The Skinny Scotland January 2017

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CULT U R A L

J O U R N A L I S M

January 2017 Scotland Issue 136

Fantastic Feasts THE FOOD & DRINK SURVEY 2017

Music Cloud Nothings Julia Jacklin SOHN Mark Eitzel New Year's Revolution Lost Map

Film 2017 preview Michelle Williams Liam Neeson Books Iona Lee Amy Stewart

Art Exhibitions of 2017

Comedy Clown Politics

Theatre Manipulate

Clubs Nightvision Setaoc Mass TEESH

Travel Living in Malmรถ Guilt and Self-Loathing in India

MUSIC | FILM | CLUBS | THEATRE | ART | BOOKS | COMEDY | TRAVEL | FOOD & DRINK | DEVIANCE | LISTINGS

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P.19 Julia Jacklin

P.25 Liam Neeson

P.30 Guilt and Self Loathing in India

January 2017 I N DEPEN DENT

CULTU R AL

JOU R NALI S M

Issue 136, January 2017 Š Radge Media Ltd. Get in touch: E: hello@theskinny.co.uk T: 0131 467 4630 P: The Skinny, 1.9 1st Floor Tower, Techcube, Summerhall, 1 Summerhall Pl, Edinburgh, EH9 1PL The Skinny is Scotland's largest independent entertainment & listings magazine, and offers a wide range of advertising packages and affordable ways to promote your business.

Get in touch to find out more.

E: sales@theskinny.co.uk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the explicit permission of the publisher. The views and opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the printer or the publisher.

Printed by Mortons Print Limited, Horncastle ABC verified Jan – Dec 2015: 30,875

printed on 100% recycled paper

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Contents

Editorial Editor-in-Chief Assistant Editor Art Editor Books Editor Clubs Editor Comedy Editor Deviance Editor Events Editor Film & DVD Editor Food Editor Music Editor Theatre Editor Travel Editor

Rosamund West Will Fitzpatrick Adam Benmakhlouf Alan Bett Claire Francis Ben Venables Kate Pasola Kate Pasola Jamie Dunn Peter Simpson Tallah Brash Amy Taylor Paul Mitchell

Production Production Manager Designer

Sarah Donley Kyle McPartlin

Sales Sales Executives

General Manager Publisher

George Sully Sandy Park Grant Cunningham Victoria Brough Kyla Hall Sophie Kyle

THE SKINNY

Illustration: Isabella Bunnell

P.10 Food & Drink Survey 2017

Contents Chat & Opinion: Auntie Trash advises 06 against a new year overhaul, plus Crystal Baws, Shot of the Month, Spot the Difference and What are you having for lunch?

Heads Up: Your at-a-glance guide to 08 cultural happenings in January.

FEATURES

LIFESTYLE

10 Food & Drink Survey 2017: The Results

30 Travel: Continuing our guides to getting

17 Our team of cinema lovers have put to-

32 Deviance: A step by step guide to heal-

We celebrate the greatest victory for democracy of the last year. Here are some guides to your favourite bars, restaurants and cafes in Edinburgh and Glasgow. gether a list of the releases they’re most excited about in the next 12 months – Films of 2017.

18 Cloud Nothings' Dylan Baldi explains the progression and purpose behind the band's most thoughtful record to date.

19 Aussie talent Julia Jacklin calls in from

Melbourne at a ridiculously early time of the morning to tell us about her wonderful debut album, Don't Let the Kids Win.

21 Our Art editor’s rung round Scotland’s

art galleries to bring you a guide to exhibitions on the year ahead in our Art Planner 2017.

23 The incomparable Michelle Williams discusses the roles that never leave her, the weirdness of seeing her face on screen and working with Kenneth Lonergan on Manchester by the Sea.

24 American director Chad Hartigan on

his new indie Morris from America, autobiographical filmmaking, working with perennial comic scene-stealer Craig Robinson, and, uh, pillow stimulation.

25 We meet Liam Neeson, who’s starring in both kids' fairy tale A Monster Calls and Martin Scorsese's God-questioning epic Silence this month.

26 TEESH party-starters Ryan Marinello

and Tom Russell share the winning formula underpinning their bi-monthly shows at Sneaky Pete's.

Nightvision is set to return this month with a killer Series 6 line-up – we speak to its founders about what we can expect in 2017

Murray of Scottish slam poetry’ 28 ‘Andy Iona Lee discusses the strange concept of competitive art ahead of this year’s Scottish Slam Poetry Championships.

29 Novelist Amy Stewart describes the

pleasures of researching crime fighting sisters (and feminist heroes) the Kopp women.

January 2017

out of Britain while you still can, here’s an insight into Living in Malmö. One traveller shares some thoughts on postcolonial Guilt and Self Loathing in India for the European visitor. ing the world after the shocker that was 2016, and a follow up to one writer’s exploration of the world of financial domination.

REVIEW

35 Music: Former American Music Club

frontman Mark Eitzel on Hey Mr Ferryman; Lost Map label in profile; we meet SOHN; plus our pick of the month’s album releases.

40 Clubs: Clubbing highlights for Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee in January, plus Setaoc Mass guest selector.

42 Books: This season’s reading rated.

43 Art: Exhibition highlights for January, plus reviews of Poppies and Ella Kruglyanskaya

44 Film: This month’s best new releases.

45 DVD: Things to watch at home.

46 Theatre: Looking forward to this month’s Manipulate festival.

47 Comedy: The right say he's on the left, the left say he's on the right – who is Beppe Grillo, the "Five Star" comedian changing Italian politics?

48 Competitions: You could win some stuff.

49 Listings: Your what’s on guide to

Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee.

55 Out Back: Meet some of the new bands playing this month’s King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution.

Contents

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Editorial

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n January we take a moment to reflect on the year that’s passed and cast an eye ahead to consider what the next 12 months may hold, much like the Roman god Janus who’s on our cover but made of food. DO YOU SEE WHAT WE DID THERE? As is our tradition, we begin the year with the Food and Drink survey. After months of shouting at you to vote and promises to reclaim democracy, our Food editor has diligently collated the results to provide you with a guide to your favourite places to eat and drink in Glasgow and Edinburgh. There are some familiar faces on there, and some new spots which have quickly won a place in your hearts (and stomachs). Let’s make food great again.

The beginning of the year is usually the time for marketing departments to point out your failings as a human being and encourage you to remedy the situation with a lovely gym membership or mad diet plan. We’re against that – Auntie Trash tells you why on this very spread.

The new year is also the time to make fantastical predictions about the year ahead, at least it is in the old cultural journalsim game. We’ve applied our years of experience and finely honed instincts to the forthcoming release and events calendar to draw together some recommendations of exhibitions and films you will be enjoying in the coming months. Did you know Harry Styles is appearing in a Christopher Nolan film about Dunkirk? I’m as surprised as you are. Will One Direction grace the soundtrack? Only time will tell.

In the spirit of reflection, one of our Deviance writers has put some serious thought into how we can each contribute to making this year a better

one for general humanity. In Travel, we’re running a series of guides to life in different European cities before eh... you can’t live there anymore.

Find out how you, too, could move to MalmÖ and build your week around your laundry room schedule!

There are more guides to living abroad (around Europe and across the globe) on the site at theskinny.co.uk/travel.

In Music, our writer defies the time difference to call up Julia Jacklin in Melbourne to discuss her debut album ahead of her UK dates. Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi shares new album Life Without Sound and the revelatory information that it’s easier to work as a band if you’re all in the same city.

There are also some words with Mark Eitzel on being produced by Bernard Butler, and SOHN phones from the back of a Berlin taxi. We profile Lost Map records, and in the spirit of anticipating 2017’s cultural highlights we’ve combed through the King Tut’s New Year’s Revolutions bill to bring you a selection of new acts you should check out now.

Film is having a sleb-tastic month, talking to Michelle Williams and Liam Neeson about their new films, Manchester by the Sea and A Monster Calls respectively. In Books, Scotland’s reigning Slam Poetry Champion Iona Lee considers the odd concept of competitive art ahead of this year’s showdown. Our Art editor phoned round Scotland’s art galleries to bring you an encyclopedic inventory of what’s to come, and only used the opportunity to promote his own work a little bit, which demonstrates tremendous restraint.

Happy new year! Here’s hoping it’s a less apocalyptic-feeling one than the last. [Rosamund West]

Spot The Difference SHRIMPLY THE BEST HEY, CHECK OUT THESE PARTY SHRIMP! Aren’t they rad? OK, we’re giving you the hard shell here.

Who knows how you get started in this line of work – to us they just look like prawns of the party industry. Still, without shrimping on the detail, at least they’re earning an honest crust(acean).

These two party shrimp may look identical,

but there’s a very subtle difference between the two that will require your observational skills to be at their peak. Summon all your powers of deduction and head to theskinny.co.uk/ competitions once you’ve identified the correct answer – the best or funniest answer will win a copy of The Weatherhouse by Nan Shepherd, thanks to the kings among prawns at Canongate.

Competition closes at midnight on Sun 29 Jan. Winners will be notified via email within two working days of closing and will be required to respond within 48 hours or the prize will be offered to another entrant. Our Ts&Cs can be found at theskinny.co.uk/about/terms

Shot Of The Month Korn, SSE Hydro, 14 December, by JayJay Robertson

By Jock Mooney

COVER ARTIST This month's cover artists: Luis Pinto Luis Pinto is a graphic designer and illustrator originally from Mexico, based in Guatemala. He usually works on a broad range of projects, from digital/traditional painting to vector icons and lettering. As a graphic artist he gets most of his work from personal sketches. He loves to

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generate ideas from a concept, and usually finds that sketches are the best way to conceive that graphic magic.

'Carpe Diem' it's a phrase that is present in everything he does. luispintodesign.com

THE SKINNY

Online Only

Crystal Balls With Mystic Mark

ARIES You and your partner have a lot in common: you both hate each other’s guts.

TAURUS You feel like hell is being demonised with propaganda.

GEMINI When the last few humans are unlucky enough to meet around the dying nightmarish embers of the world’s last bonfire to gnaw on charred kitten corpses beneath a nuclear winter sky I hope we remember what the world used to be like. I hope we can still force out a chuckle reminiscing about the Pen Pineapple Apple Pen song.

CANCER The air stewardess on your flight interrupts your in-flight movie to vomit in terror and cry uncontrollably about “all going to die” or something. You pause the film and reluctantly take your earphones out to see what the big fuss is about.

LEO An absolute dreamboat asks you out on a date this month, and whilst playing with your hair you explain you can’t on Saturday, because you’re burying 12 dogs in your back garden. But you can probably do Sunday, Sunday’s good.

Ask Auntie Trash:

VIRGO This month you go with your gut on many important decisions. Like when to go to the toilet. Or if you’d like to make a fart or not.

LIBRA We might live in a post-truth world, where photos are easily faked and news is factless nonsense invented by racist click-hungry algorithms, but they can’t Photoshop what’s in your heart.

SCORPIO You’ve been born into a time in history where there are refrigerated drinks, yet you still complain.

SAGITTARIUS You have a lovely glossy coat of thick back pubes.

CAPRICORN You watch as your cat spots the tapeworm dangling out of its bumhole, the movement alerts it and it pounces.

Your cat slurps up the worm like the spaghetti in Lady and the Tramp, locking lips and making eye-contact with its own bumhole in the process.

AQUARIUS At night, why not try closing your eyes?

After a little while you’ll stop being aware of what’s happening and you’ll come around eight hours later feeling so refreshed. Give it a shot.

PISCES For the Trump supporting, pro-Brexit Bowie fans, 2016 was a mixed bag.

New Year, New You? Illustration: Stephanie Hoffmann

theskinny.co.uk/travel Fancy a new start in 2017? Our series of Living Abroad guides continues with a look at life in the French city of Lille and the Turkish capital Istanbul.

Game of Thrones-inspired pop-up bar in Edinburgh, and find the full winners list from The Skinny North Food & Drink Survey.

Hello Trash, With the New Year coming up, I’ve been thinking about starting afresh and making some positive changes in my life.

I want to lose weight, I want a better job, I want to start doing fun things (awesome things, like going to the theatre) more, how can I use the new year to help me achieve my goals?

Thanks, Hay x

Let’s get real. There is no such thing as a New You, there is just a happier and healthier version of the person that you are now; think of it as You 2.0, because the 1.0 version of anything always has glitches. Nobody’s perfect, but we can all be better, yes, so what can you do to kickstart your goals and – most importantly – stick to them?

Don’t wait. Don’t wait until the first of January. Don’t wait until tomorrow. Start now, and start small. Create manageable goals, like “Today, I will walk home from work.” “Today, I drink water, not fizzy juice.” Christ, I sound like a lifestyle coach, but here goes.

When you make any change in your life, no matter how big or how small, the biggest obstacle in your way is YOU. (Pow, mind blown). Nobody is coming to save you. There is no white knight waiting to kick down the doors of the fortress that is your own procrastination. In order to make a change you must commit fully to it. You’ve got to want to do it, not try to do it because some pseudo-authority figure told you that this is what you should do.

Start 2017 by already making tiny little differences to your life, like, I don’t know, buying a fucking theatre ticket for a show in a few months time, not when the show starts. If you set your mind to it, you can do anything, absolutely anything. But, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to do so. It’s not going to be easy, it’s probably not going to be fun to deal with (at first) but if you can get through 2016, then you can get through anything, my friend. Absolutely anything at all.

Love, Trashy xx

Sign up to The Skinny Zap! Want to stay up-to-date on the best things to see theskinny.co.uk/clubs Get the lowdown on the best club nights in Edinburgh and do each week, but without the tricky business and Glasgow each week with our clubbing round-ups. of wading through thousands of Facebook invites and panicked WhatsApp messages? Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and let us do the hard work theskinny.co.uk/food for you.

Believe it or not, there’s even more food stuff going on over on the website. Check out our latest theskinny.co.uk/zap New in Food round-up, get the lowdown on a

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ell, 2016 was a shitter of a year wasn’t it? I don’t blame you for wanting to do 2017 right, and I want you to know that I think it’s great to hear that you’re wanting to make some changes in your life, and also, that you want to start going to the theatre more (holla!). But, I ask you, why wait until the New Year?

This whole ‘New Year, New You’ nonsense is just a way to make people feel bad about themselves, anyway. After a full month of no holds barred gluttony, encouraged by everyone around us, suddenly, January arrives with a side dose of guilt disguised as ‘radical self care’. Because, what do people who’ve been eating and drinking for a month do after? They feel bad. And what do people who feel bad about themselves do? They spend money to make themselves feel better. Ego is bad for the economy, but low-self esteem is our real currency. We love making people feel bad about themselves, because confident people don’t need to buy things and do things to themselves in order to impress those around them. Just look at the front cover of the nearest ‘lifestyle’ magazine – it’s all about how to lose weight, impress your (wo)man in bed, and how to fit into a space that society deems to be acceptable. Ick.

January 2017

Opinion

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Heads Up Compiled by: Kate Pasola

Sigh. January.

ONLY KIDDING –c'mon guys, we can do this. One gig, exhibition and kefir brewing workshop at a time. Chin up.

Tue 3 Jan

Wed 4 Jan

Let’s ease our way into January with a cosy trip to the cinema, eh? Ken Loach’s critically acclaimed feature film I, Daniel Blake makes its way to Glasgow this month.

It’s already got a Palme d’Or award under its belt, and features comedian Dave Johns portraying a man from Newcastle who’s been forced to leave work due to a heart attack.

Back down to earth with a bang, much? GFT, Glasgow, 6.15pm, £7.50-£9.50

It’s not New Year’s without King Tut’s annual New Year’s Revolution with its marathonesque bill of 80 bands across 18 days in the one and only Wah Wah Hut. Tonight kicks off the fest with Indigo Velvet, Apache Darling and FCK Yes, but there’s PLENTY more where that came from. Go hardcore and splash on a golden ticket or pop along to nights you fancy for a tenner. King Tut’s, Glasgow, 4-21 Jan, times vary, £10-40

I, Daniel Blake

Sun 8 Jan

Mon 9 Jan

Tue 10 Jan

Remember back in 2015 when artist Ellie Harrison was granted a financial award by Creative Scotland for her project, The Glasgow Effect, in which she pledged not to leave the area of Greater Glasgow for a year?

Remember the shitstorm?

Well, her stint’s finished.

Today’s lecture and Q&A is currently sold out, but there’s a waiting list and she’s on the lookout for a larger venue. Venue TBA, 12pm, waiting list on Eventbrite

Aspiring filmmaker? In need of a little support for your film project? Look no further, you silver screen wizard, you. Head along to a meeting with Lock Up Your Daughters, a Glasgow-based LGBT+ filmmaking collective who meet up on a monthly basis for read-throughs, workshops and project planning sessions. What’s more, it’s all free! CCA Clubroom, Glasgow, 7pm, free

The Fruitmarket’s very lovely (if slightly melancholic) exhibition Conversations in Letters in Lines continues this month through into February, featuring work from South African artists William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland. A particular highlight is Kentridge’s dizzying animations, set to the music of Neo Muyanga. That said, it’s certainly worth checking out the entire exhibition. Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until 19 Feb, free

The Glasgow Effect

Lock Up Your Daughters

Indigo Velvet

Conversations in Letters in Lines

Sun 15 Jan

Mon 16 Jan

Get your clicking fingers ready, Scotland’s Slam Championships (or Slampionships?) take place tonight at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre. With previous winners including Carly Brown and Bram E. Gieben, there’s no better place to wrap your eyes, ears and heart ventricles around a load of lush spoken word, so make sure you turn up if that’s your thing. Tron, Glasgow, 7.45pm, £7.50

The name Irn Bru Carnival reeks of corporate organised fun, yes, but hear us out. This is Europe’s biggest indoor funfair. Where else are you going to be able to helter skelter to your heart’s content without getting drenched by Scottish rain? Plus, it’s probably best to make the most of having access to Europe’s biggest indoor funfair while we can, right? ...Too soon? SECC, Glasgow, 21 Dec-15 Jan, times and prices vary

Not much time left to see Please Turn Us On at GoMA, a particularly group exhibition from Arthur Ginsberg & Video Free America, Heather Phillipson, Stansfield/Hooykaas and ​ Videofreex which casts an eye over international counterculture, video art and Glasgow. We should mention that there’s warning of graphic language, drugs, sex, and nudity, so p’raps not a family day out, really...Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, until 22 Jan, times vary, free

Please Turn Us On

Irn Bru Carnival

Fri 20 Jan

Sat 21 Jan

Sun 22 Jan

The first of a few recommended Burns Night events this week, Toast to the Lassies: Robert Burns & The Role of Women a nod to the women associated with the life and works of ol’ Rabbie. It’ll be made up of submissions collected throughout December, and intends to address ‘notions of femininity, masculinity, and the power struggle between artist, viewer, and subject’.

Sounds good to us. Gallery 23 West End, Edinburgh, until Feb 10, free

Nowt more cathartic than a little doom, drone and general bleakness to see you over the late-January hump, right?

Well, tonight get yourself along to FVNERALS’ gig at Broadcast, where you’ll be able to brood to your heart’s content to the tune of their brand new EP Wounds (featuring tracks such as Void, Shiver and Teeth. Told you it was dark..). Broadcast, Glasgow, 7pm, £5

More in the way of Burnsbased mirth today – National Museum of Scotland’s hosting a Burns Unbound, ram-packed with creative activities, performances, ceilidh dancing, interactive theatre, performed poetry and live music from Aonach Mor, Jeana Leslie and Adam Brown and Barluath.

Conveniently, it’s also on a Sunday afternoon, meaning you can bring along a wee one to run off a bit of energy… NMS, Edinburgh, 11am, free

Thu 26 Jan

Fri 27 Jan

Sat 28 Jan

See to making your Thursday night glorious with the help of Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys as he pays a visit to Stereo as part of his Set Fire To The Stars tour.

There’ll be a free screening of the Dylan Thomasdirected film, followed by a live performance of the soundtrack with Rhys and Y Niwl members Alun Tan Lan, Gruff Ab Arwel and Siôn Glyn. Stereo, Glasgow, 9pm, £16

What with all this Burns chat, it’s easy to overlook the fact that 25 Jan also marks the birthday of Virginia Woolf.

Luckily, Glasgow Women’s Library is well and truly onto it, hosting Herland: Burns Night/Woolf Supper a ‘Bardinfused Bohemian gathering’, including readings, music, supper and performances from Lila Matsumoto, Nuala Watt, Rahat Zahid, and MacGillivray. Oh, and the dresscode? Servin’ Bloomsbury chic with a Burns Night twist. GWL, Glasgow, 7pm, £10-20

Now, you might be thinking Celtic Connections is all about the music, but you'd be sorely, sorely wrong. It's also about WHISKY – specifically today's National Whisky Festival. Head over to SWG3 and you'll have to opportunity to sup all kindsa whisky, participate in masterclasses, chow down on food from local vendors and sink the odd craft beer to sustain your stamina. SWG3 Glasgow, 12.30-3.30pm & 4pm-7.30pm £35

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FVNERALS

Ga lle r y 23 A rt E x h i b i t i o n 23 At h o l l Cre sc e n t , E d i nb urg h

2 0 J a n u a r y - 1 3 F e b r ua r y 2 0 1 7 Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 12.00 / 5.00 p.m. | Saturday 10.00 a.m./ 4.00 p.m.

OPENING NIGHT JANUARY 20 t h 6. 30 - 9. 30 p . m.

Gruff Rhys

Photo: Eoin Carey

www.gallery23.org.uk | Tel. (0131) 229 1528 | E-Mail gallery@esuscotland.org.uk | Instagram gallery_23_edinburgh | Facebook Gallery 23



Jeana Leslie

Photo: Joshua Rappeneker

Credit: Raj Dhunna

Sat 14 Jan

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Thu 5 Jan

Fri 6 Jan

Sat 7 Jan

So here’s a little sum’n sum’n to perk up the first week of 2017 – bar boffins Pop-Up Geeks are bringing Blood & Wine, a Game of Thrones-inspired tavern into the belly of Daylight Robbery throughout the month of January. There’ll be all manner of meat and mead, not to mention everything needed to make for an authentic GoT experience (minus the Red Wedding-esque murderspree). Weds and Thurs throughout Jan, 5pm, free

Superheroes, superheroes, cooome getcha superheroes, live at the SSE. Marvel fandoms across Scotland will be pleased to hear that Marvel Universe LIVE!’s coming to the Hydro, bringing battles, SFX and cosplay galore to Glasgow. There’s chat of Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor and Black Widow, all in attendance to battle the Marvel baddies, so it’s worth checking out if you’re into your comics.

SSE Hydro, Glasgow, 4-8 Jan, times and prices vary.

Head down to Stereo tonight to get the 411 on brand spankin’ promoters Output as they chuck on a debut show with local boy Big Miz taking the lead on the ones and twos. He’s played alongside the likes of Jackmaster, Denis Sulta, Leon Vynehall, Pariah, so worth keeping a beady eye on. Support comes from Mass, Kny and Jack James. Stereo, Glasgow, 11pm, £6

Game of Thrones

Jackmaster

Marvel Universe LIVE!

Wed 11 Jan

Thu 12 Jan

Fri 13 Jan

Over in Stratford, Royal Shakespeare Company Artistic Director Gregory Doran brings his bold interpretation of Bard’s beguiling The Tempest to the stage, featuring as good old wizard Prospero. If you’re keen to catch it, head down to Festival Theatre tonight – they’re screening it live! Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 7pm, £16

Dreamy weaving-hub Dovecot is hosting a rather sumptuous exhibition entitled Colour & Light throughout January and February, showcasing their tufty wares in a manner which draws attention to the subtle effects of light on colour in bringing fabric to life. Hold tight until 26 Jan if you fancy experiencing the exhibition in the form of a torch-lit tour (6-7pm, £3-5). Until 25 Feb.

Flying Duck high-jumps into 2017 with a corker of a show this month – nip down to see Montréal electronic mastermind and recent Boiler Room talent Marie Davidson dishing out some cold wave, synth dance and techno. Support comes in the way of The Modern Institute and Sue Zuki, live along with DJ sets from MR TC and DM. Flying Duck, Glasgow, 11pm, £7

The Tempest

Colour & Light

Marie Davidson

Tue 17 Jan

Wed 18 Jan

Thu 19 Jan

Scare the absolute living shit out of yourself tonight at psychological stage horror The Woman In Black as it embarks on a tour of the UK to celebrate a whole quarter-century of petrifying success in the West End. It’s noirish, it’s thrilling, and is known to regularly fill theatres with yelping, cowering audience members. A perfectly horrifying night out. King’s Theatre, Glasgow, 17-21 Jan, times and prices vary

Ever tried the milky delight that is Kefir? Ever tried brewing it? If you answered no to at least one of these questions, Bottle of Ginger’s Kefir fermenting workshop is for you. The basic kit needed to get started, along with grains, recipes and instructions are all included in the ticket price, so Kefir keenos, get on board. Manufactory, 142 Crownpoint Rd, Glasgow, 17-20 Jan, 7pm, £15

DCA’s having a belter of a time this month. Not only does their DCA Thomson exhibition continue into Feb (celebrating 80 years of Oor Wullie & The Broons!), but they’re also bringing in renowned absurdist artists Rob Churm and Malcy Duff for a oneoff performance of theatre, puppetry and spoken word. Lovely excuse to head up to ol’ Dundee for the day. DCA, Dundee, 7pm, free Malcy Duff, Pages from the Pineapple, 2016

The Woman In Black

Mon 23 Jan

Tue 24 Jan

Wed 25 Jan

Au Revoir Les Enfants, a Golden Lion-winning feature film set in Nazioccupied France, gets a screening tonight at Cameo, followed by a Q&A with holocaust survivor Henry Wuga. With a plot centred around a young boy named Julien and his new friend at boarding school, it tells a hardhitting tale of children’s lives changing after arrest

by Gestapo agents. Bring tissues. Cameo Cinema, Edinburgh, 1pm, £TBC

If you’re in the mood for some music and only big, bashy noise will hit the spot, give Philly punk band Beach Slang a go tonight at Mono. They released an angsty lil’ record back in September entitled A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings to much acclaim, so all the more reason to catch ‘em before they head on to Barcelona, Bologna and beyond. Mono, Glasgow, 7.30pm, £12

After a banging inaugural shindig last year, BEAMIS (Black and Ethnic Minorities Infrastructure in Scotland) returns with their Celtic Connections Burns concert. The line-up includes Jamaican roots-reggae artist Brina performing with members of Tribal Global Collective, and a set from young Pakistani singer Sanam Marvi. Plus, your ticket includes dinner! Sounds heavenly. Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, 8pm, £20

Au Revior Les Enfants

Beach Slang

Sun 29 Jan

Mon 30 Jan

Tue 31 Jan

Just one final musical tipoff for you – a show from genre-hopping goddess Law Holt, who specialises in soundscapes decked in ginormous vocals and dark, oddball sounds. She's playing the gig as part of both Celtic Connections and Independent Venue Week (23-29), a stellar programme of gigs dedicated to the glory of the UK's homegrown haunts. The Hug and Pint, Glasgow, 7.30pm, £8

After kicking off officially on 27 Jan, Manipulate continues today, showcasing an e'er innovative array of Scottish and world visual theatre, puppetry, and animation in venues across Scotland and the rest of the UK. Head along to the Trav today and catch the UK premiere of Poli Degaine – If you only ever see one Polichinelle show in your life, make it this one. Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 9pm, £8.50-13.50

Round off the most depressing month of the year with some major lols courtesy of Nish Kumar as he plays the rescheduled Scotland dates of his new show Actions Speak Louder than Words, Unless You Shout The Words Real Loud. It’s what he refers to as a show about ‘history, democracy and capitalism’, but it’s funny AF, promise. The Stand, Edinburgh, 8.30pm, £12-14 (also 30 Jan at Óran Mór, Glasgow, 7pm, £12-14

January 2017

Law Holt



Brina

Nish Kumar

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The Skinny Food & Drink Survey 2017 As we report back on the findings from our 2017 Food and Drink Survey, our food editor takes stock of the nation’s culinary health

S

ix years is a lifetime in the accelerated world of food and drink, where the hours are long, the drink flows heavily and the whims of the public can set the best laid plans awry. I mean, people always need keys cut or their shoes reheeled, but will they always need a restaurant dedicated to ceviche or another heavily hygge-fied cafe?

But while hygge levels have fluctuated over the years, your enthusiasm for letting us know which venues are your favourites has continued to grow. We picked through thousands and thousands of your votes across our seven categories to help celebrate the best of Scotland’s food scene, and while it may have been a minor logistical nightmare it feels like it was probably worth it. The next eight pages feature a great mixture of styles and locations, and showcase your favourites from across the country.

It’s at this point that a lot of other writers would start cracking on about ‘the wonders of Scotland’s natural larder’, give it a bit of gladhanding about salmon and the rolling heather,

then waffle themselves inside out. Well, bollocks to that. The reason that Edinburgh and Glasgow’s food and drink scenes are on the rise isn’t because our ingredients are inherently better, or because of ‘something in the water’; it’s down to the fact that there’s a glut of talented, exciting and inventive people out there taking chances on new ideas, and people willing to go out and eat those ideas.

The Scottish coffee scene is as strong as it’s ever been, because our cafes and roasteries are run by incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable people from all over the world who all get on and collaborate with one another. The beer scene has been bolstered by a host of brewers making interesting beers plus cool beer-first bars where those brewers can shift their wares to an appreciative audience; they’re two sides of the same coin. Is every venue that opens its doors a roaring success?

No. But there is no shortage of enthusiasm and skill on display, and as your selections will attest, those two qualities are good ones to start with.

[Peter Simpson]

The Gannet

dishes is what sets it apart – each of their tacos is nicely balanced and packed with textures and tastes, and the handmade style of their dips and side dishes means they’re both charming and rammed full of exciting ingredients.

The tequila and agave menu nears the threefigure mark, the beer selection features some absolute crackers, and the Margarita machine is always on hand to tempt you into turning the night into a big one. There aren’t many tables, so you may need to wait – we suggest you set off now.

El Cartel

The Magnificent Seven Your favourite restaurants, from fine dining to delicious pho...

Words: Peter Simpson

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e squashed together a few categories from previous food and drink surveys in order to get a list of your favourite restaurants in Edinburgh and Glasgow. You responded with a varied and exciting list featuring a host of styles, cuisines and price brackets; best go through them all one-by-one and see how they compare...

Hanoi Bike Shop 8 Ruthven Ln, Glasgow; hanoibikeshop.co.uk Reportedly a favourite of 2016’s second-best Knowles sister, the first thing that hits you when you enter the West End snug of Hanoi Bike Shop is the aroma. Yes, the atmosphere is cosy, and the decor remiscent of a South Asian street market

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stall, but the savoury whiff of fish sauce and simmering broth is incredible.

We recommend picking up a pho bo – an incredibly clean and fragrant noodle soup served with sliced beef and a garden’s worth of herbs and aromatics – and pairing it with some of the Bike Shop’s homemade tofu. The quality’s great, the prices won’t break the bank, and the dishes are light as a feather. No wonder Beyoncé’s a fan.

El Cartel 64 Thistle St, Edinburgh; elcartelmexicana.co.uk Tacos reach their apex at this small but perfectlyformed spot parellel to Queen Street in the centre of Edinburgh. The attention to detail in El Cartel’s

Mother India’s Cafe 3 Infirmary St, Edinburgh; motherindia.co.uk Curry tapas – a simple concept that’s seen a slew of imitators in recent years, but none have quite mastered the formula like the OGs at Mother India’s Cafe. The menu is a treasure trove of options, from expertly-prepared standards to spectacular delicacies, and because the portions are smaller it’s a chance to bring together a host of different flavours in one meal. Round up some friends, settle in, and prepare for the kind of feast that’s only ever interrupted by recriminations over who had the last of the saag.

Paesano 94 Miller St, Glasgow; paesanopizza.co.uk Paesano is the best pizzeria in Scotland. Controversial, we know, but hear us out; we have reasons.

The dough, cooked up in 500-degree Italian-built ovens, is fluffy and remarkably light with just the right amount of char. The toppings are expertlychosen, with quality ingredients at the fore and a menu that’s long enough to give you plenty to think about but without leaving you paralysed by choice.

Service is lightning quick (everyone’s having pizza, which cuts down on the faff), while the space itself is cool, fun, and bloody enormous, so there’s never that much of a wait for a table. Oh, and you can grab an amazing pizza and a cold beer for under a tenner, in the middle of Glasgow, in 2017. We rest our case, and expect to see you in the queue.

Ox and Finch 920 Sauchiehall St, Glasgow; oxandfinch.com More tapas-style dining, with Ox and Finch taking contemporary European cuisine and serving it up

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in handy shareable chunks. We say they’re handy, because one look at the menu will bring your basest ‘one of everything please’ instincts to the fore before you can say ‘Pavlovian’. You’re lucky they’re designed for sharing, so take advantage of that luck, we say.

An extensive seafood selection, multiple kinds of confit poultry, a good selection of vegetarian dishes and incredibly inventive desserts await in a cool environment – take a friend with a kind heart and a large bank balance, then try to fit as many dishes on the table as possible.

The Gannet 1155 Argyle St, Glasgow; thegannetgla.com One of the leading lights in the ongoing Finnieston revival, The Gannet’s aesthetic is a trendy mix of wood, exposed brick and exposed bulbs, which makes it all the more remarkable that it was a disused tenement just a few years ago.

As for the food, there’s a heavy emphasis on making the best of seasonal Scottish produce on both the main menu and the selection of small plates, and their Champagne Sunday lunch of three courses for £30 is a great way to try out what The Gannet has to offer and fill a lazy weekend at the same time.

Timberyard 10 Lady Lawson St, Edinburgh; timberyard.co A flash of Nordic style and substance in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, Timberyard’s stripped-back look and focus on foraged, local and homegrown ingredients makes it a truly intriguing proposition. The main event is the tasting menu – coming in six and eight course varieties, expect to be presented with an outrageous array of beautifully presented dishes each packed with intrigue.

That said, if you’re short on time or not entirely comfortable with diving headlong into the world of Scandi-inspired fine dining, Timberyard’s lunch and pre-theatre menu is a great way in. The exciting flourishes and avant-garde ingredients are still there (shout out to all the sea buckthorn fans) but a main and pudding will only set you back around £20. Next time your friend comes up with a terrible lunch suggestion, you know what to do. theskinny.co.uk/food-and-drink/survey

THE SKINNY

Raising The Bar

Your favourite pubs and bars are an eclectic bunch – here's a guide to what makes them tick, and what to order when you get there...

Zoo off-licence and the Porty outpost of bakers extraordinaire Twelve Triangles, and just five minutes from the beach. It’s a bright space during the day and a bustling and cosy one by night, the French-inspired menu has something for everyone, and the drinks list is a great mix of local favourites and some great options from further afield.

We asked The Skylark’s Paul Lambie for his suggestion on what to try on a first visit, and he hit us with an ideal post-beach recommendation: “Dig in to a Bordeaux Croque-Madame with a rich, toasty, YellowBall lager from Eyeball Brewing. James the brewer lives one street over from The Skylark, and the croque is (owner) Nina’s granny’s secret recipe.”

There you go, that’s your first visit sorted.

The Rum Shack

Paradise Palms 41 Lothian St, Edinburgh Think of a Christmas tree; it’s a large piece of foliage that sits in your house, covered in your choice of lights and decorations, glistening away in the corner of the room. Sounds mad when you over-analyse it, but when you’re in that festive moment, it makes perfect sense. Well, Paradise Palms is the bar equivalent of a massively over-adorned Christmas tree, and that’s why we love it.

It’s a top-notch dive bar, with an impressive range of spirits and cocktails shrouded behind outrageous decor and shiny neons. It’s also a kickass vegan soul food diner that serves up the likes of Southern Fried halloumi and barbecue jackfruit sandwiches. It’s also a performance space that plays host to everything from pre-club DJ sets to avantgarde cabaret, and an events space that hosts everything from book clubs to arts and crafts events to zine fairs. Oh, and it’s a record store with its own record label championing new Scottish music.

Stepping through the door is to step into a whirlwind of sights, sounds, smells and sensations – more than anything else, Paradise Palms feels alive and assured of itself. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the drinks menu, where one beverage in particular catches the eye – the Buckfast Daiquiri. Rum, lime, sugar syrup and Buckfast together at last; it’s tropical, it’s fruity, it’s faintly medicinal. It’s absolute lunacy, and it’s absolutely brilliant – long may this kind of thing continue.

plum cordial alongside the standard gin and lemon.

It’s fruity, sweet, sour and yet still really refreshing and moreish, and it looks great to boot. Bryant and Mack’s Jason Cormack also recommends both the Date In Manhattan or their fig-infused Figroni.

The Skylark 243 Portobello High St, Edinburgh Porty’s on the up, folks. The food and drink scene in Edinburgh’s seaside has been slowly bubbling under for the last few years, and now it’s, if not boiling over, certainly up to a nice simmer. There are good things to go and eat and drink in Portobello is the point we’re making.

With Porty’s beachside vibe and small-town feel, there’s no need for vast arrays of concept bars to choose from just yet. No, this setting calls for a nice all-rounder – great drinks, nice atmosphere, a welcoming space where you can go for a pint or some lunch or a big night out, or all three if you’re off the next day.

The Skylark is just such a place, situated on Portobello High Street between the excellent Beer

Inn Deep 445 Great Western Rd, Glasgow A riverside pub boosted by a link to one of the country’s best breweries (more on them later), Inn Deep draws on its Williams Brothers connection with great aplomb. The core beer range is from Williams with an ever-changing range of guest cask and keg ales on offer as well as a hefty bottle selection. For first-time visitors, we’d recommend a pint of the Joker IPA, an all-action Williams beer with a big aroma and even bigger flavour, or to simply bend the ear of the bar staff and see what they recommend. Like we said, they know their stuff.

On the food front, think burgers, pizzas, chillis, gumbos – all food that acts as a perfect accompaniment to all that beer from earlier. Oh, and it’s dog-friendly to the point of having an Instagram feed on their website solely based around the hashtag #dugsofinndeep. An ideal spot for a lazy afternoon of tasty beers and people/dog-watching.

The Rum Shack 657-659 Pollokshaws Rd, Glasgow A slice of the Caribbean in Glasgow’s Southside, The Rum Shack has a fair few things going in its favour. First is the 230-capacity Dancehall venue attached to the bar, playing host to everything from live gigs and stand-up comedy to regular life drawing classes. Then there’s the food, with the bar’s menu featuring everything from Trinidadian doubles

Bryant and Mack 87-89 Rose St North Ln, Edinburgh Sometimes great things are hidden away, for their own benefit as much as anything else. Still, take a bit of time to track them down and the rewards can be immense. That’s the case with Bryant and Mack, tucked away on an unassuming lane off Rose Street and cunningly disguised as a detective agency.

Inside, the one-room bar is all dark colours, mood lighting and comfy seats. The speakeasy vibe is complimented by the size and shape of the space – it’s not the biggest, but everyone has their own little conspiratorial corner in which to plot away. As for the drinks menu, Bryant and Mack pride themselves on “classic cocktails with only the finest ingredients”, with a menu boosted by a host of homemade garnishes, cordials and other accoutrements.

One of the hits, in our experience, is the Plum Collins, a Japanese-inspired take on the Tom Collins featuring Umeshu plum sake and a homemade

January 2017

Words: Peter Simpson (chickpea curry served on flatbreads) to Jamaican jerk chicken, fish and pork.

And then there’s the rum list – it runs into triple figures, with sweet, sugary bottles from all over North and Central America, as well as some special picks from as far afield as Japan and India.

If you’re looking for a rum, any rum, this is one of your best bets. Then there are the cocktails, the Caribbean beer list, and a surprisingly extensive wine list. That rum list though – it’s a true liquid library. Best get ‘studying’, eh?

Trying to get a foothold in the rum game? The Rum Shack’s Brian Austin has just the thing: “For anyone trying out the Rum Shack for the first time I’d recommend a Gosling’s and Ginger Beer. Why? My 82 year old Dad came over from Tobago in May to see the pub for the first time and had four of them. And he doesn’t even drink!” Well, that’s us convinced – we’ll have four.

The Allison Arms 720 Pollokshaws Rd, Glasgow Just over the road from The Rum Shack, the Allison Arms is a genuine Southside institution having been on the scene since the 1880s. While all around seems to be in constant flux, the Arms’ success has been in staying true to itself despite the area’s changing vibe.

Around the vast U-shaped bar you’ll find a mix of long-time regulars and Southside newcomers mingling around the tables or trying to outdo each other in the hard-as-nails pub quiz every Thursday.

Meanwhile, away from the bar taps you’ll find a number of vast fridges packed with all sorts of imported beery delights.

That’s the Allison Arms’ USP – browse the fridges without getting in anyone’s way, pick out the delicious German weissbier you’ve had your eye on all evening, pay for it at the bar, get a glass, enjoy. Having nearly fallen over many a bar trying to see into the fridges, we are wholly in favour of this approach, and recommend you take advantage with a dark and malty Kneitinger Bock or a monkbrewed lager from the Andechs brewery. theskinny.co.uk/food-and-drink/survey

The Skylark

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Cafe Strange Brew

Cafe Culture From specialist coffee spots to neighbourhood hideaways, your favourite cafes in Edinburgh and Glasgow...

Words: Peter Simpson

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hile pubs provide us all with somewhere to hunker down for an evening, cafes serve the same function during the daylight hours. Need to meet someone? Cafe. Need to hide from someone? Cafe (although probably not the same one from before). Run out of milk and can’t be bothered going to the shops? Cafe.

As such, your favourite cafes are as diverse as the people who voted for them, with a host of different styles featuring in this year’s list. Scotland’s ever-expanding ‘serious coffee’ scene is represented by a pair of long-established faces in the coffee community. Artisan Roast were among the forerunners of a growing group of micro-roasteries springing up across the country, and AR’s coffee can regularly be found behind the counter at venues across Scotland. Their Edinburgh cafes in the New Town, Bruntsfield and Stockbridge got your votes, and with good reason; they’re cosy spaces where the coffee is key and each flat white comes with a side of attention and expertise.

Over in Glasgow, Papercup were a similar selection – small batch coffee roasted in-house, and served up in a West End cafe that’s packed with neat visual flourishes and is just generally a nice place to be for an afternoon. The food and coffee changes with the seasons, but the careful approach to quality ingredients remains the same.

Catch them on Great Western Road, or at their (comparatively) new second cafe on the High Street next to Strathclyde Uni. When it comes to nice city centre cafes, places where you can escape the twin horrors of shopping and the general public with good food, coffee and ambience, you made a couple of good selections. Primal Roast may only have thrown open its doors last spring, but it’s already made a sizeable impression in its St Vincent Street location.

Managing to be both healthy and fun, Primal Roast

offer up sweet treats to suit near-enough every dietary requirement, and a food menu that’s packed with interesting combinations.

In Edinburgh, you plumped for perennial favourite Lovecrumbs. The West Port cafe has changed a bit in the past year, with its focus shifting towards a mixed menu with more savoury dishes rather than their previous ‘cavalcade of cakes’ approach. Or, as they wrote on the board outside, ‘we serve LUNCH’. Whatever you go for, expect a calming atmosphere, lovely decor and brilliant coffee and loose leaf teas.

Your final two choices bear some striking similarities, so we’ll tackle them together. They’re both community-minded cafes located in one of the most exciting areas of their respective cities, they both pride themselves on brunch-tastic menus, and they’re both big hits with the dog-having and dog-liking communities.

Ostara Cafe, located just off the waterfront in Leith, work with a host of Edinburgh foodie favourites including Leith roastery Williams & Johnson, bagel supremo The Bearded Baker and the non-profit Breadshare community baker. The result is a menu that’s packed with locally sourced goodness, all served in a lovely, cosy environment.

It’s a similar situation in Shawlands’ Cafe Strange Brew, a neighbourhood spot that’s captured the imagination of Southside foodies in its first year. A menu packed with visually amazing and wildly tasty riffs on brunch classics and lunch dishes, a focus on local ingredients and regular pop-up events from the likes of burger whizz El Perro Negro have all contributed to Strange Brew’s success. If that sounds like your kind of place, head on down, but if it doesn’t then don’t be too despondent – as we’ve seen, there’s truly a cafe for everyone. theskinny.co.uk/food-and-drink/survey

Cafe Strange Brew

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Julie's Street Kitchen

On-The-Go Heroes Groundbreaking street food, top-drawer takeaways and tiny, tiny cafes; your on-the-go favourites are an eclectic and high-quality bunch Words: Peter Simpson

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he great thing about our ‘on-the-go’ category is it’s more than a little nebulous. Do we mean a straight-up hole-in-the-wall takeaway, or a fast casual dining spot that doesn’t require cancelling your afternoon to get your lunch, or a street food stand to pick up something great as you pass through? Well, it means all of those things, so let’s go through them, starting with the street food.

Glasgow street food aces Chompsky were one of your favourites this year for their ever-evolving menu of delights from all over the world as well as establishing the city’s first legit street food truck, and you also liked Julie’s Street Kitchen for its exciting take on southeast Asian cuisine. When we caught up with the Chompsky guys last autumn, they told a familiar tale of street food chefs and entrepreneurs fighting against local authority intransigence, while expressing cautious optimism for Scotland’s street food scene. As they said: “New York went through all of the same growing pains and their street food scene is huge with trucks everywhere; it’s just that the difficult stuff was all five or 10 years ago.”

There have been some interesting developments in the street food scene in the last 12 months – Edinburgh’s Pitt food market has established itself as a must-visit location, and the Gordon Street Laneways project last summer offered Julie’s and others an extended residency in the heart of Glasgow while keeping the street vibes intact. Meanwhile developments like the Taste Buchanan revamp of the Buchanan Galleries food court have brought both Chompsky and Julie’s to a mainstream audience, so we might be able to speed up that timeline from earlier after all.

From street food to fast food, and a pair of incredible Asian spots that take the act of grabbing a quick bite to eat and turn it into an artform.

In Glasgow, Kimchi Cult’s ‘punk riffs on Korean

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classics’ range from Korean fried chicken and bibimbap (think sushi rolls, but better) to kimchiinflected burgers and fusion dishes like bulgogitopped fries. Chips, with K-marinated beef and kimchi hot sauce on top; no wonder you voted for these guys.

Over in Edinburgh, Ting Thai Caravan’s continued brilliance gets the nod – the queue outside, come rain or shine, has been a permanent fixture since the doors opened back in 2013, and with good reason. The standard and scope of the menu is remarkable, from small plates packed with spice and flavour to outrageously good curries and noodle soups, and it’s incredible value for money as well. Brilliant flavours, brilliant prices and a genuine buzz about the place – that queue isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

And last but not least, the takeaways. Your Edinburgh favourite was Mexican spot Los Cardos on Leith Walk, home to some of the most outrageous burritos you’ll ever see. Their haggis burrito is particularly well-renowned (it even comes in a veggie variant) but each of their burritos is packed full of tasty ingredients.

Speaking of things being packed, the scene behind the counter at Glasgow’s Brew Box Coffee Company must be a sight to behold, with the cafe – in an old police box on Wilson St – turning out a remarkable range and quality of food and drinks.

Breakfast pots, coffees, grilled cheeses and a spectacular array of sandwiches – Brew Box is a fitting selection as an on-the go favourite. Some people say you can’t have a good meal if you’re short on time, but then some people also say you can’t run a top-drawer cafe from a box in the middle of the road. Anything’s possible if you have the skills and enthusiasm – now put down that meal deal sandwich and get yourself a real lunch. theskinny.co.uk/food-and-drink/survey

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January 2017

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inter’s well and truly here, with long nights and terrible weather to contend with. Luckily, the weather can’t get you when you’re indoors, and your kitchen can act as a gateway to warmer, happier climes. Tuk Tuk Indian Street Food chef Shahab Ali has shared his recipe for Tuk Tuk’s Butter Chicken – a warm, comforting curry that will help you forget about the driving rain outside in no time at all.

Tuk Tuk Butter Chicken Ingredients (for four portions) 500g of diced chicken breast 500ml of single cream 4 large onions, finely chopped 2 cloves of garlic 400ml of tinned chopped tomatoes 1 teaspoon of grated ginger 3 green chillies, halved and deseeded 2 teaspoons of salt 6 green cardamom pods, crushed 1 teaspoon of garam masala powder 1 teaspoon of coriander powder 1 teaspoon of cumin powder 1 teaspoon of turmeric powder ¼ teaspoon of chilli powder 500ml water 2 tablespoons of sugar 2 teaspoons of almond powder 100g of butter 100g of pure ghee 3 drops of orange food colouring (optional) Method In a large sauce pan, heat up the ghee and butter on a moderate heat. Add the garlic and ginger, and lightly brown. Then add the onion, tomato and salt, cover, and allow to simmer on a low heat for 15 to 20 minutes. On return, your onion should have begun the process of dissolving.

Stir the mixture firmly, almost breaking or mashing the onions you go. At this point, you may consider cheating and using a stick blender; if you do, ensure the onions are cooked and you have removed the pan from the heat. If not cheating, continue by adding the sliced chillies; if you like extra heat in your butter chicken don’t remove the seeds, but we usually deseed the chillies to help you enjoy the aroma of chillies but not the heat.

Once you are happy with the consistency, add the dry spices and simmer for 2 minutes, stirring well. By this point the kitchen should be full of wonderful aromas. When the oil splits from the sautéed onion, tomato and spice paste, add the chicken, stir, and cover. Cook for 15 to 20 minutes on low heat.

Once the curry thickens, add the cream, water and sugar. Stir well and cook for a further 4 minutes (and add the optional drops of orange colour if you wish). Serve hot with rice, and you must garnish your butter chicken with a little extra cream.

Tuk Tuk Edinburgh, 1 Leven St; Tuk Tuk Glasgow, 426 Sauchiehall St (open Jan 2017) tuktukonline.com

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THE SKINNY

New Kids on the Block We take a look at your favourite newcomers, and find out what it takes to get your new venue moving in the right direction Words: Peter Simpson

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Roots and Fruits

Basket Case We assemble a shopping basket from your favourite food and drink shops Words: Peter Simpson

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hopping – we all know we have to do it, and unfortunately it seems like the shops have worked that out too. Cue a half-mile walk from one end of an aircraft hangar to another because you forgot to get yoghurt on the first pass, or a trudge around identikit mini-supermarkets to try and find actual ingredients amongst the meal kits and suspiciously large biscuit selection. If only there were some nice, friendly indie shops in which we could pick up our food and drink. Oh wait, there are, and you told us where to find them.

In this ideal world, we’d be looking for a couple of places to pick up the bulk of our groceries – local produce, reasonable prices, you know the drill.

Roots and Fruits and Peckhams in the West End of Glasgow both fit the bill, with Roots leading the charge on the fruit and veg front. They encourage you to get what you need for the day, on the day, to cut down waste and help you eat the freshest food you can. Handily, there is an actual greengrocer with years of experience running the place to recommend seasonal produce and give you ideas on what to do with it once you get home, and the adjoining deli can hook you up with delicious fresh bread and pastries.

Peckhams on the other hand can help out with all the deli standards – oodles of delicious cheese, cured meats and other sundries that’ll act as great encouragement when you open the fridge after a long day of work (or be perfectly happy eaten straight off a plate with a big pile of the aforementioned bread).

Next in the basket are all the store cupboard staples – big bags of sugar, grains of varying sizes and shapes, things to spread on other things. Your pick of Real Foods in Edinburgh allows you to grab all these things in eco-friendly, healthy and organic varieties. From organic spices and flours to healthy alternatives to sugar, Real Foods is a treasure trove of consciously-sourced and good-for-you delights.

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There’s a serious range, too – they sell more than 50 different varieties of nut butter (cashew, almond, hazelnut etc) and so many different varieties of salt it’d make your head spin.

Now, by this stage you’ll be keen to acquire some culinary secret weapons. You know the type, the bottles to be liberally added to basically anything to make it taste great or the bags of hard-tocome-by secret ingredients. Lupe Pintos have been shifting this kind of stuff for years at their shops at either end of the M8, be it masa for crafting your own corn tortillas, preserved tomatillos to blitz into homemade salsas, or imported hot sauces that will clear your sinuses at 20 paces. A genuine treasure trove of goods from across North and Central America, 10 minutes spent in Lupe’s tends to end in the acquisition of more than a few exciting treats to jazz up meals long into the future.

You’ll need some liquid to wash all that down, so your pick of Valhalla’s Goat on Glasgow’s Great Western Road is an inspired choice. Their range of hundreds of beers come from all over the world, with particularly strong home-grown selections and a great choice of German and American beers.

The Goat also come across some of the world’s more exclusive and esoteric beers, from £25 limited edition bottles of oak-aged cherry beer from the Brooklyn Brewery to Swedish blackcurrant sours to an impressive range of spontaneously fermented ‘lambic’ beers from Belgium.

Don’t like beer? Fear not, there’s an outrageous selection of wines opposite the beers, plus an extensive range of whiskies, gins, rums and anything else you can think of. The staff know their stuff, and the biggest issue you’ll have is trying to make it out of the place in one piece without swapping all your possessions for more delicious beers.

Looks like we’re going to need a bigger basket...

triking out on your own can be a daunting prospect, but any fears can be mitigated by the fact that there’s always someone who’s done it before. This year’s crop of your favourite new venues should serve as an inspiration to anyone keen on kickstarting their ideal foodie venture in 2017.

For one thing, it’s a genuinely mixed bag, from the tiny, TARDIS-like Brew Box Coffee Company on Wilson Street in Glasgow to the one-room cocktail speakeasy that is Edinburgh’s Bryant and Mack.

There’s Taiwanese bubble tea, courtesy of Tempo Tea Bar at the New Waverley Arches, and natural and organic wine from Good Brothers Wine Bar in Stockbridge. Over in Glasgow, there’s the community-minded but chef-driven food and drink at Cafe Strange Brew in the Southside, and a healthybut-still-massively-fun cafe in the form of Primal Roast in the city centre. All ideas that have been taken to heart by the food-loving public, and proof that there’s space for nigh-on anything in Scotland’s dining scene.

Of course, it’s all well and good knowing that someone has done something; the real intel comes from knowing how they did it, which steps they took, and what advice they would give to anyone else. Luckily, we have acquired just such advice from two of this year’s best newcomers – Cafe Strange Brew and Good Brothers Wine Bar. Laurie MacMillan of Cafe Strange Brew “I have worked in hospitality for around 12 years so was under no illusions about what level of work would be required to run my own business. I think choosing your location is essential. It took me around five years to find the perfect unit/location.

Know what businesses have worked and haven’t

theskinny.co.uk/food-and-drink/survey

worked in the area. What were their failings?

What made a business work? Really get to know your neighbourhood.

“Secondly, never underestimate the power of social media. ‘Sometimes there aren’t enough hours in the day to make a post’ – wrong, make time. It’s a free marketing tool right at your fingertips. Engage with your audience. Create a buzz.

“Thirdly, be willing to compromise. I scrapped my first menu after one week. It was too ‘cheffy’.

If the people of Shawlands want a Mortons roll on sausage, then I will give them a roll on sausage.

The menu was an evolution. In the beginning I compromised with lentil soup and cooked breakfast, now I have built a trusting clientele, they are round to my way of thinking. Duck confit hash and ox cheek eggs benedict are winning favour.

“Lastly, maintain full control of your ship and work at full throttle. You are the boss, the buck stops with you. Put in 110% and you can’t fail.

And keep smiling.”

Rory Sutherland of Good Brothers Wine Bar “When starting a new business, the best advice I can give is to go in with a strong vision and stay true to that vision no matter what.

“It’s too easy to be sidetracked by day-to-day issues in a new business, but as long as you have an idea of where you want to get to in the end, you should be fine. Remember at all times that it’s a marathon and not a sprint; business is hard, hours are long, but always look at the bigger picture.

“Most importantly, make sure you are having fun!” theskinny.co.uk/food

Good Brothers Wine Bar

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Top Beer

The Winners

Experimental flavours, 500-year-old German brewing traditions and on-trend graphic design – an introduction to your favourite Scottish breweries

The full list of winners from this year’s Food and Drink Survey, and where to find them...

Words: Peter Simpson Brewdog ‘The popular one’ Say what you will about some of their promotional methods or the inherent contradiction of ‘Equity for Punks’ – if there’s one thing that Brewdog have done since their launch a decade ago, it’s bring craft beer to the mainstream. Once supermarket aisles were the preserve of piss-like lagers and unappealing old-man ales, but in 2017 exciting, high-quality beer is available everywhere.

Take the brewery’s Elvis Juice as a prime example – anyone who can get a flavour-packed 6.5% grapefruit IPA into our local shop without anyone batting an eyelid is worthy of a pat on the back.

Good ‘dog.

Drygate ‘The trendy one’ Do you like big sans-serif fonts? Do you like industrial-style seating? Do you like delicious and intriguing beer? Meet Drygate, the edgy offspring of Tennents and Williams Bros (more on them shortly).

Firmly bedded in to their home on the Wellpark site in Glasgow’s East End, Drygate’s beers can be spotted a mile off thanks to their incredibly distinctive branding filled with those aforementioned big fonts and some ever-so-slightly terrifying imagery.

Once you pop a bottle, the good news keeps coming – take Drygate’s Ax Man Rye IPA, blending the typical citric hoppiness of an IPA with some spicy, darker notes. Tastes lovely, plus it has a picture of a nice lumberjack-looking fella on the bottle, so doubles up as an addition to your ‘Hipster makeover lookbook’.

Their Vienna Pale is a sweet and full-bodied amber beer, while their Blønd pale ale is a fruity and light session beer that’s full of delicious tropical flavours without the standard craft beer drawback of leaving you incapable of standing within the hour.

WEST ‘The traditional one’ The Reinheitsgebot – the ‘purity law’ stating that only water, hops, yeast and barley can go into a Bavarian beer – celebrated its 500th anniversary last year. The fact that you named WEST as one of your favourite breweries is testament to the fact that some rules don’t need to be broken.

Brewing all of its beers by the German playbook, WEST’s brews offer a crispness and drinkability that’s been honed over the centuries. Their St Mungo helles-style lager holds up well against its Bavarian brethren, and is the perfect drink to get your stubborn/wrong friends on the path to hoppy righteousness.

Williams Bros.

‘The other popular one’ While Brewdog’s rise has been firework-like (lots of noise, incredible progression and no small sense of danger), Williams have gone for the bonfire approach of slowly but surely building themselves up since their launch all the way back in the 90s.

Inn Deep, their bar in Glasgow’s West End, is a perennial favourite of the city’s beer lovers, and the brewery’s hand in Drygate and the Valhalla’s Goat beer shop is clear to see in both venues.

Aside from all that, the Williams guys know how to brew a delicious beer – their Caesar Augustus IPA-lager hybrid remains a personal favourite, with a hoppy punch but a crisp finish. While the notions of ‘experience’ and ‘expertise’ don’t seem massively in vogue in the world right now, Williams are showing us that taking your time and honing your craft is well worth it. theskinny.co.uk/food-and-drink/survey

Best Food & Drink Shops Lupe Pintos, 24 Leven St, Edinburgh & 313 Gt Western Rd, Glasgow (lupepintos.com) | Peckhams, 126 Byres Rd, Glasgow (peckhams. co.uk) | Real Foods, 8 Brougham St & 37 Broughton St, Edinburgh (realfoods.co.uk) | Roots and Fruits, 455 Gt Western Rd, Glasgow (rootsfruitsandflowers.com) | Valhalla’s Goat, 449 Gt Western Rd, Glasgow (valhallasgoat.com) Best Food On-the-Go Brew Box Coffee Company, Wilson St, Glasgow (@brewboxcoffeecompany) | Chompsky, various locations, Glasgow (@chompskyfood) | Julie’s Street Kitchen, Taste Buchanan @ Buchanan Galleries, Glasgow (@juliesstreetfoodkitchen) | Kimchi Cult, 14 Chancellor St, Glasgow (kimchicult.com) | Ting Thai Caravan, 8 Teviot Pl, Edinburgh | Los Cardos, 281 Leith Walk, Edinburgh (loscardos.co.uk)

Gin City A whole host of you wrote in expressing your love for Edinburgh Gin; with that in mind, here’s a short introduction to some of the country’s best gins

f all the developments in Scotland’s food and drink scene recently (tacos everywhere, artisanal pizza, hygge-meets-industrial interiors), the resurgence of gin seems to have been one of the most low-key. It’s the sign of a genuine movement; not too many big flashy marketing campaigns or launches, just loads of interesting bottles turning up in your favourite bars for you to gawp at and drink from.

One of the great things about gin is you don’t need all that much space to make it, and so distillers have been popping up everywhere. Hell, we walk past one on the way into the office every day – Pickering’s Gin are based in what can best be described as an outbuilding at Summerhall, but produce an excellent gin that’s great with a slice

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Best Breweries Brewdog; brewdog.com | Drygate; drygate.com Pilot; pilotbeer.co.uk | WEST; westbeer.com Williams Bros.; williamsbrosbrew.com| Edinburgh Gin; edinburghgindistillery.co.uk Best Cafes Artisan Roast, 57 Broughton St, 138 Bruntsfield Pl & 100 Raeburn Pl, Edinburgh (artisanroast. com) | Cafe Strange Brew, 1109 Pollokshaws Rd, Glasgow (@CafeStrangeBrew) | Lovecrumbs, 155 West Port, Edinburgh (lovecrumbs.co.uk) | Ostara Cafe, 52 Coburg St, Edinburgh (@OstaraCafe) | Papercup, 603 Great Western Rd, Glasgow (papercupcoffee.co.uk) | Primal Roast, 278 St Vincent St, Glasgow; primalroast.com

Pilot ‘The murky one’ “If one more person tells me I’m ‘living the dream’ I think I’m going to punch them in the face,” said Pilot’s Patrick Jones ahead of their launch back in 2013. The Leith micro-brewers have come a long way since, while sticking to what made them such a breath of fresh air in the first place. Their wares are now regular fixtures in Edinburgh’s best pubs, with their unfined (murky, vegan-friendly) beers drawing praise from all corners, while their experimental brews continue to push boundaries.

O

Best Bars The Allison Arms, 720 Pollokshaws Rd, Glasgow (@TheAllisonArms) | Bryant and Mack, 87 Rose St North Ln, Edinburgh (@BryantandMack) | Inn Deep, 445 Great Western Rd, Glasgow (inndeep. com) | Paradise Palms, 41 Lothian St, Edinburgh (theparadisepalms.com) | The Rum Shack, 657 Pollokshaws Rd, Glasgow; (rumshackglasgow.com) | The Skylark, 243 Portobello High St, Edinburgh (theskylark.co.uk)

of grapefruit (and some tonic, in a glass). Down in Leith, the Achroous gin from Electric Spirit Co. is an action-packed affair full of tasty botanicals and served up in the coolest bright orange bottle you’ve ever seen.

Edinburgh Gin, meanwhile, offer up a host of flavoured gins from elderflower to rhubarb – plus an intriguing Seaside Gin, reminding you of those gin-soaked family trips to the beach – and over in Glasgow Makar serve up a smooth, juniper-heavy gin in another pretty cool bottle. It’s heptagonal, sort of. And talk of cool Scottish gin bottles has to include The Botanist, the Islay spirit whose embossed lettering makes it look a bit like an alcoholic totem pole.

Words: Peter Simpson

Then there’s the sheer variety of gin doing the rounds. Like a sweeter gin? Go for a Caorunn, served on the rocks with a slice of Pink Lady apple.

More of a veg fan? Get yourself a Hendrick’s, infused with cucumber (so it’s basically one of your five-a-day, kind of). The Isle of Harris gin is infused with locally-sourced sea kelp, while Jinzu features cherry blossom, sake and yuzu fruit for a thoroughly Japanese take. And to really push things to the next level, the Heather Rose Gin from the Strathearn Distillery performs the neat trick of changing colour when you pour in your tonic. Gin – no wonder so many of you like it, it’s literally magical. theskinny.co.uk/food-and-drink/survey

FOOD AND DRINK

Best Newcomers Brew Box Coffee Company, Wilson St, Glasgow (@brewboxcoffeecompany) | Bryant and Mack, 87 Rose St North Ln, Edinburgh (@BryantandMack) | Cafe Strange Brew, 1109 Pollokshaws Rd, Glasgow (@CafeStrangeBrew) | Good Brothers Wine Bar, 4 Dean St, Edinburgh (@goodbrotherswinebar) | Primal Roast, 278 St Vincent St, Glasgow (primalroast.com) | Tempo Tea Bar, New Waverly Arches, E Market St, Edinburgh (tempoteabar.com) | Best Restaurants El Cartel, 64 Thistle St, Edinburgh (elcartelmexicana.co.uk) | The Gannet, 1155 Argyle St, Glasgow (thegannetgla.com) | Hanoi Bike Shop, 8 Ruthven Ln, Glasgow (hanoibikeshop.co.uk) | Mother India’s Cafe, 3 Infirmary St, Edinburgh (motherindia.co.uk) | Ox and Finch, 920 Sauchiehall St, Glasgow (oxandfinch.com) | Paesano, 94 Miller St, Glasgow (paesanopizza.co.uk) | Timberyard, 10 Lady Lawson St, Edinburgh (timberyard.co)

THE SKINNY

24 films to look out for in 2017 24 of the most interesting titles coming in 2017, some we’ve seen, some we’re dying to see

T2 (Danny Boyle) Released 27 Jan We’d be lying if we said we weren’t itching to see Rents, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie on the big screen once more. But will this belated sequel be little more than a nostalgia trip? The trailer suggests otherwise: it looks as pumped up and vital as the original. [Jamie Dunn]

T2

Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade) 3 Feb Critics were outraged that Maren Ade’s hilarious and poignant Toni Erdmann didn’t win the top prize at Cannes last year and Sight & Sound subsequently named it their film of the year. A deadpan German comedy, it’s built around an apparent shaggy dog story about a father and daughter and, just as importantly, a tranche of belly laughs.

[Ben Nicholson]

Free Fire (Ben Wheatley) 31 Mar Free Fire’s premise is simplicity itself: two gangs meet in a warehouse to do an arms deal, but things quickly escalate until they’re in an all-out gun battle. Expect a Tarantinoesque, smart aleck caper fused with a Sam Peckinpah-style bullet ballet. [JD]

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (Paul W.S. Anderson) 3 Feb A rare tie-in franchise that manages to be both about and from video games, writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson is quietly doing something very sophisticated with the freedom he has earned with his Resident Evil films. Full of slick, geometric set pieces and genuine existential horror – we’re excited for the final instalment. [Tom Grieve]

Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders) 31 Mar Despite a trailer showcasing a rather splendid-looking translation of its source material’s designs, the live action adaptation of anime Ghost in the Shell is plagued by one inescapable bugbear: taking a very Japanese story and populating most of the major roles with white people.

Still, Tricky is in it for some reason, so that’s cool. [Josh Slater-Williams]

Moonlight (Barry Jenkins) 10 Feb A bold and lyrical triptych of moments from a young black man’s life, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight has been turning heads on the festival circuit and building momentum towards the Oscars. It’s both tragic and transcendent while subverting expectations at every turn. Watch out for some blistering performances and woozy, seductive visuals. [BN]

Neruda (Pablo Larraín) 7 Apr Gael García Bernal reteams with No director Pablo Larraín for this intriguing kind-of-biopic set post-second world war, with Bernal playing a fictional Chilean police detective who’s trying to track down the in-exile poet and senator Pablo Neruda. Larraín is on absolutely top form at the minute, and Neruda is right up there with his best work. [JD]

Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt) 3 Mar Kelly Reichardt’s previous feature, Night Moves, was, to our mind, the first disappointment in her five film career. This quietly stunning slice-of-life portrait of several Montana women – played by a hand-picked ensemble that includes Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern and Reichardt’s frequent muse Michelle Williams – suggests that was only a blip. [JD] Elle (Paul Verhoeven) 10 Mar We’re over the moon to see Paul Verhoeven back in the director’s saddle. His new film is a skew-whiff rape-revenge thriller where the victim, brilliantly played by Isabelle Huppert, is neither a victim nor particularly after revenge. If you haven’t already guessed, the Dutch auteur is still as provocative and transgressive as ever, despite pushing 80. [JD]

Fast and Furious 8 (F. Gary Gray) 14 Apr UK viewers will sadly not be getting Fast And Furious 8’s gloriously stupid US title (The Fate of the Furious) come April time, but the eighth instalment of cinema’s daftest mega-franchise probably doesn’t even need that cherry atop the silly sundae. This time round, Vin Diesel goes bad, there’s a fight against an arctic submarine, and, yeah, we’re probably gonna find this series heading to space by instalment #10. [JS-W] Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (James Gunn) 28 Apr It’s hard to remember that before the first Guardians of the Galaxy dropped in 2014, it seemed a risky proposition. Of course, it proved to be an uproarious success and we’re now preparing to load Mixtape vol. 2 into our Walkmans for more space shenanigans with Star Lord and his ragtag band. And how cute is Baby Groot!? [BN]

The Love Witch (Anna Biller) 10 Mar The Love Witch is a strange but compelling labour of love from the intimidatingly talented Anna Biller – as well as writing and directing this densely detailed pastiche of 70s sexploitation films, she also edited it, composed the score, designed the costumes and dressed the sets. The result is fiercely feminist and funny as hell. [JD]

My Life as a Courgette (Claude Barras) 5 May Adapted from Gilles Paris’ novel by Céline Sciamma (Girlhood), Claude Barras’ stop motion animation looks like an irresistible charmer. It’s a story about life as an orphan, balancing frank depictions of life’s harder moments and playful asides and indoor snowball fights. That it’s been shortlisted for the Best Foreign Language Oscar speaks volumes. [BN]

Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas) 17 Mar Kristen Stewart was a revelation in Clouds of Sils Maria, the previous film from Olivier Assayas. They’ve teamed up again for this intriguing ghost story where Stewart plays a personal shopper who also happens to be able to talk to dead people. And the film itself is far more beguiling than that description. [JD]

The Red Turtle (Michaël Dudok de Wit) 26 May The fact that The Red Turtle is a Studio Ghibli release will be enough to engender excitement, but for those who saw his Oscar-winning short film, Father and Daughter, it’s director Michaël Dudok de Wit that will really set hearts aflutter. His debut feature is a timeless fable, completely free of dialogue and utterly magical. [BN]

Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho) 24 Mar Kleber Mendonça Filho burst on to the scene in 2012 with the claustrophobic thriller Neighbouring Sounds. He’s still exploring the psychogeographic landscape of urban Brazil in his forthcoming follow-up Aquarius. Built around a much-lauded turn from SÔnia Braga, it’s an almost-ghost story about identity, memory and place.

[BN]

Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins) 2 Jun Wonder Woman is the gold standard for female superheroes – a character more than capable of going toe-to-toe with anyone – and it’s imperative that they get her film right. Her brief appearance in Batman v Superman was promising and the trailer for Patty Jenkins’ solo outing suggests an ass-kicking actioner with one of comics’ toughest warriors. [BN]

January 2017

FILM

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts) 7 Jul Tom Holland’s Spider-Man was one of the highlights of Captain America: Civil War. Marvel showed in just minutes that they know exactly how to handle a character who’s vexed Sony over the past few years. That the new film is being billed as John Hughes with super-powers suggests a welcome return to the character’s highschool roots. [BN] Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan) 21 Jul After the intergalactic hokum of Interstellar, Christopher Nolan brings us back down to Earth with his WWII drama that looks like his version of a David Lean stiff-upper-lip wartime epic. The cast has Nolan favourites (Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy), dependable British thesps (Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance) and the odd wildcard (One Direction’s Harry Styles). [JD] Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Luc Besson) 4 Aug The near-$500 million global gross of Lucy seems a likely cause for Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp splashing out on big bucks for the director’s newest sci-fi, an adaptation of an influential French comic that could be a risky proposition outside of Europe. The teaser, featuring a neat remix of The Beatles’ Because, suggests a promising return to the mode of The Fifth Element. [JS-W] It (Andrés Muschietti) 8 Sep Pennywise the Clown, an eternal creature that feeds on a town’s children every generation, is Stephen King’s most terrifying creation.

He was memorably played by Tim Curry in a 1990 TV movie, but the film itself has not aged well. Can Mama director Andrés Muschietti bring King’s vision to life (we hope so). And will he include the pre-teen sex orgy that ends the book (God, we hope not). [JD] Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve) 6 Oct Which way will this long belated sequel go? The good news is Harrison Ford is back (will we find out if he really is a replicant?) and he’s joined by Ryan Gosling. Our biggest reason to be hopeful is director Denis Villeneuve resently showed he had some soul to go along with his technical prowess with sci-fi cracker Arrival. [JD] Justice League (Zack Snyder) 17 Nov Regardless of what you’ve made of Warner Bros’ first few entries into the DC Extended Universe, it’s difficult not to feel a little buzz at the thought of finally seeing the JLA get together. They’ll be teaming up for an Avengers-level showdown with the dastardly Steppenwolf, and with Zack Snyder once again at the helm, expect spectacular mayhem. [BN] Star Wars: Episode VIII (Rian Johnson) 15 Dec Disney are two for two since taking over the Star Wars mythos, with the nostalgic re-introduction of The Force Awakens and the adrenaline injection of Rogue One. Rian Johnson’s thus-far-unnamed Episode VIII will hopefully break new ground with the continued adventures of Rey, Finn, and BB-8 – this time with added Luke Skywalker! [BN] theskinny.co.uk/film

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Paint Fumes and Perspective Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi explains the progression and purpose behind the band’s most thoughtful record to date

F

ive albums deep, Cloud Nothings frontman Dylan Baldi wonders if he might have found some perspective. Maybe. “I mean, every record kind of feels like I’ve reached ‘that’ place,” he admits. “But then I make another one, and it’s like oh… I was wrong! I didn’t do it yet.”

Since 2009, the Cleveland, Ohio band have specialised in digging deeper. Cloud Nothings began as Baldi’s solo project, dreamed up in his parents’ basement in Westlake, Ohio. After being offered a fortuitous support slot for indie heroes Real Estate, he realised he needed some help recreating his stormy, caustic songs in a live setting.

Since then, Baldi’s penned intimate, introspective anthems that detail moving out and moving on from a once teenage point of view, and his songs have connected with fans the world over. 2012’s Attack on Memory marked the beginning of Cloud Nothings’ proper, full-band ambitions, while 2014’s Here and Nowhere Else wound eight furious songs into a tumultuous thirty minutes, and earned Pitchfork’s sought after Best New Music stamp, but their 2017 follow-up Life Without Sound promises to rewrite the book on this band’s capabilities.

Taut and tense, Life Without Sound explores a world which, once greyscale, has just turned full colour. You could call it a coming of age album – except it explores that kind of revelatory self-development as a constant process, one which we’ll never quite complete. Baldi explains: “Everything – and this record in particular, I guess – revolves around figuring things out. I’m a little older and I’ve done a little more. I’ve had more time to think about what’s going on in my life and the world. It’s all the same sort of reflection, but updated. The updated, 2017 version.”

This 2017 version of Cloud Nothings has undergone many changes in the almost three years since we heard from them last, beginning with simple geography. Baldi moved back to the States after living in Paris, staying first in Ohio, trying out Massachusetts, and then finally reuniting with TJ Duke (bass) and Jayson Gerycz (drums) in Cleveland. “When you’re in the same city it’s so easy,

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it’s unbelievable,” Baldi says cheerfully. “I was the only one who was moving around. Everyone else was smart.”

After trying out a collaborative record with San Diego surf rock band Wavves in 2015, Cloud Nothings set to an unusually long stint of rehearsal time. “We started working on [new songs] in October 2015, but a lot of that was AWFUL. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, so we were hanging out and the work we got done was of questionable quality. But then we ended up practising every day for like, ten hours, in this space which smelled like paint fumes and probably killed brain cells, and we made a record…”

“ It took a while for it to become a cathartic statement, rather than just a scared and sad one” Dylan Baldi

To emphasise the difference between this sedate writing session and the band’s usual, lastminute antics, Baldi recalls the making of Here and Nowhere Else: “So for the last record, we forced ourselves not to have too much time to make it. We were touring a lot, and then all of a sudden it was like, oh… we have studio time. But we haven’t made a record yet. We’d better do that real fast.

Jason and I were like, ‘here’s a song, here’s another!’ and then we ran and recorded it without having really played it through. It was hectic and the record reflects that because the songs are all insanely fast. Like, ‘maybe if I play fast it’ll sound good?’” He laughs. “There was a lot of horrible

coffee; there was a guy whose job it was to make coffee all the time. Then we made an intern go and buy a grinder, and he quit the next day. It was kind of intense, actually. We weren’t there for long but we caused trouble.”

In further contrast, Life Without Sound was recorded over three weeks in Sonic Ranch studio, near El Paso, Texas by John Goodmanson (Los Campesinos!, Sleater-Kinney, Death Cab for Cutie, Bikini Kill) – another famous producer added to Cloud Nothings’ impressive roster, following previous records with Steve Albini and John Congleton.

“I like switching!” Baldi explains. “Not because we’ve had a bad experience with anyone, but I don’t want to make the same record twice.” He describes how Goodmanson encouraged the band to spend extra time and focus working on the sound of their guitars – now bolstered by an extra pair of hands in Cloud Nothings’ newest member (and old school friend) Chris Brown. The record’s twin guitars reflect the growing complexity of the band’s songwriting, and result in truly monumental, theatrical implosions.

On a record where even the jaunty single – Modern Act – investigates emotional overspill via a hook of ‘I am alive but all alone,’ the closing track Realize My Fate epitomises Life Without Sound’s ability to unnerve. ‘I believe in something bigger, but what I can’t articulate,’ Baldi intones over marching, ominous drums. As the song builds, so does the indescribable, all encompassing fear of a future unknown – before, in classic Cloud Nothings tradition, the song boils over into seething, frantic catharsis. “It’s an intense tune,” he agrees, exhaling. “It was actually the first song I wrote for this record. I made it when I came back from living in France: I came back and I didn’t know I wasn’t going back. It took a while for it to become a cathartic statement, rather than just a scared and sad one.”

Baldi’s clear, concise, documentational lyrics mark another change for Cloud Nothings: it’s the first time that a lyric sheet will be included within one of their albums. “In the past I really did just

Music

Interview: Katie Hawthorne

write them the day before I had to record something! But it took us a long time to make these songs; took a while trying to write the words too,” he says. “So they’re not something I’m embarrassed of at all. I’m proud of the words. I feel that they mean a little more to me than any other lyrics have – they’re not exactly narrative stories, but they’re definitely more that than the past records have been. I think this time it’s pretty apparent what everything is supposed to be: it’s about finding a thing that you didn’t know was a thing, and applying that to your whole life.”

The narrative remains mysterious at times, but the idea of discovering some kind of secret key feeds through every track. ‘I find peace in the terror of the mind,’ Baldi professes, bravely, on opening song Up to the Surface, and explains this new, almost philosophical perspective with a neat chorus on Things Are Right With You: “feel right, feel lighter.”

On Facebook, Baldi recently rewrote the band’s bio as “New Age” – a surprising summary of a band that’s produced many more mosh pits than meditation sessions. “Yeah, I’ve been saying that lately,” he laughs. “But for me, these songs all sort of move in the same way as the ambient stuff that I enjoy.

Where everything leads to an end point that’s just a little bigger and more powerful. Every song follows a path that’s winding and weird for a while, and then at the end it hits, in a big way.” Baldi’s holistic approach is far more thunderous than, say, yoga, but this updated, regrouped Cloud Nothings is striving for a strangely similar kind of resolution.

Like many of us, Baldi grew up in a sleepy suburb with little to do for fun. After he turned sixteen and gained a driver’s licence, he would take out his parents’ car “and just drive around, you know, into farms and stuff, and listen to records.” When he visits Westlake the ritual still remains, but occasionally he test-drives the band’s most recent studio recordings, instead: “I don’t know why I do it,” he muses. “But it’s fun to see if you’re still the same person.”

Life Without Sound is released via Wichita Records on 27 Jan

THE SKINNY

A Living Snapshot We caught up with Julia Jacklin in Melbourne at a ridiculously early time of day to discuss her overnight success with debut album, Don’t Let the Kids Win, which came in at number 34 in our Albums of 2016 list – not bad for a debut Interview: Gary Kaill

’m in Melbourne and I’m in a record store. I’m going to be playing a show here in a couple of hours. It’s early for you, right?” Oh yes. It’s early afternoon in Australia but, for The Skinny, sat blearyeyed in front of a Skype connection, well – let’s just say it’s as late as it is early. But for Julia Jacklin – whose Don’t Let the Kids Win is one of the finest debut albums of 2016 – we’ll forgo a few hours kip.

Jacklin appears to have emerged almost overnight, certainly to UK audiences but there’s history behind her already accomplished songbook. “I’ve had the songs for a long time,” she explains. “Well, I had most of them. And then I heard Aldous Harding’s album and I just loved the production. I thought it was just exactly what I was looking for. It was this warm, lo-fi production that took care to support the songwriting. And I just wanted my songs to breathe and not be too smothered. So I emailed the producer, Ben Edwards, and told him I was this songwriter from Sydney, Australia and I’d like to work with him. And he was like ‘Yeah, come over! Live at my house!’ Unbelievable, really. So I went over to New Zealand a few months later and I stayed there for three weeks and, yeah, we made the record.”

Sounds simple, and Jacklin’s understatement skates past both the quality of her writing and the record’s irresistible legacy stylings: a reverb-heavy mix that deftly frames the natural vibrato of her voice. “Yeah, well that whole schtick,” she begins, and pauses. “I know that my music can definitely sound old and I know that the styling in my videos and press shots could look quite 70s or something but I’m trying to always keep it modern as well. I don’t want to be like a retro act – I like it when you have these elements that are jarring.” That much is evident on the album’s startling cover where Jacklin lounges in a room that is clearly from another time – it’s just not exactly clear when.

The presence of a large blue gym ball only blurs things further.

Jacklin expands on the recording process: “So, yeah, Ben and I hadn’t met before. He just picked me up when I arrived in Christchurch and we started the next day. I mean, it was a pretty big gamble but thankfully we got on really well.” Aside from its melodic and sonic pull, Don’t Let the Kids Win’s lyric sheet reveals a deep gift for storytelling. ”I‘ve always kept a diary for as long as I can remember. I guess I always wanted to be a writer when I was a kid but the songwriting didn‘t really happen until I was about 20.” It looks like the lyrics take precedence. “Yes, they do. Lyrics are the most important thing for me. I usually finish the songs on the guitar but they can come to me when I‘m walking down the street or driving my car or having a shower or something: moments when I‘m alone. A phrase or a scene will come into my head and I‘ll just play them over and over again until I get something interesting and then I‘ll put it to guitar.”

That notion of someone diarising the events in their life is an appropriate way in to the album’s mix of observation and confession. You can hear Jacklin musing aloud in her songs: “I think it’s interesting with song writing how it can highlight the issues you’re having in the moment in your life,” she says. “It’s very cool for me to be able to look back over this record – because I made it over a year ago and I wrote the songs two or more

January 2017

years before that – so I do feel quite removed from it already. But I’m really glad that I have it now because it’s a really nice snapshot of my early twenties: a little time capsule that documents my feelings and my experiences.”

As the record finds a following, as reaction develops and grows, might the songs come alive in new ways? “Yeah, they might. I find that idea quite interesting. You know, because I’ve lived the album for a while and spent a long time talking about it, I’m actually really relieved that it’s out there now and it gets to, I don’t know, live on. It’s quite weird that people might now start to connect with me in a new and fresh way. And, you know, I’m very proud of my slightly younger self for writing those songs and recording them and being brave enough to do it off her own back.”

“You come to realise that the first time you broke up with someone isn’t actually the most tragic event ever” Julia Jacklin

Songs like the beautiful, sorrowful Leadlight work almost as parables, such is their narrative scope. Jacklin revisits her experiences, details those events and those feelings in a vivid past tense and then almost offers a closing summary: a commentary from a different position. “Well, look – I never really connected with that whole notion of getting up and singing depressing songs about my life for people. I do want a hopeful ending in the songs. I guess a big part of it as an adult is realising that your experiences are not unique.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it’s something that binds us all together. You come to realise that the first time you broke up with someone isn’t actually the most tragic event ever. So, I take that mentality into my songwriting: don’t feel sorry for yourself. It’s just human experience and I guess I want to, as you were saying, resolve those experiences in some way. Even if you don’t have an answer, at least you’re able to pause and think about it.”

Perhaps the smartest sad songs look for a way out of the sadness? Even if, sometimes, they never quite make it? “I guess that’s what I explore in the title track,” agrees Jacklin. “It’s this idea that as you get older and the things around you are changing, it’s okay that it feels weird. It does feel weird. And, you know, you have to acknowledge that and just keep going.” Don’t Let the Kids Win. It’s a great title. Jacklin laughs. “Yeah… I like it.

People seem to have very different ideas of what it means and I like that, too.”

Julia Jacklin plays Glasgow King Tut's, 27 Feb

Photo: Shervin Iainez

“I

They Come from a Land Down Under Fractures Fractures is the moniker of Melbourne-based multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter and producer Mark Zito, who makes incredibly immersive and lovely floaty pop music. Fractures will release his debut album Still Here on 10 Feb. Listen to: Fall Harder Oh Pep! Melbourne-based folk/pop band Oh Pep! were formed in 2009 by Olivia Hally and Pepita Emmerichs. Their debut album Stadium Cake was released in June 2016 via Dualtone Records and it’s a lovely slice of pop worth checking out.

Listen to: The Race Owen Rabbit One of Australia’s most enigmatic artists, Owen Rabbit released his debut self-produced and mixed EP One at the end of last year. Since the release of his 2015 breakthrough track Holy Holy, the Melbourne-based musician has carved out a reputation as one of the most exciting and

unpredictable songwriters and producers.

Listen to: Holy Holy Bossy Love Glasgow-based Bossy Love feature John Baillie Jr and ex-Operator Please singer – and genuine Australian – Amandah Wilkinson. They had a pretty exciting 2016, bringing their high energy live show to many a city up and down the UK, and with a number of single releases under their belt it’s surely time for something bigger in 2017.

Listen to: Call Me Up Hazel English Australian-born, Oakland, California-based singer-songwriter Hazel English released her debut EP Never Going Home via Marathon in October 2016 and has a second one due to follow shortly. English has been working with Justin Raisen (Angel Olsen / Charli XCX / Santigold), so 2017 should be a pretty exciting year.

Listen to: Never Going Home

juliajacklin.com

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Jasleen Kaur

Thinking, Making + Matter Exhibition symposium, 17 February 3 Dec 2016 – 25 Feb 2017 Wed – Sat 10.30am – 4pm FCA&C @ St Andrews Museum Kinburn Park, Doubledykes Road, St Andrews, KY16 9DP www.fcac.co.uk 01334 474610

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THE SKINNY

Fresh and Juicy Dates We’ve rounded up all of the Scottish art info so far for 2017 into this one place, and it’s as exciting as it is huge. There are birthday milestones aplenty, confrontational artworks, ambitious group shows and historical surveys, and no doubt more to come!

Words: Adam Benmakhlouf

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he new year brings with it some milestones for Scottish mainstays Edinburgh Printmakers, Stills Gallery and The Common Guild, with a 50th, a 40th and a 10th birthday respectively. Keep up to date throughout the year with the monthly column in print and the weekly column online (theskinny.co.uk/art) for all openings, talks and news about Scottish art.

Exciting Programmes from Artist Committee-Run Spaces Transmission will follow up this month’s streetfacing window project with a residency exhibition project by London-based artist and performer Travis Alabanza (opening 16 February), who will look to processes of “other’ing”. Crucially, Travis Alabanza will also turn attention to Transmission Gallery itself, the mainly white identity of its audience and respond with ‘an abundance of artists they have pretended did not exist.’ Later, for the Scottish Solo Show slot this April, Transmission have invited Edinburgh/London-based text, video and painting artist Irineu Destourelles, who scrutinises the legacies of colonial and imperialist thought within dominant discourses and social structures.

Also starting the year with a busy schedule, Market Gallery present their summer residents’ outcomes through January (see the monthly roundup on p43 for more info). Then in February artists Ross Little and Florrie James present an exhibition of footage shot in Cuba alongside a video from Cuban artist Lester Alvarez Meno. Market then host a two-person exhibition by Glasgow-based Canadian drawing, painting and installation artist Suzanne Dery and video artist, printmaker and sculptor Susannah Stark. Each of them experimentally employs certain symbolics and nods to a personal vocabulary of variously graphic signs across a range of different media.

More news from Scottish artist-committee run spaces, as Rhubaba plan a series of ‘hauntings’ with invited artists and a new monthly night event Soft Space. They’ll also be developing Rhubaba Radio as an experimental broadcast platform. First on their roster of projects is by Dundee-based artist,

January 2017

Oliver Laric Untitled, 2014-2015 4K video, colour, sound

producer and singer Siôn Parkinson with the Rhubaba Choir. Together they’ll explore and test the depths and capabilities of collective voice and perform in Edinburgh during February, then Dundee in March – dates and venues tbc.

Embassy are also plotting some of their year ahead. First, they open a group show at the end of this month (more of that in the January digest), then continue their annual open call Members Salon show in March. Moving to May, London-based artist Evan Ifekoya will make the solo presentation for Embassy this year. Previously, Ifekoya presented a radio play in progress in September in Transmission that “investigates archives of blackness, sociality and inheritance as they diffract through queer nightlife and trauma in the present moment.​“ Staying with May in Embassy, The White Pube – an art criticism website and research project by Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente – will tour their screening of moving image by 19 artists who don’t have a fine art degree. Next in June, there’s the Annuale festival, an open call festival of grassroots artists. The last confirmed event on the Embassy calendar so far is their graduate group show in September with artists selected from this 2017 BA degree show season.

RSA New Contemporaries Looking back to the 2016 degree shows, the Royal Scottish Academy carefully curated 66 graduates for the ninth edition of its annual New Contemporaries. As always, they promise painting, film, sculpture, installation and performance over two floors and across all of the gallery spaces. This one might require a few visits, so take note of its short run from 18 February-15 March.

Previous RSA New Contemporaries exhibitor and emerging artist Brodie Sim will exhibit in Generator Projects in April, continuing her enquiries into the translation of intangible moods and feelings into the material and sculptural.

Birthday Celebrations For Stills, to mark their landmark 40th birthday, a series of projects is coming up that will celebrate

it's unique work as Edinburgh’s only public photo gallery. Throughout the year, they’ll present a curated group show of new photographic work from Scotland, a display of material from the Stills archive, as well as a major touring exhibition. As for the Edinburgh Art Festival this summer, they’ve programmed 2016/17 Margaret Tait filmmaker award winner Kate Davis.

More birthdays in Edinburgh Printmakers, celebrating 50 years. They’ll be hosting a series of exhibitions at points during 2017 from their 10,000 strong print archive – the first opens 27 January.

Following Sean Caulfield’s solo presentation (see this month’s event column), Eric Great-Rex will present a series of prints and ceramics, inspired by chap-prints ‘a medium of entertainment, information and often-unreliable historical narratives printed cheaply and accessible to most.’ After Great-Rex, on 28 July EP will preview New Editions, which presents artists born in the 70s and 80s who represent a new wave of artists working with print, and often collaboratively.

Starting their 10th year, The Common Guild begin a new series of events that will form a project by art writer Maria Fusco, examining the use of colloquial language within national and international contemporary art. April will also bring artist and inaugural Hepworth Prize for Sculpture nominee Steven Claydon for an ambitious solo show that will continue his philosophical and poetic enquiry into objects and Western art narratives.

Mentor Programmes in Edinburgh hand Glasgow Still in Edinburgh, but heading over to Collective Gallery, they’ll be exhibiting the newest cohort of their mentorship programme Satellites through the year. This year’s artists work across researchbased practices, film, collaboration, sculpture and writing. The first slot is for curator and artist Grace Johnstone from 25 February.

16 Nicholson Street in Glasgow also begins its mentorship programme from 9 January to April, culminating in a group show with the mentees between April and May. Then for their summer

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show in July, London-based painter Rachel Jones and the oddly familiar Glasgow-based painter Adam Benmakhlouf will exhibit together between June and July, sharing interests in colour, style of figurative painting and treatment of celebrity/commodification image. Into autumn, and in collaboration with Street Level, 16 Nicholson Street will organise a show of three contemporary artists based in Prague, who reflect on the materials of photography and find poetic resonance in a lack of obviously poetic subject matter during late September. Taking them into 2018, from late November to early January they will mount an exhibition on the history, myth and imagery of the Titanic.

DCA and Fruitmarket Collaborate For Dundee Contemporary Arts, their DCA Thomson show on the publisher of the Beano and Oor Wullie takes them into February this year. Next up, they’re showing in parallel with Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh the work of acclaimed contemporary conceptual artist Mark Wallinger.

From 24 June-10 September, painter Clare Woods will take DCA through the summer with an exhibition of her oil on aluminium psychologically-charged and semi-abstract landscape works. Rounding off the programme as planned so far, DCA have invited UK-based Canadian digital landscape artist, Kelly Richardson.

Following their collaboration with DCA, Fruitmarket will then show the work of everyday found object sculptor Jac Leirner from 1 July-22 October.

After Leirner, Scottish environmental artist and sculptor Jacqueline Donachie’s work will be on show from 11 November-11 February, showcasing her three-decade cross-media explorations of collective identity.

Glasgow: CCA, Street Level Photoworks and GSA Exhibitions 2017 in CCA will be an exploration of current international developments in socially engaged art with a group show on the topic from 28 January-12 March (more in this month’s event column). A second group show from 1 April-14 May concerns

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Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

Juno Calypso 'Solitary Love Affair' 2016, part of EROTICA at Arusha Gallery

and some more subtle, taking on the theme of female sexuality, the sex industry and the idea of the eroticised body. Then for the rest of the year, the gallery will be showcasing a series of emerging and established painters with an exciting programme of month-to-month solo shows.

For Talbot Rice, they start the year in earnest from 11 February with a show of new acquisitions of the University of Edinburgh. At the same time in Gallery 3, photographer, video, audio and installation artist Kate V Robertson and environmental and performance artist Michael Barr present the results of their periods of residency. From July to October, across galleries one and two, Stephen Sutcliffe will present a major solo show while in Gallery 3, there’s a parallel show of trippy, historically referential paintings and assemblages by Jacob Kerray. Next up is renowned filmmaker John Akomfrah in galleries one and two for his first Scottish solo show, including the internationally acclaimed video work Vertigo Sea.

representations of the most challenging cities in the world. Later, from 27 May-9 July, Glasgowbased artist Rob Churm’s solo show of new drawings, prints, comic books and digital elements looks at new ways of describing the world. Another group show from 22 July-3 September explores the dynamic relationship between photographer, camera, subject and eventual audience. The last element of the CCA programme so far is the first Scottish solo show by Mumbai-based artist Sahej Rahal who generates installations, films and performances from an elaborate personal mythology.

After a short exhibit at the end of this month on photozines (more info in this month’s events column), Street Level Photoworks noise up February with a show by Syd Shelton who has produced the largest collection of images of Rock Against Racism. Also known as RAR, this was the ‘creative entanglement of black and white musicians, designers, writers, actors, performers and supporters who produced effective counter-narratives to whiteness as superior and blackness as alienated.’

In collaboration with Stills, from mid-April to June Street Level will then present an exhibit of contemporary Scottish photography, to ‘unveil some of [its] tendencies’ and make new connections with the visual arts. Come 24 June-27 August, the next show will open on Scotland’s Far North, with three bodies of work from the late 70s and early 80s, which provide a unique insight into Scotland’s remote landscape, islands and people.

As their last show of the year (and first of 2018), Street Level present Steven Berkoff who fifty years ago was a keen young photographer who captured the East End of London as it was then, before documenting the Gorbals in the mid-60s in a unique series of captivating and equally desolate images of the neighbourhood.

Glasgow School of Art Exhibitions begin the year with a show of silversmith Simone ten Hompel from 14 January-23 February, before a show from 4 March-27 April of the work of photographer Franki Raffles (1955-94). Curated by their Director Jenny Brownrigg, the focus is on Raffles’ projects recording women workers in China and Russia. They then host the annual GSA MFA Interim Show from 6-12 May, comprising an international student body working across all media. Summer comes with Against Landscape, a project curated by artist Daniel Sturgis, and which emphasises less straightforward attempts to represent landscape in painting.

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Glasgow East – MANY Studios and Platform Partner organisation MANY Studios have made plans for an ambitious year of residencies and exhibitions curated by African art researcher Natalia Palombo. Starting with Mass Movement through February and March 2017, workshops and events will be taking place across Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and Glasgow as part of a travelling music and dance workshop series around Scotland. More events in May and June, this time in collaboration with the experimental music imprint mushroom Half Hour from Johannesburg, who curate location-specific recordings featuring musicians who would not usually play together, making for one-off collaborations. This imprint is brought to Glasgow musicians and artists, including poet Tawona Sitholé, writer and artist Zoé Schreiber, artist and writer Rayanne Bushell, writer and musician Cassie Ezeji, musician and composer Sura Susso, and musician Kayus Bankole. More artists will be confirmed in 2017.

From 12 June-18 July, MANY Studios will then present outcomes from their current residents, the visual artist and writer Zoé Schreiber and artist Aaron McCarthy who works from a background of continental philosophy. After this, there’s the last of their planned projects, with invited artists Unum Babar and Matt Kushan. Both based in Lahore, Pakistan, they will come to Glasgow to participate in a funded and supported four week on-site residency at MANY Studios in The Barras. The residency will culminate in the presentation of new work exploring the history of relationships and the heritage of collections between Glasgow and Lahore.

Heading east of Glasgow again, after celebrating its 10th anniversary last year, 2017 brings more of Platform’s community-engaged artworks, workshops and exhibitions. From 24 February-26 March, East End illustrator Mitch Miller presents a huge drawing of the people who are based and meet regularly at Platform. Following Miller, in April the Easterhouse space will exhibit Pester and Rossi, a collaborative artist duo whose work includes sculpture, performance and multimedia installation. In workshops with young people as part of the Nu Gen art group, they’ve made a host of different handmade props and costumes that reference pop culture with irony and humour. Also in Platform, artist Gordon Douglas will present

events through the first half of the year based on a long engagement with the centre as part of his project Habits of the Coexistent.

Teasers from Telfer, Tramway, Queens Park Railway Club, Peacock Visual Arts Some teasers have also come from Telfer Gallery, Tramway and Queens Park Railway Club. For Queens Park, they’ll be opening up again at some point this year with the work of Glasgow-based painter Conor Kelly who works across abstract and figurative painting and considers the different historical and psychological potentialities of paintings and exhibition-making.

Tramway present an exhibition by Berlinbased Oliver Laric this month (read more in the January rundown). Next month, they unveil a new exhibition by Glasgow-based sculptor and installation artist Claire Barclay titled Yield Point. Looking to Tramway’s past as a transport depot, she will build an installation partly in situ in response to the relationship between the human body and industrial workplace.

Though Telfer will release details of each element of their upcoming programme throughout the year, they’re looking forward to the preview on 10 February (6-9pm) of the solo exhibition of their 2016 resident artist Kimberley O’Neill, who through a multimedia practice imagines a collective energy within media networks which draws upon the desire and attention of viewers.

Up to Aberdeen, there’s an exhibition curated

by Peacock Visual Arts from their Print Studio, previewing 23 February (4-7pm) – and on until 8 April. They head off site to Woodend Barn, Banchory, and will display artworks from artists including sculptor Claire Barclay, painter and playwright John Byrne and opera-maker, radio playwright and artist Janice Kerbel.

Edinburgh: Dovecot, Arusha and Talbot Rice Dovecot Gallery head into 2017 with a continuing exhibition on Colour & Light within weaving processes. Their first new exhibit of the year comes on 10 March, in which they survey their apprentice weavers since WWI. In Edinburgh’s Arusha Gallery, March brings a group show titled EROTICA. A diverse group of contemporary women artists will be assembled with an exciting variety of works, some controversial

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“ Travis Alabanza will turn attention to Transmission Gallery itself, the mainly white audience and respond with an abundance of artists they have pretended did not exist” Edinburgh National Galleries Rewrite History In Edinburgh, across the different National Galleries, there’s a breathtaking programme of historical and thematic exhibitions planned for the year ahead. As well as beginning 2017 with a monthlong show of Turner watercolours, there are continuing shows by renowned Scottish painter Joan Eardley, contemporary sculptor of cosmetics, soaps and ethereal found materials Karla Black and Kishio Suga – pioneering member of 60s and 70s Japanese movement Mono-ha – School of Things. Also now on until March 2017, there’s the annual exhibit of the BP Portrait Award shortlist and The Modern Portrait until October 2019 in the Scottish National Gallery.

Into April, one of the most significant artists working today Ed Ruscha will be showing a photographic series on his obsession with West Coast American Culture as part of the Artists’ Rooms programme in Modern One for a year from 29 April. Then from 13 May in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery there will be Heroes and Heroines, re-examining some of the key figures of history in Scotland with appearances from suffragists, scientists and writers.

June brings a major show on radical and revolutionary 16th-17th century painter Caravaggio and a survey show based on The Male Gaze to the Scottish National Gallery. For Modern One, July brings True to Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s. It will mark the first survey show of realist interwar painters in Britain, and showcase 50 artists that have been sidelined by the more dominant abstraction of Modernism. Zooming to December, the National Galleries open their last new show of the year which will pro-pose an alternative narrative of the Scottish AvantGarde Art 1900-1950.

THE SKINNY

Keeping it Real From Dawson’s Creek heartbreaker to indie royalty, we speak to the incomparable Michelle Williams, who gives a stunning performance in Manchester by the Sea, the new film from Kenneth Lonergan

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ichelle Williams is haunted. Spectres of film roles past hang around her psyche like benevolent Banquos. “I think about all of them,” the 36-year-old actor tells us during her visit to 2016’s London Film Festival, “and the harder that you work on something, or the more time you put into something, the more deeply ingrained they become inside of your own body memory.”

One character who’s been particularly limpetlike is Cindy Heller, the young woman who falls in and out of love with Ryan Gosling’s ukulele-playing Dean in Derek Cianfrance’s bittersweet romantic drama Blue Valentine. “I didn’t take off [Cindy]’s wedding ring for like a month after that movie; I just couldn’t let it go,” Williams recalls. “But it gets to a certain point where you have to go back and be yourself. One does really need to make an effort to not allow all these people to hitchhike inside of your soul; it’s not a healthy way to live.”

From where we’re sitting, Williams looks pretty well adjusted. She’s made the transition from the young star of 90s teen phenomenon Dawson’s Creek to formidable indie actor without seeming to break sweat. Part of her success might be down to her refined taste in collaborators. Since Dawson’s Creek wrapped in 2003, Williams has worked with some of the great auteurs working today, filmmakers like Martin Scorsese (Shutter Island), Todd Haynes (I’m Not There), Lukas Moodysson (Mammoth), Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) and Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York); and her three films with Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff and the upcoming Certain Women) represent the most rewarding director-actor collaboration in US cinema right now. In other words, Michelle Williams is an actor with an uncannily sharp nose for quality film projects.

We suggest this, but she’s skeptical. “Did you see Suite Française?” she laughs. “Wow. Ouch. That one hurt.”

To make or to watch back? “Both,” she says without missing a beat. “You can never have a sense when you read something – or even while you’re making it – if it’s going to be good or not. You really

January 2017

can’t tell. And you work just as hard on the movies that are bad as you do on the ones that are good.

So it’s alway sort of a surprise how they turn out.”

Her approach to choosing roles is more instinctual. In fact, it’s positively physical. “I can feel my heart might want to jump out of my chest,” she says, describing how she feels when she reads a good script, “and my brain starts working on it as if it’s a little puzzle and I need to solve it. And that’s how I know that I want to do something and it just becomes a part of my thought process. Even if I don’t have the role, or even if I don’t get the role, it’s just something that I’m drawn to and then start thinking a lot about.”

In the case of Manchester by the Sea, the brilliant new film Williams is in London to promote, she didn’t even wait for this reaction. “I knew that I would say yes to it before I even read it, simply because of the kind of artist Kenny is. You’d be foolish to turn down an opportunity to work with him.” The “Kenny” Williams refers to is Kenneth Lonergan, the playwright, screenwriter and director who, thanks to the recent acceleration in productivity of Terrence Malick and Terence Davies, is western cinema’s new snail’s pace genius, having managed only three features in 16 years – each one a masterpiece. In addition to Manchester by the Sea, Lonergan’s golden trio is completed by 2000’s You Can Count on Me and Margaret, which was shot in 2005 but not released until six years later, where it disappeared from theatres almost immediately. The scarcity of a Lonergan film makes being in one all the more special. “I had always wanted to work with him because his worlds are so complete and so authentic,” explains Williams, “and I really wanted to be a person in one of them.”

Williams' screentime in Manchester by the Sea isn’t substantial – she’s only in a handful of scenes – but her character, Randi, packs a punch. We see two versions of her in the film. In flashback there’s firecracker Randi, the foul-mouthed mother of three who’s in a lively and loving marriage to Lee, the film’s main focus, played by Casey Affleck. Then there’s the Randi of the present, who’s less

rambunctious than her former self and now married to another man with whom she’s had a child.

The reason why Lee and Randi are no longer together is revealed piecemeal throughout the film.

We won’t divulge the circumstance for their breakup here, but we will say it’s devastating.

“ It’s so unnatural to see yourself so large on a screen and I don’t have the stomach for it” Michelle Williams

Manchester by the Sea is a film filled with wonderful moments, but if only one scene from the last 12 months of cinema had to be locked away and preserved for eternity it has to be the one in which Lee, who’s been emotionally stunted by the event that caused his marriage to crumble, meets Randi by chance in the street of their hometown, the fishing village of the title, which Lee has reluctantly returned to to see to his brother’s funeral arrangements.

The scene is the fulcrum of the movie. Lee’s emotions have remained pent up until this point, but this encounter with his ex-wife is where they’re released. “I think we were both nervous because there’s just a lot going on in it,” Williams explains.

“It’s very technical, a very tricky scene to learn because of all the overlapping dialogue.”

It’s also a long scene, perhaps the longest in the movie. Up until this point Lonergan’s edits have been as sharp and curt as the surly and taciturn Lee has been. But in this scene Randi is in control; it plays out to her rhythms. “You don’t often get opportunities like that in movies, to work

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Interview: Jamie Dunn

with so many words and to work on something that lengthy,” she says. “Movies tend to be so much about what people aren’t saying or the spaces in between lines, but there is a dynamic verbal exchange in that scene, and it has to be performed in a very specific way. Everything is important to [Lonergan], the oohs, the aahs, the mms; those are all scripted.”

Get used to seeing this scene: it’s surely the clip the Academy Awards will play when Williams receives her fourth Oscar nomination.

When we ask Casey Affleck what makes Williams such a special actor he points to the realism of her performances. “She just inhabits the role and instantly you feel like, Oh, here’s a real person who’s treating me like I’m a real person in the world,” he says. Her secret, he reckons, is that she can communicate several emotions at once. “There’s a lot going on in her eyes and in the way she says stuff. She can convey both annoyance and love in the same sentence. So it starts to feel like, Oh, that’s how my wife talks to me.”

Since its premiere at Sundance, Manchester by the Sea has earned rave reviews and was picked up by Amazon Studios for nearly ten million dollars.

Williams sheepishly confesses that she’s in no hurry to see it herself, however. “It’s been three years since I’ve seen a movie that I’ve been in – I just find the whole thought of it too jarring.”

You should watch it, we tell her. It’s pretty good. “I was joking with Kenny about not having seen it last night. I told him, ‘I’m going to see it, I just need to see it small and contained and privately.’ Kenny was like, ‘so on an iPhone,’ and I said, ‘That would be perfect! Yes!’ It’s so unnatural to see yourself so large on a screen and I don’t have the stomach for it right now.”

Normally we’d never condone watching a film on a phone, but such is the power of Williams’ performance, she’ll blow you away, even on the puniest of screens.

Manchester by the Sea is released 13th Jan by StudioCanal

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Hart Beats We spoke to American director Chad Hartigan about his new indie Morris from America (coming to DVD this month), autobiographical filmmaking, working with perennial comic scene-stealer Craig Robinson, and, uh, pillow stimulation Interview: Josh Slater-Williams

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he movie started from the pillow humping scene.” This isn’t the exact line that started The Skinny’s chat with director Chad Hartigan, but it began one of the more memorable anecdotes about the creation of his new film, Morris from America. In the sequence Hartigan refers to, his eponymous teenage protagonist (newcomer Markees Christmas), a sweet lad who’s fallen hard for a local girl, decides to act out his confusing feelings upon his bedroom pillow.

“So I really went through a phase that I assume is not uncommon in boys, where I humped my pillow a lot, but at some point got bored with just humping it, so I dressed it up in clothes and danced with it and made a night out of humping it. And that was always a story that, when I told people, got a reaction. I felt like it could be a good scene in a movie if you can capture what’s awkward and funny but also innocent and tender about it. So that was the very first scene in my head and I started to build a coming-of-age story from there.”

In 2013, Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner was a small-scale festival hit, particularly notable for how its story of two older men trying to find a fresh start in life felt filtered through their specific points

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of view, rather than detached and commenting on their aspirations and interests from a distance. A similar quality is carried over to his follow-up film, though the POV is different in focusing on two African-Americans, 13-year-old Morris and his widowed father (Craig Robinson), adjusting to a new life in Heidelberg, Germany after the patriarch is hired to coach professional football there.

As a coming-of-age tale, Hartigan pulls off the difficult task of finding compelling drama in a basically good kid just trying to find new bearings.

Morris’s chief struggles stem from the prejudiced perception of his new home’s local kids that, based on his race and nationality, he should be some rapping, drug-dealing basketball ace (with a giant penis).

Hartigan managed to insert other personal details into his story, though, being a white man, acknowledges that the film’s characters and contexts are obviously not autobiographical: “Other things [in the film] from my own life are getting squirted in the pants when I thought I was gonna get kissed, and the rap lyrics – ‘Fucking all the bitches, two at a time’ – I really wrote when I was young and got in trouble for it. So a lot of the speci-

fics are autobiographical, and it’s more just the broad circumstances and who the character actually is and where he is that’s different.”

Christmas shines as Morris, as does rising star Carla Juri as his German tutor, but the film’s greatest asset is Robinson, who’s been a regular scene-stealer in comedies like The Office and Pineapple Express. “The way he [Robinson] tells it,” Hartigan says, “he just really responded to the language, and he read it and felt like it was how he talked and he could really just see himself saying the lines. But also, he was excited by the fact that he hasn’t had a chance to show people this side of him. Not just in the fact that it’s slightly more dramatic, but playing a parent.

“I would joke with my friends once we cast him,” he continues, “I was very excited but also nervous, and I felt like now I had a responsibility

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to give the best showcase for him. And I would tell my friends, ‘This could be his Punch-Drunk Love’, because I think the similarity there is that Adam Sandler was playing, in that movie, essentially what he always plays, but just a tiny dial to the left or to the right that just gives the impression of something wildly different. And I felt like that would be the case here – Craig could basically do what he has done, but just dial it a little to the left and to the right.”

We ask Hartigan what he’d think if Robinson were to ever comment on this film within another film, akin to his work in meta apocalypse comedy This Is the End: “Oh man, that’d be great. I have these dumb dreams of, one day, a hip-hop song referencing Morris from America. Then I’ll really know that we made it.”

Morris from America is released on DVD 16 Jan

THE SKINNY

Gods and Monsters Liam Neeson shows off the range of his “very particular set of skills” this month by starring in both kids’ fairy tale A Monster Calls and Martin Scorsese’s God-questioning epic Silence.

The actor discusses his action star persona, CGI wizardry and faith

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n recent years, Liam Neeson has been best-known for becoming a late-blooming action hero, having appeared in the financially successful Taken films and various other movies of a similar ilk. The 64 year-old Irish-born actor has been as surprised by his latent action star status as anyone. “People keep sending me scripts for action movies, and I turn around to my agent and say, ‘Do they know what fecking age I am?’ Maybe another 18 months of them, but then I think audiences won’t want it.”

Looking back on the first Taken film, he had no idea it was going to be a watershed movie that would launch his career in a whole new direction.

“When the first movie happened I thought that it was a straight-to-video movie,” he says before adding: “I am not judging how the film was made, because I think that it is a cool little European thriller.”

He’s on hiatus from punching people for the moment with two new features of very different fare. The first is A Monster Calls, a modern-day fable by J.A. Bayona based on the beloved book by Patrick Ness. Neeson appears as a tree-like monster (perhaps a distant cousin of Tolkien’s Ents) that makes night-time visits to a young boy who is coming to terms with his mother’s diagnosis of cancer, making the lad confront his worst nightmares. “Kids can handle stuff,” says Neeson, “and you should tell them the big issues in life. You know [the truth about] the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, it starts there.”

For the film, which he compares to Oscar Wilde’s fairytales, Neeson was transformed into a nightmarish creature that dwells atop a church graveyard, not dissimilar to Treebeard in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, but less ho-hum and more doom and gloom. The impressive transfor-

January 2017

mation was achieved with motion capture technology, which Neeson happily admits he found to be a strange process. “You are in this tight-fitting onesie and I felt like a twat,” he says. “I had a GoPro in front of my face, and all these cameras all over the place, and you are in this space, which the computer nerds would call ‘The Volume’ – I have no idea why. We would talk about the scene, and shoot it. Then the computer nerds would add their digital make-up. I still can’t understand it, but when you see it, it is extraordinary. The technical process was amazing.”

“ Do they know what fecking age I am?”

Liam Neeson

Another of the challenges was how exactly Neeson would be able to embody this giant tree monster. “One thing I had noticed [from the illustration] was that its face looked like it had walked into a tree, and was all squashed. I thought that would affect the breathing, so that when he had to speak it would be an effort to draw up the air from somewhere. I imagined that the air would come up from all the graves that surround the yew tree in the churchyard.”

Neeson is no stranger to playing digitally rendered characters. In 2005, he appeared as the voice of Aslan, the Christ-like Lion in Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – a Christian allegorical tale, if somewhat diluted from the original text. Films of a

spiritual nature have peppered Neeson’s career, ranging from 1986’s The Mission, alongside Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro, to Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, where he plays a pious knight attempting to atone for the sins of his past.

This isn’t a conscious decision on his part he explains. Spirituality, and faith, is something that he has been exploring all his life, saying he is “always questing.” Which leads us on to Silence, a project that Martin Scorsese has been working on for over three decades based on the book of the same name

by Shosaku Endo. In the adaptation, Neeson bookends the film playing Ferreira, a Jesuit priest in 17th century Japan who’s rumoured to have recanted his faith under pressure from the Nagasaki officials who are persecuting Christians. This causes two of his former pupils, Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe, played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver, to leave Europe for Japan and seek out the truth.

Appearing in far fewer scenes than his co-stars was something that Neeson enjoyed. “I liked it,” he quips. “Andrew and Adam had been labouring away for seven or eight months and I went there for three weeks, did my little bit, and then the characters are talking about you for the rest of the film.”

Neeson worked previously with Scorsese 16 years ago on Gangs of New York. He says the reunion was a pleasure, but he knew that this wasn’t going to be an easy project for the Oscar-winning director.

“Today, we aren’t a spiritual society, and religious attendance is plummeting around the world,” says Neeson. “You can imagine Marty going to the producers and him telling them what it is about and they turn around and say, ‘Well, thanks for coming in, Marty,’ and showing him the door.”

What does he believe Scorsese was trying to

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Interview: Joseph Walsh

say and do with this deeply personal project? “I think that he was trying to explore his own spirituality, it was his own quest, and that big ‘why’,” suggests Neeson. “Ultimately, we all ask why the fuck are we here? I think that was what Marty was after.”

Silence triggered a reaction in Neeson that caused the Catholic-raised actor to consider his faith with unexpected results. “With the research that I had done, and spending time with a Jesuit priest – and I had done a fair amount with Father Daniel Berrigan in the 1980s on The Mission – I was intrigued by it all, but on the way back from [shooting] Silence, I read a science article, and I thought to myself that I would leave God aside for a second and see what science had to say about all this.”

This led to reading Richard Dawkins’ atheist best-seller The God Delusion. “I am fascinated by science and the inroads they are making into the brain, and the natural opioids in our brain and how we release them, as well as the placebo effect,” he explains. “This stretches to the power of what faith and religion is and if it is a construct of the brain. It is very interesting. Science will always answer the ‘how’ questions, but the one they can’t and won’t is the big ‘why’ questions.”

With the recent release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, we come on to the subject of whether he would return to the franchise. “Qui-Gon who?” he jokes, suggesting that it would be good to go back to playing the Jedi Master. So, what’s next?

“Around September, I realised that I was very tired. I have been very lucky in my career, but whenever I am offered a film I think, ‘Oh, how much? Feck it, I’ll do it.’”

Silence and A Monster Calls are both released 1 Jan, the former by StudioCanal, the latter by Entertainment One

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Nightvision With the popular Edinburgh-based club night Nightvision set to return this month with a killer Series 6 line-up, we speak to founders Simon McGrath and Derek Martin about its greatest moments to date, and what we can expect in 2017 Interview: Claire Francis Nightvision began in 2014 – how did the idea for the club night come about?

Simon McGrath: “The idea came about due to various factors. At that point in 2014, the clubbing scene in Edinburgh didn’t seem to be anything near what it had been. Very few guests were getting booked in the city and it seemed to be slowly dying a death here. I always looked back to the turn of the millennium when there were acts playing lots of venues on the same night – there was a proper buzz for clubbing in Edinburgh at that time.

“Prior to Nightvision, Derek had been running Musika, dealing with the more house and techno type bookings, and I had been running Xplicit and managing the more bassy stuff, through to the likes of Annie Mac. Derek and I joined forces and put together a plan to try something a bit different, that hadn’t been done before, and launch a new project. This is how Nightvision came about, along with the idea to run it in series.”

DJs in Residence: TEESH

What makes the upcoming Series 6 unique?

SM: “The main idea as with every series is to keep Nightvision evolving by trying to incorporate new venues and new shows in order to keep it fresh.”

Ever wondered what makes a great resident DJ? TEESH party-starters Ryan Marinello and Tom Russell share the winning formula underpinning their bi-monthly shows at Sneaky Pete’s

Derek Martin: “We also have the Musika and Xplicit birthdays linked in as part of the series. A big one for Musika this year is our birthday, the grand old age of 10. We’ve lined up some of our favorite acts of the last ten years, including some fresh faces, running over two dates.”

Interview: Claire Francis

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ince October 2013, Ryan Marinello and Tom Russell have been holding down the fort at TEESH, the bi-monthly party at Sneaky Pete’s that champions the best of Edinburgh’s alternative nightlife. So what exactly makes a great resident DJ? The duo cite “a strong synergy” between tastes as the catalyst for the pairing, but as they explain to The Skinny, it’s the magic combination of right venue, right music and right crowd that contributes to TEESH’s unique atmosphere.

“Any party is only as good as its venue,” states Russell, a former resident of Sneaky Pete’s Soul Jam nights, now based in London. “From a DJing perspective, there’s an intimacy to Sneaky Pete’s which you won’t be able to find any where else, be it in Edinburgh or London. TEESH gives us an opportunity to curate and contribute to Edinburgh’s nightlife in our own way and be confident that the end product will deliver. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel; for us it’s just about having a good time and bringing our own ideas to the table.”

This spirit of independent programming is central to the duo’s residency. Marinello is quick to point out that TEESH is much more than a warmup for their bigger-name acts.

“Guests aside, we take control for the whole night, bi-monthly, and we’ve become better DJs for it,” he explains. “We’re equally confident at raising a crowd and taking control of peak-time packed floors. We work very hard at being good.

And our crowds always seem to be an amazing mix of lovely people.”

The loyalty of TEESH supporters is what enables their innovative booking policy, confirms Russell. “For me personally, the popularity of the club and its capacity mean that we can be more flexible with the bookings. There’s definitely an opportunity to book lesser known and arguably more exciting acts. One that stands out is our pal DJ Dreamcatcher, a leather-chap-wearing

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fashion designer from Sydney who played a blinder.”

“Rüf Dug and Glowing Palms have released music and DJed together; both played TEESH years apart, and each brought the house down,” adds Marinello. “They’re two people who clearly love DJing, with a ringleader’s ‘embracing the crowd’ style. They reflect our tastes in warm and weird sounds through raw house and disco, cosmic, boogie, Italo... all of that. We caught more well known types like Palms Trax and Project Pablo at just the right time too – very enthusiastic crowds for those and two of the best players around.”

The pair also agree that when it comes to being a resident DJ, the pros of the job firmly outweigh the cons. “There aren’t many drawbacks,” says Russell. “It’s a privilege to play anywhere, let alone Sneaky’s. Perhaps if I had any criticism, it would be on the overall length of the night itself and its impact on how much dancing time we get.

A 3am finish can feel painfully early on some nights but I suppose that leads to an intensity you don’t get in cities with more liberal licensing laws.”

The night’s subtitle – ‘All You Can Eat Mind Buffet’ – is a further nod to their myriad influences, which according to Marinello are drawn from “immersive worlds, psychedelia, sci-fi, retrofuturism, nostalgia for VHS... and a slight vapourwave influence.” Their artwork is similarly expansive in vision: Russell descirbes it as “an outlet for unbuilt ideas, spaces and places destined to remain in the mind.

“I like the idea of the artwork generating a narrative, creating a sense of mystery and a notion of an arrival at a final destination,” he sums up.

“Going to a party or club night is all about escapism, and I hope that the work helps people to do that.” With that ethos at the forefront, TEESH has proven that a great night out needn’t hinge on a headline act.

What is the underlying theme that links the artists you’ve pulled together for Series 6?

SM: “The ongoing ethos of the Nightvision brand is to cover all bases which we feel are important within electronic music and cater for these, meaning we have shows ranging from house, techno, and bass.”

DM: “Our range is spread across the spectrum of electronic music, so you will have artists that are completely diverse musically all under the one banner of Nightvision, but playing under different themed events or sub-brands.”

How do the venues you’ve booked for the latest series fit with the Nightvision club nights?

DM: “We’ve worked with a wide array of Edinburgh venues since the launch of Nightvision, ranging from the 3,000-capacity Corn Exchange shows to more intimate one-room events at the likes of The Caves.

“Our regular, larger capacity events are where we combine all three rooms in the Liquid Room complex, giving us the scope to programme our bigger line-ups, a factor we felt was always missing from Edinburgh in comparison to other UK cities.

This was a key part of the initial drive and reason for launching the brand.

“Alongside the musical ethos of Nightvision, the plan was always to utilise as many of Edinburgh’s best-known venues, offering the fine people of Edinburgh and beyond an array of different styled events – from solo act showcases to larger multiroom, multi-artist events. We’ve knocked up a fair few so far, with more to come in 2017.”

What guests should we be most looking forward to seeing during Series 6?

DM: “We have lots of new acts on the series as well as the return of some previous acts that we feel are worthy of a return date. Some acts and brands that should cause some hype spring to mind: Drumcode, DJ EZ, Move D and Mike Skinner, to name a few…”

What have been some Nightvision highlights over the years?

SM: “The ones that stand out to me are Annie Mac Presents at the Corn Exchange, with Stormzy performing when he was popping off massively, Adam Beyer in the Warehouse at Liquid Room and when Green Velvet and Alan Fitzpatrick played together for us.

DM: “Our recent event with Robert Hood and DJ Deep was sensational. Their sound worked perfectly in The Liquid Room Warehouse and the crowd were hungry for it. The atmosphere was brilliant.

Groove Armada were equally as amazing on the Series 5 launch. It was something of a homecoming for them in Edinburgh, as they hadn’t played here for so long, and they have always had such a massive following and close connection to the city.”

How do you think Edinburgh’s clubbing scene is faring, generally speaking?

SM: “I definitely think the clubbing scene is in a greater position than it has been for some time, with various nights bringing a lot of great acts to the capital. There now seems to be guests on every weekend at various venues, which can only be a positive for the Edinburgh clubbing scene as a whole.”

Nightvision Series 6 Launch in association with Snowbombing (starring Mike Skinner, Preditah and Conducta), Liquid Room, Edinburgh, 21 Jan

TEESH 3D World Club, Sneaky Pete's, Sat 14 Jan, 11pm, £6

CLUBS

THE SKINNY

January 2017

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Poetry Slams, Am-drams & Bellyaches Competition in art: a flawed concept surely? Scottish Poetry Slam champ Iona Lee argues that two separate beings, two lives of experience with opposite tastes and talents should not be graded or pitted against one another. In art there’s no correct answer Illustration: Raj Dhunna

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oetry can be its own worst enemy at times.

I have seen my fair share of performers whose lacklustre delivery has rendered me semi-comatose, daydreaming of dinner. Then I suddenly hear them employ the phrase “cruel vagina”, or some such, jolting me back to consciousness, wondering what on earth I just missed. But there is a lot of word being spoken out there, and for anyone to claim not to like all spoken word is like them claiming to dislike music. Just as there are a lot of lateadolescents wearing trilbies and singing nasal covers of Pumped Up Kicks, Jeff Buckley also exists.

I would argue that you have to try and find what you truly love in poetry, find the poetry that pins down love like a butterfly and kills it, or the poetry that makes the revolution bubble in your nethers.

Perhaps the most popular, open and public artistic contest these days is the poetry slam. In contrast to the rap battle, poetry slams are somewhat more be-cardiganed affairs; the point is not to be rude about your opponent, but instead solve the problems of the world in three minutes or less.

Poetry slams are frequented by enthusiastic types, eager to discuss the important issues of our times, using rhyme, borrowed trans-atlantic accents and trendy beards. Popular among the earnest, the egalitarian and students, slams are becoming an established part of the spoken performance poetry culture.

I suppose I ought to introduce myself. I’m Iona Lee, until March 2017 the Scottish slam champion (basically the Andy Murray of Scottish slam poetry). I have however, only been to three slams in my twenty years: one in Portobello, the Scottish finals at the Tron in Glasgow and the world finals in Paris. So, my success may not reflect any amount of arduous training and it could be argued that I am not the greatest expert on slams, despite being (technically) ranked 6th in the world.

Let me explain for the uninitiated what a slam actually entails, as outsiders can find it confusing.

For example, I’m often asked if they involve improvisation; they do not. Also, the word ‘slam’ implies physical violence and there is none of that, at least at those I’ve attended. A poetry slam is made up of three rounds where all poets involved have three minutes to perform to an eager audience and panel of judges (made up of either experts or members of the general public, plucked from that aforementioned eager audience). They are then scored out of ten, points being awarded for writing, performance and audience reaction, though these categories can vary from slam to slam. The poets with the highest scores move to the next round and the three highest scoring of this bunch return for the final. Here, they have to pull out their trump card poem to win the title of ‘the best’.

Now, there are of course many positives to this particular format. For one thing, a slam can get a good crowd in, and a good crowd is not always the boast of a poetry night. Let’s be honest, poetry is not for everyone. My first ever open mic night there was a man wearing a measuring tape as a scarf. While a poetry reading may not be for everyone, it would seem that a group of otherwise socially awkward bookish types doing verbal battle is. People love the competition and the smell of nerd sweat. This was brought home to

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me at the Scottish final, which, to the horror of my nervous disposition, succeeded in selling out the Tron in Glasgow.

On the element of competition, I can’t fully agree. My favourite part of the ‘job’ of poet, other than all the alcohol, is that I get to enjoy the work of my peers, elders and betters. I enjoy basking in the collective glow of creativity and listening closely to expert wordsmithery. At a slam however, I am just too nervous to pay any great attention. Instead, I start picking holes in others’ performances: “My similes are much more effective than his similes, why did he get more points than me?” As fellow poet Marc Livingstone put it: “Basically I’m a bit of a dick, but most of the time I manage to convince myself that I am a nice person and poetry slams remind me that I’m a bit of a dick.”

“ People love the competition and the smell of nerd sweat” Scottish Slam Champ Iona Lee

Herein lies one of my issues with slams – they can become a false arena. What many find admirable about slams is that they provide a platform for marginalised voices. For example, I can guarantee that at least one poem will include the word ‘patriarchy’ at any given slam. This is of course, no bad thing. I am about as feminist as they come. Germaine Greer is my gal. Isn’t it ironic however that on one level we might be requiring our slam judges to decide between pacifism, veganism and a woman’s right to choose? What’s more, the arena is seen as a safe space, yet the participants are being gladiatorially matched against one another. To complicate matters, the arena’s perceived status as a safe space perhaps excludes people with opinions that might be outside the liberal mainstream.

The structure of a poetry slam also leads to sneaky tactics. You will notice patterns forming: funny poem first to get the crowd to like you; political next to show that you are ‘woke’; and finally, picking and exploiting whatever it is or might be in one’s private life which identifies one as most marginal and deserving of sympathy. Think X Factor sob story in verse. In fact poets of my acquaintance confess to feeling guilty about exploiting their own experiences because they know that these issues will play the right mood music to evince from the audience and judges alike maximum points, and points mean prizes.

Is it right that this format of competition should put moral pressure on people to publically air their personal laundry? I am assured by older and more experienced poets that slams used to be predominantly humorous, but it seems to me – and perhaps we should blame the X Factor for this – that there’s an increasing use of these

emotional levers. The trouble is that at the end of the evening you might end up with a room full of people who have been, in effect, told that their personal struggle is less important than that of the winner. What’s more, there’s a danger that subject matter becomes more important than the quality of poetry on display. I don’t think Bob Dylan would even make it through the first round of X Factor (and if he did he’d be one of Louie’s).

The format demands an element of theatricality.

Consequently, performance styles are in danger of homogenising. I see a lot of new voices who sound as if they might be copying each other’s vocal patterns in a way that doesn’t always best serve the poetry that they have written.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t really use any of those tactics, nor those vocal patterns. I didn’t know that I should. I would not, nor do I think would others, describe myself as a slam poet, and probably this made me seem strikingly original (although I’m not).

So perhaps things are changing once again.

Slams can be an important stepping stone in a poet’s career. They afford exposure, the opportunity to rehearse one’s tortured poetic demeanour and to network. I am sure that a lot of my success, such as it is, is thanks to my winning the Scottish title. Winning allowed me to go to Paris

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and meet poets from all over the world and to wander alone in Père Lachaise and have feelings.

I am hugely grateful for all of this. Most other poets that I talk to see slams as a bit of fun. And they are.

As long as the participants don’t take them too seriously, no one is going to end up with anything worse than a bruised ego. However, slams can also be an important rung on the poetic career ladder so perhaps we should take them seriously. But taking a slam too seriously is like viewing the aforementioned X Factor as truly trying to discover the UK’s best singer, as opposed to a bit of fluff and entertainment. It is this dichotomy that jars.

This is a very exciting time to be involved in performance poetry. So, by all means go and see a slam, take part even. Slams encourage poets to deliver their work better, but can restrict the sort of work that they present. So, I would urge you to also go and support broader spoken word nights.

Go to the poetry stage at a festival. Watch Kate Tempest's Let Them Eat Chaos on BBC iPlayer.

See the poets for longer than a 3 minute slot; they might have quite a lot more to say after the buzzer stops them.

The Scottish Slam Championships take place at the Tron Theatre, 14 Jan at 7.45pm. Tickets are £7.50 tron.co.uk/event/scottish-slam-championships-95

THE SKINNY

Crime Fighting Sisters Lady Cop Makes Trouble picks up the story of the three Kopp sisters after their debut in Girl Waits With Gun. Amy Stewart talks about filling the holes in fact with fiction and reflecting modern feminist issues through these 1920s crime fighting sisters Interview: Annie Rutherford

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t can be hard to find stories about adult sisters, as novelist Amy Stewart points out. Once we’ve outgrown Little Women and Dodie Smith’s glorious coming-of-age novel I Capture the Castle, the best we can hope for is perhaps Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, which are more interested in the sisters’ relationships with their Willoughbys and Wickhams than with each other. Yet for many of us, our relationship with our siblings is one of our most enduring ties throughout our lives, surviving rivalries and tears at which friendships might flounder and offering support, inspiration and wisdom which we might not seek from our parents.

It is this cocktail of stubborn loyalty, heady admiration and more than occasional frustration which made sisterhood into one of the leading metaphors behind the feminist movement. And so it is a joy to come across a series of books which follows three sisters as they live and work together – all the more so given that Constance, Norma and Fleurette Kopp were real people whose lives played out in the early years of the 20th century, as the first tentative steps towards women’s rights were being taken.

“ Anything women did which was out of the ordinary made headlines” Amy Stewart

Amy Stewart’s first book about the Kopp sisters, Girl Waits With Gun, appeared in the UK in 2016 and transports the reader to New Jersey in 1914, to a small town as yet seemingly unruffled by the onset of war across the Atlantic. When Constance, Norma and Fleurette’s buggy is upturned thanks to some unconscionably bad driving on the part of a local silk merchant, it is an incident that has unlikely consequences. The driver refuses to pay for the damage caused and instead starts terrorising the sisters, who see bricks thrown through their windows, kidnapping threats and arson attempts. In response, the town sheriff fits the women out with guns and teaches them how to shoot. These first, startling lessons prove to be the start of a long career in law enforcement for Constance – the oldest sister and Stewart’s narrator – who went on to become one of the first female deputy sheriffs in the USA. “Constance was really a misfit,” Stewart points out, as she explains what first drew her to the

January 2017

Kopps. “She didn’t want to get married. At the age of 35, nothing was really going on in her life. And then this one event happened and changed everything. That doesn’t happen to most people; our lives change gradually.” She laughs, “That’s why no one would write a novel about my life.”

The idea for the books grew out of a moment of serendipity: Stewart had been researching a gin smuggler when she’d come across a newspaper article about the Kopps’ accident and its aftermath. “Just yesterday a similar thing happened,” she remarks. “You just find these weird, wonderful stories when you’re researching. Yesterday I came across something, stuck it in a file, and thought, someday I’ll have to write a book about this.

“With the Kopp sisters, rather than just save a couple of things in a folder and go back to what I was doing, I lost the rest of the day searching for more information about them. It’s such a long and really interesting story. I thought, this isn’t just a novel, it’s a series of novels, it’s a TV series! There’s a run of about 15 years of the sisters living and working together in law enforcement.”

The second book about the Kopps, Lady Cop Makes Trouble, is just out in the UK and picks up a few months after Girl Waits With Gun leaves off, with Constance working as a deputy for the wonderfully drawn Sheriff Heath. Like the first book, it’s both a gem of rediscovered female history and a pleasingly page-turning crime novel. When a prisoner escapes on Constance’s watch, she takes herself off to the streets of New York to bring him back, often going against her superior’s orders to do so. Constance’s contested position as a deputy is at stake: while a law had recently been passed allowing women to serve as police officers, to be a deputy you had to be eligible to vote – which women weren’t.

As with Girl Waits With Gun, the title and (beautifully designed) cover of Lady Cop Makes Trouble is inspired by newspaper articles from the time, of which there are a wealth about Constance and her sisters. “At first I was surprised that there were so many articles about the Kopps – but then I realised that anything women did which was out of the ordinary made headlines,” Stewart remarks.

“One newspaper from the time reported on two women who’d decided to have a race. They made the paper just because they did some running!”

And there’s no denying that the Kopps were out of the ordinary. Constance did in the end get her deputy’s badge – and in the 1920s the sisters went on to open a detective agency, a development to be covered in later books in the series.

If this sounds a bit too like Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, think again. Stewart’s books are steeped in the atmosphere of the era (“the time periods are so interesting,” she exclaims, “there’s always

so much done with the 1920s, but the 1910s are really fascinating too!”), but never in a way which treats the time period as a clichéd or glamorous backdrop. Rather, Stewart’s background as a nonfiction writer serves her well and the novels are meticulously researched, without the research ever getting in the way of the stories. These are novels, not biographies, and where Stewart’s research comes up against blanks, she fills in the gaps with fiction, but notes at the back of each book give curious readers the chance to fact check.

“Sometimes authenticity is about dropping little details in,” Stewart considers. “There’s an important scene set in a New York subway station towards the end of Lady Cop Makes Trouble, and I actually went to New York and walked all around the subway station, figuring out which bits were old. There’s also a museum of the New York subway – it’s the most fascinating place in New York! They even have subway cars from that time which you can sit in. The seats in the subway cars are made of wicker, which would never have occurred to me.

It’s great to be able to have those details.”

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With their cast of idiosyncratic characters and a healthy dose of humour, the adventures of the resourceful Constance, the dramatic Fleurette and the contrary Norma offer some much needed escapism from the shadow cast by 2016. At the same time, however, Stewart points out that, “It’s amazing how similar the political situation now is to back then,” and this is subtly woven into the novels.

Concerns about immigration were growing, fuelled in part by the European war. Globalisation was becoming a concept to be strived for. In some ways the books are a rallying cry to arms. Constance knows well that if anyone is to protect her sisters or defend her status as a deputy, that person is her. As Sheriff Heath is fond of reminding his colleagues, when things go wrong we can’t be defeated but rather we have to “get back to work.” It is a call reminiscent of the feminists, activists and other glorious people rallying out there at the moment to stand fast, stay strong and regroup.

Lady Cop Makes Trouble is out 12 Jan and Girl Waits With Gun is out now Both titles are published by Scribe at RRP £8.99

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LE Y ST FE LI

Living in Malmö Getting out before Brexit? Consider Sweden’s third-largest city, where an international outlook, great childcare and underground clubbing await

“T

ake the train to Copenhagen.”

That was the first reply when our Swedish teacher tried to start a conversation about things to do in Malmö. The first!

But it’s fundamentally untrue – ignore any smartarse Danes who insist that Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, is but a suburb of Copenhagen.

Such condescension is, I believe, a fairly recent development brought about by Öresundsbron, the long, elegant road and rail bridge (as seen on Scandinavian crime drama The Bridge) which links the two countries and promotes increasing social and economic closeness within Scandinavia and Europe.

That’s the idea anyway. The super-national connectedness that the bridge symbolises is, in reality, undermined by restrictions that have been in place throughout 2016, a delayed reaction to the refugee crisis. Two separate ID checks are now mandatory, making train travel to Malmö slow and unreliable. It’s a shame, because this bureaucratic irritation belies what is now, arguably, Malmö’s defining characteristic – its internationalism. In 2014, 31% of Malmö residents were born outside Sweden. There’s even been an attempt to make Malmö the first city in the world with residents from every nation on earth. 23 nationalities are still sought. Vanuatans, Andorrans, Marshall Islanders: Välkommen till Malmö! As long as you meet statutory employment requirements.

What does this internationalism mean for Malmö? Traditionally, non-European immigrants in Sweden have been packed away in suburban enclaves, but this is changing. The presence of immigrants is becoming more apparent, as the city transitions from multiculturalism to the meltingpot model. Nowhere is this melting point more apparent than in the Möllan area of the city. It’s a pretty remarkable neighbourhood, housing hipsterish faux-dive bars, actual dive bars, Asian restaurants of vastly varying qualities, fast food joints, incipient high-end eateries, Middle Eastern bakeries, arty office spaces and studios, and so on.

One of the striking, and emphatically nonSwedish, aspects of Möllan is how many people hang about in the streets. Coming from Scotland’s

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Words: Brian Cloughley

Central Belt, I initially interpreted the sight of young men hanging about in the street with trepidation/naked fear, but I was wrong. This is more like a cultural echo of warmer parts of the world where outdoor communal areas are more commonly spaces of social interaction (and, yeah, it’s also a reflection of high unemployment in Malmö, especially amongst immigrants).

Learn Swedish To feel a part of this international scene, as counter-intuitive as it might sound, I’d recommend trying to learn Swedish.

Swedish is, wrongly, thought of as a difficult language to learn. Granted, it sounds a bit peculiar, but it’s actually pretty similar to English in terms of grammar, syntax, and even vocabulary. Plus it’s great fun to speak. SFI (Svenska för Invandrare/ Swedish for Immigrants) is a free governmentsponsored language programme that all new arrivals are entitled to. Classes can be a bit chaotic, but I emphatically recommend it. It involves learning not just the language but about Sweden in general, mostly through conversations about gender equality, sexuality, human rights and so on.

More surprisingly, you’ll learn just as much about Sweden from your classmates. The Syrians, Iraqis and Slavs that you sit with in class are your neighbours. They might not watch women’s football or cure their own salmon but, in the here and now, they are Malmö. Their relationship and reaction to Sweden are important, and finding out how they live and how they came to be here is consistently enlightening.

Finding a flat As is the case with every other habitable place in the known world, finding a decent rental in Malmö is a pain. It’s important to know the difference between a first- and second-hand rental. A first-hand rental is an arrangement with a housing association, and gives you strictly enforced rights regarding changes in rent, the length of your tenancy, upkeep of properties and so on. Because of the relative scarcity of these properties, there is a

sub-letting market, with people hoarding their rented flats and renting them out on a short term basis. Second-hand (andra hand) rents of this kind are easier to come by but far less regulated and secure. Standard operating procedure for new arrivals to Malmö is to take your chances with a second-hand rental (most likely found through the Swedish equivalent of Gumtree, Blocket.se), then hunt out a first-hand place where you don’t face the risk of being turfed out by your landlord on a whim.

“ Ignore any smartarse Danes who insist that Malmö is but a suburb of Copenhagen” There’s less of a tradition of young people flat-sharing in Sweden than in the UK, so some of the terms used to describe living arrangements can be a bit misleading. If you’re invited to live in a kollectiv don’t expect to end up in a hippy commune in the style of Lukas Moodysson’s film Together.

A flat-share with a taciturn German is the more likely outcome.

Also, don’t expect your own washing machine.

Tvättstugen (literally, the washing cottage) is pretty much a Swedish tradition. You’ll have to book a time to do your laundry in advance, probably in the basement of your building. This sounds like a massive pain in the arse, but is actually extremely useful as an invariably valid excuse for ducking out of any unwanted social engagement. “Oh, you’re going to see an Ingmar Bergman double bill on Tuesday? Ah, yeah, sorry, tvättstugen.”

Malmö nightlife Weekends in Malmö centre can appear lively but somewhat sanitised. The aforementioned Möllan

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is a more reasonable place to start a night out.

There’re enough bars and restaurants to find something to anyone’s taste, and the adjoining area in and alongside Folketspark forms something of an indie music hub (Kulturbolaget, Babel, InKonst and Moriska Paviljonen). Unfortunately though, to catch touring bands, you’ll often have to resort to that old ‘take the train to Copenhagen’ approach.

A visitor would probably be surprised at how quiet Malmö seems after midnight. Serious clubbing is hampered by legislation, for example the Swedish law that (with very few exceptions) permits the sale of alcohol only to establishments that serve food.

Somehow the intensity of a hardcore trance night can be undermined by somebody tucking into their chicken and chips in the corner of the room.

Regardless of the reasons for it, Malmö has a significant underground club scene. Known in Swedish as svartklubben, parties of dubious legality pop up in and around town every weekend, and are often promoted with inclusive gender, sexual, and racial politics. On occasion parties are shut down by the police, but there seems to be an unofficial (and untypical for Sweden) police tolerance towards them. In any case, a lot of them are not illegal as such, and operate more or less legitimately as social clubs (you may have to become a member before you can attend).

In a way, the extent of a club’s legality is reflected by their overt presence on social media – if a club has an open Facebook group it surely can’t be very illegal. Oskrivet (techno/house) and Plan B (eclectic weirdness) are a couple of higher profile club names to get you started. From there, it’s up to you how far down the rabbit hole you wish to venture.

Bring the kids Of course, when people talk about moving to Sweden for the lifestyle they’re rarely referring to the underground party scene. It’s widely reported, and indeed true, that Sweden’s provisions for parental leave and daycare make parenthood a viable life choice here rather than the ruinous catastrophe and/or preposterous pipe-dream that it so often seems to be in the UK. This kid-friendly (or perhaps more accurately, parent-friendly) set-up is evident throughout Malmö. There are playgrounds everywhere and you can’t go far during daylight hours without bumping into a daycare day-out. The sight of a two-by-two line of chattering hi-vis clad munchkins is indubitably adorable. The convention for kids to go to nursery/pre-school from a young age and for long days (at little or no cost to the parents) is one of the pillars of raising kids in Sweden. Is this a sensible and holistic policy that promotes individual freedom, a healthy work-life balance and gender equality? Or is it a nefarious way of ensuring young kids become indoctrinated into a Swedish way of life at the earliest possible age? That’s an argument for another place, but those kids in the hi-vis vests are so cute they might make the whole brainwashing thing worthwhile.

The other pillar of raising young kids is the ample parental leave that new parents are entitled to, while continuing to receive the majority of their salaries. There is a hefty amount of red tape involved, but these benefits are available to all residents from EU countries (insert here: Brexit lament/mocking comment about the unsustainability of European social provisions). There is even a bonus equality payment, to encourage fathers to take equal parental leave. If the presence of earnest-looking men around parks and playgrounds is any indication, this policy seems to be working. This brings to mind the (OK, yes, almost certainly apocryphal) story of an American visitor returning from Malmö and reporting on its renowned social liberalism; “It’s amazing, there are gay au-pairs everywhere!” theskinny.co.uk/travel

THE SKINNY

Guilt and self-loathing in India Each year, the British Council escorts scores of wide-eyed university students across developing countries, but there comes a time when each guest must confront the elephant in the room

The Elephant At 6pm in mid July, an elephant lumbered down a quiet backstreet of Delhi. It was flanked on either side by dancers and fire-jugglers, and it bore a sash across its midriff. WELCOME BRITISH COUNCIL adorned it in bright pink letters. We, at whom this message was aimed, stood at the end of the street in our turbans and robes, sipping bottles of beer and awaiting the serenade that was to conclude our tour of the country on a British Council programme called ‘Make In India’. Rumours of a surprise had circulated all day – this was clearly it.

The animal was so slow, however, that by the time it got close enough to kick up dust against our ankles its novelty impact had already been supplanted by gloomy reality. The crowning centrepiece of our Delhi welcome ceremony, after trudging 8 miles across town in 40-plus degree heat, had finally arrived to the party, and it didn’t look to be in much of a mood. Frankly, it looked pretty glum: its feet flattened by too many years in the city, kneaded out like rolls of dough; its sides scarred by villainous owners; its trunk hanging like dead weight; its testicles swollen and pendu lous; its mouth gasping for air. Worst of all were the eyes: sad and cavernous, and with lids that sagged to reveal the innards of the skull. Someone should fix it a drink, I thought – something strong.

The Programme Meanwhile we all continue sheepishly sipping our own drinks to stifle our grimaces. We’re the 60 students chosen for a British Council ‘cultural exchange’ programme that’s amounted to a crash course across northern India. We’re the sponges, India is the moisture, and this so-called ‘exchange’ is really more of a one-way street. Activities have included Bollywood dancing on hotel rooftops, touching base at the Bombay Stock Exchange, dining at the Taj Lake Palace with Prince Mewar of Udaipur, and wandering through the Dharavi slums with packs of biscuits to hand out to impoverished children. But throughout this all-consuming, all-singing, all-dancing odyssey, something mysterious has been curdling the skin, contam-

January 2017

inating the food and spiking the punch, and right now it is unmistakable. The ailment they call ‘colonial guilt’ has been the elephant in the room for a fortnight, and now that there is actually an elephant present, greeting us outside our hotel and paying miserable tribute to our government, it has found corporeal form.

To the untrained eye, our trip is beginning to resemble a reenactment of a royal visit to the Raj. We’ve inspected factories and institutions, rubbed shoulders with royalty, taken pictures with the needy, and now we have our own honorary elephant.

The dancers and fire-jugglers continue to dance and juggle while our semi-circle shuffles backwards from the animal. Some members of the group can be seen breaking into tears. The rest are extremely uncomfortable. Later, during one of our regular group conferences, the ceremony is deemed “too imperialist” by one commenter, to widespread agreement. The inclusion of the elephant is labeled “an error of judgment” on behalf of the Council. Everyone nods. The issue is laid to rest.

The Guilt Colonial guilt is the Catholic guilt of an atheist, university-educated generation. It’s like a newfangled update on original sin; the guilt is present from birth, despite the absence of any specific wrongdoing. Combined with the equally ubiquitous consumerist guilt, it helps form a well-intentioned but self-indulgent, patronistic, vague and frequently misguided worldview. The received opinion is that our debt is immeasurable, hereditary, and forever unpayable, but that we must try to pay it back regardless with foreign aid and apologist rhetoric.

But the truth is, India doesn’t need our tears, or our sympathy, or even our money. Like most of East Asia, it’s turning out to be superb at capitalism. Its economy is forecast to surpass the U.S by 2050. Tellingly, and despite the attitudes of its participants, ‘Make In India’ is no typical British Council programme; it is helmed by a company called

IndoGenius, whose aim is to promote India, and it is run by Nick Booker-Soni, a brilliant man who is convinced of the West’s political, moral and economic decline, and who spends a lot of his time trying to persuade young British people to jump ship and start afresh in the new promised land. Post-Brexit, Booker-Soni isn’t the only one: “Get out while you still can!” goes the clarion call from political commentators and baby boomers at home. “Leave this stinking vessel!” The message of ‘Make In India’, too, is clear: India is the land of the future; Britain the land of the past. That was then; this is now.

“ Colonial guilt is the Catholic guilt of an atheist, university-educated generation” The Self-Loathing By its own definition, the purpose of any British Council programme since the organisation’s creation in 1934 has been to engender cultural relations and promote Britain around the world. In 2016, the curious part in all of this is that few participants on this or any British Council ‘cultural exchange’ venture appear to exhibit any willingness to represent, er, Britain. Instead, they almost all seem to harvest a loathing for their home country, and an embarrassment about their own consumerist, post-colonial selves. This is no doubt exacerbated by the contrast between India’s boundless spiritual complexion and the decidedly materialist and comparably mundane personalities of most of the Westerners who find themselves wandering through it. David Foster Wallace once said this of being a new age traveler from the First World: “It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the

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Words: Henry Scanlan Illustration: Isabella Bunnell

very unspoiledness you are there to experience.”

All 60 of the ‘Make In India’ participants seem painfully aware of this. In some ways, this is reassuring.

In others, it’s excruciating. Only in this scenario could a crowd of young, affluent people gather in a lecture room and carry out a perverse Q&A with a man from the Dharavi slums, who is held in reverence at the front of the room and asked questions that can mostly be paraphrased to “what’s it like to be poor?” The sincere self-effacement of one student’s closing statement said it all: she stood, breathing heavily into the microphone, one hand on heart. “You are richer than us in so many ways,” she assured the man from Dharavi, to ardent applause. The man graciously received the sentiment, but might’ve been tempted to ask what he could buy with it.

The Future On the morning after our Delhi closing ceremony, an announcement is made at breakfast confirming that the elephant won’t be returning next year.

A number of complaints have been made in its name. There is a collective sigh of relief in response to this announcement, which brings with it the news that the people have made a difference: a forlorn elephant will be saved another 8-mile trudge across the city next year. Of course, this won’t actually do anything to protect the elephant from a similarly painful experience elsewhere, but it does at least mean that it won’t be able to upset a group of UK students ever again.

There may come a time in the not-too-distant future when Britain’s discernible use to the rest of the world has whittled away, and India has completed its graduation into a First World powerhouse.

When that time comes, India, a nation awash with manufacturing prowess and technological genius, will be able to arrange for its own bright young students to visit Britain and gawp awkwardly at its struggling people. It won’t be all bad for the Brits, though; at least they won’t have to feel guilty anymore. theskinny.co.uk/travel

Lifestyle

31

Enough Hopelessness Toby Sharpe shares a step by step guide to healing the world after the shitstorm that was 2016...

H

ey millennials! Feeling sad? You have good reason. The past 12 months sucked. For you, 2016, the year most comparable to a garbagefire, is finally over. As I sit and write this piece, still trapped in 2016’s wicked grasp, I look fondly back to 2012. Back then, we thought a comet would incinerate us in a Mayan apocalypse. The world seemed so much less scary, enough that we could worry about supernatural or cosmic threats.

Now, everything has changed. Our world seems to be ending in a more mundane, and yet more malevolent, way.

Our Earth is not what Tomorrow’s World and The Powerpuff Girls said it would be when we were growing up. An orange virus has taken over America, endangering the lives and livelihoods of minorities, immigrants, and the world at large. Tories ineptly rule Britain. We live under austerity, a programme condemned by the UN for the way it actively contributes to the suffering and deaths of the poor and disabled. Student loans dog the youth. The right-wing lies to the populace and there is no charismatic left-wing popular leader to put on our ‘HOPE’ posters. Refugees are treated appallingly on our soil and abroad. More and more young people are growing up in poverty. Our air is growing poisonous. Our politicians are not stopping climate change. Our world will heat up, the ice caps will dwindle, the oceans will reclaim us.

You are right to be afraid. Your feelings of loss and panic are not unreasonable. However, if we fall too deep into despair, we will lose. This world can make you feel hopeless, and can convince that your voice is meaningless. You might read this and think “well... my voice IS useless, I voted Remain / Labour / Clinton and look how that turned out!”

You’re not wrong. Things didn’t work out how we wanted them to: there are many reasons why.

People felt apathetic. People felt disempowered.

People felt useless. I feel that way. I am not trying to invalidate your pain; I know how infuriating it can be when people tell you to snap out of your

32

Lifestyle

suffering, or to sort yourself out with some easy fixes.

In the grand scheme of things? You are not useless. Sure: you are not powerful. You are somewhere in the middle. We are not as special as we were told growing up. Your voice does not mean a lot. It means a little. However, our voices are louder when we shout them together. Therein our power lies. We cannot let the aged, the uninformed, and the mendacious right-wing elite doom our generation and those to come. We cannot feel that we’ve had ‘enough of experts’. We cannot hate one another. This article is a small war-cry for the future that we can grow. Here are some things that you can and should do to live for a better year and a better world.

“ Your voice does not mean a lot. It means a little. However, our voices are louder when we shout them together. Therein our power lies” Donate If you have money to give, there are organisations in the UK in need of donations. Definitely look into whether the government has defunded your local rape crisis centre, and find out whether shelters for the homeless and the abused need funding or help in your area. If you are particularly worried about the effects Trump’s reign will have over the lives of vulnerable Americans, then

there are a number of groups that you can donate to online from the UK which explicitly protect the rights of minorities, from supporting immigrants and refugees to protecting women’s access to reproductive healthcare.

Volunteer If you don’t have money to spare, but want to help charities and other organisations, take the time to consider who needs your help and where your time could best be spent. Google charities in your area. If you have skills to share, now is the time. If you are a good teacher, or if you’re good with languages, or computers, you could donate some of your time and talent to organisations or people who need them, particularly refugees.

Educate Children are going to grow up thinking it is okay to be a bigot, to scorn minorities, and to treat women’s bodies like chew-toys and playgrounds.

If you have or know kids, make sure they know that the Orange Devil is not a role model.

Call people out We’re all going to need to call people out a lot more.

We are so often worried about causing a scene, about seeming angry, as we make our voices heard.

The right wing does not worry about how its opinions come across. It yells and people listen – one is often forced to hear what is being shouted. If you have certain kinds of privilege – if you’re male, or straight, etc. – use your privilege to fight for others. Your comfortable silence makes you complicit. It is time to challenge your friends, your acquaintances, your lovers. If you think liking the occasional Facebook post makes you an ally to the cause, it is time to do more. Use your position to amplify the voices of the marginalised.

Give to your local food or clothing bank There’s most likely an old can of beans you keep

DEVIANCE

Words: Toby Sharpe Illustration: Fran Caballero forgetting to turn into chilli. Donate them. Those jeans you considered maybe turning into jeanshorts eventually? Donate them. Convert our cultural obsession with decluttering into a way of helping people around you. If you don’t have much of your own to give, see if you can collect donations from neighbours or friends to hand in on their behalf.

Join a political party I know you think they’re all evil, all bureaucratic, and all useless. They will continue to be – if people who think like that don’t get involved.

Stop ignoring homeless people Give them your change. If you don’t have any coins, at least say hello, or nod as you pass. Stop propagating the myth that everyone on the street is lying about their situation. Stop pretending that we are not all just people.

Be vocal about the good you do I know it’s embarrassing. It may not be cool to announce that you have bonded with the old lady down the road, or that you’ve just had a tough day working at the local centre for refugees. But people need to know that good work is going on, and that they too could and should be doing good.

Be kind Love people. Be there for people. Listen to people who are suffering. If someone in your life is sad and you know they’re sad, don’t just hide them from your newsfeed. You don’t have to be a therapist or a priest to give someone some time to talk.

If you don’t feel ready to talk, you can just be in the same room as someone. Send them an emoji.

Make them a cup of tea. These are dark times.

Friendship is more important than ever. It is so easy to brighten someone’s day, even when the world seems lacking in light.

THE SKINNY

Diary of a Financial Dominatrix:

Race & Reparations

Deviance’s findom correspondent tells us what it’s like to be a black goddess, from objecting to the word ‘slave’ to making money from black stereotypes

Content warning: this article is not for SWERFs (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists). If your beliefs don’t allow for a nuanced discussion of femme empowerment, don’t read on. You won’t be keen.

W

hen I stumbled into the world of financial domination a month ago, I worried about staying anonymous and my finsub’s ability to rationally consent to our transactions. In a strange twist of events, I’ve since found myself making every one of these issues more complex. Boy, my finsub, is still loyal and still buying me nice things; lately I’ve been asking for textbooks (you gotta fund that degree somehow). We’re closer now, and move smoothly between Sub/Dom interactions and a supportive friendship, which has helped make consent negotiation a lot easier. Being closer has also made me comfortable enough to suggest some very kinky shit: Boy will soon be purchasing a collar with my name on it and a chastity cage for himself.

That said, I wanted to see how much money I could make from my newfound trade without bankrupting Boy, so I decided to cast my net wider. I’m in contact with several other findommes through some activist spaces I participate in, and speaking to these other women of colour about their qualms and resolutions encouraged me to get my scam on. Following my friends’ examples, I made a new Twitter account and started the arduous process of building a following.

my friends as a recommended ‘to follow’, most memorably outing me to an old Tinder flame who proceeded to text me, asking who ‘goddess’ was.

Horrifying. Hiding my identity while also presenting a sexy persona adds further complications.

My risqué pictures have finally pushed their way onto a very public platform, so now I’m mastering the art of being coquettish with most of my face hidden, and trying not to post anything my mother would murder me over.

There’s no one way to dominate, but there are some ground rules everyone seems to respect online, such as not poaching ‘owned’ subs from other goddesses, respecting the rights of sex workers to do what they are comfortable with, respecting other people’s intellectual property by not stealing tweets or pictures, and most importantly, sister solidarity among goddesses. Breaching etiquette by attempting to scam your fellow sisters is frowned upon, and will bring a goddess’ career to an untimely end. The corner of Twitter I’m currently carving a space into is full of feminist women of colour, tweeting insightful threads about toxic masculinity, racial liberation and female oppression. Any time white male fragility edges its way

Words: Felicity Benefutuis Illustration: Fran Caballero

onto these threads, he is told to pay for daring to take up space. This is stuff I was doing for free, in comment sections, in activist facebook groups, to passing men who piss me off. It feels like a homecoming.

Financial domination is not limited to the conventionally beautiful, and many marginalised identities are able to be very successful. Larger women, women of colour and LGBTQ dommes are all represented. While the more successful dommes are predominantly young, slim, conventionally pretty white cis straight women, identity does not place a cap on success here.

While it’s sadly not news to me that racists love to fetishise and date women of colour, I had never thought to capitalise on it. In retrospect this seems ridiculous; of course I should be charging racists for my time and emotional labour!

Why didn’t I think of it sooner? I’ve been targeting Trump supporters, a small act of vengeance that is sadly trivial compared to the damage they inflict on us. I do find it strange and quite offensive that it is a specific taboo to be dominated by a black woman, more niche than being dominated by a

white woman. What does this say about our position in society, that finding us attractive and worthy of worship is a literal fetish? This is where the kink takes an uncomfortable turn for me; I find it difficult as a black woman to call anyone a ‘slave’, though I’ve compromised on ‘Boy’. ‘Boy’, a term historically used to infantilise and degrade black men, gives me a certain satisfaction to invert.

It takes a toll, being reduced to body parts and stereotypes, as I have been my entire life. I now willingly do it to myself for capital gain, posting pictures of my lips and bum, knowing that they are more likely to catch the attention of a white finsub and get me those #reparations. I have reconciled myself with this, because I like my features, and I won’t have my sexuality compromised by the white gaze. It’s also thrilling in some respects to give myself over to the anger I often feel at my position in society; my secret Twitter is where I can say exactly how I feel about the white patriarchy and the monumental debt black women are owed without any fear of being labelled an ‘angry black woman’. They can call me what they want, so long as they pay me.

“ While it isn’t news to me that racists love to fetishise women of colour, I had never thought to capitalise on it” Financial domination, or findom, is perfectly suited to social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. While there are many dedicated fetish sites, the reach and accessibility of the bigger platforms make them very appealing for this kind of kink. This is a side of Twitter I had never known before; search #findom and you are brought into a global conversation, largely between women, where men are treated with complete disinterest unless their wallets are open. The more successful, famous findommes rarely ask for money. They might demand an expense be reimbursed occasionally, but for the most part teams of worshipping subs send ‘tributes’ to gain their attention, or just to thank them for existing.

The most pleasant surprise has been how welcoming and sisterly the scene is, and how much I fit into this sorority of aggressive, confident women.

The findom community is welcoming to new dommes even though we are saturating the market, leaving fewer paying subs for everyone. The moment I joined, an account directed me to a free guide to findom created by an established black UK goddess, @MissFoxx_FD. The hardest part of joining an online community of dommes has been maintaining anonymity. Algorithms are not on your side when it comes to staying inconspicuous on social media and pseudonyms, and on more than one occasion my new profile has popped up on the timelines of

January 2017

DEVIANCE

Lifestyle

33

Know the Fringe inside out?

Fest Magazine, the biggest free guide to the Edinburgh festivals, is looking for a team for 2017.

Full job specs at: theskinny.co.uk /about/getinvolved

@festmag /festmaguk

Illustration: Ailsa Sutcliffe

34

THE SKINNY

RE V IE

Photo: Phil Knott

W

The Running Man We spoke to recent dad and nomadic songmaker SOHN at the start of December to discuss producing his sophomore album, working solo, and how 2016 was a pretty shit year

“Y

ou’re my last interview of 14,” he says in response to ‘How are you?’ Christopher ‘Toph’ Taylor is on the move; The Skinny catches him in a taxi in Berlin, on his way to catch a flight to Paris. He insists he’s feeling frazzled, but he’s lucid, effusive and keen to chat about second LP Rennen – a German word which is, incidentally, the verb ‘to run’.

The London-born musician seems allergic to inertia, having moved to Vienna in 2012 for the production of his debut record Tremors, and then again to Los Angeles in 2014. And though there’s an expansive European tour lined up for spring 2017, his recent fatherhood might be cause to slow down. “I just had a baby six weeks ago,” he explains, “so my mind’s not really been on the record. And all of a sudden I’ve realised, ‘Shit, people have heard the record. Fuck!’”

Under the alias SOHN, Taylor creates spellbinding electronica that blends intricately produced percussion, synthesiser and piano with his distinctive falsetto. Jettisoning an EP (The Wheel) into the fickle internet waters of 2012, SOHN caught the attention of music blogs and press alike, with the eponymous lead single’s chopped vox and catchy rhythms offering a fresh take on the human-meets-machine dynamic. The long player follow-up, Tremors, expanded this philosophy to a transportive and self-assured album, reflective of Vienna’s icy stillness where it was recorded, and saturated in a nocturnal heartache made tangible by his piercing vocal.

Nearly three years later, Rennen is tenser, sparser, more conflicted; a clear departure from Tremors’ lushly layered textures and heart-on-

January 2017

sleeve anguish. “For the first record, I really felt like, as a baby record, you really want to put everything into it,” Taylor recalls. “Whereas this record, I consciously tried to detach from it a little bit.

Some of the songs are the original mixes from the first day they were written. As a result, I’m a lot more relaxed about the record coming out, because I feel like, yeah, this is some music that I made. I haven’t turned myself inside out and bled in order to make it; this time I made a record and I feel good about it.”

“ Shit, people have heard the record.

Fuck!”

Christopher Taylor

This pragmatism makes for a sharper album experience. “I feel like when you don’t add a bunch of elements you have to make sure that the elements that are in there are really strong, otherwise it won’t stand up on its own,” Taylor continues.

“This time I approached myself as a producer, and I said to myself; ‘if I was producing this artist, SOHN, what would I do? What would I find interesting to work on, and how would I highlight what I wanna highlight? What should be highlighted?’ For me, the very first thing was that it was really important to put the vocal bang in front of the camera.”

But there’s a clear symbiosis between the vocals and the instrumentation, with each track

Interview: George Sully

seeming inseparable from the voice that carries it. “This time I was playing around a bit with how I was gonna sing on the record, because even the way that I’m singing is probably quite different to the first record,” Taylor highlights. “My voice lowered – like, naturally lowered, at a crazily late point in my life, suddenly!” He laughs. A late puberty?

“Yeah! Like a really really late bloom.”

Tremors also had a mesmerising live show: a masterful rendering of the studio tracks, complete with smoke and hypnotic neon lights that ‘breathed’ with the music. “I definitely felt that after two years of touring that show, it was lacking movement – physical movement,” Taylor posits. “I really enjoyed the show that we created, and it was perfect for that record because there’s a sort of soundtracky element to it – it’s definitely like a soundscape.

“I did this one show with this Danish band called WhoMadeWho. We did Lessons, and the band joined me so there was a live drummer. I’m not a big fan of putting live drums into electronic music on stage, necessarily, but there was something about that one show, where I felt the song moving – like, I felt it slowing down and speeding up. And it was like, ‘oh wow’, this is a feeling I haven’t had in three years, because our drums were running from a machine. They were never wavering, they never changed.”

Accompanying the new SOHN record will be a new SOHN live show featuring, for the first time as part of the official line-up, a live drummer: “I want the pay-off of that snare coming in, because I want to feel that physical space being moved – by an actual human.” The live show will also feature a second singer, LA artist Nylo Taylor explains: “We

Music

didn’t really want to try and do it with one voice, because there are so many parts which have a unison vocal type feel to them, like Conrad and Hard Liquor.”

Hard Liquor is a strong opening number, its gutteral drums a pounding welcome to the record. “Yeah, it’s my public nudity track. It’s like, ‘Listen, this is what it’s gonna be, so like it or get off the train.’”

Before SOHN, Taylor’s previous project was Trouble Over Tokyo – an angsty, skittish, less focused sound, that actually began as a four-piece: “Yeah it did. It was originally a terrible Muse rip-off, many many years ago,” he laughs.

But Taylor exhibits an air of deliberate control in his work as SOHN. Comparing life as a solo artist to being in a band: “You achieve the same thing but you just don’t have to fight to get there. I would love to work in a group with people but it’s just not something I can do. I’m not very good at it,” Taylor discloses. “For me, music is just right or wrong. I don’t really think you can ever sacrifice something, knowingly, and feel good about it. If you feel like that’s not the right path to take then you can’t take the wrong path just to be diplomatic.”

Of course, Taylor is no stranger to collaboration, despite his protests – he’s turned his production talents to other artists, racking up credits with BANKS, Kwabs and Lana Del Rey, as well as being commissioned to provide remixes for dance giants Disclosure. Rennen, too, involved some pairing up. “Hard Liquor would never have existed if it weren’t for that second person,” he recalls.

“It was a tune which originally I wrote with and for someone else, a guy called Sam Dew in LA,” but who ended up not using it – so Taylor sang it himself. “I definitely like the fact that collaboration brought something to this record for sure.”

At the end of such a tumultuous year, we’re keen to know if Taylor’s itinerant lifestyle has affected his perspective on the world’s precarious politics: “I moved to LA two years ago, but of course I’ve still got a lot of ties back to Vienna, so I’ve been seeing people’s reactions to everything as we’ve been going through it,” he explains. “Conrad, for example, was actually written at a time when an Austrian general election was going on, and the rise of a really far-right party was totally legitimised.”

It was an omen of what was to come, given how content the country seemed prior to Hofer and the rise of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). “So that made it into the record – on two songs really, that one and Primary, because Primary was when the primaries started in the US.” On Brexit et al, Taylor hones in on the stagnating, toxic effects of the social media echo chamber. “The thing is that social media’s just a reflection of society,” he says, adding that while it’s a positive thing that we can share information to raise awareness of particular issues, “if none of us are going to do anything about it, it’s pointless.

“I feel that 2017 is probably going to be a chance, for me and a lot of people, to start afresh.

I think a lot of people will agree it’s been a pretty shit year,” he adds, with a laugh. “It’s a chance for all of us to strengthen what we believe in, and stand up for it a bit more. I think we needed a bit of a kick in the arse from that point of view, because we’re a generation who’ve grown up satisfied.

“It makes you realise: next time I’ve gotta do something more. It’s not enough that I just say, ‘Hey all of my people who agree with me, isn’t this stupid?’ If that’s not enough you’ve gotta go out and have a conversation with people who believe it, and say, ‘Look, this is why I think that you’re wrong.’”

There’s a brief silence on the line, a silence shared all too often in 2016 as everyone’s collective optimism is left wrestling with the crushing realities of the job ahead. Taylor sighs. “We’re all fucked, man. All you can do is do your research – that’s all you can do.”

Rennen is released via 4AD on 13 Jan sohnmusic.com

Review

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Another Golden Age Longtime solo artist and former American Music Club frontman Mark Eitzel on new album, the Bernard Butler-produced Hey Mr Ferryman

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t’s become a cliché. We’ve all seen the clickbait, the articles in the broadsheet newspapers. The best singer you’ve never heard of. And it’s always the same old story: some exceptionally talented human being who didn’t get the breaks, who warrants more attention, who deserves a bigger audience. Who should be fêted, bathing in pearls and throwing bundles of money on the fire. As Denis Leary says, “Life sucks, get a helmet.”

Despite being the former frontman of the inestimable American Music Club (who existed off and on between 1983 and 2008, and recorded ten albums, one of which Eitzel has himself disowned) and a long-time solo artist in his own right (with another dozen-plus records to his name), Mark Eitzel could easily check that ‘best singer you’ve never heard of’ box. But when we talk – on the eve of the American election, with a modicum of doubt still remaining as to whether the world is shuttling like a handcart in hell towards something new and terrible – Eitzel has his mind on other things. “America’s about to become a dictatorship,” he says, offering a sarcastic “hurray!” But he’s a glass-half-full kind of guy: “There’s only a few percentage points in it. It could go either way…”

20:20 vision and all that; we’ll gingerly push the optimism to one side and talk instead about his new album, Hey Mr Ferryman, recorded with ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler in the producer’s chair. As with his many career highlights to date, it’s yet another goddamn beautiful artefact, another tremendous collection of songs that crest its highs and circumnavigate its lows in a way that will move the hardest heart. His voice sounds as good as ever; lyrics thrum like struck metal – if he’s listening, the similarly gifted Mark Kozelek of Sun Kil Moon may have sufficient cause to ponder whether he could put more effort into a song than just reading out diary pages and fan letters.

And the music… well, let’s just say that despite his Stoke Newington origins, Butler brings a beautiful, California-sunshine vibe to proceedings, best seen in album opener The Last Ten Years.

“We came to him [Butler] and said, ‘We haven’t got enough money to do a complicated album, we

need something really simple,’ and that was the plan,” Eitzel explains. “I got to London. I showed up and played him all the songs. And he said, ‘I know you wanna do an acoustic album but no – we’re not!’ And I was like, ‘Alright, you know, whatever.’”

When it came to how the two of them worked in the studio, Butler’s determined outlook seemed to suit the outcome: “I didn’t like every single note that he played on the record but that doesn’t matter. Overall everything he did was as if he was reading my mind. This was what I really wanted.

‘Cause I’ll do these demos and he’ll say, ‘Urgh! Shut the fuck up! Cut my wrists! Don’t do that – let’s do this instead.’ He really got into the spirit of what I wanted to do.”

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Preview

into the world. He’s quiet, as you might expect, but humbly says, “Thank you, that’s the intention.”

So we agreed to avoid the clickbait. We’re not going to say Mark Eitzel is the best singer you’ve never heard of, but what we will say is this: Mark Eitzel is to The National, what Paul Weller is to Oasis. He should be revered, rewarded and celebrated. Until that day comes, however, we have Hey Mr Ferryman, the latest great Mark Eitzel record and the first possible album of 2017 out of the starting gate.

Ette Broadcast, Glasgow, 20 Jan

The Yummy Fur Oran Mor, Glasgow, 21 Jan

Ette is the brainchild of TeenCanteen’s Carla J Easton, in collaboration with Joe Kane from Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab and, surprisingly, Beatles tribute act Them Beatles. Ette released their debut album Homemade Lemonade last summer and on the strength of their spectacular launch party, attendees are in for a pop-tastic time! Part of Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival, we strongly advise you to get along.

Art-rockers The Yummy Fur are back! Initially active from 1992-1999, they reunited briefly for a tour in 2009, then nothing for ages… until now. Yay! In the summer of 2015 a Facebook post: ‘Should The Yummy Fur Reunite again?’ proved so popular that John McKeown and his everchanging line-up of pals returned to action, with this Celtic Connections show providing an excellent chance to catch 'em in all their glory.

We’re excited! Are you excited?

Hey Mr Ferryman is released via Decor Records on 27 Jan facebook.com/markeitzel

Mark Eitzel

Eitzel reckons Hey Mr Ferryman is one for the fans. “Now that the career is over,” he chuckles, “I try to make songs, like this album particularly, for people who like me and American Music Club.

Let’s just make a record with acoustic guitars and singing, because that’s what I do the best. I know my strengths and weaknesses, so let’s make a stupid pop album – like kids with guitars – and rock. Bernard did it and it’s great!”

Of course, Eitzel does himself a disservice in reducing his diverse oeuvre to these “strengths and weaknesses” – as with West, the 1997 album he made with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Hey Mr Ferryman is an album that could extend to a wider audience, with new listeners checking him out for the first time. It has what people inclined to comment on these things call ‘crossover appeal’, in part because of its evident and deliberate lightness.

“I’m so sick of listening to dark music,” Eitzel says. “I mean, I love dark music, I really do. Maybe I’m just sick of aspects of my own past. It’s sort of like I can’t listen to music right now that’s dark,

Indigo Velvet King Tut’s, Glasgow, 4 Jan

Indigo Velvet

unless it’s completely electronic, and then I can’t really hear it. Songwriters – don’t fuck with my head! Say something about my life! That’s all I want.

I don’t want you to make me cry. I don’t want to feel what you’re feeling. I just want something that’s beautiful.”

We mention a line from the song Rise – ‘Tell me how to make something beautiful flash before your eyes’ – which appeared on American Music Club’s album Everclear back in 1991. There’s always something beautiful to be found on Eitzel’s records, something capable of stopping the listener dead in their tracks – he’s put a lot of beauty out

“ I just want something that’s beautiful”

Do Not Miss Kicking off King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution is the FCK YES party, featuring a live set from Skinny faves Indigo Velvet – these boys promise to start 2017 in style with a tropical pop party to get your feet moving and your spirits soaring.

Entry to this one is free, but you have to register via Eventbrite, and be sure to get down early as entry is strictly on a first-come basis.

Remember, if you’re not fast, you’re last.

Interview: Pete Wild

Tissø Lake

Tissø Lake Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh, 14 Jan The moniker of Edinburgh-based musician Ian Humberstone, Tissø Lake’s Paths to the Foss was our album of the month in December, ending a truly horrible year with a bloody wonderful album. This show at Edinburgh College of Art’s Wee Red Bar will serve as the official album launch party, and will feature support from Edinburgh’s very own eagleowl. Lovely stuff.

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Ette

The Yummy Fur

THE SKINNY

Let's Get Lost!

Johnny Lynch, aka The Pictish Trail, raised eyebrows when he left Fence Records in 2013. But his new label, Lost Map, has already established itself as one of the most exciting in Scotland Interview: Chris McCall

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he world of independent Scottish record labels is a small one. People know each other by first name and a spirit of affable collaboration prevails.

So when Johnny Lynch announced in 2013 his sudden departure from Fence, perhaps the best known label of them all north of the border, even casual fans sat up and took notice. The songwriter who performs as The Pictish Trail had effectively managed the Anstruther-based collective for a decade.

But that was then. Lynch now oversees his own label, Lost Map Records, from his home on the Isle of Eigg when not out on the road performing his own music. Lost Map has quietly established itself as one of the best micro-labels and events organisers in the country, introducing us to Glasgow fuzz-pop heroes Tuff Love and organising the biennial Howlin’ Fling festival. Following a busy 2016, the new year is already shaping up to be another action-packed one for Lynch and his roster.

He sounds in a contented mood as he chats to The Skinny from Edinburgh shortly before Christmas, despite having undertaken a 12-hour trip from Eigg to the capital the previous day.

“When we started Lost Map, I said it was a continuation of what Fence was doing. I’m really lucky all the acts were prepared to come along and start again in the way they did. We’ve since had artists playlisted on 6 Music, play high-profile sessions and appear at Glastonbury. Tuff Love became our first act to head down to Reading and Leeds. That’s remarkable for any label, let alone one based on the Isle of Eigg!

“I’m proud of what we’ve done in that time.

But there’s no plan. I don’t know what will happen other than Lost Map will carry on in some form.

I don’t have a big vision. The more an artist puts in, the more we can put in ourselves. If an artist

is happy to sell 100 tapes, we can do that. But we can also take artists to a certain level and help them. I view Lost Map as a launch pad for songwriters who want to continue music as a career and build up a fanbase. Without revealing anything, that’s already happening. There’s a few different acts whose next record will see them taking a big step up.”

“ If an artist is happy to sell 100 tapes, we can do that” Johnny Lynch

January is a hectic few weeks for the label.

New signing Ed Dowie, former frontman of psychedelic dub-pop band Brothers In Sound, releases a debut solo album, The Uncle Sold, on 27 January, while The Pictish Trail himself headlines an eagerly-awaited Celtic Connections show at the Òran Mór on 20 January. Further down the line, Manuela – the new project by former Franz Ferdinand guitarist Nick McCarthy and his wife – are planning an album on the label, and an EP is expected from London-based popsters Lazy Day. Dowie’s signing reflects the hands-on approach Lost Map champions – even if first contact between the two parties almost slipped through the cracks. “Ed sent us stuff via our web form – and I managed to miss the first two emails,” laughs Lynch. “He said he was really into the Lost Map stuff. That caught my attention as people sometimes send in demos and have no idea what the label is about.

“I listened to his music and instantly recognised his voice,” continues Lynch. “I was a massive fan of Brothers In Sound, who were label mates of The Beta Band back in the late 90s, and he was the singer. His own album is such a staggeringly beautiful record.”

Memorable live events are as much part of Lost Map as record releases, of course, and Lynch has several planned. The 20th anniversary of Eigg’s community buy-out – when islanders took control from the final absentee landlord – is this June.

Surely that’s the ideal opportunity for another Howlin’ Fling? “I‘m on the cusp of deciding what to do,” Lynch admits. “With Lost Map we’ve made a name for ourselves by doing weird events. So there will definitely be something, most likely in the summer, but I’m just trying to work out the logistics of it. Since 2010, I’ve put on the Away Game and then Howlin’ Fling, but we’ve only done them once every two years. So 2017 is supposed to be a year off. Because this year’s event was so good, and we’ve got into the swing of organising them, I

C Duncan Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 24 Jan

El Hombre Trajeado Electric Circus, Edinburgh, 27 Jan

2017 is the fourth consecutive year of Independent Venue Week, a UK-wide week-long celebration of small independent live music venues, taking place at the end of January. To mark the occasion, Mercury Prize-nominated C Duncan will play the intimate surrounds of Sneaky Pete’s, an up-closeand-personal affair which promises an incredibly special performance from the Glaswegian composer and musician.

Another Independent Venue Week show comes in the form of recently reunited El Hombre Trajeado, who returned late last year with Fast Diagonal, their first album in 12 years via Chemikal Underground. Featuring Stevie Jones (Sound of Yell / Arab Strap) and 2013 Scottish Album of the Year Award winner RM Hubbert, this Electric Circus show is an excellent way to round off January.

C Duncan

January 2017

Girl Band

Girl Band Summerhall, Edinburgh, 26 Jan Bringing the noise all the way from Dublin to Edinburgh’s Summerhall this January is energetic four-piece Girl Band. Having formed in 2011, Girl Band released debut album Holding Hands With Jamie in 2015 via Rough Trade. Their notorious live show certainly packs a wallop – here’s your chance to experience an explosive mess of feedback’n’fury in the confines of Summerhall’s Dissection Room.

Don’t forget your earplugs!

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El Hombre Trajeado

am really tempted to do another. And a few exciting names have got in touch.

“We’re already doing an event at the end of January in London called Strange Invitation. There’ll be a handful of Lost Map artists doing a couple of sets across the day. I’d like to do a few of those in different towns and introduce the collective into places that we don’t get to play that often.

“It’s not a particularly easy time to be an indie label. Because I don’t make a living out of Lost Map itself, so there’s not as much pressure for it to grow and become a bigger thing year-on-year.

I’m more interested in how we can involve artists in a more community-minded thing – without meaning to sound like a hippy. I’m not a hippy.

I like things with a collective feel, so putting on the all-dayers and events are a big thing for me.”

The Pictish Trail plays Celtic Connections at Oran Mor, 20 Jan Ed Dowie – The Uncle Sold is out on 27 Jan lostmap.com

Law Holt

Law Holt The Hug and Pint, Glasgow, 29 Jan Edinburgh-based Law Holt is an R’n’B genius who became a firm Skinny favourite in 2016. Debut album City featured in our Top 50 Albums of the Year, and then, right at the last minute, she surprised us with a second release – the (in our humble opinion) excellent mini-album Gone. Holt brings her inimitable voice and singular style to The Hug and Pint this month as part of Celtic Connections festival.

Preview

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Album of the Month Ty Segall

Ty Segall [Drag City Records, 27 Jan]

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Ty Segall is back with his first self-titled record since his 2008 debut, which should tell you that this is a restatement of basic principals: dispensing with overdubs and recording instead with a full band, this is an album that comes marching out of the gate, grabbing you by the front of your shirt and then playing the most heavenly rock your ears have heard in many a month. And that’s not even half the story.

Things kick off with Break a Guitar, which is crunchy and riff-tastic and perfectly in keeping with what you’d expect: yes, it’s slightly psychedelic; yes, it could be a Big Star B-side (still high praise), but whack it up high and by the time you hit the three-minute mark you’ll be painting your face, dancing in robes and half expecting the Age of Aquarius to resurrect itself.

Then there’s two minutes of Freedom, a garage anthem in waiting (it’s also the kind of song you’ll stick on repeat and listen to until you die; perhaps this is what David Foster Wallace meant

by Infinite Jest). And just when you think Ty’s all about the rock this time round, Warm Hands (Freedom Returned) takes Freedom down a peg

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– think Syd Barrett impersonating Neil Young circa Tonight’s the Night. Talkin’ mellows us out still further; the kind of thing Ryan Adams used to do so well. Clearly, he’s taking us on a ride.

The Only One roars like Sabbath and Thank You Mr. K hits Maiden country, but Orange Color Queen (a song he’s written for his current squeeze, which could see him being thrown a few more Lennon comparisons) and Take Care (To Comb Your Hair) are just about the loveliest folk-pop ballads it’s been our good fortune to hear in an age.

In other words this is an album of light and shade, an album of nuance – which might surprise some people. He wears his influences on his sleeve, sure, but he makes all kinds of beautiful rackets.

Not only are Ty Segall fans likely to be pressing this on people for the next few months, it also might be just about the best album he’s put his own name to. And that means it’s also likely to be the gateway Ty Segall drug for all those people who have yet to pay him any attention at all. [Pete Wild] Listen to: Freedom, Take Care (To Comb Your Hair)

Ty Segall

Cloud Nothings

Life Without Sound [Wichita Recordings, 27 Jan]

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Coldharbourstores

Sacred Paws

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Not Even Happiness [Basin Rock, 13 Jan] On her second album, Byrne expands her pallette and enriches her singular methodology. The setting is all at once familiar and then, in an instant, anything but. Here is folk music reimagined. Tenderly, expertly picked guitar supports the voice: Byrne doesn’t so much sing as exhale and her unforced delivery serves to mesmerise.

The elementary nature of the songs disguises a shrewd compositional sense. Not Even Happiness eschews conventional melody and instead – like the very best of Nick Drake – builds atmosphere and drama by letting songs drift free, breathe and unfurl. This is an album of rare beauty. [Gary Kaill]

Listen to: Follow My Voice, Natural Blue

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Review

Wilderness [Enraptured, 20 Jan]

Strike a Match [Rock Action, 27 Jan]

After 14 years away, Coldharbourstores return with eight tracks of luscious indietronica, deftly brushed by the hand of shoegaze and with their sense of ruminative melancholia intact.

A marvellous production job from Graham Sutton (Bark Psychosis, East India Youth) allows the band space to breathe amidst the Cocteaus-esque shimmer of opener Sightless, but it’s new vocalist Lucy Castro who seals the deal. Whether soaring and searching (Genie) or pitchshifted and mysterious (Kissing), she gives character and colour to David Read and Michael McCabe’s shifting washes of melody and texture. Unlikely as it is to bust them out of the indie ghetto, Coldharbourstores’ unexpected return is a very lovely thing indeed. [Will Fitzpatrick]

Ah, this is such a tonic. Opener Nothing is the eyebrow-raiser and Rest is all it takes to seal the deal: from curious to committed in six minutes. Sacred Paws’ DIY ethos has little truck with identikit indie shapes, instead taking its cue from classic Afropop: the burbling beats, clean guitar tone, voices raised in sweet uplifting harmony, and the deft picking of the high strings a refreshing alternative to the, huh, regular alternative.

Strike A Match is shot through with an infectious bonhomie – one that transforms the lyrical concerns of Everyday and Getting Old into little three-minute celebrations of the humdrum sadness of the day-to-day. An intriguing and deeply satisfying debut. [Gary Kaill]

Listen to: Sightless, Kissing

Listen to: Empty Body, Ride

We know what to expect from Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi by now, and on fourth record Life Without Sound we hear the band taking a more polished and ruminative approach under producer John Goodmanson.

Although the record was written in less hectic circumstances than 2014’s Here and Nowhere Else, Cloud Nothings’ pace certainly doesn’t drop, as the haunting piano that starts opener Up to the Surface quickly makes way for Baldi’s usual dramatic power chords and yowls, supported by TJ Duke’s motorik bass and Jayson Gerycz’s dynamic drum-

Ed Dowie

The Uncle Sold [Lost Map, 27 Jan]

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Back at the dawn of the millennium, Portsmouth’s Brothers in Sound looked destined for biggish things. Labelmates of The Beta Band, the trio’s subtle rhythms, gentle beats and loops won them fans among those who appreciated their modish blend of psychedelia.

Fast forward almost two decades since their debut single and former member Ed Dowie is leading a pleasingly odd existence as a composer for various theatre, short film and art projects as well

RECORDS

ming. ‘Saw what I’d done and who I’d been / I wasn’t comfortable with me,’ Baldi reflects on the anthemic Things Are Right With You, and on Life Without Sound we sense him being more outward than ever in his lyrical scope, with the catchy war-and-Godreferencing Modern Act providing the greatest balance between melody and wisdom.

Although Baldi has more observations to share than his previous records – and makes them with snarling passion and versatility – that added maturity isn’t quite matched by his songs yet, with the mellowed Enter Entirely soured by the discordant chaotic tantrums of Strange Year and Realize My Fate.

While bracing throwbacks, they serve to obscure his new insights. Baldi’s certainly matured; all he needs now is for his music to catch up. [Chris Ogden] Listen to: Things Are Right With You, Modern Act, Enter Entirely as making the kind of hauntingly autumnal folk music which permeates this, his debut album.

Despite the pastoral feel of proceedings, the theme is actually that of the city with The Uncle Sold taking its title from the 1995 Kazuo Ishiguro novel The Unconsoled (geddit?), a book that takes the reader on a continually evolving, dream-like journey around a non-specified city.

Dowie’s voice is the real winner here, recalling the plaintive deadpan tones of Robert Wyatt, as the delicate haze of instrumentation and choral tones rises and swells like the hopes and dreams of the urbanites whose lives are depicted here. A gently beautiful collection of stolen snapshots of glimpsed futures and lost pasts. [Jamie Bowman] Listen to: Yungpawel, Verbarhemiopia

THE SKINNY

Austra

Future Politics [Domino, 20 Jan]

Draw the curtains, light a candle and polish your crystal ball. It sounds as if Katie Stelmanis’ darkwave electro-pop outfit has been reading plenty of Huxley for her reimagining of our future, but there’s an eerie drip of supernaturalism tangled within the science fiction.

Writing on Facebook about album namesake track Future Politics, she asserts: “It’s time to build visions that are radically different from anything we’ve known before.” A noble statement, but what good are visions when you’re calling for change?

The blueprints for the Toronto musician’s third album reveal a complacency that jars against the mission statement; rather than a forward-facing examination of possibility and potential, Future Politics relies upon Stelmanis’ majestic, unsettling vocals to lift 11 tracks built from similar bricks.

Stelmanis’ opening question (‘What if we were alive?’) promises much but as tracks like I’m A Monster and I Love You More Than You Love Yourself offer beautiful but literal examinations of their titles, you begin to suspect that the sentiment rings hollow. Likewise, Deep Thought’s heavenly, bubbling waters reveal little beneath a shimmering surface. And yet, Beyond A Mortal explores unknown subterranean caverns with shivering footsteps and baggy, scratching beats: Stelmanis’ voice reflects and refracts, tracing uncertainties with her breath in icy air. Angel In Your Eye, the record’s brave, powerful highlight, harnesses the power of chemical corrosion for a rusted, ominous pop song that is truly haunting.

On Future Politics we find Austra revolving on the spot, caught in a flattering beam of light but still hovering on the brink of taking those first, brave steps towards a radical utopia. After all, it’s easier to speak of change than it is to cause it.

[Katie Hawthorne] Listen to: Angel In Your Eye, Beyond A Mortal

Mark Eitzel

Hey Mr Ferryman [Decor Records, 27 Jan]

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Hey Mr Ferryman continues in the vein of 2012’s Don’t Be A Stranger, lessening the self-laceration in favour of a far more reasoned and, dare we say, pop-friendly approach. Of course, Eitzel’s co-conspirator this time around is Bernard Butler who not only administers a very sympathetic production to Eitzel’s songs, letting them breathe and find their own space amid the typically rich lyricism, but also works as a masterful guitar foil, weaving his way in and around the entire album.

Crucially, the grain in Eitzel’s voice has shifted from anguish to empathy; particularly in opening track The Last Ten Years and gorgeous album stand-out An Answer, Eitzel’s gentle croon belies a bruised beauty, imparting wisdom. And of course, the black humour is still intact: In My Role as Professional Singer and Ham is perhaps the archetypal Mark Eitzel song title (echoing American Music Club’s In My Role as the Most Hated Singer in the Local Underground Music Scene) yet is couched in a sumptuous stringladen arrangement, gliding to a triumphant glissando-like coda.

On Hey Mr Ferryman, Eitzel no longer exudes such a colossal sense of searing introspection – perhaps he has finally reconciled with himself – and, in Bernard Butler, he’s found the perfect foil to achieve this harmony. [Colm McAuliffe] Listen to: An Answer, In My Role As Professional Singer, Ham

January 2017

SOHN

SOHN

Rennen [4AD, 13 Jan]

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Christopher Taylor, aka SOHN is back with Rennen, the follow-up to his beautiful 2014 debut Tremors.

Starting where his previous album left off, the eerie mechanical hook of Hard Liquor makes for the perfect opener, eventually closing with the sound of a needle skipping on a record. Then the intro to Conrad kicks in (‘I can feel it coming / We can never go back’), and the familiar sound of his

inimitable vocal reaffirms that yes, this is indeed a SOHN record.

Conrad is his response to Europe’s precarious political climate, with environmental analogies at its core: ‘As the ice is melting, merging with ocean / All our eyes are open and we’re looking out to sea’.

Building on layers of synths and unconventional percussion (empty glasses, walls, floors and kitchen utensils), Taylor continues: ‘We’re lost civilians with the weight of millions / We’re pawns in war living in denial’. But despite the subject matter, the overall effect is bizarrely uplifting – it gives the impression that SOHN is perhaps a glass-halffull kind of guy. It feels hopeful.

This is probably due to positive changes in Taylor’s personal life, from falling in love to getting married and recently becoming a father. ‘Time

and time again you keep the peace / Give me shelter / Let me be the man I wanted to be,’ he sings on Signal, a song rhythmically reminiscent of Massive Attack’s Teardrop.

Returning to the political themes at the heart of the album, Primary – a song written when the primary elections started in America – opens with: ‘Give me patience to wait for another day / Help me hold my tongue, keep the rage away / Nobody seems able to make a change / And I can’t believe we’re not better than this’. There’s a real vulnerability to Taylor’s voice, too, reminding us of his mastery of light and shade. Rennen is more thought-provoking than its predecessor, but it’s still unmistakably SOHN. [Tallah Brash] Listen to: Conrad, Dead Wrong

A Winged Victory for the Sullen

Iris [Erased Tapes, 13 Jan]

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In many ways, it’s surprising that A Winged Victory for the Sullen have made it this far without having scored a film before. They specialise in the cinematic, fashioning drama in the most sweeping terms and the most nuanced. Their last record – although ‘collection of suites’ might be more apt – felt like the cleverest distillation yet of Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran’s fusion of classical and electronic, and this follow-up to Atomos was commissioned as the soundtrack to Jalil Lespert’s Iris.

The resulting album feels like an exercise in understatement – it’s difficult to know whether it’s a case of self-restraint or a situation in which the shackles are being enforced. When it’s good, it’s really good – like the shimmering atmospherics of Fantasme and Galerie, while the burbling electronics on Retour au Champs de Mars feel like a nod to Vangelis’ Blade Runner score – but elsewhere, you wish they’d push down just a little bit harder on the accelerator. Tracks like Le Renversement are barely there, and Le Retour en Foret feels as if it’s going over familiar ground. A Winged Victory for the Sullen still feel as if they’re in a lane of their own – but perhaps they’re at their best when they’re the only people in it. [Joe Goggins]

Listen to: Fantasme, Galerie, Retour au Champs de

Invisible Boy

Piano Magic

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Invisible Boy [Totally Gross National Product, 6 Jan] The bass player for Poliça, for the uninitiated, but just to call Chris Bierden that would be a disservice to his prodigious work rate. Superficially speaking, Invisible Boy is indebted to synthpop and perhaps even soft psych; there’s a lot of woozy soundscapes and electronic textures, and Bierden’s vocals are pitched high but delivered smoothly.

The arrangements are pretty, but in a world where the likes of Ducktails and Panda Bear find a way to make pleasantly hazy pop that gently nestles in your brain, Bierden doesn’t quite do enough to grab the listener. A pleasant detour, but not a great deal more than that. [Joe Goggins]

Listen to: All the Kids, Darling, So Long Living

RECORDS

Closure [Second Language Music, 20 Jan] All good things must come to an end: Piano Magic’s twelfth album is also their final one, and what a way to bow out. An elegiac grace has always clung to Glen Johnson’s forever-in-flux collective, and their post-rock origins remain obvious in these sparse, subtle songs, even when smothering the title track’s chorus in howitzer guitars.

It’s Johnson’s voice that takes centre stage, however, and he explores the concept of closure through relationship breakdowns, painting the very notion as unattainable. At a time when their contemporaries are all celebrating 20-year anniversaries, it’s typical that this band of standalone misfits should choose to use theirs as a final flourish. [Will Fitzpatrick] Listen to: Closure, Landline

The Drifters [WONDERFULSOUND, 6 Jan] This debut effort from Marie Merlet and Matthieu Beck is like a long bath with a mug of herbal brew; a soothing and rejuvenating record that sounds a bit like Happy Meals in a woolly jumper while extolling the virtues of some quality solo time (Time To Get Alone) and a good night’s sleep (One Last Drink).

The pair’s lullaby vocals and chirpy keyboard presets project a naive playfulness that belies understated and mature arrangements. Realise Realise is a regrettably anonymous introduction that’s quickly forgotten in the wake of stronger tracks like trippy instrumental Jóia and breathy romantic swooner Oh Stop! Try giving The Drifters a spin next time you need a breather. [Andrew Gordon] Listen to: Time To Get Alone, Jóia, Oh Stop!

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Photo: Phil Knott

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Guest Selector: Setaoc Mass Ahead of his show at Glasgow’s Art School this month, SK_eleven label boss Setaoc Mass delves into his record bag to share childhood favourites, obscure gems, and all time favourite techno hits Interview: Claire Francis

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anchester-born Sam Coates, aka Setaoc Mass credits his hometown for his introduction to techno music. Now based in Berlin, the young DJ and producer is making a name for himself with his own muscular, otherworldly brand of techno, as well as heading up his own SK_eleven imprint (SK11 being the postcode of Coates’ family home just beyond the outskirts of Manchester).

Coates’ most recent EP, the four-track collection Cycles, was released last month; ahead of his date at The Art School with Animal Farm on 14 January, we spoke with him about some of the standout records in his collection.

What’s your favourite song or track from your childhood?

Think it has to be The Beatles’ Octopus’s Garden.

I remember the cassette never left my player for a very long time. I was only young, maybe eight or nine years old.

Clubbing Highlights January’s where it all goes quiet, right?

WRONG. Here’s our pick of the month’s must-attend club nights

Output Launch – Big Miz and Residents, Stereo, Glasgow, 7 Jan Output kick off our 2017 clubbing calendar with a launch party headlined by local legend Big Miz. A curator of secret weapons and floor fillers, Big Miz has played alongside homegrown talent such as Jackmaster and Denis Sulta, as well as recent gigs with the likes of Leon Vynehall and Pariah. His debut EP Midnight Man Handle was released on Dixon Avenue Basement Jams in 2015 to critical acclaim, thanks in part to the epic Good Thing which has become a widespread staple in any self-respecting DJ’s set. Catch Big Miz in action at Stereo where he’ll be supported by Output residents Kny, Jack James and Mass P (£6+bf).

Return To Mono with Ilario Alicante, Sub Club, Glasgow, 13 Jan With Slam away, Italian techno figurehead Ilario Alicante takes the Sub Club reins with a special four-hour set. The young Alicante made his recordbreaking Time Warp debut at the tender age of 15, and has gone on to deliver acclaimed productions for Cocoon Recordings, Cécille Records and SCI+ TEC Digital Audio. Expect old school techno mixed with industrial heft and jacking beats (£10+bf).

Shapework with Randomer, Edinburgh, 14 Jan This month sees London-based Randomer, aka Rohan Walder, visit Edinburgh to deliver a heady dose of percussive techno and electronica. Randomer has released records for Turbo Recordings, Numbers, Hessle Audio and Hemlock, and recently collaborated with Perc on last year’s joint EP Igneous. He plays a Saturday night at The Mash House with support from the Shapework DJs (£7+bf).

Animal Farm, The Art School, Glasgow, 14 Jan On the same evening over in Glasgow, Animal Farm call up SK_eleven label boss Setaoc Mass for his Scottish debut. Now based in Berlin, Manchesterborn Sam Coates is a young DJ and producer forging a new wave of urgent, futuristic techno. His impressive debut was released on Len Faki’s Fig-

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Review

Words: Claire Francis Illustration: Jake Hollings

ure label; catch him in action with a warm-up provided by Animal Farm’s Quail and Turtle (£5+bf).

Odyssey. 005 – George Fitzgerald, Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, 19 Jan Perennial favourite George Fitzgerald is joined by Khalid Hussain and Nick Checketts for Odyssey’s first show of 2017 at Cab Vol. Fittingly for such an occasion, they’ll go all the way through to 5am with a late-night Thursday license in place (£10-15+bf).

Which track always inspires you?

Probably something non-techno related like Ludovico Einaudi. All his music is really inspiring, emotional and hypnotic to me.

The best tune to open a set with?

To be honest, I usually start most of my sets with some ambient or bleeps. Talismann’s track Russia has been used many times to open a set.

What record do you like to listen to at home?

Probably Aphex Twin’s album I Care Because You Do. I’m always coming back to this album and listening to it over and over, never getting bored.

Tell us about an obscure gem in your collection?

Carl A. Finlow’s Anomaly, probably... not that obscure, but it is definitely a gem.

What track do you wish you’d produced/written?

Can I quote Aphex Twin again?! Vordhosbn is one track I definitely wish I’d produced, it’s got so many different elements which would all sound amazing on their own, and when they’re combined, it’s like living in another world.

What was one of your favourite tracks to come out in 2016?

AWB – Ecliptic [Antigone x Shlømo remix]. This track is just pure techno, and shows how good this year was for techno.

Tell us the last track you had to look up with Shazam?

I just had a look through my Shazam history and found Susumu Yokota’s Azukiiro No Kaori. There’s so much good music by this artist.

What kind of music might we be surprised to find you listening to?

Hmm...couldn’t really answer that, although I do generally like to listen to a lot of classical music. I don’t know much about the genre, I just love the sinister sound.

Finally, what is your all-time favourite techno track?

James Ruskin – Work [Steve Rachmad remix]. I just recently started playing this again in most of my sets; two absolute pioneers of techno and two of my heroes. This track really brings them together.

The original is just as great as the Rachmad remix.

Million Dollar Disco Annual Party, The Berkeley Suite, Glasgow, 21 Jan The fifth annual Million Dollar Disco party is back this January, with local disco don Al Kent again flying solo for the full four hours. The show coincides with the release of his long awaited Men In The Glass Booth album on BBE, and there will be free copies of the record up for grabs on the night. Don’t want to miss out? Last year a lengthy queue had formed by 10pm, so best get down early (£8 otd).

Headway with Skream, The Reading Rooms, Dundee, 27 Jan Oliver Jones’ metamorphosis from dubstep aficianado to serious house and techno contender continues this month with a show in Dundee, on the back of the dance music mainstay’s mammoth UK tour. Skream’s place at number 15 in Resident Advisor’s Top DJs of 2016 poll certainly hints that his career transition has been a welcome one (£15+bf).

Fractal Club with Nick Höppner, The Liquid Room, Edinburgh, 28 Jan After launching last year, Fractal Club are back for their fourth installment with none other than Berlin’s Nick Hoppner at the helm. The Berghain/ Panorama Bar resident is a key figure in Berlin’s house and techno scene, and former manager of the famed club’s in-house label Ostgut Ton. Join Hoppner plus residents E.Wan and Chris G for a night of the finest house and techno tunes (£10-14+bf).

CLUBS

THE SKINNY

January 2017

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Bard is a Four-Letter Word Our poetry columnist starts 2017 by speaking with emerging poet Keith Hutson about his debut collection of 31 sonnets, Routines. He looks at writing habits, influences and resolutions for the new year

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t’s nice to start the new year with a fresh new voice on the poetry scene. So, this month I have the pleasure of reporting back from a conversation with Halifax-dwelling poet Keith Hutson, whose debut pamphlet Routines has recently been published by Poetry Salzburg (which also earned him a position on their editorial board) and who has been invited personally by Carol Ann Duffy to read with her and another poet in February 2017, at the RSL TS Eliot Memorial event at the British Library.

Keith has written scripts as well, and as a dedicated lover of both performance and the page he proved an interesting interviewee. Amongst various topics, we covered writing habits and resolutions for the New Year.

The Skinny: What is the collection about, in a nutshell?

Keith Hutson: Routines is 31 sonnets celebrating the hard, sometimes tragic, often joyous, always extraordinary lives of music hall and variety artistes. I started writing the sonnets about 18 months ago. I have many more, for a future collection, as well as other, more free-form, poems on the same theme. But I have not written

The Animators

exclusively on this theme during this period. I write poems about many different things.

Was there a particular trigger which caused you to focus on these themes?

I have written for Coronation Street, and for many well-known comedians, so I have always had a love of light entertainment. The best performers, and their material, are up there with any culturally iconic genre, as are all the acrobats, ventriloquists, plate spinners, dancers, singers, and so many other acts that the nation, over the years I write about (1800 to the 1970s, roughly) has loved.

But perhaps the ‘trigger’ for me beginning to write these sonnets, in particular, was a love of this poetic form (I call it a strait-jacket made by angels, because the discipline of formal form tends to liberate my creativity) and a growing awareness that any direct link to the likes of Dan Leno, Little Titch, Vesta Tilly and their performance styles has almost disappeared.

Do you have any routines or habits when you write?

I write five days a week, in the morning, from about

7am to about 1pm. The rest of the day is spent doing other things (I have a smallholding, a dog, and I’m a jogger) but I never stop thinking about my writing. In the evenings, when not performing, I read. I don’t have any particular process or habit apart from sitting at the table and picking up my pen. Only later drafts make it onto the laptop, and sometimes they’re taken off again, and committed once more to paper and pen. I use a thesaurus and a dictionary – anyone who doesn’t isn’t taking their writing seriously. It’s like trying to build a wall without a spirit level. I research as I’m writing, because that is part of my writing process. I love writing form – sonnets, villanelles, terza rima. I love rhyme. But I don’t condemn free form at all, and often employ a more free approach. I’d love to say what I think of poets who are dismissive of formal structure and rhyme, but it wouldn’t do my poetry career any good.

Which poets have you been particularly inspired by, if any?

I absolutely love the poetry of Michael Symmons Roberts, Carol Ann Duffy, David Constantine and Clare Shaw.

Cheesy question time… any writing goals or vague plans for the near future?

My only writing goal for the new year is to keep doing what I do. It’s working for me. Since I began submitting my poems to journals three years ago, I’ve had over sixty published, and quite a lot of competition successes so if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I know myself very well, and know what works for me. The main thing is to do it. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant – I’m just trying to be honest. Other themes I’m working on are sport (I’m an ex-amateur boxer), physical work (as well as scriptwriting, I ran a large landscaping business for many years), and a series of poems under the theme of Journeyman, which I suppose are more directly autobiogaphical. I have had offers of publication for next year, so I might publish another ‘artistes’ collection, or take a break from that, and publish poems about another theme – or do both.

Routines is out now, available from Poetry Salzberg, RRP £5 poetrysalzburg.com/hutson

By Emma Flint

Severance/ Intercourse

Montpelier Parade

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Watching lines on paper come to life is a magic trick that never fades, the simple and infinite pleasure of animation. Sharon and Mel arrive at art school in awe of it, the weird kids ostracised in their home towns for loving the wrong music, dressing the wrong way and knowing that cartoons are a serious business. Both are driven into the bigger, brighter worlds inside their heads and TV screens by their dim reality – Sharon being absorbed shyly into fictions while Mel explodes out into the real world as her own larger than life creation. They become friends and creative partners on first contact, spilling their inner lives into their cartoons in an attempt to draw a version they can make sense of.

As the plot moves along in Kayla Rae Whitaker’s debut novel, the twists come less like bends in the road than eighteen-wheelers careering out of nowhere to smash through their lives. Death, illness and insecurity, childhood secrets and fears about the future – The Animators is about trying to make art, find love and keep sane amongst the chaos of everyday life.

Whitaker’s heroes have that cartoon quality of being more brightly coloured and clearly drawn than reality yet so human as to make them utterly absorbing. It hurts when they get hit and you soar when they succeed – more than anything else, you just want to spend more time with them. [Ross McIndoe]

As a single mother, cocktail waitress and incorrigible man-eater, Ruth Malone is the epicentre of neighbourhood gossip. But when her two young children go missing, she soon finds herself the focus of a police investigation as well.

Will Ruth’s refusal to play up to the image which society demands ultimately cost her the freedom she cherishes?

Set in 1960s New York, Little Deaths purports to be a sleek and stylish thriller, with more hardboiled characters than you can shake a stroller at. Reporters, detectives and lawyers vie for the title of least runny yolk in this pressure cooker of a novel. One which unfortunately promises a little more than it can deliver. The cast of characters are made up largely of two-dimensional affairs who refuse to talk to the press one minute, before spilling more beans than a leaky Haribo bag the next. Meanwhile, the two figures of real intrigue – the unreliably lovelorn narrator Pete and the enigmatic Ruth, at the centre of everything – don’t have their ambiguities explored nearly enough.

Yet for all that, the fast pace of the book pulls the reader along with its momentum, while the hazy 60s setting is brimming with atmospheric tension. Fans of the genre will be hooked to the final page just to find out whodunnit, but hopefully more is to come from this fledgling author.

[Jonny Sweet]

Out 31 Jan, published by Scribe, RRP £12.99

Out 12 Jan, published by Pan Macmillan, RRP £12.99

This is a tale of two books, bound together as one.

The reader need only flip and reverse to move between a collection of vignettes describing moments of intercourse or the 90 seconds of consciousness following decapitation. So, ‘La petite mort’ or, well… the bigger one. An initially strange sounding pairing settles into clarity when considering the French term for orgasm translates to ‘the brief loss or weakening of consciousness’.

Pulitzer prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler depicts the untethered post-chop streams of thought as the viscous liquid of dreams. Worryingly, the carnal ponderings are similarly surreal and meandering.

This is experimental writing in its purest form, comparable in many ways to Édouard Levé’s Newspaper – that dark collection of fictionalised reports. While Levé’s aim was to reflect the modern world as reported through our media, Olen Butler’s seems more fragmented. Apart from the title themes, there seems little to build these collections into some grand vision. They are still highly entertaining – these imagined moments of real people (Intercourse features such notables as Charles & Diana, Bonnie & Clyde, Whitman & Wilde. Severance includes Yukio Mishima, Anne Boleyn, Jayne Mansfield. Everyday unknowns also take their place, and in both cases, for some reason, a chicken).

Kudos to indy publisher NOEXIT2 for this beautifully designed, reversible double offering; a curio in form as well as content. A must for fans of sex and death. [Alan Bett]

By Kayla Rae Whitaker

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Little Deaths

Words: Clare Mulley

By Robert Olen Butler

By Karl Geary

A cold, wet spring in Dublin. Sonny sees Vera for the first time while he’s working in her garden with his da. She walks down the path towards him and he’s transfixed. Soon he’s in love, filled with curiosity and desire for this woman from a different world.

It’s a coming of age story without gloss. Geary puts you right in the action with the raw closeness of the second person narrator. So you’re right there with Sonny as he keeps fucking up without meaning to. You think and feel as he does, you remember the adolescent awkwardness that once conspired against you. You see again how unfair it is that childish actions have such adult consequences.

The novel draws its intensity from the gap between emotions and words. No one can express how they feel: we witness Sonny’s mum in a state of hopeless frustration; then Sharon, lost and hurting beneath the teenage bravado; and Vera, all but sinking into the black depths of her mind. Try as he might, Sonny can’t save any of them.

This is Geary’s first novel, but you can tell he’s no first-timer. The precision in his prose belies his training as a scriptwriter; the plot unfolds with self-assured ease, and the dialogue lives on the page. There’s no rush, no over-explanation, no showing off. He trusts his reader, and the novel has compulsive power because of it. An astonishing debut. [Galen O’Hanlon] Out 5 Jan, published by Harvill Secker, RRP £12.99

Out now, published by NOEXIT2, RRP £12.99

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Review

BOOKS

THE SKINNY

This Month in Scottish Art It’s a brand new year of art programmes, events and exhibitions. Check out the digest of 2017 so far on page 21, but for now here’s what’s coming up this month Words: Adam Benmakhlouf

Ella Kruglyanskaya, Girl with sunglasses, 2008

Ella Kruglyanskaya

Tramway

rrrrr Ella Kruglyanskaya’s solo show at Tramway spans 11 years of her practice. Works made before this year are mainly compositions of various sizes featuring cartoonish and dramatically curvy women, sometimes set amongst brightly bold patterns.

2016 then brings a distinct set of large paintings of photographs of urns and ornaments from reference books.

Across the work, there’s a twin interest in painterliness (drips and brushstrokes) and the possibilities of reducing the figurative to shapes, abstraction and so a flatness that gives a sense of the painting as an object. See for example Lemons and Lips, when a foreshortened thigh becomes just a blue band, or the lips and lemons that decorate the clothing of the two women. They’re painted no differently than the hands and features of their faces.

This self-aware and reflexive mode of painting becomes more pronounced in more recent

works in which book pages and drawings are the subjects of large paintings. In the urns especially, there’s just as much interest but a slower reveal and reduction of noise – more empty space.

By contrast, see 2010’s Lobster Picnic when two women fall asleep under their books in the sun and bracket a lobster in the middle, with beach towel decorations of ropes and rubber rings complicating the sense of space or dimension. In this noisey and complicated rendering of flatness and form, there’s nevertheless a sense of narrative and drama among the more formal experimentation. In this way, Kruglyanskaya disturbs an easy confidence of being able to work out the status of what’s being looked at (decoration, pattern motif, representation of an object) within the context of stagey compositions.

Shown together like this, these marked changes in tone and visual syntax are as excitingly apparent as the intrigue and unpredictability of Kruglyanskaya’s technique and choices of subject matter. [Adam Benmakhlouf]

Oliver Laric Untitled, 2014-2015 4K video, colour Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

Run ended

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Install View

Poppies

Gallery of Modern Art

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Exuberantly taking a wing each (loosely speaking) for their exhibition together in Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, Joanne Robertson and Max Brand – based in London and Berlin, respectively – go hand to hand with the three U-shaped corridors that make up the Gallery's middle-floor space.

Straight ahead on entering, Robertson comes first with railings of clothes that are all somewhere between new and worn. Add to that a perceptible taste seeming to inform the different items and the possibility of making colour connections to the fast-painted abstractions, this sense of a singular style emphasises the partiality of the abstract paintings.

One painting on the wall is red, orange, brown, green, purple and sky blue. It’s convivial, frenetic and signals a great deal of sincerity amongst the clothes rails, quickly rendered floor painting below them and wall painting round the corner.

January 2017

Whereas Robertson’s large oil on canvas paintings form a series of distinct works, Brand fills his wall painting and hanging fabrics with smaller drawings and paintings. More linear and looking cartoonish in places, they nevertheless tend to collapse into an expressive abstraction – floating arms and hands, then another looking like an aerial-view map.

In Brand’s end of the space, the collaborative music piece, saturation of surfaces and painted out windows increase the sense of being surrounded. Having the ambiguous, at points sinister then meditative soundtrack does a lot to transform the space into the kind of immersive atmosphere the hanging fabrics and huge wallpainting seem to suggest. With much of the work feeling provisional and single-use (tracing paper pasted and stapled to the wall, stained windows), this changes too the sense of the exhibition to a one-off event. Direct, urgent and full of details, Poppies is an unprecious and resourcefully expressive ruckus. [Adam Benmakhlouf] Until 11 Jun

ransmission begin the year with Brooklyn-based artist-activist Kameelah Janan Rasheed, who will transform the Transmission window with How to Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette). This series of public aphoristic large format digital prints examines the choreography and performance of the ‘angelic negro’ who in the face of routinised Black death must display superhuman restraint in repressing anger.

Towards the end of the month (date TBC), Embassy open a group show with three emerging artists who each in some way work with costume, prop and performance within their practice, including Edinburgh-based artists Gordon Douglas and Alima Askew, and London-based Mette Sterre.

Looking back to their residency programme of summer 2016, Market Gallery exhibit the work of the two artists. On 13 January, Lewis den Hertog will present a new publication from his research into grotesquery and body distortion. Co-resident Amelia Bywater will arrange a workshop following the development of Loom, a publishing project that focuses on writing, means of recording language and feedback across each iteration of the project through live events, screenings and printed matter.

On 18 January at The Common Guild, they begin the first in a series of projects titled Radical Dialect with art writer Maria Fusco. For this evening, she invites the cult Canadian poet Lisa Robertson to discuss the construction of the vernacular voice amidst the abolishment of a lyric culture. Places are free but limited, book via Eventbrite.

From 21 January, Tramway present a solo show of Berlin-based artist Oliver Laric. Laric’s practice, which comprises sculpture, video and installation, explores both historical and contemporary image economies. In particular, his work attends to the dynamic context of images: how they move, transform and replicate as part of an ever changing visual culture.

ART

Street Level Photography present an exhibition display of new photobooks and zines from Scotland from 28 January-5 February. They finish the exhibition with short presentations from the makers of several new projects on 4 February, and the launch of two new publications from Glasgowbased photographer Tine Bek’s collaborative publishing project Earth Saga Books.

GSA Exhibitions begin the year with a survey of the 35-year career of silversmith Simone ten Hompel from 14 January-23 February. Independent curator Amanda Game and ten Hompel for this show bring together domestic objects, sculpture, images, models and photographs to trace her exceptional work as designer, maker, teacher and curator in the field of contemporary metal design.

On 19 January, DCA’s current show on the DC Thomson publisher continues with gallery performances by Rob Churm and Malcy Duff. Both known for their absurdist humour in their visual art, from 7-8pm they will perform a mix of theatre, puppetry and spoken word in the galleries.

Towards the end of the month, on 27 January, Edinburgh Printmakers will unveil Firedamp: Revisiting the Flood by installation, sculpture and print artist Sean Caulfield. Looking particularly at the environmental transformation by forces of urban and industrial growth, Caulfield will cover the gallery in expansive woodcut prints. On Friday 27 January from 6.30-7.30pm, Caulfield will present his ideas in a free but ticketed event, before the official preview (all welcome) from 7.30-9pm.

Also on 27 January, CCA previews Forms of Action from 7-9pm. In this exhibition, they explore international developments in socially engaged practices that move art away from its usual environment and audience into the ‘cut and thrust of ordinary life.’ Putting together a diverse range of interests and approaches, this group show addresses issues including food and agriculture, second wave feminism, and radical gardening.

Review

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In Cinemas La La Land

Director: Damien Chazelle Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone Released: 13 Jan Certificate: 12A

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“How are you gonna be a revolutionary if you’re such a traditionalist?” John Legend’s Keith asks Sebastian (Gosling) in La La Land. It’s a valid question that Seb never really has an answer for and, perhaps more pertinently, neither does director Damien Chazelle. Fortunately for this immaculately dressed contemporary musical, the seduction of the past is just as potent for audiences as it is for the characters. La La Land is finely cut, A-grade nostalgia that proves nigh-onimpossible to resist.

Feet will be tapping right from the off thanks to a polychrome opening number, in which the grumbling denizens of a Los Angeles traffic jam burst out of their cars to sing and dance before silently slinking back behind the wheel and into everyday drudgery. It’s a clear riff on Fellini’s 8 1/2, and more appositely the work of Jacques Demy, whose spectre lingers throughout La La Land ’s shifts between fantastical musical whimsy and the realities of life. Although Seb and Mia (a winning Emma Stone) are presented as struggling artistes, their plight is always relatively comfortable – Chazelle acknowledges this at the outset with a jokey title that reads ‘winter’ over a gloriously sunny day.

As with much of La La Land, Chazelle is having his cake and eating it. He playfully chides genre conventions while making an ode to past masters.

He lays open his characters’ own faulty nostalgia but can’t see it through and ends with a scene taken straight from Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Of course, none of that matters if the cake is this delicious. Gosling and Stone may be no Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but their chemistry is undeniable and they’re capable of carrying the soundtrack’s catchy – if hardly extraordinary – tunes. In much the same way that flights of fancy give the characters respite from the compromises of life, La La Land has enough about it to distract from its flaws. It may not have answers, but it more than makes up for it with enchantment.

[Ben Nicholson] Released by Lionsgate

Manchester by the Sea

Director: Kenneth Lonergan Starring: Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler Released: 13 Jan Certificate: 15

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Kenneth Lonergan films centre on fatal accidents.

You Can Count on Me, a car crash. Margaret , a bus crash. In Manchester by the Sea – an equal to those two masterpieces – it’s a whole life that crashes in.

That life is Lee’s, played by a bulked-up Casey Affleck. At the beginning of the film he’s a cantankerous janitor living in a spartan bedsit. His pastimes are drinking and starting bar fights. This self-lacerating existence is interrupted both by flashbacks to happier times that seamlessly drop into the narrative and the death of his older brother, Joe (Chandler).

The latter event brings Lee back to his hometown, the New England fishing village of the title, which Lonergan films like it’s a Caspar David Friedrich seascape: cold and distant but swelling with emotion, just like Lee. As this taciturn loner sets about dealing with the funeral arrangements (they must wait for a thaw to bury Joe) and taking legal guardianship of Joe’s teenage son (Lee needs to do some thawing of his own before contemplating that prospect) the flashbacks to his

Manchester by the Sea

past continue, allowing us to piece together what happened to this once jovial family man.

In less masterful hands, this slow reveal might have felt manipulative. What makes Manchester by the Sea much more than an Oscar-chasing tear-jerker is its fine-grained performances and jet black humour, most of which stems from the prickly relationship Lee forms with his nephew Patrick (Hedges). The horny teen is brilliantly abrasive, and not about to let his sad-sack uncle get in the way of him chasing girls.

Silence

Director: Martin Scorsese Starring: Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Issey Ogata, Tadanobu Asano, Yōsuke Kubozuka, Liam Neeson Released: 1 Jan Certificate: 15

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The silence is deafening in Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating adaptation of Shōsaku Endō’s 1966 novel. Despatched to hostile Japan to locate a priest (Neeson) rumoured to have renounced his faith, young Jesuit Sebastião (Garfield) constantly beseeches God for a word or a sign that he is on the right path, but the lack of a response leaves him plagued by doubts.

Silence is a searching, questioning and profoundly moving examination of what it means to be a man of faith, to hold on to that faith, and to impose it upon others. These complex theological issues come to a head in the duels between Sebastião and the Grand Inquisitor (the remarkable Issey Ogata), while the cruel fate of the Japanese who have accepted Christ’s teachings is presented to us in some of the most harrowing sequences Scorsese has ever filmed.

With its patient storytelling, lack of music and stark widescreen compositions, Silence is probably Scorsese’s most ascetic film, but this ambitious attempt to grapple with questions that have weighed upon his whole career also stands as one of his greatest achievements. [Philip Concannon]

A glorious Michelle Williams appears briefly as Lee’s ex-wife Randi, and she’s like an atomic bomb of emotion. Even better is Affleck, who keeps Lee’s pain buried deep, his high voice sounding like it’s about to crack at any moment. Lonergan does something similar by avoiding those cathartic outpourings so overused in Hollywood dramas. Scars can’t heal, only fade imperceptibly. Manchester by the Sea shows that the same goes for heartbreak. [Jamie Dunn] Released by StudioCanal

Loving

Director: Jeff Nichols Starring: Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga, Michael Shannon Released: 3 Feb Certificate: 15

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The marriage of Richard and Mildred Loving in 1958 was a revolutionary act with far-reaching political consequences, but Richard and Mildred were not revolutionaries. They simply wanted to live together like any other couple, and Jeff Nichols’ Loving takes its lead from their quiet dignity. There no emotional outbursts, no dramatic twists, and instead of building to the rousing Supreme Court speechifying that we might expect, the Lovings’ historically seismic victory is expressed in the most understated terms.

It’s an admirable approach, but it also leaves the film lacking in dramatic thrust and emotional heft, and it sometimes seems that director Jeff Nichols is so burdened by the weight of doing justice to this story he’s wary of introducing any kind of artistic flourish. Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga both deliver modest, internalised performances – with Negga’s expressive eyes being one of Loving’s biggest virtues – and the film has some tender moments of intimacy, but the steady pace and unwavering tone grows stultifying. These are good people and it’s an important story, but that in itself is not quite enough. [Philip Concannon] Released by Picturehouse Entertainment

Released by Studio Canal

Jackie

Director: Pablo Larraín Starring: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, John Hurt, Richard E. Grant Released: 20 Jan Certificate: 15

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Natalie Portman’s portrayal of Jackie Kennedy may be the bookies’ favourite for the Best Actress Oscar, but Pablo Larraín’s Jackie is far from your conventional Hollywood biopic. Weaving together fragmented memories of the days following the assassination of John F Kennedy, Larraín shows how the death of a president gave birth to a legend.

During this period, Jackie famously compared her husband’s tenure in the oval office with King Arthur’s Camelot, and Larraín concentrates on this attempt to enshrine his presidency in mythology. Portman’s mannered performance is unforgettable, internalising Jackie’s grief into a quivering ball of anxiety, but it’s Mica Levi’s score that’s the film’s real star. Layering wailing strings over the bellow of melancholic horns, Levi violently manipulates the traditional orchestral score of a prestige picture to express how the building of a myth around one person can distort history. Peeling away the artifice of the Kennedy legacy to reveal the raw nerve of failed idealism, Jackie is a bewitching study of mythmaking that underlines Larraín’s status as cinema’s most daring political filmmaker. [Patrick Gamble] La La Land

Released by Fox Searchlight

Rules Don’t Apply

Director: Warren Beatty Starring: Alec Baldwin, Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Haley Bennett, Candice Bergen, Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, Lily Collins, Steve Coogan, Alden Ehrenreich, Taissa Farmiga, Ed Harris, Megan Hilty, Oliver Platt, Martin Sheen Released: 27 Jan Certificate: 12A

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Somewhere in Rules Don’t Apply, Warren Beatty’s long-awaited return to filmmaking, there are two good films. One is a romantic comedy about two people (Alden Ehrenreich and Lily Collins) who fall in love in the 1950s while working for the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes (Beatty), who strictly forbids inter-employee relationships; the other a quirky but layered, fictionalised look at the later years of Hughes’ remarkable, lonely, paranoiaplagued life.

It is a shame that these intriguing concepts are mashed together into one nonsensical plot, each cannibalising the best elements of the other. Ehrenreich and Collins do their best to feed off the scraps but the choppy editing and a conveyor belt of distracting cameos never really give them a chance to breathe life into their lovelorn characters. Ironically, Beatty’s wonderful performance as the erratic billionaire is the film’s only constant, causing chaos, comedy and pathos in delightfully unpredictable measures. Unfortunately for him, the rules do apply: too little of a good thing is simply not enough. [Ben Rabinovich] Released by Picturehouse Entertainment

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Review

FILM

THE SKINNY

CCA Highlights Words: Sebastian Fisher

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ully bloated out on seasonal cheer and having told 2016 precisely where it should go, the time for your fresh start has arrived. Resolutions don’t have to just be a drunken burble on a briefly illuminated New Year night, but a quest towards all that is enriching and fulfilling in this Rickmanless world. The CCA is freshly stocked right out of the gates with all the music, films, performance and military-grade culture you need to start your 2017 with renewed vigour.

Forms of Action (Sat 28 Jan-Sun 12 Mar, free) The CCA brings the new year in with a fresh focus on civic commitment. In its new exhibition, Forms of Action, a band of fantastic artists come together to create a space that questions the relationship of audience and artist, and how art survives scraping up against the muzzle of day to day life and the change in practice that it necessitates.

The exhibition is gloriously broad in scope, a magnificent miasma of storytelling, photography and performance that tackles subjects as core and intriguing as the socio-cultural implications of food and agriculture and second wave feminism. Be sure to also check out Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (or go back for more!), whose playful and nuanced exhibition on the joys and importance of communal art is still ongoing.

Glasgow Film Festival (Wed 15-Sun 26 Feb) Next up, our luck is in as the Glasgow Film Festival returns for the 13th time to the CCA. It will offer the usual smorgasbord of premieres, themed screenings and live performance – exploring the highlights of modern film and giving audiences a chance to go beyond the celluloid to peek at the lives and concepts that drive artists to create through Q&As and discussions. The full programme is announced on 19 January. Keep your eyes peeled.

Chasing Asylum (Wed 8 Feb, 6pm, free but ticketed) The world-flow of migrants is, shall we say, a thorny issue right now. Chasing Asylum – showing 8 February – is part exposé on the practice of keeping a country’s borders tight by unsavoury means, and part exploration of the lives of those who have no choice but to try and get past them.

Anna Meredith (Sat 4 Feb, 7.30pm, £12.50+bf) In music, the sonorous dynamite of Anna Meredith returns as part of Celtic Connections. Red-hot right now off the back of her successful 2016, she returns with a battery of orchestral instruments in tow to deliver her neo-cathedral sound. Acolytes to her faith should mass on 4 Feb.

Donnie Darko

Director: Richard Kelly Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Drew Barrymore, Mary McDonnell, Katharine Ross, Patrick Swayze, Noah Wyle Released: 12 Dec Certificate: 15

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Anna Meredith

Etel Adnan (Mon 30 Jan, 6pm, free) For writers, to live in exile is to live unmoored from your prescriptive visions of the world, and those who do have much to give us in our assessment of our times. Come and discuss Lebanese-American artist, essayist and poet Etel Adnan’s new book Of Cities & Women at the CCA and explore the experience of exile for an artist whose country has spent the start of the century ransacked by civil and international war.

Fright Night

The Man from Laramie

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Director: Tom Holland Starring: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse, Stephen Geoffreys, Roddy McDowall Released: 26 Dec Certificate: 15

Do you remember the first time you fell for Donnie Darko, the strange debut from Richard Kelly about a disturbed teen with an imaginary friend called Frank (a man-sized rabbit) who tells him the world will end in 28 days? Chances are you were young and impressionable, and your mind was easily blown by its superficial delights – the sci-fi philosophising, the pop-culture-referencing (do smurfs have genitalia?), the choice new wave soundtrack, the cute-as-a-button anti-hero (Jake Gyllenhaal). Looking back at the film on the occasion of its 15th anniversary, it’s clear its qualities run deeper than surface level.

Kelly’s balance of tone is remarkable, positioning the film on a razor’s edge between John Hughes teen turmoil and a David Lynch nightmare. The film has more soul than either of these touchstones, however. This is clear from the knockout opening scene where Donnie and his nuclear family is introduced, with each member given space to deliver at least one delicate grace note. Kelly’s love for his characters make Frank’s apocalypse prophesying all the more terrifying.

Donnie Darko’s baked-in weirdness remains bracing all these years later too, particularly when compared to subsequent movies that strive to be “mind-bending” (Christopher Nolan would sell his grandmother for a bit of this film’s magic). Even before the sci-fi elements are introduced, however, there’s an off-kilter quality to the film’s suburban world. The colour is drained and the image often breaks free of its axis or slips into dreamy slo-mo; it’s as if Kelly’s camera is on the same mind-altering meds as Donnie.

As pop as it is arthouse, as funny as it is tragic, Donnie Darko remains a remarkable one-off that’s easy to adore. The only downside to getting reacquainted: Tears for Fears’ Mad World will once again be your earworm. We’d only just shaken it off.

Suburban teenager Charley (Ragsdale) is on the brink of taking his relationship with girlfriend Amy (Bearse) to the next level when he clocks the arrival of an unwieldy coffin at the house next door.

Several unsubtle encounters leave horror fan Charley adamant that the new neighbour is a card-carrying vampire, so he’s understandably irked when his mother invites smouldering Jerry (Sarandon) into the house for a chinwag.

Mother and bae are equally distracted by undead Jerry’s debonair charms, ignoring Charlie’s protests. In desperation, he turns to his creature feature idol, ‘vampire hunter’ Peter Vincent (McDowall).

Vincent doesn’t believe him either – but he’s strapped for cash, so grudgingly gets involved.

Scripted by horror writer and music video director Tom Holland, Fright Night was a stab in the dark at reviving a genre that was already in an abject state of decay. But if anyone could stake a claim on the vampire movie, why not Holland, a man who had the gall to script Psycho II? The result is a film devoted to, and informed by, its genre.

This metatextual beast taps into a tangle of horror veins; here a steadicam prowl that recalls Carpenter, there a lacy gown fit for a Giallo donna.

Though it’s nowhere near the smirking reflexiveness of Craven’s Scream, for instance, Fright Night is undeniably self-aware. Female characters are hampered by a complete absence of agency, effects are gooey and outlandish. Moments of nuance or interest are trampled by hammy acting or insistent synths, all of which means Fright Night will mainly prove entertaining to those who view it in the same spirit as it was produced – as a horror artefact.

Extras They abound. There’s both cuts of the film (Director’s and Theatrical), Kelly’s short The Goodbye Place, onset documentary and interviews, B-roll footage and some sharp writing from critics Nathan Rabin, Anton Bitel and Jamie Graham. [Jamie Dunn]

Extras A comprehensive ‘making of’ entitled You’re So Cool Brewster spends over two hours poring over Holland’s background, casting decisions, special effects and outtakes. It’s presented by a faux Peter Vincent figure, and features extensive commentary from key cast members and crew. [Kirsty Leckie-Palmer]

Released by Arrow Video

January 2017

The End of Things (Tue 7 & Wed 8 Feb, 7.30pm, £8+bf) Finally, if you like your theatre to go big-concept, then The End of Things might be your – eh – thing. Let go of love and ultimately reality in a stunning performance from the experimental Glasgow-based theatre laboratory Company of Wolves. They offer a diverse performance of dance, music and improvisation as they beckon their audience to walk the path to the end and see what awaits.

ART / DVD

Director: Anthony Mann Starring: James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Crisp, Cathy O’Donnell, Alex Nicol, Jack Elam Released: 5 Dec Certificate: PG

The noirish, psychological westerns directed by Anthony Mann in the 1950s are some of the best the genre has to offer. Stewart, here making his fifth western alongside Mann, stars as an ex-soldier who arrives in Laramie eager to find out who has been selling repeater rifles to the Apaches who murdered his brother. Upon arrival he clashes with the sadistic son of a local landowner (Alex Nicol) and an ambitious cowhand (Arthur Kennedy) with his eyes on the town.

Mann is an expert in communicating the detailed workings of the worlds he presents in his films. His westerns operate within particular physical spaces with specific social and mechanical orders.

When Stewart’s gun hand is deliberately shot – in the film’s most famous scene – we are very aware of the insult and repercussions entailed. Similarly, the film clearly articulates other details such as the value of a particular type of gun, the nuances of the men’s individual codes and the relationships between the town’s complex network of characters.

This admirable attention to details adds a layer of verisimilitude, which compliments the high drama of the plotting – which is almost Shakespearean in its tangle of familial power-struggles. Add Stewart’s brilliantly dark turn as the revenge-fueled outsider, and some grandscale Technicolor CinemaScope photography, and you get a knotty, deeply idiosyncratic western that impresses on every front.

Extras It’s great to see Anthony Mann get the Blu-ray treatment and this is the second of his westerns to make it to Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series. The disc includes a 20-minute conversation with Kim Newman who is affable and informative about the film’s stars and its place in history. Australian critic Adrian Martin delivers a commentary track, while there is also a booklet featuring a new essay

by Philip Kemp and an interview with Anthony Mann. [Tom Grieve] Released by Masters of Cinema on DVD and Blu-ray

Review

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Manipulate turns ten With the panto season well and truly over, we turn our attention to Scotland’s visual theatre and film festival Words: Amy Taylor

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ater this month, the Scottish theatre calendar is set to wake up and kick off once more, after a brief period of traditionally-imposed panto hibernation, with the launch of the Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival, which marks its tenth anniversary this year. Produced by the team at Puppet Animation Scotland, the festival is set to once again celebrate visual theatre in all its forms, including not only animation and puppetry, but also dance and movement, to name just a few.

In keeping with previous years, this anniversary edition will include a mixture of brand new work and older favourites, and takes place in venues around the UK, from Aberdeen to Bristol. 2017 will also see the festival playing host to two world premieres, two European premieres, four UK premieres and one Scottish premiere. For a fully international flavour, this year Manipulate will also showcase work from Canada, Belgium, Spain, France and the UK – naturally including Scotland itself.

The programme will also feature familiar names performing their latest works, alongside newer, perhaps lesser-known companies, who are making their Manipulate debut – expect themes as diverse as trauma after conflict, dark fantasies, the relationship between humans and the world around them, and opposing points of view.

It all begins on 27 January at The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen with the UK premiere of Cities, by Manipulate first-timers Théâtre de la Pire Espèce; a new piece devised by Olivier Ducas and Julie Vallée-Léger which explores imaginary cities and the value that we place on objects. Another UK premiere taking place at the same venue is Poli Degaine, a Punch-style puppet show that has been performed in over 30 countries around the world and invites the audience to escape the mundane with creators La Pendue.

There’s also an opportunity to see a performance of Fisk, the new work by Edinburgh-based Fringe

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THEATRE

First winners Tortoise in a Nutshell, which explores the relationship between one man and a fish, and the impact that they have upon one another.

Elsewhere, Glasgow-based Company of Wolves continue their experiments with theatre, music and dance with The End of Things, a world premiere that explores humanity’s reluctance to embrace change, and marks their very first appearance at the festival. Meanwhile, Scottish theatre artist Sita Pieraccini is set to perform the world premiere of her latest work Make a HOO, which makes its second appearance at the festival and weaves together physicality, story, sound and technology.

The Snapshots: Artists@Work strand of the festival will give audiences exclusive access to see work-in-progress pieces. Consisting of performances from a range of artists and featuring a number of disciplines, this section of the festival opens up the dialogue between audience and artist and invites them to give feedback at a vital time in each piece’s development – this year’s snapshots include work from Faux Theatre, The Scottish Physical Theatre Diploma Course, Doctor Bunhead and Ainslie Henderson, among others.

Additionally, Manipulate will host a free scratch event featuring participants from its unique artist development programme Testroom – with appearances from Fergus Dunnet and Naomi O Kelly – while Scottish artist Robbie Thomson brings his robotic installation The Influencing Machine to the festival, having recently returned from a threemonth residency in Montréal.

Expect the fantastical, the unexpected, the unusual and the delightfully absurd, because Manipulate’s tenth anniversary programme shows that this festival continues to find and showcase the most outstanding and inspiring visual theatre out there. Here’s to another 10 years – or more...

Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival, 27 Jan-5 Feb 2017.

Further details (including full listings) can be found at manipulatefestival.org

THE SKINNY

Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic

Andy Cannon and Andy Manley

Votes vs Jokes The right say he's on the left, the left say he's on the right – who is the 'Five Star' comedian changing Italian politics?

Words: Ben Venables didate Virginia Raggi became the first female Mayor of Rome. Now, it is through their efforts that a Prime Minister has been toppled.

Grillo vs Grillo With, say, Al Murray or Al Franken, comedians entering politics had to go one way or the other. It’s either obviously a joke (Murray) or the comedic image must be dispensed with (Franken). Curiously, non-comedians such as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump have been able to imbue foolery into their image and character as a counterweight to overt political ambitions or, in the case of Trump, it’s playing by a different script altogether – by the time his ‘tossed salad’ approach to sentences have been fact-checked, he’s moved on to the next course. Beppe Grillo must be one of very few comedians where the job has been an advantage in a political arena.

Grillo is an admirer of Farage and has aligned Five Star with UKIP in the European Parliament.

Like Farage within the UK, his role does seem to be more effective from the sidelines, with Grillo not having been elected himself (a car accident in 1980 means Grillo has a record for manslaughter, and is not eligible for office). It might be partly how he’s managed to keep the image of a comedian without it being a term that does him harm. His movement are running for office, so can be serious, while he can play up whatever image suits the situation.

It’s been noted in the past that while he can criticise a politician, if a politician volleys back it looks unprofessional to argue or address a comedian.

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ithin the confines of our Comedy section, the words comedian and clown are always professional job titles, whereas to anyone else they are used interchangeably with ‘jackass’.

To say ‘comedian Nigel Farage’ suggests he can do an Edinburgh show. To call Donald Trump a clown conjures an image of him enrolled at Gaulier’s school outside Paris. When news was leaked of Bill Clinton saying that Labour chose Jeremy Corbyn because he was the “maddest person in the room”, it momentarily seemed like a compliment – a gift-wrapped poster quote for Corbyn’s next stand-up tour.

Admittedly, it’s not the worst occupational hazard, but it becomes a knottier problem when a politician is an actual comedian.

In Italy’s constitutional referendum in December, the government were defeated and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi tendered his resignation the next day. There is no doubt the victory belonged to comedian Beppe Grillo, leader of the Five Star Movement, a force challenging the orthodoxy of both Italian and European politics.

Comedians in Politics Beppe Grillo is the exception rather than the rule, for there aren’t as many comedians directly involved in politics as we might expect. We’re so used to stand-ups offering topical commentary on Question Time and Have I Got News For You that our sense of where politics and comedy overlap is exaggerated. It’s not uncommon for a comedian to associate themselves with a particular cause or campaign but it’s rare that they stand for election or lead a movement.

In the cases when comedians do put themselves forward in this way, it’s usually in special circumstances. Al Murray stood for election in 2015, but in character as The Pub Landlord and to hold a mirror up to Nigel Farage. In America, comedy writer and performer Al Franken is a senator

January 2017

for Minnesota. However, he’s almost entirely shed his comedic skin in order to do so. At the end of 2014, Russell Brand was more a media circus mascot for public frustrations – telling people not to vote, then later telling them to vote for Ed Miliband and what a lovely bloke Nick Clegg is... well, it just isn’t the work of a revolutionary prophet.

By contrast, Beppe Grillo has a political vision specific to certain issues, is direct and overt in his criticism, and has mobilised grassroots activism in pretty much every part of Italy. True, his detractors often compare him to Mussolini, or point out he’s implied illegal immigrants swamp Rome with rats and rubbish, and he made the news in the UK when he congratulated Sadiq Khan by suggesting the new London Mayor might “blow himself up.”

Certainty is unusual in a comedian but a job requirement for a politician. Grillo has proven tricky to pin down at times and has probably been perceived more to the left of the political spectrum until very recently, but not because he lacks a general consistency. He is almost always the David taking down corporate and political Goliaths. The late Dario Fo was a huge supporter. Is there a contradiction between the comedian Grillo and the politician Grillo, and where does one end and the other begin?

Crossing divides In both Grillo’s comedic and political careers he manages to avoid being stuck in any one pigeonhole. In comedy he’s done this through successful reinventions, and in politics through holding ‘progressive’ views, such as on environmentalism, while simultaneously having the uncompromising tough rhetoric on immigration.

Had Grillo been a UK comedian, his career would just about predate the modern era of standup which started in the early 80s. We’d perhaps associate him with Billy Connolly in terms of longevity and his appeal across generations is ano-

ther divide he bridges. During the 1980s he had a successful TV career, presenting comic travel programmes about the differences between Italians and Americans, for example. Politics was not part of his schtick.

In 1986, he took a satirical monologue too far for the state-run broadcaster, calling the then socialist government thieves. The experience was a turning point, not so much for the political aspect but because it forced him to make a living with live shows and build up another audience. Emboldened and with more freedom onstage, his routines became acerbic and aimed at large industry. In the early 90s some of his targets compare to those which would have interested US comedian Bill Hicks – such as the advertising industry – and others have something of Mark Thomas’ acts of dissent about them, like successfully empowering people to keep a monopolistic phone company in check.

In the next decade he harnesses the blogosphere, obviously the perfect medium for an entertaining voice with a point of view. This introduces Grillo to yet another audience and continues the theme of how he broadens his appeal. By 2008 his blog was listed by The Guardian as one of the top 25 in the world – it is one of the most visited sites on the planet.

Still, his political activity still carries all the hallmarks of a comedian at work. His famous V-Day started in 2007, which snowballed into crowds gathering outside municipal buildings in 180 cities across Italy. V is for vaffanculo, which means ‘fuck off ’. In 2009, he’s approached by web strategist Gianroberto Caseleggio, and Grillo’s blog becomes the pivot for which the Five Star Movement galvanises local activism by setting up offline meetings – becoming part of organising rather than opinion sharing. It’s thought this style of organising outstrips even Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

In Italy’s 2013 general election, they took a quarter of the vote. Earlier this year, Five Star can-

COMEDY

“ Is there a contradiction between the comedian Grillo and the politician Grillo, and where does one end and the other begin?”

Although Grillo seems to have lurched to the right, there are some persuasive arguments that almost all his political choices – including the holding of both right and left views – is down to a movement attempting to resist becoming a party in the traditional sense. They see the whole system as corrupt and uphold ‘direct democracy’ through discussion and online polls, leading to a more pluralistic as well as populist manifesto. The alliance with UKIP could be interpreted, rather loosely, as the choice of shacking up with an odd bunch rather than the parties whose very existence they oppose.

When it comes to something like Grillo’s attack on Sadiq Khan, it again becomes ambiguous when considered it was during a comedy routine and after him praising the Mayor. Few would accept the ‘just kidding’ defence, but it is on such ambiguities and doubt that winning politicians are now thriving on. Mud can’t stick in the same way.

In his last comedy show Grillo vs Grillo he was aware of this tension himself, expressing a wish to see the world with the doubt of a comedian again.

If Grillo’s critics are correct and he is the next Mussolini, with all that political certainty, then we must hope it is the comedian-Grillo who is the stronger half of his soul – and that’s using the term ‘comedian’ to mean an expressive artist, rather than as an insult.

Review

47

Win six pairs of tickets to Glasgow Film Festival!

Win a bottle of Edinburgh Gin

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lasgow Film Festival returns for its 13th edition 15-26 February with an action-packed programme of premieres, parties and special events in innovative locations throughout the city. Famous for its unique pop-up cinema events, this year you can look forward to swashbuckling live sword fighting and a fiendish treasure hunt with The Princess Bride, a one-off performance by stars of Scotland’s independent music scene following documentary Lost In France and a special anniversary screening of Secretary in association with Torture Garden.

With almost 200 films and events across 12 days there’s sure to be something for everyone in Glasgow this February! The full 2017 line-up will be announced 18 January.

To win six pairs of tickets to a bundle of Skinny-partnered films spread across the festival (titles to be revealed on 18 Jan), simply head to theskinny.co.uk/competitions and correctly answer this question: What date does Glasgow Film Festival 2017 begin? a) 18 January b) 25 December c) 15 February Competition closes midnight Sun 29 Jan. Entrants must be 18 or over. The winner will be notified via email within two working days of closing and will be required to respond within 48 hours or the prize will be offered to another entrant. Our Ts&Cs can be found at theskinny.co.uk/about/terms

ove gin? You betcha. Curious about local flavours? Always. Here, dear Skinny reader, is the ideal way to sate both urges: small batch distilled in Leith, Edinburgh Gin offers, in their own words, “a clean, zesty and juniper-forward” flavour, balancing “lively citrus notes and a smooth finish” thanks to their unique blend of 14 botanicals.

Ideal for cocktails or on the rocks, this classic London Dry is awarded Silver Outstanding (IWSC 2016). It makes for a refreshing G&T and lends itself perfectly to classic Martinis, Negronis and Gimlets.

We’ve teamed up with the award-winning distillers at Edinburgh Gin to offer you the chance to win a 70cl bottle of Edinburgh Gin. Already fetching your glassware? Just head to theskinny.co.uk/competitions and correctly answer the question below.

How many botanicals are in Edinburgh Gin? a) 7 botanicals b) 14 botanicals c) 21 botanicals

Competition closes midnight Sun 29 Jan. Entrants must be 18 or over, delivery within UK mainland only. The winner will be notified via email within two working days of closing and will be required to respond within 48 hours or the prize will be offered to another entrant. Our Ts&Cs can be found at theskinny.co.uk/about/terms

Win tickets to Manipulate Festival’s birthday reception!

Win Southern Comfort goodies!

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eeling a little chilly this winter? Why not warm yourself up with a cocktail? We’ll provide the Cuffs and Buttons – that’s the name M.W. Heron first gave to Southern Comfort when he first invented it back in 1874, and it’s still a firm favourite at bars across the globe.

For the perfect winter warmer, we recommend gently heating the delicious combination of Southern Comfort with apple juice and ginger beer. And if you’re fresh out of one vital ingredient, that’s where we come in...

We’re offering you the chance to win a 70cl bottle of Southern Comfort and a pair of branded enamel mugs. All you need to do to get your hands on this very timely prize is head to theskinny.co.uk and answer this question:

anipulate Visual Theatre Festival returns this month for its tenth anniversary as Scotland’s premiere celebration of visual theatre, puppetry and animation. Produced by Puppet Animation Scotland, and running from 27 Jan-5 Feb 2017, you can catch Manipulate performances at the Traverse Theatre and Dance Base (Edinburgh) and The Lemon Tree (Aberdeen), with additional events taking place at a number of satellite venues across the UK.

We’ve teamed up with the folks at Manipulate to offer readers the chance to win tickets to the festival reception. The lucky winner will pick up two tickets to Agrupación Señor Serrano’s A House in Asia, at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre on Fri 3 Feb – with a glass of fizz and a

piece of birthday cake prior to the performance, of course. To enter, all you need to do is head to theskinny.co.uk/competitions with the correct answer to the following question: What birthday will Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival celebrate in 2017? a) 10th b) 16th c) 70th Competition closes midnight Thu 19 Jan. The winner will be notified via email within two working days of closing and will be required to respond within 48 hours or the prize will be offered to another entrant. Our Ts&Cs can be found at theskinny.co.uk/about/terms manipulatefestival.org

What was Southern Comfort originally called when it was invented in 1874? a) Cuffs and Buttons b) Herons Own c) Boots and Laces Competition closes midnight Sun 29 Jan. Entrants must be 18 or over. The winner will be notified via email within two working days of closing and will be required to respond within 48 hours or the prize will be offered to another entrant. Our Ts&Cs can be found at theskinny.co.uk/about/terms

48

COMPETITIONS

THE SKINNY

Glasgow Music Wed 04 Jan

Wed 11 Jan

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:00, £10 - £40

Swedish heavy metal heroes touring in support of their latest album, The Last Stand.

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017: FCK YES (INDIGO VELVET + APACHE DARLING, VINYL NOISE)

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) kicks off with a headline set from FCK YES.

Thu 05 Jan

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (WUH OH + STILLHOUND) (ULTRAS + KVASIR + ARMS WATCHES FINGERS)

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from Wuh Oh

Fri 06 Jan SINNY

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 19:30, £8

Performing with her band for the first time, Glasgow singersongwriter Sinny brings her unique blend of melodic country/pop to Sleazy’s for the release of her forthcoming EP.

JAMIE MCAULAY (THE SINSHEIMERS + ROYAL THIEVES + TRIPTYCH) O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £8

Paisley pop-rocker who thinks of himself as a mix between Elvis and The 1975.

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (CIVIC PRIDE) (BACKSTAGE PARADISE + SUMMIT + FABRIC BEAR + THE TREND + FOGGY CITY ORPHAN) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from Glasgow fourpiece Civic Pride.

Sat 07 Jan

SINGLE BY SUNDAY (MIAMI MONROE + ALTERED SKY + DISTRICT 55 + THIS MANKIND + PARALLEL LIGHTS) O2 ABC, FROM 18:00, £10

Glasgow’s own, Single by Sunday come to Edinburgh with their a high level of pop sensibility and infectious catchiness.

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (BREAK THE BUTTERFLY) (HOMEWARD JAMES + UP IN SMOKE + STEEL VALLEY SAINTS + MICK HARGAN + THE NICKAJACK MEN) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from Levenmouth rock quartet Break the Butterfly.

Sun 08 Jan

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (ALI ROBERTSON) (NOAH NOAH + E M I L I E + FALSE FRIENDS + EMUBANDS + WE SHOULD HANG OUT MORE) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from the discotinged electro pop sounds of Ali Robertson.

Mon 09 Jan

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (QUICHE) (PYRAMIDS + THE MEDICINE PRIESTS + YAMIKA + CLUB DECODE + ACE CITY RIDERS) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from freshly baked pop band Quiche.

Tue 10 Jan

AVENGED SEVENFOLD, DISTURBED & IN FLAMES THE SSE HYDRO, FROM 17:30, £37.50 - £45

California-based rock five-piece, on tour once again.

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (THE NORTHERN) (SAINTS + ALL SUNS BLAZING + RACHEL ALICE JOHNSON + RAVE CHILD + TAPED) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from The Northern.

January 2017

SABATON

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, FROM 18:00, TBC

THE STEVE ROTHERY BAND (THE DAVE FORSTER BAND)

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £20

Steve Rothery, Marillion guitarist and founder member, returns with his outstanding band to play a selection of material from his critically-acclaimed solo album, The Ghosts of Pripyat.

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (MEGALOMATIC) (ANIMALS TO CREATORS + HEAVY SMOKE + ARTIE ZIFF + RIP IT UP + BRONSTON) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from Megalomatic, a weegie rock band with a touch of prog to their timbre.

Sun 15 Jan MESHUGGAH

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £20

Sweden’s foremost tech-metal architects head our way armed with their most recent LP, The Violent Sleep of Reason, a lead-heavy beast of an album.

THE BLUE AEROPLANES

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 19:30, £3

Punk surf rock with a dash of garage rock from Glasgow.

MARIE DAVIDSON + THE MODERN INSTITUTE + SUE ZUKI + DJS MR TC & DANIEL M THE FLYING DUCK, 20:00–23:00, £7

Montréal electronic mastermind and recent Boiler Room talent Marie Davidson dishes out some cold wave, synth dance and techno.

Support comes in the way of The Modern Institute and Sue Zuki, live along with DJ sets from MR TC and DM. JUNEBUG (THE RAIN EXPERIMENT + JUST HOPE)

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6

Classic rock sounds from Glasgow.

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (THE VAN T’S) (LUCIA FONTAINE + RASCALTON + SAHARA + CATHOLIC ACTION + DECLAN WELSH + THE DECADENT WEST) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from surf pop twin duo The Van T’s.

FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE BEGINNING

CLASSIC GRAND, FROM 19:00, FREE

A mystery line-up of some of Glasgow’s most terrifyingly rockin’ bands.

Sat 14 Jan CHARLY HOUSTON

THE GLAD CAFE, FROM 19:30, £8.50

Last year’s Celtic Connections Danny Kyle Award winner Charly Houstonc launches her new LP Canada.

MONA

BROADCAST, FROM 19:00, £11

Alternative three-part from Nashville influenced by the likes of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.

SOUNDWAVES MUSIC COMPETITION

O2 ABC, FROM 17:30, £6

Scotland’s unsigned bands and upand-comers battle it out to win a recording and exposure package.

POETS OF THE FALL

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £17.50 - £50

Finnish alt rock band from Helsinki.

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (THE DEAD SETTLERS) (THE RANZAS + RETRO VIDEO CLUB + LIONAL + THE HAZY SHADES + ST DUKES)

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from new indie rock band The Dead Settlers.

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 20:00, TBC

One of Canada’s longest running punk bands who formed back in 1982 in Edmonton, Alberta.

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

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from London-based, Scottish pop singer-songwriter Elle Exxe.

Mon 16 Jan

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

THE ANIMAL MOTHERS

SNFU

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (ELLE EXXE) (NORTH ATLAS + STRAY SAINTS + VINYL NOISE + THE STATLER PROJECT)

A unique amalgam of rock, folk, poetry, punk, dance and art.

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from Edinburgh based alt-rock and dark pop band Mt. Doubt.

Fri 13 Jan

Lead by Markus Acher of Notwist, Rayon and are an exploration of the space between music, interlocking time signatures and journeys through spiraling arpeggios, marimba, harmoniums gongs filtered through algorithmic processing.

MANRAN + BLAZIN’ FIDDLES (LINDSAY LOU & THE FLATBELLIES)

Thu 12 Jan

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from young Glasgow singer-songwriter Carly Connor.

PLATFORM, 19:00–22:00, 12.5

STEREO, FROM 19:00, £12.50

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (MT. DOUBT) (CROW’S FEET + SEA CAPTAIN + SKJOR + PODCART + MICHIEL TURNER)

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (CARLY CONNOR) (JOHN RUSH + FENELLA + CALLUM BEATTIE + CAMERON BRISBANE + JACK STARK)

RAYON (DÒL EOIN MACKINNON AND MAIRI MORRISON’S GAELIC PSALM SINGERS)

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

Tue 17 Jan CAGE THE ELEPHANT

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £18.50

After following up 2013’s Melophobia with fourth studio album Tell Me I’m Pretty last year - produced

by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys and The Arcs - the Kentucky rockers return to the UK. HALFNOISE (GILLBANKS)

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £9.50

The indie project of former Paramore drummer, Zac Farro.

Wed 18 Jan

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (DIVIDES) (TAKE TODAY + CRASHES + GET OUT STRONG + MOSHVILLE TIMES + THE 21ST STATE) KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from all-rockin’ Glasgow five-piece Divides.

Thu 19 Jan

DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, FROM 19:30, £15

Controversial hardcore metal four-piece from New Jersey, touring their sixth and final album, Dissociation.

RAE SREMMURD

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £18.50

Theh fresh-faced brothers Brown tour their latest hip-hop output, SremmLife2.

MARK W GEORGSSON

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £7

The Glaswegian singer-songwriter who specialises in alt folk and country with a Nordic twinge plays in support of his new abum, Faces and Places. A Celtic connections concert.

EMMURE

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, FROM 18:30, £14

Angsty five-man metal band from Queens, New York.

LAURA MARLING + BBC SSO

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL, FROM 19:30, TBC

The Hampshire-born nufolkster leads a concert with BBC’s symphony orchestra for Celtic Connections.

Fri 20 Jan RATIONALE

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10

London-based singer and producer, celebrated for his emotive Tracey Chapman-esque vocals.

THE GLAD COMMUNITY CHOIR (HONEY & THE HERBS)

THE GLAD CAFE, FROM 19:30, £12.50

The Glad’s own community choir gets in on the Celtic Connections merrymaking with a night of Bowie covers, supported by Honey & the Herbs.

BARROWLANDS, FROM 19:00, £20

FVNERALS (CAVALCADES)

BEACH SLANG

ROBIN ADAMS

BROADCAST, 7PM, £5

MONO, FROM 19:30, £12

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 19:30, TBC

Nowt more cathartic than a little doom, drone and general bleakness to see you over the late-January hump, right?

American punk rock band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who formed in 2013.

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £16

The musical project of Claire Martha Ffion McKay, an Irish songwriter based in Glasgow.

Classic songwriting with a dreampop sheen – a Celtic connections concert.

THE FELICE BROTHERS

NYC five-piece formed by brothers James and Ian Felice, ready to take you on a mud-stomping folk journey, as is their way.

VEX RED (ATLAS:EMPIRE)

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £12.50

Noughties alt-rock band return for a show in anticipation of a followup to their acclaimed debut album.

KING TUT’S NEW YEAR’S REVOLUTION 2017 (SERGENT) (THE BANTER THIEFS + THE DICKSONS + BEATBOX + MOONLIGHT ZOO)

MARTHA FFION

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, TBC

MARGO PRICE

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £16

The Nashville singer-songwriter brings her country twang to the road in support of debut solo album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter.

THE RURAL ALBERTA ADVANTAGE

BROADCAST, FROM 19:00, £11

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £10 - £40

Canadian indie-rockers led by Nils Edenloff on vocals and guitar duties.

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £10

AZIZA BRAHIM

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £16

THE PICTISH TRAIL (NIGHT MOVES)

Spanish-based Saharawi artist who sings about hope, hurt and peace.

BROKEN RECORDS (OLYMPIC SWIMMERS)

The 2006-formed Edinburgh mainstays play a Celtic connections concert.

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £14

Former Fence Records mogul Johnny Lynch – aka The Pictish Trail returns once more to Celtic Connections, this year with his 2016 album Future Echoes.

ETTE

BROADCAST, FROM 19:00, £6

A brand new pop-psychedelia project from Carla Easton and Joe Kane.

JOANNE SHAW TAYLOR (BROKEN WITT REBELS)

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £17.50

British blues rock guitarist discovered as a 16 year-old by the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart.

RATIONALE

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £12

London-based singer and producer, celebrated for his emotive Tracey Chapman-esque vocals.

CHRIS STOUT & CATRIONA MCKAY (AHLBERG + EK & ROSWALL) GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL, FROM 19:30, £15

One-time members of Fiddlers’ Bid, Catriona McKay (on Scottish harp) and Chris Stout (on Shetland fiddle) continue with their inspired take on traditional music-making.

HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF AND ROSEANNE REID

DRYGATE BREWING CO., FROM 19:30, £15

Hurray For The Riff Raff is the eponymous manifesto of Alynda Segarra, a young Bronx-born singer-songwriter of Puerto Rican descent, now based in New Orleans.

Sat 21 Jan

COMPTON & NEWBERRY + LAURA CORTESE (LAURA CORTESE)

TRON THEATRE, FROM 20:00, £14

Banjo talent and old-timey vocalist Joe Newberry joins Grammywinning mandolinist and singer Mike Compton at the Tron.

ALASDAIR ROBERTS, AIDAN O’ROURKE, STEPHANIE HLADOWSKI & ALEX NEILSON PLATFORM, 19:00–22:00, 12.5

Stephanie, Alasdair, Alex and Aidan have done much to expand the vocabulary of trad folk music. For this collab they will mine the canon and apply wayward techniques to familiar tunes, drawing on their interests in poetry, rock music and improv.

GAELS LE CHÈILE @ CEÒL’S CRAIC

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

Glasgow’s Gaels le Chèile organisation and Gaelic social hub Ceòl ’s Craic jointly present a diverse array of artists, celebrating Scotland and Ireland’s Gàidhlig/ Gaeilge kinship.

TEST THE WATERS

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 19:30, £5

Transatlantic pop rock sounds from Glaswegian quintet Test the Waters.

CASISDEAD (LVLZ SYNDICATE + SHOGUN + RANSOM FA + CREEP WOLAND + CLEAVERHYPE)

SWG3 GLASGOW, FROM 22:00, £16

Tottenham MC and producer, formerly known as Castro and signed to imreallydead.

THE YUMMY FUR

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £14

90s art punk band The Yummy Fur play Oran Mor.

Find full listings at theskinny.co.uk/whats-on

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution schedule (4-21 Jan) contines with a headline set from Sergent.

DRYGATE BREWING CO., FROM 19:30, £14

Sun 22 Jan DONNY OSMOND

THE SSE HYDRO, FROM 20:00, £40 - £70

Celebrating 50 years of show business with The Soundtrack of My Life tour. Oh, Donald.

SUNNY SENSE (JIM ORTON)

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 19:30, £4

Glasgow-based duo who fuse krautrock, experimental jazz, classical and a wee bit of pop to create a rich, multigenre sound.

TYKETTO (THE KING LOT)

The NYC rockers celebrate the 25th anniversary of their acclaimed first album Don’t Come Easy.

QUINN BACHAND’S BRISHEN (AIZLE)

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL, FROM 20:00, £14

HAZY RECOLLECTIONS

O2 ABC, FROM 14:00, £12.50

Handpicked selection of acts from the flourishing Glasgow indie, folk and roots scene, on hand to soothe your Sunday hangovers.

BBC SCOTLAND AT CELTIC CONNECTIONS 2017

CCA, 22 JAN- 1 FEB, TIMES VARY, FREE

The BBC returns to CCA as part of Celtic Connections, bringing coverage to BBC radio, television, iPlayer and online. Tickets for all BBC Events will be free and released on Monday 9 January on the BBC Shows and Tours website: bbc. co.uk/showsandtours/tickets

Mon 23 Jan A DAY TO REMEMBER

THE SSE HYDRO, FROM 17:30, £25

American rock outfit residing in sunny Florida, formed back in 2003 by pals Tom Denney and Bobby Scruggs.

THE PRETTY RECKLESS

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £20

NYC rockers led by vocalist and rhythm guitarist Taylor Momsen.

PROPER ORNAMENTS

MONO, FROM 19:30, £6

The London indie-pop quartet tour their new release, Foxhole.

ABERFELDY

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £9.50

Riley Briggs’ indie-pop band play a Celtic Connections gig and their first Glasgow show in six years.

NATHANIEL GOW’S DANCE BAND: CEILIDH NIGHTS

ORAN MOR, FROM 20:00, £6 - £8

A reinvention of the 18th-century ceilidh, bringing together Concerto Caledonia with a roster of top trad talents.

Tue 24 Jan BLACK SABBATH

THE SSE HYDRO, FROM 19:30, £60 - £95

Ozzy Osbourne et al head out on their final UK tour.

THE WHITE BUFFALO

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £15

The White Buffalo (AKA Jake Smith) is a Californian artist whose five-album wide discography boasts serious songwriting prowess. Expressive vocals, distinctively woven instruments and epic tracks.

Gruff Rhys plays his original soundtrack to Set Fire to the Stars following a screening of the movie itself (tickets sold separately).

FAIR MOTHERS + KATHRYN JOSEPH (HQFU) THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £8

Folky business as Fair Mothers celebrate the recent launch of debut album Through Them Fingers Yours And Mine, with special guest Kathryn Joseph and support from HQFU. A Celtic Connections concert.

SINDERINS (SOUTHERN TENANT FOLK UNION)

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £14

Wed 25 Jan TOM PAXTON

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL, FROM 19:30, £25

SUNS OF ARQA

Global fusion music from a collective which has embraced more than 200 artists worldwide since forming in 1979. Part of Celtic Connections.

SET FIRE TO THE STARS

STEREO, FROM 21:00, £16

BROADCAST, FROM 19:00, £6

The rising Texas country singer songwriter makes the trek to the UK.

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £14

Copenhagen-based electronic head Anders Trentemøller returns with new album, Fixion.

Surreal folk and crafted pop from a band who take their name from a well-known junction in Dundee.

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £15

RM HUBBERT

TRENTEMØLLER

SWG3 GLASGOW, FROM 22:00, TBC

Multi-instrumental gypsy-folk talent Quinn Bachand brings his band to Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall as part of Celtic Connections.

The veteran US folk musician celebrates 50 years on the road by, well, going out on the road again.

The Chemikal Underground instrumental guitar virtuoso plays an intimate set as part of Celtic connections.

Robin has a strong following and his songwriting has won him multiple awards. His albums are critically acclaimed, and he also released a collaborative album in July with everyone from Bonnie Prince Billy to Alasdair Robe. Get excited.

AARON WATSON

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £16.50

DRAKE

THE SSE HYDRO, FROM 18:30, £55 - £90

Last name Ever, first name Greatest strikes again.

HALF WAIF

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £6.50

A Celtic connections concert from Half Waif, the project of Nandi Rose Plunkett (Pinegrove).

MEXRRISSEY (LOS PACAMINOS + PAUL YOUNG)

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £16.50

Like a Morrissey tribute night, except the band involved have reimagined the songs of The Most Miserable Man On Earth in truly Mexican form, with brass, accordion and sunny, sunny vibes.

Sounds mental.

ROSS AINSLIE & ALI HUTTON

DRYGATE BREWING CO., FROM 19:30, £14

Ross Ainslie and Ali Hutton – whose current band credits include Treacherous Orchestra, Old Blind Dogs and Salsa Celtica – bring their new collaborative album Symbiosis to Celtic Connections.

BURNS: A TOAST TAE THE LASSIES

OLD FRUITMARKET GLASGOW, FROM 20:00, £22

BEAMIS returns with their for a Celtic Connections Burns concert. The line-up includes Jamaican roots-reggae artist Brina performing with members of Tribal Global Collective, and a set from young Pakistani singer Sanam Marvi.

Thu 26 Jan EVIL SCARECROW

CATHOUSE, FROM 19:00, £11

Parody metal band from Nottingham, monstrous in appearance and captivating in performance.

DRAKE

THE SSE HYDRO, FROM 18:30, £55 - £90

Last name Ever, first name Greatest strikes again.

MODERN STUDIES + TISSØ LAKE

THE GLAD CAFE, FROM 19:30, £12.50

Chamber pop band Modern Studies play a Celtic Connections show with stellar support from Tissø Lake.

EVIL SCARECROW (DOG TIRED + SPLINTERED HALO)

CATHOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £13

Parody metal band from Nottingham, monstrous in appearance and captivating in performance.

THE MISS’S (MICK HARGAN)

A duo comprising the SAY Awardnominated Audrey Tait of Hector Bizerk and singer-songwriter and Glasville lead woman Michelle Low. C DUNCAN (MAN OF MOON + ANDREW WASYLYK)

SAINT LUKE’S, FROM 19:30, £14

Glasgow-based muso, composing e’er beautiful choral harmonies and acoustic instrumentation in his bedroom-studio set-up.

Fri 27 Jan

THE MOTH AND THE MIRROR

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £8.50

A Celtic connections concert from the elusive sextet made up of various bands, including Arab Strap, Admiral Fallow and Frightened Rabbit.

ELEPHANT SESSIONS (DOSCA)

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £14

Award-winning neo-trad quintet forged in the Highlands of Scotland.

SLOBODAN TRKULJA & BALKANOPOLIS

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £14

A blend of modern Balkan trad, jazz, rock and art pop from multi-instrumentalist virtuoso, composer and singer Sobodan Trkulja and his band, Balkanopolis.

ROBERTA SÁ

DRYGATE BREWING CO., FROM 19:30, £15

Brazilian musician who you might recognise from the Olympics closing ceremony

Sat 28 Jan INSIDE OUT

CLASSIC GRAND, FROM 22:00, £24

Sun 29 Jan HIPPO CAMPUS

STEREO, FROM 19:00, £8.50

Minnesota indie rock four-piece, out on an international tour in support of debut album, Landmark.

ALEX CLARE

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £17.50

The experimental London composer (and ex-hubby of Amy Winehouse) tinkers further with genres of futuristic dancehall and sci-fi soul.

SARAH KENCHINGTON: BIG HAIR BAGPIPE BAND

THE GLAD CAFE, FROM 15:00, £7.50

Sarah Kenchington builds her own remarkable mechanical instruments, including a pedal-powered hurdy-gurdy, a giant rotating kalimba and a brass band powered by tractor inner-tubes. She performs regularly with her bizarre creations around the UK. LAW HOLT

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £8

A show from genre-hopping goddess Law Holt, who specialises in soundscapes decked in ginormous vocals and dark, oddball sounds.

She’s playing the gig as part of both Celtic Connections and Independent Venue week.

HAZY RECOLLECTIONS

O2 ABC, FROM 14:00, £12.50

Handpicked selection of acts from the flourishing Glasgow indie, folk and roots scene, on hand to soothe your Sunday hangovers.

ST. PAUL AND THE BROKEN BONES

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £16

Alabama sextet with a gospel neosoul garage sound.

ALEX CLARE

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, TBC

The experimental London composer (and ex-hubby of Amy Winehouse) tinkers further with genres of futuristic dancehall and sci-fi soul.

Mon 30 Jan BLACK PEAKS

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:00, £10

The Brighton-based tech-rockers take a trip up North ahead of releasing their debut album, Statues.

SOUTHERN TENANT FOLK UNION (ESTHER SWIFT + JENN BUTTERWORTH & LB SALTER)

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £10

The Edinburgh-based folk-meetsbluegrass seven-piece play a Celtic connections concert.

JOJO

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £14

JoJo of Leave (Get Out) fame returns. And boy are we glad.

BLACK PEAKS

KING TUT’S, FROM 20:30, £12

The Brighton-based tech-rockers take a trip up North ahead of releasing their debut album, Statues.

Tue 31 Jan

THE HEAD & THE HEART

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £16.50

Folk-pop sextet from Seattle, now signed to Warner Bros. Records.

Two of Europe’s finest improv musicians, both of whom are classically-trained performers.

THE SCOTTISH CLARINET QUARTET WITH ROS DUNLOP

THE GLAD CAFE, FROM 19:30, £12.50

A concert investigating the relationship between music and place from four esteemed clarinet players Frances Barker, Sally Day, Nicola Long and Alex South, plus multi-instrumentalist Ros Dunlop.

STATE BROADCASTERS

THE HUG AND PINT, FROM 19:30, £8

The local folksters play a Celtic connections concert.

DARLINGSIDE + ADAM HOLMES & THE EMBERS

ORAN MOR, FROM 19:00, £14

Massachusetts quartet Darlingside join rising folk / Americana artist Adam Holmes for a Celtic Connections show.

KAYAH & KILA

O2 ABC, FROM 19:00, £16

Think trad meets Irish rave and you’re halfway there...

THE BEVVY SISTERS’ 10TH BIRTHDAY BASH (THE JERRY CANS)

SAINT LUKE’S, FROM 19:30, £14

The Bevvy Sisters mix equal measures of sweetness and sass, grit and glamour, heartbreak and hilarity cut with a dash of potent Scottish spirit.

Listings

49

Edinburgh Music Wed 04 Jan

EDINBURGH FOLK CLUB (GEORGE MACHRAY)

SUMMERHALL, FROM 19:30, £7 - £10

A welcome visitor from the USA, Judy Cook has been touring Britain and the US as a professional musician for more than fifteen years.

Thu 05 Jan DISMAL JIBE

CONTROL SOCIAL CLUB SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00, £5

A punk showcase curated by Control Social Club.

Mon 16 Jan PAVEL HAAS QUARTET

THE QUEEN’S HALL, FROM 19:45, £13 - £22

A night of American and Czech music performed by the threetime Gramaphone award-winning Pavel Haas Quartet.

Tue 24 Jan KILDA

USHER HALL, FROM 11:00, £3

A special Burns Night edition of Usher Hall’s Emerging Artists series, featuring Kilda, a trio of Mhairi Marwick on fiddle, Norrie McIver, vocals and guitar, and Scott Wood, pipes.

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00, TBC

A debut from Scottish Bordersbased band Dismal Jibe.

Tue 17 Jan

A week-long showcase of gigs at La Belle Angele as part of IVW. Full line-up TBC.

Fri 06 Jan

MANCO RAELLI

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00, £10

BANNERMANS, FROM 18:00, £5

JONNY HOLLAND

BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £5

Guitar-led rock from Nevadahailing artist Jonny Holland.

WHITEHILL GROVE

ELECTRIC CIRCUS, 19:00–22:00, £5 - £7

Anthemic indie rock from Edinburgh.

Sat 07 Jan

LAURA BEGLEY + CHRIS SMITH

ASSEMBLY ROXY, 19:00–22:15, £5 - £7

A 23 year old vocalist from Stirling, with a strong, quirky and original voice. Support from Carrie Mac, Amy Lou and Craig McMorrow THE VIOLENT KIND (AURORA BLUES + THE COMMON PEOPLE + CHEAP TEETH)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00, £5

What’s The Noise bring four up-and-comers to Sneaky Pete’s stage.

Tue 10 Jan

MICHAEL FOYLE + MAKSIM ŠTŠURA

USHER HALL, FROM 11:00, £3

Usher Hall’s Emerging Artists series continues with The FoyleStsura Duo, featuring Michael from Ayrshire and Maksim from Estonia, both of whom are award winning chamber musicians.

Wed 11 Jan JAMMIN’ AT VOODOO

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 21:00–01:00, 0

USHER HALL, FROM 11:00, £3

Milanese virtuoso guitarist, composer and teacher Manco Raelli treats Usher Hall to his talents.

THE HUNNA

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00, £13

Hertfordshire indie-rock four-piece.

Wed 18 Jan

EDINBURGH FOLK CLUB (TANNARA)

SUMMERHALL, FROM 19:30, £7 - £10

A welcome visitor from the USA, Judy Cook has been touring Britain and the US as a professional musician for more than fifteen years.

Thu 19 Jan

EDINBURGH BLUES CLUB (TORONZO CANNON + REDFISH) THE VOODOO ROOMS, FROM 19:30, £15

Edinburgh Blues Club is a Social Enterprise established to harness popular support for a regular blues events in Edinburgh to ensure that the city, bringing in a roster of quality touring blues acts.

SCO: NICOLA BENEDETTI PLAYS BEETHOVEN

USHER HALL, FROM 19:30, £11 - £32.50

The acclaimed violinist returns to Scotland to play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.

UNDERGROUND LIVE

TEVIOT, 20:00–01:00, FREE

C DUNCAN (ANDREW WASYLYK)

Glasgow-based muso, composing e'er beautiful choral harmonies and acoustic instrumentation in his bedroom-studio set-up.

Wed 25 Jan

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK

A week-long showcase of gigs at La Belle Angele as part of IVW. Full line-up TBC. EDINBURGH FOLK CLUB: BURNS NIGHT (HAGGERDASH)

SUMMERHALL, FROM 19:30, £7 - £10

Edinburgh folk Club’s famous Burns Night, complete with haggis, neeps and tatties, the Immortal Memory, the toast to the bard (including a dram) and music from Haggerdash, a popular folk band from Lanarkshire.

DR. VZX MOIST (HORSE WHISPERER + THE ABBATOIR BLUE)

LEITH DEPOT, FROM 19:30, £2.99

Fast and bulbous rock band Dr. VZX Moist launch new EP at Leith Depot with support from madrigal-daft Horse Whisperer and noise rock duo The Abbatoir Blue.

Thu 26 Jan

SCO: MARIA JOÃO PIRES PLAYS MOZART

USHER HALL, FROM 19:30, £11 - £32.50

Esteemed Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires plays Mozart’s last Piano Concerto for an Usher Hall crowd.

EUSA’s regular live music night showcasing up-and-coming Scottish musicians.

BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £5

SUMMERHALL, FROM 19:30, £7 - £10

Melodic, bass-driven rock.

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

Fri 20 Jan

SUMMERHALL, 20:00–23:00, £10 - £12

EDINBURGH FOLK CLUB (THE DADDY NAGGINS)

A welcome visitor from the USA, Judy Cook has been touring Britain and the US as a professional musician for more than fifteen years.

Thu 12 Jan

SCOTTISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA: LLYR WILLIAMS PLAYS BEETHOVEN

THE QUEEN’S HALL, FROM 19:30, £11 - £32.50

Hypnotically intense pianist Llyr Williams performs Beethoven with the SCO at Queen’s Hall.

Fri 13 Jan BEFORE STORIES

BANNERMANS, FROM 18:00, £5

A band who refer to themselves as ‘post-everything’, and who write songs about bad decisions.

Sounds good to us.

MYBAND (MATT ANNECHARICO + EXPLICIT CONTENT + ROBIN HOWARD + ALEX CAMBRIDGE)

ELECTRIC CIRCUS, 19:00–22:00, £5 - £7

An exciting new platform intending to transform the UK live music industry – there’s rumours of free tees and the chance to be on telly, so get down stat.

Sat 14 Jan

THE BLUE AEROPLANES

THE VOODOO ROOMS, FROM 19:00, £12

A unique amalgam of rock, folk, poetry, punk, dance and art.

TISSØ LAKE + EAGLEOWL

WEE RED BAR, 20:00–22:00, £5

Edinburgh-based band and tape music project led by Ian Humberstone, launching their new album Paths to the Fodd.

TEN YEARS OF TAYLOR SWIFT

THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00, £10

A collection of Scotland’s musicians coming together to pay homate to T-Swift.

50

Listings

DUNEDIN CONSORT: SUITES AND CANTANAS

THE QUEEN’S HALL, FROM 19:30, £9 - £22

An evening of Bach from Dunedin Consort, directed by John Butt.

AWAKING ATHENA

BANNERMANS, FROM 20:00, £5

Heavy riffage all the way.

Sat 21 Jan BANSHEE FEST

BANNERMANS, FROM 20:00, £6 - £8

A roster of local metal acts split across two venues, Bannermans and Banshee Labyrinth.

THE BRIGHT SKIES (ALTIUS + SCOTT ALEXANDER)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00, £5

Indie band for fans of NME style acts.

Sun 22 Jan

SUNDAY CLASSICS: ST PETERSBURG PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

USHER HALL, FROM 15:00, £12 - £32

One of the best orchesteras in the world – with a history of conductors including Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky and Shostakovich – commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution with a Sunday Classics show at Usher Hall.

Mon 23 Jan

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00, TBC

A week-long showcase of gigs at La Belle Angele as part of IVW. Full line-up TBC. MAN OF MOON

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00, £10

The young Edinburgh-based two-piece embark on a UK tour.

Sat 28 Jan

HEAVY SCOTLAND M.I.N.D. BAND BATTLE FIRST HEAT (ANIMATOR + BATTLING BANDS + CORRUPT THE SYSTEM + DAMAJ + LUCIFERS CORPUS + SCUMPULSE) STUDIO 24, 18:30–23:00, £7 - £16

Studio 24 keeps things heavy with a metal battle of the bands.

Sun 29 Jan

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00, TBC

A week-long showcase of gigs at La Belle Angele as part of IVW. Full line-up TBC.

Mon 30 Jan BEN ROBERTS

BANNERMANS, FROM 19:30, £5

Leeds-based vocalist and songwriter, fresh from a string of gigs in London.

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00, TBC

Monthly live jam session with some of Scotland’s leading musicians playing lounge grooves from many genres.

BLIND FICTION

Glasgow Clubs

THE VAN T’S

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00, £6

GIRL BAND (GOAT GIRL)

The four-piece noise rock band from Dublin play a show at Summerhall as part of the NEHH series.

Fri 27 Jan TOM PAXTON

THE QUEEN’S HALL, FROM 18:30, £27.50

The veteran US folk musician celebrates 50 years on the road by, well, going out on the road again.

ST COLUMBA’S HOSPICE BURNS SUPPER

CORN EXCHANGE, FROM 19:00, £55

A Burns Supper hosted by Scott Wilson, featuring Keara Murphy, comedy sets from Sandy Strang and Isobel Rutter, a four-course dinner and a ceilidh.

HARLITONES (THE MICHIGANS)

BANNERMANS, FROM 15:00, £5

Indie-rock vibes in a live show at Bannermans.

INDEPENDENT VENUE WEEK

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00, TBC

A week-long showcase of gigs at La Belle Angele as part of IVW. Full line-up TBC. EL HOMBRE TRAJEADO

ELECTRIC CIRCUS, 19:00–22:00, £10 - £12

Glasgwegian mutant-disco kings featuring acclaimed flamenco punk guitarist RM Hubbert and multi-instrumentalist Stevie Jones, returning after a decade’s absence with the album Fast Diagonal.

Dundee Music

Fri 23 Dec

LATE NIGHT SKETCHY ALTERNATIVE XMAS PARTY (THE GIROBABIES + MICKEY 9S + THE TWISTETTES)

THE ART SCHOOL, 22:00–03:00, £7 - £10

Live bands and DJs across two rooms, featuring a full band set from The Girobabies and a host of special guests

Tue 03 Jan #TAG TUESDAYS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £4

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

Wed 04 Jan KILLER KITSCH

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Eclectic midweeker playing the best in house, techno and electronic – or, in their words ‘casually ignoring shite requests since 2005’.

Thu 05 Jan HIP HOP THURSDAYS

Fri 27 Jan THE MEMBRANES

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, FROM 20:00, £10

The influential 80s UK post-punk band return with a full choir.

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Euan Neilson plays the best in classic R'n'B and hip-hop.

ELEMENT

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, TBC

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

UNHOLY

CATHOUSE, 23:00–03:00, £2 - £4

Cathouse’s Thursday night rock, metal and punk mashup.

Fri 06 Jan

I AM WELCOMES THE TEAM (171 + THE SHEIKH + QUEENIE) SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £4 - £5

Subbie welcomes in some old friends to break in 2017 the right way. Leave the pretence at home a buckle up for the ride.

Wed 11 Jan KILLER KITSCH

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Eclectic midweeker playing the best in house, techno and electronic – or, in their words ‘casually ignoring shite requests since 2005’.

BIG FUN (ILLYUS & BARRIENTOS) (IDAMOS + RAESIDE)

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00, TBC

Clue’s in the name. Headed up by Glasgow electronic music pair Illyus & Barrientos.

Sat 07 Jan HARSH TUG

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, £3

Hip-hop and rap brought to you

by Notorious B.A.G and pals.

OUTPUT: LAUNCH

STEREO, FROM 23:00, £6

Get the 411 on brand spankin’ new promoters Output as they chuck on a debut show with local boy Big Miz taking the lead on the ones and twos.

I AM: 30 YEARS OF KAPPA (BETA & KAPPA) THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00, £5 - £9

Kappa turns 30, inviting some of his favourite DJs and party people out to celebrate proper.

Sun 08 Jan SUNDAY SCIENCE

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £4

As scientific as a club filled with tipsy Sunday night partiers can get, really. LED lights, glow in the dark wands, ‘Science’ cocktails and cannons. Unlikely to instigate any eureka moments, but it’ll do.

MONO BABY DISCO!

MONO, FROM 12:30, FREE

A disco designed especially for the wee ones.

Tue 10 Jan #TAG TUESDAYS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £4

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

MAGGIE MAY’S, 22:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Cathouse’s Thursday night rock, metal and punk mashup.

SINGLES NIGHT

DJ Adidadas brings vaporbeat and Eurowave hits to Sleazy’s.

THE ROCK SHOP

Rock, indie and golden indie classics with resident DJ Heather McCartney.

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, £3

Pop, disco and rock action at Sleazy’s Singles Night.

Old skool house, acid and rave.

ELEMENT

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £5 - £7

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, TBC

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

UNHOLY

CATHOUSE, 23:00–03:00, £2 - £4

Cathouse’s Thursday night rock, metal and punk mashup.

ELECTRIC SALSA (DAN BEAUMONT)

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £5 - £7

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £5

I LOVE GARAGE

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

WSHOM IN AFRICA (JD TWITCH)

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £5

Electric Salsa residents go head to head with ex-Dance Tunnel owner and Disco Bloodbath promoter Dan Beaumont.

After their first excursion with JD Twitch it was only a matter of time before they welcomed Mr Twitch back for another bite of the cherry.

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, FREE

THE ART SCHOOL, FROM 21:30, £5

KEEP FIT (ROMEO TAYLOR)

Romeo Taylor gets on the ones at Sleazy’s for a midweek disco.

Fri 13 Jan OLD SKOOL

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £6 - £7

CATHOUSE, 22:30–03:00, £5 - £6

Exactly what it says on its sparkly tin – a dazzling night of disco Europop.

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

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Euan Neilson plays the best in classic R'n'B and hip-hop.

GLITTERBANG

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, £3

Or Caturdays, if you will. Two levels of the loudest, maddest music the DJs can muster; metal, rock and alt on floor one, and punky screamo upstairs.

LET’S GO BACK… WAY BACK (BOSCO & ROB MASON)

HIP HOP THURSDAYS

Connoisseur’s mix of old-school jazz, funk and soul for your jivin’ pleasure.

MISSING PERSONS CLUB (VOLVOX)

ELEMENT THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, TBC

Thu 12 Jan

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00, TBC

Monthly evening of techno from the MPC crew and guests.

CATHOUSE SATURDAYS CATHOUSE, 22:30–03:00, £5 - £6

CATHOUSE FRIDAYS

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

JAMMING FRIDAYS

MAGGIE MAY’S, 22:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Indie rock’n’roll from the 60s to 00s with resident tune-picker DJ Jopez.

SLEAZE (A.MORGAN (RHYTHM THEORY), LEX GORRIE, FRASER BROWN & CONOR BROWNING)

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £5 - £10

Sleaze welcome A.Morgan, the man behind excellent Manchester-based techno night Rhythm Theory.

WTF FRIDAYS

SHED, 22:30–03:00, £4 - £6

Student-friendly Friday night party, playing (as one might expect) cheesy classics of every hue.

FRESH BEAT

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £6

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

FORMAL INVOCATION

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, £3

Goth, post-punk, EBM, synth, coldwave, house, noise and disco.

Aaaand breathe.

THE UNSTOPPABLE CRUSADE OF THE INTERGLACTIC FUNK SMUGGLERS

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £5

The crusade continues into January as the residents take control once again for the full 4 hours.

RETURN TO MONO (ILARIO ALICANTE)

SUB CLUB, GLASGOW 23:00, £10

The Italian techno figurehead takes the subbie reins for four whole hours.

Sat 14 Jan NU SKOOL

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £6 - £7

Nick Peacock spins a Saturdayready selection of vintage disco, soul and funk.

ANIMAL FARM (SETAOC MASS)

Animal Farm call up SK_eleven label boss Setaoc Mass for his Scottish debut. Manchesterborn Sam Coates is a DJ and producer forging a new wave of urgent, futuristic techno; catch him in action with a warm-up provided by Animal Farm’s Quail and Turtle.

Sun 15 Jan SUNDAY SCIENCE

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £4

As scientific as a club filled with tipsy Sunday night partiers can get, really. LED lights, glow in the dark wands, ‘Science’ cocktails and cannons. Unlikely to instigate any eureka moments, but it’ll do.

Mon 16 Jan BARE MONDAYS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £4

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

BURN MONDAYS

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Long-running trade night with Normski and Mash spinning the disco beats.

Tue 17 Jan #TAG TUESDAYS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £4

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

I AM (REFRESH) (BETA & KAPPA)

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £4 - £5

Resident young guns Beta & Kappa play the usual fine mix of electronica and bass, with help from the the ever-delicious ReFresh.

Wed 18 Jan KILLER KITSCH

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Eclectic midweeker playing the best in house, techno and electronic – or, in their words ‘casually ignoring shite requests since 2005’.

NOT MOVING

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, FREE

Golden Teacher and Dick 50 DJs spinning outer-national sounds.

Thu 19 Jan HIP HOP THURSDAYS

UNHOLY

CATHOUSE, 23:00–03:00, £2 - £4

SMALL TALK (DJ ADIDADAS)

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, FREE

STEREOTONE TUNNEL VISION: IN DA CLUB (WHEELMAN)

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

The final in a string of Tunnel Vision parties surveying rap, grime, dancehall and R'n'B.

Fri 20 Jan OLD SKOOL

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £6 - £7

Connoisseur’s mix of old-school jazz, funk and soul for your jivin’ pleasure.

CATHOUSE FRIDAYS

CATHOUSE, 22:30–03:00, £5 - £6

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

JAMMING FRIDAYS

MAGGIE MAY’S, 22:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Indie rock’n’roll from the 60s to 00s with resident tune-picker DJ Jopez.

WTF FRIDAYS

SHED, 22:30–03:00, £4 - £6

Student-friendly Friday night party, playing (as one might expect) cheesy classics of every hue.

PARTIAL (EWAN & ADLER)

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £6

The Partial residents take over, playing party jams, techno and house at La Cheetah.

FRESH BEAT

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £6

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

ULTIMATE BELTERS (DJ TEACHERS)

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, £3

Suzie Rodden melts the ego and burns the flag of inhibitions.

I AM (EROL ALKAN)

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £4

The king of electro house returns to the Sub Club to lay down the law for the full 4 hours YELLOW DOOR JANUARY EDITION

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £5

A night of contemporary classics, unheard of gems and well-kent belters, all for your general dancing pleasure, natch.

CATHOUSE SATURDAYS

CATHOUSE, 22:30–03:00, £5 - £6

Or Caturdays, if you will. Two levels of the loudest, maddest music the DJs can muster; metal, rock and alt on floor one, and punky screamo upstairs.

Sat 21 Jan NU SKOOL

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £6 - £7

Nick Peacock spins a Saturdayready selection of vintage disco, soul and funk.

THE ROCK SHOP

MAGGIE MAY’S, 22:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Rock, indie and golden indie classics with resident DJ Heather McCartney.

CODE (SHLØMO + NICK M)

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £6 - £10

CODE’s first event of 2017 featuring up-and-coming French producer Schlømo performing live. Schlømo performs live with a range of real hardware, so come prepared for a full blown sonic assault.

DOMESTIC EXILE

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, £3

A mixed bag of acts getting stuck into new Glasgow-based party Domestic Exile.

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Euan Neilson plays the best in classic R'n'B and hip-hop.

THE SKINNY

I LOVE GARAGE

CATHOUSE FRIDAYS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £5 - £7

CATHOUSE, 22:30–03:00, £5 - £6

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

MILLION DOLLAR DISCO (AL KENT)

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00, TBC

The fifth annual Million Dollar Disco party.

Sun 22 Jan SUNDAY SCIENCE

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £4

As scientific as a club filled with tipsy Sunday night partiers can get, really. LED lights, glow in the dark wands, ‘Science’ cocktails and cannons. Unlikely to instigate any eureka moments, but it’ll do.

Mon 23 Jan BARE MONDAYS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £4

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

BURN MONDAYS

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Long-running trade night with Normski and Mash spinning the disco beats.

Tue 24 Jan #TAG TUESDAYS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £4

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

I AM GARAGE SPECIAL (BETA & KAPPA + GUEST)

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £4 - £5

Beta & Kappa whap out the old forgotten gems for a night of garagey bliss on the Sub Club dancefloor.

Wed 25 Jan KILLER KITSCH

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Eclectic midweeker playing the best in house, techno and electronic – or, in their words ‘casually ignoring shite requests since 2005’.

DRUGSTORE GLAMOUR

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, FREE

Trashy, tacky, glamorous and ridiculous. Oh, and fun, too.

Very fun.

Thu 26 Jan HIP HOP THURSDAYS

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Euan Neilson plays the best in classic R'n'B and hip-hop.

ELEMENT

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, TBC

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

UNHOLY

CATHOUSE, 23:00–03:00, £2 - £4

Cathouse’s Thursday night rock, metal and punk mashup.

BREAKFAST CLUB

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, FREE

Gerry Lyons delivers 80s and 90s pop and rock hits.

SILVER DOLLAR CLUB X FADE LNG

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £5

Armed with his own special brand of 180g house and with a bag deeper than Moodyman’s tune choices, expect nothing less than a crisp and soulful journey through the mind of one of London’s best lo-fi producers.

HEADSTRONG (OVERMONO) (CLOUDS + ANIMAL FARM) SUB CLUB, FROM 23:00, £8

Headstrong make their Sub Club debut, bringing in XL talent and ‘tekbro duo’ Overmono.

Fri 27 Jan OLD SKOOL

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £6 - £7

Connoisseur’s mix of old-school jazz, funk and soul for your jivin’ pleasure.

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

JAMMING FRIDAYS

MAGGIE MAY’S, 22:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Indie rock’n’roll from the 60s to 00s with resident tune-picker DJ Jopez.

REMAKE REMODEL

STEREO, FROM 23:00, TBC

A night of alternative rock’n’roll shenanigans.

EZUP

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00, TBC

Glasgow’s Dixon Avenue Basement Jams rock the decks at La Cheetah.

WTF FRIDAYS

SHED, 22:30–03:00, £4 - £6

Student-friendly Friday night party, playing (as one might expect) cheesy classics of every hue.

FRESH BEAT

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £6

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

HOT HOUSE

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, £3

Cat Reilly spins the best in joyous party magic.

Sat 28 Jan NU SKOOL

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £6 - £7

Nick Peacock spins a Saturdayready selection of vintage disco, soul and funk.

THE ROCK SHOP

MAGGIE MAY’S, 22:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Rock, indie and golden indie classics with resident DJ Heather McCartney.

SHAKA LOVES YOU

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, FROM 23:30, £3

Hip-hop and live percussion flanked by wicked visuals.

I LOVE GARAGE

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £5 - £7

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

LEZURE: SECOND BIRTHDAY (A MADE UP SOUND + BRUCE + PDL)

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–04:00, £8 - £10

Mon 30 Jan BARE MONDAYS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £4

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

BURN MONDAYS

BUFF CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

Edinburgh Clubs Tue 03 Jan TRASH

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

Tue 31 Jan

Wed 04 Jan

Wed 11 Jan

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

I AM (MARIBOU STATE) (BETA & KAPPA)

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £8

i AM’s January closes out with tropical house giants Maribou State.

COOKIE

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

Resident midweek student rammy of chart, club and electro hits.

WITNESS (ROSS BLACKWAX + FAULT LINES + SKILLIS + SQUELCHY)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £2

HI-SOCIETY

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

Early weekend-welcoming (y’know, for students) chart anthems, bolstered by hip-hop, R'n'B and urban in the back room.

Fri 06 Jan FOUR CORNERS

THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

DJs Simon Hodge, Astrojazz and Johnny Cashback bring tunes from all over the globe to your Edinburgh based eardums.

PROPAGANDA

THE LIQUID ROOM, 22:30–03:00, £3 - £5

Clubber’s favourite of indie classics and baggy greats, from Primal Scream and the like.

EVOL

Infrastructure boss, techno boffin and Berghain resident Function (AKA Dave Sumner) plays TBS.

STUDIO 24, 21:30–03:00, £4 - £7

A full-spectrum psychedelic trance night featuring sets from Chris Rich, Quadrant, Sutekh and Mojo, with bespoke decor from Geomatrix design.

L’ANATOMIE (LEON POWER + SANDEMAN)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £5

BIG ‘N’ BASHY

THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £4 - £6

Mighty mix of reggae, grime, dubstep and jungle played by inimitable residents Brother Most Righteous, Skillis, Tekkerz and Deburgh.

REWIND

THE LIQUID ROOM, 22:30–03:00, £4 - £5

Classic garage and a dash of bass.

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, FROM 21:00, £15 - £24

STUDIO 24, 22:30–03:00, £2.50 - £5

CATHOUSE SATURDAYS

CATHOUSE, 22:30–03:00, £5 - £6

Or Caturdays, if you will. Two levels of the loudest, maddest music the DJs can muster; metal, rock and alt on floor one, and punky screamo upstairs.

Sun 29 Jan SUNDAY SCIENCE

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £4

As scientific as a club filled with tipsy Sunday night partiers can get, really. LED lights, glow in the dark wands, ‘Science’ cocktails and cannons. Unlikely to instigate any eureka moments, but it’ll do.

0131 CLUB (DJ DAYL + SHAUNY D)

Rock and metal requests with free pizza and the peril of Buckfast jelly shots.

STRUT!

THE VILLAGE, 19:00–00:00, TBC

Funk, dynamite disco and house.

HECTORS & ULTRAGROOVE’S UNIQUE FUNDRAISER (GARETH SOMMERVILLE + COLIN COOK)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £7

Legendary Edinburgh DJ duo play raising money for Unique: A Charity dedicated to help understanding chromosome disorders.

Sun 08 Jan THE CLUB

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

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

Mon 09 Jan

WITNESS (ROSS BLACKWAX + FAULT LINES + SKILLIS + SQUELCHY) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £2

House, garage and bass adventures with Blackwax and Faultlines.

January 2017

Thu 12 Jan

JUICE (KA MI + DAN JUICE + DECLAN)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £2

Dan, Declan and Kami make weird waves through house and techno.

HI-SOCIETY

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

Early weekend-welcoming (y’know, for students) chart anthems, bolstered by hip-hop, R'n'B and urban in the back room.

Fri 13 Jan PLANET EARTH

CITRUS CLUB, 23:30–03:00, £5

Distinctly retro selections from 1960 to 1999, moving from Abba to ZZ Top. PROPAGANDA

THE LIQUID ROOM, 22:30–03:00, £3 - £5

Crackin’ indie, pop and dance from the 80s and 90s. If you don’t hear Kelis or Wheatus at least once, sue us! (Don’t.)

COLOURS TWENTY TWO: BLASTERJAXX

Dutch dance act Blasterjaxx gets on board to help Colours celebrate 22 years of partychuckin’.

Hella fun midweek throwdown playing soul, funk, jazz, ska, disco and more.

SUBSECTOR (CHRIS RICH + QUADRANT + SUTEKH + MOJO)

Sat 07 Jan

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00, TBC

LOCO KAMANCHI

Clubber’s favourite of indie classics and baggy greats, from Primal Scream and the like.

SWG3 GLASGOW, FROM 22:00, £6 - £14

FUNCTION (LUCY BROWN + JACQUES RENAULT + OOFT)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £2

ELECTRIC CIRCUS, 22:30–03:00, £0 - £5

Edinburgh’s original rock’n’roll bash, mixing indie, pop, electro, hip-hop and alternative styles to make one hell of a party playlist.

Find full listings at theskinny.co.uk/whats-on

BEEP BEEP, YEAH!

ELECTRIC CIRCUS, 22:30–03:00, £5 - £6

WITNESS (ROSS BLACKWAX + FAULT LINES + SKILLIS + SQUELCHY)

THE BONGO CLUB, FROM 23:00, £4 - £5

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £2

Raw, high energy R'n'B from DJs Francis Dosoo and Cameron Mason.

The best in Chicago, deep and funky house music old and new with resident DJs Foxxy DJ and Hi Tech John.

COOKIE

Thu 05 Jan

Dan, Declan and Kami make weird waves through house and techno.

THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £5

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

Resident midweek student rammy of chart, club and electro hits.

House, garage and bass adventures with Blackwax and Faultlines.

JUICE (KA MI + DAN JUICE + DECLAN)

SOULSVILLE

Expect only the best pop tunes from the 50s, 60s and 70s at this retro pop club night.

House, garage and bass adventures with Blackwax and Faultlines.

The live debut show of a new project between two very talented artists, Leon Power and Sandeman.

Mike Skinner & Murkage Dave hit SWG3 with Tonga.

TRASH

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

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

DJ sets from local hero and and one half of Clouds Perth Drug Legend; Hessle Audio rising star and La Cheetah fave DJ Bruce; and a live set from Dave Huismans aka A Made Up Sound.

TONGA

Tue 10 Jan

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

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £4

DECADE: UGLY SWEATER PARTY STUDIO 24, 22:30–03:00, £2 - £5

A funk-fuelled night in the glorious surrounds of Edinburgh’s Caves.

Thu 19 Jan

Long-running trade night with Normski and Mash spinning the disco beats. #TAG TUESDAYS

FUNKTION III THE CAVES, FROM 01:30, £7 - £9

POP TARTS

ELECTRIC CIRCUS, 22:30–03:00, TBC

SAMEDIA SHEBEEN (ASTROJAZZ + SAMEDI) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £5

With full, immersive set design and décor, and a soundtrack spanning old and new sounds of Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and New Orleans, it has proven a big hit with people at clubs and festivals.

ANYTHING GOES (MORPHAMISH + DMT 23 + ALIAS 23 + WONKSIE)

STUDIO 24, 23:00–03:00, £5

Studio 24’s eclectic club night in which Morphamish, DMT 23, Alias 23 Wonksie bring the techno bangers.

FLIP

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, £0 - £3

ELECTRO CYCLE

THE VILLAGE, FROM 20:00, FREE

GRIND HOUSE

STUDIO 24, 22:00–03:00, £5

The launch of a new rock and metal night for Edinburgh, already established in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Expect all the best in metal and rock from the heyday of hair metal in the 1980s to the classics of today.

THE BOROUGH COLLECTIVE: RESIDENT SHOWCASE (CRAIG SMITH + HUGGY +MARCO CAPOZELLA + CHOW MEIN + KA MI + DECLAN LAW + CHRIS THOMAS)

CABARET VOLTAIRE, 23:00–03:00, £5 - £7

The Borough Collective launch night featuring all of its resident DJs. Think local selectors, quality house and techno, consistency and big things to come.

SHAPEWORK (RANDOMER)

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00, £5 - £10

Shapework throw a deseved birthday bash with a little help from modern bass and techno don Randomer.

TEESH 3D WORLD CLUB (DJ CHEERS + SEMI DELUXE) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £5

The ‘All You Can Eat Mind Buffet’ through Afro, Cosmic Disco, Boogie, Classics, Warm weird House & Techno, Hi NRG, Italo, creating various immersive 3D experiences in the club to enjoy.

Free 3D Glasses, 3D artworks, Projections & more

Sun 15 Jan

COALITION (BELIEVE + GAV MILLER + STU + JORDAN COCHRANE + GED + SKANKY B)

ELECTRIC CIRCUS, FROM 22:30, £0-3

Sat 14 Jan TEASE AGE

CITRUS CLUB, 22:30–03:00, £0 - £5

Long-running indie, rock and soul night, traversing the spectrum of classic and modern.

BUBBLEGUM

THE HIVE, 21:00–03:00, £0 - £4

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

INDIGO

THE LIQUID ROOM, 22:30–03:00, £4 - £5

Liquid Room’s in-house indie night returns, bringing a taste of summer rock’n’roll.

First of the monthly guest apperances at Cab Vol’s new Saturday night series. Sheffield based recording artist, DJ, producer and label boss at Shadeleaf Music returns to Edinbrugh to headline The Borough Collective guest night.

Early weekend-welcoming (y’know, for students) chart anthems, bolstered by hip-hop, R'n'B and urban in the back room.

ODYSSEY. (GEORGE FITZGERALD)

CABARET VOLTAIRE, 23:00–03:00, £8 - £15

Odyssey returns with their monthly instalment of electronic dance music heavyweights at Cab Vol. The ever-experimental Londoner is set to secure another sweaty full house on a Thursday night.

Fri 20 Jan PLANET EARTH

CITRUS CLUB, 23:30–03:00, £5

Distinctly retro selections from 1960 to 1999, moving from Abba to ZZ Top. PROPAGANDA

THE LIQUID ROOM, 22:30–03:00, £3 - £5

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

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

Mon 16 Jan MIXED UP

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

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

MINDSET (GARETH SOMMERVILLE)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £2

TRASH

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

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

Wed 18 Jan COOKIE

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

Resident midweek student rammy of chart, club and electro hits.

WITNESS (ROSS BLACKWAX + FAULT LINES + SKILLIS + SQUELCHY)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £2

House, garage and bass adventures with Blackwax and Faultlines.

MANSION

THE LIQUID ROOM, 22:30–03:00, TBC

Favourited student midweeker playing house, electro and hippity-hop.

LOCO KAMANCHI

THE BONGO CLUB, FROM 23:00, £4 - £5

Hella fun midweek throwdown playing soul, funk, jazz, ska, disco and more.

CABARET VOLTAIRE, 23:00–03:00, £5 - £7

Sun 22 Jan

COALITION (BELIEVE + GAV MILLER + STU + JORDAN COCHRANE + GED + SKANKY B) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, FREE

Weekly bass institution hosted

by DJ Believe and friends.

THE CLUB

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

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

Mon 23 Jan MIXED UP

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

Clubber’s favourite of indie classics and baggy greats, from Primal Scream and the like.

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

ELECTRIC CIRCUS, 19:00–22:00, £0 - £3

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £2

POP TARTS

Crackin’ indie, pop and dance from the 80s and 90s. If you don’t hear Kelis or Wheatus at least once, sue us! (Don’t.)

RHYTHM MACHINE

STUDIO 24, 23:00–03:00, £6

A late night utopian getaway, with music from M. Favors and DJ Sofay in the main room and performance art/installations in room two.

FLIP

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, £0 - £3

Yer all-new Friday at Hive. Cheap entry, inevitably danceable, and novelty-stuffed. Perrrfect.

FLY: DENIS SULTA’S SULTA SHEIKH DOWN

CABARET VOLTAIRE, 23:00–03:00, £10

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

Based in Berlin and Stockholm, Matt Karmil is revered by giants Ben UFO, John Talabot and Matthew Herbert. A rich tapestry of ethereal house, thumping techno and left field hip-hop is expected between him and host, local favourite of the club, Telfort.

Tue 17 Jan

The women of The Skinny spin the very nastiest in feminist pop, accompanied by bespoke teen movie visuals. Free before midnight.

HI-SOCIETY

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

THE CLUB

THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £2 - £5

SKINNY BITCHES

THE BOROUGH COLLECTIVE (THATMANMONKZ)

TELFORT’S GOOD PLACE (MATT KARMIL) (TELFORT)

Strictly house grooves from Edinburgh house DJ don Gareth Sommerville.

DJ Greenman, Skillis and Witness get stuck in at Bongo.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £2

Dan, Declan and Kami make weird waves through house and techno.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, FREE

Weekly bass institution hosted

by DJ Believe and friends.

Yer all-new Friday at Hive. Cheap entry, inevitably danceable, and novelty-stuffed. Perrrfect.

HEADSET: 2ND BIRTHDAY

JUICE (KA MI + DAN JUICE + DECLAN)

The weather might be awful, but what a better way to combat it than with an even more awful sweater! Join Studio 24 for all your fave pop-punk and party anthems along with party games, giveaways and retro gaming.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £5

Sat 21 Jan TEASE AGE

CITRUS CLUB, 22:30–03:00, £0 - £5

Long-running indie, rock and soul night, traversing the spectrum of classic and modern.

BUBBLEGUM

THE HIVE, 21:00–03:00, £0 - £4

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

THE GREEN DOOR

STUDIO 24, 22:30–03:00, £5

The Tropical tiki club night playing the hottest old-school rock’n’roll, rhythm & blues, doo wop, garage, surf and soul. And there’s cake.

POP ROCKS

ELECTRIC CIRCUS, 22:30–03:00, £5

Pop and rock gems, taking in motown, 80s classics and plenty danceable fare (well, the Beep Beep, Yeah! crew are on decks after all).

MESSENGER

THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £6 - £7

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

WASABI DISCO (KRIS WASABI)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £5

After turning the ripe old age of eight, the big wee man of Edinburgh clubland kicks off the new year as it means to go on with its usual mind-bending, genre-blending take on dance floor etiquette.

MINDSET (GARETH SOMMERVILLE)

Strictly house grooves from Edinburgh house DJ don Gareth Sommerville.

COAST 2 COAST

THE LIQUID ROOM, 22:30–03:00, £6

A hip-hoptopia covering all the greatest tracks in hip-hop from the golden age of boom bap to modern trap.

Tue 24 Jan TRASH

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

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

Wed 25 Jan COOKIE

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

Resident midweek student rammy of chart, club and electro hits.

WITNESS (ROSS BLACKWAX + FAULT LINES + SKILLIS + SQUELCHY)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £2

House, garage and bass adventures with Blackwax and Faultlines.

MANSION

THE LIQUID ROOM, 22:30–03:00, TBC

Favourited student midweeker playing house, electro and hippity-hop.

LOCO KAMANCHI

THE BONGO CLUB, FROM 23:00, £4 - £5

Hella fun midweek throwdown playing soul, funk, jazz, ska, disco and more.

Thu 26 Jan

JUICE (KA MI + DAN JUICE + DECLAN)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £2

Dan, Declan and Kami make weird waves through house and techno.

HI-SOCIETY

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

Early weekend-welcoming (y’know, for students) chart anthems, bolstered by hip-hop, R'n'B and urban in the back room.

Fri 27 Jan PLANET EARTH

CITRUS CLUB, 23:30–03:00, £5

Distinctly retro selections from 1960 to 1999, moving from Abba to ZZ Top. PROPAGANDA

THE LIQUID ROOM, 22:30–03:00, £3 - £5

Clubber’s favourite of indie classics and baggy greats, from Primal Scream and the like.

BETAMAX (CHRIS FAST + BIG GUS)

STUDIO 24, 23:00–03:00, £2 - £5

New wave and mutant disco, post punk and 80s synth, power pop and synthetic sounds for your dancing pleasure.

Listings

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SURE SHOT ELECTRIC CIRCUS, 22:30–03:00, £2 - £4

Golden age hip-hop and R'n'B night hosted by two bearded men with an equal love of food and music; The Skinny’s Food Editor Peter Simpson and one half of Edinburgh’s Kitchen Disco, Malcolm Storey.

LIONOIL (DJ YVES + PERCY MAIN)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £5

Residents party from hot young Edinburgh label ‘Lionoil Industries’.

FLIP

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, £0 - £3

Yer all-new Friday at Hive. Cheap entry, inevitably danceable, and novelty-stuffed. Perrrfect.

Mon 30 Jan MIXED UP

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

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

MINDSET (GARETH SOMMERVILLE)

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £2

Strictly house grooves from Edinburgh house DJ don Gareth Sommerville.

Tue 31 Jan TRASH

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

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

ELECTRIKAL (MEFJUS)

THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £4 - £6

Bongo’s monthly house, bassline, grime and jungle night brings in drum and bass renegade Mefjus for a 90-minute Scotland exclusive.

Dundee Clubs

SOUL TRAIN

STUDIO 24, FROM 22:00, £7 - £10

An uplifting journey filled with funk, soul, disco and motown classics. Expect dancers, lighting and visuals, soul train danceway and dance-offs, vintage makeovers, and a whole lot of soul.

Sat 28 Jan TEASE AGE

CITRUS CLUB, 22:30–03:00, £0 - £5

Long-running indie, rock and soul night, traversing the spectrum of classic and modern.

MUMBO JUMBO

THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00, £3 - £7

Funk, soul, and birthday beats and bumps from the Mumbo Jumbo regulars and pals.

BUBBLEGUM

THE HIVE, 21:00–03:00, £0 - £4

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

RIDE (LAUREN ILL + CHECK YERSEL)

Theatre Glasgow Theatre

Edinburgh Theatre

Citizens Theatre

Festival Theatre

24 JAN-28 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £12.50 £22.50

17 JAN-17 JAN 17, 7:00PM, £10

THE WINTER’S TALE

Cheek by Jowl, one of the world’s leading theatre companies tackle Shakespeare’s masterpiece of wit and wisdom.

HANSEL & GRETEL

15 DEC-7 JAN 17, 7:00PM, £5 - £22

A twist on the Grimm classics, with the witch happening to be pretty adept at tango dancing as she lures two children into her edible house.

Fri 13 Jan

The King’s Theatre

READING ROOMS, 22:30–03:00, £5

15 DEC-25 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, PRICES VARY

PHAZED AND FRIENDS PART 2 (CORRELATE + MR. FUDSON + PATHEW + WALKER)

First Phazed of the year, bringing in We Are Minder label co-owner Mr. Fudson, local boy Pathew, Reading Rooms patron Walker and Teddy Hannan and Correlate for b2b galore.

Fri 27 Jan

HEADWAY (SKREAM) (ANDY BARTON + GRAEME BINNIE + NEIL CLARK)

READING ROOMS, 21:30–03:00, £15

The Headway crew host a three-hour set from Skream – one of the key pioneers behind the rapidly developing dubstep movement. Support comes from residents Andy Barton, Graeme Binnie and Neil Clark.

CINDERELLA

A new production of Rossini’s comedy, centred on floor-scrubber Cinderella as she dreams of a better life.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

17 JAN-21 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £10 - £38.50

Stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s best-selling novel, combining the intensity of live theatre with a cinematic tension inspired by the world of film noir.

CIRQUE BESERK

24 JAN-29 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £15 - £28

Combining contemporary 'cirque' style skills with stunt action, Cirque Berserk swings by as part of a UK tour.

VAMPIRES ROCK: THE GHOST TRAIN

22 JAN-22 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £27.40 - £30

A monthly nineties and noughties hip-hop and R'n'B jams party.

Live fast, die young, RIDE girls do it well.

Steve Steinman’s spectacular sequel to the successful Vampires Rock Musical Concert. Expect aerial stunts, fire routines and all kindsa rock anthems. Eclectic.

THE LIQUID ROOM, 22:30–03:00, £5

The SSE Hydro

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £5

MADCHESTER

Long running Edinburgh club night celebrating the baggiest beats from the late 80s and early 90s.

POP TARTS

ELECTRIC CIRCUS, 22:30–03:00, £0 - £3

Crackin’ indie, pop and dance from the 80s and 90s. If you don’t hear Kelis or Wheatus at least once, sue us! (Don’t.)

KEEP IT STEEL

STUDIO 24, 23:00–03:00, £0 - £5

Starting in the 60s with Hendrix, Sabbath and Zeppelin, Edinburgh’s No.1 Metal club embarks on a riff-tastic journey with each hour devoted to a different era of heavy metal. Irresponsible party games, banter and delightful steel visuals.

THE BOROUGH COLLECTIVE: CRASH GOES LOVE (GARETH SOMMERVILLE + CUNNIE) CABARET VOLTAIRE, 23:00–03:00, £5 - £7

First instalment of the monthly Crash Goes Love series under The Borough Collective with Edinbrugh’s very own Gareth Sommerville and Cunnie.

FRACTAL CLUB (NICK HÖPPNER) THE LIQUID ROOM, FROM 22:30, £7.50

After launching last year, Fractal Club are back for their fourth installment with none other than Berlin’s Höppner at the helm. The Berghain/Panorama Bar resident is a key figure in Berlin’s house and techno scene.

Sun 29 Jan

COALITION (BELIEVE + GAV MILLER + STU + JORDAN COCHRANE + GED + SKANKY B) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00, FREE

Weekly bass institution hosted

by DJ Believe and friends.

THE CLUB

THE HIVE, 22:00–03:00, FREE

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

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Listings

STRICTLY COME DANCING LIVE

27 JAN-8 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, £35 - £65

The celebs (we use that term lightly) and dancers from television phenomenon Strictly Come Dancing take to the stage for the annual live tour. We trust you’re suitably excited?

DANCEFEST 2016

An evening of diverse choreographic talent from Scottish youth dancing collectives.

King’s Theatre Edinburgh

Michael Rosen’s timeless classic, in which the ever-popular poet and children’s author bringing his inimitable brand of humour and energy to a tale about tracking down the grizzlies.

Matinees available.

Royal Lyceum Theatre PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

13 JAN-28 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £10 £30.50

A brand new play adapted by Tom Wright from Joan Lindsay’s novel. Set in summer of 1900, three Australian schoolgirls escape from school on an ‘adventure’, never to be seen again.

The Edinburgh Playhouse THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE

30 JAN-25 FEB 17, 7:30PM, PRICES VARY

1925s set musical based on the classic Julie Andrews’ movie, all flapper girls, dashing chaps and singalong merriment.

Traverse Theatre WHISPERS

30 JAN-30 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £8.50 - £16.50

Cie Mossoux-Bonté brings its innovative and challenging dance theatre to the Trav as part of Manipulate Festival.

SNAPSHOT: EAT ME

28 JAN-28 JAN 17, 2:00PM, FREE

29 JAN-9 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, PRICES VARY

28 JAN-28 JAN 17, 3:00PM, FREE

SCOTTISH BALLET: HANSEL & GRETEL

5 JAN-14 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £9 - £37

Scottish Ballet’s take on the classic Brothers Grimm fairytale, marking choreographer Christopher Hampson’s first full length ballet for the company – backed by Engelbert Humperdinck’s moving score.

SCOTTISH OPERA: THE TRIAL

24 JAN-28 JAN 17, 7:15PM, £15 - £31

Kafka’s nightmarish tale of Joseph K is reworked by Academy Awardwinning playwright Christopher Hampton and performed by Scottish Opera.

Tron Theatre THE SNAW QUEEN

15 DEC-7 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £10 - £19

Join Kristine Cagney Kringle and her toy workshop as they embark on a quest to save the pantosphere from the evil Snaw Queen and to keep Weegietown in a state of Christmas-celebrating joy.

WIND RESISTANCE: KARINE POLWART

25 JAN-28 JAN 17, 8:00PM, £20

Karine Polwart’s first foray into the world of theatre, inspired by the autumn migration of pinkfooted geese from Greenland to a peat marsh near her home.

THE LIONS OF LISBON

29 JAN-29 JAN 17, 8:00PM, £16

Willy Maley and Ian Auld’s hit play The Lions of Lisbon is revived at Tron as a rehearsed reading with a 10 person cast and a full live band.

La Causeuse, a piece of physical theatre created and performed

by Olivia Faye Lathuilliere is a voyage through the memories of a sordid and doomed romance.

THE END OF THINGS

31 JAN-31 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £8.50 - £16.50

The Company of Wolves tell the story of four horsemen of the apocalypse. Part of Manipulate Festival.

20 JAN-21 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, £13

Theatre Royal

Brendan Cole unbuttons his shirt to the sternum and gets set to host another night of Strictly-esque grooving.

LA CAUSEUSE (THE LOVE SEAT) 31 JAN-31 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £8.50 - £16.50

WE’RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT

A woman uses the dark web to find someone to eat her. An image-based work of theatre – Manipulate Festival.

BRENDAN COLE: ALL NIGHT LONG

Comedy

SNAPSHOT: CLOTH

Tiffany Soirat’s first solo piece, Cloth is an authentic physical exploration of a woman’s dreams, relationships, of her deepest and most private of selves. Part of Manipulate Festival.

Dundee Theatre

Glasgow Comedy Tue 03 Jan RED RAW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £3

Open mic-style beginners showcase, plus some old hands dropping by to road test new material.

THE SCAFFIES

2 JAN-3 JAN 17, 7:30PM, £9 - £15

Gary Robertson, the acclaimed writer responsible for sell-out comedy The Berries brings another humorous illustration of Dundee life.

Whitehall Theatre FORBIDDEN NIGHTS

27 JAN-27 JAN 17, 8:00PM, £20

One of the UK’s top ‘male glamour’ shows. Expect gallons of baby oil, miles of abs and an audience full of yelping onlookers.

JOSEPH & THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT

14 JAN-15 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, £11 - £13

One of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s more garish gifts (which is saying something), in this biblical retelling of a man, his showboat of a coat and his eleven green-eyed bros.

Ro Cambell and The Wee Man’s comedian rap battle-off, where a select batch of comics compete to see who’s got the most swagger when it comes to hippity-hop wit.

YESBAR, FROM 20:00, £3 - £9

Resident host Julia Sutherland introduces a variety of stand-up comedians from the Scottish circuit delivering all new material.

Thu 05 Jan THE THURSDAY SHOW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £7 - £10

Weekend-welcoming selection of handpicked headline acts and newcomers over a two-hour showcase.

Fri 06 Jan THE FRIDAY SHOW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £10 - £12

Prime stand-up from the Scottish and international circuit, hosted by a rotating selection of Stand stalwarts.

LAUGHTER EIGHT

YESBAR, FROM 20:00, £10

Regular comedy slot kicking off at, aye, 8pm? Manned by a selection of hot talent from the local circuit.

THE LATE SHOW

YESBAR, FROM 22:00, £10

Late night lols at Yesbar.

Sat 07 Jan THE SATURDAY SHOW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 21:00–23:00, £18

Packed Saturday evening bill of stand-up headliners and resident comperes to jolly along your weekend.

LAUGHTER EIGHT

YESBAR, FROM 20:00, £10

Regular comedy slot kicking off at, aye, 8pm? Manned by a selection of hot talent from the local circuit.

THE LATE SHOW

YESBAR, FROM 22:00, £10

Sun 08 Jan

Five works developed in weekly workshops with leading puppeteer Gavin Glover, presented

by Puppet Animation Scotland and the National Theatre of Scotland. Part of Manipulate Festival.

FISK

28 JAN-4 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, PRICES VARY

A story of a man and a fish, and the unexpected impact they have upon one another. By Tortoise in a Nutshell and part of Manipulate Festival.

POLI DEGAINE

28 JAN-30 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, PRICES VARY

If you only ever see one Polichinelle / Punch / Pulcinella / Petrushka / Kasper l/ Don Christobal / Karagöz / Karaghiosis booth show in your life, make it this one. Part of Manipulate Festival.

THE FRIDAY SHOW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £10 - £12

YESBAR, FROM 20:00, £10

28 JAN-28 JAN 17, 4:00PM, FREE

TESTROOM

Fri 13 Jan

COMEDIAN RAP BATTLES

Late night lols at Yesbar.

28 JAN-28 JAN 17, 6:00PM, FREE

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £3

Open mic-style beginners showcase, plus some old hands dropping by to road test new material.

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:00, £4 - £6

Wed 04 Jan

SNAPSHOT: THE BODY IN SHADOW

A non-texual performance using shadow theatre, ensemble work and physical theatre to explore the notion of ‘love’ – as endurance, science and psyhosis.

RED RAW

Prime stand-up from the Scottish and international circuit, hosted by a rotating selection of Stand stalwarts.

NEW MATERIAL COMEDY NIGHT

Dundee Rep

Tue 10 Jan

LAUGHTER EIGHT

Regular comedy slot kicking off at, aye, 8pm? Manned by a selection of hot talent from the local circuit.

Sat 14 Jan

THE SATURDAY SHOW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 21:00–23:00, £18

Packed Saturday evening bill of stand-up headliners and resident comperes to jolly along your weekend.

LAUGHTER EIGHT

YESBAR, FROM 20:00, £10

Regular comedy slot kicking off at, aye, 8pm? Manned by a selection of hot talent from the local circuit.

Sun 15 Jan

MICHAEL REDMOND’S SUNDAY SERVICE

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:00, £5 - £6

Chilled Sunday comedy showcase manned by resident Irish funnyman Michael Redmond and his handpicked guests.

Mon 16 Jan

INSANE CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTING’S: HAVE I GOT CHAIR SHOTS FOR YOU

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:00, £6

What use, you might ask, does the world have for an ‘interactive wrestling-based comedy show’?

Well, comedy punter, the simple answer is that it’s 2017 and these things just happen. Live with it

Tue 17 Jan RED RAW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £3

Open mic-style beginners showcase, plus some old hands dropping by to road test new material.

LEE KYLE: WHAT DO I DO NOW? (KIDS SHOW) (LEE KYLE)

THE STAND GLASGOW, 15:00–16:00, £4

Head to The Stand and laugh at the self-proclaimed ‘world’s stupidest idiot’.

Mon 09 Jan

LEE KYLE - BURNING THIS PLACE TO THE GROUND (LEE KYLE)

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:00, £5 - £7

A solo show from Northeastern comic Lee Kyle.

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:00, £5 - £6

Chilled Sunday comedy showcase manned by resident Irish funnyman Michael Redmond and his handpicked guests.

GLASGOW KIDS COMEDY CLUB: STORYTELLING SPECIAL

THE STAND GLASGOW, 15:00–16:00, £4

Comedy and storytelling session suitable for little ears (i.e. no swearies), for children aged 8-12 years-old.

Mon 23 Jan TOPICAL STORM

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:00, £5 - £7

Radical satire from Keir McAllister, Vladimir McTavish, Stu Murphy and Mark Nelson.

Tue 24 Jan RED RAW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £3

Open mic-style beginners showcase, plus some old hands dropping by to road test new material.

Wed 25 Jan BURNS NIGHT SPECIAL

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:30, £5 - £6

A night of lols in honour of good ol’ Rabbie B.

Thu 26 Jan THE THURSDAY SHOW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £7 - £10

Weekend-welcoming selection of handpicked headline acts and newcomers over a two-hour showcase.

Fri 27 Jan THE FRIDAY SHOW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £10 - £12

Prime stand-up from the Scottish and international circuit, hosted by a rotating selection of Stand stalwarts.

LAUGHTER EIGHT

YESBAR, FROM 20:00, £10

Sat 28 Jan

A charity comedy benefit raising funds for Women’s Support Project.

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £7 - £10

A selection of five fledgling comedians do their best to win over the audience and graduate Yesbar’s ‘Comedy Sunday School’.

MICHAEL REDMOND’S SUNDAY SERVICE

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:30, £5 - £10

BENEFIT IN AID OF WOMEN’S SUPPORT PROJECT

Thu 19 Jan

YESBAR VIRGINS: COMEDY SUNDAY SCHOOL

Sun 22 Jan

Regular comedy slot kicking off at, aye, 8pm? Manned by a selection of hot talent from the local circuit.

MICHAEL REDMOND’S SUNDAY SERVICE

YESBAR, FROM 20:00, £3 - £9

Regular comedy slot kicking off at, aye, 8pm? Manned by a selection of hot talent from the local circuit.

Wed 18 Jan

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:00, £5 - £6

Chilled Sunday comedy showcase manned by resident Irish funnyman Michael Redmond and his handpicked guests.

LAUGHTER EIGHT YESBAR, FROM 20:00, £10

THE THURSDAY SHOW

Weekend-welcoming selection of handpicked headline acts and newcomers over a two-hour showcase.

Fri 20 Jan THE FRIDAY SHOW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £10 - £12

Prime stand-up from the Scottish and international circuit, hosted by a rotating selection of Stand stalwarts.

LAUGHTER EIGHT

YESBAR, FROM 20:00, £10

Regular comedy slot kicking off at, aye, 8pm? Manned by a selection of hot talent from the local circuit.

Sat 21 Jan

THE SATURDAY SHOW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 21:00–23:00, £18

Packed Saturday evening bill of stand-up headliners and resident comperes to jolly along your weekend.

THE SATURDAY SHOW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 21:00–23:00, £18

Packed Saturday evening bill of stand-up headliners and resident comperes to jolly along your weekend.

LAUGHTER EIGHT

YESBAR, FROM 20:00, £10

Regular comedy slot kicking off at, aye, 8pm? Manned by a selection of hot talent from the local circuit.

Sun 29 Jan BURNS NIGHT SPECIAL

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:30, £5 - £6

A night of lols in honour of good ol’ Rabbie B.

Mon 30 Jan MAZ’S MAGGIES BENEFIT

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–22:30, £10

A charity comedy benefit raising funds for Maz’s Maggies.

NISH KUMAR: ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS, UNLESS YOU SHOUT THE WORDS REAL LOUD.

ORAN MOR, 19:00, £12-£14

A comedy show about history, democracy and capitalism.

Tue 31 Jan RED RAW

THE STAND GLASGOW, 20:30–23:00, £3

Open mic-style beginners showcase, plus some old hands dropping by to road test new material.

THE SKINNY

Edinburgh Comedy Tue 03 Jan

RICHARD MELVIN PRESENTS: MORE RADIO RECORDINGS!

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:00–22:00, FREE

Richard Melvin brings another night of radio recordings to Edinburgh’s comedy haunt The Stand.

Wed 04 Jan VIVA LA SHAMBLES

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:00, £4 - £5

Wed 11 Jan

Wed 18 Jan

Thu 26 Jan

THE EDINBURGH PLAYHOUSE, FROM 20:00, £26.75 - £31.25

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:30, £5 - £7

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £7 - £10

JACK WHITEHALL - AT LARGE

Posh boy Jack Whitehall – recently seen gracing our TV screens as the deplorable public school tosser JP in Fresh Meat – taking his cheeky self out on the road with his latest stand-up show.

BENEFIT IN AID OF THE CHILD BRAIN INJURY TRUST

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:30, £5

A charity comedy benefit raising funds for The Child Brain Injury Trust.

TOP BANANA

The Stand hosts a monthly evening of total joke-pandemonium as Edinburgh’s top comics join forces.

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £0 - £2

Thu 05 Jan

Thu 12 Jan

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £7 - £10

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £7 - £10

THE THURSDAY SHOW

Weekend-welcoming selection of handpicked headline acts and newcomers over a two-hour showcase.

Fri 06 Jan THE FRIDAY SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £10 - £12

Prime stand-up from the Scottish and international circuit, hosted by a rotating selection of Stand stalwarts.

THE BIG SHOW

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £12

Monkey Barrel’s flagship weekend show, bringing you top laughs in the heart of Edinburgh.

Sat 07 Jan THE SATURDAY SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £18

Packed Saturday evening bill of stand-up headliners and resident comperes to jolly along your weekend.

THE BIG SHOW

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £12

Monkey Barrel’s flagship weekend show, bringing you top laughs in the heart of Edinburgh.

Sun 08 Jan

THE SUNDAY NIGHT LAUGH-IN

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:00, £5 - £6

Chilled comedy showcase to cure your Sunday evening back-towork blues.

STU & GARRY’S FREE IMPROV SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 13:30–15:00, FREE

Long-running improvised comedy show with resident duo Stu & Garry weaving comedy magic from off-the-cuff audience suggestions.

PROGRESS!

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £5

Monkey Barrel’s rising comedy star showcase; swing by and catch the stars of tomorrow.

Mon 09 Jan RED RAW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–23:00, £3

Open mic-style beginners showcase, plus some old hands dropping by to road test new material.

Tue 10 Jan WORK IN PROGRESS

SUMMERHALL, FROM 19:30, £3

Headline comedians treat us to brand spanking new material. Not for the cupboard-lover comedy fan, this night showcases material which is most definitely a work in progress.

BONA FIDE

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:00, £5 - £6

A brand new night which welcomes a stellar line-up of Scotland’s comics to perform material specially written for the theme of the night.

Monkey Barrel’s comedy competition for new folk on the scene.

THE THURSDAY SHOW

Weekend-welcoming selection of handpicked headline acts and newcomers over a two-hour showcase.

JACK WHITEHALL - AT LARGE

THE EDINBURGH PLAYHOUSE, FROM 20:00, £26.75 - £31.25

Posh boy Jack Whitehall – recently seen gracing our TV screens as the deplorable public school tosser JP in Fresh Meat – taking his cheeky self out on the road with his latest stand-up show.

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY PRESENTS…

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £5

Guest shows and tours at Monkey Barrel – keep an eye on their social media for weekly listings.

Fri 13 Jan THE FRIDAY SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £10 - £12

Prime stand-up from the Scottish and international circuit, hosted by a rotating selection of Stand stalwarts.

THE BIG SHOW

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £12

Monkey Barrel’s flagship weekend show, bringing you top laughs in the heart of Edinburgh.

Sat 14 Jan

THE SATURDAY SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £18

Packed Saturday evening bill of stand-up headliners and resident comperes to jolly along your weekend.

THE BIG SHOW

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £12

Monkey Barrel’s flagship weekend show, bringing you top laughs in the heart of Edinburgh.

Sun 15 Jan

THE SUNDAY NIGHT LAUGH-IN

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:00, £5 - £6

Chilled comedy showcase to cure your Sunday evening back-towork blues.

STU & GARRY’S FREE IMPROV SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 13:30–15:00, FREE

Long-running improvised comedy show with resident duo Stu & Garry weaving comedy magic from off-the-cuff audience suggestions.

Radical satire from Keir McAllister, Vladimir McTavish, Stu Murphy and Mark Nelson.

TOP BANANA

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £0 - £2

Monkey Barrel’s comedy competition for new folk on the scene.

Thu 19 Jan THE THURSDAY SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £7 - £10

Weekend-welcoming selection of handpicked headline acts and newcomers over a two-hour showcase.

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY PRESENTS…

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £5

Guest shows and tours at Monkey Barrel – keep an eye on their social media for weekly listings.

Fri 20 Jan THE FRIDAY SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £10 - £12

Prime stand-up from the Scottish and international circuit, hosted by a rotating selection of Stand stalwarts.

THE BIG SHOW

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £12

Monkey Barrel’s flagship weekend show, bringing you top laughs in the heart of Edinburgh.

Sat 21 Jan

THE SATURDAY SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £18

RED RAW

Open mic-style beginners showcase, plus some old hands dropping by to road test new material.

Tue 17 Jan

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:30, £10

A charity comedy benefit raising funds for Raised Voices.

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £5

Guest shows and tours at Monkey Barrel – keep an eye on their social media for weekly listings.

Fri 27 Jan THE FRIDAY SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £10 - £12

Prime stand-up from the Scottish and international circuit, hosted by a rotating selection of Stand stalwarts.

THE BIG SHOW

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £12

Monkey Barrel’s flagship weekend show, bringing you top laughs in the heart of Edinburgh.

Sat 28 Jan THE SATURDAY SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 21:00–23:00, £18

Packed Saturday evening bill of stand-up headliners and resident comperes to jolly along your weekend.

THE BIG SHOW

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £12

Monkey Barrel’s flagship weekend show, bringing you top laughs in the heart of Edinburgh.

Sun 29 Jan BURNS NIGHT SPECIAL

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 13:30–15:00, FREE

THE BIG SHOW

Monkey Barrel’s flagship weekend show, bringing you top laughs in the heart of Edinburgh.

A night of lols in honour of good ol’ Rabbie B.

STU & GARRY’S FREE IMPROV SHOW

Sun 22 Jan

Long-running improvised comedy show with resident duo Stu & Garry weaving comedy magic from off-the-cuff audience suggestions.

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:00, £5 - £6

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £5

THE SUNDAY NIGHT LAUGH-IN

Chilled comedy showcase to cure your Sunday evening back-towork blues.

STU & GARRY’S FREE IMPROV SHOW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 13:30–15:00, FREE

PROGRESS!

Monkey Barrel’s rising comedy star showcase; swing by and catch the stars of tomorrow.

Mon 30 Jan RED RAW

Long-running improvised comedy show with resident duo Stu & Garry weaving comedy magic from off-the-cuff audience suggestions.

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–23:00, £3

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £5

THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE

PROGRESS!

Monkey Barrel’s rising comedy star showcase; swing by and catch the stars of tomorrow.

Mon 23 Jan RED RAW

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–23:00, £3

Open mic-style beginners showcase, plus some old hands dropping by to road test new material.

THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE

Open mic-style beginners showcase, plus some old hands dropping by to road test new material.

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £3

Get the new week off to a bang with Monkey Barrel’s very silly and slightly adventurous alternative comedy night.

Tue 31 Jan

NISH KUMAR: ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS, UNLESS YOU SHOUT THE WORDS REAL LOUD.

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30, £12-£14

A comedy show about history, democracy and capitalism.

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £3

Tue 24 Jan

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–23:00, £3

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY PRESENTS…

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £12

PROGRESS!

Mon 16 Jan

Weekend-welcoming selection of handpicked headline acts and newcomers over a two-hour showcase.

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:30, £5 - £10

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £5

Monkey Barrel’s rising comedy star showcase; swing by and catch the stars of tomorrow.

THE THURSDAY SHOW

Packed Saturday evening bill of stand-up headliners and resident comperes to jolly along your weekend.

Get the new week off to a bang with Monkey Barrel’s very silly and slightly adventurous alternative comedy night.

BENEFIT IN AID OF RAISED VOICES

January 2017

TOPICAL STORM

BRIGHT CLUB

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:30, £5

A selection of comedic academics do a stint of stand-up for your entertainment and enlightenment. Laughs and learning in one neat package = tick.

Wed 25 Jan BURNS NIGHT SPECIAL

THE STAND COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:30, £5 - £6

A night of lols in honour of good ol’ Rabbie B. TOP BANANA

Art Glasgow Art CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art MARVIN GAYE CHETWYND: UPTIGHT UPRIGHT UPSIDE DOWN

15 DEC-8 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

For her first full solo show in Scotland, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd revisits and extends some of her earlier works transforming the exhibition spaces in CCA into a set. Proposing ideas and sharing information on what might liberate people, in an interactive live cinematic proposal Uptight upright upside down attempts not to shape the world, but rather to visually offer an extension to it.

FORMS OF ACTION

28 JAN-12 MAR 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

A show exploring current international developments in socially engaged art practices, looking at both form and content. The exhibition also aims to present a diverse series of approaches that transform spectatorship and the role of artists in society.

FRANCESCA HAWKER & DAVID HASLAM: IF YOU FIND ERRORS IN SCHEMA

7 JAN-21 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

The Hidden Lane Gallery THE CLASSIC IMAGES

Hunterian Art Gallery

WILLIAM HUNTER TO DAMIEN HIRST: THE DEAD TEACH THE LIVING

15 DEC-5 MAR 17, TIMES VARY, PRICES VARY

An exhibition curated by students on GSA / University of Glasgow’s students of Curatorial Practice, featuring objects and art which explore moments of synergy between the fields of art and science.

RENAISSANCE PRINTS: MANTEGNA, MARCANTONIO AND PARMIGIANINO

15 DEC-22 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

A collection of prints by three major figures in Italian Renaissance art: Andrea Mantegna, Marcantonio Raimondi and Parmigianino.

Market Gallery LEWIS DEN HERTOG & AMELIA BYWATER

FROM 13 JAN, TIMES VARY, FREE

Lewis den Hertog will present a new publication from his research into grotesquery and body distortion. Co-resident Amelia Bywater will arrange a workshop following the development of Loom, a publishing project that focuses on writing, means of recording language and feedback across each iteration of the project through live events, screenings and printed matter.

A joint show of two works which consider the relationship between the reference(s) and the real deal, and how we interact with and perceive these concepts.

Mary Mary

Cyril Gerber Fine Art

Jesse Wine is a sculptor who works primarily with ceramics. See an ambitious body of sculptural work based on deconstructed classical form in his second exhibition at Mary Mary.

THE WINTER COLLECTION 2016

15 DEC-31 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Specially selected paintings, drawings and sculptures collected for this seasonal exhibition, including work by Scottish Masters, Glasgow School, Modern British, St.Ives, Cadell, Colquhoun & MacBryde, Eardley, Fergusson, Kay, Knox, McLauchlan Milne, Paterson, Reeves, Sandeman, Vaughan, Watt and a selection of Scottish Contemporaries.

Glasgow Print Studio ACADEMICIANS IV

15 DEC-22 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

GPS present the fourth in a series of exhibitions combining the work of Royal and Royal Scottish Academicians. Features Christopher le Brun, Annie Cattrell, Stephen Chambers & Kate Downie.

Glasgow School of Art SIMONE TEN HOMPEL

14 JAN-23 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Independent curator Amanda Game and ten Hompel bring together domestic objects, sculpture, images, models and photographs to trace her exceptional work as designer, maker, teacher and curator in the field of contemporary metal design.

GoMA

PLEASE TURN US ON

15 DEC-22 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

A group exhibition placing Glasgow at the core of a dialogue between early video art and international counterculture.

Features What’s It To You?, a seminal work from Elsa Stansfield and Madelon Hooykaas, among other videographic works.

JOHN SAMSON: 1975 - 1983

15 DEC-17 APR 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

A showcase of the complete works of enigmatic Scottish filmmaker John Samson (1946–2004), exhibiting the five films made during his lifetime.

JESSE WINE: WORKING TITLE, NOT SURE YET

15 DEC-7 JAN 17, 12:00PM – 6:00PM, FREE

RGI Kelly Gallery

STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE

21 JAN-18 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

This exhibition brings together the work of 2016 GSA MLitt Graduate Martin Darbyshire and Elected RGI Neil Macdonald.

The artists present imagined landscapes which resonate in an age of political uncertainty; the familiar becomes less and the new embraced in an accelerated world.

Street Level Photoworks TABULA RASA II

15 DEC-5 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Five Glasgow artists, Alan Knox, Kotryna Ula Kiliulyte, Frank McElhinney, Stephen Healy, Julia Bauer, respond to the notion of the Passage of time and its effects on place, self, memory and history.

PHOTOBOOK AND ZINE EXHIBITION

28 JAN-5 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Street Level Photography presents an exhibition display of new photobooks and zines from Scotland.

The Common Guild

RADICAL DIALECT: MARIA FUSCO PRESENTS LISA ROBERTSON

18 JAN, 6PM, FREE BUT TICKETED

The Common Guild begin the first in a series of projects titled Radical Dialect with art writer Maria Fusco. For this evening, she invites the cult Canadian poet to discuss the construction of the vernacular voice amidst the abolishment of a lyric culture.

15 DEC-1 FEB 17, 11:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Canadian born Margaret Watkins spent the second half of her life in Glasgow, dying in obscurity.

But before her demise she gifted a mysterious sealed box to her neighbour, Joe Mulholland, to thank him for his help. This exhibition showcases 60 of her classic images, left inside that very box.

The Lighthouse KATHY HINDE: LUMINOUS BIRDS

15 DEC-15 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Kathy Hinde brings her musical flock of luminous birds inspired by the flight-paths of migrating birds to The Lighthouse.

JENNIFER KENT

15 DEC-5 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Glasgow-based knitwear designer and GSA grad Jennifer Kent presents a new collection manufactured in Scotland, created after Kent’s collaboration with knitters based in Sanquhar and Shetland.

A LIFE IN LETTERPRESS

15 DEC-5 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

A retrospective of Alan Kitchin’s work, spanning six decades of his letterpress typographic design and printmaking. His work is presented alongside artefacts, proofs, sketchbooks and equipment from his studio.

DRAWING ATTENTION: RARE WORKS ON PAPER 1400-1900

15 DEC-3 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

An exhibition spanning 500 years of draughtsmanship, platforming rare, quirky and lesser-known treats from the National Gallery’s drawings collection.

The Modern Institute JIM LAMBIE: ELECTROLUX

15 DEC-21 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

The 2005 Turner prize shortlisted artist brings a new exhibition to Modern Institute.

The Modern Institute @ Airds Lane

ANDREW KERR: WYNDHAM SCHOOL OF DANCING

15 DEC-21 JAN 17, 12:00PM – 5:00PM, FREE

The Glasgow-based artist presents a new body installations and paintings at The Modern Institute’s Aird’s Lane branch.

SHIO KUSAKA

15 DEC-21 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

A new exhibition from Japanese artist Shio Kusaka, who primarily works in the creation of mesmerising ceramics.

Tramway OLIVER LARIC

21 JAN-19 MAR, TIMES VARY, FREE

Tramway presents a solo exhibition by Berlin based artist Oliver Laric (b.1981, Innsbruck, Austria).

Laric’s practice, which comprises sculpture, video and installation, explores both historical and contemporary image economies.

In particular, his work attends to the dynamic context of images: how they move, transform and replicate as part of an everchanging visual culture.

Edinburgh Art Arusha Gallery YOU WANT THE MOON

15 DEC-6 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

A group exhibition featuring work from Kristian Evju, Marie Harnett, Michael Aurel-Fowler, Blair McLaughlin, Shelly Tregoning, Kirsty Whiten, Amy Winstantley, Charlotte Roseberry and Ross M Brown.

City Art Centre PAPER TRAIL: DRAWINGS, WATERCOLOURS, PRINTS

15 DEC-21 MAY 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

An exhibition exploring some of the many ways artists create works from the starting point of a fresh sheet of paper, including work by celebrated figures like Anne Redpath, Joan Eardley, Eduardo Paolozzi and Paul Sandby.

A SKETCH OF THE UNIVERSE: ART, SCIENCE AND THE INFLUENCE OF D’ARCY THOMPSON

15 DEC-19 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

City Art Centre showcases the highlights of a collection of artworks inspired by pioneering Edinburgh-born biologist D’Arcy Thompson.

PETER RANDALL-PAGE: WORKS ON PAPER

15 DEC-12 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Renowned sculptor Randall-Page’s interest in order and chaos is explored in a series of his large-scale drawings, created using controlled pouring of ink.

Collective Gallery

W.W.W. (WHOLE WORLD WORKING)

15 DEC-5 FEB 17, 10:00AM – 4:00PM, FREE

W.W.W. (Whole World Working) is an exhibition devised by Anastasia Philimonos, that brings together artworks and writings considering the possibilities of a world without border demarcation. Examining the tensions between geopolitical restraints and information technologies, the exhibition includes work

by Michel De Broin, Alessandro Di Massimo, Buckminster Fuller and Ben Russell.

Dovecot Studios COLOUR AND LIGHT

15 DEC-25 FEB 17, 10:30AM – 5:30PM, FREE

Dovecot exhibits a selection of recent projects which share in common a creative relationship between colour and light.

Edinburgh Printmakers PROCESS & POSSIBILITIES

27 JAN-15 APR 17, 10:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

An archival exhibition curated

by Lesley Logue, Process & Possibilities features artists who have helped to lay and then build upon the foundations of printmaking as a fine art practice in Scotland and beyond.

FIREDAMP: REVISITING THE FLOOD

27 JAN-15 APR 17, 10:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

Through installation, sculpture and printmaking Caulfield’s work considers the ways our environment is transformed by forces of urban and industrial growth. Caulfield has transformed the gallery, covering the entirety of the walls with woodcuts.

National Museum of Scotland

51ST WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR EXHIBITION 15 DEC-19 FEB 17, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

The only Scottish showcase for the 51st Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition, which will feature 100 awe-inspiring images, from fascinating animal behaviour to breath-taking wild landscapes.

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY CLUB, 20:30–22:50, £0 - £2

Monkey Barrel’s comedy competition for new folk on the scene.

Find full listings at theskinny.co.uk/whats-on

Listings

53

Royal Scottish Academy RSA UNREALISED: ARCHITECTURAL IMAGINATION FROM THE RSA COLLECTIONS

15 DEC-13 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

RSA showcases the architectural plans, sketches and competition entries detailing plans for buildings that never came to be. Have a wander and wonder ‘what if?’.

THE DAVID MICHIE GIFT

15 DEC-29 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

The RSA exhibits a collection of over twenty works gifted to them by artist, exhibitor, tutor and avid supporter of the RSA, David Michie.

THE ARTIST TRAVELLER

15 DEC-29 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Coinciding with RSA’s The David Michie Gift exhibition, The Artist Traveller is a showcase of work created via travel sponsored by the Academy itself. Exhibiting artists include Kate Fahey, Stephanie Mann, Rebecca Milling, Kyle Noble and Murray Robertson.

WILLIE RODGER RSA: WEE PRINTS

15 DEC-29 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

An exhibition of over 100 printed works by one of Scotland’s bestloved artists, Willie Rodger RSA.

Scottish National Gallery ROCKS AND RIVERS: THE LUNDE COLLECTION

15 DEC-30 JAN 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Long-term loan from one of the finest private collections of 19thCentury Norwegian and Swiss landscape paintings, American collector Asbjörn Lunde, taking in 13 works by artists including Johan Christian Dahl, Alexandre Calame and Thomas Fearnley.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art BRIDGET RILEY: PAINTINGS,1963-2015

15 DEC-16 APR 17, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

OUT OF THEIR HEADS: BUILDING PORTRAITS OF SCOTTISH ARCHITECTS 15 DEC-5 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

An opportunity to peer into the minds of some of Scotland’s greatest architects via The Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s collection of portraits and designs.

THE VIEW FROM HERE

15 DEC-30 APR 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Taking the theme of landscape through photographs from the 1840s to the present day, this exhibition is drawn completely from the National Galleries of Scotland’s permanent photographic collection and aims to explore the techniques and processes of landscape photographers far and wide.

THE MODERN PORTRAIT

15 DEC-27 OCT 19, TIMES VARY, FREE

A display collating paintings, sculptures and works from the Portrait Gallery’s twentiethcentury collection, ft. a variety of well-known faces, from Ramsay Macdonald to Alan Cumming, Tilda Swinton to Danny McGrain.

BP PORTRAIT AWARD 2016

15 DEC-26 MAR 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Now in its thirty-seventh year at the National Portrait Gallery and one of the most prestigious international portrait painting competitions of its kind, the BP Portrait Award 2016 makes its way to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Stills

JILL TODD PHOTOGRAPHIC AWARD 2016 15 DEC-22 JAN 17, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

Stills showcases the works of three victorious entrants into the Jill Todd Photographic Award 2016, an annual award promoting early careers in photography, open to photography graduates in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland.

Summerhall

THANA FAROQ: WOMEN LIKE US

A focused display of selected paintings from the works of Bridget Riley, born in 1931. The exhibition chronicles her earlier, iconic use of monochrome, her transition into using a grey palette, before an expansion into using an array of colour.

15 DEC-9 JAN 17, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

15 DEC-18 FEB 18, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

15 DEC-3 JAN 17, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

20TH CENTURY: MASTERPIECES OF SCOTTISH AND EUROPEAN ART

An exhibition of works offering a historical overview of some of the most significant artistic contributions made during the last century. The exhibition also aims to place Scottish modern art within an international context.

KARLA BLACK AND KISHIO SUGA: A NEW ORDER

15 DEC-19 FEB 17, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Karla Black and Kishio Suga share in common their knack for taking ordinary everyday materials and using them to create beautifully complex sculptural works. Their exhibition at Modern One combines their work for the first time.

Scottish National Portrait Gallery THE TWEEDDALES: POWER, POLITICS AND PORTRAITS

15 DEC-28 MAY 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

Artwork featuring and commissioned by the Tweeddale family, a highly influential dynasty at the heart of Scottish society in the latter half of the seventeenth century who were known best for contributions to politics and the military.

SCOTS IN ITALY

15 DEC-5 MAR 19, TIMES VARY, FREE

A showcase of the Scottish experience of Italy in the eighteenth century, a time when artistic, entrepreneurial and aristocratic fascination with the country was reaching boiling point.

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Thana Faroq is a street photographer and visual storyteller based in Sana’a, Yemen. In Women Like Us, she opens a window into the lives of 15 women and their experience of the war in Yemen: their struggles, their aspirations, and their ambitions.

INVISIBLE

Painter Alexander Mackenzie presents a Christmas exhibition featuring an array of large oil paintings, a collection of small moments in time and some bright children’s book illustrations of a big hearted bear.

COUP DE THÉÂTRE

15 DEC-8 JAN 17, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

A group exhibition of contemporary sculpture featuring new work from Hans K Clausen, Clare Flatley, Despina Nissiriou, Paulina Sandberg, Kjersti Sletteland and Chloe Windsor.

Dundee Art DCA: Dundee Contemporary Arts DCA THOMSON

15 DEC-19 FEB 17, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

A group exhibition in partnership with DC Thomson featuring murals, prints, drawings, sculpture and videos created by a group of six artists: Rob Churm, Rabiya Choudhry, Craig Coulthard, Malcy Duff, Hideyuki Katsumata and Sofia Sita.

ROB CHURM & MALCY DUFF

19 JAN-19 JAN 17, 7:00PM – 8:00PM, FREE

DCA’s current show on the DC Thomson publisher continues with gallery performances by Rob Churm and Malcy Duff. Both known for their absurdist humour in their visual art, from 7-8pm they will perform a mix of theatre, puppetry and spoken word.

Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design

OF OTHER SPACES: WHERE DOES GESTURE BECOME EVENT? (CHAPTER TWO) 20 JAN-4 MAR 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

A contemporary art exhibition and rolling event programme comprising live performances, screenings, collective readings, participatory dance and an international symposium; 12-Hour Action Group.

Referencing art works, artist collaborative groups and activism by women from the 1970’s to the present day, the project looks at the contemporary relevance and cogency of feminist thinking on power as it is enacted through bodies, institutions and systems of representation.

Hannah Maclure Centre ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

15 DEC-24 FEB 17, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

A NEoN festival exhibition by Miyu Hayashi, Ruth Kerr, Willy Lemaitre and Tom Sherman, interrogating the idea of whether machines now recognise and understand the spaces they inhabit.

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The McManus OUT OF THE FRAME: SCOTTISH ABSTRACTION

15 DEC-23 APR 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

A collection of works celebrating the artistic freedom afforded by abstraction, including art by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Calum Innes, plus a major new acquisition

by Victoria Morton.

The Fruitmarket Gallery CONVERSATIONS IN LETTERS AND LINES

15 DEC-19 FEB 17, TIMES VARY, FREE

The Fruitmarket presents an exhibition combining the works of South African artists William Kentridge (animated filmmaker, opera director, performer and draughtsman) and Vivienne Koorland (painter, printmaker and maker of objects).

Traverse Theatre

10 YEARS: MANIPULATE ANIMATION (PROGRAMME ONE) 28 JAN-28 JAN 17, 9:00PM, £8.50

Puppet Animation Scotland presents a selection of short animated films screened between 2006 and 2016 in celebration of their 10th birthday.

THE SKINNY

Meet The Revolution Now in its sixth year, King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution returns this January to brighten the winter gloom with a slew of acts representing Scotland’s best musical talent

I

conic venue King Tut's will host over 80 artists across 15 days from 4-21 January, with each show featuring a headline act supported by three bands, plus guest DJs and aftershow parties in Tut’s main bar.

Ahead of the mega-festival, The Skinny caught up with Chris Beltran, Assistant Booker at DF Concerts and programmer for this year’s New Year’s Revolution line-up, to chat about what makes this year’s event extra special.

“I think the ethos that links the bands together this year is the same ethos that links the bands together every year the festival has run,” he explains. “There’s a real sense of community spirit and togetherness, with everyone pushing the festival as a whole as well as their own individual shows.

“This year’s event, in my opinion, is the festival’s most diverse line-up yet. Fans who purchase the Golden Ticket, which gets you access to all the shows across the festival, will be able to experience a wide range of amazing Scottish music.”

With so many quality acts taking to the King Tut’s stage this year, we’ve put together a list of some of the most exciting names on the bill, to give you an idea of the diversity you can expect from this year’s festival. Read on and get to know the bands at the vanguard of the latest Revolution.

Break The Butterfly Fife-based Break The Butterfly are a folk-rock fivepiece led by frontman Cameron Barnes and his unashamedly Celtic twang. Their live shows have been known to incorporate bagpipes, and they’ve even got a celebrity endorsement under their belt – comedian and pseudo-revolutionary Russell Brand described the group on Twitter as “a proper tartan band that embrace Scottish freedom.”

In short: Feel-good folk music with true Scottish heart.

Civic Pride Civic Pride are the live band project of Glasgowbased singer-songwriter Peter Ross. If you like a carefully crafted blend of indie, Britpop and alt rock that conjures up the spirits of Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, Civic Pride are a safe bet.

In short: Heartfelt, strummed introspections on love and life.

Elle Exxe Crowned Best Female Solo Act at the 2016 Unsigned Music Awards, Elle Exxe makes self-described ‘dirty pop’ with riff-driven compositions in the vein of Sleigh Bells. The Edinburgh talent is

now based in London, and her debut album Love Fuelled Hate showcases her distinctive electroclash aesthetic.

In short: Fuzzy, bombastic hand-clap pop with added grit.

Heavy Smoke Self-described ‘weird hard rock band’ from Glasgow, though there’s nothing unpalatable about the quartet’s hefty mix of psych, funk and sharp guitar solos. If you like it loud, these boys are definitely the ones for you.

In short: Bring your earplugs and get ready to rock out.

The Insomniac Project Disco-pop confections are The Insomniac Project’s jam. The sextet from Glasgow combine live instruments with slick electronic production – check out their single Vacillation for a dose of frontwoman Deborah Lang’s expansive diva vox, with plenty of cowbell for good measure.

In short: Guilty pleasure indie-disco with polish.

Lucia Fontaine Singer-songwriter Lucia Fontaine makes an instant impression with her husky, gravel-drenched vocals and insouciant, noir-rock’n’roll compositions.

She played T in the Park last year and has supported acts as diverse as Honeyblood, The Bay City Rollers and MaxÏmo Park.

In short: Cool-girl indie rock that demands repeat listens.

Megalomatic This hirsute three-piece from Glasgow have been kicking about for a few years now, and have garnered a solid fan base on the back of their explosive live shows. Think powerful riffs, heavy bass lines and a general eardrum-bursting experience.

In short: What Mastodon would sound like if they were Scottish.

Mt. Doubt Named by BBC Scotland’s Vic Galloway as one of his Top 25 Scottish Artists to Watch in 2016, Mt Doubt is the project of Edinburgh-based musician Leo Bargery. Anyone who has caught the outfit live will attest that Bargery is a leonine presence onstage, and the group are masters of distinctive, brooding melodies and unexpected waves of euphoria.

In short: Peerless songwriting cloaked in unique, addictive indie-pop.

Elle Exxe

NOAH NOAH The fledgling NOAH NOAH only formed in March 2016, but they’ve generated quite a buzz with their synth-laden single Champion, and have already supported the likes of Scottish legends Idlewild, as well as Model Aeroplanes, 100 Fables, Start Static, Kirsten Adamson and more.

In short: Expansive indie synth-rock in nice shirts.

Quiche Founded in January 2015, this freshly baked band from Glasgow specialise in summery, winsome guitar pop. Check out their languid, dreamy debut single Lying In The Sun, which will have you wishing you were doing just that.

In short: A perfect soundtrack when you’re wishing you were somewhere else.

The Ranzas Formerly known as The Shires, this rock‘n’roll five piece from Ayrshire draw on influences as diverse as The Clash, The Strokes, Milburn, Oasis, The Pixies, The View and Paolo Nutini to create their own ballsy blend of rock’n’roll. Any band game enough to cover Tainted Love onstage is worth a look, in our book.

In short: Punk-laced rock‘n’ roll from the west coast Sergeant Hands up who remembers Sergeant’s jangle-pop hit Counting Down The Days? After bursting onto the scene in 2007 to critical and commercial acclaim, things went very quiet for the four-piece from Fife. Once hailed as the saviours of Scottish music, they make a welcome return after a rather long hiatus.

In short: Ten-year-old memories wrapped in impeccable indie-rock.

The Van T's

January 2017

Interview: Claire Francis

Stillhound Formerly known as Discopolis, the Edinburghbased three-piece rebranded as Stillhound in 2015.

They cite Foals, Tame Impala, Interpol and Death Cab For Cutie as primary influences, and their atmospheric debut Bury Everything is out now.

In short: Smooth synth-rock for warming the cold January nights.

Music

Sergeant

The Van T’s Sure to be one of the most popular acts on this year’s Revolution rota, The Van T’s hardly need any introduction. Their summery, scuzzy indie rock lays on the fuzz, and the group, led by twin sisters Hannah and Chloe Van Thompson, embrace 90s grunge vignettes, as evinced by their recently released Laguna Babe EP. In short: Upbeat, scuzzy indie rock with stick-inyour head melodies.

Wuh Oh Peter Ferguson – aka Glasgow-based electronic composer Wuh Oh – can count a support slot for DJ Shadow among his career highlights to date.

The talented multi-instrumentalist Ferguson has been playing, composing and alchemising tunes since childhood, and he’s built up a cult following with his eclectic, sample-heavy productions.

In short: One to catch now so you can boast, “I saw him before he was famous!”

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution, Glasgow, 4-21 Jan Full line-up at kingtuts.co.uk

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