25 minute read
Tramway, Glasgow, 3 Sep-5 Feb
Loyal and Local
With both the Freakender and Pop Mutations festivals looming large on the Glasgow cultural horizon, we catch up with one of the organisers of both to find out more
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Interview: James Ewen
This year, Freakender Festival is celebrating its fifth birthday. Although technically, it should be their seventh. Think of it as a kind of leap year birthday effect on account of COVID. During their relatively short lifespan, the grassroots promoter has managed to cement themselves as a pillar of the Glasgow gig scene. The affable Ross Keppie is my guide to the many milestones of Scotland’s finest purveyor of psych, pop, garage, and post-punk. Together with chums Holly Calder and Ian Crawford, Keppie has booked an immense raft of mighty international talent for their year-round Freakender shows: Black Lips, Tess Parks, The Gories, Crack Cloud, The Blank Tapes, L.A. Witch, Night Beats, the list goes on. And on the domestic front, they’ve given many bands from the local DIY music scene a platform to debut: Hairband and Kaputt, to name a couple. “We just want to put on bands we like,” Keppie shares, “to give them the show they deserve.” In 2018, they took their penchant for party planning stateside and hosted the Freakender Buckaroo Ball at SXSW in Austin, Texas. This showcase flexed such a hefty horde of Scottish musical muscle that the Texans asked them back in 2019 for a follow-up dose of their festivities. And even if you haven’t attended one of their gigs, you may recognise the trio de Freakender from being plastered all over the Glasgow Subway as part of the #MyGlasgowMySubway campaign, which saw our three amigos clad in their retro threads cutting about the fair city on the Clockwork Orange. They’ve been around…and around the block a few times now, so it’s safe to say they’ve earned their corner. With all of these jewels in their crown, it’s hard to maintain composure when thinking about what lies in store for their birthday shindig on 17 September. They’ve distilled their usual three-day event down to a 12-hour blowout at The Old Hairdressers's. The lean duration of this year’s fest promises a relentless roster of acts, so be prepared to hit the ground running when the doors open! The lineup includes Glasgow’s sharp-tongued post-punk outfit Sweaty Palms, Aussie crooner Emerson Snowe, local krautrock/post-punks Ceefax, Californian synth-pop duo System
Exclusive, Edinburgh post-gutterskunk-funk troupe Bikini Body, London experimental-rock/party band Fat Dog, and way more to sink yer teeth into! And if you’re looking for some fuel throughout the day, venture over the lane to Stereo where they’ll have some food specials to mark the occasion. The success of these events hinges on more than just the weight of the bands on offer; it is also down to the loyalty of the audience. “They’re just all good people that are collectively there to enjoy themselves,” Keppie says resolutely. The passage of time bolsters the strength and inclusivity of a community, so after seven years and countless gigs there are many familiar faces in the crowd, and they are always welcoming of newcomers, so get yourself along! Onwards to next month! Keppie is also involved in putting together the Pop Mutations Festival (13-16 Oct), which he says differs from Freakender’s favour for guitar bands by providing “a smorgasbord of different genres.” Expect electronica, hip-hop, performance, and a slew of bands and DJs until the wee hours. Birthed out of lockdown boredom, the inaugural festival was hosted online over a weekend in June 2020 and featured over 70 artists and acts from Glasgow and further afield. The event was a major success that helped to bring merriment to a particularly dark time in our recent history. This year will mark the festival’s first IRL event. Over 40 acts will perform across four days at four venues: The Old Hairdressers's, Mono, Stereo, and The Flying Duck. Keppie is one of a team organising this cultural takeover of Glasgow and says that the reason for such an eclectic storm of acts is because they “all come from different backgrounds.” “The lineup is solid!” he beams. Experimental electronica/noise act Container, multi-instrumentalist world fusion group GABO (Glasgow African Balafon Orchestra), the high-energy indie of Sacred Paws, Aberdonian grime rapper Ransom FA, local community radio station DJs from Radio Buena Vida, German post-punkers Liiek, genreshifting DJ junglehussi, and loads more. “There’s not a weak link,” Keppie concludes, “it’s going to be a really fun weekend.” The commonality of the two Keppie and co. endeavours is the unwavering sense of community. “Everybody helps each other out,” he says, “everybody’s got each other’s back.” It is admirable that they have such a passion for debuting local artists, and so is their guarantee that international bands are received with the quintessential Glasgow warmth. The existence of both Freakender and Pop Mutations serves to better the musical landscape of Scotland and beyond. “It gives me so much joy putting on shows,” says Keppie. “Live music brings people together.”
Photo: Neelam Khan Vela
Freakender
Freakender takes place at The Old Hairdressers's, Glasgow, 17 Sep; Pop Mutations takes place at various venues, Glasgow, 13-16 Oct
facebook.com/FREAKENDER
Love Poetry
Dean Atta discusses his new poetry collection, There is (Still) Love Here, written in Glasgow during lockdown
Interview: Beth Cochrane
There is (Still) Love Here, Dean Atta’s new collection, is a meditation on love in its many forms: not just love for family, partners and friends, but also love for culture, heritage, and home. Many of the poems were written in lockdown while Dean and his partner – a person who appears in many of the poems as a figure of much-loved domesticity and adventure – were living in Glasgow. During that time, Atta found himself not only writing his second novel, but also returning to his poetry pen, gifting his readers with this collection on love, identity, sorrow, and so much more. “The collection has a kind of story to it,” Dean remarks. “[These poems are] reflecting on times throughout my life…The fact that I moved home, moved from London to Glasgow. It’s also about my connection through my mum’s family to Cyprus. It’s also about being Black and queer and in a long-term relationship.” Having read the collection, it is easy to see the narrative drive which Atta refers to. The reader is with him as he holds his friend’s hand as she loses her fight with cancer, we celebrate finding community at Category Is Books in Glasgow, and we long to watch the Thames flow past the Southbank Centre. But at the heart of the collection, the thing that binds the narrative together, Dean says, is the “celebration of love: lots of kinds of love, family love, friendship love, romantic love, and self-love.” It’s this myriad of interpretations of love which makes There is (Still) Love Here so engaging, so easy to empathise with. It would be nearly impossible to read the collection without finding a poem which speaks directly to an experience which you have yourself had. When asked what he would like people to take away from the collection, Atta says: “Just for people to appreciate what’s already there in their lives. I don’t think we need to look very far to find a lot of love in our lives. I think that’s what I want to tell people.” And that’s a very clear and beautiful message within the collection, but that’s not to say this is an easy or wholly comfortable read. Atta talks about the more challenging side of the collection: his grief and homesickness, and the horrendous treatment and murder of LGBTQIA+ people across the world. “My poem, Pulse, was written after the Orlando shootings at Pulse night club. And that was a very angry response. It might not even come across as an angry poem, but I felt very angry about so many things. Not being American, sometimes you can try and distance yourself from gun violence, but if it’s happening anywhere it’s a thing to be angry about.” There are many moments like this throughout the collection, where Atta shares his anger or pain, punctuating the narrative with times of grief and crisis. He reflects that writing these poems is an important, valid way of marking moments in time. That, for example, although the laws around gay men donating blood have changed, its previous illegality should still be remembered as abhorrent; something that reminds us to keep progression alive and inclusive. Poetry, as Atta exemplifies in his poem Sanctuary, is the perfect artform to undertake this work. But poetry can be comforting too. “I was part of Hannah Lavery’s Writers of Colour group and we met throughout the pandemic on Zoom, every Friday. It was just amazing, Friday lunchtimes were the highlight of the week, so a lot of these poems came from that workshop.” While creating poetry is at the heart of those workshops, Atta also talks at length about how important those groups were to him from a personal, community-building perspective. “When you weren’t allowed to be close to people physically, you could get really close to people emotionally by sharing rough poems, like first drafts and giving each other feedback or just encouragement. “My main connection with people was writing workshops and it’s just a really lovely, privileged position to be in, to hold that space for people. I definitely felt like poetry in its rawest form, the poetry workshop, was really what gave me a sense of community during these times.” Although Atta talks about – both in the interview and in There is (Still) Love Here – London as his home, his poetry gives such a warm sense of how welcome he has felt in Glasgow and, more widely, Scotland. With this new collection shining with empathy, generosity, and solidarity in grief, Scotland will be sad to see him move back down South. But, it can safely be said, there will (still) be love here for one of the UK’s fastest rising poetry stars.
Nine Arches Press, 8 Sep, £10.99
A Celebration of Culture
Scotland in Colour Festival
As their Scotland in Colour festival returns for its fourth year, we chat with Chidera Chukwujekwu and Sara Elbashir from Intercultural Youth Scotland to find out more
Interview: Anita Bhadani
This September sees the fourth annual Scotland in Colour festival return to Edinburgh. A celebration of the creativity of young Black and people of colour in Scotland, this year over 20 acclaimed and emerging music acts will take to the stage in the ornate Pianodrome venue, currently housed in the Old Royal High School on Calton Hill. “The festival is an opportunity to bring different communities together,” Asistant Producer Sara Elbashir tells us. Fostering community and a sense of belonging are at the heart of organisers Intercultural Youth Scotland’s remit, and this annual festival is a culmination of their ongoing wider work engaging young Black and people of colour in Scotland with creative futures to this end. “We identified quite quickly through our work that the young people we work with have this interest in performance and music and art,” Chidera Chukwujekwu, Head of Communications tells us. “There were just not enough opportunities for young people of colour to express their talent or get on a stage.” Giving young people of colour in Scotland a platform to express themselves and share their talents with a wider audience was the driving force behind the inception of Scotland in Colour, Chukwujekwu tells us. “We don’t just want this to be a gig – it’s so much more than that. It’s a whole celebration of culture.” They continue: “It’s about giving young people of colour a chance to connect and meet people that might be like-minded and see where that feeds into the rest of their life. It’s really inspiring to see people who are like you on stage with people around them and sounding great. You think, ‘maybe I could do that too’, you know?” Scotland in Colour boasts an eclectic lineup this year, from rapper Bemz (BBC Introducing’s Scottish Act of 2022), to lauded jazz outfit Grace & The Flat Boys, rising artist Billy Got Waves and a host of performers from Intercultural Youth Scotland’s various programmes playing throughout the day. Later, drawing the evening to a close are an enviable selection of DJs making waves through Scotland’s club scene. These include Glasgowbased ISO YSO, whose sets take inspiration from orchestral compositions and video game soundtracks, to underground Afrohouse and Afrotech DJ and producer Optimistic Soul (aka Sibusiso Mpofu), to emerging KTAB, the Moroccan-Scottish DJ/producer soon to make his debut as a recording artist. “When booking artists, we considered: Who’s visible? Who are people listening to? Who would the young people in our groups want to see?” Chukwujekwu says. “We try to book slightly larger people each year to mark a progression for the festival itself and the visibility of what we’re trying to do.” Building leadership in the creative sector is especially important, Elbashir and Chukwujekwu tell us, from finding ways to facilitate artists of colour, to creating the larger frameworks that can support artists of colour throughout their journey. While events such as Scotland in Colour are exemplary of the exciting grassroots work being done to make Scotland’s music scene and wider creative industries more representative of our society as a whole, there is always more work to be done. “There are some great creative opportunities out there for young people of colour – internships and all of these things. But there’s also an issue with a lot of organisations not being able to see between the lines of why some of these young people can’t take these up,” Elbashir says. “Their parents might not want them to get into a creative industry, or they
Chidera Chukwujekwu
might not be able to drive, or they may not be able to afford things like travel costs to get there. At Intercultural Youth Scotland, we try to provide all these things and find connection – truly work with the young person and maybe even get to know their family, and try to find an avenue for this work.” “Unpaid internships especially can pose a barrier,” Chukwujekwu adds. “We’ve always pushed for – if you’re going to offer an internship there has to be an access budget so they can get there. There has to also be a form of support throughout.” Chukwujekwu continues: “The reality is that we do live in a racist world, as much as we try to avoid people experiencing that. We see our role as being the conduit for the ‘what ifs’ – trying to recognise the barriers to these creative fields and creating ways to get more people into these things.” Indeed, Scotland in Colour is as much a catalyst for ongoing change for young people of colour in Scotland today as it is a celebration of new and emerging talent in Scotland today. “We don’t do the festival to make money,” Chukwujekwu reflects. “We do it to connect with young people... Come along because we want you there, ‘cause it’s fun, ‘cause it’s good. Just come along.”
Scotland in Colour takes place at the Pianodrome, Old Royal High School, Edinburgh, 3 Sep; tickets available from eventbrite.co.uk
Go West
Ten years and over 100 shows later, founder of infamous Dundee club night Locarno, Scott Davidson, aka Red, tells us about the club night’s enduring legacy and why he’s taking it to Glasgow
Interview: Jamie Wilde
Head through the gate. Hold out your hand for a mark of felt tip pen. Make the trip inside and discover colourful oil wheel projections. Feel the wall of body heat against your skin and listen to the sounds of The Doors blasting from the sound system to a room full of 500 people. Only at Locarno can this euphoric scene be pulled off. The long-standing Dundee club night – founded 10 years ago by local DJ and visual artist Scott Davidson, aka Red – is embedded in the folklore of the city’s underground music scene. Locarno’s monthly club nights at The Reading Rooms, and later at King’s, saw hundreds of young people itching to get their fix of 50s and 60s soul and rock‘n’roll music. It was a club night unlike any other. But now, almost one year after Locarno held its final show in Dundee, a Glasgow resurrection is looming. “There were a few reasons for taking Locarno through to Glasgow,” says Red. “The experienced guys from Hometown Promotion Soundsystem in Glasgow, who have their set-up in King’s through here, said that they thought Locarno was one of the best things they’d ever seen. That gave me a real confidence boost. Another reason was through Locarno’s 10th anniversary posters, which so many people from Glasgow ordered. It made me realise that there was something to tap into outside of Dundee. So, I thought, let’s do it.” Chatting to Red in his studio space, colourful prints adorn the walls and neatly stacked 45s sit underneath the record player in the centre of the room. He chats about Locarno’s history – taking us through its early inspiration from a rock’n’roll club night called Ice Cream Social in Vancouver to becoming a staple in Dundee nightlife – with complete enthusiasm. “Locarno’s success is down to the fact that there’s nothing else really like it,” says Red, matter-of-factly. “The majority of club nights in Dundee revolve around dance, techno and different types of electronic music, but when you go to Locarno, you can sing to 50s and 60s soul, rock‘n’roll and psychedelia like The Rolling Stones or The Doors. Having that alternative audience interaction is what makes it special. People love it; it’s high-powered music and that’s what we like.” Despite its huge success, in October last year, after more than 100 shows and following the sobering loss of The Reading Rooms, Red was burnt out and decided to call it a day with Locarno. But then a new research opportunity in his day job with mutual friend Jonathan Dawson, the general manager of SWG3, presented Red with the opportunity to run a club night at the Glasgow venue. With the Locarno dance hall legacy stretching back to the 1920s on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street, it felt like the right place to revive the party. “There were Locarno dance halls all around the country in the 50s and 60s, but Glasgow’s was one of the most popular,” Red explains. “It’s where The Garage is now and these dance halls were where the gradual transition from live band to disc jockey happened. They offered the first type of dance music for youth where you could listen to a record playing, so in a sense Locarno was part of the birth of what we now know as DJing, which I think is a really cool connection to bring back through to Glasgow with our club night.” For those taking their first steps on to the Locarno dancefloor, “an alternative clubbing experience” is what Red says attendees can expect. “I can’t think of any places in Glasgow where young people can come to a club that plays 60s music all night,” adds Red. “We’re not looking to be gatekeepers to older music like you might get with other types of Northern Soul nights. We’re open for anybody to come and see what they make of it. Music is variety, and variety is the fun part.” A high-energy, inclusive night for open-minded music lovers is what has always been at the club night’s core, and is what gives Locarno its enduring appeal. “Locarno has always been a fun night,” says Red, smiling. “We’d love to encourage young people to DJ rock‘n’roll or soul music and to come away from the night telling their friends about how they’d experienced a club night totally different from what they’d ever been to before. If I could describe Locarno in a sentence, I’d say it’s like Wayne Cochran on acid.”
Scott Davidson, aka Red
Locarno, The Poetry Club, SWG3, Glasgow, 23 Sep
New Future
We chat to Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye from Jockstrap to find out more about their electrifying debut album, I Love You Jennifer B
Interview: Max Pilley
When you press play on a Jockstrap song, all you know is that you will be transported into a parallel sonic world where established forms of music are warped, stretched and deconstructed into new, mutant hybrids; what you hear is somehow familiar, and yet it is electrified with the shock of the new. Even for the London-based duo themselves, whose debut album I Love You Jennifer B is released on 9 September on Rough Trade Records, the surprise of what they produce leaves an impact. Singer Georgia Ellery, who typically sends a raw demo version of a new song to producer Taylor Skye, is never sure what will have become of the track by the time she gets it back. “I’m scared to open the file, sometimes!” she says. “In a good way, of course. The reaction I get when I hear what Taylor has done with it, I always feel something, and that’s good. A lot of the things he does are really out there.” Take the single Concrete Over Water, for example. The finished track is a ghostly, disjointed, extraterrestrial beast, ranging from eerily isolated vocals to incongruous towers of processed strings and searing synths, swinging
Georgia Ellery, Jockstrap
dramatically, often frantically, between the two. It is one of the most intoxicating, beguiling songs of 2022, and yet when Ellery sent Skye her initial recording, it consisted of little more than a group of lyrics, a harmony and a light, percussive rhythm. “When he sent it back to me,” she says, “He’d filled it out with all the synths, and hearing that for the first time, with all that tension and space, but with so much mass to it? I remember hearing that and just being wowed.” Skye rightly prefers to focus on the brilliance of Ellery’s original composition as the key to the song’s magic, and to the album at large, but he does accept that his contributions bring Jockstrap’s music into an intriguing new musical space. “I’m just always trying to do something new,” he says. “I like to make music that I want to hear that I don’t think I am hearing. The more songs you do, the more exciting it is to try different things.” The duo share a love of the classic songwriting of the 1960s and 70s, but they first bonded over their mutual admiration of the original dubstep movement of the late 2000s (Skye’s mum took him to Skrillex gigs and his dad introduced him to James Blake), so conceiving a musical project that breathes cutting-edge dynamism into vintage song structures could be said to be the natural combination of the two. “That’s what all of my favourite music is like,” says Skye. “That’s what Bob Dylan did, he looked at the people he was inspired by and he put it through his voice. Everybody does, they grow up listening to something and they regurgitate it in their own way.” After meeting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where Ellery was studying jazz and Skye electronic composition, they first made a major splash with their stunning Wicked City EP in 2020. Now, this album is the result of three years of diligent work, during which they both allowed their influences to continue to expand. For Ellery, one influence came from an unexpected source. “We moved into this flat in Soho and it turned out there was a radio in every single room. We would flick through Jockstrap
Taylor Skye, Jockstrap
all the channels – it would be World Service at night – but we discovered Greatest Hits Radio and it was great!” So taken was she by her discovery of new favourites by the likes of Pet Shop Boys, Sister Sledge and Rick Astley that there is a song on I Love You Jennifer B titled Greatest Hits. The retro nostalgia also carries over to the track What’s It All About?, and its invocation of the unforgettable opening to the Bacharach/David classic, Alfie. With that in mind, you could be mistaken for assuming that Jockstrap’s music veers towards the arch or ironic, but that would be to misunderstand Ellery’s writing, which on a track like Angst finds her describing her inner turmoil via the metaphor of a difficult birth. “There is always a lot of me in the lyrics, usually I write from experience,” she says. “Angst was difficult to work on, because of the ba age it carried. “It does feel vulnerable,” she admits, when talking about putting such personal material into the public arena. “That’s why I’m uncomfortable listening to it. But I don’t mind that, it’s very cathartic to put it out and for people to hear what your experience is.” As if Jockstrap wasn’t enough, Ellery is also the violinist in Black Country, New Road, but it is a testament to the heights that Jockstrap reach on this debut that they should already be considered comfortably on a par with her other band. With two such hungry, adventurous minds continuing to invent a new future together, the potential for Jockstrap is scary.
I Love You Jennifer B is released on 9 Sep via Rough Trade Records
Jockstrap play Stereo, Glasgow, 30 Sep; The Mash House, Edinburgh, 1 Oct
Our Movement, Our Stories
The Skinny meets artist Rhys Hollis as they prepare to open OMOS at the Royal Scottish Academy this month
Interview: Harvey Dimond
Photo: Washington Gwande
Divine Tasinda in OMOS
OMOS is a 20-minute moving image work featuring four award-winning performers: cabaret performer Rhys Hollis (also known as Rhys’s Pieces), opera singer Andrea Baker, dancer Divine Tasinda and pole artist Kheanna Walker. OMOS is inspired by the settings of Puck’s Glen near Dunoon and Stirling Castle, as well as a largely unknown historical vignette from 1594. At the court of King James VI of Scotland, a performance featuring a lion was planned but was changed at the last moment due to the obvious dangers that performing with the animal would entail. The lion was instead replaced by an unnamed Black man, who pulled a chariot through the castle’s Great Hall, one of many instances of Black performers in the royal courts in Scotland. Both the anonymity and the invisibilised labour of the Black performer are concerns that OMOS contends with and seeks to address. Originally an acronym for the phrase ‘O monstrous! O strange!’, a quote from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the acronym has developed a more compelling meaning, now standing for ‘Our Movement, Our Stories’. Each scene acts almost as a character study, representing the expansive history and complexity of Black Scottish identities and the LGBTQIA+ experience. OMOS throws open the doors for discussions around representations of Black people in arts and culture in Scotland and speaks to the Black queer experience in a context where queer spaces remain predominantly white and cisgender. Across the film, the performers engage with the landscape of Puck’s Glen and Stirling Castle, each artist bringing their own interpretation of their craft for their respective performances. The colourful and dynamic costumes contrast with the sombre granite of Stirling Castle and add a sculptural definition to the verdant, green Scottish landscape. The versatility of movements changes the way in which the viewer engages with these historically charged landscapes and buildings, retracting and detracting certain details. Hollis speaks to the importance of showing “a variety of art forms, such as in this case drag, opera, pole dancing, and placing them in the same historical Scottish spaces.” This is what makes the work particularly striking; how an array of diverse artistic performances is curated and synthesised so seamlessly in one work. Hollis tells me that they produce cabaret shows (which also feature in OMOS), so this experience meant that the visual curation of different art forms wasn’t as daunting when the work was being composed. OMOS beautifully showcases each individual artist while also being firmly committed to its collaborative process and identity. Although it references the historic event at Stirling Castle and touches on contemporary personal experiences of tokenism, Hollis describes the moving image work coming out of a decision to create pro-actively rather than reactively: “In the early stages of the project, when I was thinking about this historic event where a Black person featured in a performance at Stirling Castle, I was thinking about that tokenistic experience. I factored this into my creative process and used my own experience of having wanted to be an actor and falling out of love with that due to the tokenism I experienced, and sometimes still do experience as a performer. However, when we were creating the artwork, rather than thinking about tokenism and reacting against it, the artists and I just thought about the art that we wanted to create and to do that in an authentic way.” Hollis understands OMOS as being part of a longer, more extensive project, and they say it’s vital that workshops and community engagement are central pillars of the project. The exhibition is accompanied by an array of workshops in Edinburgh and beyond. These include an artist Q&A at The Royal Scottish Academy on 1 September; workshops with Rhys Hollis, Andrea Baker and Briana Pegado on 3 September at St Cecilia’s Hall, and two cabaret shows in Stirling and Edinburgh on 13 and 15 September. Excitingly, the performers plan to bring the work to more venues not only across Scotland, but across the UK and internationally, showcasing a plethora of Black Scottish talent.
