The Skinny February 2025 by The Skinny

The Skinny's favourite songs involving a puppet

Sandie Shaw – Puppet on a String

Dustin the Turkey – Born Greasy

Nat King Cole – I've Got the World on a String

Blackstreet – No Di ity

LCD Soundsystem - New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down

*NSYNC – Bye Bye Bye

Jason Segel and Walter – Life's a Happy Song

Mr Oizo – Flat Beat

Interpol – Evil

Cliff Edwards, Walter Catlett – I've Got No Strings

Eminem – Ass Like That

Bo Burnham – How The World Works

Bradley Walsh – That's Life

Echo & The Bunnyman – The Puppet

Tyler, The Creator – PUPPET

Metallica – Master of Puppets

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

Issue 229, February 2025 © Radge Media C.I.C.

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Meet the team

Championing creativity in Scotland

We asked: Who's your favourite puppet and why?

Senior Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief

"That horse in War Horse."

Peter Simpson Deputy Editor, Food & Drink Editor

"The Swedish Chef – style icon, excellent cook, great moustache, and a male TV star from the 1970s who hasn't been cancelled. Yet."

Anahit Behrooz Events Editor, Books Editor

"Gonna ﬂy the ﬂag for that noisy imbecile Sweep, his little squeaks are adorable I don’t know what Jamie’s problem is."

Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist "Sooty. I've always been impressed with his calm demeanour despite living in a toxic ﬂatshare with a noisy imbecile (Sweep) and a supercilious posho (Soo)."

Tallah Brash Music Editor "ALF! His obsession with trying to eat the family cat was hilarious to me as a kid, and the episode where he makes a music video to impress a crush is etched into my brain."

Commissioning Editors

Cammy Gallagher Clubs Editor "Alexander Lukashenko."

Eilidh Akilade Intersections Editor "Lily Allen's music video for Alﬁe was on repeat a lotttt."

Rachel Ashenden Art Editor "Love Manipulate's work, but I have a deep-seated fear of puppets, especially Andy Pandy."

Polly Glynn Comedy Editor "As comedy editor, I would be remiss to not vouch for Fozzie Bear (waka waka), but as a true Muppet nerd, the best is clearly Pepé the Prawn, okay? And then Gonzo, and then Rizzo, and then Tim Curry…"

Rho Chung Theatre Editor "N/A"

Business

Laurie Presswood General Manager "Frankie Monroe's Mucky Little Pup."

Sales

George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist "Socko. IYKYK. "

Production

Dalila D'Amico Art Director, Production Manager "Spitting Image’s Margaret Thatcher, nothing says ‘puppet’ quite like an actual political ﬁgure being operated by unseen hands."

Sandy Park Commercial Director "Bert and Ernie."

Phoebe Willison Designer

"Miss Pi y because she is hot and she is a pig, just like me x"

Ellie Robertson Digital Editorial Assistant

"I have no idea who that little Nanalan freak is but she sure does make good memes."

Ema Smekalova Media Sales Executive

"It's gotta be Big Joe. Super underground puppet, not many people know about him (my friend made him and he lives in my ﬂat)."

Emilie Roberts Media Sales Executive "Muppet Tiny Tim. I even made him into a WhatsApp sticker. Text me if you want it."

Editorial

Words: Rosamund West

It’s an unusual theme this month – it started out simply as ‘PUPPETS’ during the annual planning meeting back in November, inspired by the return of Manipulate Festival (includes puppet-related programming); the 25th anniversary of the UK release of Being John Malkovich (also involves puppetry or is it truly only about puppetry?); the fact some of the team (*cough* Anahit *cough*) really like puppets. “Could we get Kermit for the Q&A?” “A deep dive into the making of *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached!” we shouted, excitedly.

The theme has evolved, as they tend to do, responding to things that are actually happening in Scotland this month and are not insane, so sadly the puppets have been reduced to a minor role in an issue that explores the politics of the body, of control, intimacy and autonomy. It is, to quote the elevator pitch sent round the team, both sexy and political. Also puppets.

Starting with Manipulate Festival, we meet artistic director Dawn Taylor to learn about this year’s programme, which includes puppetry, and consider the radical potential of intimacy in theatre. We speak to some authors whose books, released this month, explore themes around the politics of the body.

Afghan-German writer Moshtari Hilal’s Ugliness delves into the cultural constructs of beauty / ugliness and how they delineate ideas of belonging and exclusion. layla-roxanne hill and Francesca Sobande have collaborated on Look, Don’t Touch, drawing on conversations started during COVID to consider ways of feeling, public messaging as societal control, and technology as both barrier and broker of communication.

Returning to the puppets, we look back at the masterpiece that is Being John Malkovich and its pre-social media exploration of parasocial relationships. Film also talks to Edinburghbased writer-director Laura Carreira to learn more about On Falling, about the physical and spiritual impact of life trapped in

the precarity of gig economy employment. Vera Drew introduces supervillain satire The People’s Joker, and we celebrate the legacy of the recently departed David Lynch as one writer shares how surrendering to incomprehension within his work opened up the world.

Music meet Baths aka Will Wiesenfeld whose new record is called Gut, which is inarguably extremely bodily. We also talk to Adwaith, the post-punk trio whose new album (double album in fact) Solas is written entirely in the Welsh language, about carving out space for themselves within the male-dominated Welsh music scene. Joining the ranks of the Scottish community radio stations doing interesting things, Dundee Radio Club launches this month – we meet the duo behind the project.

Intersections has one feature committed to the theme, looking at foot fetishes and their potential for STI-free sex. We also take a tiny dive into the Lavender Menace queer archive, with a fascinating look at the LGBTQI+ history of Edinburgh’s streets.

Art, this month under the new editorship of Rachel Ashenden, talks to the curator of the Maud Sulter exhibition in Tramway, learning how the artist’s legacy lives on through their participatory events programme. Clubs provides an insight into the world of Scotland’s go-go dancers, with a series of mini interviews with a few of them. Comedy meets Chris Cantrill and Sunil Patel to talk about their podcast Rural Concerns and their enduring preoccupation with securing a discount at Bella Italia. In a solitary nod to Valentine’s Day, our design columnist has carefully selected some pieces of Scottish design that you might like to consider for those in your life who say things like “my love language is the receipt of gifts.”

We close with The Skinny on… Georgia Cécile, a jazz artist who doesn’t want to ﬁght any celebrities for some reason.

Thea is an artist & graphic designer, working predominantly across the arts/culture/music sector. She strives to create design that is bold, expressive and hopeful. She particularly enjoys designing for events and places that celebrate and nurture local communities or music scenes, like her ongoing design work for Edinburgh Psych Fest, or event posters for Edinburgh’s EHFM.

IG: @__bythea theabryant.com

Thea Bryant

Cover Artist

Love Bites: Sleepover Club

This month’s columnist celebrates the sacred ritual of a sleepover with friends

Words: Maria Morava

It’s not lost on me that the month of love is also the most dreadful month of the year. This dissonance always bothered me. In February, I could not be bothered to leave the house, spend more money after the great holiday pounds purge, or partake in buzzy capitalist affection.

Sometime in the past year, however, I’ve found a love practice that is perfect for this bitter month. Sleepovers with my friends have become my winter salve. A practice rooted in the ancient tradition of Girlhood, platonic sleepovers remind me of abundance and agency in a time of year when bi er forces—depression, oppression – threaten my hope for the months ahead.

In winter, I feel the myth of scarcity everywhere. Capitalism tells me there’s not enough time or resources to live well, and the short, dark days seem to prove it. But at sleepovers, I feel this myth dissolve. When I go to sleep knowing I will see my friends in the morning, I feel drunk with time. When we share coffee, and they make e s knowing their way around my kitchen, I think: this could be endless, and maybe already is.

‘Revenge bedtime procrastination’ is understood as a way to delay the next day’s work – and usually this means lying in bed on your phone. But I take revenge on capitalist functioning by laughing into the night. I wake bleary eyed and it doesn’t matter because I’ve spent the night with my friends, remembering we have choices about how to spend our lives.

One morning, my friend woke up and said they had a dream that I didn’t love them. With one hand holding coffee and another holding theirs, I healed something I wasn’t even there for – and felt the power of friendship strike me clear and deep.

Heads Up

Love Electric Mono, Glasgow, 13 Feb, 8pm

Celebrate love in style at this gorgeous gorgeous fundraising event, with all proceeds going to community-based electrolysis for trans women and nonbinary people in Glasgow. Hosted by beloved drag artist Medea, there’s local live music acts on the lineup –including R.AGGS, comfort, pictureskew and Chanterelle playing everything from punk to folk – and DJs on until the wee hours.

Manipulate Festival

Various venues, Edinburgh, 12-15 Feb

Scotland’s celebration of puppetry, physical theatre and animation returns this month with a programme of experimental theatre and ﬁlm exploring the boundaries of visual representation and performance. Highlights include Cartography, an immersive series of intimate encounters staged around Fruitmarket’s Warehouse, a series of works-in-progress, and a programme of inventive, one-of-akind short ﬁlms like Frank Mukunday's Machini

Glasgow Film Festival

Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow, 26 Feb-9 Mar Film is set to take over Glasgow in the next couple of months, and things kick off with the 21st edition of Glasgow Film Festival. The festival opens and closes with two Scotland-shot ﬁlms by Scottish directors – high-octane thriller Tornado and heart-warming documentary Make It to Munich – and features the likes of Joshua Oppenheimer’s musical The End, indie comedy Boys Go to Jupiter, and an in-conversation with Glasgow star James McAvoy along the way.

Chicago

The Edinburgh Playhouse, Edinburgh, 4-8 Feb, various times

We round up some of the best events this month in celebration of our bodies issue: think plenty of physical theatre, queer club nights and dancey gigs.

Compiled by Anahit Behrooz

The Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, 7 Feb-28 Jun

Shoot Your Shot: BASHKKA + Marie Malarie

The Berkeley Suite, Glasgow, 15 Feb, 11pm

The ﬁrst Shoot Your Shot of 2025 is a lovestruck Valentine’s Day special, featuring two big name DJs making their Scottish debut. Germany-based artist BASHKKA’s sets are infectious, honouring dance music’s Black and Brown roots, while DJ and producer Marie Malarie is renowned for their deliriously fun queer parties back home in East London.

Petra Bauer: Sisters! Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 22 Feb-23 Mar Swedish artist and ﬁlmmaker Petra Bauer uses her work to explore socio-political issues, often created in collaboration with her subjects. In the thought-provoking and moving Sisters!, she worked with London-based feminist collective Southhall Black Sisters to chronicle the power of community activism and grassroots action to rebel and resist against power structures. This exhibition at Fruitmarket marks the ﬁrst time the work is screened in its entirety.

Luke Sital-Singh

King Tut’s, Glasgow, 26 Feb, 7:30pm

To mark the release of his ﬁfth album Fool's Spring, out this month, British folk musician Luke Sital-Singh heads out on tour. Chronicling a period of intense turbulence in his life, Fool's Spring embodies the same intimate lyricism and gentle melodies as his previous music, drawing on inﬂuences as broad as indie-rock to disco.

Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 12 Feb, 7pm

BABii

Image: courtesy of NEON

Photo: Harvey Pearson

Image: courtesy of artist

Photo: Petra Bauer

Photo: Clara Patrick

Photo: Frank Mukunday

Sisters Petra Bauer, still from digital ﬁlm

BASHKKA

The End at GFF

Luke Sital-Singh

Machini at Manipulate Festival

comfort for Love Electric

Chicago

Luxembourg Gardens SJ Peploe, for Scottish Colourists

BABii

Sweet Spectres, Yeonjoo Cho, part of Home In Home

Goner by Marikiscrycrcycry

Tramway, Glasgow, 8 Feb, 7pm

Presented in collaboration with experimental theatre festival Buzzcut, this choreographic piece by Malik Nashad Sharpe, aka Marikiscrycrycry, builds on his work in horror-infused performance to establish a Black tradition of horror in a live context, drawing on themes of abuse, Caribbean migration, alienation, belonging, addiction, and violence through the mysterious and dark ﬁgure of the Goner.

W.H. Lung

The Mash House, Edinburgh, 14 Feb, 7pm Manchester outﬁt W.H. Lung hit up Edinburgh, bringing their dreamy, glitzy synth-pop sound to The Mash House for a dose of dancey energy to shake off the February blues. They’re touring their latest record, Every Inch of Earth Pulsates, a euphoric album that does just what it promises – offering big, dramatic melodies and pulsating, irresistible beats.

Suzanne Lacy: Between the Door and the Street Cooper Gallery, Dundee, 28 Feb-12 Apr

The ﬁrst solo exhibition in Scotland by pioneering American artist Suzanne Lacy is a testament to her life-long commitment to confronting the structures of oppression that women continue to face. This exhibition draws on her 2013 one-day performative public action in New York, using texts, archival material and a three-channel video installation to document the ability of communities to effect political change.

Fokus: Films From Germany Various venues, Scotland, until 20 Feb

Shon Faye – Love in Exile

Toppings & Company, Edinburgh, 13 Feb, 7pm

Known for her landmark book The Transgender Issue, and for her warm and insightful advice column for Vogue, Shon Faye comes to Edinburgh to launch her second book Love in Exile. Hailed as “a book for lovers in this era”, Love in Exile explores structures of attachment and belonging, examining how we can liberate love from the narrow strictures we have placed it in.

She Drew The Gun Room 2, Glasgow, 15 Feb, 7pm

Psych-pop outﬁt She Drew the Gun live up to their name, creating incendiary music with confronting lyrics that speak back to contemporary political issues, as seen on their latest album, the aptly titled Howl Drawing on inﬂuences as diverse as 80s electronica, hip-hop and spoken word poetry, their music is full of the kind of unmitigated energy that makes for great live performance.

RCS: Into the New 2025

CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, 13-15 February

neurons

Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 8 Feb, 11pm

Welcome to the ﬁrst edition of neurons, a new multi-sensory club night at Sneaky Pete’s. There are two-hour sets from Iris Pertegaz and Noodle, and a specially commissioned lighting installation from sculptor and computational artist Shankar Saanthakumar. Expect great beats, incense, haze and otherworldly bleeps and bloops transporting you into another world, with proceeds going towards raising money for mental health charities.

SWG3, Glasgow, 14 Feb, 10pm

Ponyboy: Jyoty

Joshua Burnside The Caves, Edinburgh, 27 Feb, 7pm

Photo: Nathan Magee

Image: courtesy of The Goethe Institut

Photo: Mathilde Darmady

Photo: Spit Ting

Photo: Maria Baranova

Photo: Rebecca Toohey

Photo: Marieke Macklon

Photo: Sophie Davidson

Image: courtesy the artist

Image: courtesy of Sneaky Pete's Goner

Shon Faye

Iris Pertegaz for neurons

Between the Door and the Street, Suzanne Lacy

W.H. Lung

She Drew the Gun Langue Etrangere at Fokus

Joshua Burnside Ponyboy

OMG at Into the New

What's On

Music

All details correct at the time of writing

Local shows are our priority this month, so let’s get into it! Fresh from releasing his debut album on Lost Map, Glasgow-based Cornwallian Curtis Miles celebrates with a launch show at The Glad Cafe (6 Feb), with Boab and Snout on support. On the same day, Jill Lorean starts a peace cult, as she takes her latest record on the road with shows in Edinburgh (Sneaky Pete’s, 6 Feb), Stirling (Tolbooth, 7 Feb), Aberdeen (Tunnels, 8 Feb) and Glasgow (The Glad Cafe, 9 Feb).

On 8 February at Stirling’s Tolbooth, catch Sacred Paws play their SAY Award-winning album Strike a Match in full, for the ﬁrst in a series of shows celebrating past nominees and winners of Scotland’s national music prize, while over in Edinburgh, The Micro Band release their percussive new single Lamb’s Tongue Tango and play an album fundraiser at Leith Cricket Club. A few days later in Glasgow, singer-songwriter Rhona Macfarlane celebrates As the Chaos Unfolds at The Glad Cafe (11 Feb), with support from Annie Booth. The middle of the month brings Valentine’s Day parties to either end of the M8 with riot grrrl pop outﬁt Lou & The Killjoys hosting a party with Disco Mary and lisa and the beauty queen at Edinburgh’s Leith Depot (14 Feb), while the following day brings an amorous all-dayer to Glasgow’s The Old Hairdresser’s. Hounds of Love #4 – Love Is In the Hair will feature live music from Craig John Angus (Savage Mansion Former Champ), Hound, Ceefax, Sara Rae and more.

Back in the capital the following weekend, BBC Radio 1 Future Artist and Edinburgh native Fourth Daughter celebrates her debut EP Full Bloom with a headline show at Cabaret Voltaire (21 Feb), Scottish titans of post-rock Mogwai bring The Bad Fire to Usher Hall (23 Feb), while over at The Old Hairdresser’s in Glasgow, Marcus Engwall releases his gorgeous debut EP Glacial Pace (22 Feb). The end of the month brings yet more release shows to Glasgow. Curlew celebrates live EP, a work in progress… at The Rum Shack (25 Feb), Constant Follower honours The Smile You Send Out Returns to You at Cottiers (27 Feb), Niamh Morris brings Strawberries & Honey to The Poetry Club (28 Feb), and Penny Black launches My Skin Brought Me Here at Nice N Sleazy (1 Mar). In Edinburgh, Georgia Cécile’s City Girl takes the spotlight at The Queen’s Hall (28 Feb), while on the same day, Fiona Soe Paing brings Sand, Silt, Flint! to Aberdeen’s Lemon Tree.

As he continues to tour the magniﬁcent A Firmer Hand, Hamish Hawk bookends a run of February dates with shows in Aberdeen (Lemon Tree, 9 Feb) and Edinburgh (Usher Hall, 22 Feb), while non-Scots worth your time this month include BABii (Sneaky Pete’s, 12 Feb), Anna B Savage (Stereo, 14 Feb), Personal Trainer (The Mash House, 16 Feb; Room 2, 18 Feb), Squid (Old Fruitmarket, 19 Feb), Oneda (The Poetry Club, 20 Feb), Hinds (Saint Luke’s, 20 Feb), Biig Piig (SWG3, 20 Feb), Man/Woman/Chainsaw (King Tut’s, 21 Feb), Adwaith (Nice N Sleazy, 26 Feb; Sneaky Pete’s, 27 Feb), Fat Dog (La Belle Angele, 27 Feb; QMU, 28 Feb) and MIKE (Room 2, 28 Feb). [Tallah Brash]

Film

The film world was rocked last month by the death of David Lynch, the most original and influential American filmmaker to emerge after the New Hollywood era. He leaves a huge hole in film culture, but thankfully his wonderful work

Photo: Harrison Fishman

Photo: Margaret Salmon

Photo: Rosie Sco

Rhona Macfarlane

Sacred Paws

Squid

lives on and there are a couple of chances to see two of his greatest films on the big screen this month, with more tributes sure to follow. Cameo in Edinburgh screen his 1989 lovers on the run story/Wizard of Oz homage Wild at Heart (15 Feb), Braw Cinema Club screens the same film five days later at Banshee Labyrinth in Edinburgh (20 Feb), while Dundee Contemporary Arts have opted for his dreamy 1986 fantasy Blue Velvet (27 Feb). If you’re new to Lynch’s genius, these feverish films are great entry points.

It’s been 16 years since Australian animator Adam Elliot released his wry and emotionally devastating claymation feature Mary & Max. With Elliot back this month with his sophomore feature Memoir of a Snail, a similarly whimsical and singular stop-motion marvel (see review on p. 57), Glasgow Film Theatre is bringing Mary & Max back to the big screen, with an introduction by programmer Heather Bradshaw (15 Feb).

The Moving Image Archive, situated in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall, holds a treasure trove of Scottish film, from work by Margaret Tait, Norman McLaren and Bill Forsyth to home movies, amateur films and other sundry clips, reels and rarities. They also host screenings, and to mark LGBTQ history month month, on 5 February they’ve programmed the little-seen 1983 Scottish documentary Coming Out, which will be followed by a conversation with Sigrid Nielsen, co-founder of Lavender Menace, Scotland’s first lesbian and gay bookshop.

All films are better on the big screen, but some demand the big screen treatment, and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is one of those films. It’s currently screening widely across Scotland, but if you want to view it in the most detailed and vibrant formats possible, make it to one of GFT’s 70mm screenings, which run 14 to 25 February. And for an immersive screening, how about watching The Brutalist in one of Glasgow’s Brutalist gems? It screens at The Pyramid at Anderston on 23 February, where there’s currently an exhibition on Brutalist architecture in Glasgow, and the screening is preceded by a talk from the exhibition’s curator, Rachel Loughran. The mighty Japan Touring Programme returns this month too, with screenings at Inverness’s Eden Court (16 Feb-31 Mar), Dundee Contemporary Arts (22 Feb-23 Mar) and Edinburgh’s Cameo (6-31 Mar). It’s a varied lineup, mixing anime (Ghost Cat Anzu), classics (1951’s Carmen Comes Home) and mint-fresh works of contemporary Japanese cinema. For full listings, head to jpf-film.org.uk [Jamie Dunn]

Clubs

On Thursday 6 February, head to The Bongo Club for a Scottish dub and ceilidh fusion with An Dannsa Dub and Uplands Roast for Botanica – expect a big rig sound system. Or for something a little funkier, head to Sneaky Pete’s for a mixed bag of ghettotech and Chicago house with Martyn Bootyspoon Bakey returns to Glasgow on Friday 7 February, bringing a selection of two-step and garage cuts to Stereo. Alternatively, head to Queen Street for UK techno, new and old, from Radioactive Man and Lucas Wigﬂex, as Lezure mark ten years of basement debauchery inside La Cheetah. On Tuesday 11 February, The Hug and Pint host nymph bass queen BABii Strut your stuff at SWG3 on Valentine’s with Ponyboy featuring Jyoty. For a slightly freakier Friday evening, Stereo hosts Valentine’s with ballad, Plata, Julietta Ferrari, dji mon, opherings and 500 (14 Feb). On Saturday 15th, the celebrations continue at The Flying Duck with ELANDA, Spineﬂuid and 3MR for DRIP Valentine’s. If you’re not feeling the love, The Bongo Club goes dubstep galore with Mia Koden at Chromatic (15 Feb).

The following weekend, La Cheetah presents: Shanti Celeste - All Night Long – expect a contemporary take on the classic Motor City sound. At The Berkeley Suite, picture the best percussive UK techno with a tinge of tech house at ThudLine: Ploy, LWS & más allá (both 21 Feb). On Saturday 22 February, Detroit’s DJ Stingray brings top Electro and Techno to Edinburgh for Pulse at The Bongo Club. On Friday 28 February, crack a can for 10 Years

Photo: Jimi Herrtage

Shanti Celeste

Blue Velvet

BABii

Mary & Max

Ghost Cat Anzu

of Craigie Knowes with Om Unit at La Cheetah – dress to sweat. [Cammy Gallagher]

Art

At The Hunterian in Glasgow, Di ing in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature (until 4 May) finds inspiration in the multidisciplinary artist’s diary entries from the last five years of his life. The diaries divulge details on his performance-installation at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre and the planting of his garden at Prospect Cottage. Commissioned responses by five contemporary artists explore Jarman’s mammoth contribution to queer art history.

Printmaking as a tool for political activism and propaganda is explored in Soft Impressions (until 23 Mar), a Dundee Contemporary Arts exhibition that platforms intergenerational works by Helen Cammock, Ingrid Pollard and Camara Taylor. Also in Dundee, at Cooper Gallery, the pioneering American artist Suzanne Lacy – whose practice is rooted in social justice – gets her ﬁrst solo exhibition in Scotland. Between the Door and the Street (28 Feb-12 Apr) exhibits Lacy’s video work, alongside archival material and texts illuminating the urgency of women’s bodily autonomy.

Say No!, an exhibition about the feminist act of refusal, continues throughout the month at the Wardlaw Museum in St Andrews until 11 May. Stories of activism and societal change are explored through the work of artists Alberta Whittle, Josie KO, Frankie Rafﬂes and Petra Bauer. Archival material of feminist refusal from the 1960s and 1970s interrogates how far women’s equality has come and how far it still has to come.

Over to Edinburgh, where the practice of Swedish artist and ﬁlmmaker Petra Bauer can be relished again. Fruitmarket screens Sisters! on a loop until 23 March, a ﬁlm which follows the vital work of Southall Black Sisters, a feminist activist charity that advocates for the rights of Black and minority women in the UK. [Rachel Ashenden]

Theatre

Things are picking up this month, as we edge towards spring. There’s even a festival on the horizon, as Manipulate Festival (12-15 Feb) bring their celebration of visual theatre, animated ﬁlm and puppetry to stages across Edinburgh and beyond. Highlights include Cartography, an intimate performance taking place in ‘a kind of labyrinth’ in the Fruitmarket Warehouse, and workshops including the dramaturgy of puppetry, acrodance and micro cinema techniques. You can ﬁnd out all about the programme in our interview with the Artistic Director, Dawn Taylor, on p22.

Scottish Opera are staging Janáček’s mature masterpiece The Makropulos Affair in the Theatre Royal Glasgow (15, 19 & 22 Feb) and Festival Theatre Edinburgh (27 Feb & 1 Mar). A co-production with Welsh National Opera, it tells the story of Emilia Marty, Elina Makropulos, EM – the stylish, enigmatic diva who has lived many lives, and for over three centuries has been on a quest to become a great opera singer.

Tramway stages the ﬁrst part of BUZZCUT’s Double Thrills programme – Goner by Marikiscrycrcycry (8 Feb) promises to establish a Black tradition of horror for the live context, exploring themes of Caribbean migration, alienation, belonging, addiction, and violence. Later in the month, Tramway hosts Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey (22 Feb, 26 Feb-1 Mar), co-produced between Scotland and Japan by Vanishing Point and Kanagawa Arts Theatre. Based on short stories by Haruki Murakami and featuring human and puppet monkeys, lurking shadows, stunning sound, it’s set to be a magical, immersive experience.

A Play, A Pie, A Pint kick off their spring programme with Dookin’ Oot by Éimi Quinn (Òran Mór, 24 Feb-1 Mar), a black comedy about a wild moneymaking scheme in a council ﬂat in Easterhouse. There’s a bunch of high

Image: © Petra Bauer. Courtesy the artist

Image: Courtesy Keith Collins Will Trust and Amanda Wilkinson, London

Image: courtesy of the artist

Photo: Anne Tetzlaff

Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

Goner by Marikiscrycrcycry

The Makropulos Affair

Camara Taylor, Untitled (familiar document) Digital Print, 2014

Petra Bauer, Sisters! 2011, digital ﬁlm, 123mins, still

Derek Jarman, Et in Arcadia Ego (Aids Memoir Prospect Cottage) 1992 Oil on canvas with black metal foil

octane musical productions arriving in Edinburgh with Mary Poppins (Festival Theatre, until 15 Feb), Chicago (Playhouse, 4-8 Feb), and Kinky Boots (Playhouse, 18-22 Feb).

Up in Dundee, Law of Gravity (Dundee Rep, 14 Feb) brings us full circle, combining puppetry and music, using the work of 20th century classical composers Arnold Schoenberg and Philip Glass to explore the line between the abstract and the real. [Rosamund West]

Books

There are so many iconic Scottish authors launching their books and running events at The Portobello Bookshop this month: on 13 February Kirsty Logan launches her new short story collection No & Other Love Stories; on 19 February, Camilla Grudova runs a short story masterclass; on 20 February, Gutter magazine launch their latest issue; on 26 February, Chris McQueer launches his long-anticipated debut novel Hermit; and on 27 February Heather Parry launches her second novel Carrion Crow

There are more book launches at Lighthouse Bookshop, with Jake Hall launching Shoulder to Shoulder: A Queer History of Solidarity, Coalition and Chaos (18 Feb), Omar El Akkad launching One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (12 Feb), Colin McGuire, Lakshmi Ajay and Suki Hollywood launching Fierce Salvage: A Queer Words Anthology (21 Feb) and layla-roxanne hill and Francesca Sobande launching Look Don’t Touch (25 Feb) – read our interview with hill and Sobande on p26.

Over in Glasgow, there’s the launch of Border Abolition Now on 6 February and the launch of Selali Fiamanya’s debut novel Before We Hit the Ground on 27 February, both at Mount Florida Books. There’s also an open mic poetry night (12 Feb) and To Filth: A transfeminist reading group (18 Feb) at Glasgow Zine Library, for those who like to get more stuck in. [Anahit Behrooz]

Comedy

Start your month with a hand-picked showcase of the freshest new comedy talent. Chortle Hotshots (Monkey Barrel, 5 Feb 7.30pm, £8-£10) is here to platform promising newbies and give you a heads-up on who to look out for at Fringe. Dean T. Beirne, Amanda Hursy and Mick McNeill are just a few local names on the lineup.

If you’ve somehow missed the wonder that is Mr Chonkers (Monkey Barrel, 7 Feb, 8pm, £12), you’ve simply got to see it. From the brain of LAbased clown John Norris, the show is, at its base level, a deranged acting showreel, but there’s so much more to it than that. Let us do the meatball trick for you one more time!

For those with more rural concerns, be sure to book for Edinburgh Comedy Nominee Chris Cantrill (Monkey Barrel, 12 Feb, 8pm, £15) and pod-mate Sunil Patel (Monkey Barrel, 8 Feb, 6pm, £7). Cantrill’s show, a companion piece to the pair’s newly award-winning podcast about Chris’s move to a far away ﬁeld, was nominated for the big award at the Fringe and is a sweet, lightly surreal musing on male friendship and loneliness. The same week, Patel’s working up a brand new show of deadpan nonsense.

Monthly queer comedy night All Mouth, run by Glasgow comics Kate Hammer and Rae Brogan, has a busy month ahead. As well as their regular gig at The Rum Shack (27 February, 8pm, £9) with a lineup boasting Eleanor Morton, Chris Thorburn and Ayo Adenekan, the team hop on the Queen Street quick train for an Edinburgh especiale (Monkey Barrel, 13 February, 7.30pm, £10). The ‘Gay-lentine's special’ is the gig’s ﬁrst time in the Capital and is set to be a total hoot, headlined by Sam Lake. [Polly Glynn]

Photo: Trudy Stade Image: courtesy of All Mouth

Photo: Sinead Grainger

Photo: Alan Michnoff

Eleanor Morton

Kate Hammer

Chris McQueer

Mr Chonkers

Star Power

Forever Edinburgh’s Resident Rewards are a great way to make the most of your city – we take a look at their Star Rewards and Resident Rates

Edinburgh is a city packed with places to go and things to see – but of course you know all that, you live here. One of the joys of living in such a famous and well-loved city is having a glorious backdrop to your everyday life, but it’s also nice to get back into exploring mode from time-to-time. That’s the thinking behind Resident Rewards Edinburgh, a programme from Forever Edinburgh that aims to help residents of Auld Reekie make the most of living in the capital.

Resident Rewards serves up an ever-changing menu of great o ers and discounts on some of the city’s most interesting attractions and venues. The monthly Star Rewards are big ticket o ers that give bumper discounts to locals. Previous deals included 30% o a gin and chocolate pairing at the new Edinburgh Gin visitor centre in the Old Town, 25% o at Edinburgh Castle, and a 45% discount at Johnnie Walker Princes Street. And February’s deal is a cracker, o ering £50 worth of food and drink at the Ten Hill Place Hotel in the Southside for just £25 per person. Tucked away behind Surgeon’s Hall, Ten Hill Place is perfectly placed for dinner before a show at the Festival Theatre or a gig down the street at the Queen’s Hall, or a spot of lunch after exploring the Old Town. With the Star Rewards discount you can add some extra pizzazz to your day out without breaking the bank.

Next month’s Star Rewards deal brings the chance to visit (or revisit) one of Edinburgh’s most illuminating and unusual attractions, with the return of one of the most popular Resident Rewards deals. The Camera Obscura and World of Illusions, at the top of the Royal Mile, is a cavalcade of illusions and fun trickery that constantly has visitors of all ages scratching their heads at exactly what’s going on. From Sunday to Thursday throughout March, kids go free with every adult ticket purchased via the Resident Rewards programme. If you want to be the rst to know about future Star Rewards, sign up for the Resident Rewards newsletter at

edinburgh.org/residentrewards

If you need a bit more exibility, Resident Rates are longer-running deals that span the length and breadth of what Edinburgh has to o er. If you fancy a distillery tour, you’ve got options: Resident Rewards o er a 20% discount on all tours of the Pickering’s distillery at Summerhall and a 20% discount on a tour and tasting at the stunning Port of Leith Distillery, as well as 10% o tours at the aforementioned Edinburgh Gin. For a post-tour meal, head to The Brasserie at The Scholar, just a stone’s throw from Holyrood Park, where your Resident Reward is 15% o their all-day menu.

Looking for something more active? Take a running tour around your city with Stride Out; EH residents get 15% o all tours, which range from 4 5 to 8 miles and take in some of the key sights around central Edinburgh as well as Calton Hill and Holyrood Park. If you need a bit of rest and relaxation, why not combine two Resident Rewards together? Head to Studio 15 in Granton – the salon o ers 15% o adult hair and nail services – then order a selection of cakes and traybakes from Mimi’s Bakehouse direct to your door. You get 20% o your online Mimi’s order with Resident Rewards.

If you want to give yourself a bit of a fright and blast away the winter cobwebs, head to the Edinburgh Dungeons where there’s a 30% discount via Resident Rewards, then pop around the corner to cafe and cocktail bar Hot Toddy where you’ll get 10% o your food and drinks as well as a comfy, cosy environment to decompress after all the jumpscares. Edinburgh is a city with a bit of everything, so grab your Resident Rewards and take advantage of what the city has to o er. Start exploring, and who knows what you might nd.

Image: Courtesy of Forever Edinburgh

Camera Obscura and World of Illusions

Image:

Courtesy of Edinburgh Gin

Edinburgh Gin Distillery at The Arches

Edinburgh Style Icons

What does Edinburgh Style mean to you? What is your Edinburgh STYLE Icon?

A STYLE Icon can be a person, place, store, building, interior… We asked some of The Skinny’s team to share their local style inspirations, and you can nominate yours for entry into this year’s STYLE Awards, part of the St James Quarter’s STYLE 2025

Shirley Manson

It was inconceivable, in Scotland, in the 90s, that the actual lead singer of actual Garbage could come from Edinburgh. No one cool came from Scotland. But she did – snarling on stage or in photoshoots bedecked in leopard print, heavy eyeliner, a shock of red lipstick, the sort of chic choppy bob I’m still trying to copy 30 years later. Punk street fashion that I had seen looking grimy on the actual street (speci cally Cockburn, then home of the capital’s countercultural teens). On Shirley Manson, though, it looks like the epitome of style. [Rosamund West]

Morningside Maisie

Big knits, vibrant patterns, block colours – Morningside Maisie may be a cat, but she’s the patron saint of Edinburgh’s vintage shoppers and charity shop diggers. Turn up at an art school seminar in a Fair Isle jumper, pleated kilt, a bandana and no shoes, and you’ll t right in; that’s the legacy of a style icon. [Peter Simpson]

Ncuti Gatwa

Ncuti Gatwa’s fashion sense irl is all clean lines, and impeccably eye-catching, oft risqué, tailoring, but the wardrobe of Eric E ong, his character in Sex Education, remains unmatched for me, and not something anyone can pull o easily. Con dent vibrant colour and pattern clashes expertly tied together his queer self with his African roots, and it was a joy to watch that evolution onscreen. [Tallah Brash]

Landform by Charles Jencks

Lovely green and blue hues, swirling geometric patterns, nature-inspired elegance, for me the grounds of National Galleries Scotland’s Modern

One represent ultimate style. Not to mention there’s an unmistakable sense of ‘art’ in the air, and the right setting can make even the most basic of out ts feel special.

[Ema Smekalova]

Port of Leith Distillery

Unbeatable views, clean lines, lovely shiny copper - what’s not to love about this big beefy unit soaring above, well, everything? Their Port and Sherry bottles are equally as glam, with gorge labels depicting Edinburgh landmarks. Get yourself up there asap. [Emilie Roberts]

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie represents everything a stylish modern woman should aspire to (with one huge exception) Chaotic a airs that destroy her personal and professional life, three-syllable pronunciation of the word ‘girls’, probably the only person ever to make tweed sexy? My icon, my hero – may she rest in peace. [Laurie Presswood]

Young Fathers

No other Scottish act can touch Young Fathers’ crown as the country’s coolest band. I rst saw the trio back in 2012, when they still dubbed themselves a boy band and incorporated dorky dance choreography in their live performances. But even then they had outrageous swagger and style, all bashed-up leather and vintage threads; MC Kayus even pulled o wearing an Arctic fox’s tail from his posterior. As they’ve grown in fame, their stage apparel has only become more unique and re ned. [ Jamie Dunn]

STYLE Icon Award

As part of St James Quarter’s Edinburgh STYLE, we’ll

be encouraging Edinburgh residents to ‘nominate’ their STYLE Icon for entry into this year’s Edinburgh STYLE Awards. A STYLE Icon can be a person, place, building, etc... Who do you feel is deserving of claiming the title of ‘Edinburgh STYLE Icon’.

Nominator Prize

To share your submission for the Edinburgh STYLE Icon Award for the chance to win two weekend tickets to Edinburgh STYLE Weekend (28-30 March) and enjoy a shopping spree with a £500 St James Quarter gift card, head to theskinny.co.uk/competitions now!

Photo: Fraser ColquhounDouglas

Image: NicoUtuk

Image: courtesy of

PortofLeithDistillery

Photo: Marilena Vlachopoulou

Features

22 Kicking off the body talk / puppets theme, Manipulate Festival’s Dawn Taylor discusses the programme and the radical potential of intimacy in theatre.

25 Afghan-German writer Moshtari Hilal on her book Ugliness and the politics of beauty.

26 layla-roxanne hill and Francesca Sobande on their book Look, Don’t Touch and the politics of feeling.

28 On the 25th anniversary of its UK release, we look back at Being John Malkovich’s prescient exploration of parasocial relationships.

29 Edinburgh-based writer-director Laura Carreira’s On Falling considers the physical and spiritual effects of the gig economy.

30 Vera Drew introduces supervillain satire The People’s Joker.

33 Baths aka Will Wiesenfeld on new record Gut and queer acceptance.

34 Post-punk trio Adwaith return with Solas, a double album written entirely in the Welsh language.

41 Artist Maud Sulter’s legacy lives on through a participatory events programme at Tramway.

42 We meet Dundee Radio Club’s Becca Clark and Su Shaw ahead of their maiden broadcast.

45 Inside the world of Go-Go Dancers in Scotland.

46 “Get podcasters 20% off at Bella Italia” – Chris Cantrill and Sunil Patel on their Rural Concerns podcast.

On the website...

Long-awaited funding news from Creative Scotland, more on the Glasgow Film Festival programme, a batch of Celtic Connections reviews, and Bob Hardy from Franz Ferdinand talks us through the band’s new album.

Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) A Town Called Panic; Florian Thoss; 404 Ink; Being John Malkovich On Falling; courtesy Vera Drew; Tonje Thilesen; Aled Llywelyn; © Estate of Maud Sulter. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022; Ibi Feher; Spit Ting; Polly Hillstead

Shot of the month

Jacob Alon @ The Caves, Edinburgh, 29 January by John Mackie

Across

1. Speech error (4,2,3,6)

9. Pure – unabridged (5)

10. Pre-adult (9)

11. Study of roots (9)

12. Feel – feeling (5)

13. Imagined (7)

15. E.g. biology (7)

17. Become interested in (3,4)

19. Execution-themed word game (7)

21. Design – theme (5)

23. Villains – so reviled (anag) (9)

25. Advantage (4,5)

26. Name – book (5)

27. You should be jealous about this – you the true aorta (anag) (3,4,5,3)

1. Fried (7)

2. Restlessness (5,4)

3. Be better than (5)

4. Treaded carefully (7)

5. (Fertilised) e s (7)

6. Hyperﬁxation (9)

7. Verdant (5)

8. Utmost – drastic (7)

14. Credo – team's info (anag) (7)

16. Assistant – poop (6,3)

17. Detective – goes "hum..." (anag) (7)

18. Outdoor (4,3)

19. Bobble – scrunchie (4,3)

20. Don't worry about it (2,5)

22. Characteristic (5)

Compiled by George

Sully

24. Put off (5) Feedback? Email crossword@theskinny.co.uk

Turn to page 7 for the solutions

In this month’s advice column, one reader wants to live that party girl lifestyle amidst a group of settled-down friends

What do you recommend for someone who wants to embrace a real party girl social life but whose closest pals are all quite reserved/in long-term relationships? I want to be on a joint mission of drunk ﬂirting but they are feeling more like wholesome catch-up drinks lol.

I DON’T KNOW BUT IT’S SO ANNOYING ISN’T IT? I too share this urge and at best I feel like Mephistopheles trying to lead my friends into a life of sin (sexy!), and at worst like one of those sad rom-com heroes with a Peter Pan complex who comes to see the error of their ways (not sexy!). Trying to live that party girl life with friends who are not up for it can feel so alienating; there’s this sense that they are somehow living their life ‘correctly’, with all the requisite maturity that the mainstream life narrative promises, and you are living your life ‘incorrectly’, trying to – God forbid – ‘have fun’.

I think it’s quite telling that my obligatory existential crisis when I turned 30 wasn’t about ageing per se, but about ageing out of my lifestyle, which simply does not reﬂect that of most of my peers. Sure age is just a number, blah blah blah, but we are ultimately formed by our social contexts and it’s kind of alarming when your social context stops matching the material conditions of your life. If you’re single (I assume you might be?) and you can’t live the glamorous single life, then truly what is the point? I have spent a lot of time crocheting this winter, and with each sweater vest it becomes increasingly difﬁcult not to envision a future as one of Jane Austen’s more tragic supporting characters.

To be brutally honest, I think the solution might be to ﬁnd new friends. No harm to your old ones! You don’t have to dump them! But maybe it’s about accepting people as they are, meeting them where they’re at, and knowing your own desires enough to follow them elsewhere. Volunteer at your local community radio station! This may be the most concrete piece of advice I’ve ever given but I really think it might work. It sounds like you want a different kind of life. You should go out and get it.

Bodies Bodies Bodies

Illustration: Thea Bryant

In this supposedly sexiest month of the year, when there is also a puppetry festival arriving in Edinburgh, we challenged the team to think about bodies/embodiment and how these intersect with ideas of desire, power, sexuality, intimacy, materi ality and autonomy. How we imagine and construct our embod ied selves, and how thinking about our bodies can be a cypher for how we exist in the world.

We meet the Artistic Director of Manipulate, to find out more on the festival’s programme, visual theatre, animation, and those puppets. Afghan-German writer Moshtari Hilal talks about her book Ugliness and the politics of the construction of beauty, while layla-roxanne hill and Francesca Sobande, the authors of Look, Don’t Touch, discuss the politics of feeling. Marking the milestone 25th anniversary of its UK release, we look back on that masterpiece of puppetry, John Malkovich. As On Falling comes to Glasgow Film Festival, we meet director Laura Carreira to discuss how precarious employment holds bodies and souls hostage; Vera Drew intro duces The People’s Joker, an absurdist trans-coming-of-age film that reimagines the origins of Batman’s nemesis; and we have words with Baths aka Will Wiesenfeld, about his bodily-named new record Guts, while visceral post-punk trio Adwaith tell their story of claiming space as three women from rural Wales. Intersections has the final word on this bodily theme, with a think piece on how foot fetishes can reduce STI transmission. Tl;dr: vibe is both sexy and political. Also puppets.

POSTER ARTIST (p36-37):

Dusty Watts is a recent graduate from the Glasgow School of Art who specialised in illustration. She's particularly interested in working three-dimensionally, exploring themes with a lighthearted and often slightly ridiculous touch. Her practice also extends into ﬁlm where she can bring her props to life. She is currently working as a part time ceramics teacher as well as a freelance printmaker.

dustystudio.cargo.site @dusty_watt

Puppets and Embodiment

As Manipulate Festival returns with another celebration of animated ﬁlm, puppetry and visual theatre, we talk to Artistic Director Dawn Taylor about the programme and the radical potential of intimacy in theatre

Speaking to Artistic Director Dawn Taylor about the Manipulate 2025 Festival programme, she shares a surprising anecdote.

A puppeteer, embroiled in a dispute with HMRC, asked if she could write a letter to advocate for them to justify their role as a performer. HMRC had argued that, because the puppeteer was ‘just manipulating objects’ rather than physically appearing on stage, they were just ‘operators’ and so the work did not qualify for theatre tax relief. This bafﬂing clash with a powerful governmental institution raises big questions about ofﬁcial perceptions of a performer’s presence, the nature of embodied labour, and the Kafkaesque hurdles surrounding puppetry and artistic work. Is the puppet autonomous? What is the puppet without the puppeteer, and what is the puppeteer without the puppet? The intimate relationship between puppet and puppeteer is as undeniable as the performativity of the puppeteer’s movements, which breathe life into the inanimate materiality of the puppet. And yet, how can we quantify the incorporeal elements of the life and breath that the puppet borrows?

In a year of having to ﬁght to justify the existence of artists, Taylor tells me that

Manipulate’s focus is precisely on them, investing in the Scottish sector, experimentation and de-growth. The festival aims to step back to reﬂect on what makes the arts in Scotland, and festivals like Manipulate, sustainable. “It’s been a terrible year for artists, with the Open Fund closing, [and subsequently re-opening after artists’ protests and public outrage] and it feels like routes to getting work to the stage have become far fewer. We think it’s the responsibility of organisations like us to respond to where our community are,” says Taylor.

Taking inspiration from performance artist Adrian Howells – whose 2006 performance Held led audiences through three progressively intimate scenes – visual theatre-maker Al Seed has challenged six artists to create Cartography, an intimate series of offers that reconﬁgure the audience-artist relationship. These works will be showcased in a labyrinthic journey at the Fruitmarket gallery, experimenting with visual techniques while inviting audiences to wind their way through different performance stations to engage with a variety of experimental forms.

Taylor and Seed share a frustration with the limitations artists have faced, particularly considering ongoing funding challenges and the lack of

freedom to make work that really takes risks. “This type of work in particular, as opposed to a play, really takes oxygen and time in a room and expertise and collaboration. And artists have been telling us that that just hasn’t felt possible,” says Taylor.

So, within the parameters of intimacy – designed for small audiences of around four – and brevity, the artists were given the autonomy to truly experiment. The resulting works will span a spectrum: some will be more installation-focused, others will lean towards ﬁlm, and some will be distinctly performative.

There isn’t much detail about the content of the pieces – almost as if the element of surprise is part of the mystique. This lack of information works on two levels: it piques my curiosity while also prompting questions about the subtle power dynamics inherent in intimate and immersive work as artists and small audiences meet. While this tradition of one-to-one or small-audience encounters invites vulnerability, connection, and risk, it also raises broader questions about the capacity of artists to adapt to an era of tightening budgets.

Over a decade ago, Mark Ravenhill complained: “You would think that the theatre, that most public of acts, would resist this transformation into private experience.” Intimacy, however, has long been a hallmark of resourceful artists operating in underfunded or alternative spaces – in the early 2000s, Argentina’s post-‘corralito’ economic crisis living-room theatre scene saw theatre-makers turn their own homes into stages.

“What is the puppet without the puppeteer, and what is the puppeteer without the puppet?”

Theatre and performance academic

Caroline Wake draws parallels between intimate exchanges and the work of highbrow artists like Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović, while also tracing their roots to the crystal-gazers and fortune-tellers of fairground traditions. Reﬂecting on my own experience, I vividly recall the deeply exposing tarot card reading I had with Chilean

Words: Andrea Cabrera Luna

A Town Called Panic

ﬁlmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky at Café Le Temeraire in Paris where the lines between performance and life were the most blurred I’ve ever experienced. Jodorowsky believes in group healing so in front of a small audience, I exposed my most intimate thoughts and desires – a moment that left me feeling profoundly vulnerable, exposed, held and healed. Well, at least for 15 minutes.

Contemporary theatre scholar Adam Alston’s take on artist-audience relationships adds to the conversation. He points out that it’s worth questioning how private exposure in these interactions might be exploited and how participatory opportunities aren’t always equally shared. Yet pioneering labyrinthic and immersive work La Menesunda by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín (made in collaboration with Pablo Suárez, David Lamelas, Rodolfo Prayón, Floreal Amor and Leopoldo Maler, it was presented on May 27, 1965, at the Torcuato di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires) absolutely revolutionised the art world. It brought people together in a way that was pretty spectacular.

Another promising aspect of the festival is Snapshots, which offers a glimpse of hope for emerging artists and works in progress. Craig McCulloch, who is a deaf artist and physical theatre performer, presents Nightmares, a piece about childhood and how nightmares can help us understand and process challenging things that are going on in our lives that may be too big or scary. This is the culmination of his process, supported by the Creative Fund and featuring an entirely deaf cast and creative team. Featuring less international live work than in previous editions, the festival still retains a strong sense of internationalism, particularly through its Queer Stories ﬁlm programme, which remains as global as ever. “There are so

many urgent voices and amazing queer voices in animation,” says Taylor. Animation, she notes, creates unique possibilities for storytelling, allowing artists to tackle themes that might be difﬁcult to explore through live-action performance. The result is a programme packed with bold and beautiful work, co-curated with Fraser MacLeod.

Complementing the animation programme is On the Edge, a new initiative co-created with Take One Action. This collaboration marks a ﬁrst for Manipulate, expanding its lens to explore circumpolar regions – the Arctic and sub-Arctic nations – and their relationships with a changing climate. “Often, when we talk about climate change, we focus on the equator, where communities face its sharpest impacts,” Taylor explains. “But the ripples are felt across the globe, including in northernmost regions. We wanted to ask: What does climate change mean in these areas? And what are the cultural relationships between high-latitude nations?”

Through this thematic approach, On the Edge highlights unexpected links between communities, cultures, and ecosystems in these regions. By shifting the focus to the north, the programme offers audiences a fresh perspective on the global climate crisis while delving into the interconnectedness of cultural and environmental change. Manipulate 2025 offers a space to reﬂect and reconnect. Whether you’re delving into the intimate world of Cartography, exploring bold global perspectives in the ﬁlm lineup, or attending a workshop like So You Think a Puppet Could Tell Your Story Better Than Yourself with the always witty Mamoru Iriguchi and Fergus Dunnet, the festival has a lot to offer.

Manipulate Festival 2025, 12-15 Feb, venues across Edinburgh manipulatearts.co.uk

Jack Anderson in Shotput for Snapshots Acrodance with Gabbi Cook

Photo: Simon Abel

Photo: Amy Sinead

Three Women

This month Lucy Askew, Chief Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland gives us an insight into three works by women artists which have been added to the national collection

These three works – Frieda Toranzo Jaegar’s The Disorder of Desire, Caroline Walker’s Theatre and Marie Laurencin’s La Lecture dans un Parc – are very di erent in terms of their style and approach, but a common feature between them is the representation of people or objects in the world. In each case, the artists could be said to be sharing scenarios that invite the viewer to imagine a story about what they see in the painting.

The Disorder of Desire (2022) by Mexican artist Frieda Toranzo Jaeger ( born 1988) takes the form of a still life which turns the conventions of Western art history on its head. The painting expresses Toranzo Jaeger’s interest in creating works unbound from classication, and which re ect her queer, feminist perspective.

Botanical imagery featured in Renaissance religious paintings from the fteenth and sixteenth centuries, and seventeenth century Dutch still life painting. However, in Toranzo Jaeger’s work, the ora has multiple references. She employs Indigenous Mexican women expert in pre-Columbian embroidery techniques, passed from mother to daughter. Their embroidery disrupts the painted surface and is intended to highlight the value of Indigenous traditions and labour, too often overlooked as being the work of women or so-called ‘other, ‘non-Western’ communities.

Caroline Walker’s Theatre (2021) is a collective portrait of NHS sta working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Born in Dunfermline in 1982, Walker is one of today’s leading contemporary painters. Her practice highlights a wide range of female perspectives on contemporary society, particularly scenes capturing the nuance and complexity of women’s working lives.

Theatre was painted following the artist’s residency at the maternity wing of University College London Hospital. The grand scale of this operating theatre scene captures an intimate moment after a birth by caesarean section. The mother gazes towards her child, their bodies separated by the all-female medical team at work. The baby is being warmed in a Resuscitaire medical device, while the midwives check him over.

In Marie Laurencin’s Reading in the Park (around 1926) we encounter a dream-like, pastoral space in which three women sit together with a lamb and a dove. All these characters are equally engrossed in whatever story is being read.

Laurencin’s ethereal, simpli ed style was distinctively her own and this painting is typical of her use of pastel colours. The artist noted her interest in exploring what she saw as feminine worlds, perhaps in opposition to the heavily maledominated environment in which she lived and worked.

Despite having been raised in poverty, Laurencin achieved fame within her lifetime as an artist; Reading in the Park was made while she was at the height of her powers. As part of Paris’s literary lesbian community, Laurencin was at the centre of its progressive artistic scene. During her career she also made portraits of signi cant creative women, including Coco Chanel, and created designs for interiors as well as stage sets and costumes for the theatre.

Each of these three artists is signi cant in the history of art, and in each case, the acquisitions have allowed us to represent these artists’ practices for the rst time. In di erent ways the artists each explore ideas and experiences from a female perspective, and open up di erent narratives about what it is to be a woman in the world.

For over ten years we have been proactive in acquiring works by women artists for the National Galleries of Scotland’s modern and contemporary collection, which spans roughly from 1900 to the present day. At that point only around 12% of works within this part of the collection were by women artists and we recognised that we had work to do to change this, to re ect the important role of women artists in history. This work has extended across the National Galleries of Scotland’s collection.

It has been exciting and positive in the intervening decade to see how this has resulted in a wide number of important acquisitions of artworks by women artists, and we are also now increasingly taking an intersectional approach. It is important to us that we are able to have works in the collection that represent a range of histories and backgrounds and allow all of our visitors to feel they are represented within their collection.

Frieda Toranzo Jaegar’s The Disorder of Desire, Caroline Walker’s Theatre and Marie Laurencin’s La Lecture dans un Parc are on display and free to visit in National Galleries Scotland’s Modern, National and Portrait galleries

To nd out more visit www.nationalgalleries.org

Marie Laurencin, La Lecture dans un Parc, about 1926

Image: courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland. Accepted by HM Government in Lieu of Inheritance Tax from the estate of Elizabeth Morhange and allocated to National Galleries of Scotland.

Caroline Walker, Theatre, 2021

Image: courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland. Acquired with the generous support of Tia Collection, 2024Scotland.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, The Disorder of Desire, 2022

Ugly Thoughts

We speak with Afghan-German writer Moshtari Hilal about her book Ugliness and the politics of how beauty is constructed

“Ilike to talk about beauty and ugliness in terms of assimilation, rather than self optimisation,” Moshtari Hilal comments on her debut book Ugliness, which has recently been translated into English from its original German. Composed of poetry, essays and visual art, Ugliness deﬁes categorisation. It is at once autobiographical work, charting Hilal’s awareness and subsequent policing of her own ugliness, but it also traces the construction of ugliness and beauty as political tools to delineate the line between belonging and isolation. The text collapses time and geographies, the personal and the public, pain and pleasure – not to tell us what ugliness is but to reveal its power in dictating our social and material conditions.

“I found it very important to link personal intimate moments of self-hate with the language of criminalisation, assimilation, othering and colonialism. Because that is where it comes from,” Hilal tells me. She fuses her own experience of ugliness, deeply shaped by the experience of growing up in Germany as an Afghan immigrant, with the history of ugliness as a social construct. The chapter on noses, titled Nasal Analysis, opens with a brief history on the origins of rhinoplasty and its founder, Jacques Joseph, a GermanJewish doctor who claimed that those who opted for surgically altering their bodies could ‘become happier in life by attaining a normal or ideal appearance.’ This is immediately followed by a personal excerpt describing the long noses shared by the women of Hilal’s family, and the relentless criticism they experienced because of it. Hilal’s deft traversing between the historical and the intimate blurs the boundaries of linear chronology. For Hilal, it is clear that ugliness is a shared embodied legacy, where our insecurities are not individual or even personal.

“Beauty is not just something that passively exists. It is violently constructed”

Moshtari Hila

Yet there is no solace to be found in beauty. The process of beautiﬁcation, so often depicted in mainstream (usually Western) ﬁlm and books as something gentle and passive, and referred to euphemistically as a ‘makeover’ or ‘glow-up’ is

Words: Laila Ghaffar

truthfully described by Hilal as a violent and tortuous process. The chapter of the book focussed on hair removal reads like a horror show; detailed descriptions of razors, blades, bleach and blood abound. Hilal smiles at this comparison.

“I wanted to tell the story of beauty as something horrible and violent, rather than innocent or passive,” she says. “Beauty is not just something that passively exists. It is violently constructed.” Beauty is also, Hilal notes, an ephemeral concept which requires daily investment of time and material resources for its upkeep. “The power of beauty is its role in disciplining our everyday routines and behaviours,” she says, observing how the COVID lockdown presented a crisis to beauty. “People could not maintain their beauty practices – either their hair grew or their nail extensions became too long,” she says. “It was like a reverse Cinderella effect. The upkeep and promise of beauty was no longer a truth you could hide.”

Although Ugliness is an indictment of the social manipulation of aesthetics, Hilal does not place direct blame on any single individual or group for reproducing and manipulating these hierarchies. The poetic interventions woven into the text reﬂect on her childhood encounters with the women in her family, particularly her aunts. “Most of the people policing my looks were aunts, because they understood that you are in a cultural setting where your value is linked to your looks,” she explains. Rather than casting anger or shame,

Hilal uses poetry to recall these moments with deep tenderness and sensitivity. Although theoretically rigorous, Ugliness is also characterised by a profound sense of longing – longing for better, longing for more and longing for change.

Up until recently, Hilal’s interrogation of ugliness has been through her visual artistic practice. She distorts her own image by enlarging her facial features, usually her nose, to grotesque proportions or adorns her face with a thick moustache or unibrow. These anatomical visual studies punctuate the text, giving form, shape and colour to Hilal’s intimate insecurities. But they also serve another purpose. Hilal was clear that she did not want to reproduce historic studies of racialised bodies, and so reproduced them in her own image.

“Everytime we scrutinise ourselves or selfdiscipline our bodies, it is never just about us,” she explains. “We exist in and reproduce a tradition of dehumanisation.” Through her self portraits, Hilal extends the invitation for us to locate ourselves in the tradition of ugliness, and question how we might reproduce it by both judging ourselves and others. “I want the reader to feel like they are part of the research. Research is bound with memory, and I wanted to create that experience of familiarity.”

To read Ugliness is to confront the twin myths of ugliness and beauty. This is the truth we already embody but will not name. The power of Hilal’s work is that she poses deeply threatening questions with great care. “Why do we need the ugly?” she asks. “Why do we fear them?”

Ugliness is out on 11 Feb with New Vessel Press

Moshtari Hilal

Tactile Politics

We chat with layla-roxanne hill and Francesca Sobande, the authors of Look, Don’t Touch, about the politics of feeling in contemporary society

The latest of 404 Ink’s Inkling series to hit shelves, Look, Don’t Touch: Reﬂections on the Freedom to Feel by layla-roxanne hill and Francesca Sobande explores connectivity, emotions, (im)mortality, boundaries and the language of ‘okayness’ embedded in our day to day lives. The book grew from “conversations in many different forms… cards, letters, WhatsApps, audios, long telephone calls and even a Skype phase,” hill and Sobande say – conversations between them that span years of friendship, enhanced by the contours and confusion of the COVID pandemic as connection shrank online. This period prompted them to focus on “acknowledging and sitting with the messiness of life” in a way that felt generative and expansive.

The pair started looking at public signage, such as the ‘Look, Don’t Touch’ signs that lend their name to the book. Questioning the double entendre behind the wording of signs and the intended recipients of the messaging, hill and Sobande began to think about the commanding

“Nothing right now is unprecedented, despite how it’s discussed”

Francesca Sobande

nature of street signs and their emphasis on public appearance and morality which contributes to isolationist mindsets.

“One of the things that comes to mind,” Sobande says, “was around two or three years ago when we met in a café and were speaking about the particular signs that had cropped up on streets during that time, and how COVID was being used to legitimise ways that governments and public bodies were trying to make it more difﬁcult for people to exist in public spaces.

“I think we wanted to try and embrace some sense of freedom in the process [of writing,]” Sobande adds. “We wanted to grapple with the speciﬁcs of exactly what is happening in different spaces at this point of time. How in some ways, nothing right now is unprecedented, despite how it’s discussed.”

The pair employ a multi-media approach, flitting between music, culture, film and television references to explore ways of feeling – how softness and hardness can be felt together in the work of Gothicness, Black Metal and Nu-Metal music, for example, and how media can create spaces of reflection and visibility. Towards the end of the book is a playlist of the songs they listened to over the course of writing, and their experiences of neurodiversity when it comes to writing are centred throughout. Inviting the reader to come and go from their pages in a similar style, hill and Sobande stress that both their writing process and its reception need not be linear. “It doesn’t matter if [the readers] don’t read all of it,” hill adds. “It doesn’t matter if they read some of it. You know, even if they just look at it – we’re happy about that.”

Central to the book is how technology serves as both barrier and broker to communication, the hypocrisy of microtrends underlying the paradox of online connection and the (lack) of freedom in society to feel. “Everybody’s always rebranding,” says hill. “That’s not new. But now it seems that there has to be a particular way in which you have to rebrand, be that through a Brat summer, be that through a Rat Girl summer, be that through Clean Girl or Maﬁa Wife or one of the many, maybe billions of microtrends that there are.” The irony of the illusion of uniqueness embedded within microtrends, echoed multiple times on social media, highlights the pursuit of online connectivity and the fallacy it ultimately pedals. This clamour for connection across screens that the pair unpick points to the inherent consumerism placed within ideas of ‘rebranding’ and identity.

Above all, the pair emphasise embracing and acknowledging feelings of confusion. ‘Okayness’ takes many different forms, as hill says: “the platform-itsation of existing and being involves this pressure on writing streaks or keeping up your daily routine of learning this or that, or tracking your number of steps.” Look, Don’t Touch encourages readers to pause in the pursuit of okayness

Words: Josephine Jay

which as Sobande points out, means “you lose sense of that space for curiosity and experimentation and dreaming, which I guess we’ve tried to include as part of this.”

The phrase, ‘it's okay to not be okay’ is discussed at some length. “If the sentiment contributes to [people] feeling more able to open up about stru les, we wouldn’t want to be dismissive of that,” Sobande says, “But for many, a lot more is needed materially and structurally to support them and address systemic reasons.” hill and Sobande explore how “the idea of okayness feels restraining. It can be weaponised to not only distract from, but to deny the structural realities of genocidal actions, racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, capitalism, and so much more.” Their book explores how billing okayness as a model of social value can be detrimental and reductive. hill continues: “I think it can also be part of very oppressive political projects to create revisionist accounts of history and to deny violences that are happening right now.”

Look, Don’t Touch is a small window and testament to the friendship of layla-roxanne and Francesca. Their work disentangles the hypocrisy embedded in many forms of technological connection that ultimately create distance between users – a start but certainly not the end of a conversation that still has many corners left to explore.

Look, Don’t Touch is out on 20 Feb with 404 Ink

Francesca Sobande

layla-roxanne hill

Image: courtesy of author

Head Canon

Twenty-ﬁve years after its UK release, Being John Malkovich offers a prescient look at celebrity, parasocial relationships, and the horror of being inside your own head

“Consciousness is a terrible curse; I think, I feel, I suffer…” – Craig Schwartz, to a chimpanzee

In Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s beguiling 1999 comedy Being John Malkovich, John Cusack plays Craig Schwartz, a sad-sack who begrudgingly takes an office job as his puppetry career refuses to take off. At the office, he and his new work crush, Maxine (Catherine Keener), discover a mysterious door behind a filing cabinet, which leads directly into the head of noted star of stage and screen John Malkovich. After a few test runs, Maxine and Craig hatch a plan to monetise their access; Craig, Maxine and Craig’s wife, Lottie (Cameron Diaz), end up in a psychosexual love triangle; Malkovich starts to notice something’s up; chaos ensues.

This is a film that draws you in with Jonze’s trademark surreal-to-zany flourishes, from the half-height ceilings of Schwartz’s new office workplace, to Craig and Lottie’s bizarre menagerie of animals including the aforementioned chimp, to an iconic scene in which John Malkovich goes into the head of John Malkovich and suddenly *everyone* is John Malkovich.

“Being John Malkovich presses and prods at the divide between personal and private, then punches a great big hole in the wall”

But pretty quickly, the ﬁlm starts to hit you with something darker and more existential. It asks the classic body swap question – ‘What if you could see the world through the eyes of another?’ – then answers it with a strained expression and a ‘cut it out’ hand gesture.

Take our ﬁrst trip into Malkovich. Craig crawls down a low, dank tunnel that almost seems to be sweating and breathing, before he’s violently sucked in, the darkness descending and the door slamming behind him. All of a sudden we take Malkovich’s point of view, but there’s a disconcerting thrum in the background, and a haziness to the edges of the image. We clomp about in John’s shoes, and we squelch and crunch and slurp our way through breakfast. The sound is bassy, the speech is mufﬂed, the camera is juddery. We’re in his body, but we are interlopers, sticking our heads through the door and nosying around. We are not, in any meaningful sense, John Malkovich.

Words: Peter Simpson

As their visits to Malkovich continue, characters gain more control over the Malkovich body, and start to reﬂect on gender, power, their relationships with one another and with themselves. But in 2025, the ability to temporarily dive into another body and experience worlds through the eyes of another does exist – and it feels quite telling that in the real world, nobody seems to want it. The bi est technology companies the world has ever seen, during a pandemic where many people had nothing else to do, couldn’t make virtual reality or the ‘metaverse’ stick as anything other than a punchline about Mark Zuckerberg’s legs.

Being in your own body can be gross enough, with your blocked nose and itchy skin and thoughts and feelings, without taking a leap into someone else’s. Rather than jumping from vessel to vessel, the hardware and software of the 21st century are about observing anything you want, at a safe remove that comes with holding a rectangle 12 inches from your face.

But in an environment saturated with text, images and audio, you need a hook. Parasocial relationships, where audiences are encouraged to see stars as friends rather than distant unknowable beings, are the cornerstone of modern life. Finished a book? You should follow the author on Instagram! Liked that song on the radio? Watch this video to ﬁnd out what the singer takes with them on a plane! But Being John Malkovich pushes the idea one step further. When you log in

for your 15 minutes with the star of Con Air, you aren’t just tracking what John gets up to on his day off, or watching an actor get ready for his big night out; you *are* the actor, and it’s your night out. It’s this breach of the pact between performer and audience that sends Malkovich spinning, and results in Schwartz taking full control of his host and turning him into a literal puppet to act out his greatest desires (which involve remaking John Malkovich as the world’s greatest puppeteer – metaphor is truly a hell of a drug).

As much as the new century has changed how we interact, there is still a desire and a deep need for some division between our personal and private lives, to turn off if we want to and turn away when we have to. Being John Malkovich presses and prods at the edges of this division then punches a great big hole in the wall, challenging the viewer to think about what we actually want from our relationships with celebrities, society and those closest to us, and what it means to be ourselves when we’re so immersed in outside inﬂuence. We’re in the future where everyone can and will be famous for 15 minutes – but we won’t all get to be John Malkovich.

Being John Malkovich was released in UK cinemas on 17 Mar 2000

It’s available to stream on Sky and Now Cinema, and available to rent from sundry VOD platforms

Image: courtesy of Being John Malkovic

Money Trap

On Falling takes us inside the empty life of a picker at an Amazon-like warehouse. Edinburgh-based writer-director Laura Carreira tells us why she wanted to explore the physical, ﬁnancial and spiritual toll of working within the gig economy

Words: Jamie Dunn

Have you ever noticed how rarely you see people working on screen? It’s something that dawned on Portuguese ﬁlmmaker Laura Carreira around the time she arrived in Scotland, aged 18, to begin a course studying ﬁlm at Edinburgh College of Art. The move coincided with her taking on shift work to pay her way. The combination of her studies and jobs caused “a kind of crisis” and altered her outlook on life.

“I suddenly had this realisation of how much of our lives are defined by work and how little we talk about it,” Carreira tells me. ”I was seeing so many films at school where the characters didn’t particularly talk about money, and seemed to have so much time to do what they wanted. And then I was looking at my own life, which was so defined by shifts and having to request time off with enough time in advance, and working really hard and barely making ends meet.”

of those vast facilities that stores, processes, and ships products purchased online.

At ECA, Carreira’s focus was documentary, and she’d hoped to redress this imbalance by exploring work in a ﬁlm. Her plan was simply to ask companies if she could bring in her camera to document the shop ﬂoor. “I guess maybe I was a little naive,” she admits. “Of course companies weren’t up for that.”

By the time Carreira realised the documentary would be too compromised, she had finished the course. But after several years of working as an editor, she returned to the idea in a fiction film, her breakthrough short Red Hill. Her urgent follow-up The Shift, about a woman forced to make some tough decisions while out food shopping when she discovers her agency work has fallen through, was even more successful in its exploration of the precarity of the gig economy. It helped pave the way for her debut feature, On Falling, a similarly clear-eyed condemnation of modern working conditions. In this case, it concerns Aurora (Joana Santos), a Portuguese woman living in Edinburgh who works as a “picker” in a fulfilment centre, one

Carreira discovered the job of the picker – the person responsible for running around these warehouses to select items from storage shelves for online orders – while researching precarious agency work for The Shift. “The more I found out about [pickers], the more I realised how interesting a job it is.” One thing Carreira discovered was that the picker role debunks the myths about the modern miracle of online shopping. “We’re told that online shopping is really easy because these companies are using innovation and technology to streamline the process to get these items to our house so quickly,” says Carreira. “But what was shocking to me was how these pickers are made to really rush to get your items; that’s where the speed comes from.”

Cinema is not short of depictions of poverty, but the type of poverty we tend to see on screen is usually the most extreme kind of destitution, so far removed from the average viewer’s life that it feels like science ﬁction to most. But On Falling is concerned with a different kind of poverty: one that many millions of people in the UK face. Aurora works, she has shelter (she lives with several strangers in a private HMO let), and food (hearty and cheap bowls of pasta). But she has no

safety net. She’s one or two unexpected expenses away from freefall. “I was interested in that constant feeling of not being secure,” explains Carreira. “I think that does a lot to your psyche when you don’t have the freedom to live your life in a comfortable way.”

Basics aren’t the only thing Aurora is going without. Carreira’s ﬁlm draws a sharp line between poverty and the modern epidemic of loneliness. “I think it’s well documented how these jobs are really exploitative and tough physically,” she says. “But I wanted to go a little further and look at what these kinds of jobs do to you almost spiritually as well. The fact you don’t have money is not just problematic because you’re not getting the basics, it’s also excluding you from society. It’s excluding you from activities that would be as everyday as going out for a drink with a friend. I wanted to look at the bi er picture: what is your life like when you’re just working to barely survive?”

On Falling has clearly struck a chord. It’s been winning awards at festivals all across the world, including Best Debut at London Film Festival and Best Director at San Sebastián. It should be required watching for every right-wing pundit or Tory politician who sees poverty as a failure of an individual’s moral fibre. “I think a lot of the times we’re told to look within to fix our financial precarity or fix our mental health,” says Carreira. “With this film, I was trying to frame that stru le within a context. I think it’s valuable if the film introduces that idea of looking at what’s around us, and potentially looking for solutions there, instead of blaming the individual first. That, I think, would be a good takeaway.”

On Falling has its Scottish premiere at Glasgow Film Festival on 28 Feb and 1 Mar, and is on general release by CONIC on 7 Mar

Origin Story

Following the ﬂop of Folie à Deux, you might think the world domination of comic book movies is coming to an end – but Vera Drew, director of supervillain satire The People’s Joker, has united hundreds of artists in the crossover event of the century

Words: Ellie Robertson

“Batman’s just very gay.” Vera Drew draws her connection between the Caped Crusader and the closet by citing men in tights, rubber nipples and fractured identities. Drew’s background is in editing, piecing together shows for Adult Swim and often teaming up with comedy duo Tim & Eric. The leap to feature-length ﬁlmmaking became her calling after COVID, and inspiration struck when a friend commissioned her to edit her own cut of Todd Phillips’ Joker

“At that point, every superhero movie was just like, look how gritty and dark and serious it is!” she explains. “And to me, that’s not what’s interesting about comics… Like, why do I need to watch something that’s some approximation of my reality when comics have a larger-than-life thing to them?” But while splicing in slapstick sound effects to Phillips’s dour ﬁlm, Drew was putting herself in Arthur Fleck’s shoes. “It resonated with me as a mentally ill trans woman who had run up against various institutions in that same way… but the idea of talking about all that stuff with a Joel Schumacher [the auteur of 90s Batman entries Batman Forever and Batman & Robin] aesthetic was what ﬁnally clicked.”

Wanting to do more than remix memes into someone else’s ﬁlm, Drew posted an open call for collaborators, and got a few hundred more responses than she expected. “Like, every single style of animation,” she recalls. “So, OK, this is gonna be a mixed media thing; this is gonna be like Natural Born Killers or Pink Floyd’s The Wall. In one scene a character might be a Barbie doll and in the next it’ll be a two-dimensional thing and then it’ll be live action.”

The ﬁnal product is The People’s Joker, which sees Drew adopt the alter-ego ‘Joker the Harlequin’ in a patchwork parody of DC story beats. Expect unhinged animation, gonzo greenscreen effects, and a rogues’ gallery of cult comedy cameos (Tim Heidecker voices a TV broadcaster demanding Batman save Gotham from the “transsexual reptilian agenda”).

But the ﬁlm isn’t just one big gag: this multimedia multiverse features Drew’s most formative memories; her stint in stand-up is shown as starting Gotham’s ﬁrst anti-comedy club; a toxic T4T relationship plays out with a Jared Leto-style ‘Mr J’; and the director’s childhood gender dysphoria is gassed away into gi les, courtesy of a pediatric Scarecrow.

“It felt like this opportunity to do a sort of play therapy,” Drew reﬂects on being on the other side of the camera. “I never even sat down and memorised lines, I just showed up on set and it poured out of me.” Superheroes, or their secret identities, often have an everyman quality, so audiences can project themselves onto the day-saving do-gooders. But as injustice becomes more transparent in the world, embodying the antihero, one who antagonises society, can be just as empowering.

Joker the Harlequin learns to laugh away the pain under acclaimed comedian Ra’s al Ghul, played by outsider artist David Liebe Hart. Drew directed Hart’s Adult Swim web series, and knew from day one she wanted him to play the mentor in the training montage. “He’s the one that has all the answers, and I just thought that was such an interesting role to give to somebody like [David]”, says Drew. The casting is especially apt as Hart’s awkward anti-comedy often plays to bewildered audiences. “When they talk about David, they sort of remove his agency or describe him as if he’s being exploited, or the joke’s on him… That’s never been my sense of him; he is super aware of how funny he is, and how outsider-y and outlandish he is.”

The People’s Joker premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, but nobody in the 600-strong audience knew how close the picture came to being canned. “The night before was when we had ﬁrst heard from Warner Brothers that they were trying to bury the movie,” Drew recalls, “so up until a couple of hours before, I wasn’t even sure we were gonna have a screening.” The possibility of losing this limited edition community project was traumatising, but after two years of negotiations, the ﬁlm has found distribution – copyright holders have a sense of humour after all.

Drew’s ﬁlm couldn’t come to UK cinemas at a better time. With our queer communities on the defensive, a narrative of trans triumph is sure to put a smile on those faces. At the Toronto premiere, a touched mother even told the director that she now felt she knew how to talk to her daughter. “No part of me ever thought the parents of a trans person would watch that movie, and get something out of it,” says Drew. A lot of actors have donned the Joker’s white makeup over the years – but not everyone who dresses up as the iconic supervillain gets such a heroic reception.

The People’s Joker is released 21 Feb by Matchbox Cine

The People's Joker

Queer Melancholy

One writer explores the companionship he’s found in Baths’ music over the years, catching up with Will Wiesenfeld to discuss new record Gut and queer acceptance

Once, aged nineteen, I headbanged so hard – headphones plu ed in, so as to not wake my usually-indignant ﬂatmate – that I whacked my head against the corner of my laptop. When I looked back up at the wall-length mirror in my tiny, overpriced room, I saw blood mapped half my face, from the miniscule cut above my right eye.

The song I was so enraptured in was No Eyes by Baths, aka Will Wiesenfeld, from his 2013 album Obsidian. It was 1am; I was a young queer, living in an unfamiliar city (Dublin). I was single. I was lonely. Ever since then, No Eyes is up there as a song too good to listen to, along with LCD Soundsystem’s american dream and Not What I Needed by Car Seat Headrest – too hot to the touch, like blood over the eye. They conjure an adolescent universe of emotion.

What I ﬁnd most brutal about No Eyes (a song about seeking casual sex “rooted in apathy,” Wiesenfeld tells me over video call) is the brevity of its intermission. It chugs, relentless as desire, Wiesenfeld’s abrasive topline all howls and yelps, before suddenly pausing with quiet piano. But any reprieve we expect is sucked away with a wave of crashing harsh noise, and we’re back to the inescapable beat. What had come before will persist, again and again, whether we want it to settle or not.

Baths’ music treads this ground constantly. It’s been a companion to me, over the years, through all my questioning, my queer melancholy, my queer ambivalence. Aged nineteen, it was hard to know what the “right” way to be queer was, as if it were possible to be illegitimate in my attraction to men; that I could be discredited. Not enough casual sex, too horny, not horny enough, averse to gay clubs, etcetera. Chronic eczema distorted my body image, made me feel inadequate, failing at twinkdom. Community-making was always a searching. I never felt I could ﬁt. ‘I’m queer in a way that works for you,’ Wiesenfeld sings on Human Bog, getting at the colossus of this expectation. Or this ambivalence towards hook-ups, on 2014 B-side Disorderly: ‘Forgot to thank you for your love / Whatever your name was.’

The lyrics for Human Bog “came all at once,” Wiesenfeld says, “[but] disconnected from music… a complete miracle.” There’s a vivid poetics to Wiesenfeld’s lyrics, irrespective of the lush electronic production that accompanies them. Obsidian is full of dark startling gems, apocalyptic turns of phrase, or this desperate confession in No Eyes, words which haunted my teenage mind: ‘It is not a matter of / If you mean it / But it is only a matter of / Come and fuck me’.

For so much of this queer melancholy is illogical; it lives in the stomach. Hence Gut. Baths’ latest record is a truly sophisticated achievement, dra ing this queer melancholy right to the fore. It’s “all instinctual, uncouth or unfriendly,” Wiesenfeld says, “coming back to the negative feelings I’ve had all my life and allowing them to be said out loud… making a new mess out of that stuff.” Whereas the spoken-word intro for Obsidian

Words: Ian Macartney

“There is this lingering philosophy of Christianity in my brain that hinders me from being 100% of the person I want to be”

Will Wiesenfeld, Baths

conjured a Sheol-like space, ecstatic Gut opener Eyewall telescopes in on a lover. The chorus of several selves comes to the fore on Sea of Men – sassy, demure, sincere, yelping, ‘on their knees.’ Homosexuals, meanwhile, features tumbling drums, warped guitar, and a lament: ‘Know that none of how I’ve loved is working.’

The story of the queer body is never done on Gut. Closer, The Sound of a Blooming Flower, exempliﬁes this. With the title taken from “a Björk interview, Vespertine-era,” where she mentions the impossible task, the seven-minute epic starts with a quiet piano ballad, before shooting into the stratosphere with maximalist glee like an anime theme on poppers. “So much of that song is tied into the weight of a Christian childhood,” Wiesenfeld explains, “to thinking that certain things have to be a certain way,” something also reﬂected in the song Cedar Stairwell, where ‘our parents pause to see us through the glassware.’ For Wiesenfeld, Gut dramatises “the tandem nature of my slow abandonment” of these expectations, even

though “it’s always messy. I still feel there is this lingering philosophy of Christianity somewhere in my brain that hinders me from being 100% of the person I want to be.” The Sound of a Blooming Flower is “not ending the album on a positive note,” Wiesenfeld says, “so much as acceptance.”

As queer people, we do this all the time: accept the darker currents underneath our daily experience, be they social (homophobia) or psychological (religious shame). We persist. ‘Some beauty just annihilates’, Wiesenfeld screams in the last minute of the record. Gut is a prime example of the ‘queer art of failure’, to paraphrase Jack Halberstam – in other words, it’s art of feeling, total feeling, beyond all else. Ultimately, it’s art that helps me feel, truly, the contours, complexities, and possibilities, of my strange anxious queer self.

Gut is released on 21 Feb via Basement’s Basement; Baths plays The Poetry Club, Glasgow, 6 May bathsmusic.net

Baths

Photo: Tonje Thilesen

The Age of Enlightenment

Post-punk trio Adwaith have always been outspoken from voicing adolescent frustrations to reﬂections on recovery. But they have more to say, returning with a double album written entirely in the Welsh language

“Iremember when they announced ‘The winner is Adwaith!’ I just cried ‘Fuck off!’,” begins Hollie Singer, guitarist and vocalist of the Welsh trio. She’s snu led up beside her two bandmates, bassist Gwenllian Anthony and drummer Heledd Owen, on a single sofa in their rehearsal space. The group is recalling the moment when they won the Welsh Music Prize for the second time beating off homegrown heroes Manic Street Preachers and wonky pop patron Cate Le Bon. “I had to work in Starbucks the next morning,” continues Singer, clearly dumbfounded. “We were in the paper and I was in work like…,” she mimicks holding the front page aloft to her colleagues.

Adwaith has never been a band to shy away from the local spotlight. In fact, it was the lack of young women in its glare that propelled them to come together almost a decade ago. “When we would go to gigs in the Welsh music scene, there would be no females,” says Singer. “We thought, ‘We could do this!’” Three years on and their debut Melyn (meaning yellow) showcased a real moment of autonomy for the Carmarthen-based friends. Holed up in the rural residential studio space of Giant Wafer allowed Adwaith not only to tap into the evocative landscapes around them but also explore the impossible. “Nothing was too silly. Nothing was too crazy. Nothing was a stupid idea,” reasons Singer.

The reception proved the group’s cosmic take on post-punk guitars was far from crazy, ba ing them their ﬁrst Welsh Music Prize win the

following year. Follow-up Bato Mato pushed their creativity to even more radical realms, conﬁdently pulling from sprawling shoegaze into more doomdwelling, monster riffs. No wonder they snatched the title again in 2022. If Prize founder BBC 6Music radio presenter Huw Stephens is looking “to celebrate the best new music in Wales,” a band like Adwaith continues to push the brief for fresh and forward-thinking.

“Why would you compromise if you can’t even make a living singing in English?”

Heledd Owen, Adwaith

None more so than with latest record Solas, a Celtic word meaning enlightenment. This month’s returning release marks Adwaith’s most ambitious body of work to date; the ﬁrst double album from an all-female Welsh-language band. Long gone are the days of local exports like Super Furry Animals and Catatonia shirking off their mother tongue for the mainstream English chart positions, something that SFA keyboardist Cian Ciaran later admitted feeling guilty about in a 2020 VICE interview sharing, “We felt we had to in order to make a

Words: Cheri Amour

living. We hit a glass ceiling.” Instead, a new legion of Welsh language acts like Adwaith, Gwenno (her first solo full-length Y Dydd Olaf was almost entirely in Welsh) and, more recently, drill music maker Sage Todz is finally cutting through. “It’s so difficult to even make a living as a musician now,” posits Owen. “Why would you compromise if you can’t even make a living singing in English? Why would you compromise on what you want to do?”

There are no compromises with a bumper release like Solas though. “We did pre-production this time which we’ve never done before,” relays Anthony, “so we went to the studio with every single idea, riff, and GarageBand demo.” The plan was to narrow down to a smaller selection of ﬁne-tuned songs until a happy problem presented itself, as Singer confesses. “We were like, ‘Well, they’re all good so now what?’ Then Steff (Steffan Pringle, a Cardiff-based producer) was like, ‘It’s almost like you’re doing a double album!’” “We’ve not strayed from the idea since,” concludes Anthony. There are so many things that have led Adwaith here. Singing in the Welsh language has been a big boon on home turf and beyond. Their transient relationship with recording has fostered a healthy curiosity in the studio. Prepare for an eclectic array of instrumentation. Plucked piano strings from a broken upright. Owen’s 3D-printed pipe lands “somewhere between an oboe and a recorder.” Anthony “hitting a trumpet with a drumstick” and picking up the ﬂute. Even the rise of “track creep” as an album’s form continues to evolve thanks to the streaming era. (See: Taylor Swift turning 2024’s The Tortured Poet’s Department into a surprise 31-track double album, and Kanye West’s 2021 27-track release Donda one of the longest albums this decade to reach No.1 on the Billboard 200).

But the real standout is the band’s growth, not just personally as friends but professionally as a trio of ambitious and astute musicians. “These three albums have documented us growing into women sharing our view on the world as three female people from rural Wales and that story hasn’t been told before,” says Singer. Anthony agrees. “We’ve really found ourselves musically and as people, and we’re conﬁdent in what we’ve done. [We’ll] look back at this album knowing that was the moment that we reached our peak!” As daughters of the Welsh dragon living in such a mountainous landscape though, surely the next embers of an idea are already burning in their bellies.

Solas is released on 7 Feb via Libertino Music; Adwaith play Nice N Sleazy, Glasgow, 26 Feb; Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 27 Feb

adwaithmusic.com

Photo: Aled Llywelyn

Dusty Watts

Finding Your Feet

When it comes to safer sex, condoms are only the start of what can be a pleasure-ﬁlled, and even kinky conversation. We unpack the surprising connection between foot fetishes and reduced STI transmissions

Are you into feet? If you are, you’re not alone: The Joy of Lesbian Sex by Dr. Emily L. Sisley and Bertha Harris, published in 1977, had several paragraphs dedicated to the pleasure of ‘toe-fucking’, explaining that ‘there is no portion of your body that is not capable of arousal or that cannot be used to arouse a lover.’ Further down the page, they detail how to stimulate your partner’s clitoris with your big toe. Yet fast-forward almost 50 years, and being into feet is still met with disgust or ridicule. We don’t take the potential pleasure they can bring seriously. Of course, this isn’t unique to foot fetishes – it’s how most of us grow up thinking about sex acts that fall outside the ‘script’ of what we’ve been taught is normal.

There’s another reason why it’s worth taking feet seriously – one that surprised Adam Zmith when researching Solemates: A History of Our Fetish for Feet. Zmith was familiar with how, in the 1980s and 90s, “groups of people at really high risk of HIV, men having sex with men, were choosing to explore other pleasures that had less risk of HIV transmission.” Gay and bi men attended “circle jerk parties”, where they sat around and wanked together, or explored kinky practices that didn’t involve anal or oral penetration. What Zmith hadn’t known is that this had inspired psychiatrist A. James Giannini to look at 800 years of trends in STI outbreaks to see if there were other periods in history where people had changed the kind of sex they were having to reduce the risk of STI transmission. As Zmith notes, “Giannini found that outbreaks often correlated with evidence of foot action. When gonorrhoea ﬂared up in medieval Europe, poets wrote odes to feet.”

‘Being into feet is still met with disgust or ridicule. We don’t take the potential pleasure they can bring seriously’

We’re a long way from the 16th-century syphilis outbreak where “painters showed renewed interest in feet and Giannini found sources reporting that shoes began to show off toe cleavage,” as Zmith details. But STI rates in the UK are currently rising. Data from Public Health Scotland in June 2024 shows that gonorrhoea diagnoses in 2023 had increased by 56% since 2019.

Dr Eduardo Peres, who specialises in sexual health and HIV, explains that the UK is following a global trend of increasing STI diagnoses, however,

Words: Quinn Rhodes Illustration: Magda Michalak

we should focus on public health initiatives and policies rather than individual behaviours. “Sexual health in the UK has lost a lot of its funding, and although we can definitely say people are testing more and still able to find treatment, the rise of STIs is a reflection of the lack of funding and investment in the sexual health sector.” He explains that the information people have about sex and sexual health “can be misleading or simply incorrect, if not fear-mongering and stigmatising.”

Dr Peres says that people with herpes have come to their sexual services ashamed and have “completely stopped engaging in sex because they believe they are constantly transmitting the virus.”

For 25-year-old Arlo*, being diagnosed with herpes (HSV1) deﬁnitely changed their relationship to sex. As well as bringing up internalised slutshaming they needed to unpack, they lost a lot of interest in casual sex. “The emotional vulnerability of having to disclose my status means I have different wants and needs now,” they say. There’s also an emotional vulnerability to disclosing your kinks to a partner. Arlo’s feet are an erogenous zone for them: “A foot massage can be really intimate and part of the sex I’m having.” (Zmith thinks foot massage is a great place to start if you want to introduce the idea of feet being hot to a partner, as it can be deeply pleasurable.)

Dr Peres agrees that there are “several beneﬁts for people to think in a non-normative way about sex, so they can explore and enjoy their sexual lives fully.” However, they also wish people

understood how many ways there are to prevent STIs beyond using condoms (which aren’t a 100% fail-proof method of preventing STI transmission). These safer sex practices can involve: “Testing regularly, treating and notifying partners as soon as there are positive tests for STIs, and engaging in efforts to stop the chain of transmission – such as respecting the timeframes to abstain and re-engage in sexual activity once on treatment.”

Jena is 31-years-old and polyamorous. She’s started dating someone new since testing positive for HPV, and he requested to wait until he’s vaccinated to have sex that involves any ﬂuid exchange. This means they don’t have penis-in-vagina sex – but they’ve found plenty of ways to have sex, including attending shibari classes together. “[We] weren’t taking anything off the table, just delaying it a few months until he’s vaccinated,” she says. You might not be into having your toes sucked (though I recommend trying it at least once). However, there might be other sex and kink acts on the ‘menu’ of pleasure possibilities that you are interested in exploring. Building a menu that works for you and your partner’s needs, desires, and safer sex requirements takes time and communication, so remember – cold feet are to be expected when trying something new.

*Name has been changed for anonymity

Adam Zmith’s Solemates is out with 404Ink

Queering Memory Lane

This February, Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive spotlights Edinburgh’s queer history in exhibition Desire Paths: Reading Queer Edinburgh. To celebrate, one writer takes a look at a handful of the city’s landmarks and their queer tales

Before gay bars, apps and law reform, queer people were forced to ﬁnd more inventive ways to meet each other. Calton Hill’s after dark tales are well-shared, but many other unassuming Edinburgh landmarks also had a reputation for cruising and cottaging.

Register House: Cottaging Central

Standing on the pavement outside Register House – where various enthusiasts attempt to proselytise passersby – you may not realise that there are disused public toilets under your feet. But they were once so well-known for cottaging that generations of gay men referred to them as ‘GHQ’ (general headquarters).

A door on the left corner of Register House led downstairs to a long curve of about three dozen toilets. Out of politeness, queer men would leave the ﬁrst few cubicles vacant for those who actually needed the loo. The rest, though, were fair game.

Hot and Humid in the Russian Baths Russian baths, a more humid precursor to the modern sauna, were popular in Scotland before the Second World War. And in 1930s Edinburgh, they were steamy in more ways than one. The Russian baths at Glenogle Swim Centre and Inﬁrmary Street Baths (which is now Dovecot Studios) were popular gay cruising spots.

Inspector Merrilees, an overzealous police officer who waged a ‘war on homosexuality’ in the 1930s, assaulted two men in the steam compartment at Infirmary Street for allegedly hitting on him. Police surveillance on the Russian baths revealed that the vast majority of visitors were there for ‘homosexual practices’, many of them having travelled from outwith Edinburgh. The police report resulted in the temporary closure of the Russian baths at both Glenogle Road and Infirmary Street.

Sailor’s Delight at Rosebery Hotel

Most people passing the respectable-looking Rosebery Hotel opposite Haymarket station in the 1930s probably had no idea it was the base for a group of queer sex workers. But this was well-known to many sailors, who made up most of the group’s clientele. The sex workers used camp nicknames such as Lady Godiva, Blondie, Annette Page and Princess Marina. Blondie fell in love with a

Words: Ali Leetham

sailor called Jack and wrote impassioned letters about the relationship.

Unfortunately, the group’s effeminacy attracted the unwanted attention of Inspector Merrilees. When the police raided the hotel in 1935, they found Blondie reading a Bible, but regardless they also seized a variety of items they considered evidence of deviance. These included Blondie’s love letters, make-up, jewellery, perfume, Vaseline and a novel called Strange Brother, whose protagonist stru les with his sexuality. Godiva, Blondie and Annette all received prison sentences after Merrilees convinced Princess Marina and Jack to testify against them. The law not only deprived queer people of their freedom but also destroyed queer spaces and shattered relationships.

Bellevue Urinals and the Gay Gordons

Many urinals throughout Edinburgh were used for cottaging, but those in Bellevue particularly attracted the attention of (yet again) Inspector Merrilees. Nightly, he’d sneak into the adjacent gardens and secretly watch people through holes in the roof. At said urinals, he arrested a sergeant

of the Gordon Highlanders. The sergeant had an address book containing details of queer men, and Merrilees was convinced that this, rather than ability, was the reason for the sergeant’s recent and rapid promotion.

Sometime later, the Bellevue urinals were mentioned in the indictment of Peter O , who managed Maximes dancehall in Tollcross. The prosecution’s evidence just su ested that O may have had sex with men at locations including Bellevue. However, Merrilees was convinced that O also facilitated an underground network that provided soldiers from the Redford Barracks to Edinburgh’s gay elites. It seems Merrilees saw gay soldier conspiracies wherever he looked.

Wartime Romance in Princes Street Gardens

While the Second World War disrupted many aspects of life, it didn’t prevent gay men from cruising. In fact, the air raid shelters built in Princes Street Gardens provided an additional hidden location for queer assignations when the sirens weren’t sounding.

MP and journalist Tom Driberg, a self-described “incorrigible practising homosexual”, visited Edinburgh for the 1943 by-election. After bumping into a handsome Norwegian sailor on Princes Street, they decided to retreat to a nearby air raid shelter, despite not understanding a word of each other’s language. Down in the darkness, the sailor revealed a “long, uncircumcised, and tapering, but rock-hard erection”. But while Driberg was on his knees, he was caught “wet-handed” by a policeman. Luckily, the policeman turned out to be a fan of Driberg’s journalism and let them off. Driberg found the policeman attractive but thought it wise not to hit on him under the circumstances, and the two became lifelong friends instead.

As many of these spaces are known through records made by authorities who oppressed their users, we’re left with an incomplete picture. Surviving information may be biased, while queer spaces that avoided police attention may be forgotten completely. If our society is to learn and grow, it needs not only queer spaces but queer historians and queer archives to record and share their stories.

Desire Paths, Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive, Edinburgh Palette, St Margaret’s House, Edinburgh, 19-25 Feb, free

Princes Street Gardens

Photo: frdm on Unsplash

Archive of Diaspora

Curator Pelumi Odubanjo tells us how she’s reimagining Maud Sulter’s legacy through a participatory events programme at Tramway

“It’s not a retrospective, it’s a continuation,” reﬂects writer, editor and curator Pelumi Odubanjo on the exhibition Maud Sulter: You Are My Kindred Spirit, currently on display at Tramway. For Odubanjo, the late ScottishGhanaian artist’s legacy is far from static; instead, it’s an active force ripe for new critical interpretations and creative responses.

While many might come to know Sulter through her subversive photography that deﬁes the systematic erasure of Black people from art history, this exhibition foregrounds her voice. Archival recordings of the artist’s spoken word works, delivered in her thick Glasgow accent, ripple through the exhibition space, corresponding with photography, collages and moving image. The artist’s political and personal practice is animated as her voice propositions the visitor in dialogue with the visual material, forging a connection that is at once challenging and comforting.

To activate the exhibition, Odubanjo has curated an incisive events programme that resembles a “living archive of diaspora”: an embodied form of cultural memory where Sulter’s work evolves in dialogue with contemporary diasporic experiences. Primarily platforming Black women and non-binary creatives, the programme encompasses ﬁlm screenings, a poetry recital, a screenplay workshop and culminates in Call and Response: a multidisciplinary forum that centres the practices of Black creatives in Scotland and incites shared dialogue on Sulter’s work and legacy.

For Odubanjo, and the wider curatorial team, it was crucial that the events programme unfolded within the exhibition space itself, ensuring participatory engagement with Sulter’s work. “As I imagine, Maud would have wanted,” Odubanjo reflects, “her work is there for you to engage with and respond to.” A circular gathering spot within the gallery becomes a site of collective reflection. Through this space, the soundscape of Sulter’s spoken word amplifies her rhetorical questions, inviting listeners to reckon with their own positionality. In Blood Money, a poem that examines the personal and historical traumas of colonialism and systemic racial violence, Sulter repeatedly asks her listeners, “Would you?” confronting us with a series of impossible choices. Similarly, in the film installation Plantation (1994), we’re thrust into the abject world of the artist’s womb, challenging us with the question: “Can women have wishes?” Odubanjo’s curatorial vision is shaped by her imagined companionship with Sulter. She speaks of Sulter as if she is a guiding presence.

“Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to know Maud in person,” Odubanjo says, “but I deﬁnitely feel like I’ve taken one step closer to understanding how she thought and the way she worked.” Central to this understanding is Sulter’s relationship with

Words: Rachel Ashenden

Glasgow, which in the words of Odubjanjo, was vital to the artist’s practice “as a place, an environment, [and] an ecology”.

The living archive of diaspora as an act of collaboration and reclamation is expressed through the programme contributions of Natasha Thembiso Ruwona and Tomiwa Folorunso. In 2022, Ruwona and Folorunso created maud., a filmic mediation on Sulter’s legacy. Its title, lowercase and punctuated by a full stop, su ests a deep intimacy, as if a lover’s name scribbled down on the envelope of a letter never sent. Odubanjo, similarly refers to the artist by her first name; “Sulter” just doesn’t cut it. Screened at Tramway, maud. was bookended by a heartfelt in-conversation between the filmmakers and some of the creative contributors, including Adebusola Ramsay, Khadea Santi and Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie. Each connected by the life-affirming moment of discovering Maud’s work as Black creatives making work in Scotland. Each connected by the ongoing fight for just cultural memory that is not obscured by white supremacy.

One anecdote stood out: artist Camara Taylor came across Maud’s work in a 20 pence book in a secondhand sale. That 20 pence chance

encounter is potentially seismic in creative inﬂuence, but it can’t be that only the serendipitous are afforded the chance to know her. With You Are My Kindred Spirit, we are on our way for Maud to become a household name in Scotland.

The final audience member’s question, met with gasps of affirmation, seemed to distill the room’s collective sentiment: “What do we owe Maud?” Among the answers was a recognition of the visibility of friendship, collaboration and spirit in the face of the “impossibility of being Black and Scottish”, in the words of another audience member. As Odubanjo explains, “It’s about remembering [Sulter] as a person, rather than as figure of the past.” By uplifting Sulter’s voice and the continual impact of her practice, Maud Sulter: You Are My Kindred Spirit refuses the nostalgic confines of traditional retrospectives, embracing instead an ever-evolving archive of ideas. In doing so, Sulter and her work is propelled into the present, her provocations increasingly urgent.

Maud Sulter: You Are My Kindred Spirit, Tramway, Glasgow, until 30 Mar

tramway.org

Syrcas. Duval et Dumas Duval 1993

Active Listening

We catch up with Becca Clark and Su Shaw from Dundee Radio Club ahead of their maiden broadcast at the start of the month

Scotland’s been enjoying a community radio boom over the last decade, with EHFM, Clyde Built Radio, Radio Buena Vida and Radiophrenia all establishing themselves as ﬁxtures of the cultural landscape. Now Dundee looks set to add its own contribution to that list.

The first official Dundee Radio Club broadcast was technically last August – a three-hour playlist curated around the theme of GRAIN for Hospitalfield’s Summer Festival – but the first live broadcast proper will be a continuous 48-hour listening festival hosted on their website starting on Friday 7 February.

The pieces, songs, and recordings making up the 48 hours are the result of an open call for submissions, broadcast across local creative opportunities boards and the community radio network more widely. Becca Clark and Su Shaw, the duo behind Dundee Radio Club, say they’d initially wondered how much work they’d have to produce themselves to ﬁll the time – but the warmth of response means now, if anything, they have the opposite problem.

The hundred-odd submissions they’ve received represent a wild and multifarious coming together of form, genre and style. There was no su ested theme, or guiding principle as such, so listeners can expect a mixtape of deep house/ modern Italo/weird world bangers from Tom at Dundee’s Le Freak Records sitting alongside the ﬁrst episode of podcast What The Hat?!, from V&A Dundee’s Young People’s Collective, sitting in turn beside an excerpt from Tommy Perman’s 2020 album Positive Interactions – a collection of sounds Perman received from friends across the globe, in response to the question, ‘What sounds make you happy?’

For Clark this smash contrast is precisely the point: “One of the things I love about radio is that you tune in, you’ve no idea what’s on, you just happen upon things and it ﬂows into something. You can be listening to an amazing playlist, and then you can be listening to a really abstract documentary, and there’s not a space in between... You’re listening to proper 90s bangers one minute, and then you’re listening to the news the next, [it’s lovely] how quickly you can move between these types of listening or different types of sounds.”

They reckon the balance of music to field recordings, poetry and podcast is somewhere close to 50/50, although as Shaw teases, setting them in binary categories like this depends very much on your definition of music. “[There are] quite a lot of submissions which really focus on field recordings, which I would also consider to be quite musical.”

You might expect this from Shaw. Known for her music and sound-based installations under the moniker SHHE, her work frequently explores connections between environment and sound. Clark herself has a track record of experience with student and community radio – this very ﬁtting collaboration is born out of a mutual love of music, found sounds, and deep and active listening.

The two were originally introduced through Creative Dundee‘s Amps network – they mention that although it’s not an ofﬁcial policy as such, the organisation makes a point of putting interesting minds together, connecting people that are making and doing across all creative disciplines in the city to see what ideas might be sparked.

The organisation’s wider work of championing Dundee’s arts community and providing physical space for them is a cause close to Clark and Shaw’s hearts – their own ties to the city are longstanding and tenderly maintained. Shaw

“One of the things I love about radio is that you tune in, you’ve no idea what’s on”

Becca Clark,

Dundee Radio Club

comments on Dundee’s incredible creative ecology – the incredible DIY and grassroots projects and programming that takes place there – and you get the sense that the full breadth of that community is reﬂected in these submissions.

Although the programme has an incredible international presence, there is a distinct local character (a characteristic trait of community radio in the digital age). Animal infrasounds from the Atacama Desert give way to a collaboration between UNESCO City of Design Dundee and the youth work project Hot Chocolate Trust which asks what the future will sound like. There’s even a half-hour instrumental from artist Siôn Parkinson exploring the Dundonian origins of heckling. There are no plans to archive for future listening. For Clark and Shaw, the defined duration of the project makes for deliberate engagement, and therefore, community. So listen live, and listen intentionally. This sonic effigy of a city will be fleeting and then it’ll be gone.

Dundee Radio Club launches with an event at Volk Gallery, The Keiller Centre, Dundee, 7 Feb, 1pm; Dundee Radio Club will then be streaming for 48 hours from 2pm on 7 Feb at dundeeradio.club

dundeeradio.club

Words: Laurie Presswood

Su Shaw and Becca Clark

Photo: Ibi Feher

Su Shaw and Becca Clark

OK Go-Go

With Glasgow’s club scene evolving, the lives of go-go dancers within queer spaces are changing too – what does the future of performance look like in Scotland’s clubs?

Today in Glasgow, go-go dancers are taking up space within four main areas: ballroom, cabaret, drag and the club scene – all of which reﬂect a form of expression, with a combination of dance, performance, art and all the intricacies in between.

Originating back in the 1960s, go-go dancing’s role of engaging crowds is now an essential in the queer clubbing scene, helping build the atmosphere within venues.

Last year, insider.co.uk shared a report stating that more than a third of nightclubs in Scotland have shut down since 2020. This decline has seen the closure of many third spaces for marginalised communities, meaning the responsibility is now on the wider community to accommodate queer bodies in their spaces.

It’s as important as ever that venues employ staff who implement safeguarding policies for those who visit and work in them. What are the experiences of those go-go dancers starting out, and for those who have seen the changes over the years?

Name: Diamond Noir

How long you’ve been dancing: Three months

What is something you had to learn when starting out? I’d never done any paid work except in a 9-to-5 situation, I didn’t know how to draft an invoice or who to even contact for your payments. [My friend] Zulaa gave me some guidance which has been very important and helpful.

Are there any safety measures you put in place before going out? Usually, I go out with a group of people I know and trust. During the night when I’m on stage [my friends] will be around so that it’s easy for me to see them and [for them to] keep an eye on me.

What are your opinions on clubbing in Scotland as a club-goer and dancer? I think my experience with straight clubs early on kind of

taught me how to watch out for myself. There are POC spaces and there are queer spaces, but where they meet in the middle is very small.

Name: Masseduction

How long you’ve been dancing: Over a year For go-go dancing, do you come up with choreography or do you improvise? When I do drag I have an idea of what I’ll do because I know exactly what the song is going to be, whereas with go-go dancing you’re thrown onto that stage [and improvising].

What is something you wish people understood about go-go dancing? People don’t realise that part of it is also being someone who is sociable and fun off the stage. We’re on and off that stage throughout the night, if [we’re] not in the club, we’ll be in the smoking area or the green room.

Have any experiences changed the way you thought about performing? [It’s] remembering that you are still booked for a job – self-control. I did get a bit too drunk once which involved me falling down the stairs and almost twisting an ankle. I think that was a wake-up call for me.

Name: Zulaa

How long you’ve been dancing: A year and a half When did your interest in performing begin? I came to

Words: Nicole Ndlovu

the UK from Mongolia and I discovered drag [through] Drag Race as a teenager. But even before then, I was always lip-syncing in my room with my cousin as a child, imagining myself on stage and giving lipstick stamps to my stuffed toy audience.

When was your ﬁrst time on stage? I was recruited by Ponyboy while in alien drag and I was asked to dance on stage for the GSA Graduation Showcase After Party in 2023.

Have any experiences changed the way you thought about performing? I sometimes get guilty about my inability to dance as I am known for my ‘looks,’ meaning I focus on channelling myself through my outﬁt. A positive is that I get to be more creative and push myself through visual art.

Name: Huntress

How long you’ve been dancing: 11 years

What is something you wish people understood about go-go dancing? There’s a lot more unknown in these spaces in terms of risk. There are lots of people who are intoxicated, so learning [how] to perform and dance but also be safe in that environment is really important.

Have any experiences changed the way you saw performing? One of my favourite gigs was when I was go-go dancing for SOPHIE & Friends back in 2019 at the Art School. Also [working with] people like Jasmine Inﬁniti and Big Freedia; so much of club culture is queer and lots of queer artists come up through it.

Are there any safety measures you have in place before a night? I’ve learned now to have an access rider and be explicit with promoters if I’ve never worked with them before.

Diamond Noir with DJ Bellarossa

Zulaa HUNTRESS

Photo: Kate Mcmahon

Photo: Spit

Photo: Diamond Noir Masseduction

Photo: Masseduction

Catching Up

Comedians Chris Cantrill and Sunil Patel talk podcasts, triﬂe and creativity

“Igo through busy and fallow periods with podcasts. It’s comforting isn’t it. They do a thing that isn’t a radio show,” says standup, one half of The Delightful Sausage, and now podcaster, Chris Cantrill. Rural Concerns, hosted alongside good friend and fellow comedian Sunil Patel, is exactly that – comfort, with a healthy dose of silliness.

Born out of Cantrill’s move to the countryside during the pandemic (“it’s so lockdown in hindsight”) and wanting to stay in touch with his inner-city mate Patel, the podcast seemed like an ideal outlet for regularly committing to catching up with one another. Before, one would text the other “we need to talk business” – code for let’s have a natter – exchange a ﬂurry of texts over an hour and then not chat for months. But now they’ve got a schedule, checking-in on each other by recording the weekly podcast.

The show has built something of a cult following, but not with the audience they expected. “It feels like it’s hit a bit of a chord with people that are at a very speciﬁc time of life,” laughs Cantrill. “We thought we were aiming for a ‘young person’s podcast, broad cut-through’, but it’s basically people who are starting to take medication on a daily basis.”

The podcast itself is like having a cuppa with your daftest mates. They catch up on their weeks, any minute news of worth (“there’s lots of bin-related chat”), and latest escapades. In one recent episode, Patel is quizzed on how he eats triﬂe while Cantrill deep-dives into the lore of Kirby, the pink lump of a Nintendo character, before he reveals he was scammed out of twenty quid when trying to buy a copy of a game on Facebook Marketplace.

Cantrill and Patel’s presences are so opposed to each other, it couldn’t work better. Patel’s low energy deadpan bounces straight off Cantrill’s energetic musings, with sardonic Producer James (Shakeshaft, of the Loremen podcast with Alasdair Beckett-King) providing a foil to them both.

They share a long friendship which started on London’s open mic scene over ten years ago. “I remember talking to Sunil whilst he was having a cigarette on some very wet decking in around 2013 maybe. And now basically everybody that we started comedy with is either a household name OR an alt-right nazi and there’s literally nothing in between,” says Cantrill, jibing that Patel might fall into both categories. The latter has a keepsake from when the two really hit it off, organising a gig together. “I’ve got a lovely old photo of me and Chris,” Patel says, “hiding behind the curtain on the stage because it’s gone so badly that we’ve had to wait for the audience to ﬁle out.”

And in an industry which places an increasing value on prep and polish, Cantrill praises the podcast format as being hugely creatively freeing.

“There’s nothing like the thrill of just being able to make it, upload it and get it out there in a short amount of time.” The spontaneity of the medium and creative control is unparalleled for him: “[It’s] one of the most direct things I’ve done that’s had a tangible effect [on my career] because so much of this sort of lifestyle is basically just waiting for people to give you opportunity, to grant you the permission to do something.”

“That’s the campaign for 2025. Get podcasters 20% off at Bella Italia”

Rural Concerns isn’t the only thing on their plates at the minute. As well as popping up everywhere on our screens (Cantrill chips in, “You do forget, he’s a very successful actor”), Patel has a radio series about to launch (“I’ve spent the last year trying to marry a rich lady for the purposes of the radio show”) and is drumming up material for a

Words: Polly Glynn

series of WIPs, including one at Monkey Barrel this month. At the same time, Cantrill is touring Easily Swayed, his Edinburgh Award-nominated hour which also tackles his house move and male friendships, and has a new series of Icklewick FM, The Delightful Sausage’s radio show, in the works. But it’s good to know the podcast’s success hasn’t gone to their heads. Cantrill gesticulates over the screen, “ﬁremen, nurses, podcasters – these are the true emergency services.” The pair are still waiting on their blue light discount to come through. “That’s the campaign for 2025. Get podcasters 20% off at Bella Italia”.

Rural Concerns is available wherever you get your podcasts

Sunil Patel: Work In Progress, Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, 8 Feb, 6pm, £7

Chris Cantrill: Easily Swayed, Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, 12 Feb, 8pm, £15

Sunil Patel: An Idiot’s Guide to Ba ing an Heiress is on BBC Radio 4 from 10 Feb

Image: Poppy Hillstead

Entering Lynch’s World

The late David Lynch was not an artist you had to understand. His films were not puzzles to solve, they were journeys that had to be experienced. One writer reflects on how dipping her toes in Lynch’s films after years of reluctance opened up the world

Words: Emilie Roberts

It’s past midnight. The end credits of Eraserhead roll. Two of my best friends and I are tangled on the sofa, delirious and tired and buoyant about what we’ve just seen. We have spent the last 89 minutes in something akin to a trance, letting images of beauty, hilarity, sadness and oddity confound us. We’re unsure of what’s just happened, but sure we have found something new and thrilling: that very rare thing, an artist who has invited us into his world and made us feel. We look at each other and laugh; something great has just happened.

David Lynch was a director I spent a long time avoiding – not because I thought I’d dislike him or that he wouldn’t interest me, but because of a latent fear of not getting it. I avoided many writers because of the same fear, too shy to face up to the works of Joyce and Beckett, say, lest I was cornered by someone I deemed more intellectual who would, for some reason, quiz me on their intricacies, leaving me blank-faced and babbling as I had to admit that it had all gone over my head. It wasn’t until I picked up my ﬁrst Beckett and found myself laughing out loud that I realised I had nothing to fear. These were not artists I had to understand, these were artists I had, simply, to experience.

Welcoming David Lynch into your life opens up a world: a world wherein the possibilities of art are seemingly endless, where irony lives among joyful earnestness, where love and beauty are reﬂected in the odd and disjointed.

Discovering his ﬁlms was like opening a toy chest full of broken dolls, limbs bent backwards, one eye closed and drooping, but so clearly and honestly loved. He brought to my attention the works of others in his sphere too: the paintings of Francis Bacon, the photographs of Diane Arbus and Francesca Woodman, all of whom created work that leaves me questioning and uncertain, but alive and singing with feelings. He does what all good artists do: he broadens your mind.

On the day Lynch passed, social media was

awash with tributes and stories, everyone clambering to tell each other the exact moment they had found a friend in him, the moment they had realised there was someone out there just like them, someone weird and unapologetic about it, someone who viewed life the way we all wanted to: as a playground, a place to explore and marvel at. Lynch put it perfectly himself in his 2006 book Catching the Big Fish: “It’s supposed to be great living. It’s supposed to be fantastic.” In the drudgery of our every day, it can be so easy to lose sight of this fact, that our being here in the ﬁrst place is a matter of extraordinary chance. It seemed, at times, that Lynch was one of the only people who knew this. And so it is with this in mind we should approach him, not as an opaque aesthete whose thinking is so beyond our own, but as the artist and person he was: someone who cared, deeply, about humanity, about our world and our place in it, and who loved, sincerely, those who were cast out of the mainstream.

What does it mean, anyway, to understand a ﬁlm? To understand any piece of art? Who are the great arbiters of opinion that get to decide what is meant by Lynch, or anyone’s work? Surely not the YouTube creators making their MULHOLLAND DRIVE ENDING EXPLAINED videos, surely not

even the creators themselves. Surely it is only ourselves, our minds and hearts, standing in front of a work and letting it pass through us, letting us feel it. A Rothko painting is many things to many people, not because of the colours on the canvas but because of the pair of eyes looking at it. Yves Klein and his blue matter to us because blue matters to us. We love Lynch because we love this world and all its myriad complications, alive and contradicting. I have not always agreed with Lynch but that is part of what I love about him. He has made me interrogate myself, made it so I look a little deeper at that around me, look, as he said himself, for the red ants crawling underneath this beautiful life.

The paintings of Francis Bacon, the words of Samuel Beckett, the ﬁlms of David Lynch. I look at them, hold them in my vision and in my heart, and let them wash over me, taking me with their tidal pull. Do I understand any of it? No. And thank god for that.

David Lynch’s 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet screens at Dundee Contemporary Arts on 27 Feb, 8pm, and his 1989 road movie Wild at Heart screens in Edinburgh at Cameo, 15 Feb, 9:30pm and Banshee Labyrinth, 20 Feb, 7:30pm

Released 7 February by Warp Records rrrrr

Listen to: Crispy Skin, Blood on the Boulders, Fieldworks I and II, Well Met (Fingers Through the Fence)

Album of the Month

Squid — Cowards

Squid emerge triumphant from the post-punk revival armed with familiar frantic vocals, motorik drums and driving bass, combined with expansive post-rock, electronica, folk and psych, akin to Tortoise, Sufjan Stevens and Warp labelmates Grizzly Bear. The result is exceptional. If there was any doubt before, then it’s clear now: Squid have undeniably arrived. No wonder then, that Cowards is our album of the month.

The record ranges from the dulcimer sparkles and lurching bass of Crispy Skin, to the Slint-esque dark nursery rhyme of Fieldworks I and II, roadtested in a series of ‘socially-spaced’ gigs between lockdowns. The jazz, funk and prog experiments of debut Bright Green Field and 2023’s O Monolith are here too, honed to a ﬁne point.

There are parallels to Radiohead; indeed Squid have often felt like natural successors, and the spidery, menacing Blood on the Boulders is a perfect example. ‘All the houses in this country are built like shit’; these are drummer/vocalist Ollie Judge’s most forthright lyrics since 2019’s Houseplants. One can’t help but think of Radiohead’s most outspoken record, Hail to the Thief, similarly a distillation of their style after two albums of experimentation. Fat snare hits propel a

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

relentless rock’n’roll crescendo accentuated by abstract, whining vocals reminiscent of Thom Yorke. Cowards is packed with surprising and electrifying moments. The low end of dubby excursion Showtime! hits with soundsystem force, perhaps the influence of the storied bass music culture in Bristol, where the band is now based. The finale, Well Met (Fingers Through the Fence), is a stunning surprise; a heady collaboration with Celtic vocal voyager Clarissa Connelly recalling Electrelane’s choral explorations on 2004’s The Power Out. It sounds like nothing Squid has ever done before. Squid describe Cowards as a collection of nine stories concerning evil, but there is a tremendously uplifting finish to the music. Perhaps right and wrong are harder to define when you’re in deep. Indeed, depth is exactly what’s delivered on Cowards. There’s nothing raw here; this is a band settling into their status as Britain’s new rock innovators. There seems little doubt that this will be their most influential record, and it feels reasonable to place them alongside the likes of Soft Machine, XTC and Spirit of Eden-era Talk Talk. Squid say this is the album they wish they started with; while that isn’t possible, Cowards certainly feels like a new beginning. [Vicky Kavanagh]

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory

Jagjaguwar, 7 Feb rrrrr

Listen to: Idiot Box, Indio, I Want You Here

Sharon Van Etten has invited her band behind the curtain for her latest album, resulting in a more varied collection of songs that sprawl from the speakers, creating a loose-limbed feel. The elevated presence of Teeny Lieberson’s synths are the most immediate difference, evoking dark corners on Live Forever and augmenting the widescreen drama of Afterlife. They’re relentless on Somethin’ Ain’t Right, reaching a thrilling crescendo with Van Etten’s guitarwork in interweaving lockstep. There’s a sense of 80s new wave-viaclassic rock to the album which this song exempliﬁes, but is elsewhere felt in some Springsteen-esque vocalising or bass funk.

Van Etten’s voice remains a unifying force, whether wrapped in ghostly reverb, galloping on a dreampunk beat or cosplaying The Boss. Her lyrics concern topics familiar to her fans: Can love last? Can we ever truly know someone? Have we lost our connection to the world around us? The Attachment Theory highlight fascinating new aspects to Van Etten’s craft, like the reﬂective prisms of precious stone. What is lost in cohesion is made up for by an exploratory freedom that the band revel in, hopping from wistful to explosive to triumphant. [Lewis Wade]

Noah Lennox’s seventh album as Panda Bear is a departure. There are conventional rock song structures; hooks and choruses in plain sight. If you enjoyed Reset, his 2022 Sonic Boom collaboration, Sinister Grift has the same warmth, immediacy and accessibility. If you’re looking for another Bros or Good Girl / Carrots, it ain’t here. What there is, ten tracks co-produced with Animal Collective bandmate Josh Dibb, is worth celebrating. These are meticulously crafted songs performed by one of modern music’s most distinguished vocalists.

Sinister Grift is also in new thematic territory for its creator. Where once we had the ode to family par excellence My Girls, the psychedelic dub-pop of Ferry Lady explicitly acknowledges separation. Left In the Cold and Elegy for Noah Lou are reﬂective and sobering meditations. The playful call and response of the album’s curtain raiser Praise sees Lennox sing ‘My heart is best before it breaks’ and on closer Defense he acknowledges both his past and present love, before a guesting Cindy Lee, in a scene-stealing cameo, lets rip with a sweeping guitar solo, the sound of a bruised soul taking ﬂight. The overall mood is bittersweet, but buoyant. [Craig Angus]

On her fourth album Jupiter, Nao is smitten, her sincerity and passion radiating like natural light ﬁlling a room. Wildﬂowers is a breezy, kick-drumming opener – ‘If you really love me, then say you love me… / Time should wait for us but it won’t’ – like Lovefool by The Cardigans but with the Damoclean threat of mortality. Wary of life’s eroding roads, she urges: ‘Catch me and I’ll catch you back / We’ll keep falling ‘til the end of time’.

Channeling Kali Uchis and Bootsy Collins funk, Elevate captures a rhapsodic episode of swimming through the cosmos: ‘We push through the stars, how you navigate’. Happy People’s vocal layering imbricates meditative gratitude, while Light Years’ adorable gloss is perhaps sentimental bait for a Samsung AI ad that incredulously invokes #ThePowerOfLove and #Family. 30 Something is a strippedback recognition of growth, a changed-by-experiences big sister to SZA’s 20 Something. And the quirky promise of Better Days feels like Capra-meets-Lynch imaging. Dulcet and sensitive, high on love and open to change, Nao expresses it all in vulnerable communion on Jupiter: the collapse, the calm, and the ascension. [Lucy Fitzgerald]

Aoba Luminescent Creatures hermine, 28 Feb rrrrr

Listen to: tower, FLAG, 惑星の泪 (Wakusei no Namida)

In Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach novels, characters navigate an unchartered ecosystem that assimilates, regurgitates and realigns personal geographies. Like Vandermeer’s series, Ichiko Aoba’s Luminescent Creatures contains a lighthouse, the coordinates – 24° 03’ 27.0” N, 123° 47’ 7.5” E – providing the name for a short rendition of a folk tune belonging to the people of Japan’s southernmost point, Hateruma island. Through this, Aoba traverses the idea that stories, traditions and music can be absorbed and carried through environmental and biological connections over time via the land and nature. Aoba’s work is steeped in the emotions and form of what we consider cinematic; her last record Windswept Adan was conceptualised as the score to an imagined film. Luminescent Creatures is an extension of, if not a direct sequel to, that film. But Aoba’s music strays far from what we consider to be cinematic, which can often be sweeping and grandiose. These songs can be small, even womblike, but no less detailed or ambitious for it. On tower and aurora, Aoba paints pastoral watercolours. Compositions move incrementally, like the limbs of coral on the seabed, songs flourishing with cultivation and care. [Tony Inglis]

Ichiko

Panda Bear

Sinister Grift Domino Records, 28 Feb rrrrr

Listen to: Praise, 50mg, Elegy for Noah Lou

Nao Jupiter RCA, 21 Feb rrrrr

Listen to: Elevate, Happy People, All of Me

Marie Davidson City of Clowns DEEWEE, 28 Feb rrrrr

Listen to: Demolition, Sexy Clown, Fun Times

With companies like Google and Meta harvesting our data for proﬁt and AI-driven automation threatening job security, tech anxiety is at an all-time high. Inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Montreal producer Marie Davidson places this unease at the core of her latest album. Opener Validations

Weight plays like an infomercial for a dystopian future where our privacy is traded for the illusion of collective enhancement, setting the stage for the relentless techno throb of Demolition, where Davidson’s deadpan delivery mirrors AI’s indifference: ‘I don’t want your cash, all I want is you / I want your data!’

Elsewhere, Statistical Modelling probes how algorithms manipulate human behavior, while Fun Times explores how tech’s constant demands on our attention have eroded our ability to be present. These songs land on the right side of silly-serious, combining sledgehammer-subtle vocals with a feverish commitment to the tension-release cycles of the danceﬂoor, making hooks like ‘Time is never coming back / What you choose you might lose / Wake up or go back to snooze’ feel rousing. Redirecting the euphoric energy of the club toward creative ends, City of Clowns is a rallying call for a more humane digital future. [Patrick Gamble]

Tzusan Ponzu

Self-released, 5 Feb rrrrr

Listen to: Ponzu, Post Hoc, The Girl With the Dragonﬂy Tattoo

Edinburgh rapper and producer Tzusan is often described as making ‘dystopian’ music due to its dark themes and suffocating production. But he gives the game away on the blurb for his latest project in which he invokes the late author Mark Fisher, who famously wrote of what he termed “capitalist realism”. That in mind, Ponzu isn’t an otherworldly exercise; it’s hyper-modern prose. Rapping with his trademark lethargic ﬂow, Tzusan depicts hazy house parties in brutalist cities, where drugs and hedonism are the only relief from the mundanity of contemporary life. The familiar intonation of a ScotRail announcer pops up at one point. Oh, and it’s probably raining.

Tzusan is hardly reinventing the wheel – his stream-of-consciousness rhyming style draws heavily from UK hip-hop titan Ed Scissor, who pops up on album highlight Post Hoc – and his intimate, breathy delivery can distract from the intensity of the vision he wants to present. His technical gifts are undeniable, though. Few Scottish emcees are as gifted as Tzusan at delivering complex, internal and multisyllabic rhyme patterns over such haphazard beats, whether it be disembodied drum’n’bass (Post Hoc) or syncopated techno (The Girl With the Dragonﬂy Tattoo). [Jonathan Rimmer]

Oklou choke enough True Panther, 7 Feb rrrrr

Listen to: ict, choke enough, blade bird

On choke enough, Oklou’s mature and assured debut album, any potential bombast is subdued, like it was recorded underwater. Throughout its entirety there’s a hint of the lushness of a Magdalena Bay production, or the whimsy of Astra King, except all hyperpop trappings are subtler, out of focus; they evaporate in the mix. A ﬂeeting sense of distance comes through songs like thank you for recording and family and friends, strange chords drifting over autotuned voicenotes and sparse brass synth.

ict is a particular highlight, with giddy nostalgic lyrics delivered over shimmering trance-like stabs. The title track also beguiles – out of its patient intro comes rolling loops and snippets of topline, cohering, slowly, to form a hauntological take on Y2K rave. want to wanna come back is the most Caroline Polachek-adjacent track here, both in its alt-R’n’B groove and ‘want to wanna’, the distance of some half-remembered childhood desire, fading into the cutoff. blade bird ends the album, and when the 808s come in, it elevates to a post-danceﬂoor anthem – it’s like opening a window, to hear some mysterious sound from outside just a little clearer. [Ian Macartney]

Colin Self respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis RVGN Intl. , 21 Feb rrrrr

Listen to: Dissimulato, gajo, Losing Faith

On their ﬁrst album since 2018’s debut Siblings, Colin Self returns with a vast, ecstatic take on grief; sublime in moments, rather limp in others. respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis is immediately a noticeably less sonically confrontational record than Siblings, which often had the vibe of being pulled by the hair down a 200ft rubble chute, with the edges slightly softened. Even on the wonky bubbling bass of Doll Park Doll Park, needling synths don’t prick quite like they have from Self in the past.

Instead the record has a haunted, elegiac quality, particularly on Dissimulato and paraphrase of a shadow. These vaster tracks give Self the space to unleash their gorgeous, operatic vocals, and intertwine with the delicate arpe ios that surround it. Self’s voice, beautiful as it is when given space to stretch out, is less effective when given more traditional songs, feeling cumbersome and slu ish. It makes Tip the Ivy and gaolbreaker’s dream in the record’s latter stages feel constraining. It’s a shame, as it makes the album feel heavily front-loaded, one that in its tremendous ambition to do everything all at once, hits less and less the longer it goes on. [Joe Creely]

Music Now

We dive into new albums from Constant Follower, Maud the Moth and F.O. Machete as well as EPs from Marcus Engwall, Isabella Strange and more

Words: Tallah Brash

January was a busy month. On day one, P3, the collaborative record from producer Supermann on da beat and rapper xidontile arrived, with debut albums later in the month from Lost Map signee Curtis Miles (What Could’ve Become Of) and husband-wife duo Beautiful Cosmos (Dance of the Atoms). There were loads of new singles too from the likes of waverley. (Nettle), Rianne Downey (The Song of Old Glencoe), Pleasure Trail (I Think I’m Just Exhausted), Rebecca Vasmant (Rooted), MALKA (Baby I Need This) and Jacob Alon (Liquid Gold 25).

When it comes to February, Glasgow-based Natasha Noramly and Paul Mellon, aka F.O. Machete, are back together after over a decade apart, and Mother of a Thousand arrives on the 14th via Last Night From Glasgow. Opener Confetti Crown lands somewhere in the cracks between Pom Poko, Deerhoof and MGMT; Noramly’s razor blade-studded candyfloss vocal floats over tricky time signatures, and a chorus that calls to mind Time To Pretend, although dripping in guitars rather than synths. Recorded at Chem19 with Paul Savage, pummeling drums, ja ed guitars and Noramly’s unique vocals are all given space to shine, coalescing into a beautiful post-rock, post-punk, alt-pop, shoegaze cocktail, Noramly’s poetic lyricism and vocal delivery the sharp, sweet and tart flaming twist of citrus on top.

On 21 February, Edinburgh-based, Madrid-born mezzosoprano and pianist Amaya Lopez-Carromero releases The Distaff as Maud the Moth. Despite being originally conceived in a singer-songwriter fashion, the end product is an expert convergence of impressive noise, every found sound, every cymbal crash, every metallic screech, every cello bow, every static squall and every vocal run meticulously placed. Exploring ‘generational trauma and catharsis’ across nine tracks, The Distaff unfolds like a modern-day, avant-garde opera ﬁlled with incomprehensible levels of drama, beauty and pain.

On 28 February, more beauty arrives with The Smile You Send Out Returns to You from Constant Follower, the follow-up to Stephen McAll’s SAY Award-shortlisted album Neither Is, Nor Ever Was. At the end of last year, McAll told us that the album’s title was borrowed from a phrase his dad used to say to him, which he sees, “Not as a ‘give and ye shall get’, but more like the kindnesses you give to the world, enriches us all.” And you can feel that across the record, despite the occasional ominous undertone as McAll addresses past traumas head-on. All Is Well, a song about resilience and overcoming adversity, is the album in microcosm as McAll sings ‘And then the codeine takes effect / another Sisyphus is born’ over a mufﬂed pulsing bass wub, the song punctuated with surpising electronic ﬂourishes.

Ultimately, The Smile You Send Out Returns to You offers the kindness akin to being wrapped in a warm blanket after a blustery walk along the beach, the elements stinging your face. “I have hope for the future,” McAll told us last year. “And I think that the record reﬂects that hopefulness.”

On 5 February, Edinburgh rapper and producer Tzusan releases his latest album Ponzu (turn back a page for the full review), while a couple of days later, led by Glasgow saxophonist Brian Molley, the Brian Molley Quartet release Journeys (7 Feb), a collaborative album with the Asin Langa Ensemble of Northern India, fusing together jazz and traditional Indian folk for something altogether unique. The following week, The View frontman Kyle Falconer releases his latest solo record, The One I Love the Most (14 Feb), while a few days later Gates of Light release Gates of Light II (London Edition) (17 Jan). At the end of the month, The Glasgow Barons release Lab Raps (28 Feb), an experimental collaborative record that fuses together artists across classical, jazz, folk and hip-hop disciplines, with some standout vocal turns from rapper SVG and Gaelic Scots singer Evie Waddell.

There are some impressive EPs out this month too. On 1 February, alt-punk outﬁt Isabella Strange release their punchy EP, Slick Git, all ‘raw jams and feminist undertones.’ An exciting debut from the Edinburgh four-piece, check out our recent chat with them on the website. Later in the month, Glasgow-based, Indonesian-Swede Marcus Engwall releases his debut EP, Glacial Pace (21 Feb). Inspired by artists like The Beach Boys, Todd Rundgren and Mac DeMarco, everything about Glacial Pace feels beautifully considered, with a lightness of touch both instrumentally and vocally that’s hard to teach, one of those you either got it or you don’t situations.

On the same day, Glasgow singer-songwriter Niamh Morris explores love and heartbreak on Strawberries & Honey, and BBC Radio 1 Future Artist, Edinburgh electronic producer Fourth Daughter releases Full Bloom. At the end of the month, seek out City Girl, the latest EP from jazz sensation Georgia Cécile. You’ll ﬁnd loads of new singles peppering the month too from The Micro Band (Lamb’s Tongue Tango, 1 Feb), Nikhita (Late Karachay, 6 Feb), Lugas Europ (Horse Manure, 7 Feb), Disco Mary (Small Quakes, 13 Feb), Grayling (Always, 14 Feb), Lacuna (Shelley, 14 Feb), Bottle Rockets (Video Call, 20 Feb), Jeshua (Happiness Is Calling Me, 20 Feb) and more.

Scan the QR code to follow and like our Music Now: New Scottish Music playlist on Spotify, updated on Fridays

Photo: Martin J Pickering

Photo: Aidan Duckworth

Photo: Scott McLean

Constant Follower

Isabella Strange Maud the Moth

Film of the Month — The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Director: Mohammad Rasoulof

Starring: Soheila Golestani, Missagh Zareh, Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki

RRRR R

Released 7 February by Lionsgate Certiﬁcate 15

theskinny.co.uk/ﬁlm

Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a portrait of three women who live in the shadow of their family’s patriarch. The film opens with Iman (Missagh Zareh) being appointed as an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran; it’s a role that will earn him a significantly higher salary and allow him to move his family to a bi er house in a better community. Iman has toiled as a lawyer for years and sees this as his overdue reward, but his more high-profile role comes with dangers. “You must be irreproachable,” his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) warns their teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki).

Rasoulof presents this quartet as a microcosm of the Iranian state. Iman demands absolute loyalty from his wife and daughters, but ﬁssures in the family unit have begun to appear. Iman’s daughters have become emboldened through their exposure to social media and have started to question the status quo, with their peers engaged in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that exploded in Iran in 2022 (Rasoulof cuts vivid real-life footage of these protests and the regime’s brutal crackdown on them into his ﬁlm). When Iman’s government-issue gun goes missing he quickly suspects those closest to him, even employing state-level interrogation techniques to extract a confession.

It would be easy to paint Iman as a draconian brute – and his actions are often beyond the pale – but Rasoulof and Zareh have created a character who’s more nuanced; Iman is a man

who is part of an unforgiving system and whose actions are driven by a sense of fear, shame and vulnerability. On his first day in his new position, he discovers that one of his duties is to sign off on death sentences for crimes that he hasn’t had time to investigate, and he is deeply troubled by this, but he knows that if he doesn’t comply there will soon be whispers about his loyalty to the regime. Rasoulof takes the time to find the shades in each of his characters and to allow his actors the room to give remarkably nuanced and touching performances. Soheila Golestani is magnificent as Najmeh, a woman whose whole life has been devoted to supporting her husband, but who finds herself increasingly torn by her desire to protect her daughters. Ultimately, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is not really about the rights and wrongs of these individuals. It’s a direct attack on a corrupt and oppressive regime that strangles its people, just like the ficus religiosa of the title. Similarly to Rasoulof’s previous feature, There Is No Evil, The Seed of the Sacred Fig was shot secretly and smu led out of Iran at great risk by a filmmaker whose career has already been marked by numerous prison sentences and filmmaking bans. Having been under house arrest because of his filmmaking since early 2023, Rasoulof fled his homeland in May 2024 following a sentence of flo ing and eight years’ imprisonment. He is now exiled from the country he has documented so unsparingly, but The Seed of the Sacred Fig stands as a vital act of defiance. [Philip Concannon]

Scotland on Screen: Glasgow Film Festival

2025 programme

Scanning this year’s GFF lineup, it’s notably lighter on the big-name arthouse auteurs that usually pepper the festival’s programme. There are a few notable exceptions like The End, a curious-sounding apocalyptic musical from Joshua Oppenheimer starring Tilda Swinton, George MacKay and Michael Shannon, or world premiere Tornado, the hugely anticipated new ﬁlm from Scottish director John Maclean (Slow West), which is opening the festival and should kick it off with a mighty wallop. I’ve gone di ing around the rest of the programme and here are ten of the most promising-looking titles that have caught my eye.

On Falling

Laura Carreira’s riveting drama about a young Portuguese woman working in an Amazonlike fulﬁlment centre in Edinburgh makes its Scottish debut after wowing audiences and winning prizes at festivals across the world. A clear-eyed, deeply humanistic ﬁlm about how easy it is to get stuck in a spiral of everyday capitalist exploitation, it’ll make you reconsider ever making a convenient online purchase again. 28 Feb & 1 Mar

Went Up the Hill

Australian ﬁlm director Samuel Van Grinsven impressed with his sexy and deeply atmospheric 2019 debut Sequin in a Blue Room, which mixed queer desire with a nail-biting techno-thriller plot. This follow-up, a poetic ghost story centred on the relationship that forms between a grieving woman and her dead wife’s estranged son, looks similarly intriguing. Stranger Things’ hunk Dacre Montgomery and the brilliant Vicky Krieps star. 8 & 9 Mar

Peacock

This debut from Austrian ﬁlmmaker Bernhard Wenger got rave reviews when it premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival. A quirky satire concerned with the way we curate our personalities in the modern world, the ﬁlm centres on Matthais (Albrecht Schuch), who works as a companion for hire, and while he’s great at being the perfect person for others, he’s kind of forgotten

how to be his authentic self. Early reviews have compared Peacock to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos and Ruben Östlund. 2 & 3 Mar

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Jessica Lange has made a career playing women on the edge of a nervous breakdown, so she’s perfectly cast as Mary Tyrone, the drug-addicted matriarch of the dysfunctional family in Eugene O’Neill’s 1941 Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Also don’t miss the chance to see Lange at her special In Conversation event (1 Mar) where she’ll discuss her glittering Hollywood career, which took her from King Kong to American Horror Story via Tootsie, Cape Fear and Rob Roy. 28 Feb

Motel Destino

If you’re in the mood for something steamy, look no further than this pulpy, neon-lit gem from Brazil. Set mostly within the sweaty conﬁnes of a seedy roadside motel, it’s reportedly a feverish and wildly uninhibited erotic thriller ﬁlled with sexy people getting up to no good. 28 Feb & 1 Mar

Boys Go to Jupiter

This gloriously leftﬁeld coming-of-age animation follows a Floridian teenager who’s trying to earn ﬁve grand during the dreamy twilight zone between Christmas and New Year, but his hustle is interrupted when a gelatinous alien makes his acquaintance. 4 & 5 Mar

U Are the Universe

I love the sound of this Ukrainian sci-ﬁ about a space trucker taking a shipment of waste to Jupiter accompanied by his joketelling robot. All is going well until he learns that the Earth exploded while he was on the job, leaving him possibly the only person alive in the solar system. Existential hijinks ensue. 4 & 5 Mar

Restless

If you’ve ever had a noisy neighbour then you’ll likely get a kick (or potentially be tri ered) by Jed Hart’s thriller Restless. The ﬁlm centres on Nicky, a mild-mannered, middle-aged care worker who starts to channel a more primal side when she’s driven to sleep-deprived distraction by her obnoxious new neighbour who parties into the wee hours. This darkly humorous bout of psychological warfare is reportedly a hoot. 5 & 6 Mar

Ghostlight

The power of art to act as a balm for heartbreak is at the centre of this family drama that’s repeatedly left audiences in puddles of their own tears across the US. It centres on a grumpy labourer with a hot temper and a family in turmoil, who ﬁnds a surprising creative outlet when he joins an amateur dramatics group putting on Romeo and Juliet. 27 & 28 Feb

The Girls (1968)

GFF can always be relied upon for great retrospectives, so be sure to make some time in your schedule for the strand dedicated to the ﬁlms of Swedish-born actor and director Mai Zetterling. The Girls, Zetterling’s ﬁerce, playful and often surreal feminist fable starring three legendary Swedish actresses (Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom) is a great place to start. 5 Mar

Our picks of Glasgow Film Festival’s

The 21st Glasgow Film Festival runs 26 Feb to 9 Mar; full programme at glasgowﬁlm.org

Words: Jamie Dunn

Went Up The Hill

Restless

On Falling

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Ghostlight

The People’s Joker

Director: Vera Drew

Starring: Vera Drew, Lynn Downey, Kane Distler, Grifﬁn Kramer rrrrr

After a lengthy legal battle with the parody-allergic Warner Brothers, Vera Drew’s queer satire The People’s Joker has finally been unleashed. This Joker origin story follows the titular harlequin (Griffin Kramer as a child, Drew as an adult and narrator) from her dreams of a life beyond Smallville to carving out a niche for herself as an “anti-comic” in Gotham City. Along the way, Vera / Joker the Harlequin negotiates a complicated relationship with her mother (Lynn Downey), who we see in flashback booking her child an appointment in Arkham Asylum at the first hint of gender dysphoria. She also becomes entangled with Mr J (Kane Distler), another transgender anti-comedian who has a troubled history with the Batman – here, no moral Caped Crusader. Finding her true self and her place in the world

I’m Still Here

Director: Walter Salles

Starring: Fernanda Torres, Selton Mello, Fernanda Montenegro rrrrr

After a decade away from directing features, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles returns in a mode loosely similar to his most widely celebrated work, the Che Guevara road movie The Motorcycle Diaries. This new film is similarly concerned with someone who’s been in something of a protective bubble and is now coming to terms with grim political realities. But in I’m Still Here, the real-life figure’s path to activism and personal reinvention comes from the scary reality turning up at her front door. In early 1971, against the backdrop of a tightening military regime, a raid by unidentified officials occurs at an idyllic house in Rio de Janeiro, where former congressman Rubens Paiva (Mello) lives with his wife Eunice (Torres) and their five children. Rubens is taken away while

requires one extravagant, irreverent transformation.

Drew, who directs, stars, and co-writes alongside Bri LeRose, uses comic book tropes and characters in a joyous allegory for LGBTQ+ disruption of heteronormative, corporatised societal structures. Aided by a combination of rudimentary animation and special effects that burst with invention and colour (no sepia Russo-Marvel tones here); cameo appearances from the likes of Maria Bamford, Tim Heidecker and Bob Odenkirk; and gleefully subversive running gags in the background, Drew’s colourful metanarrative celebrates the overexposed superhero (and supervillain) genre, ﬁnding genuine excitement, inspiration and community in these ubiquitous characters and dynamics. Sharp, droll and utterly original, The People’s Joker is the perfect antidote to superhero fatigue.

[Carmen Paddock]

Released 21 Feb by Matchbox Cine

his family are kept at home overnight. Eunice’s inquiries on Rubens’ location and safety soon lead to her own arrest and torture for 12 days. From there, she pursues answers as best she can, as everyone around her processes the pervading risk that speaking up will only lead to a fatal form of silencing – one that seems all too likely to be the explanation for Rubens’ fate.

Following a playful opening stretch before the inciting incident, Salles’ film unfolds in a relatively unostentatious style and at an unhurried pace, which is of great benefit to Torres’s intricate central performance. The film around her loses some momentum from the stateliness, though, even if the eventual dual codas achieve much of their intended emotional punch.

[Josh Slater-Williams]

Memoir of a Snail

Director: Adam Elliot

Starring: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Eric Bana, Magda Szubanski, Dominique Pinon, Tony Armstrong, Paul Capsis rrrrr

Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot returns with his sophomore feature ﬁlm Memoir of a Snail, a distinctive, heart-rending, charming – and now Oscarnominated – tragicomedy.

At once idiosyncratic and universal, the ﬁlm is as notable for its poignant care for the downtrodden and marginalised as it is for its meticulously crafted and instantly recognisable claymation. Every dimple and ﬁngerprint that remain visible in Elliot’s animation are as necessary as the imperfections and foibles that make his characters and story so uniquely compelling. It’s a style infused with pallid skin tones and hues of browns and greys that echo a cruel world, but one in which

The Last Showgirl

Director: Gia Coppola

Starring: Pamela Anderson, Dave Bautista, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd rrrrr

In Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson is Shelly, a seasoned Las Vegas dancer with a breathy, Monroe voice and heart of gold as well as a complicated domestic life. Her best days are behind her and ties with her daughter (Billie Lourd) are strained (understandably), and despite embracing her ‘found’ family (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Jamie Lee Curtis), she spends nights alone, dancing in front of ballerinas on a home movie projector.

Gia Coppola spent a lot of time on set with her aunt Sophia growing up and it shows: the ﬁlm’s world is like The Bling Ring or The Virgin Suicides through osmosis, shot through a hazy, vaseline-smeared lens. From the showgirl outﬁts to Jamie Lee Curtis’s frosted lips and

love and connection can shine all the more brightly. The story revolves around Grace (voiced as an adult by Sarah Snook), who’s separated from her brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), when they’re orphaned as children. Dispatched to opposite ends of the country by a callous state, they are forced to grow up in their own forms of isolation, both outsiders who stru le to conform to the very different worlds around them. Grace’s life is one beset by impediments; positive twists in her tale tend to be fleeting. But Elliot’s ode to the downtrodden is never miserable. Instead, Memoir of a Snail feels freewheeling and playful even in its darker moments. Its harshly grotesque world is crammed full of odd asides, deft observations, and moments of genuine warmth. It gives Elliot’s filmmaking a piercing pathos that isn’t easy to come by and is difficult to shake. [Ben Nicholson]

blue glittery eyeshadow to a Vegas supermarket, it’s a world of baby pinks and powder blues, rhinestone and glitter, only here it’s tacky, more Spring Breakers than Marie Antoinette The aesthetic, like candied confetti, is one of femininity on ketamine. Yet it’s somehow both overly saccharine and lacking in heart, leaving you feeling empty and cold amid all that desert heat.

Despite the spunk of Curtis’s performance (a spontaneous midday dance in the middle of a hectic casino to Total Eclipse of the Heart is my favourite kind of fever dream), the rest of the cast can’t help elevate the ﬁlm, resulting in what feels like a disconnected rich kid’s fantasy of what kooky, poor people with crushed dreams must be like.

[Katie Driscoll]

Released 28 Feb by Picturehouse Entertainment; certiﬁcate 15

I’m Still Here

The People’s Joker

The Last Showgirl Memoir of a Snail

Released 14 Feb by Modern Films; certiﬁcate 15

KONJ CAFE, EDINBURGH

With lovely personal touches and bags of ﬂavour, Iranian cafe Konj make a great impression in their bumper-sized new home

15-17 Grindlay St, Edinburgh, EH3 9AX

Wed 12-5pm; Thu-Sat 124.30pm & 5.30-10pm; Sun 12-4.30pm & 5.30-9pm konjcafe.com

There’s always something new in Scotland’s food scene, and you can never tell what it’s going to be… but generally speaking, you can work out roughly where it’s going to be. So when we put the new address for Konj into our phones and were told that address corresponded to a random point in the middle of the road, it took a bit of a lunchtime wander to actually track the place down.

And when you ﬁnd it, you’ll see that it’s a real step up for Faranak Habibi’s cafe, which previously operated from a small space in Tollcross by the King’s Theatre. They’re still in theatreland, but this time they’re bi er and closer to the action, in the restaurant unit attached to the Lyceum on Grindlay Street. All of this is to say that if you take a wrong turn out of the toilets, you might end up with a blast of unexpected Shakespeare.

The room itself is massive, with a mezzanine level upstairs that seems to keep extending forever. It’s difficult to truly fill a space like this, but a few neat design flourishes speaking to the venue’s Iranian heritage brighten it up. Flashes of carpet adorn the walls and lovely little details like pomegranateshaped salt shakers sit on the tables, and while it’s pretty bright in here, there’s a pleasingly homespun vibe to the place.

A pot of Persian lemon verbena tea is smoky and sweet, and – beginning a theme that will develop over the evening – it’s served in lovely china cups from an ornate glass teapot. In terms of the food, the menu is a mixture of mezze-like small plates, stews, rice dishes and grilled meats and kebabs.

Each of our small plates manages to be decadent and refreshing at the same time. For one thing, they look great; there’s excellent colour and shape to each dish. Sabzi o paneer (£7) is an obelisk of supremely creamy whipped cheese ﬂecked with walnuts, while the Kashke bademjan (£8.50) pairs smoky roasted aubergine with a lactic tang from cured yoghurt, then tops it off with a variety of delicious textural additions like fried garlic and more of those walnuts. Meanwhile, the Shiraz salad (£6) cuts right through all that dairy and richness. It’s cucumber, tomato and red onion dressed with zingy lemon and sumac, and shot through with mint leaves; simple, but brilliantly put together.

The Ghormeh sabzi (£19) comes to the table with a very different vibe. This stew, made with kidney beans, lamb, and a mixture of earthy herbs, is an almost hypnotically deep green. It’s very very earthy, but pleasingly complex at the same time. On the other hand, the Joojeh kebab (£18) is bright, light and breezy. We do mean that ‘bright’ part literally – the saffron-marinated chicken is an incredible shade of yellow – and it’s beautifully juicy and tender.

Saffron is a recurring thread throughout our meal, bringing depth and potency to everything from the starters to a truly excellent dessert.

Faranak’s homemade Persian love cake (£6) is sold to us as ‘like a really great birthday cake’; while you don’t need to tell us twice to eat a piece of cake, this is actually a perfect description. It has all the bounce and lightness of a classic sponge, but delicately ﬂavoured with pistachio and more of that saffron, topped with dried ﬂowers and a light, sweet whipped cream.

Konj manages to work that tricky tightrope between fancy and homely, of offering something opulent and special but without it feeling uncomfortable or stuffy. There’s real care and detail here, from the complex engravings on the tea trays to the lovely carpeting on the staircase and walls to the seemingly endless edible ﬂowers. But there are also vibrant and direct ﬂavours, and dishes that are both exciting and engaging. A trip to Konj has that little something special – it feels like a real treat.

Words: Peter Simpson

Photo: Romina Key

Tokens of Affection

Our design correspondent helps you to ﬁnd your sweet spot as February brings the subject of love to the fore

Gifts are my love language (there is possibly nothing dearer to my heart than a carefully chosen curio), and now, as we transition closer to spring and the days become fractionally longer, some hearts may be lightly turning to thoughts of love.

For those of you who’d like a helping hand to choose a meaningful gift; rest easy, there are alternatives to cut ﬂowers shipped from the continent and boxes of chocolates wrapped in cellophane. Closer to home you can ﬁnd glorious items that will move the dial in the right direction with your crush or pay tribute to a platonic friend who deserves a treat.

Glasgow-based jeweller Patrick Murphy is the designer and maker behind PAS.COS. Pleasingly textured molten metals merge with vibrant hand-sculpted crystals.

His signature style are unisex rings with angular shapes softened with the beautiful gems in cool tones. The Lagoon Ring is available from Lunch Concept (£225) and features a purple baguette sapphire and a blue star sapphire, made with recycled 925 silver.

Jorum Studio is an independent fragrance brand founded in Scotland and led by Scottish perfumer Euan McCall and Chloe Mullen. Jorum craft exciting, poetic fragrances that capture the beauty of nature with an unconventional spirit and an ever-evolving perspective on modern fragrance. Designing and manufacturing all products inhouse, the studio celebrates the craft of perfumery using only the purest materials in truly unique and creative ways.

Part of the Scottish Odyssey collection, Pony Boy is a fresh interpretation of the Kelpie featuring aquatic elements and an enticing zesty ﬂirt. An opening impression of rhubarb, pink grapefruit and coriander seed is uplifted by champaca absolute and pink lotus absolute with a hearty dose of vetiver, red cedarwood and calamus to fade.

Unspoken Gesture is inspired by tender, platonic love; it's an enchanting skin-scent designed to last. Exuding soft skin-like salinity, cocooned around a tender heart of rice and sweetened cardamom, hazelnut, and almond. A trail of pollen-drenched mimosa petals precludes lingering memories of musk, sandalwood and ambrette seed. A visit to their chic Edinburgh showroom on St Stephen’s Street would be a memorable date! Prices start at £89.

Emer Tumilty specialises in the design and production of murals, set-design and illustration. Her recent foray into furniture design SPREE – a collaboration with M’eudail M’eudail - was presented to critical acclaim at last year’s Dundee Design Festival. For fans of her style there are products available at a very accessible price. She describes her Living Casual range as

Words: Stacey Hunter

follows: “Living Casual is art for everyone. It is art for places and art for bodies. These works embody experimentation, playfulness and individuality, brought to life with care and love.”

The monochrome Beach print has been produced as an edition of 50 and is £18.

Cecilia Stamp is a Glasgow-based designer and maker. Inspired by abstract forms from Modernist architecture, packaging, and the man-made, she creates graphic, contemporary jewellery with an understated palette and considered simplicity. Her Chub Disc Ring (£125) is minimal yet weighty, easy to wear and goes with everything. It’s handmade in silver, with a subtle satin brushed ﬁnish and stamped with the Edinburgh hallmark.

Julija Pustovrh is a Slovenian-born artist and ceramicist living and working in Edinburgh. Her functional and decorative tableware is based on a clean minimalist form, using the natural qualities of clay and sand as a way to convey the dynamism unique to Scottish landscapes. This large cup is perfect for lattes, teas and cappuccinos – it’s made with dark brown clay mixed with wild clay and decorated with a variety of wild clay slips and glazes, including recycled clay and porcelain.

“I collected these materials over the past year or two and tested them over time to develop these unique effects", says Pustovrh. "The brush strokes are applied with handmade brushes from different types of grass that I collected in the area of Arthur’s Seat or applied simply with my ﬁngers.”

Other notable gift ideas from around the country are Jemima Dansey-Wright’s Free Palestine T-shirt which is available to buy for £25 from Welcome Home. These screen-printed T-shirts have been made in Glasgow to raise money for Medical Aid Palestine – all proﬁts from the T-shirt will support this cause.

Òr Shop consists of two creative retail stores in Portree on the Isle of Skye. Their Tiny Taper Kit (£20) is designed by Tiny Norah, a traditional beeswax candlemaker based in the heart of Scotland. Laura Thomas Co’s Citrus + Herb Bubble Bath (£15) is an all natural bubble bath by the Scottish maker. Scented with citrus and herb with notes of lemongrass, lavender, bergamot and pine essential oils.

Finally, what could be more romantic than drawing a bath for your loved one and filling it with petals? Floral Bath Salts contain real petals and are also available from Òr Shop – these are handmade on the Isle of Skye by local maker Kasia of Half of Nine (£8.50) and have the additional benefit of a beautiful floral scent to help relax as well as repair.

@stacey___hunter @localheroes.design

Photo: Gabriela Silveira

Image: courtesy of the artist

Jemima Dansey-Wright

Cecilia Stamp, Chub Disc Ring

Photo: Julija Pustovrh

Image: courtesy of the artist

Image: courtesy of Jorum

Image:

Image: courtesy of Òr Shop

Jorum, Unspoken Gesture

Laura Thomas Co at Òr Shop

Emporium Julium Ceramics

PAS.COS

Beach by Emer Tumilty

Art Review

Everlyn Nicodemus

National Galleries Scotland

Shapes spin inwardly. Broad strokes and bold colours are indulged. Patterns appear expansive and grand; singular colours appear somehow minute and intricate. Whether depicting pain or joy, Everlyn Nicodemus’s genius is in her bold metamorphosis of the body.

Although Nicodemus’s academic work is long renowned, her artistic work has received little recognition until recent years. This impressive retrospective of her work by National Galleries Scotland goes some way to addressing this. With a tender forcefulness, the Edinburgh-based and Tanzania-born artist centres women’s oppression alongside individual and collective trauma.

Lined across a wall of the central corridor, The Object – a series of 24 drawings which depict a depressive period in Nicodemus’s life – begins the exhibition. Charcoal scratches tug us round and round in their melancholy. For a retrospective so buoyed by a colourful vitality, it’s an affecting yet jarring entry point. Elsewhere, placement retains its purposefulness, with instances such as Woman (1983) facing opposite its counterpart Two Black Candles (1983). Duality is spoken to, rather than insisted upon. Indeed, in Nicodemus’s early work, her

signature – simply, ‘Everlyn’, no surname – finds itself nestled into a mother’s foot or curved around a blooming flower. Seeking its placement is a small joy. Later, the signature finds itself neatly sat in a bottom corner, left or right. Only a retrospective of this expanse can offer such intimacies at large.

And, certainly, Nicodemus’s work renders human intimacy anew. In a hot red and an even hotter blue, Man and Woman (1983) shows the artist and Kristian Romare, her late husband, embracing and becoming one another; the exhibition is dedicated to him, for his dedication and love over the years. Her later selfportrait series The Wedding (199192), consisting of 84 paintings, considers the brink between life and death, following the artist’s neardeath experience. Peculiarly beautiful paintings depict her confronting death, speaking to her associated post-traumatic stress disorder, rendered in a quiet black as well as gorgeous purples, blues, yellows, and oranges.

The newly produced series Lazarus Jacaranda heralds the restorative, life-giving potential of art. Departing from Lazarus’s biblical binds, Nicodemus instead depicts female ﬁgures in a near luminous, burgeoning orange, with jacaranda ﬂowers resting at each body’s base. Coupled with the deep midnight blue

“Only a retrospective of this expanse can offer such intimacies at large”

of the room’s walls, the series offers no less than an otherworldly state. But this glorious closing is not a closing at all: a small room follows, containing a collection of Nicodemus’s textiles before a corridor of collage-based paper works. The grandeur of Lazarus Jacaranda is somewhat too quickly lost in the timid return to normality. Although deeply bound to her inner world, Nicodemus’s work also looks outward, to both the past and the present. Gynaecologist Chair (1983) speaks to women’s lack of agency at the hands of male gynaecologists; overhead lights appear trumpet-like in the same brilliant gold as the woman’s bent legs. Set Free (1985) is based upon the collective will of women across Tanzania – in Arusha, Dar es Salaam and Moshi – to attain ﬁnancial and cultural freedom from their male counterparts. A singular subject is

refused, while the collective focus of women’s oppression and liberation is embraced. On arriving and departing the exhibition, however, it is inevitably difﬁcult to overlook the Baillie Gifford logo and its too-proud support of such beautifully radical works. With the recent knowledge of their unethical investments, their funding of art – whether a single exhibition or an institution at large – is deeply uncomfortable. Undoubtedly, Nicodemus paints with a wonder that is as poignant as it is potent. Despite some structural limitations, her retrospective welcomes us and holds us. We are indebted to her for this. [Eilidh Akilade]

Everlyn Nicodemus, National Galleries Scotland: Modern One, Edinburgh, until 25 May nationalgalleries.org

Everlyn Nicodemus, with works from her new series, Lazarus Jacaranda (2022–24), created for the exhibition

Everlyn Nicodemus, The Wedding 45, 1991

Photo: Neil Hanna

Behind the Mic

The brainchild of Glasgow-based comics Rae Brogan and Kate Hammer, All Mouth is a monthly lineup of queer, funny folk with a dedicated following. We pop behind the mic to ﬁnd out more

Words: Polly Glynn

Tell me about All Mouth – what’s the gig like?

Kate: The gig is raucous, playful, hilarious fun with a heavy sprinkling of sexy. We make sure every gig has a variety of comedians and tones, and try to bring in new people from out of town as we have a lot of audience members who come every month. At the end of every show, I read out a poem about the night, which is something I wouldn’t do anywhere else. It comments on all of the interactions I’ve had and the performers, and encompasses one of my favourite aspects of comedy: making inside jokes with the audience that can only work in that room, on that night, with those people.

How did the gig come about?

Rae: It started as a one-off show at Glasgow International Comedy Festival in 2023 which went so well it seemed daft not to make it a regular thing. I roped in Kate to be resident host and now we run it between us. It’s been really well received by acts and punters and we try very hard to keep it that way!

What was the ﬁrst All Mouth gig like? Do you have any stand-out moments of the gigs so far?

Rae: The ﬁrst show was so fun! We packed out McChuills and the place was buzzing. Glasgow obviously loves the gays – it was clear right away there was an appetite for more.

Kate: For one show, the star herself Ruth Hunter took over hosting, allowing me to dress in a bear costume and wreak havoc until the other star, Chris Thorburn, unmasked me.

Who’d be on your dream lineup?

Kate: CHLOE PETTS. Sorry, now that’s out of my system, I would deﬁnitely book Chloe Petts, an amazing queer comedian with perfect hair. Then Ashley Spinelli from Recess who is deﬁnitely a lesbian now, still wearing her leather jacket and beanie. And lastly, if nothing was a barrier, I would get Virginia Woolf and her longtime, close female friend to close the show. I’m not sure they’d be funny but I want to see their reaction when I tell them I’m a bottom with big top energy.

What’s been your best bit of comedy or gig-running advice?

Kate: Josie Long is such a supportive, hilarious, and badass comedian who is always full of the most profound advice, both

professionally and personally. I’m way too ready to give up on bits if they don’t go well immediately, but Josie has challenged me to re-write and re-test before chucking it. Also she has a wicked blue jacket that, in my opinion, is now canon to her brand.

Who or what on the comedy scene do you think we should look out for?

Rae: Honestly, there are so many exciting up-and-coming acts in Scotland but I really think Maddie Fernando is a genius and a star. Also, Open Comedy in Edinburgh is a fantastic free open mic gig run by Giulia Galastro.

Who’s the funniest comedian you’ve seen and why?

Kate: Chris Fleming, because they really mine every angle on a topic and make me laugh at things I’ve never even considered. Like, who else could do ten minutes on Bitmojis which leads to Chris pretending to be Amy Adams in Arrival?

Dealer’s Choice: Which Glasgow Subway Station is the most gay?

Kate: Just off vibes, Cowcaddens gives conﬁdent queer energy, though St. Enoch sounds like the next star of Drag Race UK Hillhead is about to come out, and we support that.

What’s next for All Mouth? Do you have anything exciting coming up?

Kate: We are going MULTI-CITY baby! On 13 February we’re doing a Gay-lentine’s Special at Edinburgh’s Monkey Barrel with Sam Lake headlining. This is All Mouth’s ﬁrst show outside of Glasgow, and I hope we have many more. The queer comedians here are just too funny to keep to ourselves. I hope it’s not too obnoxious how much I love this show. I think I love this show more than my phone loves telling me it’s out of storage (once a day, every day – give me some space please).

Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about?

Kate: I’m doing a work-in-progress at the Glasgow International Comedy Festival about my journey trying to stay in the UK to tell jokes. My shows are always heavy on the barely-controlled chaos so you’re not going to want to miss this.

All Mouth: Gay-lentines Special, Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, 13 Feb, 7.30pm, £10

All Mouth: A Queer Comedy Show, The Rum Shack, Glasgow, 27 Feb, 8pm, £9

Kate Hammer: Government-Approved Comedian (WIP),Van Winkle West End, Glasgow, 23 Mar, 7.10pm, £4-5, part of Glasgow International Comedy Festival

@allmouthcomedy / @katethehammer / @raebrogan on Instagram

Kate Hammer

Image: courtesy All Mouth

By Roque Larraquy, trans. Frank Wynne rrrrr

The National Telepathy is a graphic, acerbic work of satirical science ﬁction unlike anything you’re likely to have ever read – unless you’re familiar with Argentinian writer Roque Larraquy’s two preceding novels. Raised a Marxist in Buenos Aires, his books share a central pre-occupation with the darkness inherent to his country’s right-wing political discourse.

The main text is narrated ﬁrst by the nameless assistant to Amado Dam, a 1930s rubber oligarch, then by the vile Amado himself. A sloth is discovered amongst the otherwise human cargo of a Peruvian ship delivering undocumented indigenous tribespeople to an ‘ethnopark’ – a human safari set to be the ﬁrst of its kind. Soon, it is discovered that the sloth can connect two people in orgasmic, telepathic bliss. What has the potential to unlock the interconnectedness of all living things is instead, to Dam, two things. Firstly, an ugly battle between unadulterated pleasure and his own disdainful prejudices; and secondly, a business opportunity.

The documents in the book’s appendices go on to tell of the sloth’s adoption by multiple governments as an evolving tool of surveillance and propaganda. Within them is a whole other phantom book that extends the main text’s central critique. The National Telepathy is a stupefying clarion call for how a white, cis-het male elite will strip something of all of its revolutionary potential, weaponising it if need be, to stay on top.

[Louis Cammell]

By Heather Parry rrrrr

Carrion Crow follows Marguerite Perigord, eldest daughter to crumbling French nobility in Chelsea, as she begins a conﬁnement in the attic overseen by her mother to prepare her for married life.

The plot may have been inspired by the tragic case of Blanche Monnier, known as ‘the conﬁned woman of Poitiers’ who was imprisoned in her family’s attic for twentyﬁve years to prevent a marriage considered unfavourable by Blanche’s mother. The timeline shifts between Marguerite’s imprisonment in the attic and the early married life of her mother Cecile and her transformation from Cecilia Hargreaves, humble soapmaker’s daughter, to Cecilie Perigord, nouveau-riche wife of a hedonistic and absent aristocrat.

Heather Parry’s imagery and atmosphere are visceral and she creates evocative character studies of Marguerite and Cecile. The novel interrogates spectacle and metamorphosis, with the misfortune of a declining lineage represented through images of soap as both luxurious and abject and the titular carrion crow nesting in the rotting rafters. This is further underscored by the aviary in London Zoo, setting of a life-altering romantic meeting, and the stuffed platypus, a gift by Lord Graves from the colonies which amuses and then unnerves by its bizarre appearance.

A surreal and abject little monster of a novel, artful in its exploration of women’s unspoken and unfulﬁlled ambitions, and the transformations they make to try and achieve them. [Katalina Watt]

By Michel Nieva rrrrr

In the year 2272, climate change has transformed central Argentina into a new Caribbean; conglomerate corporations have recreated Earth’s extinct ecosystems in other planets – anyone can visit for the right price! – and the emergence of new viruses dictates stock market fluctuations as countries stru le to manage every new pandemic. It is into this scorching world that Dengue Boy, a halfhuman-half-mosquito creature is born. Poor and monstrous, resented by his mother and abused by his peers, Dengue Boy has one mission: to take revenge on the human race. Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy is a wild book, surprising on every page; insightful, funny and grotesque. A unique hybrid of body horror, absurdist satire and dystopian science fiction, this novel critiques capitalism and colonialism with an entrancing humorous tone and a gruesome plot. While clearly influenced by the likes of Cronenberg and Philip K. Dick, Dengue Boy is also distinctly Latin American. It is as Borgian as it is Kafkaesque, but more importantly, this novel is completely, freshly, Nievan.

Dengue Boy is a book about transformation. It might be eccentric, its absurdity too distracting at times, but it poses important questions about the metamorphosis of the self (it does not take long for the protagonist to become much more than a bullied mutant child), and about the tangible changes that are being inﬂicted on this very real planet today. [Venezia Paloma]

Ask Me Again

By Clare Sestanovich rrrrr

Among contemporary novels, there are those in which the arbitrary exploration of the mundane is skilfully used to convey a sense of realism – life, after all, rarely conforms to traditional narrative structures. Then there are those stories which will keep readers searching for a plot, a theme, or any hint of pattern at all. Ask Me Again is one of the latter: it keeps you at the edge of your seat, waiting for something to happen.

In this debut novel by Clare Sestanovich, an author better known for her critically acclaimed short stories, we follow a young woman named Eva through her teenage years and into adulthood, watching her grow and be transformed by the people she meets. Especially signiﬁcant is Eva’s friendship with Jamie, a mysterious and introspective boy coming from a very different background and who ends up following an even more starkly different path.

Ask Me Again is a novel composed of vignettes, a book of tautological questions and half-answers. While there are certainly some kernels of truth in its precisely put observations, and even some moments of brilliance lurking within its constant metaphors for growth and relationships, it begs the question: is that enough? Is the journey always more signiﬁcant than the destination? What if it is a winding journey? What if there is no destination? Asking once might be more than enough. [Venezia Paloma]

Doubleday, 27 Feb

The National Telepathy

Dengue Boy

Picador,

Carrion Crow

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 03 Feb

TWRP

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Canada.

SURF TRASH

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Alt rock from Australia. Tue 04 Feb

STEVE‘N’SEAGULLS

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00 Country from Finland.

WONDERLESS

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Alt rock from Scotland.

COREY KENT

SWG3 19:00–22:00 Country from the US.

SIAMESE CATHOUSE, 18:30–22:00 Rock from Denmark.

GLORYHAMMER

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 18:30–22:00 Power metal from the UK.

SLOMOSA THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Norway.

SUB-RADIO

STEREO, 19:00–22:00 Indie pop from Washington DC.

ORIGAMI ANGEL ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Punk from Washington DC.

GLARE (SUNNBRELLA) ROOM 2, 19:30–22:00 Shoegaze from Texas.

Wed 05 Feb

DROPKICK MURPHYS

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Celtic punk from the US. SLAY SESSIONS PRESENTS (TRACERS + THE TRANQUILS + CHRDBL + AN OPENING LIE)

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:30–23:00 Experimental rock from Glasgow.

THE HARA THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Alt metal from Manchester.

MARY OCHER (BELL LUNGS) THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Avant-pop from Berlin.

Thu 06 Feb

BLUE VIOLET

KING TUT’S, 19:00–22:00 Alt pop.

TREMONTI SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Heavy metal from the US. THE NOISE CLUB + DAY DRUNK + DAVID WILTS

SWG3 20:00–22:00 Eclectic lineup.

BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE BARROWLANDS, 19:00–22:00 Rock from the US. SOFT RIOT (OBERST PANIZZA + UBRE BLANCA) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:00–22:00 Experimental lineup. CURTIS MILES (BOAB + SNOUT) THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Alt country from Glasgow. HENRY WAGONS (DEAR HEATHER) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00 Country rock from Australia. GLASGOW STREETSOUND PRESENTS! ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00 Eclectic lineup. Fri 07 Feb

JAN AKKERMAN ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00 Jazz rock from the Netherlands.

SERGEANT KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Indie rock from Fife.

LAZY DAY NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Indie rock from London. SAN JOSE STEREO, 19:00–22:00 Punk from Glasgow.

KEVIN MCGUIRE ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Country from Scotland. Sat 08 Feb

MARIBOU STATE O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Electronica from the UK.

GIRL SCOUT NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Indie rock from Stockholm. DUTCH CRIMINAL RECORD

SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Indie.

PURPLE HEARTS THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Mod from the UK.

IGOR CAVALERA STEREO, 19:00–22:00 Metal from Brazil. RYAN AND THE LIMBS THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00 Indie from Glasgow. SULTANS OF PING ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Indie from Cork.

SLOTH RACKET (BENICIO DEL TRAINWRECK + SMIRK + DR VZX MOIST) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:00–22:00 Experimental lineup. THE GENTLE SPRING (VETCHINSKY SETTINGS + THE CATENARY WIRES) THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Indie pop from France. CYNDI LAUPER THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00 Pop from New York. YOUNG KNIVES THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00 Indie rock from the UK.

Sun 09 Feb

WARREN ZEIDERS

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Country from the US.

SAM GREENFIELD NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:30–23:00 Jazz from New York.

KAWALA

SWG3 19:00–22:00 Indie pop from the UK. SKARLETT RIOT

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Hard rock from Scunthorpe.

BAYSIDE

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Punk rock from New York.

JILL LOREAN THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Indie rock.

Mon 10 Feb

THE MESSTHETICS (JAMES BRANDON LEWIS) NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Experimental jazz punk from Washington DC. AMBLE

SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Folk from Ireland.

PETEY (LIAM BENZVI) ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Pop from the US.

Tue 11 Feb

WAGE WAR

SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Metal from Florida. RHONA MACFARLANE (ANNIE BOOTH) THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Singer-songwriter from Glasgow.

Wed 12 Feb

BERLIOZ O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Jazz house. WINGS OF DESIRE KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Indie rock from the UK. SLAY SESSIONS PRESENTS (ROGER BACON + DOLLS PARTS + MYSTIC HEIGHTS + PAPERHOUSE) NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:30–23:00 Experimental rock from Glasgow. BEN BARNES OLD FRUITMARKET GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Singer-songwriter from the UK. STATE OF THE UNION THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Americana. JENNY DON’T AND THE SPURS THE RUM SHACK, 19:30–22:00 Outlaw country from Portland. COLBY T HELMS THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00 Country from Virginia.

Thu 13 Feb

CAGE THE ELEPHANT

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Kentucky.

PETER PERRETT

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Alt indie from London. DUBINSKY NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Indie from the Highlands. ADULT. (SPIKE HELLIS) STEREO, 19:00–22:00 Electro, techno, punk, and darkwave from Detroit. GAVIN JAMES ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Singer-songwriter from Ireland. FLYNN BUTLER FRASER THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:00–22:00 Classical from Scotland. KIM RICHEY THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Singer-songwriter from the US.

DAN BYRNE THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00 Indie from Liverpool. Fri 14 Feb

DEAN LEWIS O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Singer-songwriter from Australia. FACE THE WEST

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Electro-trad from the Outer Hebrides. THE BOO RADLEYS (KEELEY ) MONO, 20:00–22:00 Alt rock from the UK. THE CLAES (RUBY CHERRY + THE STRIKES) SWG3 19:00–22:00 Local bands. ANNA B SAVAGE STEREO, 19:00–22:00 Chamber rock from London. MAQUINA THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00 Electro rock from Lisbon.

BEN WALKER ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Singer-songwriter from the UK.

STANLEY WELCH THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Alt folk.

JAMES BLUNT (TOPLOADER) THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00 Pop from the UK. JAY1 ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00 Rap from the UK. Sat 15 Feb

SKINNER NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Post-punk from Dublin. KATIE NICOLL SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Pop from Scotland. THE RUMJACKS CATHOUSE, 19:00–22:00 Celtic punk from Sydney. THE REZILLOS THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Punk from Edinburgh. SAMMY RAE & THE FRIENDS BARROWLANDS, 19:00–22:00 Indie from the US.

HEEDZ (WATER MACHINE + BLOW UP DOLL) STEREO, 19:00–22:00 Punk from Glasgow. LOS PACAMINOS ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Americana from the UK.

HOUNDS OF LOVE THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:00–22:00 Eclectic lineup. SHE DREW THE GUN ROOM 2 19:00–22:00 Psych pop from the UK. Sun 16 Feb BILK SWG3 19:00–22:00 Punk from the UK. HAPPYDAZE THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Pop rock from Edinburgh. CIRCA WAVES BARROWLANDS, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock from Liverpool. STURGILL SIMPSON BARROWLANDS, 19:00–22:00 Country from Kentucky. ORANGE CLAW HAMMER THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Indie. FRANCES MCKEE (CARLA J EASTON) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00 Indie from Scotland. Mon 17 Feb

INHALER O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Dublin. PENTIRE (GIRLS. SPEAK.FRENCH) KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Indie from Herefordshire.

RUTHVEN

SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Funk from London. CORY WONG

BARROWLANDS, 19:00–22:00 Jazz rock from the US.

Tue 18 Feb

INHALER

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Dublin.

HEARTWORMS (SHE’S IN PARTIES)

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Indie from London. BERTHAJU (TOAST + YELLOW HELEN) NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Pop rock from Rotterdam.

THEE SACRED SOULS

SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Retro soul.

JAZZ AT THE GLAD (HERAK + BULATKIN

QUARTET FEAT. PAUL TOWNDROW)

THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Jazz.

PANTERA (POWER TRIP + KING PARROT)

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00 Metal from Texas.

PERSONAL TRAINER ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00 Alt indie.

Wed 19 Feb

THE BUG CLUB ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock from Wales.

LUVCAT

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Alt rock from Liverpool. THE HIGH LLAMAS NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Avant-pop from London.

LAWRENCE

SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Pop soul from New York. SQUID

OLD FRUITMARKET

GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Jazz from Brighton.

Thu 20 Feb

DELIGHTS (PEDALO)

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Alt from Manchester. MYLES SMITH

SWG3 19:00–22:00 Pop from Luton. BIIG PIIG

SWG3 19:00–22:00 Pop from Ireland. ONEDA

SWG3 19:00–22:00 Rap from Manchester. GREEN LUNG (UNTO OTHERS)

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Doom metal from London. HINDS

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock from Spain.

K.O.G

ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00 Afro-fusion from the UK.

Fri 21 Feb

OLIVER ANTHONY O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Singer-songwriter from the UK.

MAN/WOMAN/ CHAINSAW

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Punk from London. MARY IN THE JUNKYARD NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Experimental art rock. CUPID STUNTS

SWG3 19:00–22:00 Punk from Glasgow. SECRET AFFAIR THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Rock from London. EMMA BLACKERY STEREO, 19:00–22:00 Synth pop. THE BLUETONES ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Brit pop from the UK. SNOW PATROL THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00 Rock from Dundee. THE BUOYS THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00 Punk rock from Sydney. CORINTHIANS (RIVIERA + THE BACK PAGES + SENTIMENT) ROOM 2 19:00–22:00 Psych rock.

Sat 22 Feb THE ROOKS (TOM. A SMITH)

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Indie rock from Glasgow. FOUR YEAR STRONG THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Pop rock from the US. RYLEY WALKER THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Indie from the US. BAWO STEREO, 19:00–22:00 Rap and soul from London. LAS NUBES THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Garage pop from Miami. MAMA TERRA THE RUM SHACK, 19:30–22:00 Jazz.

Sun 23 Feb

EMEI (HAIDEN HENDERSON) KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Alt pop from LA. JAKOB NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Post-rock from New Zealand. STATE CHAMPS

SWG3 19:00–22:00 Pop punk from the US. ZAHO DE SAGAZAN SWG3 19:00–22:00 Singer-songwriter from France.

CHUCK PROPHET (OUR MAN IN THE FIELD) ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Rock from California. COLE STACEY THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:00–22:00 Folk pop.

MAN REI (UGNE UMA) THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Dream pop.

Mon 24 Feb

SET IT OFF

SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Rock from the US. MISPLACED

SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Pop punk from Glasgow.

LOLA YOUNG THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Neo-soul from London. DEAD AIR THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00 Alt rock from London.

Tue 25 Feb

CARLY PEARCE

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Country from the US. BLACK FOXXES

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Indie rock from Exeter. SLOWDANCE

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:30–23:00 Indie rock from Glasgow.

DOVES

SWG3, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Cheshire. SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock from Philadelphia.

KANE GANG

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Pop from the UK. BEING DEAD THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Pop punk from Texas. BIG SLEEP THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00 Alt indie from New York.

Wed 26 Feb

LUKE SITAL-SINGH

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Folk from the UK. ADWAITH NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00 Indie from South Wales. BIOHAZARD + LIFE OF AGONY

SWG3, 18:00–22:00 Hardcore metal from the US.

CHLOE SLATER SWG3 19:00–22:00 Indie from Manchester. MATTIEL (COSMIC CROONER)

STEREO, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock from Atlanta. POST-PARTY THE FLYING DUCK, 19:30–22:00 Indie rock from Ireland. THE LOTTERY

WINNERS

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00 Indie pop from Manchester.

STEREOCILIA THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Experimental from Bristol.

Thu 27 Feb

CHALK

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Punk from Belfast. KILLCITY (DJ JAY + EEECTOOO + BAD COMPANY + LIL PANDA + OMC + SK4 + REVIVE + WASTED4U)

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:30–23:00 Rap from London and Birmingham.

Tue 04 Feb

BBC INTRODUCING: WAVERLEY. + SAINT SAPPHO + PEDALO

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Indie.

Wed 05 Feb

BLUE VIOLET

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Alt pop.

Thu 06 Feb

DARREN KIELY

SWG3 19:00–22:00 Folk from Ireland.

PALEFACE SWISS

SWG3 19:00–22:00 Deathcore from Switzerland.

HONEY

STEREO, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock from Glasgow. TOUCHÉ AMORÉ

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

Post-hardcore from LA. ALESIA (PRETTY UNDERGROUND + THE EUPHONICS + RAIDAX)

ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00 Garage rock from Glasgow. Fri 28 Feb

SANDI THOM

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00 Pop from Scotland.

PASTEL

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Rock from Manchester.

COLDWAVE NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–23:00

Post-punk from Australia. FAT DOG

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00 Rock from the UK.

NIAMH MORRIS

SWG3 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Glasgow.

DISTANT (ENTERPRISE EARTH)

CATHOUSE, 18:30–22:00 Heavy metal from Rotterdam.

JAMIE MILLER

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00 Pop from Wales.

RED SKY JULY

THE GLAD CAFE, 19:30–22:30 Alt country from the UK.

BECKY SIKASA THE RUM SHACK, 19:30–22:00 Soul pop from Scotland.

MIKE

ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00 Rap from the US. Sat 01 Mar

THE RILLS

KING TUT’S, 19:30–22:00 Indie rock from London.

BEN ELLIS

SWG3 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Wales.

NORTH ATLAS

CATHOUSE, 19:00–22:00 Pop rock from Glasgow. JAMES JAY LEWIS

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Liverpool. Sun 02 Mar

OPETH

BARROWLANDS, 19:00–22:00 Prog metal from Sweden.

Edinburgh Music

Mon 03 Feb

NEW TOWN

CONCERTS: QUATUOR

VAN KUJIK WITH SEAN SHIBE

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:45–22:00 Classical from France.

HARSH (MOSKITO) BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Punk from Calgary. BOWLING FOR SOUP O2 ACADEMY EDINBURGH, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Texas.

JILL LOREAN (PHILIP JOSEPH RAE) SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock.

Fri 07 Feb

LIVE AT THE RED (TWISTED ENDS + ROUGHLY 4000 GEESE + LA MANTRA) WEE RED BAR, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock.

FRIGHT YEARS SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock.

THE RAMPANTS THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00 Indie.

Sat 08 Feb

LOGOZ (NERVOUS TWITCH + AFTERSHOCKS) BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Punk rock from the UK. EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY JAZZ ORCHESTRA PRESENTS: A NIGHT AT THE SILVER SCREEN

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:00 Jazz and blues from Scotland.

DAVE ARCARI + TREVOR BABAJACK STEGER

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:15–22:00 Blues from the UK.

RANDOM RULES: LAZY DAY + GOODNIGHT LOUISA + BECCA SLOAN SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock from London. SCHTËPI (ELLIANA CRAIG) THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00 Art punk from the UK. Sun 09 Feb

DUNES (THE KRYSS TALMETH EXPERIENCE) BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Alt rock from Newcastle. MARTYN JOSEPH THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00 Folk from the UK. GIRL SCOUT (COMFORT GIRL) SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock from Stockholm. DUTCH CRIMINAL RECORD

THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00 Indie.

Mon 10 Feb

COLBY T. HELMS SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Country from Virginia. Tue 11 Feb

WILLIE DOWLING BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Rock from the UK.

JENNY DON’T AND THE SPURS SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Outlaw country from Portland.

Wed 12 Feb

BABII SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Hyperpop from Margate. Thu 13 Feb

HELENA KAY QUARTET: GOLDEN SANDS REVISITED (NORMAN & CORRIE) THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:00 Jazz and blues from Scotland. RATS ON RAFTS THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00 Punk from Rotterdam.

Fri 14 Feb

NERINA PALLOT THE ASSEMBLY ROOMS, 19:00–22:00 Indie from the UK. MIKE MCGEARY AND FRIENDS THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:30 Folk and roots from Scotland. LAURENCE JONES THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:00–22:00 Blues from the UK. W.H. LUNG THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00 Krautrock, post-punk and synth pop.

Sat 15 Feb

SUBVERSIVE PUNK NIGHT BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Punk. THE FRANK AND WALTERS THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00 Alt pop from Cork. MAQUINA. SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Industrial rock from Lisbon.

Sun 16 Feb

DESENSITISED (FIRING AT STATUES) BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Alt punk from Nottingham. JAZZ SABBATH THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:30 Jazz metal. PERSONAL TRAINER THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00 Alt indie.

Mon 17 Feb

THE GODFATHERS THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00 Rock from London. BLACKBIRD PRESENTS WOMEN SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Mixed genre. THE KIFFNESS LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00 South Africa.

Wed 19 Feb

DRIVEN BY HARNESS BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Scotland. CARL MARAH (DANIEL MCGEEVER) SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Singer-songwriter.

Thu 20 Feb

SPIKE BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Rock from the UK. SCO 24/25: MOZART OBOE CONCERTO (WITH SOLOIST IVAN PODYOMOV) THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:00 Classical from Scotland.

EUGENE RIPPER SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Folk punk from Toronto. Fri 21 Feb

QUEER AS PUNK (JUNE HENRY + THE LAST ARIZONA + PICTURESKEW) WEE RED BAR, 19:00–22:00 Punk.

GOLDIE BOUTILIER THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00 Singer-songwriter from Canada.

STUFFED ANIMALS THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock.

Sat 22 Feb

HAMISH HAWK USHER HALL, 19:00–22:00 Pop rock from Edinburgh. PANHEAD SHARPS SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Alternative. LOS FASTIDOS LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00 Oi! from Italy.

Sun 23 Feb THE COUNTESS OF FIFE THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00 Alt country from Scotland. MOGWAI USHER HALL, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Glasgow.

Mon 24 Feb

FAIR WEATHER SON (THE FOLK DRAMA + THE SHOREZ) SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Indie rock.

Tue 25 Feb

FISH BOWL (TUESDAY NIGHT WHITES + CITADEL) THE BONGO CLUB, 19:00–22:00 Funk from Edinburgh. THE MURDER CAPITAL THE CAVES, 19:00–22:00 Post-punk from Ireland. DEAD AIR

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Alt rock from London.

Wed 26 Feb

SLACKRR (HEMLOCK) BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Underground from the UK. DOVES LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Cheshire.

Thu 27 Feb

HOLYRUDE VAULT (BLACKFYRE RISING) BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Metal from Edinburgh. DUSTIN O’HALLORAN THE QUEEN’S HALL, 20:00–22:30 Indie from the US.

JOSHUA BURNSIDE THE CAVES, 19:00–22:00 Folk from Belfast. ADWAITH SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00 Indie from South Wales. FAT DOG LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00 Rock from the UK.

Fri 28 Feb

WHITE TYGER (WHITE SKIES) BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Rock from Birmingham.

GEORGIA CÉCILE THE QUEEN’S HALL, 20:00–22:30 Jazz from Edinburgh.

CARNIVAL WEE RED BAR, 19:00–03:00 Pop rock.

Sat 01 Mar

TYTAN

BANNERMANS, 19:00–22:00 Rock from the UK. PAMA INTERNATIONAL THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00 Reggae.

Dundee Music

Mon 03 Feb

STEVE‘N’SEAGULLS BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 19:30–22:00 Country from Finland. Fri 07 Feb BLUE VIOLET BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 20:00–22:00 Alt pop.

Sat 22 Feb

PETE WYLIE AND THE MIGHTY WAH! BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 20:00–22:00 Indie from Liverpool.

Glasgow Clubs

Thu 06 Feb

SAY SO 2ND BIRTHDAY THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 Trance and techno. Fri 07 Feb

DISFUNCTION: LESSSS, OMAKS + CARAVEL SWG3 22:00–03:00 Techno. CIRCUIT CONTROL: JULZ LEVER AND CREADH SWG3, 23:00–03:00 Techno.

23 DEGREES: BAKEY (JENN GUNN) STEREO, 23:00–03:00 UK garage from London. OUT OF BOUNDSKAMIXLO (MVCOKO + MM + R.DENHAM + KIEF) THE FLYING DUCK, 23:00–03:00 Experimental. 10 YEARS OF LEZURE: RADIOACTIVE MAN B2B LUKAS WIGFLEX LA CHEETAH CLUB, 22:00–03:00 Techno and electro. MISSING PERSONS CLUB (DJ SMOKER + LOVEJOY + ANDY BARTON) THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 Techno. BOB MARLEY BIRTHDAY - A CELEBRATION OF REGGAE MUSIC THE RUM SHACK, 21:00–01:00 Reggae. TRISTWCH Y FENYWOD AFTERPARTY EXIT GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00 Experimental. Sat 08 Feb

STEREO: MARTYN BOOTYSPOON & AMY KISNORBO (MAVEEN + TEKHOLE) STEREO, 23:00–03:00 Baltimore club and ghettotech from Montreal. WORLD OF TWIST: GLOBAL GROOVES WITH JAMO KIDD + HOW BIZARRE THE RUM SHACK, 21:00–01:00 Disco and afrobeat. EXIT CLUB: JUNGLE EXIT GLASGOW, 22:00–03:00 Drum ‘n’ bass and jungle.

Regular Glasgow club nights

The Rum Shack

SATURDAYS (LAST OF EVERY OTHER MONTH)

VOCAL OR VERSION, 21:00

Vintage Jamaican music on original vinyl by resident DJs and guests.

Sub Club

FRIDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) RETURN TO MONO SLAM’s monthly Subbie residency sees them joined by some of the biggest names in international techno.

Cabaret

Voltaire

FRIDAYS

FLY CLUB, 23:00

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

SATURDAYS

PLEASURE, 23:00

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

The Bongo Club

TUESDAYS

MIDNIGHT BASS, 23:00

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

FRIDAYS (THIRD OF THE MONTH)

ELECTRIKAL, 23 00

Sound system and crew, part of a music and art collective specialising in BASS music.

FRIDAYS (MONTHLY, WEEK CHANGES)

SOUND SYSTEM LEGACIES, 23 00

Exploring the legacy of dub, reggae and roots music and sound system culture in the contemporary club landscape.

FRIDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH)

DISCO MAKOSSA, 23 00

Disco Makossa takes the dancefloor on a funk-filled trip through the sounds of African disco, boogie and house – strictly for the dancers.

FRIDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH)

OVERGROUND, 23 00

A safe space to appreciate all things rave, jungle, breakbeat and techno.

Sun 09 Feb

KEEP ON WITH SPECIAL GUEST DICKY TRISCO LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00 Disco and Balearic.

Wed 12 Feb

SIH-LEST PRESENTS: OCBOYS THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 Techno.

Thu 13 Feb

FLIPSIDE WITH LEWIS

LOWE LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00 Techno and dub.

CANDLE (MI$ CO$MIX + ARLO DUKE + GEORGE BEST) THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 Electro and acid.

SATURDAYS SUBCULTURE, 23:00

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

SATURDAYS (FIRST OR SECOND OF THE MONTH)

MESSENGER, 23 00

Roots reggae rocking since 1987 – foundation tune, fresh dubs, vibes alive, rockers, steppers, rub-a-dub.

SATURDAYS (MONTHLY )

CHROMATIC, 23 00

Championing all things UKG, grime, dubstep, bass and more, with disco, funk and soul from Mumbo Jumbo upstairs.

SATURDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH)

PULSE, 23 00

Techno night started in 2009 hosting regular special guests from the international scene.

SATURDAYS (MONTHLY )

HOBBES MUSIC X CLUB

NACHT, 23:00

A collaboration between longrunning club night and Edinburgh record label ft. house, techno, electro, UKG and bass.

Sneaky Pete’s

MONDAYS MORRISON STREET/ STAND B-SIDE/CHAOS IN THE COSMOS/TAIS-TOI, 23:00

House and techno dunts from some of Edinburgh’s best young teams.

TUESDAYS RARE, 23:00

Weekly house and techno with rising local DJs and hot special guests.

THURSDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)

VOLENS CHORUS, 23:00

Resident DJs with an eclectic, global outlook.

FRIDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) MISS WORLD, 23:00

All-female DJ collective with monthly guests

FRIDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH)

HOT MESS, 23:00

A night for queer people and their friends.

Fri 14 Feb

PEGASSI SWG3, 23:00–03:00 Techno. DENNIS LOUVRA SWG3, 23:00–03:00 House and afrohouse. PONYBOY VALENTINES (ALUNA) SWG3, 23:00–03:00 Hyperpop and techno. FOURTEENSIXTEEN X OPHERINGS: VALENTINES (BALLAD + PLATA + JULIETTA FERRARI + DJI MON + OPHERINGS + 500) STEREO, 23:00–03:00 Trance.

HILL52 PRESENTS: KISS ME, I’M THE DJ THE FLYING DUCK, 23:00–03:00 Club.

EZUP: FERRIE + JAY

CELINO + MURPHY LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00 Techno and house.

SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)

SOUL JAM, 23:00

Monthly no-holds-barred, down-and-dirty disco.

SUNDAYS POSTAL, 23:00 Weekly Sunday session showcasing the very best of heavy-hitting local talent with some extra special guests.

The Liquid Room

SATURDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) REWIND, 22:30 Monthly party night celebrating the best in soul, disco, rock and pop with music from the 70s, 80s, 90s and current bangers. The Hive

MONDAYS POPTASTIC, 22:00 Pop, requests and throwbacks to get your week off to an energetic start.

TUESDAYS TRASH TUESDAY, 22:00

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

WEDNESDAYS COOKIE WEDNESDAY, 22:00 90s and 00s cheesy pop and modern chart anthems.

THURSDAYS HI-SOCIETY THURSDAY, 22:00 Student anthems and bangerz.

FRIDAYS FLIP FRIDAY, 22:00 Yer all-new Friday at Hive. Cheap entry, inevitably danceable, and noveltystuffed. Perrrfect.

SATURDAYS BUBBLEGUM, 22:00 Saturday mix of chart and dance, with retro 80s classics thrown in for good measure.

SUNDAYS

SECRET SUNDAY, 22:00

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

Subway Cowgate

MONDAYS

TRACKS, 21:00

Blow the cobwebs off the week with a weekly Monday night party with some of Scotland’s biggest and best drag queens.

TUESDAYS

TAMAGOTCHI, 22:00

Throwback Tuesdays with non-stop 80s, 90s, 00s tunes.

WEDNESDAYS TWISTA, 22:00

Banger after banger all night long.

THURSDAYS FLIRTY, 22:00

Pop, cheese and chart.

FRIDAYS

FIT FRIDAYS, 22:00

Chart-topping tunes perfect for an irresistible sing and dance-along.

SATURDAYS

SLICE SATURDAY, 22:00

The drinks are easy and the pop is heavy.

SUNDAYS

SUNDAY SERVICE, 22:00

Atone for the week before and the week ahead with non-stop dancing.

The Mash House

TUESDAYS MOVEMENT, 20:00

House, techno, drum ‘n’ bass and garage.

SATURDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)

SAMEDIA SHEBEEN, 23:00

Joyous global club sounds: think Afrobeat, Latin and Arabic dancehall on repeat.

SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH) PULSE, 23:00

The best techno DJs sit alongside The Mash House resident Darrell Pulse.

NO SWEAT INVITES

VIVACE SWG3, 23:00–03:00 Techno. HO HARDER V2 SWG3, 23:00–03:00 Techno.

SWEATBOX X STEREO: RP BOO & BIG DOPE P (MAKAYA + BELLAROSA + DJ FARLIC BREATH) STEREO, 23:00–03:00 Footwork from Chicago. FORTIFIED : EL-B (ELECTRIC ELMINATORS) THE FLYING DUCK, 23:00–03:00 Dubstep, garage and bass.

CO -ACCUSED: GARY BECK + LUKE’S ANGER THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 Techno and acid. COORIE DOON CIVIC HOUSE, 17:00–00:30 Disco.

Wed 26 Feb

GUEMS PRESENTS: HOUSEPARTY THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 Techno and garage.

Thu 27 Feb

BEN HEMSLEY PRESENTS INTIMACY

SUB CLUB, 23:00–04:00 Trance and rave. MILLBOY RECORDS X RHYTHMIC REVIVAL PRESENTS: DJ LOVE THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 Techno.

Fri 28 Feb

ALEX FARELL

SWG3, 23:00–03:00 Electro. MADE

SWG3, 23:00–03:00 Techno. NARCISS [LANGUAGE OF LOVE]

SWG3, 23:00–03:00 Techno. HOMETOWN SOUNDSYSTEM

STEREO, 23:00–03:00 Reggae.

10 YEARS OF CRAIGIE KNOWES WITH OM UNIT

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00 Techno and acid. ANIMAL FARM: OSCAR MULERO SUB CLUB, 23:00–04:00 Techno.

CELESTE W/ SALOME THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 Techno.

Sat 01 Mar

Edinburgh Clubs

Mon 03 Feb

BLACK FLAG THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 Techno.

Thu 06 Feb

BOTANICA PRESENTS: AN DANNSA DUB + UPLANDS ROAST THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00 Dub and jungle. SWEATBOX SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 Latin bass. FERAL THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 Queer femme.

Fri 07 Feb

BALKANARAMA LA BELLE ANGELE, 22:30–03:00 Balkan. HEADS UP THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 Drum ‘n’ bass. Sat 08 Feb

EZSTREET THE CAVES, 23:00–03:00 House.

REGGAETON PARTY LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00 Reggae.

ETERNAL THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 Techno.

UNTITLED PRESENTS: THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 Hard techno.

Sun 09 Feb

NEURONS: THE FIRST EDITION SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 Techno.

Mon 10 Feb

RIDE N BOUNCE SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 R’n’B.

Fri 14 Feb

Sat 15 Feb

EHFM: VALENTINE’S SPECIAL SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 House.

RELIVE THE MASH HOUSE, 15:00–20:00 House and trance.

DILF THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 Pop.

Sun 16 Feb

LIONOIL SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 House.

Tue 18 Feb

RIDE N BOUNCE SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 R‘n’B.

Thu 20 Feb

YBZ: BUCKLEY

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 UK garage. Fri 21 Feb

AGORA SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 Techno.

SWIFTOGEDDON LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00 Pop.

BASS INJECTION THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 Drum ‘n’ bass.

Sat 22 Feb

Fri 28 Feb

DISORDER W/ METALHEADZ: DOC SCOTT & GROOVERIDER THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00 Drum ‘n’ bass and jungle. SO FETCH - 2000S PARTY LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00 Pop.

DIFFUSION THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 Hard techno. INKOHERENT THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 Techno and hardcore.

Sat 01 Mar

EDINBURGH DISCO LOVERS SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 Disco.

Dundee Clubs

Fri 07 Feb

SWIFTOGEDDON CHURCH, 22:00–03:00 Pop.

Sat 08 Feb

DISTORTED CHURCH, 22:30–03:00 Emo and punk. Tue 25 Feb

Sat 15 Feb

MOVE’N GROOVE SWG3, 23:00–03:00 House. BARE MAXIMUM: BEAR HUG (PATRICE + EMILIOOO + 3 - LIX + LOOSE E + BIG PHARMA) STEREO, 23:00–03:00 Garage and jungle. SHOOT YOUR SHOT: BASHKKA + MARIE MALARIE THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 House.

Thu 20 Feb

SIH-LEST PRESENTS: FASTER HORSES THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 Trance and techno. Fri 21 Feb

SWIFTOGEDDON SWG3 23:00–03:00 Pop.

SUDANSE (JOEM + PMCCOTTER + LEWISROBERTSON + LOOSE E + THOMAS BLOOMER) STEREO, 23:00–03:00 House, techno and acid. DATAFARM (MURGA + SINNAH + ORLA HALLIGAN + DJ MOV) THE FLYING DUCK, 23:00–03:00 Bass and techno. LA CHEETAH CLUB PRESENTS: SHANTI CELESTE

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00 Techno.

THUDLINE: PLOY + LWS + MÁS ALLÁ THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–04:00 Bass and balearic. Sat 22 Feb

NATHAN DAWE SWG3 23:00–03:00 House.

CL!CK 1ST BIRTHDAY W TEKI LATEX STEREO, 20:00–04:00 Berite club, house and bass. MR. SCRUFF’S MINIATURE ARENA TOUR SUB CLUB, 18:00–22:00 Electro, disco and funk. A LOVE FROM OUTER SPACE WITH SEAN JOHNSTON THE BERKELEY SUITE, 22:00–04:00 Acid and electronica.

WALL OF BASSMANDIDEXTROUS THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00 Drum ‘n’ bass and techno. VAN ROUGE VALENTINES THE CAVES, 23:00–03:00 House and techno. HOPELESS ROMANTICS WEE RED BAR, 23:00–03:00 Goth and New Wave. RED ROOM SOUND: DUAL MONITOR & SMIFF SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 Bass and techno. CLUB SPIT WITH PEGGY VIENETTA THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 House.

BETAMAX WEE RED BAR, 23:00–03:00 Mutant disco.

BRAT WINTER - THE REMIX PARTY LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00 Pop.

PULSE THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 Techno.

BORLEY ROOM PRESENTS: CAMERON RILEY + BORLEY THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00 House and techno.

Sun 23 Feb

HEYDAY: CHRIS CRUSE & PROSUMER SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 House.

Tue 25 Feb

RIDE N BOUNCE

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 R’n’B. Thu 27 Feb

ODDBALLS PRESENTS: ODDBEATS THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00 Trance and garage. MILE HIGH CLUB

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00 House and techno.

DUNDEMO CHURCH, 22:30–03:00 Emo and punk. Fri 28 Feb THE POWERPOP GIRLS CHURCH, 22:30–03:00 Pop.

Regular Edinburgh club nights

Glasgow Comedy

The Glee Club

MASOOD BOOMGAARD: SELF-

HELP SINGH TOUR

4 FEB, 7:15PM – 9:45PM

Masood Boomgaard brings his latest hit comedy show to the Glee Club: a hilarious yet thought provoking juxtaposition of stand-up, parody and motivational speaking.

BORED TEACHERS

9 FEB, 7:30PM –

10:00PM

US smash-hit comedy show featuring ‘teachercomedians’ is headed for their UK debut, a comedy powerhouse for anyone who's ever been in (or near) a classroom.

KARUNESH TALWAR

LIVE 2025 TOUR!

23 FEB, 3:45PM –

5:00PM

Karunesh takes you on a journey through the everyday quirks of life, 80% in Hindi and 20% in English.

The Old Hairdressers

IMPROV FUCKTOWN

4 FEB, 8:30PM – 9:30PM

Glasgow Improv Theatre Presents: Welcome to Improv Fucktown, population: you.

HAROLD NIGHT

4 FEB, 7:00PM – 8:00PM

Two Glasgow Improv Theatre house teams performing The Harold. Featuring F.L.U.S.H. and Raintown!

GIT IMPROV CAGE

MATCH

25 FEB, TIMES VARY

Two improv teams battle to be crowned champions of the Glasgow Improv Theatre this month. Audience decide who wins.

COUCH SURFS THE WEB

25 FEB, TIMES VARY

A night of improv comedy where Couch surfs the web.

Bring your desktop PC and a LAN cable!

PERFECT IMPROV

11 FEB, 7:00PM –

8:00PM

Wade into the stream of improv comedy with stories flowing from a special guest monologist.

The Stand

Glasgow MATERIAL, GIRL

23 FEB, 3:00PM –4:00PM

Susan Riddell and Amanda Dwyer present an allfemale line-up.

SCREEN TIME

9 FEB, 4:00PM – 5:00PM

A new mutlimedia comedy night hosted by Fearghas Kelly.

RED RICHARDSON:

BUGATTI LIVE

9 FEB, 8:30PM – 9:30PM

Red Richardson returns with his brilliant sell out show.

JOSEPH PARSONS: RE-DESIGNED

6 FEB, 8:30PM – 9:30PM

An operation transformed his life and now Joseph is ready for a fresh start.

W.I.P.LASH

16-18 FEB, 8:30PM –

9:30PM

A secret line-up of headline comedians trying out new stuff.

LEE KYLE: BOTTLE IT

24 FEB, 8:30PM –9:30PM Lee looks at what its like to have a bottle, to throw bottles and to be bottled.

BRENNAN REECE: LIVE 16 FEB, 4:00PM –5:00PM Brennan is back on the road with his hilarious new show.

BENEFIT IN AID OF AMESTY INTERNATIONAL 20 FEB, 8:00PM –9:00PM

A great line-up for a great cause.

PADDY YOUNG: IF I TOLD YOU I WOULD HAVE TO KISS YOU 23 FEB, 8:30PM –9:30PM Second tour show has hit Paddy and this time he’s yearning.

Edinburgh Comedy

Monkey Barrel Comedy Club

SUNIL PATEL: WORK IN PROGRESS

8 FEB, 6:00PM – 7:00PM Sunil Patel brings his brand new work in progress show to Monkey Barrel Comedy Club.

CHORTLE HOTSHOTS: CLASS OF 2025

5 FEB, 8:00PM –10:00PM Leading comedy website Chortle celebrates the most promising new shows heading to this year's Edinburgh Fringe.

COLIN GEDDIS: G.O.A.T (GEDDIS ON ANOTHER TOUR)

6 FEB, 8:00PM – 9:55PM Colin Geddis announces his brand new, eponymous stand-up show G.O.A.T.

JOE SUTHERLAND: MISS WORLD

8 FEB, 8:00PM – 9:40PM Joe “could have been a dancer” Sutherland is bravely talking about something that, until recently, he's suffered in silence: being a total hunk.

STUART MITCHELL: TESTING TESTING

9 FEB, 5:00PM – 6:00PM

Join the longest running panellist from BBC Scotland's ‘Breaking The News’ and star of BBC Radio 4 as he runs through new material.

ZOE LYONS: WEREWOLF

9 FEB, 8:00PM – 9:40PM If happiness is ending up the best version of yourself, Zoe is finally getting there. She is where she needs to be. She is werewolf. ALL MOUTH: QUEER COMEDY (GALENTINE’S SPECIAL)

13 FEB, 7:30PM –9:30PM Glasgow’s favourite queer comedy show is coming to Monkey Barrel for a one-off Galentine's Special, featuring Sam Lake, Amanda Dwyer, Maddie Fernando, Jodie Sloan and more.

ALICE FRASER: A PASSION FOR PASSION

14 FEB, 7:30PM –9:10PM Alice Fraser has fallen in love with romance novels. She's written a delirious love letter to the genre and now she has to live with the consequences.

BRITNEY ARE BARELY LEGAL (WIP)

GARY MEIKLE: NEUROSPICY

26 FEB, 8:00PM –9:45PM

Come join Gary in a show where he gives you a first hand insight from his delusional eyes to what goes on in his ever expanding mind.

The Edinburgh Playhouse

PAUL SMITH: PABLO

12-13 FEB, 6:30PM –10:00PM

Comedian Paul Smith heads out on this biggest tour yet.

RHOD GILBERT & THE GIANT GRAPEFRUIT

15 FEB, 7:30PM –10:00PM

Rhod Gilbert returns with a citrus-infused show.

The Queen’s

Hall

JENNY ECLAIR: JOKES

JOKES JOKES LIVE!

22 FEB, 7:30PM –10:00PM

A brand new autobiographical show from a national treasure.

The Stand Edinburgh

JOSEPH PARSONS: RE-DESIGNED

5 FEB, 8:30PM – 9:30PM

An operation transformed his life and now Joseph is ready for a fresh start.

SUSIE MCCABE AND FRIENDS

9 FEB, 4:00PM – 5:00PM

Susie introduces some of her favourite chums.

W.I.P.LASH

11 FEB, 8:30PM –9:30PM

A secret line-up of headline comedians trying out new stuff.

ANTI VALENTINES DAY

13 FEB, 8:30PM –9:30PM

Not got a date? Head to The Stand for a laugh instead.

GARY FAULDS: LIVE

4 0

16 FEB, 4:00PM –5:00PM

Gary Faulds returns with his unforgettable new show.

SUSIE MCCABE: WIP

16 FEB, 8:30PM –9:30PM

A rough draft of a new show by beloved Scottish comic.

JAY LAFFERTY & LIAM

WITHNAIL: WIP

19 FEB, 5:00PM –6:00PM

New works-in-progress from two mainstays of the comedy circuit.

ANDY ZALTZMAN: THE ZALTGEIST

23 FEB, 4:00PM –5:00PM

One of the leading satirists assesses the state of the planet.

Glasgow Theatre

CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art

INTO THE NEW: THE DREAM/A DREAM

13-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

A participatory installation performance piece that involves creation from both the audience and performer.

INTO THE NEW: SACRED NOISE

14-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

Part punk gig, part storytelling, this performance explores the art of noisemaking.

INTO THE NEW: I CARRY YOU WITH ME AS WE BOTH SLIP BACK INTO THE DARK

14-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

Inspired by an encounter with a crow, this piece explores how we can disrupt the human/nonhuman binary.

INTO THE NEW: THE PERFORMANCE OF DIVA

14-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

Experimental movement and storytelling explores the tension between authentic and commodified expression.

INTO THE NEW: IF I SHOW YOU MINE, WILL YOU SHOW ME YOURS?

14-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

Part poetry, part podcast, this live-art participatory performance immerses the audience in the chaos of an ADHD brain.

INTO THE NEW: WITH YOU.

14-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

A performance that explores how trauma may affect the mind and body, using projected text, movement and soundscape.

INTO THE NEW: THAT’S IT.

14-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

A choreographed piece capturing the paradox of live performance.

Oran Mor A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: DOOKIN’ OOT

24 FEB-1 MAR, 1:00PM – 2:00PM

A riotous black comedy by Eimi Quinn about a wild money-making scheme in an Easterhouse council flat and going out with a bang.

The King’s

Theatre MACBETH

27 FEB, 1:15PM –2:15PM

Two actors bring over 20 roles to life in this high-octane Shakespeare adaptation.

KINKY BOOTS

11-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

Lace up your boots for this Cyndi Lauper musical extravaganza.

DEAR EVAN HANSEN

25 FEB-1 MAR, TIMES VARY

The hit high school musical (no, not that one) tours around the UK.

Theatre Royal

SCOTTISH OPERA: THE MAKROPULOS AFFAIR

15-22 FEB, 7:15PM –

10:00PM

Janacek's mature masterpiece about a singer who has lived for centuries is a staggering exploration of mortality.

SCOTTISH OPERA: NATIONAL OPERA

STUDIO

21 FEB, 6:00PM –10:00PM 16 young singers showcase their skills with a varied programme including Handel and Shostakovich.

Regular Glasgow comedy nights

The Stand Glasgow

FIRST MONDAY OF THE MONTH

MONDAY NIGHT IMPROV, 20:30

Host Billy Kirkwood & guests act entirely on your suggestions.

TUESDAYS RED RAW, 20:30

Legendary new material night with up to 8 acts.

FRIDAYS THE FRIDAY SHOW, 20:30

The big weekend show with four comedians.

SATURDAYS THE SATURDAY SHOW, 20:30

The big weekend show with four comedians.

Glee Club

FRIDAYS FRIDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00

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

SATURDAYS SATURDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00

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

Regular Edinburgh comedy nights

The Stand

Edinburgh

MONDAYS RED RAW, 20:30

Legendary new material night with up to 8 acts.

TUESDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)

STU & GARRY’S IMPROV SHOW, 20:30

The Stand’s very own Stu & Garry’s make comedy cold from suggestions.

THURSDAYS THE BEST OF SCOTTISH COMEDY, 20:30

Simply the best comics on the contemporary Scottish circuit.

FRIDAYS THE FRIDAY SHOW, 21:00

The big weekend show with four comedians.

SATURDAYS THE SATURDAY SHOW (THE EARLY SHOW), 17:00

A slightly earlier performance of the big weekend show with four comedians.

CONFESSIONS OF A SHINAGAWA MONKEY

22 FEB-1 MAR, 7:00PM –10:00PM

A major new international theatre work featuring live performance and puppetry, based on short stories by Haruki Murakami.

Edinburgh

Theatre

Festival Theatre

MARY POPPINS

1-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

Everyone’s favourite nanny floats down on her umbrella in this gorgeous classic.

SCOTTISH OPERA: THE MAKROPULOS AFFAIR

27 FEB-1 MAR, 7:15PM –10:00PM

Janacek's mature masterpiece about a singer who has lived for centuries is a staggering exploration of mortality.

Fruitmarket

MANIPULATE FESTIVAL: CARTOGRAPHY

12-13 FEB, TIMES VARY

Every 13 minutes a new group is led around the Fruitmarket’s Warehouse space in a series of experimental, intimate, and highly interactive encounters

SATURDAYS THE SATURDAY SHOW, 20:30

The big weekend show with four comedians.

Monkey Barrel Comedy Club

SECOND AND THIRD TUESDAY OF EVERY MONTH

THE EDINBURGH REVUE, 19:00

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

WEDNESDAYS TOP BANANA, 19:00

Catch the stars of tomorrow today in Monkey Barrel’s new act night every Wednesday.

THURSDAYS SNEAK PEAK, 19:00 + 21:00

Four acts every Thursday take to the stage to try out new material.

FRIDAYS MONKEY BARREL COMEDY’S BIG FRIDAY SHOW, 19:00/21:00 Monkey Barrel’s flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.

FRIDAYS

DATING CRAPP, 22:00 Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, Farmers Only...Come and laugh as some of Scotland’s best improvisers join forces to perform based off two audience members dating profiles.

SATURDAYS MONKEY BARREL COMEDY’S BIG SATURDAY SHOW, 17:00/19:00/21:00

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

SUNDAYS MONKEY BARREL COMEDY’S BIG SUNDAY SHOW, 19:00/21:00 Monkey Barrel’s flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.

Glasgow Art

Glasgow Women’s Library

RAYNA CARRUTHERS: WHILE WE WAIT

1 FEB-29 MAR, TIMES VARY

A series of intimate portraits focused on women forcibly displaced in Jordan and awaiting resettlement.

GoMA

SCOTT MYLES: HEAD IN A BELL

1-23 FEB, 11:00AM –4:00PM

An exhibition of painting, sculpture, print, moving image and sound exploring ideas of exchange and circulation, and the cyclicality of materiality.

JOHN AKOMFRAH: MIMESIS: AFRICAN SOLDIER

1 FEB-31 AUG, 11:00AM – 4:00PM

A film installation from acclaimed artist exploring the significant contribution of over six million African, Caribbean and South Asian people from across former colonies who fought and died in World War I.

Street Level

Photoworks

SHEILA ROCK: REBELS AND RENEGADES

1-23 FEB, TIMES VARY

Part of a two-part exhibition foregrounding the work of two pioneering female directors who captured the zeitgeist of the punk era.

JILL FURMANOVSKY: REBELS AND RENEGADES

1-23 FEB, TIMES VARY

KINKY BOOTS

18-22 FEB, TIMES VARY

Lace up your boots for this Cyndi Lauper musical extravaganza.

The Studio

MANIPULATE FESTIVAL: WHEN PROPHECY FAILS

14-15 FEB, 8:00PM –9:00PM

A new work of physical theatre set in a world of apocalyptic visions and UFOs.

MANIPULATE

FESTIVAL: SNAPSHOTS

12 FEB, 8:00PM –9:00PM

A platform for artists based in Scotland to try out new or developing work across puppetry, circus, physical theatre, visual theatre and dance.

Traverse Theatre

MANIPULATE

FESTIVAL: THE LAW OF GRAVITY

13 FEB, 8:00PM –9:00PM A collaboration between Scottish Ensemble and puppetry company Blind Summit exploring the creative intersections between puppetry and music.

HEAVEN 25 FEB-1 MAR, TIMES VARY

An adaptation of a Eugene O’Brien play by Olivier and Fringe First award-winning company Fishamble.

Dundee

Theatre

Dundee Rep

BUFFY REVAMPED

18 FEB, 7:30PM –10:00PM

All 144 episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer told through the eyes of Spike.

DICEBREAKER: A LIVE D&D ADVENTURE

7 FEB, 7:30PM –10:00PM Improv and character comedy inspired by the beloved tabletop role playing game.

JEKYLL & HYDE: A ONE-WOMAN SHOW

13 FEB, 7:30PM –10:00PM

A electric reinterpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale.

THE LAW OF GRAVITY

14 FEB, 7:30PM –10:00PM

Part of a two-part exhibition foregrounding the work of two pioneering female directors who captured the zeitgeist of the punk era.

The Modern Institute

MICHAEL WILKINSON: STILL LIFE WITH BLANK CANVAS

1 FEB-5 MAR, TIMES VARY A new body of work exploring traditions of still life painting and its relationship both with transience and with trickery and humour through the use of trompe l’oeil.

The Modern Institute @

Airds Lane

JULIA CHIANG: SECRET SMILE

1 FEB-3 MAY, TIMES VARY

Abstract paintings caught in a state of transformation, exploring momentary interactions through colour and shape.

KIM FISHER: ROOTS AND TOURIST

1 FEB-5 MAR, TIMES VARY

20 FEB, 8:45PM –9:45PM

In their newest deathdefying feat, double act Britney (Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson) attempt to stand on stage for an hour.

INTO THE NEW: CAN WE DANCE AGAIN?

14-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

An immersive club performance that dives into the fragile connections formed between strangers in the fleeting, euphoric world of nightlife.

Tramway

GONER

8 FEB, 7:00PM –10:00PM Marikiscrycrcycry’s experimental performance piece explores the tradition of Black horror.

The Edinburgh Playhouse

CHICAGO

4-8 FEB, TIMES VARY

Give ‘em the old razzle dazzle in this energetic and sexy Prohibition-era musical.

MANIPULATE FESTIVAL: ELKE/ RATKIN 15 FEB, 6:00PM –7:00PM

A double bill of experimental theatre exploring nature through queered and dystopian lenses.

A collaboration between Scottish Ensemble and puppetry company Blind Summit exploring the creative intersections between puppetry and music.

DIAL M FOR MAYHEM

25 FEB-1 MAR, TIMES

VARY

A comedy drama about a group of Scottish actors putting on a production of Dial M For Murder.

Drawings, collages and installation pieces responding to remembered and imagined places.

Tramway

LEANNE ROSS: DIRTY DANCING FLOWERS

1 FEB-23 MAR, TIMES VARY

Words act as the building blocks for a series of paintings and prints that explore the interplay between image and text in vibrant, experimental ways.

MAUD SULTER

1 FEB-30 MAR, TIMES

VARY

An immersive exhibition by the Scottish-Ghanaian poet, artist, photographer, writer, curator, gallerist and publisher whose work sought to claim space for Black Artists and address the erasure and representation of Black Women in art.

Transmission

Gallery

HOME IN HOME

1-12 FEB, 11:00AM –

5:00PM

A community art project that unravels what home means to various Glasgow-based artists with different social and cultural backgrounds.

Edinburgh

Art

&Gallery

MARY MORRISON: HIDDEN JOURNEY

1-22 FEB, TIMES VARY

Work by Outer Hebridean artist responding to the the space, light and elemental qualities which are unique to the islands.

City Art Centre

INKED UP: PRINTMAKING IN SCOTLAND

1 FEB-1 JUN, TIMES

VARY A survey of the historic versatility and experimentation in Scottish printmaking practices.

POP LIFE

1 FEB-9 MAR, TIMES

VARY

Examining the intersection between popular culture and contemporary figure drawings, this exhibition explores and subverts the traditional distinction between high and low art.

Dovecot

Studios

PTOLEMY MANN

1 FEB-15 MAR, 10:00AM – 5:00PM

A groundbreaking exhibition marrying intricate techniques of hand-weaving with vibrant, expressive painting.

Edinburgh Printmakers

HOPE/DÒCHAS

1 FEB-16 MAR, 11:00AM – 4:00PM

An exhibition of work by the Edinburgh Printmakers’ Members Community.

Edinburgh Sculpture

Workshop

ETCHINGROOM1: WHAT A WONDERFUL DAY IN A WONDERFUL

WORLD

1 FEB-1 MAR, 11:00AM

5:00PM A collaboration between Ukrainian artists Kristina Yarosh and Anna Khodkova, this mural articulates the artists’ experiences of conflict and their strategies for resilience.

Fruitmarket

PETRA BAUER : SISTERS!

22 FEB-23 MAR, 10:00AM

6:00PM

A major moving image piece that explores the complexities of feminist activism through the work of Southall Black Sisters, and the role of art in vocalising political struggles.

Ingleby Gallery WINGS OF A BUTTERFLY

1 FEB-19 APR, 11:00AM – 5:00PM

A group exhibition responding to French avant-garde painter Pierre Bonnard’s final diary entry.

Museum of

Edinburgh

TAPE LETTERS

1-23 FEB, 10:00AM –5:00PM

A project exploring practices of sending messages on cassette tape as an unorthodox method of communication by Pakistani migrants between 1960-1980.

Royal Scottish Academy RSA IN ORCADIA

1 FEB-2 MAR, TIMES VARY

A group exhibition of newly commissioned and existing work responding to the natural environment of Orkney.

Dovecot

Studios

THE SCOTTISH COLOURISTS: RADICAL PERSPECTIVES

7 FEB-28 JUN, TIMES VARY

A groundbreaking exhibition placing the landmark work of the Scottish Colourists in conversation with their wider European context for the first time.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

EVERLYN NICODEMUS

1 FEB-25 MAY, 10:00AM – 5:00PM

The first ever retrospective exhibition by landmark Edinburgh artist, whose joyful artworks explore and resist the global oppression of women and the profound impact of racism.

Stills

JESS HOLDENGARDE: GLIMMER

1-8 FEB, 12:00PM –5:00PM

Camera, body, light, silver, and sound come together to explore how photographic practice can encapsulate moments of transition.

Talbot Rice Gallery

GUADALUPE MARAVILLA: PIEDRAS DE FUEGO (FIRE STONES)

1-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

Sculptures, paintings and murals explore narratives of healing and recovery, drawing on global healing and shamanic practices.

GABRIELLE GOLIATH: PERSONAL ACCOUNTS

1-15 FEB, TIMES VARY

This first solo exhibition in the UK by South African artist Gabrielle Goliath uses video and sound installations to explore decolonial and Black feminist projects of repair.

Dundee Art

Cooper Gallery

SUZANNE LACY: BETWEEN THE DOOR AND THE STREET

28 FEB-12 APR, TIMES

VARY

The first solo exhibition in Scotland by pioneering American artist capturing her life-long commitment to the critical issues confronting women today and the necessity of continued community organising and political activism.

DCA: Dundee Contemporary Arts

HELEN CAMMOCK + INGRID POLLARD + CAMARA TAYLOR: SOFT IMPRESSIONS

1 FEB-23 MAR, TIMES

VARY

Print works by three landmark artists examine artistic practices as a means of responding to identity and re-thinking historical narratives through soft, poetic actions.

Generator Projects

MEMBERS’ SHOW 2025

15 FEB-9 MAR, 12:00PM – 5:00PM

Generator Projects Members’ Show is an annual celebration of the local artists, practitioners and creatives that make up Generators membership.

Tickets on Skiddle.com

Tickets on Tickettailoir.com

The Skinny On... Georgia Cécile

Ahead of releasing her latest EP, City Girl, and a show at The Queen’s Hall to mark the occasion, Glasgow jazz and soul star Georgia Cécile takes on this month’s Q&A

In 2021, Glasgow artist Georgia Cécile won Best Album at the Scottish Jazz Awards for her debut, Only the Lover Sings. The following year she was crowned UK Jazz Act of the Year and Vocalist of the Year in the Jazz FM Awards. Over the years Cécile has performed everywhere from tiny basements like The Jazz Bar in Edinburgh, to world famous spots like Ronnie Scott’s in London, to glamorous celebrity-packed New Year’s Eve parties in Monaco.

Fresh from playing a packed Celtic Connections show in January, at the end of this month she’s on track for a headline show at The Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh to celebrate the release of her brand new, dripping in vintage jazz and soul, EP City Girl. Due at the end of February, City Girl features a crack cast of talented musicians (including members of Jungle and Incognito) across its ﬁve tracks as Cécile explores the feeling and energy of big city life. With the record on the way, we get to know Cécile a little better as she takes on the Q&A.

What’s your favourite place to visit?

Probably New York City! The energy and feeling is like nowhere else on Earth! I never tire of exploring the city and the jazz scene there is the best in the world!

What’s your favourite food?

Italian food and salt and vinegar crisps!

What’s your favourite colour?

Emerald green! My birth stone!

Who was your hero growing up?

Nina Simone! I was obsessed with her piano playing, her voice and her presence of power. She makes people stop and listen to her. I love her style too.

Whose work inspires you now?

I am obsessed with Doechii at the moment, her commitment to excellence in her work is incredible. The bar has been set so high by her!

What three people would you invite to your dinner party and what are you cooking?

So I don’t cook very well for a start, but I’d order something in and I’d like to invite Judi Dench, Oprah and Shirley Bassey.

What’s your all-time favourite album?

Songs for Swingin’ Lovers by Frank Sinatra. It is the epitome of class and timeless swing! I couldn’t go a day without it.

What’s the worst ﬁlm you’ve ever seen?

Gosh, I hate sci-ﬁ, anything like Star Trek is a big no for me!

What book would you take to a desert island? The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. It’s a beautiful exotic story and laden with key life wisdom! I learned so many lessons from this book, it’s magical.

What are you most scared of? Failure!

What was the last gig you went to?

My friend Alex Bryson had his album launch at the Pizza Express jazz club last night in Soho, it was incredible!

Tell us a secret?

I don’t really have any, honestly, I’m an open book.

Which celebrity could you take in a ﬁght?

I wouldn’t really ﬁght anymore, I’d rather get a cuppa tea and a Tunnock’s Teacake and talk it over!

If you could be reincarnated as an animal, which animal would it be and why?

Deﬁnitely a cat. My little ragdoll cat Simone (named after Nina) has the best life ever!

In line with this month’s meet the team question, who is your favourite puppet and why?

Elmo? I guess I saw the movie in Universal Studios in the USA when I was a kid!

And what’s your favourite song involving a puppet? The Sesame Street theme tune.

Finally, you’re releasing your latest EP, City Girl, at the end of February – what inspired the record, and what can you tell us about it?

This record is inspired by the feeling and energy of big city life! I moved to London two years ago and this EP is a result of the creative relationships I have found here and the inspiring experiences I have had living here. The record is a culmination of my core inﬂuences in jazz and soul music but pushes the boundaries of the genres.

Being in London has given me a sense of permission to be playful and more exploratory in my music making. I feel able to take more risks and try new things. Working with people from all cultures and walks of life has really inspired my sound, it’s pushed my creative boundaries. I wanted to capture the vitality, energy and feeling of the cities that I have spent the most time in – London, Glasgow, New York, Paris.

City Girl is released via Mahogany Music on 28 Feb; Georgia Cécile plays The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 28 Feb georgiacecile.com

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust

Hidden Door Festival Collective

Royal Scottish Academy Fruitmarket Stills: Centre for Photography Edinburgh Festival Fringe EAF

Edinburgh

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The Skinny February 2025

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