The List Issue 791

MAY 2025 | ISSUE 791

MICHAEL PEDERSEN

The Portobello poet on love, loss and lighthouses

Jacob Alon

Chelsea Handler

James Yi

Billy Nomates

Gary Oldman

Wild food

Kiell Smith-Bynoe

Bottoms

The Surfer

Gordon M Williams Lyon

Pauline Black

MixoloGy a blenD of

I have no problem sharing the good, the bad and the

COVER: SHAUN MURAWSKI

CHELSEA HANDLER ON HER PURPOSE IN LIFE

PICTURE: JOHN RUSSO

Big hair and bigger talent are clearly all the rage this season. Exhibit A is the fact that the delightfully barneted Brooke Combe has been followed in our coverstar stakes by Michael Pedersen, another Scottish creative type with luscious locks. Of course, it’s not what they’ve got going on atop their heads that counts, but what’s occurring inside them. Plenty, as it turns out.

Having made his literary name as a well-loved poet and then memoirist, the Edinburgh Makar launches his debut novel at us, a tale of loyalty, love and lighthouses set in the remote confines of Muckle Flugga, one of the most northerly points of Britain. It’s a stirring read from a man whose emails and forewords have more invention than many scribes’ entire careers.

We also have a broad-ranging interview with Scotland’s next music superstar Jacob Alon (no shortage of fine fluff on top of their bonce also), the Fife-born singer-songwriter who emerged with a flourish on Jools Holland’s telly showcase last autumn. Many words flow from US comedian Chelsea Handler, who has caught the ire of right-wing politicians and pundits (clearly she’s doing something right), with our interviewer managing to trap some of them, and we also hear from James Yi who heads up the cast of Kim’s Convenience, as it makes its journey from Netflix to Glasgow.

There are further interviews with Pauline Black, Billy Nomates, Gary Oldman and the people behind Dance International Glasgow’s Bottoms show, plus we hear all about Jack Dee’s comedy heroes and put Kiell Smith-Bynoe under the microscope with our Back Q&A. And in the often harsh-but-fair world of reviewing, we pass judgement on Nicolas Cage’s new film The Surfer, a dual exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, kids’ show The Baddies, the reissue of a Scottish Booker-nominee from Gordon M Williams, plus the latest sonic musings from Andy Bell and Ezra Furman. Packed, you say? Packed, you are right.

Brian Donaldson EDITOR

Our brand-new guide to eating & drinking in Edinburgh Out 15 May Distributed with Saturday 17 May

EAT& DRINK 365 edinburgh

A year-round guide to restaurants, diners, bars and cafés across the city

FREE and available at your List pick-up points

front

L‘mouthpiece

ive from London, it’s Saturday night! Featuring Jimmy Carr! Katherine Ryan! And Romesh Ranganathan! And your host . . . Gemma Collins!’

Such is the nightmare vision of a British treatment of Saturday Night Live, which Sky recently confirmed will be cluttering your NOW TV home screen soon. The project will be overseen by SNL’s executive producer Lorne Michaels, a Sauron-like figure who excels at throwing talented young comics into the lava pits of 30 Rockefeller Plaza and spitting them out as network-friendly skit slingers.

Much like Michaels, the show has attained near-mythical status despite being nothing more than a grab-bag of agonisingly long sketches featuring more dud gags than an evening with Joe Pasquale. The seal-clapping enthusiasm of its audience is the real killer. Perhaps Michaels owns a wing of Guantanamo Bay where he imprisons audience members in solitary confinement with only one five-minute clip of Kevin Hart for company.

So relieved are they to be freed from their cages, they’ll applaud almost anything. ‘It’s Saturday night!’ Cue the wildest response to the days of the week since King Sargon I Of Akkad. ‘It’s a half-baked sexual innuendo!’ A further 35 minutes of whooping. ‘It’s fresh air!’ Oh, thank god I’m not in Lorne Michaels’ cell anymore. Thank the good lord for fresh air. Everyone give fresh air a standing ovation!!

The nausea-inducing echo of back-slapping has emitted from SNL for the past year in celebration of its 50th anniversary, during which time it has enjoyed dizzying highs (championing Andy Kaufman, discovering Kate McKinnon,

Saturday Night Live is sailing to our shores. Will it save the ailing sketch-show format or lumber UK audiences with yet more middling gumph? Our resident SNL agnostic Kevin Fullerton chucks his view into the mix

providing inspiration for the sitcom masterpiece 30 Rock) and shit-the-bed lows (inviting Donald Trump to host, Adrien Brody’s Jamaican accent, everything about Colin Jost). And let’s not get started on Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s recent masturbatory fantasy depicting Michaels as a have-a-go-hero amassing a stable of legendary comics.

SNL’s UK edition is a continuation of Michaels’ incredible hubris, evoking America’s colonial instinct of entering a country, waving its flag and bellowing ‘yeehaw, get off our new lawn before we shoot you etc.’ But it’s not likely to work. British comedy excels at lots of things, but an excess of selfcongratulation isn’t one of them. Sketch shows that have gained a cult following in the UK (Limmy’s Show, The League Of Gentlemen, Smack The Pony) have worked because they revel in peculiarity more than broad satire, while Brit-led SNL knockoffs (10 O’Clock Live, The Friday Night Project) were received about as favourably as Sarah Sherman’s false teeth. There’s a slim chance that a UK transplant of America’s favourite sketch show could be decent, but only under these specific circumstances: a) execs take Michaels’ cash and do their best to ignore him; b) they hire a revolving door of untapped British talent and mould them into stars: Jimmy Carr will just have to fill the gaping void in his life with another game show on Dave; and c) audiences have their hands and larynxes forcibly removed before transmission to avoid excessive excitement. These surgical procedures will be shown in the opening credits as a warning to any Americans who dare to whoop during a UK comedy show. No amputations, no success. That last one is a dealbreaker.

The merry month of May is here, so time to check in on a bunch of cultural M words, though in this case we’ve plumped for a variation on a theme. Flagging this one up a whole month early for the full slowburning sweaty-palmed effect, sci-fi horror movie franchise (does a mere two make a franchise?) M3gan (featuring that walking, talking, nailgun-clutching, AI-powered lifesized doll) returns with a sequel. 2.0 features a plot so ludicrous that this modest column couldn’t hope to sustain either its word length or credibility while spelling it out. Despite catastrophically bad reviews for With Love,

a ‘reimagining’ of the lifestyle programming sub-sub-genre, we were aghast to learn that Meghan Markle (double points score) had been handed her own scary sequel. Reading those reviews alone should have made the palms of those top cats at Netflix sweat profusely, but apparently not, as more of it is coming this autumn. Finally, we’re in lastchance-to-see territory here, but Meghann Fahy (star of the second White Lotus if you can think back that far) is doing sterling paranoid-but-with-total-justification work in, yep, the sweaty-palmed thriller Drop. Have you spotted the theme yet?

PICTURE:

The League Of Gentlemen Saturday Night

PlayList

This month’s soundtrack brings you the dulcet tones of Scottish acts such as Jacob Alon, Brògeal and Frightened Rabbit alongside new tracks by the likes of Wet Leg, Billy Nomates, Ezra Furman, Smut, and Sex Pistols

Scan and listen as you read:

from the archive

We look through The List’s back catalogue to see what was making headlines this month in decades gone by

In this blast into our past, we peek into the pages of a May 1987 issue. John Hannah graced the cover for his role in Brond, a threepart TV drama based on the novel by Scottish author Frederic Lindsay. We spoke to both Hannah and Lindsay (who also created this Channel 4 mini-series) about stardom, Scottish nationalism and working-class life. Also inside, Anne Bancroft told us about her new film 84 Charing Cross Road while we meticulously previewed Glasgow arts festival Mayfest which boasted an impressive programme of dance, music, theatre and workshops.  Head to list.co.uk/archive for our past issues.

In this series of articles, we turn the focus back on ourselves by asking folk at The List about recent cultural artefacts that touch their heart and soul. This time around, Aashna Sharma tells us which things . . .

Made me cry: The end of Severance’s second season. For those feeling the woe from that finale, check out The Lexington Letter, a short story set in the same universe that’ll give you just enough of a hit until next season drops.

Made me angry: The continued existence of Elon Musk, who seems to be barrelling through this timeline like a cursed tech bro, evolving each day into more and more grotesque forms of unchecked ego and sociopathic spectacle.

Made me laugh: I recently stumbled upon Would I Lie to You? It had me howling, particularly one episode featuring Bob Mortimer and dentistry.

Made me think: John Green’s new book Everything Is Tuberculosis, in which TB is a Forrest Gump-esque figure, popping up in the background of so many major historical events. I’m not one for non-fiction, but Green has an uncanny ability to blend history, storytelling, humour and hope. All of which we could use a bit more these days.

Made me think twice: A 1967 documentary by the Films Division Of India called I Am 20 (available on YouTube) which interviewed Indians who were 20 as the country turned the same age. It made me reflect not just on what became of their dreams, but also on how articulate they were. It got me thinking about how much language has changed; the way 20-year-olds expressed themselves back then feels like a completely different language to how we speak today.

Wednesday 11 - Sunday 15 June, Turnhouse Road, Edinburgh

Live music, DJs, visual art, dance, spoken word and performances plus projections, murals, special events, street food & pop-up bars

Featuring Bikini Body + Erland Cooper + Isabella Strange + Ishmael Ensemble + Katy J Pearson + Mermaid Chunky + MC Yallah & Debmaster No Windows + Moor Mother + Pearling + PVC + Roller Disco Death Party SISTER MADDS + Smag På Dig Selv + Snapped Ankles + SPRINTS Tina Sandwich + The Orielles + Tinderbox Orchestra + Witch Fever + more

I like to ruffl e feathers

Edinburgh Makar, university writer-in-residence, an acclaimed memoirist and poet, and oft-cited cultural rabblerouser, Michael Pedersen is now dipping his toes into a seafaring lighthouse-set novel featuring an angry dad, a son who is in contact with Robert Louis Stevenson, and a tormented journalist from the ’big city’. Brian Donaldson meets the man behind this fevered triumph

MICHAEL PEDERSEN

Near the end of Michael Pedersen’s Boy Friends, his 2022 ‘memoir of joy, grief and male friendship’, he details a first encounter with the Muckle Flugga Lighthouse. The Portobello poet had travelled to Shetland in order to assist KLF icon Bill Drummond with a film being presented in a community centre on Unst but returned with the germination of an idea that would bloom into assuredly one of the key Scottish books of this year.

‘The idea for a lighthouse novel was sort of bouncing around my bread box for years,’ he tells me in typically breathless and lyrical style within the sanctum of his shared Edinburgh University office where he plots and performs his duties as the academic centre’s writer-inresidence. ‘It’s sort of shape-shifted like the island itself, became amorphous and swirled around into different incarnations. It was really over the period of touring Boy Friends that I solidified on the idea for a friendship love story. The characters started speaking to me as I started to think about different people I’ve met and the friendships they had.’

What he’d learned from those comradeships eventually fed into his two lead characters, Firth and Ouse. The former is an Edinburgh journalist in his mid-20s who begins the book attempting to kill himself but eventually makes it over to Muckle Flugga to rent out a room in the lighthouse where he clears his head and recalibrates his life.

Ouse is a talented but thwarted 19-year-old who maintains this grand edifice while living under a reign of quasi-tyranny enforced by his widower dad (aka The Father). The pair become close pals, with Firth holding out a promise to Ouse of a future career and life enhancement should he relocate to the nation’s capital. Oh, it should be mentioned at this point that Ouse also has regular briefings with ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’.

If you feel that those lead character names might suggest a certain watery connection, then you feel correctly. Across the book’s 300 pages there’s also a Nile, Garry and Shannon while the more enigmatic choice of character title in Figgie refers to the nickname of a burn which crossed two parks in Pedersen’s Portobello when he was growing up. ‘This is an island-based novel and there are so many currents and tides

and vicissitudes going through it that I felt the characters had to be in some way connected with bodies of water too. There’s quite a few little cryptic swirls in the book that are sort of for me, but I think also serve the story. The majority of readers will whistle past some clues but those diving a bit deeper will uncover them.’

It’s hard to bring this up but is the character of Firth partly tapping into his memories of Scott Hutchison, the Frightened Rabbit frontman, a friend and collaborator (Hutchison provided illustrations for Pedersen’s 2017 poetry collection, Oyster), who did end his life in the waters near South Queensferry in May 2018? Their friendship and Pedersen’s attempts to reach some kind of equilibrium with his pal’s death is the achingly moving yet often life-affirming core of Boy Friends

‘I guess it’s an emotional connection to what myself and a lot of people went through at that point in time. I wanted to meet a character, who’s in no way based on Scott, at his lowest ebb, hanging off the side of this bridge, this metal monster, and I wanted to pull him back from the abyss. I wanted them to find a reason to keep on living and to see him fighting his way back into the light. It’s a manifestation of all the moments I went through with Scott’s leaving, so of course I’m aware of the comparisons. It was the biggest thing that had happened to me emotionally from a grief perspective; it left this cataclysmic gap and I guess I’ll always be searching for ways to understand that. Writing this character that took themselves back down off the bridge was almost gifting myself some form of resolution.’

Our conversation darts around a variety of subjects such as the toptier Scottish actor who is all set to become the narrator of the Muckle Flugga audio book (‘unless he gets named the new Bond’ before they are able to bundle him into a recording studio); dream casting for any possible film of the book (Capaldi, McAvoy or Carlyle as The Father?); looking Stateside and thanking our lucky stars for literary freedoms here (‘like anywhere, there’s more to be done but we’re in a nurtured place in the UK’); going too long without writing a poem (‘it would niggle me’); attending literary festivals and hoping that his hotel has a swimming pool (‘I’ve always got my trunks on me just in case’); and,

MICHAEL PEDERSEN

of course his warm feelings about lighthouses (‘they’re beautiful, aren’t they? They’re sort of lampposts of the sea; these great watchtowers. They stand like giants’).

Ahead of the book’s publication, there are contractual obligations to be met and writerly duties to be performed. One of which requires him to head to a cavernous building in Kent and sign a shedload of books. Potentially not at his own good pace though, if the venue’s bosses have their way. ‘I’ll go to the big Faber warehouse and sign a few thousand copies of them. I love doing that though, seeing them en masse and thinking about all the readers that they’re going out to; it’s a pretty euphoric experience. I got told off, actually, when I was doing Boy Friends because I was loving it so much that I bought three different coloured inks and a stamp; they pulled aside the Faber rep and said “look, normally we expect writers to do about 250 books an hour and Michael is averaging 70 to 75”. So, they sort of de-sheathed me and took a couple of colours and my stamp off me. I got them back for the final 50. When you buy a signed book I don’t want it to look like there’s a bit of spilt biro on there. I want people to know that this has been worked on.’

No one could ever accuse Michael Pedersen of being a slacker. He has an enthusiasm and brio (one of his favourite words) that is totally infectious, and anyone still harbouring stereotypical images of the ‘stuffy old author’ can be dismissed and demolished when confronted with his verve. ‘Rabblerouser’ is a spiky noun he’s had hurled at him, one he is happy to catch in his mitt. You wouldn’t find Pedersen burning a million quid like his pal Bill Drummond, but the Neu! Reekie! literary production house that he co-ran with Kevin Williamson between 2010 and 2022 became known for breaking down the barriers between high and low art, and trying to make non-mainstream culture widely available to all. ‘I love to ruffle feathers,’ Pedersen insists. ‘You can’t provoke change any other way.’

He views such ruffling as very much part of his remit as both the newly anointed Edinburgh Makar (that role runs until 2027) while his Edinburgh University writer-in-residence gig expires this summer at which point he will fully fling himself into the mayhem that is his city’s Festival month. ‘The first thing I did as Edinburgh Makar was to launch a poetry prize in order to get more young people writing poetry and which was only taken into state schools: my old school, Portobello, plus Leith Academy and Craigroyston. Those schools have a higher degree of students that need more help getting their literacy levels up. I knew I wanted to go to these schools first and I’ll grow that every year. The most important element of this Makar role to me will be getting more young kids feeling like they have access to literature. I’m offering people an inlet into writing what can be quite soppy, sentimental, vulnerable stuff. It’s not exactly burning down the Parliament but it’s hopefully a benevolent offer.’

Muckle Flugga is published by Faber on Thursday 22 May; Michael Pedersen discusses the book at Portobello Bookshop, Tuesday 20 May; Waterstones, Glasgow, Sunday 25 May; Topping & Co, Edinburgh, Monday 16 June.

WHERE TO HIGHBALL WITH WWOVEN

GLASGOW N

WWOVEN HIGHBALL HOSTS

GLASGOW EDINBURGH

THE GATE 251 Gallowgate UNO MAS 4 Picardy Place

DADDY MARMALADES 25 Parnie St THE VOODOO ROOMS 19a W. Register St

THE ABSENT EAR

Brunswick St THE WILDCAT 11-13 Tarvit St

KELVINGROVE CAFE 1161 Argyle St

THE MOTHER SUPERIOR 96-98 Leith Walk

NAUTICUS 42 Duke St

EXPERIENCE WWOVEN HIGHBALL

When whisky is in Highball mode, it’s whisky as it should be. Simple in form yet supremely delicious, highballs open up new flavours, spark conversations and make whisky a little more approachable at the same time.

To many, a Highball is just a simple spirit and mixer, like Scotch & Soda. But when prepared correctly, it’s the very drink that took whisky culture around the world. It’s safe to say it evolved along the way too.

We’re proudly showcasing the best bars in the UK where you can discover the people, drinks and experiences that are writing a new chapter in UK whisky culture. It still blows our minds that, even in 2025, UK whisky culture is defined more by what you shouldn’t do with your drink than by what you can. Let’s change that.

Scan here to discover recipes, videos, events and more or visit WOVENWHISKY.COM

N

EDINBURGH N

Joy to the world

Chelsea Handler’s zest for life is electric. Ahead of her Glasgow show, the unapologetic US comedian and author is fizzing with positivity, telling Claire Sawers about getting her shit together, being a ‘dad’, and the thrill of drug and alcohol-fuelled bikini-skiing >>

There’s a passage in Chelsea Handler’s massively enjoyable new book, I’ll Have What She’s Having, where she recalls a crushing yet pivotal moment. She was summoned by her friend Jane Fonda to be told she’d behaved terribly at a party and offended pretty much everyone. The New Jersey-born comedian has made her name by telling it how it is. She has presented her own late-night talk shows, The Chelsea Handler Show and Chelsea Lately, both showcases for her potty-mouthed, alpha-female style and tinder-dry one-liners, followed by Netflix specials, reality TV appearances, documentaries and her own advice podcast, Dear Chelsea. But she knew she had overstepped when Fonda called her out.

‘Yeah, that was a seminal moment in my life,’ she nods, beaming in from her couch in the wealthy neighbourhood of Brentwood, Los Angeles, for a morning Zoom chat. ‘It was humiliating, mortifying. Most of us are conflict averse but Jane took the time to have a difficult conversation with me. I had to really think about how I wanted to conduct myself. I wanted to be like her. Jane made me understand the importance of sisterhood.’

A quick Google reveals that Handler has millions of devoted fans but also attracts a certain kind of detractor. Back in March, someone compared her to Satan after she discussed abortion and drugs with the Trump-supporting, bro podcaster, Theo Von. Surely a huge feather in Handler’s cap, Piers Morgan once called her ‘a disgrace’ and ‘a disaster’: Handler told Morgan that he was ‘a terrible interviewer’ and has given it back to him with both barrels several times. Her own sister calls her ‘one of the loudest people in the world.’

‘I can be very confrontational and I’m not shy about sharing my opinions,’ she understates, when I bring up a cracking anecdote from the book where the vocally anti-Republican Handler got invited to former President Bush’s home for a game of pickleball with her family. Although she detests that game, her brothers and sisters were starstruck and she couldn’t turn them down. ‘I had to take a lot of edibles to subdue my personality that day. At least I knew there is a time and a place for certain conversations and that time, at his house, wasn’t the time or the place.’

But alongside Handler’s no-holds-barred material about sex, drugs and 50 Cent (she briefly dated the rapper), she has become extremely good at delivering sage life lessons on everything from ageing, dealing with ‘pathological negativity’ from others, and showing up for the young people in your life. The former ‘brat’ now ‘has her shit together’, as she puts it, after many years of therapy, regular meditation, frequent microdosing and lots of exercise. Now she wants to ‘inject joy’ (not literally, thankfully) into as many people’s lives as she can.

I’ll Have What She’s Having debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list. Her six other books were all bestsellers too, with titles including Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea and My Horizontal Life: A Collection Of One-Night Stands. Her new Netflix special, The Feeling, is her unapologetic look at dating, family and her ‘very active drug life’. The 50-year-old is brilliant as she looks back at Young Chelsea (born craving her first business venture, apparently) and gets a huge roar from the crowd when she dips into anti-Republican gags. She’s ultra confident, deadpan, laser focused, always with a twinkle in her eye.

‘I have no problem sharing the good, the bad and the ugly. The flattering and the unflattering. I like to be authentic. It’s why I have fans. They know I’m not full of it.’ Handler makes it clear that she always strives to blend humour with her own entertaining, spiritual, self-help sermons. And the cocktail is potent. ‘I feel more alive and more together and more optimistic than ever. At 50, I have the body I wanted when I was 20. Yes I am confident, and I have positivity and self-assuredness in spades, so I want to spread that

self-belief to as many women as possible, especially young girls.’ Although she’s got hours of material on the many advantages of being child-free (being able to take mushrooms in the morning, for one), paradoxically she writes at length about how important the young girls in her life are.

When one relationship ended with a boyfriend, Handler stayed close with her ex’s three daughters, whose identities she has hidden under the nicknames Poopsie, Whoopsie and Oopsie. In turn, they call her ‘Father’. Handler writes about taking a parenting course to better understand their needs and she helped to repair the girls’ bond with their frequently absent dad. ‘When those sweet girls came into my life it was very instinctual. You can call it maternal instinct; I prefer paternal. I identify as a stepfather. I don’t think I’d be great at being a mother. But I am great at this. One of the unsung benefits of not having kids is the bandwidth it allows you to have for other people.’

The youngest of six children, Handler’s eldest brother Chet died tragically in a hiking accident when she was nine. She has spoken publicly about the impact that had on her, as well as on her dad who fell into a period of grief. She has described her dad as a misogynist and the pair fought regularly. Her brother’s death and the rift with her father left Handler with a sense of abandonment and deep anger, so she reacted by becoming fiercely independent. ‘My own childhood was turbulent and unsteady. But my thirdgrade teacher really believed in me. She inculcated in me that I was special, that I had something to offer the world. Now I like pushing people in the right direction. Being that big sister. Everyone needs to find out what they like to do and get after it.’

Besides finding her calling as a big sister/stepfather, she’s also on a mission to share her appreciation of drugs. She has invested in a cannabis lifestyle company called Civilized and given talks about the benefits she’s experienced from using drugs. ‘Yes, I’m spreading that message loudly. I’m not talking about cocaine or heroin. I’m talking about mind expansiveness. Ways to uptick your happiness. The show I’m bringing to Glasgow gives a full excavation of the positivity that drugs have brought to my life. MDMA, LSD, psilocybin. There is scientific data and I’ve seen so many people benefit from it. Plus I love to share my drugs. I love to receive drugs from my fans also.’

These days, Handler is a multi-millionaire, travelling the world performing her comedy and doing interviews, and she owns homes in Mallorca, Los Angeles and Whistler, Canada. ‘I think I added 20 years to my life when I bought my tiny ski chalet in Whistler. It’s a place that really allows me to let it rip. It brings me so much happiness. I get to ski all the time.’ In fact, she likes to mark her birthdays by skiing in a bikini with a joint in one hand and a margarita in the other.

‘Listen, my vibes are high. You’re not bringing me down. I’m going to have a good time. You can either come with me, or you’re out. I don’t have any problems cutting people from the roster but I also have a very open-door policy. I’m open for sex, open for drugs: please spread the word that I’m hoping my European tour will yield a short-term husband, someone to help me marry and exit my country, or at least a recurring cast of men in different locations.’ Watch out Glasgow.

Chelsea Handler, whose middle name happens to be Joy, is hellbent on showing her fans a good time. ‘This is a big year for me: I’m 50. I like to laugh and be vibrant, have fun. I’m here to apologise on behalf of my country too. Right now, with the politics in the country I’m from, we need a lot of lifting up. I take that as a kind of personal duty.’

Chelsea Handler: An Abroad Broad, Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, Sunday 25 May; I’ll Have What She’s Having is out now published by Random House.

WHERE IDEAS COME ALIVE

“Music saved my life

Anti-depressants, poppers, theoretical physics, queer identity: just some of the subjects which electrifying singer-songwriter Jacob Alon is pondering as they prepare to unleash a stunning debut album. With their star firmly in the ascendancy, Alon talks to Fiona Shepherd about embracing their inner badass

Outside the Barrowland Ballroom, doused in spring sunshine, seasoned pop singer Olly Alexander is greeting an excited coterie of fans. Inside, his tour support act Jacob Alon is emitting the gentler but unmistakeable glow of Scotland’s newest music star, as they ponder astrophysical concepts in the cool murk of the venue’s Revue bar. ‘The brightest things in our universe are made under immense forces of attraction,’ says Alon. ‘Quasars, stars, supernovas: all these things come from pulling things together. I think of love and compassion; those are the most powerful forces of this universe. Although it seems dark right now, hate cannot win because we are social creatures of attraction in our nature. Hate is a force of division, and in division we are weaker. But the force of love is a force of attraction.’

Phew. And I was only wrapping up the interview by asking if there was anything else Alon would like List readers to know. But there speaks a former student of theoretical physics as much as a thoughtful poet. Alon was a maths kid at school but it sounds like they have found their calling in the other universal language of music.

This eloquent, sensitive, scintillating singer-songwriter first beamed into our living rooms last autumn with a spellbinding slot on Later . . . With Jools Holland, arriving seemingly fully formed as an assured troubadour with natural charisma, puckish style and a fragile voice for heartbreak which reeled in the room and left audiences craving more. More of that is on the way when Alon releases debut album In Limerence, a truly gorgeous suite of acoustic songs about reality and fantasy, confinement and escape, science and fiction, altered states and being crazy in love. The record is so captivating that Alon might have to prepare for going supernova themselves.

‘I’d be lying if I said I’ve enjoyed it all,’ says Alon of the accelerated journey so far. ‘I’m trying to figure out where my heart lies within doing this. It’s easy to feel daunted at the start because it’s a lot at once. There’s so much to be grateful for but there are days when I’ve wondered “am I built for this?”’

Alon was brought up in Dunfermline in an environment where playing music was not much considered nor encouraged, but grew up on their mum’s favourite female singers, Lauryn Hill and Alison Moyet, and effortless tenor voices such as Stevie Wonder and Chris Martin which were to inform their own bewitching, feminine tones. Eventually. ‘I found music in the small cracks between the couch and the places where I wasn’t meant to look,’ they say, with typical off-the-cuff lyricism. ‘It always felt like something naughty or something I was getting away with; that’s why I never pursued a career in music. The idea of it seems like an oxymoron to me, this unachievable thing that I shouldn’t think myself worthy of, so I pushed it away for a long time.’

Alon knew there was something there. Hearing a classmate play Beethoven on the piano ignited a spark which appealed to both the methodical mathematician and the dormant artist. Their mum taught them to pick out a tune on a ‘wonky’ piano at home and from there, Alon turned to the universal tutor that is YouTube for piano, guitar and singing practice. ‘I would sit in my room at night where I had this little digital keyboard, click-clacking away, pissing off my stepdad,’ they say. ‘I just felt all these feelings that I didn’t know I had and I would push into them more.’

Meanwhile, Alon attempted to parlay their desire to help people and meet family expectations by studying medicine. When that didn’t work out, they jumped to theoretical physics, with music gnawing away in the background as the love that dare not speak its name. ‘I was truly so miserable; I couldn’t see myself going on, trying to be something I wasn’t,’ they say. ‘It sounds dramatic but it was a dramatic time, with covid and stuff, so it led to big thoughts about my own identity. Understanding who I am through my queerness is this ever-evolving process that happens in layers. It’s not this one big coat you take off and you show the world “hello, this is me, I’m coming out, end of story”. We’re always coming out; we’re always coming to terms with who we are and what we love and how we live.’

Alon found community in the unlikely environment of Edinburgh’s tiny Captain’s Bar, one of the city’s intimate destinations for live folk music. ‘I came across this circle of wacky characters sitting outside the pub, all spread two metres apart, passing round a sanitised guitar.’ Alon played an original song ‘and it opened this whole other world.’ They moved to London for a few months, lived in a van, worked in hospitality and failed to find fortune. It was only on returning to Scotland and meeting their manager Hamish Fingland (ex-Kassidy) that things started to fall into place. Ears pricked up, doors opened, shit got serious.

‘For a long part of my life I couldn’t take myself seriously because I didn’t feel like a very serious person,’ says Alon. ‘When I was a teenager I would write songs to make my friends laugh, and take the piss out of the world and myself and other people. I was always a messer and getting into trouble but I was always taught from a very young age “don’t be silly”. You are not allowed to be an outlier, because if you don’t take it seriously then you are not productive. But now it feels like it’s got too serious sometimes. I think we would all do a lot better if we were a bit more playful and silly.’

There is surely playfulness in Alon gadding about like a woodland sprite in photo shoots or naming a song about the trials of Grindr hook-ups after a brand of poppers (‘Liquid Gold 25’). But there is also no doubt that their music is set to be taken very seriously, with (justified) superlatives and Nick Drake/Jeff Buckley comparisons already flying about ahead of the album release.

In Limerence is named after an emotional state akin to unrequited love, and the album rages quietly with the madness of romantic infatuation. ‘I say it as directly as I can in the song “Fairy In A Bottle”,’ says Alon of the debut single which made everyone sit up and take note. ‘It’s like you trap them in this prison of an idea and you’re always thinking about them. In a way you’re mourning them because they’ve never existed.’

Another track, ‘Of Amber’, alludes to the entrapment/ protection of ancient matter in an amber inclusion, while closing song ‘Sertraline’ is an ambivalent hymn to antidepressants. ‘I think the attachment style of limerence comes from trying to protect yourself from being rejected for who you really are, but in doing so you protect yourself from real love because something that’s not real can’t love you back. When I’ve been in these limerence spells, in deep despair, Sertraline has come to me as this spindly little hand that does pull me out of it but it comes with a lot of its own problems.’

Later that night, Alon brings a stillness, grace, vulnerability and beauty to the Barrowlands stage. Sure, there is bar chatter up the back but also plenty of rapt attention for a singer still reckoning with their place in the musical universe. ‘I’ve been reflecting on what I want because it’s not to be really popular and make lots of money and get lots of attention. I don’t like it when a lot of eyes are on me. Music saved my life and I would like to just propagate art in some way. The thing that’s driving me now is I want to keep fighting all these ugly things that are happening in this really dark turn back to fascism. I want to have a voice in that and stand up, be a badass. I think that’s what I want to say.’ Spoken like a true star.

In Limerence is released by Island/EMI on Friday 30 May; Jacob Alon plays Glasgow School Of Art on Thursday 5 June.

STRAIGHT FROM OUR OWN BEEHIVES

On the . corner

If Appa from Kim’s Convenience landed in Scotland, you just know he’d be in his element: touring historic sites, dishing out life advice to unsuspecting Glaswegians, and probably finding some way to haggle for a better deal in the city’s legendary labyrinth of bulk bargains and trolley-warfare cash and carries. ‘I think he would probably be very interested in some of the museums and the history,’ muses James Yi, the actor bringing Appa to life for the UK tour of Kim’s Convenience. ‘Appa is a teacher by trade, so I think he’s always interested in educational-type things. And, you know, maybe he’d play some golf.’ Maybe? Given Yi’s own passion for the sport (he’s heading to St Andrews for a few rounds before the Glasgow run), it’s safe to say Appa’s itinerary might look suspiciously like his own.

The play that provided inspiration for hit Netflix series Kim’s Convenience finally lands in Glasgow. Star James Yi chats to Zara Janjua about a Korean challenger to Irn-Bru, what his character would make of Scotland, and why the stage show will appeal to mega-fans and total newbies

I caught up with Yi from his hotel in Leeds, where he had just wrapped up rehearsals and was itching to get in front of an audience. ‘Theatre is all about the audience,’ he insists. ‘We’re still a week away, and I’m thinking “we need an audience so badly!”’ Unlike the slick sitcom version of Kim’s Convenience, the play thrives on raw emotion, live reactions and, occasionally, unexpected wardrobe malfunctions.

‘You have to be ready for anything. I’ve had to subtly gesture at another actor mid-show because their zipper was down,’ Yi laughs. ‘And then there was the time someone’s fake beard just started peeling off. I had to hold it together while this beard slowly inched its way from his face. The audience lost it.’ For those unfamiliar, Kim’s Convenience is a warm, funny, and deeply relatable story about a Korean-Canadian

family running a corner shop. Originally a stage play by Ins Choi, it won audiences over before becoming the Netflix series that made it a global hit. Now, the play is back on the road, offering a grittier, more intimate take on the story. Yi, who plays Mr Kim (Appa) on stage and appears as recurring character Jimmy Young in the Netflix series, embraces the switch between mediums. ‘The show is a sitcom; it’s meant to be light and funny. But the play? It really dives into the deep stuff: the generational struggles, the sacrifices of immigrant parents, the push and pull between tradition and change. And yes, there are still plenty of laughs.’

And what about coming to Glasgow? ‘I am so excited to go to Scotland. Not just because of golf, but because I’ve heard the people there are hilarious.’ When I teach him the Scottish phrase ‘gie’in it laldy’, he gives it a go with enthusiasm before quickly admitting ‘I am terrible at accents.’

And what if Appa were to open a convenience store in Glasgow, what would he sell? ‘Oh, definitely Korean snacks. And he’d introduce some kind of energy drink to rival Irn-Bru,’ Yi says, chuckling. ‘In the play, there’s this whole bit about Appa trying to sell a Korean ginseng energy drink called insam. It’s this medicinal, super-healthy drink, and Appa is convinced it’s the next big thing.’ So, could insam be the new Irn-Bru? ‘Who knows? Appa would absolutely insist you give it a go.’

Beyond the laughs, what makes Kim’s Convenience special is its ability to connect with audiences from all walks of life. The show’s themes of family, culture and intergenerational misunderstandings hit home for a lot of people. ‘I remember seeing the play for the first time in Toronto, and after it had ended, I overheard someone say “I need to call my dad”. That’s what this show does. It makes people reflect on their own family relationships.’

The British tour is also proof that the story resonates far beyond its Canadian origins. ‘I’ve been amazed by how many people here already know and love the show,’ Yi says. ‘And for those who don’t, it’s also an absolute joy to introduce them to it.’ He encourages audiences to come with open hearts and expect waves of emotion. ‘You’ll laugh, you might cry, and by the end of it, you’ll feel like you’ve just stepped into someone’s family home.’

As anticipation builds for the Glasgow leg, one thing is certain: Appa’s charm, wit and wisdom look set to win over live audiences just as they have for TV viewers. Whether you’re a long-time fan or a newcomer, this is a show that will leave you entertained, moved, and maybe even considering a bottle of insam over Irn-Bru. Either way, Appa would approve.

Kim’s Convenience, Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, Thursday 8–Saturday 10 May.

FROM SCREEN TO STAGE

Here’s a bunch of TV shows that escaped from cathode-ray confines to have their characters treading some boards

There’s a solid tradition of British sitcoms which have made the move to London’s West End and the UK touring circuit. While its wildly interactive Dining Experience has long been a Fringe tradition, a just-announced national run of Fawlty Towers is the latest in a long line of telly comedies that eventually hit the stage. With John Cleese fully involved, no doubt its scripts will work as both aching nostalgia and taste-challenging theatre. Arguably cosier screen-to-stage fare has come from the likes of Only Fools And Horses, Still Game and Early Doors while it feels doubtful whether the oft-touted Father Ted musical will ever see the light of day. Sketch shows have been less likely to pop up on The Stage’s listings pages but The Fast Show and Dead Ringers are two successful transfers. The League Of Gentlemen don’t quite count given they were on the wireless and won the Perrier Award before making it to TV and subsequent high-profile tours (and a film). But that troupe’s Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith were obviously too sad to say a total goodbye when their Inside No 9 came to an end after (of course) its ninth season, as they immediately announced a live show entitled Stage/Fright.

Undoubtedly the most spectacular transfer is Stranger Things which appears to feature an actual boat, has jump scares aplenty, and lays on a glorious recreation of its iconic 80s-infused opening credits sequence. But let’s face it, many of us are simply yearning for the day that tickets go on sale for Twin Peaks: The Musical! (Brian Donaldson)

Only Fools And Horses

Fawlty Towers

To celebrate the launch of our new menu at The Rabbit, we are offering an exclusive offer to readers of The List.

Book via the QR code to dine with us before 27th June and enjoy 15% off your final bill.

Valid for lunch and dinner until 27th June 2025

FIREHOUSE

Maryhill’s short-lived Café Ibiza, which took over from The Botany Bay last year, has given way to barbecue specialist Firehouse. The team behind Smoke (near Belfast) have brought their fiery skills to town, rubbing, marinating and chargrilling a smoky selection including baby back and short ribs, beef brisket, sausage, half chickens and pork belly. They also do burgers, wings, plenty of sides and drinks, plus all-you-can-eat Thursdays: 90 minutes to get your fill from a special buffet. Diners can shelter from the inevitable summer rain in their glass garden domes and still soak up the leafy surrounds. (Jay Thundercliffe) n 795 Maryhill Road, Glasgow, firehouseglasgow.co.uk

eat & drink

‘Where the wild things are

With foraging and ‘conscious cuisine’ on the rise in Scottish restaurants, Suzy Pope gets lost in the weeds and finds that some of them are actually pretty tasty

It’s rare to find a Scottish restaurant without anything foraged on the menu these days,’ says chef Paul Wedgwood, of Edinburgh’s eponymous Wedgwood The Restaurant. Wedgwood runs foraging experiences into the ancient woodland, salt marshes and rockpools of East Lothian’s coast every other weekend, and he certainly doesn’t think wild food is overdone. ‘It’s definitely a good thing,’ he says. ‘Why import truffles from Italy when there’s an abundance of sea truffle growing just a few miles down the road?’

Many of Scotland’s wild foods mirror the flavours of sought-after produce from thousands of miles away; for example, dulse (seaweed) provides the same salty hit as bacon lardons while, as the name suggests, sea truffle adds the same earthy tones as truffles foraged by pigs in Italy. ‘Nettles are my favourite,’ Wedgwood says dreamily. ‘Nettles pair perfectly with lamb.’ There’s certainly no shortage of them around, and he teaches would-be foragers how to harvest the small, sweet leaves at the top without getting stung. His eager students also gather pineapple chamomile, which springs up along the dirt paths to East Lothian’s beaches and fields, and can be turned into a sweet syrup to pair with sorbet.

The experience culminates in a lunch of freshly foraged food back at the restaurant on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, where the likes of venison carpaccio may be presented with wood sorrel picked earlier. ‘They served venison carpaccio with green ants at Noma when I went,’ recalls Wedgwood. ‘I thought the sharp citrusy taste of sorrel would work just as well.’ Indeed the citrus zap from the sorrel cuts through the venison’s iron tang without the need to import green ants from their sub-tropical habitats.

Using native wild ingredients, local produce and letting landscape dictate menus is a big part of the New Nordic food movement for which Noma was famous and there are obvious parallels with Scotland’s wild food landscape. We even have our own festival devoted to wild food: in mid-May, the Scottish

Wild Food Festival takes place as the hedgerows and bracken of the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park burst with berries, herbs and edible flowers. Inspired by similar events in Finland and Latvia, the festival features guided foraging walks, workshops and a long-table lunch of wild food and drink. They also encourage responsible foraging: not taking too much and letting the plants and shrubs regrow. Wedgwood confirms this vital point: ‘Foraging should be about taking only what you need and leaving enough for nature to rewild itself and enough for everyone else. We don’t want to strip this landscape.’

Some chefs across the UK are taking wild food sustainability further, focusing on invasive flora and fauna which pose a threat to our endemic plant life. In London, Crate Brewery uses Japanese knotweed to brew a sour beer. In Edinburgh, Paul Wedgwood has had grey squirrel on and off the menu for years, often using it in homemade haggis or a squirrel trappers’ pie. ‘It’s actually delicious,’ he says. He also uses the non-native three-cornered wild leek, which he chops up and adds to salads, like he would a spring onion. He urges caution with invasive species though. ‘The three-cornered leek is taking over our wild garlic patches, so you have to be careful when you harvest it to not spread the seeds.’

With so-called conscious cuisine on the rise, more and more chefs are considering the impact of their choices on the environment. In Scotland, we’re blessed with an abundance of wild foods speckled across our meadows, forests and seashore, so there are many ways to stock our kitchens and pantries, while getting a little bit closer to nature at the same time.

The Scottish Wild Food Festival, Tir na nOg, Balfunning, Balfron Station, Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 May, scottishwildfoodfestival.co.uk; for more information on foraging days, see wedgwoodtherestaurant.co.uk/foraging

side dishes

Jo Laidlaw goes wild for pizza, eating outside and our new guide, Eat & Drink 365

Here at List Towers, we’re all about reading the runes as well as the (dining) room and, may we say, the nation’s appetite for a cheesy slice continues to astonish. As well as the excellent Sub Rosa Pizza in Glasgow, it’s been widely trailed that Paesano Pizza are about to open their third spot in Shawlands, with more on the way. Edinburgh also hosted Pizza Pilgrims’ Scottish debut (that double pep with hot honey though), as well as news that local heroes Razzo Pizza Napoletana have fired up a long-awaited second oven at Edinburgh Street Food. Cheesin’ for them.

Spring means a slew of foodie festivals and markets. If you’re a fan of the smoky dram, then plan ahead for Fèis Ìle on Islay (Friday 23–Saturday 31 May). If a wee beach walk in St Andrews is on the planner, time it to coincide with Balgove Larder Night Market, with live music and plenty of local produce to taste (Tuesday 6 May, monthly). And if you fancy street food in the sun, The Neighbourgood Market returns to its summer home at the Accies ground in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge from Wednesday 7 May.

May also sees the launch of Eat & Drink 365 Edinburgh, our brandnew guide to food and drink in the city. Available everywhere you pick up The List, expect objective, insightful and useful recommendations to help you chomp and cheers your way around town. Eat & Drink 365 Glasgow will follow hot on its pretty little heels in the autumn.

Balgove Larder Night Market

TipList

Our TipLists suggest the places worth knowing about in different themes, categories and locations. This month, we’re going beyond the typical beer garden to highlight eating and drinking spots with stunning outdoor spaces, should the sun eventually decide to shine

ALTERNATIVE AL FRESCO

Quirky venues

Glasgow Edinburgh

EDINBURGH GLASGOW

CAFÉ BUENA VIDA

535 Victoria Road, buenavida.co.uk/new-home

FINGAL

Alexandra Dock, fingal.co.uk

Soak up the buzz of Vicky Road while looking into the big entrance to Queens Park, as DJs from Radio Buena Vida broadcast live from the café’s front window. Come for coffee, natural wines and Spanish/Catalonian small plates like sobrasadaloaded tostadas and smoky patatas bravas.

All aboard Fingal for dinner on a ship, without having to leave shore. This award-winning hotel is open to non-residents for cocktails, afternoon tea or dinner. It’s a gorgeous space for a celebration, with views of the islands in the Forth.

CHINASKIS

1820

ROOFTOP BAR

Calum Fraser, UK Brand

Ambassador

Discarded Spirits Co, shares his favourite sun traps

THE FINNIESTON

1125 Argyle Street, Glasgow, thefinniestonbar.com

Many people spend an evening here without having an inkling that there’s an outdoor spot hidden behind the back door. While it may not be the largest outdoor area in the West End, it’s a definite sun trap with table service of some of the best cocktails in Scotland.

JOAO’S PLACE

11th Floor, W Edinburgh, St James Square, Edinburgh, joaosplace.com

239 North Street, chinaskis.co.uk

KIM’S MINI MEALS

5 Buccleuch Street, facebook.com/mrkimsfamily

While it’s all ultra-low lighting and ambience inside, Chinaskis’ rear exterior is a split-level garden party. The impressive food strikes a balance between global small plates and pub classics, where Mexican street corn and Japanese fried chicken jostle with smash burgers and hand-stretched pizzas.

You’d think early last orders (8.30pm, no exceptions) and a firm policy on reservations and takeaway (neither allowed) would put folks off, but Kim’s is an enduring institution. Show up, queue up and eat up some of the best bibimbap in town.

THE LADYWELL

PABLO EGGSGOBAO

139 Barrack Street, theladywell.co.uk

62 Inverleith Row, eggsgobao.com

According to legend, a tunnel connects this perfectly old-fashioned boozer with the Tennent’s brewery across the road for ultimate pint freshness. With a touch more certainty, it also has a back yard that’s an utter sun trap, seats about 80, has a giant TV screen and is very chilled out.

Quirky name, quirky food, and the bao bun/ breakfast fusion you didn’t know you needed. Refined? Nope. Delicious? Oh yeah. Try the breakfast bao: crispy hash browns, square sausage, omelette and melted cheese with sriracha. Takeaway or delivery only.

MONO

12 Kings Court, King Street, monocafebar.com

PARADISE PALMS

41 Lothian Street, theparadisepalms.com

The courtyard at Mono gets the light well into early evening. Spritzes and pints of Williams Bros are the drinks of choice for bohemians and musos wandering in, out, and about. If you get peckish, a playful plantbased menu does stomach-lining numbers like a pizza crunch supper or shawarma fries.

Bright and bold Paradise Palms is the antidote to a grey weather day. It’s a bar, a restaurant, a record shop and a venue, decked in neon lights and kitsch ephemera. Cocktails are a specialty, plus a menu of American-style veggie/vegan soul food.

UBIQUITOUS CHIP

SINGAPORE COFFEE HOUSE

12 Ashton Lane, ubiquitouschip.co.uk

5 Canonmills, singaporecoffeehouse.co.uk Singaporean food is a fusion of flavour and colour, condensed here into a cheery eight-seat restaurant. Roti canai is deliciously buttery and flaky, served with a rich curried sauce. A cup of kopi with condensed milk completes the authentic experience, powering you with sugar and caffeine for your day.

In addition to its storied past, verdant interior and peat fire upstairs, The Chip also has The Rooftop Terrace, an outside bar with comfy benches and ample shelter against a particularly ferocious sun (doubtful) or breeze (highly likely). Nibbly stuff from the brasserie menu works well; say, baked camembert with balsamic onions, or a pork and fennel scotch egg. (David Kirkwood)

Johnnie Walker Princes Street, 145 Princes Street, johnniewalker.com

BATTLEFIELD REST

55 Battlefield Road, battlefieldrest.co.uk

Tempting cocktails and food lure you in, but it’s the view from the rooftop terrace that drops jaws. With church rooflines in the foreground, Edinburgh Castle rising above and the Old Town skyline trailing into the distance, it’s breathtaking.

HERRINGBONE ABBEYHILL

This restored tram shelter has a history going back to 1914. Since 1993, its petite confines have housed a quaint Italian with bistro-ish plates (smoked haddock crêpe, black pudding salad) alongside pizzas and pastas. Lunchtime offers particularly good value.

HANOI BIKE SHOP

3 Royal Terrace Gardens, herringbone-abbeyhill.co.uk

8 Ruthven Lane, hanoibikeshop.co.uk

This mini-chain has established itself as a reliable favourite for all-day dining. On this corner spot, a former WC-turned-office space has been transformed into a stylish destination, opening out onto a substantial raised deck where a timber sign declares kids, dogs and friends are all welcome.

Places hidden down lanes always excite. A garland of plants and Vietnamese flags herald your entrance into this canteen-style space of wooden benches and hanging bikes, with vibrant renderings of street foods and hearty dishes. Try the pho, and anything with the homemade tofu.

Sitting atop the W hotel in the St James Quarter, Joao’s Place is not a bar you’d stumble across, but it’s certainly worth seeking out. The drinks are excellent, but what really makes this venue sing are views of Edinburgh that are second to none, especially when the sun is out. Make yourself comfortable because you won’t want to leave.

TEUCHTERS LANDING

1c Dock Place, Edinburgh, teuchtersbar.co.uk

MILK AT EDINBURGH SCULPTURE WORKSHOP

NONNA SAID . . .

21 Hawthornvale, cafemilk.co.uk

26 Candleriggs, nonnasaid.com

Terrific seasonally inspired breakfast and lunch options are par for the course here. Outside, there’s heaps of seating looking out on the sculpture workshop’s courtyard and across a flower meadow to the bike track. Perfect for kids, pups or anyone topping up on the vitamin D.

This place picks up on our ongoing love affair with all things Neapolitan, throws in some eyebrowraising toppings, and indulges an equally potent crush with old-school hip hop. Munch on fried carbonara bites or a lamb doner pizza, while Biggie blasts out of the speakers.

Situated at The Shore in Leith, Teuchters Landing is far from a hidden spot. However, with an ample outside area bathed in sun practically all day and an excellent selection of beer, whisky and Scottish food, it is impossible to miss it out of any outdoors list. Get down early for a prime spot.

TIMBERYARD

THE TIKI BAR & KITSCH INN

214 Bath Street, tikibarglasgow.com

10 Lady Lawson Street, timberyard.co

Quirky is kind of the point of tiki bars. Foosball, shuffleboard and popcorn machine downstairs, Thai eatery above and doing some fantastic work on sticky and aromatic curries. You can also order food amid the 50s Americana of the bar while supping on a Zombie from a Polynesian tankard.

The scale of this former 19th-century props and costume store has real presence, and their take on Scotland’s larder has been showered with accolades, including a Michelin star. A handsome, leafy courtyard is both sheltered and south-facing, major plus points in breezy old Edinburgh.

THE WEE CURRY SHOP

WILLIAMS & JOHNSON COFFEE CO

7 Buccleuch Street, weecurryshop.co.uk

1 Customs Wharf, instagram.com/williams_and_johnson_coffee

Twenty-odd seats, an open kitchen and the steady stewardship of the Mother India group make for a delightfully quaint ‘front room’ experience where dishes are classically composed but light and modern.

Grab a top-notch coffee and filled sourdough focaccia by the cobbled quayside, and take in the beautifully restored Ocean Mist ship and jumble of historic port buildings across the water, as a brood of ducklings putter gently by. (Paul McLean)

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

Williams & Johnnson Coffee Co

Café Buena Vida

Joao’s Place

SCOTTISH MOSS

With a litany of culinary accolades to his name, including a stint at Copenhagen’s Noma, chef Henry Dobson could easily have added another tasting menu experience to Edinburgh’s already saturated scene. Instead, this farm-to-table venture has a neighbourhood feel with pricing to match. The à la carte menu features over 90 products sourced directly from Dobson’s family farm near Dundee, with nearly everything else coming from producers close to Edinburgh. The wine list has only English varietals, and even the tea leaves, fermenting away in huge kombucha jars, are British.

It’s an intimate space, low-lit with flickering candles in lumpy clay holders made by Dobson; the much more professional cups and plates are made by Akiko Matsuda, a ceramicist and sculptor, partially using clay from ditch digging at the farm. Farm-to-table is literal here: the tables themselves are crafted from wind-fallen trees and medium-rare pigeon is smoked over the excess wood shavings, adding a subtle smokiness to the meat’s iron tang. Miso has a barley base, rather than rice, adapting to what’s grown locally and the menu changes weekly or even daily, depending on the harvest. Turbot flakes delicately and comes with a rich cauliflower base, the miso adding a nutty depth. There’s only one pudding but it’s a good one: light and fluffy Japanese-style chiffon cake.

Moss more than lives up to its claims, serving exceptional dishes with distinct character, and the service is unobtrusive too. This is an evening of understated quality and quiet appreciation of Scotland’s natural larder. (Suzy Pope)

n 112 St Stephen Street, Edinburgh, mossedn.co.uk; average price for two courses £42.

PIZZA

SUB ROSA PIZZA

There’s a bit of excitement around Sub Rosa, a new Detroit-style pizza place making waves from an industrial unit at the edge of Castlemilk. A winding road, skirting Linn Park, takes you there: it’s on the first floor but cars drive up a ramp and park outside and it does feel like Jason Statham could step out of a black Range Rover with a suitcase handcuffed to his wrist. Enter and you’re in a prep kitchen: gingham tablecloths make it a restaurant, and a Lego Ayrton Senna McLaren model, Oasis poster, and couple of Italian football strips on the wall make it bloody bonkers.

But from there on, everything is strikingly deliberate. Nunez De Prado olive oil and imported Lloyd pizza pans signify intent, as does the owners’ previous stint at Canotto in the Southside. The offering is simple: red or white, round or Detroit, toppings as you see fit. A Detroit feeds two and the cheese-climb frico is majestic, browned to crisp glory and defying gravity. Pepperoni is nicely blackened, guindilla peppers are scorched and spiky, and pulpy San Marzano tomatoes soak into the dough before a sesameseeded undercarriage finishes things off with crunch.

The round is thinner, crispy and equally nailed with a chewy, airy, perfectly seasoned crust, with soft, milky cheese that browns and bubbles when it needs to. A vibrant lemon wedge and some Calabrian oregano, flicked off the branch before the oil is drizzled, maintain the remarkable attention to flavour and detail: you taste every single thing to the correct extent. This understated pizza place in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city is a masterclass in accuracy and, as a far fancier publication likes to say of far fancier places, is definitely worth the detour. (David Kirkwood) n Unit 34, Enterprise Park, 147 Drakemire Drive, Glasgow, instagram.com/subrosagla; average price for a Detroit sharer for two £28.

DRINK

ROOFTOP

Ask EADith

Got a food dilemma? Need a killer rec to seal the deal? Or just want the inside track on Glasgow and Edinburgh’s eating and drinking scene? Then why not ask EADith, our Eat & Drink team’s helpful agony aunt. This month, she goes quackers for a hostelry with history behind its name

Dear EADith

I love to soak up some local history while dining out. Any recommendations for a Glasgow brunchy/lunchy spot to tickle my historical tastebuds?

HistoryLover1314

Dear HistoryLover1314

Glasgow has plenty of spots for reminiscing about the past, but I think your taste for bygone tales will be well fed at Partick Duck Club. While this allday diner has only been open since 2017, and isn’t based in a particularly old or noteworthy building (though it is in a rather fetching corner tenement), its name nods to a satisfying slice of local history.

The original Duck Club of Partick was formed in 1810 by city merchants and bankers who wanted to escape the smog of Glasgow by heading to the village of Partick and feasting on roasted duck and local ale. Meeting at the now long-gone tavern, The Bun & Yill House aka The Bunhouse, on nearby Old Dumbarton Road, they particularly enjoyed the area’s ducks, which grew big and tasty from eating the grain from the nearby Kelvinside mills. Oh, they quack me up, so they do.

Fast forward to the present, and the chaps running today’s Club certainly cannot be accused of knowing duck-all about top-notch brunches, having worked at nearby Zique’s for years. Two all-day menus cover brekkie/ brunch and lunch/dinner so there’s none of that annoying ‘missing the brunch menu by five minutes’ fuss. Brunch covers everything from full fryup and sourdough toppers to pancakes and eggs many ways.

Among comfort-leaning mains such as steak, schnitzel or indeed duck, the bread buns from Freedom Bakery are excellent: filled with breakfast items or the likes of beef and black pudding burger, hoisin duck and more. It’s impossible to visit without sampling the duck-fat fries; loaded with truffle mayo and parmesan, or honey mustard mayo and bacon, they’re as decadent as a banker’s breeches. Only inside tables are bookable, so get in early if you want to nest in one of the cute duck house booths outside, especially on weekends when crowds flap about on the brunch hunt.

(As told to Jay Thundercliffe)

 27 Hyndland Street, Glasgow, partickduckclub.co.uk; average price for two courses £25.

BAR FILES

Creative folks reveal their top watering hole

COMEDIAN KIM BLYTHE

I love Glasgow and could probably do a top 20 favourite pubs, but I’ll try my best to narrow it down. When it comes to it, I measure a pub by the quality of a pint. I don’t need any thrills and I’m absolutely sound with your toilets being sub-par if the beer makes up for it. With the good weather we’ve been having recently, I’ve found myself in the beer garden at Hootenanny next to St Enoch Centre. Cracking pint and good price, and their garden is brilliant for that week of summer we get. When I’m not being wee-laddrinking-pints, I love to go for a nice cocktail. In 2018 before a Kendrick Lamar gig, I went to Dukes Bar in Finnieston and got a Pomegranate Sour. It was the greatest cocktail I’ve ever had and I think about her a lot.

 Kim Blythe appears with Zara Gladman, Alan Jay, Eva Peroni and host Robin Grainger at The Social Hub, Glasgow, Friday 9 May, as part of ListLive Comedy Night.

Step into Edinburgh’s hidden past and uncover the untold stories of the LGBTQIA+ community from the 16th century to 1912.

ORZEL

On the River Clyde’s north side in Glasgow’s Thornwood neighbourhood, this independent menswear store offers a handpicked selection of pieces from top-tier brands including Corridor, OrSlow, Kestin and YMC. Entering the shop, you’ll be greeted by one of two employees (or if you’re lucky, shop dog Ruby, a gorgeous chocolate lab) who are on hand to help you find that next wardrobe staple. Browse a wide array of workwear-inspired basics, shirts, trousers and accessories, including limited-edition shoe collaborations and bespoke graphic tees. Keep an eye out on socials for regular in-store events with other local brands. (Megan Merino) n 678 Dumbarton Road, Glasgow, orzel.store; instagram.com/orzel.store

travel & shop

Struck by its similarities to her native Edinburgh, Jo Laidlaw treats us to a tour of budget-friendly but culturally rich Lyon

Eavesdrop on any group of Gen X-ers, and you’ll likely overhear someone bemoaning the end of the cheap flights era. It’s not that we don’t get it: it’s more that discovering random European cities through bargain EasyJet trips landing in shed-airports at least 50km from town at midnight was a formative experience.

So yay for Lyon. France’s third biggest city almost flies under the radar, but it’s highly accessible for a cheap (by today’s standards) city break. It’s also somewhat . . . familiar, what with its old town, a new town that isn’t, secret traboules (or closes) linking the two, and plenty of hills.

Jump on the tram and head for Presqu’île (‘almost an island’) formed by the meeting of the Rhône and Saône rivers. Plenty of accommodation options make this a great base, but the whole centre is highly walkable. Well, apart from the achingly hip Croix-Rousse: the former weavers’ quarter is well worth a visit, with its shabby charm, great brunch spots and cute bars with hidden terraces and real-life Saturday-afternoon pétanque leagues. But it’s also at the very top of what can only be described as ‘that bastarding hill’, and therefore not ideal for getting back home after a pot or two of wine.

Pot, you say? Yep, pot. A pot is Lyon’s very own wine bottle, a heavybottomed 46cl that formed part of the highly skilled and highly paid weavers’ wages back in the 16th century. It’s still the best way to drink house wine, and in some ways it’s the key to this city. Shops, sights, architecture, river walks and culture abound but a highly specific tradition of food and wine is Lyon’s heart.

Take the bouchon. Established as simple cafés to feed those hungry weavers, there’s still one on every corner of the old town. Practically unchanged in décor or menu, they preserve all that tradition without falling into tourist-trappery (take note, our own whisky-and-haggis bars). Expect lyonnaise sausage, pike dumplings (honestly, lush), duck and offal, plus pots, brisk service and tourists elbow-to-elbow with locals who all have their favourite. Their very similarities can lead to choice-paralysis, but Le Vieux Lyon will not disappoint.

The bouchons sit side by side with hyper-modern choices such as the gorgeous Söma, which offers a precise, thoughtful and surprisingly reasonable take on modern French cooking. True, veggies and vegans will (still) be met with the traditional Gallic shrug but everyone else can eat well here and get a little closer to the city at the same time. And don’t disregard the Lyonnais love of an Irish bar: the James Joyce Pub’s banner (Live, Laugh, Love, Leave) raises a giggle as well as a nightcap, particularly when there’s still a million stairs between you and your bed.

en.visiterlyon.com

WanderList: Lyon

my favourite holiday

While on tour in 2024, Ed Night experienced a unique evening in Copenhagen. The comedian tells us why he almost quit stand-up to pursue a career in Danish billiards

This time last year, I went to do a tour show in Copenhagen and stayed with one of my oldest friends and his partner. After the show, we found a bar that stayed open late and allowed smoking inside. The centrepiece of its one room was a Danish billiards table. My friends taught me the rules and we began to play.

It was just us and a few regulars who eventually came over to introduce themselves. ‘We’re about to get booted off the table,’ I thought, but no. They asked us to take part in a group tournament where the loser of each round would have to buy everyone in the bar a drink. I played first and, much to everyone’s surprise, didn’t lose; we all got a drink. I played again, didn’t lose; we all got a drink.

The hours got smaller and the room got smokier. My friend kept coaxing me out of my seat to represent our group, like when Moe became Homer’s boxing coach. I couldn’t speak or barely stand, but damn could I play Danish billiards. Just as I considered quitting comedy, I lost a round. Jimmy White never won a world title, did he? But history will remember the flair.

It was a one-of-a-kind evening; a storybook night out that makes you feel like a true bon viveur. Despite being from different places, we’d all come together for one ecstatic evening in the spirit of generosity, friendship and wagering for real money. That night remains pride of place in my memory collection.

Ed Night: The Plunge, Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, Friday 9 May; The Stand, Glasgow, Saturday 10 May.

on your doorstep

Getting lost in a museum is one of life’s greatest joys, but it’s not all about the standard big-hitters. Megan Merino recommends three alternative museums to discover in and around the central belt

MUSEUM ON THE MOUND

Home to Scotland’s oldest bank note, this museum focuses on all things financial and is aptly housed in the former Bank Of Scotland Head Office. This historic building stands proudly at the top of The Mound and features exhibits on money’s evolution, building societies in Victorian Britain, and the impact on banking of computers and mechanisation. n museumonthemound.com

THE MUSEUM OF PIPING

Inside Glasgow’s National Piping Centre, this museum offers a deep dive into the vital role of piping in Scottish culture. Discover the pipes and manuscripts of renowned piper John MacColl as well as an array of instruments from both Scottish and European origins. Listen to archive recordings and learn how bagpipe music was printed before having a go on the practice chanter yourself. n thepipingcentre.co.uk

THE DEVIL’S PORRIDGE MUSEUM

An hour and a half drive from Glasgow, this curiously named museum in Eastriggs highlights Scotland’s World War I history, focusing on the munitions factory that produced explosives for the war effort. Women made up the majority of the workforce and this museum showcases their crucial contributions through interactive exhibits, historical photos and personal accounts.

n devilsporridge.org.uk

Museum On The Mound

Five years on from a moment of inspired thinking during lockdown, Finnieston Clothing founder Ross Geddes is relishing the success of his sustainable workwear brand. From trendy tweed jackets to merino wool vests, Finnieston Clothing is a local business that places Glasgow at the centre of its name and mission statement. ‘The heritage of Glasgow is industrial, its shipbuilding,’ explains Geddes. ‘So from the getgo, I was always quite attuned into not making cheap crap, but trying to use really good, strong, sturdy materials, and stuff that’s going to last.’

His steadfast commitment to a quality-over-quantity approach has helped Finnieston Clothing build a loyal base of returning customers and even open a second branch in the south of the city. ‘I want to try and have shops that provide local jobs,’ says Geddes of his decision to scale up. ‘As massive corporations and businesses expand, I think there’s a lot less purpose and meaning out there for people. And I think in order to really fight against what’s happening in the world, I want to keep making products local.’

While the prices may raise eyebrows among some casual Saturday shoppers, Geddes maintains that each garment is priced fairly and with honesty. ‘We have a lot of transparency on our website, and it tells people how much we’re paying for things, because we have absolutely nothing to hide. There are lots of brands out there, and it can be confusing for consumers who can buy a t-shirt for £5 or £300, but there might not be a lot of difference in those t-shirts. I do feel like we are becoming a reliable and trustworthy brand, and that people know that they’re buying into something, a good quality product, but also one that has a heart and a purpose to it as well.’

305 Byres Road and 1092 Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow, finniestonclothing.com; instagram.com/finniestonclothing

Sustainable workwear brand Finnieston Clothing was established in Glasgow with style and versatility in mind. Founder Ross Geddes tells Danny Munro about his commitment to making clothes that last and to keeping things local

shop talk

BOOKS AT THE BOTANICS

With the glory days of Britain’s bustling high streets sadly behind us, pop-up shops are a popular, lower-stakes option for many independent retailers. Isy Santini brings you a trio of host spaces or events worth checking out

Round off a trip to Glasgow’s beautiful Botanic Gardens by browsing this expertly curated monthly (or in May’s case bi-monthly) secondhand bookshop. Pick up that perfect beach read or search for something truly special among the shelves of antiquarian tomes and folios or vintage art and postcards.

n 730 Great Western Road, Glasgow, booksatthebotanics.co.uk, Saturday 3–Monday 5 May, Saturday 24–Monday 26 May.

LEITH ARCHES

With its spacious loft area, Leith Arches is one of the best venues for pop-ups in Edinburgh, frequently playing host to markets selling everything

from vintage clothing to antique bric-a-brac. When you’re done shopping, you can head downstairs for a drink and some local food from the café bar. n 6 Manderston Street, Edinburgh, leitharches.com; instagram.com/leitharches

NEW GLASGOW SOCIETY

Aiming to support Glasgow’s heritage and culture, New Glasgow Society is a Finniestonbased community space with a vibrant shop front. It can be hired for workshops, talks, exhibitions or any other pop-up needs you can possibly think of.

n 1307 Argyle Street, Glasgow, newglasgowsociety.org; instagram.com/ newglasgowsociety

Books At The Botanics

Sounds Good

1st SCO 24/25: Mozart Sinfonia Concertante

2nd Edinburgh Tradfest 2025: Ross Ainslie & the Sanctuary Band

3rd Clearwater Creedence Revival

5th Foivos Delivorias Trio

8th China Crisis

9th

Hanley and the Baird, Sing In The City Aw Blacks

17th Francis Rossi

18th Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers: In Time

19th

Levison Wood: Walking the World - A Life of Exploration and Adventure

20th The Music of Hans Zimmer & others

24th Yale Concert Band - ON TOUR!

27th Elkie Brooks - Farewell Tour

28th29th Morgan Jay - The Goofy Guy Tour

30th A Night for MAP

31st Malin Lewis Presents: Frigg, Marvara, Me Lost Me

4th Martha Wainwright

5th Rastak; Tales of Earth and Sun 12th Bôa

13th Emma Kenny’s – Killer Couples

26th Jacqui Dankworth with Charlie Wood

28th Kid Creole & The Coconuts

July

17th

18th

19th

Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival: Curtis Stigers

Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival: Colin Steel: STRAMASH

Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival: corto.alto + support

20th

Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival: A Very Special Evening with Kenny Wayne Shepherd and the Legendary Bobby Rush

BALLET BC

Scotland missed out on Ballet BC’s debut UK tour in 2018, so the excitement surrounding these two Edinburgh dates is not inconsiderable. Although based in Vancouver, the company’s artistic director Medhi Walerski spent years dancing and choreographing with Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT). This gives the contemporary (but classically trained) company a ‘best of both worlds’ output that’s alive with North American spirit and awash with European influences. The double-bill they’re bringing us echoes this ethos, featuring Swede Johan Inger’s climate crisis-inspired Passing, and Canadian Crystal Pite’s Frontier, originally created for NDT. For dance fans, missing this is not an option. (Kelly Apter)

 Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Friday 23 & Saturday 24 May.

going out

“We really hope kids see the importance of lifting up your friends

Back for its 35th outing, Edinburgh International Children’s Festival has lined up a feast of theatre and dance from around the world. Claire Sawers explores the homegrown shows aiming to entertain and educate young minds

On the poster for Tongue Twister, Greg Sinclair is peering out of a pink balaclava made from a spiky, squashy pattern of long knitted tongues. It’s one of many specially designed costumes in his colourful and rhythmic kids’ show, where he dances and performs tongue twisters in English, Gaelic, French, German, Yoruba, Ukrainian, Arabic, Japanese, Greek, Polish, Setswana, Urdu and Norwegian.

‘All of the tongue twisters in the show were gifted to me by native speakers of those languages,’ explains the performance artist, composer and cellist from Edinburgh, who has a string of community and theatre shows under his award-winning belt. ‘It was really important for me to actually connect with people through their language rather than just look up tongue twisters on the internet.’ The show features electronic dance music from sound designer Ben Fletcher and ‘amazingly creative and bonkers’ costumes by designer Alison Brown. ‘The costumes are an integral part of the work,’ says Sinclair. ‘Some of them are relatively simple, like the balaclava, while others completely change my entire body shape and movement.’

Tongue Twister will be presented at North Edinburgh Arts (Tuesday 27–Saturday 31 May), a community-owned space in Pilton where Sinclair has staged shows in the past. This piece evolved from his short film Seashells, where he performed words taught to him by community members with English as a second language. ‘I love how the repetition of them and the inevitable mistakes make unique performances each time,’ explains Sinclair. ‘For me, the show is about the importance of listening to each other, making connections with people in your community and globally, through language. It’s about how languages can be heard as musical instruments with their own unique sounds, and you don’t always need to know a translation in order to experience or understand. It’s also about failure and making mistakes. And it’s about celebrating my own queer identity and showing the children in the audience that it’s ok to explore your gender and self-expression through dressing up.’

Over at Assembly Roxy, some similar messages will be shared by performance artists Vee Smith and Sadiq Ali, who bring us their contemporary circus show, The Unlikely Friendship Of Feather Boy And Tentacle Girl (Monday 26–Wednesday 28 May). This is

the magical, moving tale of two outsiders: a girl who wants to be a monster and a boy who wants to fly. The Unlikely Friendship . . . and Tongue Twister are two exciting new Scottish commissions from the festival’s producer Imaginate, supported by the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund. Each show will have toured Scotland before arriving at Edinburgh International Children’s Festival and both focus on celebrating diverse cultures and accepting differences.

‘We really hope that kids see the importance of friendship, of lifting up your friends and of being able to have fun together, even if you are very different,’ says Smith who, alongside Ali, is originally from Edinburgh and graduated from the National Centre For Circus Arts in London. Both identifying as queer, they often felt like outsiders as kids. They explored those feelings of not belonging when together they created circus shows The Chosen Haram and The Kelpie And The Phoenix, featuring impressive aerial rope and Chinese pole.

‘We first started thinking about it [The Unlikely Friendship . . .] way back in 2021,’ recalls Smith. ‘We were given an opportunity by Catherine Wheels Theatre Company who put out a call for artists who had never made work for young audiences before. We weren’t really sure exactly what we wanted to do, but we knew we wanted it to be circus, and we knew we wanted it to be very visual. We were then accepted by Imaginate as Accelerator Artists, and the show continued to develop from there. I would describe it as stunning, characterful circus.’

The Edinburgh International Children’s Festival’s 35th programme will feature 14 productions in total, from seven different countries. The third Scottish offering in the festival’s programme is The Show For Young Men (Thursday 29 May–Sunday 1 June), a beautiful dance piece at The Studio which features 45-year-old choreographer and performer Robbie Synge, and his 11-year-old sidekick Alfie. Dressed in blue Dickies boilersuits and soundtracked perfectly by Dolly Parton, Bill Callahan and Oasis, the pair dance and jump around the room. It’s a gorgeous duet about male friendship and a sweet antidote to toxic masculinity.

Edinburgh International Children’s Festival, various venues, Saturday 24 May–Sunday 1 June; see imaginate.org.uk for Scottish tour dates.

Local heroes: Greg Sinclair (main pic and above left), The Show For Young Men, The Unlikely Friendship Of Feather Boy And Tentacle Girl

PICTURE:

TOMMY GA KEN-WAN

PICTURE: TOMMY GA KEN-WAN

PICTURE:MINTTU

“ I’ve been sober a long time.

f ilm • mlif lif• m •

Without

Famed for playing Dracula, Sid Vicious, Joe Orton, Lee Harvey Oswald and Winston Churchill (for which he won an Oscar), chameleonic 67-year-old Londoner Gary Oldman is now starring as American author John Cheever in the new film by Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty). The two feel well matched. Like Cheever, who became sober at 65, Oldman has struggled in the past with alcohol. As James Mottram discovers when the pair meet in Cannes, these days he’s more clear-sighted than ever

Is it true you’re a big Paolo Sorrentino fan? Is that why you signed on to Parthenope? I’ve seen all the films, and I absolutely love his movies . . . I’d have done anything for him. I actually wrote back and said ‘I’d play a shadow on the wall. I will just come and do anything to be a part of one of your films.’ I’m obviously thrilled to

be a part of this.

people?

Soldier Spy

You’ve played many real characters before, and here you’re author John Cheever. Are you ever fearful taking on real Not fear. I almost feel that George Smiley [in Tinker Tailor ] was real, in a way, because it was such an iconic character, and made even more so by Alec Guinness. So it was a bit fearful going into that. And then there was Churchill who was again iconic and possibly the most well-known Englishman who ever lived. This is a little different because I’m playing John Cheever and I’m not playing him. In as much that he is a melancholic, big, romantic, drunken construction of Paolo’s. He’s Paolo Sorrentino’s John Cheever.

How do you choose your roles? Do you have a career I have no plan. I don’t think I’ve chased anything I’ve ever done.

He’s plan? to days he’s more clear-sighted than ever

You never directed again after 1997’s Nil By Mouth. Is it simply a case that you won’t compromise on budgets? I’ve been in films where they promise one thing, and then they cut the budget, and then we haven’t got the days, and then they’re tearing pages out of the script, and they’re changing the story, and then it’s all what I call a ‘fuck, bollocks and a scramble’ at the end of the day. They’re like ‘we’ve got to be out of here. We just got to shoot and get the scene.’ And I don’t want to work like that. I can work like that as an actor and earn far more money than spending two years of my life on a film, my own film, to then stand at the back of the Palais [in Cannes], if I was lucky enough, and go ‘I should have listened to myself.’ I’d rather not do it.

that, I’d be dead

That aside, are you at a very happy stage of your life? I’m at the happiest I’ve been. I’ve been sober a long time. Without that, I wouldn’t be sitting here today. I’d be dead. I know that for a fact. I’m 27-and-a-half years sober, so that’s a big deal. And things have come my way since then.

Do you have trouble recalling the pre-sober movies you made? Well, I know I’m in The Scarlet Letter because I can see it. I don’t know if I remember making it, but I know I’m in it because I’m on the screen. I wasn’t drinking on the set but it just becomes part of your life. You would go to work, and then you finish in the evening, and then you would go home and drink. And when you weren’t working, or at the weekend, you drink more than you normally would in the week. But it wasn’t like I had a flask in my costume and I was guzzling at vodka in the corner.

You were also famed for over-the-top characters, like your corrupt cop in Léon. Were those fun? Léon is a cartoon, isn’t it? It’s like a James Bond villain. That’s just me having a laugh! When we were shooting Léon, a guy [on screen] came up to me and I’d say ‘bring me everyone’ and he said ‘everyone?’ And I’d go ‘everyone.’ On one take, I went to the sound guy and said ‘I’m going to do this one really loud so be prepared. I’m just going to make Luc [Besson, the director] laugh as a joke.’ It was a joke! So we did the take and went ‘everyone!!!’ and he kept it in. It was just me having a giggle.

You’ve had great success in Slow Horses. How do you feel about your character Jackson Lamb? It’s my pension! I feel very lucky, very privileged, to get a project which is that good.

Parthenope is in cinemas from Friday 2 May; four seasons of Slow Horses are available on Apple TV+.

GAELIC CULTURE OÍCHE CHEOIL & CRAIC

Since 1895, Glasgow has been home to Scotland’s branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, the Republic Of Ireland’s primary Gaelic-language body. Now based at Govanhill Community Centre and promoting the sister tongue of our own Scottish Gaelic to diaspora communities across Scotland, the organisation runs a calendar of events including language classes for adults, singing groups and regular pop-up Gaeltacht catch-ups. It's led by minoritised languages advocate Evin Ó Duinigh who, as a person with Irish Gaelic, ‘really wanted to learn Scottish Gaelic for a long time.’ Having built this Gaelic bridge for over ten years, Ó Duinigh says he has ‘loved being involved in the lively, welcoming community. It has given me a different link with Scotland,’ where he has lived now for over 20 years.

For the last three years, he has taken part in the Glasgow Gaelic Drama group at the Mòd, which he describes as a ‘fun and fulfilling way to engage with talented and positive people from all over Scotland.’ Divining such links is the focus of the forthcoming event at Garnethill Multicultural Centre, featuring Cór na Déise, an all-male line-up of ‘renowned singers, box and flute players and other class musicians.’

Ó Duinigh explains that since the Waterford-based outfit started 15 years ago, they’ve appeared on television in Ireland, toured around the country and overseas several times, and have released two very well-received albums. Joining them will be Argyll singer Joy Dunlop. ‘The night should see some Gaeilge-Gàidhlig crossover, as many songs transcend the two communities,’ says Ó Duinigh. (Marcas Mac an Tuairneir)

 Garnethill Multicultural Centre, Glasgow, Saturday 10 May.

Joy Dunlop

LVIC’S PICKS

BBC broadcaster, author, actor, musician, DJ, and now a List columnist, the lad Galloway flicks through some music listings to choose a number of top May gigs in variously sized rooms and across different genres

ooking back over the past eight decades of popular music, besides sonic invention, technological innovation, pioneering aesthetics and progressive politics, one thing is for certain: we all love a silly band name. And they don’t come much more obtuse than Wet Leg. If ruthless, calculating marketing execs had laid bets on a breakthrough success story of 2022, I’m not sure an oddball indie duo with that name from the Isle Of Wight gatecrashing the charts, securing a number one album, touring the globe with Harry Styles and gathering billions of streams would have featured prominently on their Excel spreadsheets. Well, Rhian and Hester have done all that and more, and they return to Scotland with an ‘intimate’ show at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall (Tuesday 27 May). If you’re lucky enough to possess a ticket, expect an evening of propulsive, spiky, surrealist pop and exquisite onstage costume choices.

The remaining Pogues are touring to celebrate 40 years of their astonishing Sodomy & The Lash album with two dates at Glasgow’s hallowed Barrowland Ballroom (Tuesday 6, Sunday 11 May), with guest singers (including our very own Iona Zajac) standing in for legendary whisky-soaked frontman Shane MacGowan.

of Rum, music democratisation of the internet. So it’s often difficult to navigate listings and

Tickets to both gigs are long gone, so why not check out a band who could be their natural successors? Falkirk tearaways Brògeal pull together rowdy, boozy shanties with Irish traditional and punk rock colliding in a way that brings to mind the Irish London rabble. They’ve built a near rapturous, fanatical following already with only a few singles and two EPs to their name, as well as a whole heap of touring. The live show is a riot but they also have the tunes and the attitude. Judge for yourself as they headline Glasgow’s SWG3 (Thursday 29 May).

. Catch two

There’s a lot of new music around, now more than ever thanks to the democratisation of the internet. So it’s often difficult to navigate listings and find the good stuff. Scotland’s music convention Wide Days has always been a dependable one-stop shop for discovering the next best thing, but as it takes a sabbatical in 2025, in steps the straight-talking New From Scotland nights of showcases at La Belle Angele and Sneaky Pete’s plus an afternoon pop-up in Summerhall (Thursday 1 & Friday 2 May). Among those appearing are Indoor Foxes, Theo Bleak, KuleeAngee, Her Picture, and Gurry Wurry, all of whom may not yet be household names but could well be in the near future. Support the scene, discover new talent and have a brilliant night out, all for a ridiculously low price.

 Listen to Vic Galloway every Monday and Wednesday night on BBC Radio Scotland; he is MC and DJ at FyneFest in Glen Fyne, Friday 30 May–Sunday 1 June.

3 TO SEE COMEDY

Bags of time to go, of course, but Lauren Pattison (Blackfriars, Glasgow, Saturday 24 May; Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, Sunday 25 May) should really have attained household-name status by now. You good people can hurry that along by popping over to one of these two shows by the Geordie comic as she puts on her Big Girl Pants. Conversely, it’s hard to see how much more stratospheric Katherine Ryan (SEC, Glasgow, Friday 9 May) can get in the comedy game. A very well-known face on both screen and stage, the Canadian gives us Battleaxe, a no doubt sardonic take on family, relationships and celebrity culture. Writer, actor and stand-up Ellie Taylor (Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, Friday 2 May; EICC, Edinburgh, Saturday 3 May) is Palavering! her way around the nation. More family and relationship fare can be expected here while word has it that ‘the Steve Tyler lookalike’ (her words) is just glad to be getting out of the house. (Brian Donaldson)

Wet Leg

Lauren Pattison

KATHRYN JOSEPH

IKICK ASS

f there’s a nonconformist way to approach something, Two Destination Language will find it. So you’d be forgiven for raising an eyebrow of curiosity at the notion that their next show is inspired by the can-can. Exuberant though it may be, today’s can-can is rooted in uniformity, both in its synchronised steps and the people who deliver them. Dig a little deeper, however, and lurking behind the Moulin Rouge heels and head-dresses lies the fascinating history of this high-kicking French dance. For the can-can’s origins began not on a glamorous Parisian stage, but in the post-work watering holes of ordinary folk during the industrial revolution.

‘There are no proper recordings of what the can-can was like choreographically,’ explains Two Destination Language’s co-founder Katherina Radeva. ‘We just know that people kicked their legs high. And what’s important to note is that men started this in public halls, and it was the working classes after a hard day’s work that would go and have a pint and a dance. So it was the opposite of the social dances of the middle

Think you know the can-can? As new show Bottoms discovers, it’s not all frilly knickers and synchronised steps.

Kelly Apter speaks to the team behind this Dance International Glasgow production as they explore the famous dance’s working-class roots

classes, which were a lot more formal. We absolutely loved this bit of history, which was born out of letting loose, letting rip and letting go of the working day.’

Radeva and company co-founder Alister Lownie were exploring music hall and cabaret when they discovered all this, and it felt like the perfect fit for them. Allowing the work to germinate for a couple of years, Bottoms slowly began to take shape and follow in the footsteps of previous thought-provoking productions such as 40/40 and Fault Lines ‘As with most of our work, we don’t do it straight,’ says Radeva. ‘You will recognise the can-can for sure, but we like to twist and turn and shape-shift. And none of the five performers in Bottoms would fit the Moulin Rouge. We respect their choices, but we’re going to do it our way.’

‘If you look at the Moulin Rouge audition rules, you’ll see that they know exactly what they want,’ says Lownie, picking up the thread. ‘There’s the uniformity of that chorus line and the very particular kinds

of body types; there is definitely an audience for that but this was an opportunity to take it apart, deconstruct it and apply a kind of creative distortion.’ A quick search confirms that if you want to grace the Moulin Rouge stage, you’ll need to be a minimum of 5ft 9″ with a ‘slim graceful figure’ (women) or 6ft 1″ with a ‘well-proportioned muscled body’ (men). Instead, Bottoms celebrates the individuality of each performer.

‘The people on stage might be doing the same thing,’ Radeva adds, ‘but they’re all doing it a little bit differently from one another, rather than attempting to precisely replicate the same thing across all the bodies on stage.’ Size and shape aside, Radeva and Lownie are also keen to address the societal history of who performed the can-can. And while the show’s title could refer to the body parts on show when the dancing girls throw their skirts over their heads, there’s also something deeper at play.

‘The history of the can-can and cabaret is about taking pretty girls who are from families in need of money and creating a frame that gave them opportunities but very little agency,’ says Lownie. ‘And it’s about taking

what would be the “bottom” of society and giving agency to people. We’re interested in difference, not in creating a kind of uniform desirable iconography.’

With all their work, Radeva and Lownie like to leave room for audience reflection, in this case posing a question about how we appreciate and pay for art and the people who produce it. ‘We’ve had years of austerity and cuts on culture,’ says Radeva, ‘and yet we all know that it’s good for us; it’s food in another way. But as artists, a lot of the time we feel like we’re very much at the bottom of the chain. So we work very hard for our audience in Bottoms; it has a cheeky twist that I’m not going to reveal, but which deals directly with how art is valued. Our work doesn’t present answers, but it does make space for conversations around these themes.’

Bottoms, Tramway, Glasgow, Wednesday 14 & Thursday 15 May, as part of Dance International Glasgow.

eht a tre • the a ert •

COMEDY

MY COMEDY HERO

JACK DEE

Every time I’m asked who my comedy hero is, so many names tumble through my mind. There are a lot of American comedians that I especially admire, from Jerry Seinfeld to Rodney Dangerfield, from Richard Pryor to Joan Rivers. I often think that American is the mother-tongue of stand-up. The accent (in most of its manifestations anyway) seems especially suited to the rhythms and intonations of spoken comedy. It’s almost like an unfair advantage, one that on this side of the Atlantic is enjoyed to a great degree by all Irish and Scottish comics. I’ll name-drop only Billy Connolly and Dave Allen and let you come up with your own examples of brilliant comics who follow that rich tradition of mad, brogue-lilted storytelling. I’m way too ungenerous to plug the likes of Kevin Bridges and Jason Byrne in a piece which is, after all, supposed to be about me.

Do I even need to mention Tommy Cooper? Stupid jokes and an even stupider physical presence from a natural clown who had his audience laughing before he even walked on stage. Add to this the genius of Morecambe And Wise and I’d have to reflect on how formative these three particular comedians were for me. When I was a kid, anyone I encountered who wore a suit was serious, in charge, to be obeyed, perhaps even feared. The suit was a symbol of authority and power. So to see it subverted by all the daftest men on television had quite the effect on me. Eventually this informed my own comic style; adopting the suit, not just as a thing to wear, but as an integral part of my act, as a comic device, a way of amplifying the comedy in taking yourself too seriously. It is a deliberate choice and I’ll always be grateful to those comedians who showed me that.

 Jack Dee: Small World, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Sunday 11 May; Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, Thursday 15 May; see more of this column at list.co.uk

THEATRE MONUMENTAL

After F-Bomb Theatre’s Rachel O’Regan read Sara Sheridan’s Where Are the Women?, she set about righting some herstorical wrongs and came up with Monumental. ‘These women don’t have statues, so we’re going to create a spectacle for them in a way nobody can ignore,’ says O’Regan. Taking the form of a 90-minute walking tour (starting at noon and then 3pm), Edinburgh’s city centre will become the stage, giving five historical women the recognition they deserve. Hang on though . . . a walking tour? We’re famous for many things here in Scotland but a guaranteed good-weather day isn’t usually part of the playbill. ‘I’ve always been interested in theatre in non-traditional spaces,’ adds O’Regan. ‘For many, the stereotype of theatre is of a serious “sit down and be quiet” experience. It’s about breaking down this barrier and inviting audiences who perhaps haven’t actively participated in theatre before to do so. Doing it in public also feels radical in a way, and a little rain won’t stop us.’

Directed by Emily Ingram, Monumental (which plays a part in the Edinburgh 900 celebrations) is a collaboration between O’Regan and four other early-career female writers: Hannah Low, Jaïrus Obayomi, Kirin Saeed and Emery Schaffer. Each one has been paired with a figure from the past whose story resonates with their own experiences and complements their writing style.

The five heroines span several different time periods, so some artistic license has been used, with the writers being encouraged to interpret rather than teach in order to appeal to a modern audience. The women coming to life in a street scene near you are Saint Triduana, a 4th-century holy woman; Clara Marguerite Christian, the first black woman to study at Edinburgh University; Bessie Watson, Scotland’s youngest suffragette; Maggie Dickson, survivor of the hangman’s noose; and Elizabeth Wiskemann, a war correspondent who helped track the Nazi movement. ‘The stories explore womanhood and the fight for gender equality,’ notes O’Regan. ‘But there are also themes of poverty, reproductive rights, racial discrimination and ableism, all of which feel very relevant today.’ (Louise Holland)

 Starting from Greyfriars Bobby, Edinburgh, Saturday 10, 17 May.

future sound

Our column celebrating new music to watch continues with Edinburgh-based folk group Àirdan. With May heralding the arrival of their debut album and an appearance at Knockengorroch Festival, guitarist David Lennon raves to Fiona Shepherd about the influence of Edinburgh’s buzzing folk scene

Like many new bands in recent years, Edinburgh folk outfit Àirdan can trace their beginnings to the pandemic, particularly that period when restrictions loosened and small gatherings were permitted. All four members already knew each other from the city’s folk scene, playing pre-covid in pub sessions, ceilidh bands and folk clubs.

‘I come from a very traditional Irish music scene,’ says guitarist David Lennon, who arrived in the city from Belfast in 2017. ‘When I moved over to Scotland I couldn’t believe how much folk music there was in the city, especially at the university.’

Being robbed of that face-to-face community at a stroke in 2020 focused minds when it did become possible to meet up again. The newly minted Àirdan made up for lost time, appearing at Celtic Connections for their live debut before playing the likes of Eden Festival, Moniaive Folk Festival, and sundry club gigs in Edinburgh. ‘We were all so glad to be able to play music with our friends again,’ says Lennon. ‘I think that was the most important thing for us.’

Àirdan may have been forged in friendship but the line-up is eclectic: ‘Fiddler extraordinaire’ Paul Sinclair is a quarter Finnish and steeped in Scandi tradition; accordionist Coll Williamson plays a lot of world music; and Polish drummer Ewa Adamiec majors in West African percussion with a side order of sitar. Lennon is effusive in his enthusiasm for the scene that birthed their band. ‘Edinburgh is such a culturally rich city. People come in and out of your lives for a couple of weeks

with brilliant pieces of music and little influences that you pick up and then they leave again. That’s why I think Edinburgh is that melting pot of influences.’ With their background, Àirdan will fit in just fine at the self-styled ‘world ceilidh’ that is Galloway’s Knockengorroch Festival, taking their place alongside such diverse artists as Malian diva Rokia Koné, dub outfit African Head Charge, Malawian one-man band Gasper Nali, Arizona-born, Edinburgh-based multi-instrumentalist Cera Impala, and fellow Future Sound alumnus Kate Young. Meanwhile, debut album Cosmic also arrives in May, produced by broadcaster and Blazin’ Fiddles member Anna Massie, with a mix of original compositions and American, Scottish, Irish and Swedish tunes.

For Lennon, the album title alludes to ‘the idea of being part of something that is bigger than yourself. No egos are allowed in Àirdan. It’s a very open environment. We always listen, no matter what. If anyone brings a tune to the band, we always give it a stab and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but you have to meet up and have that goal. We’ve always tried to meet once a week and when we finish practise on a Wednesday, we’ll go off to the pub and host a session. Sometimes if it’s not too busy we’ll stick in a cheeky Àirdan track because it’s a wee bit different. We love playing music for people.’

Àirdan play the Langwhan (Longhouse) stage at Knockengorroch Festival on Thursday 22 May.

THE MARCHING BAND

You might say Emmanuel Courcol has taken the baton with his new film The Marching Band. After Bradley Cooper’s Maestro and the Cate Blanchettstarring Tár, the French writer-director is following suit with another film about a classical conductor. Just don’t point that out to him. ‘I don’t want to be part of a fashion trend,’ he sighs. Courcol’s film is a little different. It tells the story of Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe), an acclaimed conductor who has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant. It’s a journey that leads him to discover not only that he was adopted, but that he has a brother Jimmy (Pierre Lottin), a trombone player and factory worker.

While the siblings get acquainted after Jimmy becomes Thibaut’s donor, it’s clear that life dealt them very different hands. Courcol wanted to explore ‘the injustice of destiny,’ as he puts it. ‘Sometimes the family or the social class you’re born in makes your fate, so that’s the injustice of it. If you’re not born in a favourable condition, it’s very hard to catch up on what you’ve been missing.’

His research included watching Tár, which made him realise just how much he’d need from his actor. Lavernhe went into training, working with reallife conductor Antoine Dutaillis to perfect his baton-waving skills. ‘Benjamin said he wanted to be at least as good as Cate Blanchett. So when they met in Cannes, he told her that, and he was quite happy with the results.’ That result is a feelgood film which has already performed well at the French box office, drawing comparisons to British effort Brassed Off (which was set around a depressed industrial northern town, not unlike the choice of Lille here). Whatever the struggles, Courcol wanted his tune to be ultimately upbeat. ‘I do see a lot of warmth, hospitality and solidarity in the people living in that part of France.’ (James Mottram)

 In cinemas from Friday 16 May.

MUSIC CLYDE CHORUS

The city of Glasgow is celebrating its 850th birthday this year, and what better way to commemorate the occasion than with a three-day weekend jamboree of its storied musical history. A UNESCO City Of Music, Glasgow’s sonic achievements are well documented, and the eclectic Clyde Chorus line-up plays host to a collection of Scotland’s most exciting artists. Spread out across six locations, organisers have done an excellent job of showing off Glasgow’s impressive array of stages. One particularly unique host venue is The Savings Bank, a lavish Victorian remnant nestled between a baklava shop and a Chinese restaurant in the Southside. The Glasgow Mela and Glasgow Jazz Festival Showcase will take over the former financial hub on the Friday evening, with a rich line-up that includes Mama Terra, a four-person strong collective of local acid-jazz aficionados. Indie rockers Lucia & The Best Boys will shake the walls of the old bank the following afternoon, followed by a trad takeover led by Celtic Connections in the evening. Included in those Celtic celebrations is songstress Siobhan Miller who has been crowned Best Singer at the Scots Trad Music Awards not once, not twice (not even thrice), but four times.

Clyde Chorus-goers seeking a new-age Scottish sound should head to Box Hub on Friday evening, where Triple01s are set to give an energetic demonstration of a unique brand of Glaswegian drill. Performing at The Pearce Institute (aka The PI) the following afternoon is alt-pop hero Nina Nesbitt, though you may need to stand outside the venue with a wad of cash and a strong sense of optimism if you haven’t already sourced a ticket.

(Danny Munro)

 Various venues, Glasgow, Thursday 29–Saturday 31 May.

Triple01s

07 NOV Oran Mor, Glasgow 08 NOV La Belle Angele, Edinburgh

“We were like the

Retirement is not an option for 2-Tone legend Pauline Black. As a revealing documentary explores her life and she heads back out on the road with The Selecter, Black tells Neil Cooper that she’ll never be afraid of pastures new

Ginger Rogers and

I‘Fred Astaire of ska

was a bit of a force of nature when I was younger. Nobody was going to challenge me and nobody did.’ This is Pauline Black talking about her early life in Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story, Jane Mingay’s documentary which found inspiration from Black By Design, the dynamic Selecter vocalist’s 2011 autobiography. Mingay’s Scottish Screen co-produced film rather handily arrives as the band set out on a tour once again, with the sort of itinerary that would make younger bands feel exhausted.

‘I still enjoy performing with The Selecter,’ Black beams over Zoom, like a very friendly force of nature. ‘And we’ll do it while we still can. I don’t have plans for any kind of retirement, and this tour is an opportunity to celebrate our 45th anniversary of releasing Too Much Pressure. We’ve never really left those songs, even though we’ve always been recording and pushing on.’

In 1979, The Selecter burst out of the original 2-Tone scene that came straight outta Coventry with a multiracial fusion of frenetic ska and socially aware lyrics that captured the mood of Britain’s disaffected youth. Alongside The Specials and Madness, The Selecter took this new people’s music into the charts with singles such as ‘On My Radio’, ‘Three Minute Hero’ and ‘Missing Words’.

With the original line-up disbanding in 1982 after two albums, Black went on to release solo material as well as undertaking various stints as an actor, TV presenter and now writer. Reformations of The Selecter have sired another 15 albums, with the most recent, Human Algebra, appearing in 2023. Throughout it all, Black has remained on the frontline.

Like Black’s book, the film explores her roots as a mixedrace child adopted by an Essex family in an all-white environment. The smiles of the little girl in photographs seen in this film hid a toughness that saw Black escape as soon she could to become a student in Coventry, where she fell in with the right crowd. ‘I always had a very profound belief that this is what I think,’ says Black regarding her ‘force of nature’ comment. ‘“Tell me I’m wrong, and if you don’t, then fuck you.” That was where all that came from.’

Mingay’s film is dedicated to Black’s original co-vocalist, Arthur ‘Gaps’ Hendrickson, who died shortly after filming had been completed. ‘He was a lovely man and a unique performer and we all miss him very much,’ says Black. ‘What I like about the film is it gave him an opportunity to speak. We were like the Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire of ska.’

Forty-five years on from The Selecter’s first flush, Black is far from finished yet. ‘I never expected when I started out to have done all the things that I’ve done. I’m one of those people that someone says “do you want to come and do this?” And I’ll say “yeah, I’ll have a go.” That’s how it’s always been. I’ve had a great life and I don’t see any reason why I still can’t find things to do. If I was to have a hero, it would probably be somebody like Maya Angelou, who just went on and on doing what she did. She had this energy about her that was always looking forward. That’s what I take from her. If you put your energy out there, something will come and find it and say “let’s try this for a bit.”’

The Selecter, Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow, Thursday 22 May; La Belle Angele, Edinburgh, Saturday 24 May; Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story is available on Sky Arts and NOW TV.

COMINGSOON!

TThe Nook restaurant is Edinburgh’s best-kept secret

Situated within the National Galleries Scotland: Portrait, this bistro-style restaurant is a hidden gem

he National Galleries Scotland: Portrait has been feeding the imaginations of art lovers since the end of the 19th-century. Its red sandstone Victorian Gothic facade is one of the New Town’s most iconic and celebrated sights, and that distinctive eye for style extends to the spectacular interior. In February, following an extensive refurbishment of Café Portrait, a brand-new bistro-style restaurant opened within, The Nook.

Situated in the corner of Café Portrait, The Nook’s seasonal menu incorporates delicious, fresh, local produce, with dishes inspired by the magnificent surrounding artworks. Its Smokie Hash is a beautiful combination of smoked haddock, sweet potato hash, poached egg, wilted kale, spinach, grilled tomato and cava beurre blanc, all inspired by John Bellany’s famous painting Queen Street Café, which also informed the restaurant’s revamped interior.

Along with a range of hot drinks and wine list, the restaurant also has a selection of tempting cocktails, some of which have been created in honour of a few of the gallery’s most famous artworks. The Banana Bootleg pays homage to the Big Yin himself, Billy Connolly, while the Crown & Thistle honours Mary, Queen of Scots.

Meanwhile, The Nook is open now. This cosy, bookable table-service restaurant serves brunch and lunch seven days a week, and breakfast from 10am on Saturday and Sunday. It’s also available for private hire.

GOING OUT FURTHER AFIELD

Get yourself away from the central belt and out into various parts of Scotland where the cultural landscape is just as rich and varied. Among the upcoming highlights are a hugely popular documentarian-podcaster and a box that holds almighty secrets

ABERDEEN

MATTHEW BOURNE’S SWAN LAKE

We wrote about this last issue and we’ll write about it next time, and in between here’s a mention of the groundbreaking ballet heading north.

n His Majesty’s Theatre, Wednesday 28–Saturday 31 May.

AN EVENING WITH LOUIS THEROUX

Known for his investigative documentary work, Theroux has now made a big name for himself in the podcasting arena. A master of the self-deprecating but incisive long-form interview, this time he is on the end of some questions.

n Music Hall, Wednesday 14 May.

CUMNOCK

BOSWELL BOOK FESTIVAL

The world’s only festival dedicated to biography and memoir features separate programmes for grown-ups and kids, with appearances from the diverse likes of Rupert Everett, Juano Diaz, Helen Lederer, Wayne Sleep, Kate Leiper, and Dom Joly.

n Dumfries House, Friday 9–Sunday 11 May.

DUNDEE

KELI

Set to a live brass score by Lau’s Martin Green, this tells the story of a teenager who is a star musician but seems to struggle with everything else that life throws at her. Liberty Black plays the titular character.

n Dundee Rep, Thursday 22–Saturday 24 May.

GLENROTHES

PUDDLES PITY PARTY

Before he heads off to be Weird Al Yankovic’s support act across a vast US tour, the very tall man they call Puddles brings his amazing voice and equally impressive sad-clown make-up to Fife for a one-off Scottish gig.

n Rothes Halls, Wednesday 16 May.

INVERNESS

KING CREOSOTE

Any Storm In A Teacup has Fife icon Kenny Anderson heading off on the road again, this time delivering classics from his oeuvre, both young and old.

n Eden Court Theatre, Saturday 3 May.

PERTH

BENEDETTI PLAYS BRAHMS

While doing a grand job as Edinburgh International Festival boss, Nicola Benedetti is not forgetting her roots and picking up the violin whenever she can. Here, she joins the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for a performance of Brahms but also Mendelssohn. n Perth Concert Hall, Wednesday 14 May.

PITLOCHRY

WATER COLOUR

The St Andrews Playwriting 2024 Award winner by Glasgow-based Milly Sweeney is a tale of connection, mental health and opening yourself up to the world, directed by Sally Reid.

n Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Friday 9–Saturday 17 May.

STIRLING

SILVER CASKET

Asking the intriguing question ‘was this the box that sealed Mary, Queen Of Scots’ fate?’, this display considers how the past can still speak to us.

n Stirling Smith Art Gallery, Thursday 1 May–Sunday 31 August.

Nicola Benedetti (and bottom from left), Keli, Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, Silver Casket

INicolas Cage adds another magical, maniacal performance to his CV, as he loses his mind in the face of a menacing Australian beach gang. Emma Simmonds believes The Surfer to be an unsettling fever dream directed with real flair

t’s hard to think of a modern movie star who inspires the same cultish devotion as Nicolas Cage. He’s always had the crazy in him (think Moonstruck, Wild At Heart, Face/ Off, or even his notorious property portfolio) but Cage’s ability to pick interesting and unconventional projects and give them something truly extra has really accelerated recently. An often prolifically busy actor (he had six credits in 2023 alone), Cage has invigorated the likes of Longlegs, Dream Scenario, Renfield and Pig with his much-touted brand of ‘mega acting’.

Scorched by the heat of an Antipodean sun, The Surfer represents another fascinating filmic trip. The brainchild of Irish director Lorcan Finnegan, best known for 2019’s equally unnerving Vivarium, the film shadows an unnamed protagonist (Cage) who, after years of living in America, is trying to buy the Australian beachside property he grew up in, falling foul of some unsavoury characters along the way.

‘The Surfer’ (as he appears in the credits) begins proceedings by attempting to secure the funds needed to see off a rival bidder, before trying to bond with his unimpressed teenage son (Finn Little) by taking him surfing at the local beach. Unfortunately, the beach in question is fiercely guarded by a group dubbed the ‘Bay Boys’, led by Julian McMahon’s guru-like Scally. Described as a ‘bunch of fucking yuppies cosplaying at being surf gangsters’, this absurd gang’s threats send The Surfer into a doom spiral, during which he’s tormented by thoughts of his dead father and starts to lose his very sense of self.

The film is written by Irish screenwriter Thomas Martin, who was inspired by surf noir novels and John Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer’, alongside a violent incident he witnessed on a Sydney beach. Shot in Yallingup, Western Australia, The Surfer channels Ozploitation, the 70s and 80s boundary-breaking cinema epitomised by George Miller’s Mad Max series, with

which it shares a certain sun-baked mania. It brings an outsider’s eye to Aussie culture and explores toxic male behaviour by throwing someone perceived as an intruder into the mix. There’s also an intense, western-esque revenge feel to all this, recalling Deliverance or Point Break at its most insane.

Finnegan directs with real flair, playing on stereotypes (including the corrupt, one-of-the-boys copper, effectively played by Animal Kingdom’s Justin Rosniak) while subverting the perception of Australia as a chummy, stress-free idyll, with the sun blinding and anxiety levels off the scale. Although The Surfer reaches a crescendo of impressive delirium, Finnegan and Martin bring things back from the brink courtesy of a neat and well thoughtthrough concept and, despite some inevitable meandering as its protagonist struggles to keep hold of his sanity, the pair keep things admirably trim.

Still remembered for the sadism he showed on Ryan Murphy’s blackly comic surgical drama Nip/Tuck (and more recently popping up in Netflix’s murder-mystery comedy The Residence), McMahon is fittingly cast as Scally, bringing ample slippery charisma to the role. Australian cinema does obnoxious menace like no other, and the pack of bully boys that flank Scally (including Alexander Bertrand’s Pitbull and Rory O’Keeffe’s Blondie) are deliciously unpleasant.

While 2022’s The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent felt a bit too knowing at times, The Surfer fits Cage like a glove. It’s another one to add to his list of must-see, maniacal performances, illustrating an incomparable commitment to the craft. He starts the film in a fairly modest register, giving him somewhere to go. And boy does he go there, capturing the desperation and increasing disorientation of a man being driven totally and utterly out of his mind.

The Surfer is in cinemas from Friday 9 May.

film of the month

ART

ANNE COLLIER

In the 1960s, philosopher Marshall McLuhan came up with the idea of ‘hot and cool media’ to distinguish between culture which demands a quick, emotionally charged reaction and that which leaves space for slower, more considered responses. Anne Collier’s art is cool. Baltic, even. Much of her practice consists of large-format photographs showing objects saturated with pop-culture resonance (often the pop culture of a previous age), placed in expanses of white space. The items allude to the carnivalesque world of hot media, but the clinical framing obliges us to step back and think about how they might be intended to act on our thoughts and feelings.

The crux of Collier’s Modern Institute show is in the connections established between three figures of varying fame whose lives evoke the fate of women under 20th-century capitalism. There are photographs of LPs containing recordings of Sylvia Plath reading her poetry, and Marilyn Monroe singing songs and performing scenes from her films. There is also a pile of books by the radical feminist Valerie Solanas, best-known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968. Whereas Plath and Monroe succumbed to suicide, Solanas proposed a more radical solution to the pressures brought to bear by patriarchy, and in her 1967 SCUM Manifesto she called for the eradication of the male sex.

At a distance of more than half a century, and in the contemplative space invited by Collier’s bare staging, we’re invited to scrutinise how pop culture and misogyny, encoded in the objects by which the public ‘got to know’ these women, might have acted on and eroded their lives. Accompanying works, including several fixating on the human eye, suggest how we mistake reproduction for emotional reality. Not a thrilling show (and not intended to be) but a quietly engaging one. (Greg Thomas)

 The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Wednesday 21 May.

MUSIC ORA COGAN



Apart from the high of performing, the touring experience for small-to-mid-sized bands these days is all about small victories. Canadian gothic-country singer Ora Cogan broke her own spell for a moment to espouse the joys of more-thana-service-station Tebay, and there was surely an additional satisfying glow in knowing that her Glasgow show had been moved to a larger venue.

Cogan’s sound is a dark psychedelic folk melange but actually very soothing and mesmeric in execution by a full band, incorporating keys and violin, plus lashings of echo on her already alluring voice. Her music undulates from the ethereal to the earthy, even in the course of one song. Opening number ‘Lucile’ featured spacey synths, like an alien contact, alongside creaky fiddle. The group were joined by Matthew Broadley from support act Greet for the languorous Mazzy Star twang of ‘Cowgirl’ while ‘Holy Hells’ was a lysergic Californian canter in the vein of The Doors or Jefferson Airplane. New song ‘Division’ began with a stoner rock doomy clang but developed as a sultry incantation with the bass picking up pace, volume and urgency as the song progressed.

The needle swung back to folk rock on ‘Crickets’ with its dual fiddle and Pentangle vibes but the band’s jamming instincts were roused again on space raga ‘The North’ from new EP Bury Me. There was seemingly more to come beyond the rockabilly rumble of ‘Feel Life’ but Cogan and co were foiled by the pesky curfew. (Fiona Shepherd)

 Reviewed at Stereo, Glasgow.

art of the month

Story and Impressions, two group exhibitions running in parallel at Edinburgh Printmakers, both serve as a timely reminder of the importance of printmaking in the journey of major artists, says Neil Cooper

As the necessary historicisation of Scotland’s pre-digital but all-too-recent artistic past runs on apace, it is vital that collections are put on show to remind Year Zero types that the world didn’t begin with NFTs and AI, but with hard graft and artistic vision. So it goes with Story, which fills Edinburgh Printmakers’ downstairs gallery with what is effectively a greatest hits selection that joins the dots between the gallery’s assorted homes since it was founded in 1967 as The Printmakers’ Workshop. Seen together, the 40 works on show also become something of a rough guide to the high rollers of contemporary Scottish art since then.

Drawn from Edinburgh Printmakers’ permanent collection, the exhibition begins with the muscularity of work by John Bellany, Jock McFadyen, Ken Currie and Peter Howson, as well as pieces from Sam Ainsley and Carol Rhodes. This moves onwards to several generations of art stars, with contributions from the likes of David Shrigley, Rachel Maclean, Nathan Coley and Katy Dove. More recent incumbents such as Hanna Tuulikki are also present.

With brief introductory essays from former Edinburgh Printmakers’ directors shown alongside the images, viewers can learn about its evolution as a much-needed resource, being the UK’s first open-access printmaking studio. These words chart the organisation’s move from Victoria Street to Market Street, then Union Street, before setting up in its wonderfully translucent current home in Fountainbridge. The result of this lovingly tended potpourri is a powerful primer of Edinburgh Printmakers’ ethos and how it has changed from its grassroots beginnings. As the centre’s 60th anniversary looms, Story might also be seen as a curtain raiser or first draft of what will presumably be bigger things to come.

The upstairs gallery does something similar with the Jerwood Collection in Impressions, with 20 works by the likes of Tracey Emin, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Eduardo Paolozzi and other household names lined up. Having these two exhibitions running in tandem rubs both sides of the same artistic coin as it emphasises how printmaking has been embraced by major artists, both at the beginning of their careers and in their prime. In this way, Story and Impressions become a little microcosm of the more lauded shape of stuff to come. For now, both exhibitions show off an impressively rich tapestry of movers and shakers spanning decades of British art that sees it transformed from black and white to living colour.

Story: Selected Works From Edinburgh Printmakers’ Collection, and Impressions: Selected Works From Jerwood Collection are both on display at Edinburgh Printmakers until Sunday 29 June.

Different sides of the same artistic coin: works by Peter Howson and Bridget Riley

FILM

ALONG CAME LOVE

Although it premiered at Cannes in 2023, it’s taken two full years for tempestuous French drama Along Came Love to wash up on our shores.

The latest film from acclaimed director Katell Quillévéré (Heal The Living) delves into an apparent marriage of convenience, positing that love within wedlock can sometimes take a rather complicated form.

Set in the aftermath of World War II, the film follows Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier), who is driven from her small French community after getting pregnant by a German soldier. Years later we find her working as a waitress in a coastal town and caring for her son Daniel (played first by Hélios Karyo, then by Josse Capet and Paul Beaurepaire as he grows up); it’s there that Madeleine meets François (Vincent Lacoste), a wealthy archaeology student who ditches his hot-headed male lover to be with her. Later, when the couple take charge of an American GIs bar, they enter into what seems like a mutually beneficial but extremely taboo relationship with black serviceman Jimmy (Morgan Bailey).

With its themes of forbidden longing, the film takes inspiration from Douglas Sirk’s seminal 1950s melodramas, combining this with a racier, more modern approach to sex and sexuality. Yet, for all the romantic turmoil, it so often doesn’t feel well fleshed out, particularly in relation to the character of Daniel, who mopes about on the sidelines while his parents behave recklessly, and whose own psychological struggles remain strangely unexplored.

Along Came Love feels like a less distinctive offering than Quillévéré’s previous films such as Suzanne and her eye-catching 2010 debut Love Like Poison. Still, it’s classy, well-acted and engaging throughout, transcending the constraints of its period setting by refreshingly acknowledging that there’s no right way to approach your life.

(Emma Simmonds)

 In cinemas from Friday 30 May.

KIDS THE BADDIES

Following in the footsteps of The Smeds And The Smoos, The Snail And The Whale and The Gruffalo, The Baddies stomped into kids’ storytimes in 2022. This work added to the giant collection of over 200 books written by ultra-popular rhyming author Julia Donaldson who is now so beloved by families around the world that she’s been translated into over 100 languages. Donaldson’s story of a witch, a troll and a ghost has now been adapted for the stage by David Greig and dramaturg Jackie Crichton, and received its world premiere at Edinburgh’s Lyceum.

The book’s wee white mouse gets an upgrade from cameo to narrator, with a Mary Poppins-style prim Mama Mouse telling her rambunctious mice babies a scary bedtime story. Joe Stilgoe, who also wrote music for the Zog and Stick Man stage shows, delivers once again with fantastic, earwormy songs. He stays true to Donaldson’s love of chirpy cadences while riffing on some of the book’s most memorable lines, such as ‘there was pushing and shoving and pulling of hair, there was pinching and kicking and biting!’

Slapstick sequences and clowning from the three excellent baddies (Rachel Bird, Dyfrig Morris and James Stirling) keep smaller kids laughing while older ones can admire the fearless sangfroid of The Girl, a tiny pigtailed feminist icon played with tuneful poise by Yuki Sutton. This 3D, fleshed-out version is full of obnoxious, quarrelling characters and wily fun, with bonus cabaret cat and life lessons on personal hygiene and good manners chucked in. (Claire Sawers)

 King’s Theatre, Glasgow, Tuesday 6 & Wednesday 7 May; Gaiety Theatre, Ayr, Saturday 10 May; reviewed at Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh.

FILM

THE UNINVITED

A party in a Hollywood Hills home goes wrong when a confused elderly woman named Helen (Lois Smith) shows up insisting the house is hers. For host Sammy (Walton Goggins), an agent hoping to woo his biggest client for a new business venture, this is a frustrating inconvenience. For his wife Rose (Elizabeth Reaser), a middle-aged actress who isn’t ready to leave an industry that seems finished with her, Helen’s appearance appears portentous, standing in sharp contrast with the superficiality of showbusiness.

The Uninvited casts a critical eye on Hollywood’s infamous ageism and misogyny. While Rose is passed over for career opportunities because she’s ‘too old’, her male contemporaries jump from one success to another. Her young rival Delia (Eva De Dominici), on the other hand, complains of being reduced to a sexualised cliché and forced into a competitive role. Originally developed as a stage play,

The Uninvited never quite shakes its theatrical origins. The finished product is very competent, but it’s tempting to think it might have worked better on the stage after all, with its single setting, small cast of characters and dialogue-driven plot.

Nevertheless, it’s an affecting film. Smith is brilliant as the delirious but perceptive Helen. Her connection with Rose is at the heart of

The Uninvited, showing us a side of Rose that she’s seemingly had to stamp down in order to make it as both an actress and a housewife. As Rose now reckons with the reality of ageing and the inevitability of death, she must ask herself what’s truly important.

(Isy Santini)

 In cinemas from Friday 9 May.

COMEDY JONNY & THE BAPTISTS: THE HAPPINESS INDEX

Jonny & The Baptists have been the quiet success story of UK comedy for more than a decade, amassing swelling numbers of arts centre and comedy club patrons on a wave of absurdist songs, gentle one-liners and erudite political commentary. They’re the alternative comedian’s alternative comedians, hiding a structural finesse with digressions, esoterica and seemingly loose improv between Jonny Donahoe and Paddy Gervers.

Using David Cameron’s introduction of a ‘Happiness Index’ to the UK as a launchpad to discuss the decline of Gervers’ mental health, their show takes on an NHS being rapidly dismantled, lockdowns driving a wedge through communities, a revolving door of poisonous prime ministers, and a country turning its back on the socialist principles Donahoe and Gervers live by. While chummily delivered, every joke in The Happiness Index is embedded with a razor-sharp message about hyper-capitalism’s invasion of our every waking moment, systematically stripping away social services for the neurodivergent (or, as Donahoe puts it, the ‘neurodelightful’) or anyone unable to commit to the tyranny of work.

In case this refresher course on recent political chaos sounds like a soapboxshouting rabblerouser, there are more flights of fancy per minute than in the average stand-up hour, from barbed sideswipes at politicians to indulgences on monkey funerals and ‘Gangnam Style’. They’re deliriously off-piste and backed up by a sense that if the world wasn’t on fire these would be the tightly crafted gags that Donahoe and Gervers would much rather dedicate their talents to.

As this duo grow older, their ability to weave disparate elements that really shouldn’t be compatible has only got stronger, balancing satire, music and pathos before dovetailing into an emotional and humane climax. These are tumultuous times and, while Donahoe and Gervers don’t have the answers to fix it, their underlying message of hope through friendship is both heartwarming and hilarious. (Kevin Fullerton)

 Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Saturday 24 May; reviewed at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

FRIDAY 31 OCTOBER GLASGOW PAVILION THEATRE

SATURDAY 01 NOVEMBER EDINBURGH THE USHER HALL

MYTICKET.CO.UK | KIDZBOP.CO.UK

Concerts for a Summer’s Night

Words and music take flight with singer Héloïse Werner.

Mon 9 June

Rossie Byre, Perthshire

Tue 10 June

Strathpeffer Pavilion

Wed 11 June

Aberdeen Art Gallery

Fri 13 June

Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, Glasgow

Sat 14 June

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh

Mon 16 June

V&A Dundee

scottishensemble.co.uk

OTHER THINGS WORTH GOING OUT FOR

If you fancy getting out and about this month, there’s plenty culture to sample such as a joyous dance company, a compelling early performance from an Icelandic icon and a theatre work which invites audience members to draw

ART

JAMES MCDONALD

The 1970s Edinburgh College Of Art graduate exhibits his paintings which feature trompe l’oeil still lifes and portraiture presented in the manner of an Old Master.

 Compass Gallery, Glasgow, Saturday 3–Saturday 24 May.

COMEDY

AMY ANNETTE

After a fun run at the Edinburgh Fringe, Annette brings us more of her Thick Skin, replaying her memories of the early 2000s from questionable wardrobe choices to formative pop-culture moments.

 Tennent’s Laughter Lounge, Glasgow, Wednesday 7 May; Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, Sunday 11 May.

DANCE

THE QDANCE COMPANY

At Dance International Glasgow comes this Nigerian company who fill the stage with ten dancers and two musicians for a joyful performance which taps into the energetic chaos of Lagos.

 Tramway, Glasgow, Saturday 17 May.

FILM

FOLK FILM GATHERING

Among the films being screened at this festival which fuses new cinema and archive screenings are Palestine-set Fertile Memory, and The Juniper Tree, a 1990 Icelandic take on a Brothers Grimm tale featuring none other than Björk.

 Cameo Picturehouse and Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, Friday 2–Sunday 11 May.

KARATE KID: LEGENDS

Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio hit the big screens once more to entertain a new generation of martial arts devotees. Our duo help out a rising kung fu star in preparing for an epic showdown.

 In cinemas from Wednesday 28 May.

MUSIC

CHOIR! CHOIR! CHOIR!

Nobu Adilman and Daveed Goldman return with their fully interactive singing show that gets audiences out of their seats and into their element as they fully submit to the power of harmony.

 St Luke’s, Glasgow, Thursday 8 May.

RIVAL CONSOLES

With a new album looming in July, the acclaimed producer known to his mum as Ryan Lee West takes to venues across the country.

 SWG3, Glasgow, Friday 9 May.

ELKIE BROOKS

The Long Farewell Tour continues for the singer who has been in the music biz for a mere six decades. Blues, rock and jazz will all be on the menu as fans enjoy the live likes of ‘Pearl’s A Singer’ and ‘No More The Fool’ just one more time.

 Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, Tuesday 27 May; Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, Thursday 29 May.

THEATRE LIFE

Ahead of a nationwide tour, Maria MacDonell’s piece draws on her own experiences as an older woman working as an artist’s model. A nice quirk is that four audience members are offered art materials and invited to draw and doodle throughout should they wish.

 The Studio, Edinburgh, Wednesday 7 May.

Choir! Choir! Choir! (and bottom from left), Amy Annette, The QDance Company, a young Björk as part of Folk Film Gathering

• exhibitions, performances & workshops

• artist development & opportunities

• The Royal Dick pub

Fringe 2025 programme launching 7th May

staying in

REINHARD KLEIST

Given his career spanned six decades and multiple image departures, various constituents of the David Bowie fanbase will argue over his most successful period (even the Tin Machine lot). But hands down, his time in mid-70s Berlin spawned The Thin White Duke’s greatest creative endeavours. And it’s all here in Low: Bowie’s Berlin Years, Reinhard Kleist’s graphic novel follow-up to Starman which tracked the Ziggy era. The beautifully evocative pages capture his retreat from the addictive chaos of California, an experimentation with new sounds, and some general larks with a pal called Iggy. (Brian Donaldson)

 Published by SelfMadeHero on Thursday 22 May.

STYLING IT OUT

In her Funny Looks podcast, Amelia Bayler probes fellow comedians about serving looks as well as laughs on stage. She tells Aashna Sharma about setting her sights on top-to-toe red leather and why shorts are a big no-no

Growing up, Glasgow-based comic Amelia Bayler was fascinated by the trajectory of pop stars and their sartorial choices, from Madonna’s Confessions On A Dance Floor disco leotard to Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad rock-star rebrand. Entering the comedy world, she adapted the idea for herself, curating outfits and creating new thematic identities for each show. ‘I had an era where I would exclusively wear a tracksuit with piano keys down the side,’ she says. Paired with a yellow wig and yellow glasses, it was her way of signaling to the audience: there’s music involved, buckle up. ‘Then I changed it up and started wearing a pink suit. I had no idea why.’

Then Bayler realised she wasn’t the only comedian doing this sort of thing. ‘It started off as fun conversations in green rooms and WhatsApp chats,’ she recalls. ‘That’s when I realised loads of comedians have something to say on this topic. So I wanted to explore their thought process and what they’re thinking when putting together looks for the stage.’

That’s how her podcast Funny Looks came about: a niche, hilarious, heartfelt series where she chats with fellow comics about what they wear and why. Whether it’s deliberate visual cues, superstitions or simple comfort onstage, style in comedy isn’t an afterthought; the podcast makes it clear that it’s a big part of the craft. And there are rules, unsaid but not to be undervalued. ‘There’s this longrunning idea that you don’t wear shorts onstage, especially at weekend gigs. Lots of comics take that seriously.’

Over time, the podcast has transformed into a fascinating catalogue of individuals tracing their careers through clothes, complete with stage fashion rules, style confessions and the occasional fashion fantasy. Bayler herself has one eye on Eddie Murphy’s iconic all-red leather outfit from his 1983 stand-up film Delirious. ‘It perfectly captures the rock-star persona comedians often adopt. Though I’m not sure I’d pull it off at a bowling club in Glasgow.’

Beyond the laughs and the serving of looks, the podcast has become something deeper. ‘The most rewarding part has been the stories,’ Bayler says. ‘Hearing how people’s families influenced their style, or the weird little rituals they have before gigs . . . it’s just been a real laugh, but also so fulfilling.’ Clothes, it turns out, are just the podcast’s starting point. What follows is an intimate, funny and refreshingly honest peek behind the comedy curtain. And if Funny Looks had a uniform? ‘Pink!’ Bayler declares, without a single doubt.  Funny Looks is available on all the usual platforms.

LISTEN BACK

We’re slinging a few more records your way in our alphabet-themed series of album recommendations. So tune your ears to the letter H and dig in

The dream-pop sparkle of Smut’s How The Light Felt (2022) gestures towards one of the lesser-walked paths of 90s revivalism, with hooks and a wistful energy that crib lovingly from Swervedriver and Lush. We’re in throwback territory that never uses its reference points as a crutch, not least because tracks such as ‘After Silver Leaves’ and ‘Morningstar’ exhibit a craft equal to their antecedents. In another dimension (or perhaps simply another era), this would have been a chart-stormer.

Filed at the back of Smut’s rolodex of influences is Bark Psychosis’ debut Hex (1994), a maudlin post-rocker lingering in the liminal space between sleep and wakefulness. Each arrangement is a series of left turns, unfurling with a wild array of instrumental flourishes before retreating into sparse bass lines. Disaffection in the 90s was popularised by the roguishness of Pavement or Slint, but this southern English quartet carry a greater weight on their shoulders, every muttered vocal and catatonic time signature an exhalation of unwavering apathy. (Kevin Fullerton)

 Other H listens: Here Come The Warm Jets by Brian Eno (1974), Hats by The Blue Nile (1989), Have One On Me by Joanna Newsom (2010).

Part of me held onto the album for dear life “

Billy Nomates is back with a work that both embraces and rejects the crazed fairground of life and the music industry. She tells Kevin Fullerton about grief, high-concept visions, and tapping into the fantastical

The funfair is broken. We spent more than a century constructing its maze of carousels, rollercoasters and merry-go-rounds, rewarding its architects with a financial and cultural status beyond most people’s wildest dreams.

Then something went wrong. The owners of the fair continued coining it in while their attractions grew rickety, and their creators endured less autonomy and a smaller share of the profits. The people we relied on for escapism, art and insight became as estimable as carnival barkers.

Such is the theme of Billy Nomates’ new LP Metalhorse, her first with a full band, which dissects the idea of a rundown funfair to examine the music industry, her personal struggles and precarious economic models we’ve built for ourselves. It’s a dark philosophy reflective of a difficult period in Victoria ‘Tor’ Maries’ life; three months before entering Paco Loco recording studio in Seville, her father passed away with Parkinson’s and she herself was diagnosed with MS.

‘There was a part of me that just held onto the album for dear life as this positive thing,’ she says. ‘Recording an album is quite highpressure and stressful in its own way, but in comparison to what I’ve just been through, it was light relief. By going through with it, I was kind of honouring him. Even though there were parts of me that wanted to turn everything off and go “do you know what? I’m going to take a year off and walk into the mountains or something”. But the idea of not finishing the album just wasn’t an option.’

Though raw in its treatment of loss, its theme gives Metalhorse a shimmer, replete with references to a hall of mirrors and the endorphin-

tingling sound of a one-armed bandit. ‘It gives you a bit of poetic license to hide behind, and I always like making things a little more fantastical. It was also just a good analogy for so many aspects of my life. In the music industry, you’re constantly aware that bolts are loose on the ride and that the candy floss is rank. Parts of it you really enjoy and parts of it make you feel sick. It’s like being on the waltzers at the end of the world, just holding on and trying to find some light and some fun.’

It’s telling that much of Metalhorse feels indebted to the no-holdsbarred pop experimentalism of the 80s, from the guest appearance of Hugh Cornwell (a favourite of Tor’s father, who was buried with Stranglers memorabilia) to her soaring power-pop vocals. Was the funfair in a fitter state back then? ‘It was all up for grabs. If I’d been around in the 80s, I’d have been a shoo-in! You’d get fuckin’ normalass people being popstars, right? You could get someone with a balding head, gut in a suit and singing his heart out, and everyone would be like “that guy’s sexy”. Whereas now the incredible pressure to be a readymade rock star is always there. But normal people don’t write that stuff.’

And there’s the nub with Billy Nomates, an artist making accessible, confronting songs while negotiating the demented carnival of an industry in crisis. ‘It’s important to me to make something that I really like and that I feel represents my vision. If I do that, and I’m not in loads of debt, then that’s ok.’

Metalhorse is released by Invada Records on Friday 16 May; Billy Nomates plays Fringe By The Sea, North Berwick, Friday 8 August.

first writes

In this Q&A, we throw some questions about ‘firsts’ at debut authors. This month we feature Issa Quincy, author of Absence, whose elusive narrator is captivated by a poem that returns to him in mysterious ways across the years

What’s the first book you remember reading as a child? I remember my mother reading The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde over and over to me and my siblings as children. I also remember reading Aesop’s Fables and an old book of fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen. But the books that have always stuck with me are Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. I think I am always trying to recapture the feelings those books gave me.

What was the book you read that made you decide to be a writer? When I was 15 my mother gave me a copy of The Outsider by Albert Camus and ordered me to read it. I gave it to a friend after I finished it and I won’t ever forget how deeply it impacted us both. As well as this, the plays Ubu Roi and The Tempest. Two dreams.

What’s your favourite first line in a book? ‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new’ from Murphy by Samuel Beckett. It is perfectly weighted and encapsulates the novel’s tone.

Which debut publication had the most profound effect on you? A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce. More recently, it surely has to be Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. I read it at a time when I didn’t know I needed it. It gave me a lot. I adore it for that. It’s so plentiful.

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up on a writing day? I tend to go on a run then read through the morning. I can’t really begin writing until the evening. My mind doesn’t switch on until the afternoon.

What’s the first thing you do when you’ve stopped writing for the day? Try to sleep. Or go to the pub. If it’s not too late, my partner and I will watch something.

In a parallel universe where you’re the tyrant leader of a dystopian civilisation, what’s the first book you’d burn? Absence by me.

What’s the first piece of advice you’d offer to an aspiring novelist? Fail. Go on. Repeat ad nauseam.

Absence is published by Granta on Thursday 8 May.

GAMES THE MIDNIGHT WALK

As anyone who’s seen the famous Fast Show sketch knows, claymation is an intensely laborious process; it takes a huge amount of skill and patience to make even the shortest piece of animation, moulding bits of clay ‘just a tiny amount’ at a time. It should therefore be no surprise that there isn’t a huge array of games made using this process (Edinburgh-based developer and self-publisher Jack KingSpooner is one of the main practitioners, with his Scottish folk-inspired adventures Judero and Beeswing, and upcoming ‘digging adventure’ Mashina).

The Midnight Walk is from new studio Moonhood, comprising developers behind dark games Lost In Random and Fe. Players take on the role of The Burnt One, using their flame to navigate through a horrific world riddled with monsters, and they can do so in either traditional play or VR: Sony have put some of their weight behind the title and it’ll be one of a handful of May releases on PS VR2. Resembling the work of early Tim Burton, The Midnight Walk looks very atmospheric, with its impressive characters and objects created in clay and then scanned into the game. The stop-motion animation looks suitably creepy and it will probably forever haunt the dreams of anyone who dares to play it in VR. (Murray Robertson)

Out on PC, PS5 and PS VR2 on Thursday 8 May.

TV MAN LIKE MOBEEN

After five series spread across seven years, Man Like Mobeen is finally coming to an end. Guz Khan has previously threatened to call time on his rascally BBC Three sitcom, before serving up successive cliffhanger finales. This time though, it truly feels as if conflicted former drug dealer turned observant Muslim Mobeen (who can’t seem to do right for doing wrong), his sister Aqsa and none-too-bright sidekick Nate will discover their ultimate fate at the hands of menacing crime kingpin Uncle Khan.

Throughout the series’ acclaimed, BAFTA-nominated run, Khan and co-writer Andy Milligan have struck an impressive balance, couching throwaway gags and broad humour in topical social commentary, all the while creating characters you actually care about. Despite attracting powerhouse actors in the form of Art Malik and latterly Youssef Kerkour as main villains, alongside enigmatic stand-up Mark Silcox as the blank, belligerent Uncle Shady, the always wide-eyed and expressive Khan has been the chief draw, a charismatic natural talent who can convey roguish swagger and buffoonery alongside real depth of emotion, often in the same scene.

Evocative of its setting in Small Heath, Birmingham, and of Pakistani-Muslim culture experienced through a working-class scrap for survival, Man Like Mobeen has ambitiously tackled issues such as knife crime, Islamophobia and the rise of the far right, as well as food-bank poverty, the masculine mental-health crisis and the deadening impact of prison incarceration.

Bolstering onscreen diversity in UK sitcoms, the show has also pioneered greater representation behind the camera with a scheme that has since been adopted by other comedy productions. And while Khan’s outspoken support for Palestine may inhibit his nascent US career, it’s to be hoped that the exteacher now finally gets to make his long-mooted TV comedy set in a school. (Jay Richardson)

 Episodes available on BBC iPlayer from Thursday 1 May.

In this column, we ask a pod person about the ’casts that mean a lot to them. This month, it’s Marcel Lucont, the self-effacing and self-proclaimed ‘greatest UK-based French comedian around’ and host of Marcel Lucont’s Whine List which serves up complaints from across the globe, courtesy of his audience

my perfect podcast

Which podcast educates you? I find that most podcasts dishing out education offer me little I don’t already know, so here, I am going to say Affaires Sensibles with Fabrice Drouelle. It uncovers forgotten stories of history, many of which even I am unaware of. In a way it is like Marcel Lucont’s Whine List, in that it delves into otherwise unknown lives to discover new tales to be told.

Which podcast makes you laugh? There is a new podcast on the market you may know: Marcel Lucont’s Whine List. As each is recorded very much in the moment on stage, I don’t recollect every interaction so clearly, especially those towards the end of the show/bottle of wine. So what a joy to listen back to them and marvel at my own expertise and répartie.

Which podcast makes you sad or angry? It seems the obvious choice, but it has to be Transfert for this category. It is often important to remind myself that not everybody’s lives are as exquisite as mine; these are personal stories told directly to the listener without an interviewer. In a way this is Marcel Lucont’s Whine List without fermentation: gripe juice, if you will.

Tell us someone who currently doesn’t have a podcast but totally should. And why do you think their one would be amazing? The woman from the forthcoming New York recording of Marcel Lucont’s Whine List, whose worst day at work was having to stage a rescue attempt of a man who had become trapped under a table at an orgy she had organised. I would most certainly listen to a podcast of sex-party anecdotes.

Pitch us a new podcast idea in exactly 25 words Une Bouche Pleine, Une Bouche Qui Parle: interviews conducted with both the interviewer and interviewee receiving oral sex. Caters for listeners with short attention spans.

Marcel Lucont’s Whine List is available on all the usual platforms; see un soupçon more of this Q&A at list.co.uk

Book of the month

Originally published in 1968 and nominated for the first Booker Prize a year later, Paisley author Gordon M Williams’ cult classic portrayed a Scottish male psyche at war with itself. Eddie Harrison hails

Taking its title from a line in Robert Burns’ poem ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, From Scenes Like These is a bracingly stark 1950s-set novel located in a fictional west of Scotland town called Kilcaddie. Having died in 2017, Gordon M Williams is probably best remembered for The Siege Of Trencher’s Farm which became a controversial 1971 Sam Peckinpah film (Straw Dogs) set in Cornwall. But as James Robertson’s foreword points out, the fictitious names in From Scenes Like These all relate to Scotland: for Kilcaddie read Paisley, and for the new housing estate of Darroch read Ferguslie Park, where Williams’ father was a policeman.

At 15, protagonist Dunky Logan seems doomed to a directionless life on his family farm. An early school-leaver, he loves playing football with the same youthful passion with which he hates his father Duncan. Dunky harbours a farmer’s lack of sentiment about animals and has aspirations to romance which turn to frustration and anger when he’s spurned by local girl Elsa. The catalyst for Dunky’s collapse into misogyny and bigotry is the arrival of family housekeeper Mary O’Donnell, an Irish-Catholic keen to create a better life for her unborn child but disparaged for her physical disability by Dunky’s fellow farm workers who bitterly dismiss women as ‘easy meat’.

Landing somewhere between the writings of Lewis Grassic Gibbon and William McIlvanney, From Scenes Like These shines a light on jagged, ingrown aspects of Scottish life that are frequently disguised by nostalgia, such as hatred of women, religious intolerance and males who dream of a better life overseas but remain unfulfilled and angry. Williams evokes a longpast world of Jimmy Shand and Third Lanark, tackety boots, illicit ‘kneepadding’ behind bushes, and hoping for a ‘lumber’ after the pictures; the graphic description of the death throes of a horse in a knackers’ yard is as ‘chill as an Englishman’s heart’, to adopt one of Dunky’s phrases.

‘Sex booze and football’ rule the life of this frustrated west of Scotland male; the author himself moved in wider circles than Dunky would imagine (such as ghostwriting the autobiography of England’s World Cup captain Bobby Moore) but Williams describes Dunky’s displacement and resentment as a specifically negative Scottish trait. The last few paragraphs powerfully evoke how self-loathing and alienation feed into sectarian hatred that never goes away. From Scenes Like These unsparingly observes the social conditioning that led generations of Scottish men to seek personal escape through alcohol and hatred. Dunky’s dreams of Canada and Hollywood remain as far away as Chekhov’s Moscow in this bleak bildungsroman, capturing a steep descent from hope into despair.

From Scenes Like These is published by Picador on Thursday 29 May.

PODCASTS WRITING WRONGS

(Aston Institute For Forensic Linguistics)

While true-crime podcasts often fall prey to accusations of tasteless sensationalism, Tim Grant and Nicci MacLeod share the science of forensic linguistics in Writing Wrongs with an ethos that appears far from morbid hype. Grant and MacLeod (two experts often called to court) tell us how linguistics can be used to solve cold cases, but they also disclose that the practices used to collect statements can create allegations of complicity or even elicit a false confession.

The episodes are painstakingly researched and include guests who have an important role in the narrative surrounding true crime. In one episode, Kate Summerscale, prize-winning author of The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher, describes the case of the killer John Christie, the subject of her new book, who watched as Timothy Evans was wrongly convicted of murders Christie himself had committed. After learning about the case in a previous episode, we hear Summerscale’s compelling knowledge of the investigation, her role in presenting stories of real people, and the similarities between historic crimes and those committed in very recent history.

Although cases may still be unsolved or riddled with investigative issues, Writing Wrongs strikes a fantastic balance between storytelling and systematic assessment, remaining captivating without a whiff of sensationalism. Guilt-free true crime? Sign me up. (Rachel Morrell)

 Episodes are available on all the usual platforms.

ALBUMS THEO BLEAK

Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers (Polymoon) 

Theo Bleak is the alias of Dundee-based artist Katie Lynch, who bears a penchant for layered, ruminative songwriting that has helped her establish a place as one of Scotland’s most highly regarded young musicians. Lynch’s latest offering, the Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers EP, is a typically thoughtful and intricate ode to a complicated friendship.

The collection leads with ‘Peach Sky’, a haunting reflection on the time Lynch spent living on the Isle Of Skye. Gracefully rising from a strippedback whisper to a wailing crescendo, the opener helps to create an impressively unnerving atmosphere that lingers for the duration of this project. ‘Man, I could’ve been someone,’ cries Lynch on ‘Said Like A Poet’, a track littered with harsh, self-effacing lyricism. The brutal selfreflection continues on ‘Katie You’re A Liar’, as Lynch lambasts herself from the perspective of those who don’t like her, before the lavishly produced ‘Look Out The Window’ breathes a rare sense of optimism into proceedings. Any feeling of hope is swiftly quashed by the crushing finale, ‘You Don’t Want Me’, which, at 90 seconds in length, leaves the listener wishing it were more fleshed out.

Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers is not exactly jam-packed with unforgettable moments, though the listener is never too far from the next piece of inspired lyricism. Given the marked progress Lynch has made in the three short years since her debut, it feels as though the big time may not be too far around the corner for Theo Bleak. (Danny Munro)

 Released on Friday 16 May.

GAMES COMMANDOS: ORIGINS (Kalypso Media)

One of the earliest successful examples of the real-time strategy genre is 1998’s Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines which became the best-selling Spanish-made game of all time. Numerous sequels ensued, and now German studio Kalypso Media have taken control of the series with this prequel. In Commandos: Origins, players take control of an elite squad of WWII soldiers who must stealthily infiltrate enemy maps, secure objectives and escape. It employs an isometric viewpoint which can be rotated to reveal obstructions (and obscured enemies), and it’s essential to use the environment to keep your soldiers hidden from view at all times. Specialists can lure enemies using various gadgets such as a noisy radio or a whistle, before taking them down quietly and dealing with their foe out of sight.

Just like the earlier games, Origins is very hard but not unfair. While it’s possible to see an enemy’s vision cone (albeit only one at a time), most maps position guards that oversee one another, and some guards will resolutely not leave their posts. Fortunately, copious trial and error is encouraged and players are urged to regularly save their progress before attempting anything tricky.

It’s just a shame that the quick-load function isn’t instantaneous, taking a few seconds and requiring a further click of the mouse/controller to get back into the action. That might not sound like a long time but it happens a lot. The game’s environments are nicely varied and full of detail, and the audio is wonderfully atmospheric. Origins is a really tense, challenging game and a great revival of this much-loved series. (Murray Robertson)

 Out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

TV JUST ACT NORMAL (BBC Three)

Three siblings, living on an estate, have been abandoned by their mother; at least that’s what we’re led to believe at the start of this genre-bending sixparter from Janice Okoh who has adapted her own stage play Three Birds And yet we also know from the outset that even within this sorrowful premise there is something stranger going on. Big sister Tiana has just brought home a live chicken for an ‘experiment’, middle brother Tionne is in a catatonic state, while youngest sister Tanika is practising her grooves and affirmations before school. So far it’s offbeat comedy with the hint of an edge. But the push-pull between sitcom larks, surrealism and menace is about to get a whole lot faster and fiercer.

It’s no surprise that Okoh’s background is in theatre as there is a stagelike feel to the dialogue that asks you to sometimes suspend your disbelief through moments of blunt character development or exposition. But what is lost in naturalism is gained in Okoh’s feel for cranking up the drama, whipping away the rugs, and offering tender and bizarre surprises just when you think you have a grasp of the show’s plot and tone.

Each of the children is grappling for their own way to cope with the tragedy that has befallen them, from Tionne believing a chicken is possessed with the spirit of his mother, to Tanika’s blossoming para-siblingship with local drug dealer Dr Feelgood, to Tiana stepping up into maternal responsibility. And yet the tone shifts in a split-second from social commentary to tomfoolery, such as when Dr Feelgood’s mother turfs him out for not being a successful enough dealer. All of this is underpinned by director Nathaniel Martello-White’s unsettling camera angles and composer Benjamin Kwasi Burrell’s enigmatic score. The ensemble cast are strong but it’s Okoh’s writing, surefooted in its boldness and ambition, that is the true star. (Lucy Ribchester)

Episodes available on BBC iPlayer.

ALBUM OF THE

MONTH

BOla Onabulé’s soulful vocals and Nicolas Meier’s inventive guitar playing combine to create a masterful sonic brew. In his rave review, Rob Adams finds an album studded with marvellous contrasts

ritish-Nigerian vocalist and composer Ola Onabulé has spent the post-covid years flying between continents and collaborating with some of the world’s finest jazz orchestras. During lockdown, however, he and Swiss guitarist Nicolas Meier worked on ideas that have been crafted into this superb collection of songs that are bursting with musical invention. Stylistically varied and incorporating influences ranging across Brazilian rhythms, Turkish scales and African folklore, the writing calls for serious jazz skills while providing plenty of melodic hooks. Although Meier mostly concentrates on his unfailingly elegant, startlingly fluent acoustic playing, once or twice we hear why the great Jeff Beck, no less, invited him into his band to tour as an electric foil.

The album opens quietly with the almost hymn-like hush of ‘Rio De Janeiro’, Onabulé at his most poetic before breaking into an uptempo shuffle as intricate vocal lines, steely guitar picking, crisp drumming and a joyful chorus of multi-tracked, extraordinarily pliable voices merge. ‘Aegean Blue’ is wonderfully moody, with bowed bass and detailed percussion, while the title track itself ventures into Arabic modes and singing suggestive of both the qawwali tradition and vocal jazz artistry.

One of Onabulé’s great strengths is his ability to create contrasts. ‘Centauri’ has something of Jack Bruce’s quiet delivery and stacked choirboy vocals before ‘Sorry In The Morning’s swaggering riff sticks its foot up on the monitor with Onabulé pointing a reproachful finger (this is a guess) at those suffering from voter’s remorse.

As well as from track to track, these contrasts can occur within the songs and arrangements themselves. ‘Funmilayo’ starts off as an affectingly simple African street song in celebration of Fela Kuti’s mother (a formidable character whose harrowing demise might explain much of her boy’s own defiance), before morphing into a beautifully sophisticated vehicle for Onabulé’s soulful vocal expression and light-touch keyboards alongside Meier’s brilliant, quicksilver improvising.

Similarly, while ‘Eternally Yours’ begins as a light, joyfully waltzing, sweetly melodic love song, it soon develops into something much deeper and more powerful. Through these imaginatively wrought arrangements, Onabulé and Meier are supported instrumentally by Chris Nickolls’ consistently swinging, directional presence on drums, Will Fry’s always judicious percussion, and some truly marvellous double-bass playing from Jakub Cywinski, who contributes a fine solo on the nimbly executed ‘Future Past’.

In one final contrast, Onabulé swaps his carefully considered lyricism for unbridled vocalese on the wordless ‘Scoops’, where both his own and Meier’s inventiveness reaches a creative peak, the latter signing off with a piece of real ‘don’t try this at home’ electric-guitar shredding. Proof Of Life is a hugely enjoyable listen and a masterly musical tour de force.

Proof Of Life is released by Rugged Ram on Friday 30 May.

PODCASTS

THE SCREEN ROT PODCAST

Hawley & Jake Farrell)

A podcast about the latest TikTok talking point is hardly revolutionary; there’s a seemingly endless list of comedians itching to deconstruct and intellectualise the bizarre world of social media. What makes Jacob Hawley and Jake Farrell’s Screen Rot Podcast notable is not just their cracking chemistry but a particularly lewd brand of humour. Everyone knows one friend whose chief contribution to social gatherings is an unceasing assault of dirty jokes. Sure, the first couple garner some genuine laughs, but soon enough the punchlines grow stale.

It’s a shame that Hawley and Farrell’s rude humour is so overwrought, drowning out much of their interesting and often astute commentary on internet culture. A case in point is episode 81 which had much to say about TikTok ‘entrepreneur’ Cam Easty, whose content, they argue, targets the vulnerabilities of a generation of young men confounded by a dire job market. Other episodes have tackled toxic masculinity, unrealistic body standards for men and the unreality of social media.

This podcast’s audience is mostly male and topics discussed relate to the content cluttering the social media feeds of men in their late teens and twenties. Hawley and Farrell are perfectly placed to offer an alternative to the rampant misogyny of Andrew Tate and his ilk, and it’s clear that their podcast attempts to do just that. But this admirable goal is overshadowed by material that frequently verges on vulgarity. Curb the crudeness, keep the comedy and focus on the topic at hand. (Eve Connor)

 Episodes available on all the usual platforms.

ALBUMS

EZRA FURMAN

Goodbye Small Head (Bella Union) 

Ezra Furman’s tenth studio album is a product of a torrid time marked by illness but captured, as ever, with wit, character and intoxicated energy. Furman, like many of her peers, knows what it is to be saved by rock’n’roll. Goodbye Small Head (named after a Sleater-Kinney lyric) features a dozen songs about losing it in various ways, all marshalled into exuberant rag-tag pop music with appropriate orchestral embellishments. This is her Ramones-working-with-Phil-Spector moment, sleek and elegant in places but with dirt under its manicured fingernails.

Furman is a vocalist teetering on the brink, her familiar adenoidal tone ramped up with a desperate rasp on ‘Sudden Storm’. The apoplectic rock’n’roller is out in force with bonus punk-rock violin on ‘Jump Out’, a stop-the-world song expressed as the need to escape from a moving vehicle. Still fraying at the edges, at least she can muster some whoops over the propulsive rhythm of ‘You Mustn’t Show Weakness’.

Life is a rollercoaster, as a more anodyne pop star once sang, and Furman rides the ups and downs with white knuckles but also some louche class. ‘Submission’ emits stealthy, prowling lo-fi Bowie vibes, with a constant pulse running through the track like a beeping medical machine. The fragile ‘Veil Song’ is accompanied by brushed drums and a quavery theremin-like pitch, while ‘You Hurt Me, I Hate You’ is a sweet, twinkling dump of bile referencing ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ and recalling ‘love like the moon landing; probably fake.’

Goodbye Small Head closes on a high with a cover of ‘I Need The Angel’ by Boston musician Alex Walton. This raw missive with fuzz guitar feedback and chiming percussion is a rip-roaring E Street Band dust-up delivered raucous indie style with shades of Johnny Thunders. Ezra Furman may be on the precipice but she’s got her fist in the air.

(Fiona Shepherd)

 Released on Friday 16 May.

TV SUSPECT

For those who lived through the events of July 2005, Suspect might be dragging them back to a time most would rather forget. Londoners, in particular, had barely got into their stride in celebrating the news that their city would host the 2012 Olympics when three tube trains and a bus were blown apart through a co-ordinated terror attack. Two weeks later, an exact replica of those atrocities was attempted yet mercifully failed. But one day later, an innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, was repeatedly shot in the head by security forces while minding his own business on a train at Stockwell underground. They wrongfully believed him to be set upon carrying out another attack.

The events that led to this murder were a trail of errors (by the Metropolitan Police) and misfortune (de Menezes happened to be living in the same block as one of the failed bombers, and was falsely identified and subsequently followed on the morning of his death), with Jean Charles’ family initially grief-stricken and then galvanised into seeking justice in the face of police intransigence and media slurs.

An all-star cast bring this appalling story to terrifying life with Russell Tovey as Brian Paddick, the high-ranking copper who paid with his job for breaking ranks with the flawed official line; Conleth Hill as Met boss Ian Blair whose handling of events could charitably be dubbed ‘ropy’; and Emily Mortimer as Cressida Dick who oversaw the de Menezes pursuit. Even those perfectly au fait with this bloody period of history will feel a rush of anxious adrenaline as the countdown to the failed bombings reaches its conclusion. (Brian Donaldson)

 Episodes available now.

ALBUMS ANDY BELL

Ten Crowns (Crown Recordings)

No, ‘Breaking Thru The Interstellar’ is not another Katy Perry roasting (although give the internet enough time and it could be). Instead, it’s the majestic opening track on Andy Bell’s first album in 15 years. Fans can relax; the Erasure frontman is currently working with Vince Clarke again on a new album but drops this solo offering in the meantime. Bell collaborates here with Dave Audé, who produced his two previous number ones on the US dance chart, and they bring us the euphoric dancefloor thumper ‘Dance For Mercy’, 60-year-old Bell’s response to numerous near misses with danger and bad health, including living with HIV. You can hear his defiant, upbeat ‘not today Satan’ vibes as he vows to dance, take trips and find new love, with nothing to lose except his dignity.

There are plenty of biblical references here, besides the title Ten Crowns which nods to the album’s ten tracks but also the Book Of Revelation. Bell says that a big influence was recording in Audé’s hometown of Nashville, where there’s a church on every corner. So expect a blend of heartfelt gospel jubilation and musical-theatre grandiosity on tracks such as ‘Thank You’ and ‘Godspell’. In ‘Dawn Of Heaven’s Gate’, the solemn chime of church organ gives way to tough pop beats and Spanish language lyrics about dissipating the hate, with Bell wrestling with homophobic demons as well as personal ones. ‘Godspell’ and ‘Put Your Empathy On Ice’ come across like Jesus Christ Superstar preaching at the disco about false prophets and fakery, with added cosmic drama.

‘Lies So Deep’, his track with America’s Got Talent star Sarah Potenza, is a standout: her powerhouse vocal gives flashbacks to the rich Alison Moyet sound in Yazoo, crossed with the chutzpah of Disney’s Ursula and operatic flair of Anohni. Blondie legend Debbie Harry puts in a surly, haughty appearance too, on the bittersweet ‘Heart’s A Liar’; Bell throws camp shade at his ultimate pop heroine, calling her ‘a sorry state’ and singing ‘I’m so broken and you’re so beautiful. But your love is cruel.’ There are a couple of less than interstellar tracks but hearing the best songs from Ten Crowns alongside classic Erasure tunes on the upcoming live tour will doubtless be an utterly heavenly combo. (Claire Sawers)

 Released on Friday 2 May.

Simple Favour

OTHER THINGS WORTH STAYING IN FOR

A packed month of things to do indoors or consume on your travels include a trilogy of remastered classic albums, a game featuring four iconic (albeit mutant) reptiles, and Netflix’s latest shocking documentary series about British serial killers

ALBUMS

MEI SEMONES

Endorsed by Red Hot Chili Pepper Flea as someone whose music has him ‘floating around my hotel room’, Semones delivers a debut album, Animaru, which traverses bossa, math rock, jazz and samba, and sung in both English and Japanese. n Bayonet Records, Friday 2 May.

EMMA JANE LLOYD

Dubbed a ‘mesmerising musical metamorphosis’, Mue is the debut collection from solo violinist Lloyd. It features short caprices dedicated to her parents, and an Indian raga-infused track which was recorded live at Summerhall.

n TNW Music, Friday 16 May.

4AD 30TH ANNIVERSARY

Following on from their Record Store Day exclusives, 4AD unleash a trilogy of remastered classics plucked from a fine back catalogue: Pale Saints’ Slow Buildings, Belly’s King and Lisa Germano’s Geek The Girl n 4AD, Friday 23 May.

BOOKS

NATALIA GINZBURG

The City And The House is the latest novel from the author of All Our Yesterdays and The Little Virtues, a family story set in both Italy and America which throbs with humanity, passion and perception.

n Daunt Books, Thursday 8 May.

GAMES

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES:

TACTICAL TAKEDOWN

Everyone’s favourite quartet of furtive, genetically altered turtles of a certain age stratum are back in video game form, tackling deadly new threats while also facing the approach of adulthood.

n Strange Scaffold, Thursday 22 May.

PODCASTS

ALTERNATE REALITIES

Writer Zach Mack thinks his dad has gone all in on conspiracy theories, while pops believes Zach is brainwashed. This pod investigates how they tried to pull each other out of a very different mindset

n Episodes available at npr.org

TV ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOUR

Blake Lively, Anna Kendrick and Allison Janney star in this Paul Feig sequel to A Simple Favour in which all hell breaks loose when a dead body shows up at an extravagant wedding on the island of Capri.

n Prime Video, Thursday 1 May.

FRED & ROSE WEST:

A BRITISH HORROR STORY

Not for the faint of heart this, as Netflix haunts us once again with a three-part depiction of the husband-andwife serial killing team who looked both inside and outside the family for their female victims.

n Netflix, Wednesday 14 May.

MURDERBOT

Based on the sci-fi books by Martha Wells, this action comedy stars Alexander Skarsgård as a rogue security robot who secretly gains free will and concludes that he doesn’t really fancy protecting ‘idiot’ humans anymore.

n Apple TV+, Friday 16 May.

Another

(and bottom from left), Pale Saints as part of 4AD’s 30th anniversary, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, Natalia Ginzburg

back

Who would you like to see playing you in the movie about your life? Who Who do you think the casting people would choose? Simply, me. I’d be fuming if it was someone else. I understand that that’s not how biopics work, but as an actor, getting another actor to play me would really piss me off. So it has to be me. Failing that, I think if they’re like, absolutely no way, we’re going to give you loads of money but you can’t play yourself, then I would play my dad and I would be played by Lara Ricote.

joke? One of them is: ‘you won last year,

What’s the punchline to your favourite One of them is: ‘you won last year, you’re not allowed.’ And the other one is: ‘that’s not a lion, it’s a giraffe.’

an animal, what would it be?

a big one, so no one eats me. So an eagle.

If you were to return in a future life as an animal, what would it be? Well, this depends, because I need to know how much energy it takes for birds to flap their wings. Because everyone’s like ‘I want to fly’, but is flying the equivalent of running? Because if it is and I don’t want to run as a human, I definitely wouldn’t want to fly as a bird. But if flying is as easy as walking, then I do want to be a bird. But a big one, so no one eats me. So an eagle.

If you were playing in an escape

If you were playing in an escape room, name someone (well-known or otherwise) you’d recruit to help you get out? Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote

were on the right path, but I didn’t want to help already thought I was another comedian; they didn’t

When was the last time you were mistaken for someone else and what were the circumstances? This happened very recently. The thing is, I think that they were on the right path, but I didn’t want to help because they’d already got it so wrong. They thought I was another comedian; they didn’t going

THE Q& A WITH KIELL SMITH-BYNOE

Ghosts star and Great British Sewing Bee host Kiell-Smith Bynoe is heading out on the road with his improv comedy pals and special guests for Kool Story Bro, an evening of unscripted sketch action (and if you miss it this time around, don’t worry folks, it’ll be back at the Edinburgh Fringe in August). In our hardcore and hard-hitting Q&A, he reveals his desire to (maybe) fly like an eagle, opens up on the vicious world of egg and spoon, and why being vomited on can’t ruin a day out for him

say the name but they said I’d been on Strictly and I said no. And then they said ‘you hosted the MOBOs’ and I said no. Now this sometimes happens because people confuse black people with other black people on TV. But the guy that did this was black. So what’s his excuse?

What’s the best cover version ever?

Destiny Child’s cover of ‘Amazing Grace’.

Whose speaking voice soothes your ears?

William Andrews. He’s a comedian, but he’s kind of stopped doing comedy though he’s still in some programmes. And he has this show on Instagram called A Shed Show. He’s building a shed in his garden and he narrates it and I think he’s got the greatest voice in the world. I would actually even put him above Morgan Freeman.

Tell us something you wish you had discovered sooner in life? You don’t know anything until you’re 27.

Describe your perfect Saturday evening? Do a show at Soho Theatre, then dinner afterwards in Chinatown with three random members of the audience also coming to dinner.

If you were a ghost, who would you haunt? I think my best friend Jax because we lived together for almost three years and I don’t understand how he functions without me. He’s not a normal person, so I just really want to see how he’s able to live his life.

If you could relive any day of your life, which one would it be? When I was younger, maybe about seven or eight, I went on a summer trip, like a play scheme trip, to Hastings. Despite getting vomited on by the boy that sat next to me on the coach, it was the best day. Also, I wasn’t paying council tax then, so that’s definitely a good day.

What’s your earliest recollection of winning something? Egg and spoon race. I used to win the egg and spoon race every year at school. And then in year five, a new boy joined and he was also in my house (our school had four houses). By this point everyone knew the egg and spoon race was kind of my thing, and then all of a sudden he was winning the egg and spoon race. So I intervened. And we were both disqualified.

Did you have a nickname at school that you were ok with? And can you tell us a nickname you hated? I didn’t really have a nickname at school because I was an MC, so everyone just called me by my MC name, which was Klayze. There are about three people in my life that call me Ki and I’m ok with it; but if anyone outside of them did it, I’d call the police.

If you were to start a tribute act to a band or singer, who would it be in tribute to and what would it be called? I’d like it to be a rap tribute act but, like, a good one. And it would be called That Pack. That’s the best I can think of in these current circumstances.

When were you most recently astonished by something? I went on Sunday Brunch the other day and there was a guy, Marcin, who plays guitar. But as well as playing the guitar strings, he also plays the actual guitar like a percussion instrument. So he’s like a one-man band, but just with one instrument. My mouth was wide open and I was honestly astonished. I’d never seen anything like it.

What’s a skill you’d love to learn but never got round to? My instinct is to say juggling. But how useful is that? I’ve learnt a bit of magic, and I’d like to learn more. Actually, fixing the printer. But I guess now nobody uses the printer, so it’s a bit late.

What tune do you find it impossible not to get up and dance to, whether in public or private? ‘Taste’ by Tyga.

Which famous person would be your ideal holiday companion? I need someone that’s completely chill because on holiday I’m chilling; I don’t want anyone making an itinerary or anything. I’m going to choose Jane Fonda.

As an adult, what has a child said to you that made a powerful impact? ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Tell us one thing about yourself that would surprise people? I think I know all the words to A Goofy Movie

When did you last cry? I think in 2018, at my dad’s funeral. That was a long time ago. I’m due one.

What’s the most hi-tech item in your home? I don’t think I have many hi-tech items in my house. The doorbell?

By decree of your local council, you’ve been ordered to destroy one room in your house and all of its contents. Which room do you choose? It has to be the spare room because all that’s in there is a bed and a TV that hasn’t been on since 2010. But then there are photo albums in there. Let me get the photo albums out and then you can have the spare room, Newham Council.

If you were selected as the next 007, where would you pick as your first luxury destination for espionage? Australia.

Kiell Smith-Bynoe & Friends: Kool Story Bro, Glee Club, Glasgow, Wednesday 7 May.

hot shots

1 2 3

Depressingly, ‘timeless’ is one word to describe Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. His ‘drama of power and persecution’ is set around the 17th-century Salem witch trials but resonates whenever it’s performed. Scottish Ballet bring us a stirring rendition (Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 1–3 May; Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 22–24 May).

Glasgow hosts the UK premiere of Brazilian sculptor Solange Pessoa’s new solo work (Tramway, 10 May–22 September) created from ceramics, bronze and Hebridean fleece, and produced between Glasgow and Minas Gerais in her homeland. The exhibition references landscapes, archaeology and narratives from both nations.

There’s a strong case to be made that Mr Swallow is one of the 21st century’s finest character creations. Nick Mohammed’s irritating, pedantic and awkward northern renaissance man is back pestering audiences with Show Pony (Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 25 May), an act of vengeance for not having yet secured his own sitcom.

PICTURE: GAVIN SMART