

Mon 13 Jan

Fri 03 Jan

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

BETA WAVES (KARDO + TALKER + HAZEYDAYS) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Ambient electronic duo from Dundee.

FIRST FOOTING: KUBITARU (PRUSSIA SNAILHAM + VICTORIA’S FLIGHT) THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

A new showcase event with the best new music in Scotland in the best wee venue in the world.

Sat 04 Jan

HEAVY RAPIDS (THE STONED IMMACULATE + NEW REBEL CULT + CAMEO HABITAT) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Hotly-tipped Glaswegian young team.

FIRST FOOTING: CHARRETTE (GOODNIGHT LOUISA + HANNAH SLAVIN + THINGS THAT AREN’T THERE) THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

A new showcase event with the best new music in Scotland in the best wee venue in the world.

Sun 05 Jan

WEATHERSTON (GHOSTWRITER + GOTH GF + AMUR)

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

A new showcase event with the best new music in Scotland in the best wee venue in the world.

Wed 08 Jan

MIKE MCKENZIE (REBEKAH KIRK + ANDREW DICKSON + MARINA ROLINK) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

BBC Radio Scotland’s Singer/Songwriter of the Year Mike McKenzie takes to the Tut’s stage. THE RESIDENTS: VAJ. POWER

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 20:00, £5

The Flying Duck presents The Residents, a month long weekly residency from some of Glasgow’s up and coming bands who will curate each week to bring you something from their world of music and art.

FIRST FOOTING: SULKA (HEYUP + SUNSTINGER + YOUTH GROUP) THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

A new showcase event with the best new music in Scotland in the best wee venue in the world.

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Thu 09 Jan

FIRST FOOTING: POCKET KNIFE (KLEOPATRA + TINY MURDER + KING WINE)

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Weatherston are an indie rock band from Glasgow.

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

A new showcase event with the best new music in Scotland in the best wee venue in the world.

Mon 06 Jan

FIRST FOOTING: GELATINE (SUPERCLOUD + ALUMINIUM HANDS + EAT THE FRIEK)

January 2020 — Listings

FIRST FOOTING: GRAVELLE (FRANKY’S EVIL PARTY + MIDDLE CLASS GUILT)

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

A new showcase event with the best new music in Scotland in the best wee venue in the world.

Tue 07 Jan

FIRST LISTEN 01: FIELD MUSIC – MAKING A NEW WORLD

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 19:30, FREE

First Listen is The Flying Duck’s new playback event series, where they play upcoming new albums by some of their favourite artists and bands; all genres, all exclusive.

THE PLASTIC YOUTH (FAUNA + ST DUKES + VICTORIA SPONGE)

The Plastic Youth are an indie/jangle-pop four-piece from Glasgow.

FIRST FOOTING: NEKKURO HÁNA (LUCID HOUND + LUTHIA + AORTAROTA) THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

A new showcase event with the best new music in Scotland in the best wee venue in the world. MUSE-IC

PIE & BREW, FROM 21:00, FREE

BAJZEL (BRUK + FOXGANG)

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 19:00, £8

Bajzel (meaning: mess) is the purest definition of “one man show” and “one man band”. He is a musical chameleon tap dancing on pedals, live-looping guitar, bass and beats into virtuosic alternative art-rock exhilaration. WE ARE NOT DEVO

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £12.50

The UK’s only Devo tribute. ORGANIC GROOVES PIE & BREW, FROM 18:00, FREE

A fusion of Glasgow’s finest DJs collaborate with talented vocalists and exceptional musicians to offer something fresh and exciting to the city’s vibrant music scene.

Sat 11 Jan

THE VANITIES (THE MONOCASTERS + NU CROS + PLASMAS) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Taking their distinct brand of Glaswegian garage punk around the block, The Vanities stay true to the ferocity and energy of their chaotic live sound.

BIG FARMER (DROVES) THE RUM SHACK, FROM 20:00, £4

A band describing themselves as “Glasgow Agri-core”, which is great and we approve. WE ARE NOT DEVO

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £12.50

The UK’s only Devo tribute. RAMBOOTAN

PIE & BREW, FROM 21:00, FREE

Rambootan are a young funk four-piece from Glasgow bringing funky vibes and neo-soul to the dancefloor.

Sun 12 Jan

WEEKEND DEBT (THE RITZ + BIGHT + BEAFETS) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Talented singer-songwriters Nicola Evans and Olivia Ennemoser invite local singers and songwriters to join them every week.

Lanark-hailing four-piece who’re inspired by Fatherson, Catfish and the Bottlemen and Arctic Monkeys.

Fri 10 Jan

Gary Lightbody et al do their amiable indie-rock thing. We once rather beautifully described them as a “bed-wet fest”. Enjoy.

DIRTY MIKE

STEREO, FROM 18:45, £6 - £7

Three Glasgow kids who play punk/alt rock music, launching their new single.

SNOW PATROL

SWG3, FROM 19:00, £16

FIRST FOOTING: LEMON DRINK (ELEANOR KANE + KATHERINE ALY + MAARYA)

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

A new showcase event with the best new music in Scotland in the best wee venue in the world.

FIRST FOOTING: OPHELIA LIES (ALASTAIR TIBBS + LAKYOTO)

A new showcase event with the best new music in Scotland in the best wee venue in the world.

Tue 14 Jan

FIRST LISTEN 02: HOLY FUCK – DELETER

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 19:30, FREE

First Listen is The Flying Duck’s new playback event series, where they play upcoming new albums by some of their favourite artists and bands; all genres, all exclusive. FIRST FOOTING: WHO’S OLIVIA? (CORTNË + FALSE FRIENDS + THE RUNAWAY MODELS) THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

A new showcase event with the best new music in Scotland in the best wee venue in the world.

Wed 15 Jan

JACK BROTHERHOOD KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Jack Brotherhood return with their blend of emotive and energetic indie rock. THE RESIDENTS: VAJ. POWER

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 20:00, £5

The Flying Duck presents The Residents, a month long weekly residency from some of Glasgow’s up and coming bands who will curate each week to bring you something from their world of music and art. SLAUGHTER BEACH, DOG (DOGEYED + U.S. HIGHBALL) THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £12

Modern Baseball’s Jake Ewald’s side project.

Thu 16 Jan

ONE NINE (SHEARS + KENDAMA + KONNER) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Glasgow indie-pop duo. MUSE-IC

PIE & BREW, FROM 21:00, FREE

Talented singer-songwriters Nicola Evans and Olivia Ennemoser invite local singers and songwriters to join them every week.

Fri 17 Jan

THE REZILLOS

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £19

Edinburgh-formed punk/ new wave outfit active since 1976, running on high octane, guitar driven, melodic anti-mope rock. BILLY MITCHELL (SHOALS + THE NOVACS + DEAR ASTEROID)

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

IAIN MORRISON (MARC DUFF)

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 19:30, £10

Iain Morrison will be joined onstage by Joe Smillie (drums) and Pete Harvey (bass).

CELTIC CONNECTIONS: LOST MAP PRESENTS (PICTISH TRAIL + ROZI PLAIN) ST LUKE’S, FROM 19:30, £17

A showcase from Eiggbased label Lost Map. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: NATIVE HARROW

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £10

Native Harrow is singersongwriter Devin Tuel, a former ballerina and classically trained singer. ORGANIC GROOVES PIE & BREW, FROM 20:00, FREE

A fusion of Glasgow’s finest DJs collaborate with talented vocalists and exceptional musicians to offer something fresh and exciting to the city’s vibrant music scene.

Sat 18 Jan

QUICHE (GHOSTBABY + SOBRIETY + SAM PLANT) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Rising local soft pop slingers.

CELTIC CONNECTIONS: THE GRIT ORCHESTRA BARROWLANDS, FROM 19:30, £24.20

The 80-piece GRIT Orchestra, a hand-picked array of Scottish folk, jazz and classical artists, revisit the music that first made them. THE LOCKHEARTS

STEREO, FROM 19:00, £10

The Lockhearts will be performing a two hour set of some of the greatest hits of all time. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: STOCKTON’S WING (MNÁ) ST LUKE’S, FROM 19:30, £20

2019 saw Irish music veterans Stockton’s Wing release their first new music in 20 years and launch their Retrospective tour.

SUMSHAPES (THE GYMNASTIC BAND + NORMAL SERVICE + DJ MARC BAINES)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, FROM 20:00, TBC

Glasgow trio who formerly played together in ‘skronytonk’ group Dawson. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: JOHN CRAIGIE CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, FROM 19:30, £15

Singer-songwriter who’s said to sound like the lovechild of John Prine and Mitch Hedberg.

The Dundonian singer plays with a full band.

— 56 —

SLIPKNOT (BEHEMOTH)

THE SSE HYDRO, FROM 19:30, £43.70 £60.70

Legendary heavy metal band return with their sixth studio album and a world tour. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: MOLLY LINEN (SOFIA WOLFSON) THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £10

Lost Map signee Molly Linen creates atmospheric, captivating and personal songs, led by melodic guitar lines and lulling yet hypnotic vocals.

Sun 19 Jan

CRASHES (FORREST CAN’T RUN + DETER + PAINTING ROCKETS) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Glasgow band playing a blend of pop and rock, with big riffs, surging rhythms and anthemic melodies. THE MOWGLIS

STEREO, FROM 19:00, £12

The Mowgli’s are a quintessential California band. Their songs are a joyous revival of rock’n’roll, a twisting indie-folk dance and a heartfelt protest ballad. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: COMMON HOLLY

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £10

Common Holly puts unpredictable compositional elements into a singersongwriter/folk framework, packaged in textured, eclectic electro-acoustic production.

Tue 21 Jan

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM

ST LUKE’S, FROM 19:00, £18

American black metal band formed in 2003 in Olympia, Washington, by brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: GWENIFER RAYMOND (HANK TREE) THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £10

Gwenifer Raymond spent years playing around the Welsh valleys in various punk outfits before going solo.

Wed 22 Jan

ALTINAK (NEON SEAS + LAST LIGHT + DEE.) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Four-piece indie rock outfit from West Lothian. THE RESIDENTS: VAJ. POWER

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 20:00, £5

The Flying Duck presents The Residents, a month long weekly residency from some of Glasgow’s up and coming bands who will curate each week to bring you something from their world of music and art.

Thu 23 Jan

THE WANDERING HEARTS

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £16

London-based country/ Americana group. CARAVAN PALACE

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, FROM 19:00, £28.90

Mighty fusion of gypsy-jazz, swing and high-octane electronica from the raggletaggle French natives. RUSSELL STEWART (MOTHER FOCUS + NASTY NESTO & THE SAD BOIS + MEGAN BLACK) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Singer-songwriter from Glasgow draws on multiple soul influences to form his fresh sound. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: FRAZEY FORD (ADAM HOLMES & THE EMBERS) ST LUKE’S, FROM 19:30, £17

Canadian singer/songwriter and co-founder of country-folk trio the Be Good Tanyas.

CELTIC CONNECTIONS: HANNAH READ & ANDY MONAGHAN (CARA ROSE)

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, FROM 19:30, £13

Hannah Read & Andy Monaghan’s shared collaborative appetites create evocative, beautifully soundscaped new songs. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: KETTLE OF KITES

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £10

Kettle of Kites is an indie art-rock band, a soaring crescendo and then a simple folk melody. ORGANIC GROOVES PIE & BREW, FROM 20:00, FREE

A fusion of Glasgow’s finest DJs collaborate with talented vocalists and exceptional musicians to offer something fresh and exciting to the city’s vibrant music scene.

Sat 25 Jan

SCHOOLBOY Q (JAY ROCK)

CELTIC CONNECTIONS: JONAH TOLCHIN

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, FROM 19:00, £34.50

Jonah Tolchin has consistently found the means of integrating his sentiments into his songs.

THE VAN T’S (OSKAR BRAVES + FREAKWAVE + MEDICINE CABINET)

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £10

MUSE-IC

PIE & BREW, FROM 21:00, FREE

Talented singer-songwriters Nicola Evans and Olivia Ennemoser invite local singers and songwriters to join them every week.

Californian hip-hop artist, known to his mammy as Quincey Matthew Hanley.

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

Rapturous surf-pop with rock swagger balanced by sugar-pop harmonies. BRUNO MAJOR

STEREO, FROM 19:00, £13.75

CRYSTAL (SWIM SCHOOL + THE ROLY MO + THE BLEEDERS)

Bruno Major splices classic singer-songwriter confessionals with sleek modern electronic production, girding the entire enterprise with hints of soul.

Bold, brazen and utterly mesmerising, Crystal are a four-piece grunge/punk band from Glasgow.

ST LUKE’S, FROM 19:30, £17

Fri 24 Jan

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

CELTIC CONNECTIONS: ALASDAIR ROBERTS OG VOLVUR

PLATFORM, FROM 19:00, £10 - £15

Inimitable folk musician and songwriter Alasdair Roberts plays with a Volvur – a band from Norway. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: MANRAN & SPECIAL GUESTS (BAND OF BURNS) BARROWLANDS, FROM 19:30, £22

Traditional Scottish ensemble on driving accordion, fiddle, Highland pipes, Uilleann pipes and wooden flute. That do you? TWIN TEMPLE

STEREO, FROM 19:00, £14.50

The Satanic Doo-Wop duo, hailing from the City of Angels, come to Glasgow to play a full headline show.

CELTIC CONNECTIONS: RYAN BINGHAM (STEPH GRACE)

American singer/songwriter who won an Oscar and a Grammy for his songs written for the film Crazy Heart. GUMS! (CALLUM BAIRD + THE HECTOR COLLECTORS)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, FROM 19:30, £6

Three artists launch new releases on Burns Night.

CELTIC CONNECTIONS: GAELS LE CHÈILE @ CEÒL ‘S CRAIC CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, FROM 19:30, £15

Celebrating the contemporary kinship between Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaeilge traditions, this youthful triple bill welcomes Dublin visitors Imlé, BBC Young Folk Award winner Mischa MacPherson and Glasgowbased sextet Trip.

THE SKINNY CELTIC CONNECTIONS: SHHE THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £10

SHHE is the alter-ego of Scottish-Portuguese artist and producer Su Shaw. MARIANA MOREIRA & SAMUELE SORANA PIE & BREW, FROM 21:00, FREE

An evening of Portuguese Fado and Bossa Nova will be hosted by soulful Fado singer Mariana Moreira alongside jazz guitarist Samuele Sorana.

Sun 26 Jan

CELTIC CONNECTIONS: IRMIN SCHMIDT

PLATFORM, FROM 19:00, £12.50 - £20

Experimental German keyboardist and composer Irmin Schmidt is best known as a founding member of legendary German band CAN. WATERPARKS

SWG3, FROM 19:00, £15.75

Texas trio who’re big fans of Ke$ha, apparently. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: AVI KAPLAN (LIZZIE REID) ST LUKE’S, FROM 19:30, £14

Formerly of triple Grammywinning acapella quintet Pentatonix, Avi Kaplan is inspired by his parent’s country-folk favourites. LO RAYS (TEOSE)

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK: HUNG PARLIAMENT (MANUKA HONEY + HOUND)

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 19:30, £6 - £7

Bedroom pop music filled with drum machines, cheap beats, fuzzy guitars and intimate, indie shoe-gazing songwriting. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: SAM BAKER ST LUKE’S, FROM 19:30, £16

Texas born-and-raised singer/songwriter whose sound is built on sparse instrumentation and his trademark poetic delivery. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: RORY BUTLER (KITTY MACFARLANE)

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, FROM 19:30, £14

Scottish singer-songwriter channelling a modern-day Woody Guthrie through politically-minded, protest lyrics. REV MAGNETIC (COLOSSAL SQUID) THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £8

Glasgow four-piece combining elements of dream pop, R’n’B, shoegaze and post rock.

Thu 30 Jan

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK: GRAVELLE

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 19:30, £6 - £7

Lo Rays combine catchy melodies with heavy breakdowns and quirky rhythms.

Experimental electronic duo from Livingston.

Mon 27 Jan

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, FROM 19:30, £14

THE TESKEY BROTHERS

SWG3, FROM 19:00, £16.88

A raw combination of soul and blues.

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK: KIWI JR THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £7

Toronto’s Kiwi Jr. deliver an exciting 12-string guitar attack and book smart lyrics.

Tue 28 Jan MAN OF MOON

SWG3, FROM 19:00, £11.25

Psychedelic duo from Edinburgh.

BOMBAY BICYCLE CLUB

BARROWLANDS, FROM 19:00, £32.45

Expect the usual damaged affectations of indie from the north London-based four-piece, out on their UK tour. SLEEP TOKEN

ST LUKE’S, FROM 19:30, £13.50

An anonymous masked collective of musicians. Creepy.

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK: GIANT DRAG THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £15

Wed 29 Jan GRACE PETRIE

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

A charming and engaging performer, Petrie is foremost a protest singer but she has also earned her stripes in the folk, comedy and alternative scenes. BOMBAY BICYCLE CLUB

BARROWLANDS, FROM 19:00, £32.45

Expect the usual damaged affectations of indie from the north London-based four-piece, out on their UK tour.

Canadian folk/roots duo say their music is rooted in the place where they grew up: a remote, small-town community in Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan. GEORGIE

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £8

Nottingham singersongwriter pops in for an inevitably rousing set of country-esque tunes. MUSE-IC

PIE & BREW, FROM 21:00, FREE

Talented singer-songwriters Nicola Evans and Olivia Ennemoser invite local singers and songwriters to join them every week.

Fri 31 Jan

THE NICKAJACK MEN KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £8.80

The four-piece indie-rock / alt-country unit from Denny. THE INTERRUPTERS (BUSTER SHUFFLE + THE SKINTS) BARROWLANDS, FROM 19:00, £22

Ska and 2-Tone indebted four-piece.

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK: NEKKURO HÁNA (CONOR HEAFY + TAXIDERMY CAB)

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 19:30, £6 - £7

Making self-proclaimed ‘sex music’, the Glasgowbased quintet’s performances are pleasurable for the mind, body and soul. CELTIC CONNECTIONS: ROSS AINSLIE & THE SANCTUARY BAND (OKRA PLAYGROUND) ST LUKE’S, FROM 19:30, £16

Multi-instrumentalist/ composer Ross Ainslie channels influences from his collaborative work and reflects on his path to sobriety.

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, FROM 19:30, £14

The one-man alternative folk band that is Peter Kelly plays accompanied by Cairn String Quartet. INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK: GALLUS THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £7

The hotly tipped five-piece from Glasgow return to shake things up. ORGANIC GROOVES PIE & BREW, FROM 18:00, FREE

A fusion of Glasgow’s finest DJs collaborate with talented vocalists and exceptional musicians to offer something fresh and exciting to the city’s vibrant music scene.

Fri 03 Jan

THE SENSATIONAL ALEX HARVEY EXPERIENCE BANNERMANS, FROM 20:00, £10 - £13

Sensational Alex Harvey Band tribute act. NICOLE AND THE BACK-UP CREW

THE JAZZ BAR, FROM 23:30, £5 - £6

Lively and soulful blues party paying homage to the most important women in blues history, featuring stunning singer Nicole Smit.

Sat 04 Jan

CHAKALAKA FUNK

THE JAZZ BAR, FROM 23:30, £5 - £6

On the first Saturday of the month, DJ Simon Hodge, and live acts handpicked from the cream of the funk and soul scene, celebrate all things soul, funk, latin, Afro and boogie. MOCKNESS: 80S WINTER PARTY (DURANANDURAN + JUST JOVI + MONEYPENNY)

LA BELLE ANGELE, FROM 19:00, £10 - £15

80s Winter Party with tributes to Duran Duran, Bon Jovi and 80s hits.

Sun 05 Jan

OPEN MIC (JED POTTS & THE HILLMAN HUNTERS) BANNERMANS, FROM 15:00, FREE

Free music all day from acoustic to blues and rock.

Mon 06 Jan

ZERO ONE (REVEREND JIM & THE HERETICS) BANNERMANS, FROM 20:00, £5

Two great unsigned bands kick off the new year in style.

Tue 07 Jan

PRESSURE VALVE UNPLUGGED BANNERMANS, FROM 17:00, FREE

Local artists play stripped back sets, before the public get to be the stars at karaoke.

Fri 10 Jan RAMBOOTAN

THE JAZZ BAR, FROM 23:30, £5 - £6

Rambootan are a young funk four-piece from Glasgow bringing funky vibes and neo-soul to the dancefloor. ABSOLUTION

THE VOODOO ROOMS, FROM 19:30, £5

Muse tribute band from Scotland playing classic tracks.

Edinburgh Music Sat 11 Jan

THE LURKERS (THE SHAN) BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £10 - £12

Bluegrass, folk and rebel punk.

FRIDAY NIGHT: LATER AT THE JAZZ BAR THE JAZZ BAR, FROM 23:30, £5 - £6

Heavy bands (tbc) and an equally heavy DJ. BOWIE BLINDERS

THE VOODOO ROOMS, FROM 19:00, £7.50

Not a Bowie tribute act! But musicians and guest artists coming together to play the songs they love and that means the most to them. CHERRY RED

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 19:00, £6

Cherry Red’s first headline gig at Sneaky Pete’s, with support from Molly Hall, Aidian Cross and First Offence. FIELD MUSIC (DEATHCRASH)

THE MASH HOUSE, FROM 19:00, £10

The Mercury Prizenominated brothers Brewis playing percussive pop music.

Fri 17 Jan

PYGMY TWYLYTE

BANNERMANS, FROM 20:00, £10

Pygmy Twylyte play the music of Frank Zappa with the same cosmic, otherworldly bent with which it was intended. A must for hardcore fans and beginners alike. POWER RANGERS

THE JAZZ BAR, FROM 23:30, £5 - £6

Four of the heaviest hitting performers from Edinburgh’s underground funk family – The Chambers Street Collective (CSC). ARMORY SHOW

THE VOODOO ROOMS, FROM 19:30, £20

Richard Jobson performs the critically acclaimed Waiting for the Floods album with a brand new band. MOSEL SHIFT

TRAVERSE THEATRE, FROM 20:00, £12

Mosel Shift combines jazz, latin, tango with a touch of Scottish folk music on the side. CAROUSEL (PETTY CASSETTES + A MONTH OF SUNDAYS) WEE RED BAR, FROM 19:00, £5 - £6

Sun 12 Jan OPEN MIC

BANNERMANS, FROM 15:00, FREE

Emerging indie rock quartet from Dundee.

CRANACHAN

LOGOZ (2SEVENS + SLALOM D)

Free music all day from acoustic to blues and rock.

Sat 18 Jan

BANNERMANS, FROM 21:00, FREE

BANNERMANS, FROM 20:00, £6 - £8

Classic rock covers from the 60s to present day.

Punk pop at its finest with the three band bill. PURPLE PILGRIMS (MAUD THE MOTH + BURNT PAW)

Mon 13 Jan WAKO

TRAVERSE THEATRE, FROM 20:00, £12

Coming from the vanguard of the New Wave of Nordic Jazz, Wako is one of the most dynamic and innovative groups on the contemporary scene.

Tue 14 Jan

PRESSURE VALVE UNPLUGGED BANNERMANS, FROM 17:00, FREE

Local artists play stripped back sets, before the public get to be the stars at karaoke.

Wed 15 Jan

HENRY’S CELLAR BAR, FROM 19:30, £8

New Zealand sister duo crafting folk-tinged dream pop soundscapes. DAS CONTRAS

THE JAZZ BAR, FROM 23:30, £5 - £6

Das Contras are a band of musicians from The Kingdom of Fife, playing folk-funk-jazz-punk, soaring brass, face-melting guitar and raucous vocals.

Sun 19 Jan OPEN MIC

BANNERMANS, FROM 15:00, FREE

Free music all day from acoustic to blues and rock.

INCITE (SWORN AGAINST + DEATH REMAINS)

CRANACHAN

BANNERMANS, FROM 21:00, FREE

BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £12 - £15

The Arizona thrash groovers bring the bullish riffs and heavy soundscapes. BODY VOID (BISMUTH + GAY PANIC DEFENCE + GNARL) HENRY’S CELLAR BAR, FROM 19:30, £8

Harsh doom, sludge and crust from New England. NATIVE HARROW

Classic rock covers from the 60s to present day. BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD

THE MASH HOUSE, FROM 19:00, £9.90

Six-piece guitar group turning heads with their energetic live shows.

Tue 21 Jan

PRESSURE VALVE UNPLUGGED

THE VOODOO ROOMS, FROM 19:30, £12

Devin Tuel may consider herself to be an artist meant for a different time, but she now finds herself inhabiting her own true place.

BANNERMANS, FROM 17:00, FREE

Thu 16 Jan

BANNERMANS, FROM 21:00, £6

POPA CHUBBY

BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £18 - £22

WEE RED BAR, FROM 19:00, TBC

Solo project from King Krule’s saxophonist.

VIOBLAST

Spanish death metal band. THE BELLRAYS

Ted Horowitz marks 25 years of rocking the blues as, er, Popa Chubby. GAL GO GREY

Local artists play stripped back sets, before the public get to be the stars at karaoke.

THE VOODOO ROOMS, FROM 19:30, £12

Sexy and intelligent, passionate and powerful; all at once. The Bellrays call their music ‘maximum rock and soul’, which is as much a description of the heart that goes into their music.

— 57 —

A DIAMOND DOGS SESSION: HECTOR SHAW (HECTOR SHAW + THE VANDERBLUES + KATIE GREGSONMACLEOD) SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 19:00, £6

Showcasing the best upand-coming talent in the Edinburgh music scene.

Wed 22 Jan

GUIDA (THE NO-THINGS + POWDERKEG + CONTINENTAL QUILTS) BANNERMANS, FROM 19:00, £12

The Italian rockers with a 70s rock vibe make their Edinburgh debut. KAISER CHIEFS

USHER HALL, FROM 19:00, £24.75 £49.50

We’re not going to insult your intelligence with ‘Predict a Riot jokes’. You’re better than that. And we don’t predict one anyway. THE ARISTOCRATS

THE LIQUID ROOM, FROM 19:30, £25

Rock fusion three-piece. DOMICILES

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 19:00, £7

Domiciles draw from a myriad of different influences, with hints of throbbing Krautrock and dreamy shoegaze, whilst also touching on sneering garage, blissed-out space rock and experimental noise. VANT

THE MASH HOUSE, FROM 19:00, £12.10

Parlophone signed fourpiece doing their indie rock thing.

Thu 23 Jan

CANNABIS CORPSE (WITHERED + TEMPERED) BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £12 - £15

Crushing death metal that is a massive tribute to the styles of a certain other corpse-related band. SHHE

SUMMERHALL, FROM 19:00, £10

SHHE is the alter-ego of Scottish-Portuguese artist and producer Su Shaw, whose self-titled debut album tracks a period of intense personal change.

Fri 24 Jan

RAMAGE INC (A RITUAL SPIRIT + NORTH ATLAS)

BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, FREE

Ambient metal quartet formed by Ramage for the purpose of bringing life to his musical work on stage. SWAMPFOG

THE JAZZ BAR, FROM 23:30, £5 - £6

Swampfog are a sevenpiece funk outfit from Edinburgh, spiritually via New Orleans.

THE PLIMP SOULS

THE JAZZ BAR, FROM 23:30, £5 - £6

Raw funk and heavy soul vibes.

GIRLS ROCK SCHOOL WEE RED BAR, FROM 19:00, £5

Band event run by womxn for womxn (self-identifying, trans, non-binary, genderqueer inclusive). REV MAGNETIC

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 19:00, £10

Glasgow four-piece combining elements of dream pop, R’n’B, shoegaze and post rock.

Sun 26 Jan ARIEL POSEN

BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £16

Singer-songwriter, internationally-renowned guitarist and producer.

A WALTZ ACROSS THE CARPET USHER HALL, FROM 20:00, £40

A night of music and entertainment in support of Tiny Changes. GIANT DRAG

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 19:00, £15

The dreamy-but-tough indie rock of LA’s Giant Drag is the brainchild of singer/ guitarist Annie Hardy.

Mon 27 Jan FOLLOW DEEP

BANNERMANS, FROM 20:00, TBC

The Edinburgh debut for this indie/alt trio.

ALASDAIR FRASER & NATALIE HAAS TRAVERSE THEATRE, FROM 20:00, £12

A musical partnership that spans the full spectrum between intimate chamber music and ecstatic dance energy. INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK: KETTLE OF KITES (KAPIL SESHASAYEE)

Sat 25 Jan ARRANTHRAX (NORTHERN TRENDKILL)

BANNERMANS, FROM 20:00, £7 - £10

Two great tributes: one to Anthrax and the other Pantera.

SORRY FOR NOTHING BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £5

Heavy grinding three-piece. COUNTERFLOWS: JOE MCPHEE (DECOY) THE QUEEN’S HALL, FROM 19:00, £10

For over four decades Joe McPhee has been pursuing a beauty in his music that balances fierce attack and lyrical poetry. THE SMOKING POCKETS

THE JAZZ BAR, FROM 23:30, £5 - £6

A smoking hot eight-piece band with top shelf vocals and heavy horns. A KICK UP THE 90S THE VOODOO ROOMS, FROM 19:30, £6

A Kick Up The 90s bring two hours of start to finish 90s hits and anthems featuring songs from acts such as Oasis, Pulp, Blur and a whole lot more. CHECK MASSES

THE VOODOO ROOMS, FROM 19:30, £8

A new Leith-based trio who mix up beats, psych, dub and soul across well-crafted, self-produced songs. INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK: CARLA J. EASTON (BROKEN CHANTER) SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 19:00, £10

Wondrous, synth-soaked and uncompromising symphonic pop from the Scottish musician.

THE NINTH WAVE + SAVAGE MANSION + HEIR OF THE CURSED SUMMERHALL, FROM 19:30, £12

Dundee Music

ZACHARY KIBEE

BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £8 - £10

The Bullets & Octane man brings his solo outfit to Bannermans.

Wed 29 Jan

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK: CLOTH (ANNIE BOOTH) SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 19:00, £7

Glasgow three-piece Cloth are a proper Sneaks favourite of the last year and they’ll play alongside pals from Last Night From Glasgow. BETA WAVES

Thu 30 Jan

The World’s leading Pistols tribute troupe.

Fri 31 Jan

Tue 28 Jan

Indie art rock band Kettle of Kites (featuring members of Admiral Fallow) are joined by the incredible, genredefying Kapil Seshasayee.

Post punk belters BOOTlace headline Sneaks.

LA BELLE ANGELE, FROM 19:00, £15

Making his name as a member of The Pale Fountains alongside Chris “Biffa” McCaffrey, Michael Head has built a cult following of loyal fans over four decades,.

The Ninth Wave, Savage Mansion and Heir of the Cursed come to Summerhall as part of Independent Venue Week 2020.

BOOTLACE

THE SEX PISTOLS EXPERIENCE

SUMMERHALL, FROM 19:30, £23 - £26

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 19:00, £6

THE MASH HOUSE, FROM 19:00, £9

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 19:00, £6

MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND

Ambient electronic duo from Dundee. LIAR THIEF BANDIT (DYLAN PATERSON MUSIC) BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £7 - £10

The Scottish debut from the Swedish rockers.

Sat 04 Jan COMBAT ROCK

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, FROM 20:00, £8

The Clash tribute show.

Sat 11 Jan

DANGER ZONE

CLARKS ON LINDSAY STREET, FROM 21:30, TBC

A night of 80s pop and rock favourites.

Sat 25 Jan

FROM INSIDE (SPECIAL GUESTS VALUES + GRIEVANCE + IMMORTAL OMEN) CHURCH, FROM 19:00, £8

Liverpool alt-metal stars From Inside play their debut Dundee show. RATTLED AND HUMMIN’

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, FROM 20:00, £8

U2 tribute.

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK: AWKWARD FAMILY PORTRAITS

Wed 29 Jan

Awkward Family Portraits are back rocking the Cowgate this January.

Nottingham singersongwriter pops in for an inevitably rousing set of country-esque tunes.

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 19:00, £10

GEORGIE

CLARKS ON LINDSAY STREET, FROM 19:30, £8

January 2020 — Listings

Annie Hardy revives her Giant Drag persona for The Resurrection Tour.

CELTIC CONNECTIONS: KACY & CLAYTON (AVOCET)

CELTIC CONNECTIONS: BEERJACKET WITH CAIRN STRING QUARTET

THE SKINNY

Fri 31 Jan

STRANGE BONES

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, FROM 19:30, £7.50

Strange Bones have a reputation for explosive punk shows and were nominated for UMA Best Live Band 2018.

Glasgow Clubs

Clubs Fri 24 Jan

BELEC (DOUBLE DISCONE + COMFORT + MR TC)

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 22:00, £5 - £10

The Flying Duck presents a night of of leftfield Balearic, house, punk and disco with Belec, member of the Parisian collective Bruitd De La Passion. SYMBIOSIS

Sat 04 Jan

DECADES OF DUB

STEREO, FROM 23:00, £6

Glasgow-based roots, dub and reggae collective spreading love and unity.

Sat 11 Jan

SHOOT YOUR SHOT: PROSUMER (BONZAI BONNER)

THE BERKELEY SUITE, FROM 23:00, £10

Former Panorama Bar resident and now Edinburghbased DJ, Prosumer joins SYS for their latest party. LOOSEN UP (FERGUS CLARK + CHARLIE MCCANN + DAVID BARBAROSSA) THE RUM SHACK, FROM 22:00, £4

Afro, disco and fun times guaranteed.

Fri 17 Jan

PHASE GROUP: BARE BONES LAY LOW (GRIM LUSK + SUSANNAH STARK + SOFAY + LO KINDRE + MR TC) THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 22:00, £7 - £12

New Glasgow label Phase Group bring a selection of friends and contributors to The Flying Duck for a night of leftfield and psychedelic electronics.

Sat 18 Jan

BASTION (ETIENNE KRISTOF)

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 23:00, £6 - £7

Bastion are an industrial electronic duo based in Glasgow, taking influence from artists such as The Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails and Pendulum. FRENCH TOUCH

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 23:00, TBC

Etienne Kristof presents a night of French Touch House at The Flying Duck. MILLION DOLLAR DISCO

THE BERKELEY SUITE, FROM 23:00, TBC

As usual, Al Kent will be playing from start till end, treating your ears and feet to four hours of the most wonderful disco music at MDD’s annual party.

January 2020 — Listings

MOJO WORKIN’ (FELONIOUS MUNK)

THE RUM SHACK, FROM 21:00, £3

The Rum Shack’s monthly soul party, spinning soul, Motown, 60s R’n’B and more.

Wed 22 Jan

EXTENSION LAUNCH PARTY (RIZ LA TEEF + ADAM K B2B EDO) THE BERKELEY SUITE, FROM 23:00, £5 - £7

A new club event based around extended sets spanning 140, UK garage, breakbeat, grime and more.

AUDIO, FROM 23:00, FREE

The longest running and hardest hitting drum’n’bass night in Glasgow.

Sat 25 Jan

ANWULI SOUND: 1ST BIRTHDAY

STEREO, FROM 23:00, TBC

Anwuli Sound invite you to celebrate one year of fun and to kick off the new decade with a bang. PINK NOISE

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 23:00, £3 - £5

A new platform for Glasgow’s bubbling underground. Expect live music, experimental electronica and immersive DJ sets coupled with bespoke live visuals to take you on an audiovisual trip.

Fri 31 Jan FAST MUZIK

STEREO, FROM 23:00, TBC

FAST MUZIK is for everyone, but especially ravers, freaks, cyberpunks,groovy chicks, hackers, MySpace celebrities and responsible tamagotchi owners. OCTO TRAX

THE FLYING DUCK, FROM 23:00, £5 - £10

Octo Trax is a fledgling label and Glasgow based multi-media outlet running monthly parties around Glasgow.

Edinburgh Clubs Fri 03 Jan MISS WORLD: RESIDENTS

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £5 - £7

Miss World residents Aphid, Emily Grieve, Iced Gem and Feena play all night long in this installment of the monthly night promoting womxn in music.

Sat 04 Jan

5 YEARS & OUT! HECTORS AT SNEAKYS RESIDENCY CLOSING PARTY SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £0 - £5

Hectors finishes its five year residency at Sneaks with an all night long set from Edinburgh don Gareth Sommerville. RIVIERA PARADISO (ANDREA MONTALTO) PARADISE PALMS, FROM 21:00, FREE

One of the best selectors in the country playing all night on his own, bringing Mediterranean vibes and whistles to the Palms stage. Not to be missed! Solo Catania!

Mon 06 Jan OPR: GENESIS

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £5

OPR is escape to excess, hedonism, freedom. OPR nights will consist of techno, electro and industrial music from across Europe, but focusing on France.

Wed 08 Jan

HEATERS: OCTO TRAX SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £1 - £3

The often enigmatic creative crew, Octo Trax return to Sneaks’ midweek, packing their staple ‘allthings-quality’ party cuts.

Thu 09 Jan

EDINBURGH DISCO LOVERS

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £3 - £5

After a spirited 2019, the Edinburgh Disco Lovers invite you to kick off the new year with a celebration of brass, guitar licks, diva vocals and irresistible grooves, while raising money for Hope Not Hate.

Fri 10 Jan EH-FM

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £5 - £7

Your favourite local radio station celebrate their return from winter hibernation with a big presenter showdown. All proceeds go towards supporting local community radio. DAVID BOWIE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY

LA BELLE ANGELE, FROM 23:00, £5

Celebrating David Bowie’s birthday with as many of his hits as possible. WACK PRESENTS: PLOY

THE MASH HOUSE, FROM 23:00, £3 - £5

Ploy has cemented his place as one of the most consistent producers in the UK scene with a string of seminal releases. JACUZZI GENERAL PRESENTS…

PARADISE PALMS, FROM 21:00, FREE

An electronic night curated by producer Jacuzzi General. Expect leftfield, disco, downtempo electronica and nu-wave. Bring a towel.

Sat 11 Jan

SOULSVILLE (JACUZZI GENERAL) THE BONGO CLUB, FROM 23:00, £3 - £7

Residents Cameron Mason and Calum Evans spin the finest cuts of deep funk, Latin rhythms and rare groove into the early hours. THE EGG: DAVID BOWIE SPECIAL

WEE RED BAR, FROM 23:00, £6

A salad of genres: sixties garage and soul plus 70s punk and new wave, peppered with psych and indie for good measure. TEESH (PAKO VEGA)

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £6

DJ Cheers is joined by musical chameleon Pako Vega, one of the best DJs to play the club (certainly the most passionate!), to serve another all-you-can-eat mind buffet.

Regular Glasgow club nights Sub Club SOUND SYSTEMS FOR THE GREAT ORCHESTRA OF CHRISTMAS CHARITY (MANDALA SOUND SYSTEM FEAT. REGGAENERATOR + SAMEDIA SHEBEEN + MAD CARAVAN + DJ CUBA)

SATURDAYS

This charity event aims to support The Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity.

TUESDAYS

LA BELLE ANGELE, FROM 23:00, £4

Mon 13 Jan GROOVE LABS

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £5

Oscar James hosts another set of the capital’s budding talent, all in the name of charity.

Wed 15 Jan

HEATERS: JASMIN AND CAP’N GOODTIMES SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £5

Chameleon selector Jasmín touches down for her debut Scottish appearance at the midweek haven, while Sneaks’ own Cap’n Goodtimes sets the scene.

Thu 16 Jan

CHURCH PRESENTS FRICTION (LINGUISTICS)

THE LIQUID ROOM, FROM 22:30, £6 - £12

Kicking off the decade with heavenly bass gospel, king of the drums, Friction. BEATROOTS

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £5

The Beatroots crew make their debut at Sneaky’s, bringing their bass heavy mix of worldly sounds, with Hiba in support. All proceeds go to Kazmuzinda Health Clinic in Uganda.

Fri 17 Jan

OVERGROUND: MEGA RAVE THE BONGO CLUB, FROM 23:00, £3 - £6

Overground bring the rave back to Bongo, following celebrations of their third year in the game. MINISET

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £5 - £7

The first Headset of the new year. Expect a percussion salad of UK techno, UK bass, garage, UKF and 2-step. ZERO CHILL

LA BELLE ANGELE, FROM 23:00, £5 - £9

Conscious change cordially are bringing climate action to a club near you. CLUB NACHT

THE MASH HOUSE, FROM 23:00, £5 - £10

Club Nacht is back for refreshers Friday with a special guest to be announced.

PARADISE PALS: MISS WORLD (EMILY + JULIA) PARADISE PALMS, FROM 21:00, FREE

All female DJ collective based in Edinburgh. Sneaky Pete’s and EH-FM residents.

Sat 18 Jan

MESSENGER SOUND SYSTEM

THE BONGO CLUB, FROM 23:00, £5 - £7

Conscious roots and dub reggae rockin’ from the usual beefy Messenger soundsystem.

SUBCULTURE, 23:00, £TBC

Long-running house night with residents Harri & Domenic, oft' joined by a carousel of super fresh guests.

The Berkeley Suite MIDNIGHT BASS, 23:00, £3-5

Big basslines and small prices form the ethos behind this weekly Tuesday night, with drum'n'bass, jungle, bassline, grime and garage aplenty.

Cathouse WEDNESDAYS

CATHOUSE WEDNESDAYS, 23:00, £4

DJ Jonny soundtracks your Wednesday with all the best pop-punk, rock and hip-hop. THURSDAYS

UNHOLY, 23:00, £2-4

Cathouse's Thursday night rock, metal and punk mash-up. FRIDAYS

CATHOUSE FRIDAYS, 22:30, £5-6

Screamy, shouty, posthardcore madness to help you shake off a week of stress in true punk style.

SATURDAYS

CATHOUSE SATURDAYS, 23:00, £5-6

Or Caturdays, if you will. Two levels of the loudest, maddest music the DJs can muster; metal, rock and alt on floor one, and punky screamo upstairs. SUNDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) HELLBENT, 23:00, £TBC

From the fab fierce family that brought you Catty Pride comes Cathouse Rock Club’s new monthly alternative drag show. SUNDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) FLASHBACK, 23:00, £TBC

Pop party anthems & classic cheese from DJ Nicola Walker. SUNDAYS (THIRD OF THE MONTH)

CHEERS FOR THIRD SUNDAY, 23:00, £TBC

DJ Kelmosh takes you through Mid-Southwestern emo, rock, new metal, nostalgia and 90s and 00s tunes. SUNDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)

SLIDE IT IN, 23:00, £TBC

Classic rock through the ages from DJ Nicola Walker.

The Garage Glasgow MONDAYS

BARE MONDAYS, 23:00, £3-4

Lasers, bouncy castles and DJ Gav Somerville spinning out teasers and pleasers. Nice way to kick off the week, no? TUESDAYS

#TAG TUESDAYS, 23:00, £0-4

SATURDAYS

I LOVE GARAGE, 23:00, £5-7

Garage by name, but not by musical nature. DJ Darren Donnelly carousels through chart, dance and classics, the Desperados bar is filled with funk, G2 keeps things urban and the Attic gets all indie on you. SUNDAYS

Indoor hot tubs, inflatables as far as the eye can see and a Twitter feed dedicated to validating your drunk-eyed existence.

SESH, 23:00, £3-4

GLITTERED! WEDNESDAYS, 23:00, £0-4

FRIDAYS

WEDNESDAYS

DJ Garry Garry Garry in G2 with chart remixes, along with beer pong competitions all night. THURSDAYS

ELEMENT, 23:00, £TBC

Ross MacMillan plays chart, house and anthems with giveaways, bouncy castles and, most importantly, air hockey. FRIDAYS

FRESH BEAT, 23:00, £3-6

Twister, beer pong and DJ Ciar McKinley on the ones and twos, serving up chart and remixes through the night.

Oran Mor FRESH! FRIDAYS, 23:00, £6

Resident DJ John McLean brings you the biggest tunes and best deals to make your weekend one to remember. SATURDAYS

SATURDAY AT THE CLUB ROOM, 23:00, £8

Resident DJs Neil Hood and Craig McHugh spin the Saturday night tunes.

Dance, chart and remixes in the main hall with Craig Guild, while DJ Nicola Walker keeps things nostalgic in G2 with flashback bangers galore.

Regular Edinburgh club nights Cabaret Voltaire TUESDAYS

HECTORS, 23:00, £0-7

Since May 2012, Hectors has become Edinburgh’s soundest midweek shindig, drawing in capacity crowds each and every Tuesday to their home, the prestigious Cabaret Voltaire. THURSDAYS

UNDERGROUND SOCIETY, 23:00, £TBC

Expect music from across the spectrum at Cab Vol's weekly midweek party, every Thursday. FRIDAYS

FLY CLUB, 23:00, £TBC

Edinburgh and Glasgowstraddling night, with a powerhouse of local residents joined by a selection of guest talent. SATURDAYS

PLEASURE, 23:00, £TBC

Regular Saturday night at Cab Vol, with residents and occasional special guests.

The Bongo Club TUESDAYS

MIDNIGHT BASS, 23:00, £3-5

Big basslines and small prices form the ethos behind this weekly Tuesday night, with drum'n'bass, jungle, bassline, grime and garage aplenty.

Sneaky Pete’s TUESDAYS

POPULAR MUSIC, 23:00, £1-3

DJs playing music by bands to make you dance: Grace Jones to Neu!, Parquet Courts to Brian Eno, The Clash to Janelle Monae.

— 58 —

WEDNESDAYS

HEATERS, 23:00, £TBC

Heaters resident C-Shaman presents a month of ambiguous local showdowns, purveying the multifarious mischief that characterises Sneaky’s midweek party haven. SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH) SOUL JAM, 23:00, £5-7

Weekly no holds barred, down and dirty bikram disco, destroying Wednesday mornings since 2009.

FRIDAYS

PROPAGANDA, 22:30, £4-6

Clubber's favourite of indie classics and baggy greats, from Primal Scream and the like. SATURDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) REWIND, 22:30, £5

Monthly party night celebrating the best in soul, disco, rock and pop with music from the 70s, 80s, 90s and current bangers.

The Hive

SUNDAYS

MONDAYS

Believe presents the best in bass DJs from Edinburgh at his weekly Sunday communion.

Monday-brightening mix of hip-hop, R'n'B and chart classics, with requests in the back room.

Wee Red Bar

TRASH TUESDAY, 22:00, £FREE

COALITION, 23:00, £FREE

FRIDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)

MJÖLK, 23:00, £4-5

Playing the finest in Swedish indie-pop, 60s, 70s and independent music from near and far. SATURDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) HEART OF GLASS, 23:00, £4-6

Glamourous, glittery, flamboyant, feathery, ostentatious and rock 'n' roll, Heart of Glass plays only the best music from the 70s and beyond.

SATURDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) CITRUS SATURDAY, 23:00, £5

Expect the usual Citrus blend of indie mixed with some soul classics and maybe a few 80s hits.

The Liquid Room THURSDAYS

SILK THURSDAYS, 22:30, £1-5

Weekly Thursday chart, house, R'n'B and indie night with DJ Big Al.

MIXED UP MONDAY, 22:00, £FREE

TUESDAYS

Alternative Tuesday anthems cherry picked from genres of rock, indie, punk, retro and more. WEDNESDAYS

COOKIE WEDNESDAY, 22:00, £FREE

90s and 00s cheesy pop and modern chart anthems. THURSDAYS

HI-SOCIETY THURSDAY, 22:00, £FREE

Student anthems and bangerz. FRIDAYS

FLIP FRIDAY, 22:00, £0-4

Yer all-new Friday at Hive. Cheap entry, inevitably danceable, and noveltystuffed. Perrrfect. SATURDAYS

BUBBLEGUM, 22:00, £0-4

Saturday mix of chart and dance, with retro 80s classics thrown in for good measure. SUNDAYS

SECRET SUNDAY, 22:00, £FREE

Two rooms of all the chart, cheese and indie-pop you can think of/handle on a Sunday.

The Jazz Bar MONDAYS

GLAMOUR AND THE BAYBES, 23:30, £3-4

Six-piece funk with ripping horns and massive vocals that grab you by the soul and drop you on the dance floor. TUESDAYS

THE 101ST AIRBORNE, 23:30, £3-4

Fat grooves, jazzy excursions, soulful vocals and bags of pocket from guitarist Aki Remally’s soul-funk four-piece band. WEDNESDAYS

SWAMPFOG, 23:30, £3-4

Swampfog are a sevenpiece funk outfit from Edinburgh, spiritually via New Orleans. THURSDAYS

FUTURE HEROES, 23:30, £3-4

Aki Remally (guitar) and Jonny White (sax) front this funk five-piece band hitting you with deep funk rhythms, crazy jams and insane musicianship. SUNDAYS

THE SUNDAY SINNERS, 23:30, £3-4

Neo-soul, trip-hop grooves and re-edited classics are delivered to your ears, feet and hips by this vocals-fronted band with a rhythm section to die for.

THE SKINNY SHAPEWORK: LIEF

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £7 - £8

Shapework celebrate four years of running parties with Bristol-based Leif, whose recent releases on Livity Sound, Whities and his own TIO-Series label have further cemented his place at the cutting edge of UK dance music. JACUZZI GENERAL PRESENTS… (NICK FROM SNEAKS + CAP’N GOODTIMES)

PARADISE PALMS, FROM 21:00, FREE

An electronic night curated by producer Jacuzzi General. Expect leftfield, disco, downtempo electronica and nu-wave. Bring a towel.

Mon 20 Jan

LIQUID CITY: PHASE ONE

CABARET VOLTAIRE, FROM 23:00, £4 - £6

Edinburgh’s new home for all your favourite liquid drum and bass tunes. HWTS PRESENTS: KASPER MAROTT

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £5 - £7

Originating from Denmark, Kasper Marott is now known to the world following several high-quality releases that encapsulate the fast-paced, energetic and nostalgic rave scene in Copenhagen.

Wed 22 Jan

HEATERS: PRIVET B2B APHID (HIBA) SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £1 - £3

Miss World’s most energetic, frog-friendly, musical aficionado Aphid hops up to Heaters for a long overdue back to back session with Privet.

Thu 23 Jan

CULTUR: S-TYPE

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £5

Celebrating one year of bringing the heat to the streets, with very special guest S-Type. WE DO DISCO’S 1ST BIRTHDAY W/ THE SHAPESHIFTERS (BACK TO BACK)

LA BELLE ANGELE, FROM 23:00, £12

We Do Disco 1st Birthday with Lola’s Theme producers The Shapeshifters.

Fri 24 Jan

ELECTRIKAL (SERIAL KILLAZ + T>I)

THE BONGO CLUB, FROM 23:00, £10 - £14

Soundsystem partystarters, part of a music and art collective specialising in all things bass. TELFORT’S GOOD PLACE: AZIESCH

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £5 - £7

Telfort continues Good Placin’ in 2020, firstly inviting the Frankfurt-based, Robert Johnson and AMP resident, Aziesch. LA BELLE ANGELE, FROM 23:00, £7.50 - £17

T78 is a DJ/producer from Italy and founder of the techno label Autektone Records.

JACUZZI GENERAL PRESENTS… (MARIOS) PARADISE PALMS, FROM 21:00, FREE

An electronic night curated by producer Jacuzzi General. Expect leftfield, disco, downtempo electronica and nu-wave. Bring a towel.

MUMBO JUMBO + LUCKY 7

THE BONGO CLUB, FROM 23:00, £3 - £7

Funk, soul, beats and bumps from the Mumbo Jumbo gang and room two residents Lucky 7.

KICKSTART MY HEART: 80S METAL & POWER BALLADS NIGHT LA BELLE ANGELE, FROM 23:00, £5

Be transported to the Sunset Strip of LA in a night full of 80s hair metal and power ballads.

Mon 27 Jan TEN BIT

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £3

No messing about. Heads down thumpers for the Monday night warriors, provided to you by Ten Bit.

Wed 29 Jan

23 DEGREES (VOLTAGE & INJA + SKILLIS) THE BONGO CLUB, FROM 23:00, £4 - £8.50

23 Degrees returns to the Bongo following a monumental few UKG shows with Wookie and Decoy. HEATERS: HIGHLY IMPORTANT

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £1 - £3

Comedy Glasgow Comedy Stereo

HELP I SEXTED MY BOSS: BRING ON THE D 16 JAN-17 JAN, 7:30PM, £12

Help I Sexted My Boss is the hit podcast where etiquette expert William Hanson and radio presenter Jordan North help you navigate the daily struggles of modern life. Well… most of the time.

The Blue Arrow LARRY DEAN: WORK IN PROGRESS 13 JAN-14 JAN, 7:30PM, £7

Fresh from an Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination, Larry Dean tries out some brand new jokes.

The Flying Duck VISION BOARD

25 JAN, 8:00PM, £5

Little is known about this dynamic duo, except that attendance at their parties is Highly Important.

Long-running comedy show featuring the best of Glasgow’s local comedy scene.

Thu 30 Jan

19 JAN, 6:00PM, £5

WACK: MINIMAL

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, £3

For Wack’s 12th edition the residents takeover with a focus on the more minimal sounds of dance music, showcasing their favourite groovers and movers.

KINKY DISCO: DOUBLE TROUBLE

LA BELLE ANGELE, FROM 23:00, £6 - £12

Disco, funk and soul night. CULTUR (MAG)

PARADISE PALMS, FROM 21:00, FREE

Bringing the heat to the streets since 2018, but this time with tropical twist.

Fri 31 Jan

SSL XL (SICARIA SOUND + RIZ LA TEEF + SKILLIS)

THE BONGO CLUB, FROM 23:00, £5 - £10

Sound System Legacies explores the legacy of dub, reggae, roots music and sound system culture on more contemporary club and dance music styles. NO STRINGS ATTACHED: CURSES

SNEAKY PETE’S, FROM 23:00, TBC

Curses flies over from Berlin for what’s to be a memorable evening at Edinburgh’s most intimate venue. FIRST EDITION: CALL SUPER

THE MASH HOUSE, FROM 23:00, £10 - £14

Call Super needs little introduction – known for his forward-thinking productions combined with being one of the most respected selectors in the scene.

Dundee Clubs Fri 31 Jan 90S RAVE

FAT SAM’S, FROM 23:00, £0 - £6

Revel in the hedonism and fun of a great decade for dance music.

ON THE FLY! IMPROV

Join some of Scotland’s best improvisers in a new monthly comedy night, as three different teams make it all up On The Fly!

The Glee Club MIZ CRACKER: AMERICAN WOMAN

27 JAN, 7:00PM, £20

Miz Cracker’s brand new show, American Woman, is a witty and informative comedy show made for women from every background as well as the men among us. GARY FAULDS: NEW MATERIAL

30 JAN, 6:45PM, £10

Join Gary Faulds as he runs through his brand new show ahead of his biggest tour to date.

The King’s Theatre

JOSH WIDDICOMBE: BIT MUCH... 25 JAN, 8:00PM, £24.40

A very funny night of grumbles and jokes in which Josh Widdicombe will finally tackle the hot comedy topics of advent calendars, pesto and the closing time of his local park.

The Stand Glasgow

GLASGOW KIDS COMEDY CLUB

5 JAN, 3:00PM, £4

The Stand Comedy Club presents a live stand-up show for younger fans every month. BURNS NIGHT SPECIAL

26 JAN, 8:30PM, £5 - 6

Celebrate Burns night with an evening of top comedy and some traditional Scottish fayre. JAMIE MACDONALD: WORK IN PROGRESS 19 JAN, 6:00PM, £5

Jamie MacDonald is the UK’s hottest blind comedian, and the first ever blind comedian to appear on a TV comedy panel show.

LEE KYLE: CONQUEST 26 JAN, 5:00PM, £7 - £8

Lee Kyle became the most hated man in Australia earlier this year. What did he do? You’ll have to see the show to find out. IVAN BRACKENBURY SUPPORTS TOM BINNS: THE ‘PSYCHIC COMEDIUM’ 27 JAN, 8:30PM, £12 - £14

Multi-award-winning comedian Tom Binns has performed his ‘psychic’ character Ian D Montfort to five star reviews around the world.

DARREN CONNELL: THE VEGAN GORILLA & CHUMS 12 JAN, 4:00PM, £8

Join comedian Darren Connell for his brand new show to see some of the best and more established acts on the circuit trying out new material. CHRISTOPHER MACARTHUR-BOYD’S NEW MATERIAL NIGHT 13 JAN, 8:30PM, £2 - £3

Brand new jokes from Scotland’s newest and best comedians in a laid-back and loose format. CLINTON BAPTISTE: THE PARANORMALIST RETURNS 20 JAN, 8:30PM, £18

Join paranormal sensation Clinton Baptiste as he takes you on a hilarious yet touching journey through his life, out the other side and beyond the Celestial Curtains.

Edinburgh Comedy Monkey Barrel Comedy Club MICKY OVERMAN: WORK IN PROGRESS

BENEFIT IN AID OF BONE CANCER RESEARCH TRUST

14 JAN, 8:30PM, £6 - £8

The Chris Fairley Fund is a special fund of the Bone Cancer Research Trust raising vital funds for lifesaving research into Ewing Sarcoma, a type of primary bone cancer.

The Stand Glasgow

25 JAN, 5:00PM, £7 - £8

RED RAW, 20:30, £3

LEE KYLE: CONQUEST

Multi-award-winning comedian Tom Binns has performed his ‘psychic’ character Ian D Montfort to five star reviews around the world.

The Voodoo Rooms

HELP I SEXTED MY BOSS: BRING ON THE D 16 JAN-17 JAN, 7:30PM, £12

Help I Sexted My Boss is the hit podcast where etiquette expert William Hanson and radio presenter Jordan North help you navigate the daily struggles of modern life. Well… most of the time.

Glasgow Theatre Stereo

FLIGHTPATH

15 JAN, 7:30PM, TBC

Stitching up a story from loosely-related scenes, Flightpath weaves a tapestry of craziness which might just help make sense of the spinning world we live in.

The King’s Gearing up for her third year Theatre 12 JAN, 4:30PM, £5

at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Micky Overman is testing the waters by throwing new material at the wall and hoping everything lands.

THE KING AND I

28 JAN-8 FEB, 7:30PM, £16 - £78.50

The Basement Theatre

Lavish new production of the beloved musical, with giant gold Buddha’s, shiny costumes and acrobatic dancers, no less. Matinees available.

16 JAN-30 JAN 20, 8:00PM, £2.50

2 JAN-5 JAN, 7:00PM, £12 - £49

THE COMEDY SHOW: NEW SH*T

JACK AND THE BEANSTALK

The Comedy Show’s wee sister, where old pros and new talent try out fresh material for free.

Elaine C Smith and Johnny Mac are back, swapping their magic carpet for Dame Trot’s farm this year. Matinees available.

The Stand Edinburgh

BEYOND THE BARRICADE

MIDWEEK COMEDY CABARET

9 JAN, 7:30PM, £20.75 - £40.75

Midweek comedy showcase.

A selection of West End/ Broadway tunes, brought to the stage in a variety-style performance.

26 JAN, 8:30PM, £5 - 10

15 JAN-19 JAN, 7:00PM, £13 - £44

7, 21 & 29 JAN, 8:30PM, £4 - £5

Regular Glasgow comedy nights

MONDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) MONDAY NIGHT IMPROV, 20:30, £3

Comedian improv battle. TUESDAYS

Legendary new material night with up to 10 acts.

WEDNESDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) COMEDIAN RAP BATTLES, 20:30, £4-6

The country's best comedians battle it out, hosted by Neil The Wee Man Bratchpiece.

The Stand Edinburgh MONDAYS

RED RAW, 20:30, £3

Legendary new material night with up to 10 acts.

TUESDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) BONA FIDE, 20:30, £5-6

New comedy show with a different theme every month, hosted by Jay Lafferty.

WEDNESDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) SHAMBLES, 20:30, £4-5

A collective of Edinburgh's top comics join forces to provide an evening's worth of entertainment, with the emphasis on the alternative, every month. WEDNESDAYS (THIRD OF THE MONTH)

THE END OF THE WORLD SHOW, 20:30, £5-7

Armageddon is not so much nigh as teabagging the world in the face. So now that we've bought the tickets to Hell in a handcart and this really is the end of civilisation, surely we can still find the time to trivialise it? THURSDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) THE CABARET OF DANGEROUS IDEAS, 17:30, £5

Join The Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas and challenge your preconceptions on hot button issues. THURSDAYS

THE THURSDAY SHOW, 21:00, £5-10

Start the weekend early with five comedians. FRIDAYS

THE FRIDAY SHOW, 21:00, £6-12

The big weekend show with five comedians.

BILLIONAIRE BOY

SATURDAYS

Celebrate Burns night with an evening of top comedy and some traditional Scottish fayre.

One of David Walliams’ many best-selling children’s novels is brought to life by the producers of Gangsta Granny and Horrible Histories. Matinees available.

The big weekend show with five comedians.

5,12 & 19 JAN, 5:00PM, FREE

Scotland’s top funny man, Mark Nelson leads a panel of comedians and personalities attempting to decipher the good from the bad, with a few unexpected twists along the way.

— 59 —

THE THURSDAY SHOW, 20:30, £5-10

Start the weekend early with five comedians. FRIDAYS

THE FRIDAY SHOW, 20:30, £6-12

The big weekend show with five comedians. SATURDAYS

THE SATURDAY SHOW, 21:00, £17.50

The big weekend show with five comedians. SUNDAYS

MICHAEL REDMOND'S SUNDAY SERVICE, 20:30, £5-6

The Glee Club FRIDAYS

FRIDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00, £8-20

The perfect way to end the working week, with four superb stand-up comedians. SATURDAYS

SATURDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00, £823.95

An evening of awardwinning comedy, with four superb stand-up comedians that will keep you laughing until Monday.

The Stand’s popular Sunday show has resident Irish funnyman Michael Redmond at the helm.

Regular Edinburgh comedy nights

BURNS NIGHT SPECIAL

FREE TICKETS FOR BBC RECORDING

THURSDAYS

THE SATURDAY SHOW, 21:00, £17.50

SUNDAYS

STU & GARRY'S FREE IMPROV SHOW, 13:30, £FREE

Improvised comedy at its very best every Sunday. SUNDAYS

THE SUNDAY NIGHT LAUGH-IN, 20:30, £5-6

Chilled Sunday night comedy to see out the weekend.

SUNDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)

JOJO SUTHERLAND AND SUSAN MORRISON: FANNY'S AHOY!, 17:30, £4-5

Set sail with the awardwinning grand dames of Scottish comedy.

Monkey Barrel Comedy Club

MONDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) FREE FOR ALL, 19:00, £FREE

Edinburgh's only genuine open mic comedy night. MONDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) PETER PANCAKES, 19:30, £FREE

Phil O’Shea brings a handpicked selection of riotous lols to Monkey Barrel on the second Monday of the month.

MONDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH) COMEDIAN SHOWDOWN, 19:00, £0-3

Two teams of comedians compete against each other through several rounds of humiliation, hilarity and hardship. TUESDAYS

PROJECT X, 19:00, £0-3

Monkey Barrel welcome the weird, the wacky and the downright hilarious to the stage.

FRIDAYS

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY'S BIG FRIDAY SHOW, 19:00, £10-12

Monkey Barrel's flagship night of premier stand-up comedy. SATURDAYS

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY'S BIG SATURDAY SHOW, 19:00, £14

Monkey Barrel's flagship night of premier stand-up comedy. SUNDAYS

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY'S BIG SUNDAY SHOW, 19:00, £5

Monkey Barrel's flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.

The Basement Theatre THURSDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) BELTER COMEDY, 20:00, £6

Bringing you the best and brightest of the comedy scene, showcasing brand new gags alongside tried and tested material. FRIDAYS & SATURDAYS

THE COMEDY SHOW, 20:00, £10-12

Bringing you top notch line-ups from the best in the world of comedy for a side-splitting evening every Friday and Saturday at 8pm.

TUESDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) THE EDINBURGH REVUE, 19:00, £0-2

The University of Edinburgh's Comedy Society, who put on sketch and stand-up comedy shows every two weeks. WEDNESDAYS

TOP BANANA, 19:00, £0-3

Catch the stars of tomorrow today in Monkey Barrel's new act night every Wednesday. THURSDAYS (FIRST AND THIRD OF THE MONTH)

SPONTANEOUS POTTER, 20:00, £5

A brand new Harry Potter play from some of Edinburgh's most top notch improv wizards. THURSDAYS (SECOND AND LAST OF THE MONTH)

SPONTANEOUS SHERLOCK, 20:00, £5

An entirely improvised Sherlock Holmes comedy play from Scotland's hottest improv troupe.

January 2020 — Listings

TONTO TECHNO PRESENT: T78

Sat 25 Jan

THE SKINNY

Theatre Art Theatre Royal OOR WULLIE

20-25 JAN, TIMES VARY, PRICES VARY

Join Wullie, Fat Boab, Soapy Soutar, Wee Eck and the rest of the Sunday Post gang in a musical adventure celebrating their 80th anniversary as Scotland’s most beloved comic strip. Matinees available. SCOTTISH BALLET: THE SNOW QUEEN

KING’S PANTO: GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS

2 JAN-19 JAN, 7:00PM, £18.50 - £36

Allan Stewart, Andy Gray and Grant Stott are back in a circus-inspired King’s Panto spectacular. Matinee performances also available.

Royal Lyceum Theatre

3 JAN-18 JAN, 7:30PM, PRICES VARY

AN EDINBURGH CHRISTMAS CAROL

Tramway

Writer and director Tony Cownie brings this famous festive story back to the city of its birth. Matinee performances also available.

Scottish Ballet’s 50th anniversary year comes to a spectacular close with the world premiere of The Snow Queen. Matinee performances also available. A CITIZENS THEATRE PRODUCTION: PINOCCHIO

3 JAN-4 JAN, 7:00PM, £9 - £12.50

Follow the mischievous Pinocchio on his journey from wooden puppet to real boy. Matinee performances also available.

Tron Theatre CINDERFELLA

2 JAN-5 JAN, 7:30PM, £9 - £23

Johnny McKnight reworks the classic tale of Cinderella for this year’s panto at the Tron. Matinees available.

Edinburgh Theatre

2 JAN-4 JAN, 7:00PM, £10 - £100

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE* (*SORT OF) 23 JAN-15 FEB, 7:30PM, £10 - £33

An adaptation like no other, drawing on over 200 years of romantic pop history this is Blood of the Young’s unique take on a beloved novel. Matinees available.

The Basement Theatre THE GHOSTING OF RABBIE BURNS

24 JAN, 7:30PM, £12

Featuring the great songs and poems of Burns, this hilarious comedy proves that love and relationships haven’t changed that much in 200 years after all.

The Edinburgh Playhouse DISNEY’S THE LION KING

2 JAN-29 MAR, 7:30PM, - £115 Assembly Roxy £20 Stage adaptation of the SCOTTISH BOOK

TRUST NEW WRITERS SHOWCASE 30 JAN, 7:30PM, £2

Hear some of Scotland’s most exciting new writers perform their work live at Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Awards celebration. Hosted by Gary McNair.

Festival Theatre

I’M SORRY I HAVEN’T A CLUE 17 JAN, 7:30PM, £30

The BBC Radio antidote to panel games starts an all-new touring stage show/ evening of inspired nonsense, with host Jack Dee joined by Tim Brooke-Taylor Tony Hawks, Miles Jupp and Richard Osman. SCOTTISH DANCE THEATRE

January 2020 — Listings

29 JAN, 7:30PM, £15

Join Scotland’s leading contemporary dance company in this extraordinary programme by two of the most internationally acclaimed choreographers of our times, Sharon Eyal and Emanuel Gat.

King’s Theatre Edinburgh OOR WULLIE

28 JAN-1 FEB, TIMES VARY, PRICES VARY

favourited Disney film, bolstered by suitably dazzling staging and elaborate costumes, masks and puppets. Matinee performances also available.

Traverse Theatre HEROINE

30 JAN-1 FEB, 8:00PM, £5 - £15

A survivor of military sexual trauma, US solider Danna Davis’ story explores healing, forgiveness and what speaking your truth really means. IMAGINATE IDEAS EXCHANGE

29 JAN, 6:00PM, £3

The Imaginate team present an evening of new works-in-progress for young audiences by artists based in Scotland.

Dundee Theatre Dundee Rep OOR WULLIE

2 JAN-1 FEB, TIMES VARY, PRICES VARY

31 JAN-2 FEB, 7:30PM, £10 - £19

Gary Clarke’s sequel to COAL, set in 1994, looks at how two generations coped in an era of radical upheaval.

Glasgow Art Acid Bar

ALAN DIMMICK: FROM THE ARCHIVE 1 JAN-16 JAN, 8:30AM – 4:00PM, FREE

Alan Dimmick has selected 25 photographs from his archive for this exhibition, serving as a cross-section of 42 years of subjects from art, music and Glasgow life.

CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art JEANNE TULLEN: IN TRANSIT

11 JAN-30 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

Jeanne Tullen’s performative installation In Transit simulates the simultaneous disassembly and reassembly of a body, using a series of screen based GIFs and her own body.

Cyril Gerber Fine Art

THE WINTER SHOW 2019

1 JAN-31 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

Specially selected works for this seasonal exhibition, featuring paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture, including works by Glasgow School, Modern British, Scottish Modern Masters and selected Contemporaries.

Glasgow School of Art

MICHAEL STUBBS: SMALL SCALE WORKS 10 JAN-2 FEB, TIMES VARY, FREE

Michael Stubbs’s paintings are constructed by combining poured, abstract configurations of transparent varnishes and opaque household paints with ready-made graphic stencils.

GoMA

FIONA TAN: DISORIENT

1 JAN-26 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

A two-screen video installation combining a fictional scene, documentary footage and spoken word to explore complex historical identities, cultural perceptions and truths about the world we live in. HAL FISCHER, GAY SEMIOTICS AND OTHER WORKS

1 JAN-30 MAY, TIMES VARY, FREE

This exhibition displays three works by American artist Hal Fischer: Gay Semiotics, exploring the visual language that was unique to gay culture of San Francisco in the later 1970s, Boy-friends and 18th Near Castro St.

Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery

A GIFT TO GLASGOW FROM NEW YORK: THE PHILLIP A. BRUNO COLLECTION 1 JAN-12 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

A selection of paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints by American artists and international figures such as the Mexican painter José Luis Cuevas and the Japanese sculptor Masayuki Nagare.

DRESS FOR THE WEATHER IS 10 YEARS OLD 1 JAN-26 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

Dress for the Weather studio has compiled a retrospective of projects that reflect on their crossdisciplinary approach to architecture and aims to invite conversation about the future of their practice. BRUCE HAMILTON: FURNITURE MAKERS 1 JAN-22 MAR, TIMES VARY, FREE

An exhibition showcasing work by Bruce Hamilton,

Kelvingrove with new pieces bringing Art Gallery and some of Mackintosh’s rarer designs to life. Museum THE LINDA The Modern MCCARTNEY Institute RETROSPECTIVE 1 JAN-12 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

A major retrospective of photography by Linda McCartney will be shown in the UK for the first time, curated by Paul, Mary and Stella McCartney. It features iconic names and moments in music from the 1960s along with more intimate and emotional later work.

Street Level Photoworks

OSCAR MARZAROLI

1 JAN-15 MAR, TIMES VARY, FREE

Oscar Marzaroli’s photographs and films of Glasgow from the 1950s through to the 1980s captured a period of enormous change with images of people going about their lives in the city, at work and at leisure.

The Glasgow Art Club THIS IS GLASGOW

1 JAN-11 JAN, 11:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

MATT CONNORS: FIGURE

1 JAN-18 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

Matt Connors presents a new body of work encompassing drawing, painting and tapestry across the gallery’s Aird’s Lane and Bricks spaces, in his second solo exhibition at The Modern Institute. DIKE BLAIR

1 JAN-22 FEB, TIMES VARY, FREE

New York-based artist Dike Blair presents a new body of oil paintings originating from his own photographic observations.

Tramway

FRANCE-LISE MCGURN: IN EMOTIA

18 JAN-29 MAR, TIMES VARY, FREE

The title, In Emotia, refers to a state of being, simultaneously emotional and in motion. McGurn’s figurative painting and wall drawings evoke bodies and limbs overlapping and interacting in ambivalent spaces.

Works depicting, symbolising or reflecting the City of Glasgow in physical, human or metaphorical terms.

WASPS Artists’ Studios Briggait

1 JAN-11 JAN, 11:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

1 JAN-15 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

WINTER EXHIBITION

EMMA HISLOP

Works by GAC Artist Members, including a selection of invited artists.

Emma Hislop’s solo exhibition, as part of Wasps’ Arts Programme.

SCOTTISH PORTRAIT AWARDS 17 JAN-15 FEB, 11:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

A showcase of finalists in an art competition open to artists born, living or studying in Scotland.

The Lighthouse

FURNITURE MUSIC

1 JAN-6 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

Yuri Suzuki presents his solo exhibition that explores definitions of sound design in contemporary culture. AQUAPHONEIA

1 JAN-6 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

Examining and deconstructing sound technology and the transmission of information, Navid Navab’s Aquaphoneia is something like a record player reverseengineered by a people who can speak underwater. THE ART OF SCOTTISH GLASS: 40 YEARS OF THE SCOTTISH GLASS SOCIETY 1 JAN-9 FEB, TIMES VARY, FREE

An exhibition charting the work of the Scottish Glass Society and the history of Scottish glass over the last 40 years, showcasing key artists, artworks and techniques.

iota @ Unlimited Studios

TRANSITIONAL TOYS

4 JAN-11 JAN, 12:00PM – 5:00PM, FREE

Scottish and international artists are charged with the eponymous theme across visual art, sound performance, poetry and film in an exhibition for Glasgow and Geneva.

Edinburgh Art City Art Centre THE ITALIAN CONNECTION

1 JAN-24 MAY, TIMES VARY, FREE

The Italian Connection explores the enduring bond between Scotland and Italy, celebrating the ability of art to transcend geographical borders. MARY CAMERON: LIFE IN PAINT 1 JAN-15 MAR, TIMES VARY, FREE

An exhibition celebrating the life and career of pioneering Edinburgh-born artist Mary Cameron (1865-1921).

— 60 —

BENEATH THE SURFACE

1 JAN-1 MAR, TIMES VARY, FREE

Beneath the Surface features work by nine contemporary artists based in Scotland, each of them articulating a minimalist aesthetic through abstraction in their work. CLASSICAL EDINBURGH

1 JAN-8 MAR, TIMES VARY, FREE

A celebration of Edinburgh’s neo-classical architecture, as seen through the eyes of two architectural photographers – Edwin Smith and Colin McLean – working half a century apart.

Collective Gallery

L’ATELIER DE L’OBSERVATOIRE: THE COLLECTIVE MUSEUM 1 JAN-9 FEB, 10:00AM – 4:00PM, FREE

A new exhibition from L’Atelier de l’Observatoire, a Casablanca-based contemporary art organisation who design, produce and disseminate projects which support Moroccan contemporary creativity, nationally and internationally.

Dovecot Studios

OUR LINEN STORIES

1 JAN-25 JAN, 10:30AM – 5:30PM, FREE

This exhibition and events series celebrates contemporary design in flax fibre and linen, and Scotland’s extraordinary relationship with this quintessentially European textile. MAY MORRIS: ART & LIFE

1 JAN-14 MAR, 10:30AM – 5:30PM, TBC

A landmark exhibition exploring the life and work of May Morris, the younger daughter of William Morris and one of the most significant artists of the British Arts and Crafts movement.

Edinburgh Printmakers

MOUTH OF A SHARK

1 JAN-4 JAN, 10:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

Artists from Edinburgh Printmakers and Cork Printmakers share reflections and responses to British Somali poet Warsan Shire’s rallying call for refugees and their advocates, exploring humanity and questions of what unites and divides us. TRANSPARENCY: ALBERTA WHITTLE & HARDEEP PANDHAL

1 JAN-4 JAN, 10:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

Transparency is a two-person exhibition from Glasgow-based artists Alberta Whittle and Hardeep Pandhal, spanning print, artist moving image, drawing and installation. ALEXANDRA HAESEKER: THE BOTANIST’S DAUGHTER

18 JAN-21 MAR, 10:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

An installation of new contemporary print works by Canadian artist Alexandra Haeseker illustrating botanical and entomological themes.

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop

LUCY WAYMAN: CLOVEHITCH

1 JAN-30 MAY, 11:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Lucy Wayman’s work, created from marine rope, follows her interest in the industrial and historic uses of rope, connecting ideas of system, control and release.

Embassy Gallery

SALON DES REFUSÉS

25 JAN-2 FEB, 12:00PM – 6:00PM, FREE

EMBASSY’s annual salon showcase of work by its members base, offering an uncensored and experimental view of practices spanning painting, sculpture, moving image, text, print, sound, performance and more.

National Museum of Scotland

CHINESE ORACLE BONES

1 JAN-29 MAR, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Discover some of the treasures within the National Museum of Scotland’s significant collection of oracle bones, the second largest in the world outside of China. THE LUXURY OF TIME: CLOCKS FROM 15501750

1 JAN-26 JAN, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Explore the history of early British clock making in this small display, featuring beautiful objects from the golden age of British clock making in the 17th century. PARASITES: BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL

1 JAN-19 APR, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

This interactive familyfriendly exhibition will explore the fight to eliminate five tropical diseases and the role of research taking place in Scotland to do this.

Royal Scottish Academy RSA

HENRY KONDRACKI RSA (ELECT): LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 1 JAN-5 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

This exhibition from the Edinburgh-based painter focuses on a series of works based around locations of literary significance in Edinburgh and the surrounding area. CALUM COLVIN RSA: CONSTRUCTED WORLDS

11 JAN-2 FEB, TIMES VARY, FREE

Timed to coincide with the publication of the first major book exploring the artist’s work, this exhibition will celebrate the extraordinary career of one of Scotland’s most innovative photographers.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

NOW: KATIE PATERSON, CIARA PHILLIPS AND OTHERS

1 JAN-31 MAY, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

In the first major showing of the artist’s work in a public institution in Scotland, the sixth and final exhibition in the NOW series will highlight the work of Scottish artist Katie Paterson.

PICTURE HOOKS 2019

1 JAN-31 MAY, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

The highly-acclaimed exhibition returns for the fourth time to showcase the work of award-winning children’s illustrators alongside that of emerging illustrators. PAULA REGO: OBEDIENCE AND DEFIANCE

1 JAN-19 APR, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, £6.50 £11.50

An ambitious retrospective of the Portuguese artist’s work that brings politics to the fore, spanning Rego’s career from the 1950s through to 2012.

Scottish National Portrait Gallery

ART AND ANALYSIS: TWO NETHERLANDISH PAINTERS WORKING IN JACOBEAN SCOTLAND 1 JAN-26 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

A small exhibition focusing on two 17th century artists, Adrian Vanson and Adam de Colone, showcasing a group of paintings which have been examined by paintings conservator Dr Caroline Rae, along with the findings from her research. IN FOCUS: THE EXECUTION OF CHARLES I

1 JAN-26 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

An exhibition centred around a painting of the execution of Charles I – based on eye-witness accounts and contemporary engravings – by an unknown Dutch artist. THE REMAKING OF SCOTLAND | NATION, MIGRATION, GLOBALISATION 17601860 1 JAN-21 JUN, TIMES VARY, FREE

An exhibition exploring the lives and careers of the Scots behind the period of dramatic change between 1760 and 1860, when Scotland rapidly attained a central role in European cultural life and in Britain’s industrial and imperial expansion. It documents the material and artistic benefits of their achievements, while also confronting the darker shadows they cast. THE MACKINNON COLLECTION

1 JAN-16 FEB, TIMES VARY, FREE

This exhibition celebrates an unparalleled collection of Scottish photography recently acquired and shared by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland.

SCOTLAND’S PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM: THE MACKINNON COLLECTION 1 JAN-16 FEB, TIMES VARY, FREE

This exhibition celebrates an unparalleled collection of Scottish photography recently acquired and shared by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. BP PORTRAIT AWARD 2019 1 JAN-22 MAR, TIMES VARY, FREE

The most prestigious portrait painting competition in the world, representing the very best in contemporary portrait painting. Over the years, this has attracted over 40,000 entries from more than 100 countries.

THE SKINNY

1 JAN-8 MAR, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

Summerhall

WILL KNIGHT: SOME OF SUMMERHALL

1 JAN-8 MAR, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

Will Knight presents the results of his artistic survey at Summerhall, having spent nearly a year getting to know the building and its residents, visiting the venues and drawing the interiors.

SHEILA MULLEN: AULD REEKIE’S ROSES. PAINTINGS OF SCOTS POEMS 1 JAN-31 JAN, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

This exhibition celebrates the centenary of the birth of poet Hamish Henderson (1919-2002). MOUNT STRANGE AND THE TEMPLE OF FAME 24 JAN-15 MAR, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

In this curated exhibition, four major female artists investigate and uncover managed histories, strange landscapes and the power of myth-making and folklore.

THE EXTENDED MIND 1 JAN-1 FEB, TIMES VARY, FREE

The Extended Mind is set across a diverse series of journeys to other real and imagined places, demonstrating that art plays a role in enriching our cognition. MYRIAM LEFKOWITZ: WALK, HANDS, EYES 1 JAN-1 FEB, TIMES VARY, FREE

A project examining the relationship formed between a city and its inhabitants, in which a participant and a guide form an immersive relationship with their surroundings over the course of an hour’s silent walk through a city.

Dundee Art DCA: Dundee Contemporary Arts SEIZED BY THE LEFT HAND

1 JAN-22 MAR, TIMES VARY, FREE

This international group exhibition takes as its starting point some of the ideas contained within American writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness.

The McManus

V&A Dundee

3 JAN-31 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

1 JAN-15 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

LINKS WITH THE PAST

A partnership project between The McManus and the University of Edinburgh’s Unit for Forensic Anthropology Research has uncovered new details about a Pictish man’s life and death, which are revealed in a new display.

AS WE SEE IT: TWENTIETH CENTURY SCOTTISH ART 3 JAN-31 JAN, TIMES VARY, PRICES VARY

Exploring the innovative and diverse approaches artists have taken in their creative practice. Whether representing the real world, abstracting elements from it or depicting a realm from the imagination, each artwork is unique and individual. AMONG THE POLAR ICE 1 JAN-8 MAR, TIMES VARY, FREE

Selected from Dundee’s nationally significant fine art and whaling collections, this exhibition showcases a small but growing collection of polar artworks which spans 200 years. A WOMAN’S PERSPECTIVE

3 JAN-31 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

Annual winter works on paper display celebrating women artists, highlighting diverse stories and exploring women’s contribution to the visual culture of their time.

A compelling piece of graphic design that unpacks the wider context around a 19th century trade catalogue by cast iron manufacturers Walter MacFarlane & Co.

From Chinese banquets under cherry blossom-infused canopies to the cutest of wine bars, we take you through the very best of Edinburgh’s newest venues

CIARA PHILLIPS

Words: Izzy Gray

1 JAN-15 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

A new commission, championing the often-unseen process of making by evoking a moment suspended in time where vital decisions about materials and their composition are made. SCOTTISH DESIGN GALLERIES

1 JAN-15 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Explore the everyday relevance of design and how it improves our lives, experience the processes that underpin it and discover little-known stories of Scottish design with international impact.

Piggs

HELLO, ROBOT.

1 JAN-9 FEB, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, £6 - £12

This groundbreaking exhibition investigates the science and fiction of robots and looks at how they are changing the world we live in. STUDIO NICHOLAS DALEY

1 JAN-2 FEB, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

A series of objects and a specially commissioned film work will show the inspiration behind Nicholas Daley’s work, from his Jamaican-Scottish heritage to the influence of music in his approach to fashion.

Competitions Win a fun-filled night out at The Glee Club Glasgow A big-collared comedian started a late-night standup show on Channel 4 last year. What’s the show called? a) Harry Hill's Clubnite b) Stewart Lee’s Clubnite c) Billy Connolly’s Clubnite Competition closes midnight Sun 2 Feb. Entrants must be 18 or over. Winners will be notified by email and will have 48 hours to respond or the prize will be offered to another entrant. The prize includes free entry to The Glee Club Glasgow’s weekend shows valid on Friday Night & Saturday Night Comedy shows in Feb 2020. The prize is valid for redemption by 29 Feb 2020 and subject to availability. The Skinny’s T&Cs can be found at theskinny.co.uk/about/terms

Piggs Seasoned Edinburghers will remember that, for many a moon, Jeffrey Street played home to the colourful Iggs restaurant, run by the equally colourful Iggy Campos. Sadly Iggs is no more, but the family legacy does not stop there. With a gauntlet laid well and truly down, it’s now on to son Daniel to carry the name forward, and what better way than with a shiny new premises? Piggs unashamedly brings together a fusion of Spanish tapas with Scottish produce, and the end result is no bad thing. Expect smoky cured meats, artisanal cheese from I.J. Mellis, delicious wines and punchy coffees, in a cafe-come-wine bar setting that somehow manages to tick all the boxes. 276 Canongate, facebook.com/piggswinebar

Tattu There’s been a buzz around the streets of Auld Reekie since upmarket Chinese chain Tattu announced their plans to open their first Scottish restaurant. Having a peep in, we can see why. Their Edinburgh joint is a thing of beauty, with cherry blossom ceilings, mahogany furnishings and wonderful hanging lanterns that complement the old-meets-new theme of the menu very well. Chef Andrew Lassetter and his team have done a cracking job with their playful creations, from the Wok Fired Angry Bird to the King Oyster Mushroom Hot Pot. We’d tell you more, but you really have to see this place to believe it. 18 West Register St, tattu.co.uk

Crossword Soultions

Photo: Jack Spicer Adams

Spilt Milk Gallery Calling all mama bears! Spilt Milk is a new, artist-led social enterprise with one ambition: to provide a platform for artists who are mothers. They might not have a permanent base yet, but that hasn’t stopped the team from letting their voice be heard, with exhibitions that have captured attention across town, from Stills to St Margaret’s House. They’ve also held a string of learning opportunities, including the wonderful Unsung Leith, a series of childcare-supported creative workshops at Dr Bell’s Family Centre. If ever there was a case to watch this space, it’s this. spiltmilkgallery.com

Spry Wines Energetic by name and by nature, Spry Wines are fast zipping to the top of the go-to lists of wine connoisseurs. What sets them apart is that Spry stock only organically-made products, meaning additives and preservatives can officially do one. Their recently opened and classically decorated bar sits just off the top of Leith Walk, and on its shelves you’ll find nothing other than the finest of small batch, independently-produced plonk. Pick up a bottle on your way somewhere special or pull up a chair and, for a £10 corkage charge, sample the goods by the glass, along with some tasty treats from the kitchen. 1 Haddington Pl, facebook. com/sprywines

The Glee Club

— 61 —

January 2020 — Listings

Glasgow’s fantastic comedy venue The Glee Club is offering Skinny readers the chance to win one of three pairs of tickets to one of their hilarious weekend shows this winter. The Glee Club plays host to some of the nation’s much-loved comics every weekend in their 400-seat venue. Situated in the city centre, it boasts a menu of delicious freshly made food and great quality drinks, so guests can enjoy an evening of entertainment and a dining experience under one roof. To be in with a chance of winning one of these pairs of tickets, simply head to theskinny.co.uk/ competitions and correctly answer this question:

New in Edinburgh

MAEVE REDMOND

Photo: Kristof Turi

A selection of photographs from The AmberSide Collection, a unique archive that continues to grow out of the documentary production, commissioning, exhibition and touring work of Newcastle-based Amber Film & Photography Collective.

Talbot Rice Gallery

DOWN 1. Fleabag, 2. IELTS, 3. Exe, 4. Lace, 5. Fifty Six, 6. Ever, 7. AAAA, 8. Trudeau, 9. Asst, 12. Tide Pods, 19. OK Boomer, 20. Mao, 21. ACX, 24. EMI, 25. Wes, 26. King Ahab, 28. Copiapo, 30. Epstein, 34. Apple, 35. Tars, 37. Nics, 38. YMCA, 39. SOPA, 43. Mod

WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS FROM THE AMBERSIDE COLLECTION

ACROSS 1. Fields of Wheat, 9 Alexa, 10 Vary, 11 Select, 13. Eau, 14. Sat, 15. Eighth Grade, 16. Tbsp, 17. Men, 18. Soma, 22. Ego, 23. Pikachu, 24. Ewok, 27. Xbox, 28. Comedic, 29. Ted, 31. ISSN, 32. Toy, 33. East, 36. Tiny Changes, 40. Pta, 41. AIM, 42. Romper, 44. IPCC, 45. Polis, 46. Osama Bin Laden

Stills

THE SKINNY

The first in our new series sees Honeyblood’s Stina Tweeddale and The Twilight Sad’s James Graham give us the skinny on their favourite foods, what they’re most scared of, which celebrities they could take in a fight and more Photo: Amy Muir

Photo: Marieke Macklon

The Skinny On...

Stina Tweeddale

What’s your favourite place to visit? Stina Tweeddale: I’ve been very lucky to tour all over the world and have fallen in love with so many places on my travels. I’ve got a few but I guess Melbourne or Portland top the list for me. James Graham: St. Cyrus Beach on a bright winter’s day with my family.

January 2020 — Chat

Favourite food? ST: I could eat tacos every day for the rest of my life. JG: Pizza. Neapolitan style. My favourite place to eat in the world is Roberta’s in NYC. The pizza is the best and I have so many happy memories of being there with friends. Favourite colour and why? ST: Green – I’ve always been in love with it. It’s got very calming qualities. JG: Black. Goth. Or Red. Who was your hero growing up? ST: A hybrid of Daria and Sabrina The Teenage Witch. JG: My Dad – and he still is. Whose work inspires you now? ST: I’m inspired by the young women working tirelessly on their dreams and artistic vision. The older I get, the more inspired I am by the generations coming up after my own.

James Graham

JG: Grant Hutchison. Everything he’s done with The Tiny Changes charity and his new business re:stalk inspires me to be a better person and to make the most of the time I’ve been given.

amazing. JG: Attack of The Clones is pish. The Room is the worst, but also one of the best I’ve seen. Actually Batman & Robin is horrendous.

What three people would you invite to your dinner party and what are you cooking? ST: Věra Chytilová, Sylvia Plath and Vesta Tilley. I’m serving the patriarchy. JG: Robert Smith, Billy Connolly and Carrie Fisher. Pizza… Or I make a pretty good vegetarian Mediterranean tart. Then for dessert we’d have a white chocolate and Malteser cheesecake. Then we’d listen to Bowie all night.

What book would you take to a desert island? ST: Dracula by Bram Stoker. I’ve read it so many times and it still gives me the creeps. I’m not into new vampire stories, the original is the best. JG: I, Partridge or The Wicked + The Divine series by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie.

What’s your all time favourite album? ST: Ah! You aren’t making this easy! Pod by The Breeders was integral in my sonic awakening. JG: ABBA Gold. I suppose people would expect something miserable. Of course I love miserable stuff, but ABBA makes me feel good and I like that now and again. Plus they talk about Glasgow in a tune which is cool. What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen? ST: I’ve seen a bunch! Killer Klowns from Outer Space is pretty bad/

Who’s the worst? ST: There’s a lot of terrible people out there. At the moment it’s Boris Johnson. JG: Me. When did you last cry? ST: About 15 minutes ago. I’m a serial crier, I feel pretty deeply. JG: Yesterday. The day before yesterday. The day before that. The day before that I watched E.T again... tears... lots of tears. What are you most scared of? ST: I’m terrified that A.I. is going to find the human race obsolete and wipe us off the face of the planet. JG: Disappointing people.

— 62 —

When did you last vomit and why? ST: A few weeks ago after drinking too much wine and eating too many mince pies probably. JG: The day after our gig in Mexico City with The Cure. Mezcal and tequila. It’s one of the best gigs we’ve ever played and the crowd were phenomenal. One of the best nights of my life. Then I overindulged a little with the local delicacies, the next morning wasn’t fun. Tell us a secret? ST: I don’t know all the chords. JG: I have a National Certificate in Electrical Engineering and I can’t wire a plug. Which celebrity could you take in a fight? ST: I’m gonna choose Jodie Comer as Villanelle because after she beat my ass I know we’d hug it out and go get cake. JG: I’d like to take on all internet ‘influencers’ or that Jacob ReesMogg cunt. If you could be reincarnated as an animal, which animal would it be? ST: An otter, the cat-dog of the water with cute baby hands. JG: A complete shite hawk.

THE SKINNY

The Skinny On...

January 2020 — Chat

— 63 —

January 2020 — Chat

The Skinny On...

THE SKINNY

— 64 —