The List September 2026

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SEPTEMBER 2026

ISSUE 804 LIST.CO.UK FREE

Juliette Binoche Scottish Gaming Maisie Adam Bad Apples The Singer Dexys Midnight Runners Barossa Jane Austen Company Chordelia Both Hands

Art Special Design. Disability.

Dinos. Dolls.

art | books | comedy | dance | drink | eat | film | games | kids | music | podcasts | shop | theatre | travel | tv

2 THE LIST September 2026

Mouthpiece Our hardy columnist embraces his inner Austen

The Insider Going through all the emotions

FEATURES Dinos Chapman Hopping mad for Sonica

In the pink with the world’s most famous doll

EAT & DRINK Craft butchers

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PICTURE: MATT CROCKETT

Barbie

contents

FRONT

20

34

Cleaving open the cost vs quality debate

Celentano’s

37

Acclaimed Italian’s second coming

TRAVEL & SHOP On Your Doorstep

43

Public art across the central belt

East End Press

45

Pretty with paper

GOING OUT Vic’s Picks

51

Gigs galore from Sigur Rós and more

My Comedy Hero

56

Mark Thomas hails a trailblazer

Through The Shortbread Tin

68

Defining a nation

STAYING IN First Writes

78

Drool author Charlie Fox takes our Q&A

Corto.Alto

88

Liam Shortall gets romantic

BACK Hot Shots

94

MAISIE ADAM ON JOHN COOPER CLARKE’S SOOTHING VOICE

Deep seas, Roma culture and crime capers

STUDENT GUIDE Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee It’s not all about the learning

” 92 His tone is a tonic for the soul

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COVER PICTURE: COLECTIVO MULTIPOLAR

September 2026 THE LIST 3

welcome

The last embers of the Edinburgh Festival are still fizzling out but frankly there’s no stopping us given we pulled together this September magazine while the Fringe and International Festivals were still raging. I’d like to pay tribute here to everyone who helped drag this monthly issue into life when many of us were dead on our feet. And once you’ve been through this mag you can’t say we’ve skimped on the coverage or cut too many corners (some were definitely mildly trimmed but hopefully none of that comes across in the publication you have in your hand right now).

Our Student Guide was months in the making and we hope it’s a good and useful read for freshers and anyone else still working their way through university and college life. Given our heightened presence in Dundee now, we felt it was right to include this great place (as a Perth boy, I can’t tell you how troubling it was to write those words and I may now be banished from The Fair City) alongside our well-established Glasgow and Edinburgh sections (and sorry Stirling, it was good while it lasted).

Students love visual art and video games, right? Not all of them, probably, but some, surely? Our art special is for everyone though as we look at the cult of Barbie, profile one half of the notorious Chapman brothers ahead of Dinos’ appearance at Sonica, and explore the ongoing Jupiter+ campaign to take art into cities and towns that are arguably less catered for culturally. And we look at the current state of Scottish gaming ahead of some pretty huge releases later this year.

We’ve gone reviews crazy over the past month but critical analysis doesn’t stop on 31st August so in this magazine we pass judgment on new albums by Dexys Midnight Runners, Phoebe Bridgers and Corto.Alto while the comedy keeps on rolling with pieces on touring shows by Stuart Goldsmith and Kanan Gill. It’s September and we’re still standing, and all set for a brilliant autumn of arts and culture. You should probably join us in that.

Brian Donaldson EDITOR

CONTRIBUTORS PUBLISHING CEO Sheri Friers Editor Brian Donaldson Art Director Seonaid Rafferty Subeditor Paul McLean Eat & Drink Editor Jo Laidlaw Travel & Shop Editor Isy Santini Advertorial Designer Bradley Southam Writers Ailsa Sheldon, Brian Donaldson, Carol Main, Claire Sawers, Craig McLean, Danny Munro, David Kirkwood, Eddie Harrison, Ellie Carr, Eve Johnston, Fiona Shepherd, Gary Sullivan, Greg Thomas, Isy Santini, James Mottram, Jay Richardson, Jay Thundercliffe, Jennifer McLaren, Jo Laidlaw, Katherine McLaughlin, Kelly Apter, Kevin Fullerton, Lauren McKay, Lucy Ribchester, Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, Megan Merino, Murray Robertson, Neil Cooper, Paul Dale, Rachel Morrell, Rob Adams, Suzy Pope, Vic Galloway, Zara Janjua Print & Digital Content Manager Murray Robertson Head Of Commercial Jayne Atkinson

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62

WHIRLYBIRD

BAD APPLES

Online News Editor Kevin Fullerton Head Of Marketing & Events Leah Bauer Business Development Manager Lachlan McMaster Marketing & Events Executive Eve Johnston Marketing & Events Assistant Paighton Scott Publishing Assistant Juliette Pepin

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Published by List Publishing Ltd 2 Roxburgh Place, Edinburgh EH8 9SU Tel: 0131 623 3040 list.co.uk editor@list.co.uk ISSN: 0959 - 1915

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PHOEBE BRIDGERS 4 THE LIST September 2026

© 2026 List Publishing Ltd. Reproduction in whole or in part is forbidden without the written permission of the publishers. The List does not accept responsibility for unsolicited material. The List provides this content in good faith but no guarantee or representation is given that the content is accurate, complete or up-to-date.

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PI

Sense And Sensibility is being adapted, yet again, for a new movie generation. Kevin Fullerton has a few questionable suggestions to zhoosh up the Jane Austen industry

E

linor saw, with great uneasiness, the low spirits of her friend. His visit afforded her but a very partial satisfaction, while his own enjoyment in it appeared so imperfect. It was evident Kevin was unhappy.

‘I am ever so worried about your melancholy,’ said she. ‘What ails you so?’

‘Hing is,’ he replied, ‘how come every Jane Austen lad in these films is a posh hunk wearing crisp linen shirts? Is there not some equalities law that means one in every five Austen movies has to feature a manky guy? For instance, why isn’t there an Austen where a squat, bald, bearded 36-year-old with lumbar issues and a minor facial twitch gets to play the leading man?’

‘I suspect,’ replied Elinor, blushing, ‘that to avoid the dilution of physical bedazzlement, one must maintain an integrity of charm, finesse and picturesque beauty.’

‘You calling me ugly like?’ said he with enthusiastic ejaculations. ‘Are you saying that a squat, bald, bearded 36-yearold man with lumbar issues, a minor facial twitch, a front tooth denture and accompanying gingivitis can’t go toe-to-toe with Colin Firth? Discrimination! I could wade in and out of a pond as well as any floppy haired Rada radge.’

Elinor met his eye and remained thoughtfully silent, watching his countenance grow uneasy until he arose from their picnic blanket, discarded his Radiohead t-shirt in favour of a loose-fitting white nightie and loped towards the nearby Sackingham Lake Of Toffington. This excursion

Shay

is for...

6 THE LIST September 2026

is going just dreadfully, thought Elinor. By the time he was knee-deep in the lake, Kevin turned to Elinor and ejaculated: ‘See! Just like Colin Firth or one of the other ones; Cumbersnitch or Ruddymayne, or that one who’ll probably be accused of something dodgy any time soon (you know the one). It’s all a heritage industry designed to maintain a specific social class of actors and their coterie of trust fund hangers on. If Danny Dyer stood in a lake in a white shirt, he’d probably be shot to death by a Daily Mail columnist.’

Most unwilling was Elinor to bear witness to Kevin’s protruding stomach, for which he insisted he was the ‘victim of a UPF conspiracy and probably beer’, and his curious pallor, which grew ever more ghastly when submerged halfway in a lake, particularly as he now appeared to be drowning.

Unaccountable in his incompetence though he was, Kevin’s foot had become trapped in the knotted rushes at the lake’s edge.

‘Help!’ he ejaculated repeatedly. ‘Colin Firth! Help!’

Elinor, her cheeks reddened from the undeniable folly of the flailing specimen before her, turned away to examine the Dashwood house, considering the fate of the heritage drama and her place in it. Was it really a cynical studio creation which siphoned money away from stories of everyday contemporary Britain, like Richard Curtis in a fleecy bonnet? And did that matter if people enjoyed the fantasy? She glanced back at Kevin, still ejaculating wildly as water filled his lungs, and muttered: ‘What a ghoulish adaptation.’

Suzi

PICTURE: JIKSAW

S

PICTURE: REBECCA JONES

front

mouthpiece

. . a September that is packed with busy S action. With that being said, let’s get into it.

Glaswegian singer-songwriter Shay O’Dowd has had a good summer playing festivals and hanging out with CMAT and Lewis Capaldi, and has an upcoming EP on the way called What’s The Plan, Son? World domination by the looks of it. Seasick Steve (double points score, people) sounds pretty despondent with this album title: The Last Season Of America. But, you know, no wonder. Seth MacFarlane sings songs from The Muppets in an album curiously titled Seth MacFarlane Sings The Muppets in which he croons orchestral jazz versions of tunes from the TV series and films as well as some cuts from (double points score incoming) partner show Sesame Street. Is this a man with too much

time on his hands? Someone called Stabbing Westward has a record coming out but, you know, that name isn’t drawing us in. There are also albums released by the likes of Shudder To Think, Scene Queen, Slothrust and (DPS alert) Sensible Soccers. Of all the S band names this month, Stornoway feels like the most chilled. And Susanna Hoffs pays tribute to all the great reviews her solo work and band stuff with The Bangles received down the years from this very organ by calling her album, The List. Thanks Suse. In nonmusic news, comic Suzi Ruffell is on tour, and if you’re feeling festive, you can get your tickets nice and early for Johnny McKnight’s Tron panto, Snaw Queen. Finally, there’s a Shaun The Sheep movie as well as comedy film The Stunt Driver. It’s an S express.

FRONT

Pla yLi st Festival season is over and it’s back to business as usual at List HQ. Luckily there’s still plenty going on across the country and in your ears this month.Get a taste of it through the music of Charli XCX, Julian Cope, Turnstile, Arab Strap, Stereolab, Phoebe Bridgers, SleaterKinney and several more Scan and listen as you read:

wholesome pic of the mont h Granted, some people are not dog fans. We get it. But, come on, look at this critter’s soulful eyes and fluffy chops: how could you not love it? To the uninitiated this is Zac (or it might be Buster), the border terrier standout star and title character of Colin From Accounts which is entering its third and final season. Real-life couple Patrick Brammall (the eagle of eye might spot another reference to him later in the mag) and Harriet Dyer (not the British stand-up) are great in it, but really, who’s watching it for them? Brewer Hop Nation even created a beer for dogs called Colin’s Pale Ale, a non-alcoholic tipple that has been dubbed ‘soup in a can’.

In this series of articles, we turn the focus back on ourselves by asking folk at The List about cultural artefacts that touch their heart and soul.

This time around, Eve Johnston tells us which things . . .

Made me cry: Seeing Penelope and Odysseus reunite in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. There’s nothing more worthwhile than being back in the arms of someone you love, especially if it takes 20 years to get there. An emotional scene like that coming at you in IMAX size can only end in tears.

Made me laugh: The brilliant roaming acts at our List Festival Party. Special shoutout to Puss Puss for climbing over a table to take a lick of someone’s beer.

Made me angry: Agnes Owens’ book For The Love Of Willie recently got me riled up, ironically over the character Willie Roper himself. His manipulative, exploitative treatment of Peggy and its lifelong impact on her had me turning each page aggressively. Safe to say, I have zero love for Willie.

Made me think: As well as giving me a good giggle, the Spilled podcast got me thinking about historical events that are often glossed over. I highly recommend their episode on women’s roles in WWII and the queer resistance movements of that era.

Made me think twice: Seeing Florence + The Machine at Summer Sessions.

Her live vocals were absolutely enchanting and completely shifted how I experience her music. My friend Sarah and I found ourselves dancing around to even her most heartbreaking tracks. It made me think a lot about how live music can instantly transform quiet heartbreak into pure, shared joy.

the insider September 2026 THE LIST 7

2026

AWARDS Our List Festival Awards hit its third year with a bang, expanding the diversity of our categories to further reflect the incredible scale of the Scottish capital’s overbrimming season of art and entertainment. Taking place at W Hotel, we invited luminaries of Edinburgh’s cultural scene to help us dole out awards to some of the best artists performing across the city.

Taking home the prize for Best Rising Scottish Artist was Lee McCormack: A Magic Lantern, the first solo exhibition by the Niddrie-based photographer and former community worker. It was an exhibition which inspired with its depiction of domestic scenes and social action. The winner of Best Rising Scottish Author was Alycia Pirmohamed, the Canadian-born poet based in Scotland whose nonfiction debut Shorelines explores memory, migration and change to touching effect.

Our Best Scottish Film went to These Violent Delights, a radical reinterpretation of Romeo & Juliet from Scottish Ballet that wowed judges with its dreamlike atmosphere and incredible choreography. Best International Show went to A Trial: After An Enemy Of The People, a riveting sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy Of The People which transplants its action to modern-day Brazil.

The winner of Best Cabaret Show was Sarah Hester Ross: Serving Cunt, a chaotic one-woman show anchored by powerhouse vocals and Ross’ vibrant, hilarious energy. Best Comedy Show went to Man Sings The Same Song Over And Over Again For An Hour, a true one-off filled with experimentation and verve.

In Best Dance, Circus & Physical Theatre Show was Collaborator, Ockham Razor’s touching ode to working together. For Best Kid’s Show, the award went to Boys Don’t Dance, an inspirational story of overcoming adversity. Best LGBTQIA+ Show went to Megasquirt: Fully Loaded, a concert/sketch show hybrid that bristles with latenight energy. Our Best Show From Adelaide is Dust, a touching ode to the mining community. Winning the International Fringe Encore Series Edinburgh Prize, Big Stuff wowed critics for its innovative approach to grief. And our Spirit Of The Fringe winner was Elf Lyons for her highly acclaimed Elf Lyons Is The Woman On The Edge.

The final winner of the Bragi Awards, presented by Summerhall Arts and Shepherd and Wedderburn, was awarded at the ceremony and went to Common Tongue, a play about language, identity and their intersections in Scotland. Finally, the inaugural McTavish Award was presented to Chris Forbes for Father Christmas, a tale of trees, tinsel and tragedy.

A big thank you to W Hotel Edinburgh for accommodating us, and to Jay Lafferty for hosting with quick wit and cracking patter. And an equally massive round of applause for our supporters, which include Ghost Light Global, Whyte & Mackay, Edinburgh Marriott Hotel Holyrood, YourScene, Adelaide Fringe, Data Thistle, Set! Productions, Pure Life Plus, International Fringe Encore Series, Wildtopia and Arbikie Distillery.

PICTURES: TOBY TREES

8 THE LIST September 2024

September 2024 THE LIST 9

sixtysomething bloke, shaven of head and side-eye of stare, dressed as a giant white rabbit, the head dangling off his lap: it’s not everyone’s idea of the curator of a 50-minute club mix.

But then Sonica, as a world-class visual sonic arts festival, is far from a normal rave-up, and Dinos Chapman is far, far indeed from a mere DJ or electronic music producer.

The new work from the creator habitually referred to as ‘the former Young British Artist wunderkind’ is a pulsing piece of instrumental electronica which soundtracks images as potentially disturbing, if not quite as grotesque, as anything Dinos created with his brother Jake in their controversy-magnet heyday (ie 2008’s ‘Fucking Hell’, their monumental Nazi landscape composed of 60,000 mangled toy soldiers). As the Sonica publicity materials about his headline piece put it: ‘Instead of escapism, Chapman’s work encourages us to engage with the visions he shows us: folding forests with eerie faces; overgrown toy rabbits cavorting in a psychedelic field. Across Britain, something buried is coming back to the surface, a haunting Chapman makes as enthralling as it is unsettling.’ Let’s call it the rural-infernal, the alco-bucolic.

The near hour-long work (no interval) is of a piece with where the elder Chapman’s solo practice has focused for the past five years. ‘Rendered in a hand reminiscent of the Old Masters,’ runs the wording on his website, ‘Dinos Chapman forages an iconography traditionally associated with the naive and the playful: dinosaurs, flowers, birdies, bees, bunnies, and wide-eyed children peppered with the occasional skull, limned in glitter, or a candy-coloured noose, to create a potent quiver of drawings, watercolours, glitter works and canvases that mine the gothic crevasses and corners of the human psyche.’

It’s certainly a long way from the cultural space inhabited by the wife of the London-born, Los Angeles-based Chapman: she’s the actor Lucy Punch, titular star of brilliant BBC sitcom Amandaland. After emerging as part of the YBA movement in the early 1990s, Jake and Dinos Chapman had a wild ride together. Their works were provocative in execution (child-like mannequins with genitals on their face, all those mini-Nazis) and no-punches-pulled in their titles: ‘Hell’, ‘Two-Faced Cunt’, ‘Fuck Face’, ‘The Rape Of Creativity’.

But working in that netherworld, at that intensity, as brothers, was highly likely to end in tears. And so it did. After three intense decades, the partnership had run its course. Speaking to The Guardian in 2022, Jake said: ‘Nothing about our practice was amicable. It was never a love-in. It was always tinged with a certain seething disdain for each other, so I guess at some point that reached critical mass, and we decided to go our separate ways.’

Music, though, has long been a throughline for Dinos. With Jake, he curated 2004’s Nightmare Before Christmas edition of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, with Aphex Twin, The Fall and Throbbing Gristle offering an insight into both the Chapmans’ taste and their feelings about the festering season. The pair directed the video for PJ Harvey and John Parish’s ‘Black Hearted Love’ (2009). In 2014, Dinos released Luftbobler, an album of throbbing industrial techno. And, after doom metal trio Ramesses used ‘Fucking Hell’ on the cover of their 2010 album Take The Curse, there were plans for the Chapmans to join them for a gig at Selfridges. Bizarrely, the brothers had been asked to curate some sort of piece in the London department store’s boujie food hall. So they invited Ramesses to get involved.

‘Jake was going to play guitar with them,’ Dinos told Vice in 2013. ‘I couldn’t work out how my music was going to fit in with what they were doing so I was just going to dance like Bez. We wanted to see if we could fill one end of the hall with loads of amplifiers and see if that would smash all the crystal and glass in the room with noise. It got quite far down the line until someone pulled the plug. We couldn’t believe it took them so long to realise it was such a bad idea, from their point-of-view.’

Almost two decades on, Dinos Chapman’s disruptive approach to what music can do, where it can be performed and how it can inspire, destabilise and, frankly, freak-out, lives strongly, loudly on. Now, at Tramway, he’s inviting us to go weird in the country.

Dinos Chapman, Tramway, Glasgow, Thursday 24 September.

10 THE LIST September 2026

Down the rabbit hole

DINOS ART CHAPMAN SPECIAL

A

Kicking off our art special, Craig McLean looks at the wild and disruptive career of Dinos Chapman, from his emergence with the YBA movement to his brand new show for audiovisual, art and experimental music festival Sonica

at Sonica

Inspired by composer Martin Green’s fascination with the links between folk music styles across the globe, he brings together Scotland and Serbia for Folding Songs (Tramway, Friday 25 September) while Charles Hazlewood conducts Paraorchestra in Music For 18 Musicians (Tramway, Saturday 3 October), paying tribute to Steve Reich, the pioneer of minimalism who reaches the ripe old age of 90 in October.

Unique visual artist Rachel Maclean and audiovisual composer maestro Ela Orleans collaborate for They’ve Got Your Eyes (Buchanan Galleries, Saturday 12 September–Sunday 25 October). An interrogation of AI, it features a Victorian tech bro who creates fairies to fulfil his every whim.

Shanghai-born musician and artist Ban Lei has created 153 Returning Birds (Pollok House, Thursday 24 September–Sunday 4 October), an idea which came to him while hearing the sound made by the wind and some avian creatures during a visit to a Swiss castle. Three sets of birds sculpted from bellows and whistles hang from the ceiling with the audience encouraged to ‘play them’.

A strong multi-act bill (The Glad Cafe, Sunday 27 September) brings together Latvian producer/ DJ Raivo Sloan, a film about Britain’s waterways

by Moira Salt accompanied with live music by Tommy Perman and Andrew Wasylyk, plus Filipino music producer and multimedia artist Jett Ilagan (aka Escuri) with a hybrid of performance and light installation.  Sonica, various venues, Glasgow, Thursday 24 September–Sunday 4 October.

PICTURE: SANDY BUTLER

art special

Folding Songs

September 2026 THE LIST 11

DINOS CHAPMAN

5 More To See

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“

GLASGOW ART SCENE

The legacy has been squandered and mismanaged

The arts scene in Glasgow has been dealt some brutal blows in recent times, with the closure of the CCA and massive rent hikes for Trongate 103. Greg Thomas speaks to some of the organisations impacted to find out why it’s happening and whether anything can be done to halt the damage

M

y interview with Chloe Reith, interim director of Glasgow-based arts organisation The Common Guild, opens with me, the interviewer, unexpectedly on the back foot. She’s read my review in Art Monthly of the brilliant recent iteration of Glasgow International, the city’s biennial art festival. While she wholeheartedly agrees about the festival’s success, she takes issue with ‘the discourse of creative resilience’ that the article presented. ‘The idea that artists have to be resilient, to do a lot with nothing, is part of the problem. We have to expect more from the city, from Creative Scotland.’

>>

PICTURE: ALAN DIMICK

art special

September 2026 THE LIST 13

GLASGOW ART SCENE

Glasgow art life: (previous page) Rudy Kanhye and Lauren La Rose at Glasgow Print Studio; (this page) Aqsa Arif at Street Level; (bottom) treating a Ciara Phillips at Glasgow Print Studio; (below from left) Trongate 103; Joanna Piotrowska at The Common Guild; a SCAN summit in June

PICTURE: EOIN CAREY

PICTURE: TIU MAKKONEN PICTURE: FIONA WATSON

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September 2026 THE LIST 15

GLASGOW ART SCENE

PICTURE: ERIKA STEVENSON

Perhaps it’s a fair cop. This is a city that has seen its cultural assets repeatedly bashed over the head in recent years; there’s a risk that uncritically celebrating mere survival might obscure the urgent need to stop Glasgow’s art scene being KO’ed. Because, while the economic fragility of the arts is nothing new, the post-covid era has been a litany of bad news on Clydeside.

Where to start? The Charles Rennie Mackintosh-built Lighthouse, which had been a hub for exhibitions and events since 1999, never reopened its doors after lockdown, with Glasgow City Council unable to fund staffing and upkeep. Around the same time, the legendary artist-run gallery Transmission entered a period of drastically reduced programming, having lost Creative Scotland funding in 2018 because of what Frieze called, at the time, its ‘principled refusal of professionalisation’.

At the start of this year, things took a further, dramatic downward turn. In January the Centre For Contemporary Arts, an important venue for showcasing emerging artists in the city, announced its permanent closure with, according to staff, insufficient warning and delays on notice pay and arrears. And then the really big one. In February, City Property, the council-owned commercial body that leases out Trongate 103, a venue housing seven separate organisations, announced it was increasing rents by 400%. Organisations were given a month to comply.

‘Part of the historical context,’ says Claire Forsyth, creative director of Glasgow Print Studio, one of the seven tenants, ‘is that we were going to buy our own premises in the late 1990s to future-proof the organisation. We didn’t because discussions started about a publicly owned downtown arts venue and we came onboard.’ In 2009, T103, as it is known, opened its doors for the first time, a council-controlled public asset with peppercorn rent . . . or that was the idea.

Like Glasgow Print Studio, many groups were lured in with the promise of static rates. But within six months, City Property had been established and the council had handed over control of the former warehouse complex in Trongate. ‘We’ve had this existential threat on and off for 17 years now,’ says Forsyth. ‘It just drains resources and capacity.’ Until February, rent and overhead increases had been minimal, but there was always the looming threat of what ultimately came to pass this year.

What are the underlying issues behind all these closures and threats, and what can be done to resolve them? Malcolm Dickson, who runs Street Level Photoworks, another T103 tenant, takes a sanguine and long-term view when we speak, while pointing out some of the distinctions between the various cases under consideration. ‘For example, the Centre For Contemporary Arts situation isn’t new. I was doing some tidying up the other day and came across a newspaper cutting from August 2006 about the Scottish Arts Council [now Creative Scotland] bailing out the CCA. These situations are varied and complicated. It’s too easy to always blame the powers that be.’

True enough, CCA is among a few Scottish organisations that, by all accounts, have been scuppered primarily by in-house woes. Nonetheless, there are clearly wider issues precipitated at city and national level, from the ongoing squeeze on Creative Scotland by the SNP government, with losses passed down the food chain, to the perennially cash-strapped council’s outsourcing of property management to a profit-making outfit. Those going granular on the history might even point to the council’s uncoupling from the much larger and wealthier Strathclyde Regional Council in 1996 as the start of the rot.

Zooming out further, is it too vague, and too fatalistic, to point to the long-term recession in which western economies have been mired since the late noughties as the underlying threat here? For Reith, whose perspective I sought in order to get a grassroots curatorial angle, that seems a cop-out. ‘Last week, Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, pledged a $323.8 million boost to culture in the city, in recognition of the artists who make it an important place to be. Glasgow has that same status for Scotland and Britain, but the legacy has been squandered and mismanaged.’

Commentators have indeed pointed out Glasgow City Council’s failure to make good on the priorities in its own cultural strategy for 2024–2030. These include sustainability (‘Glasgow supports the conditions for a sustainable cultural sector by working collaboratively to secure investment’ it stated). Still, Forsyth and Dickson both emphasise a great deal of support and productive goodwill among individual figures within the council. One upshot of this is that T103 tenants have secured a temporary deal involving a council-run support fund and a pause of eviction threats. Down the line, feasible options include the venue being handed back to the council, to be run by its cultural arm, Glasgow Life, on terms close to those dangled in 2009.

A more collective approach could be part of the answer, according to Veronique AA Lapeyre, director of the Glasgow-based Scottish Contemporary Art Network, a national network for arts organisations and artists whose remit includes advocacy work. She points to the need to create forums in which discussions with local and national government, as well as funding bodies, can take place simultaneously. ‘Arts organisations need to be able to get all the decision makers in a room at the same time, so they can show how cultural provision is often falling through the cracks, where the impacts of funding cuts from one public body are compounded with rent hikes or venue closures by another institution for example. We need a sense of collective accountability and support.’

This article began with a pitch to report on ‘green shoots of recovery’ in Glasgow’s art scene. My discussions have left me feeling like taking that angle would have been pollyanna-ish, perhaps counter-productive. Still, Lapeyre points out: ‘I do meet people every day who are committed to being in this city, to their communities and audiences, and to making sure Glasgow is still a great city for contemporary art.’ Do people make Glasgow? Yes, but not without help. 

16 THE LIST September 2026

JUPITER+NATION

Plus side On the outskirts of Edinburgh, Jupiter Artland sculpture park is a thrilling outpost of the city’s art scene. Now with their Jupiter+Nation programme, they’re bringing contemporary art to high streets and town centres across the country. Zara Janjua chats to founder Nicky Wilson and artist Lindsey Mendick to find out more about this ambitious concept On the town: (from top) artists Rachel Maclean, Lindsey Mendick, Anya Gallaccio

I

t started with a derelict Jacobean house, 50 acres of ‘useless’ farmland and a digger Nicky Wilson thought she might need for a fortnight.

Before long there were five children, five dogs, chickens, doves, a pony and some of the world’s most important contemporary artists wandering around the garden.

Today, that slightly bonkers experiment is Jupiter Artland: the internationally renowned sculpture park and arts organisation hidden in the foothills of the Pentlands, west of Edinburgh. What began as Nicky and Robert Wilson’s family home has become a registered charity with a board, a major collection of permanent commissioned artworks and a learning programme that has engaged more than 100,000 young people over the past 18 years.

Arriving at Jupiter is intentionally unlike entering an austere cultural institution. Wilson believes traditional gallery architecture can intimidate people before they encounter a single artwork.

Here, you drive through strange steel gates and emerge into what she gleefully calls a ‘Teletubby magical land’. There are tiny sheep and oversized horses; glimpses of Christian Boltanski’s ‘Animitas’ twinkling in the distance and Marc Quinn’s ‘Love Bomb’; and permanent commissions sitting within a landscape shaped by both agriculture and West Lothian’s post-industrial past. ‘It’s all about creating a slightly Alice In Wonderland kind of perspective,’ Wilson says.

That sense of surprise has attracted artists including James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy, Jim Lambie, Nathan Coley and Anya Gallaccio, alongside generations of emerging Scottish artists. But the collection was never the endpoint. Education has become, in Wilson’s words, ‘the main drive of why we exist’. Visitors pay admission partly because she wants ‘everybody to be a philanthropist’, with that income helping support learning programmes.

Yet after years of working with schools, another problem became impossible to ignore: geography.

>> September 2026 THE LIST 17

JUPITER+NATION

>> A child in the Lothians could experience Jupiter Artland. For many in Dundee,

art special Jupiter Artland founder Nicky Wilson; (above) Jupiter+ in the community

Perth, Paisley or Dumfries, the cost and time involved in getting there made that impossible. ‘So that’s why we go to them,’ states Wilson. Jupiter+ launched in Perth in 2022, taking ambitious contemporary art by the likes of Rachel Maclean into vacant high-street units. Across Perth, Ayr, Paisley and Dundee, it has attracted more than 20,000 visitors and directly engaged 2500 learners. Now, reimagined as Jupiter+Nation, the programme begins its chapter in Dumfries.

There is something beautifully circular about it. The Wilsons began by opening their home to strangers; now Jupiter is taking something of that home, its art, hospitality, curiosity and belief in possibility beyond its own gates. Its latest vehicle is Lindsey Mendick’s ‘Growing Pains’, a surreal estate agency installed in an empty unit at Dumfries’ Loreburne Shopping Centre. Eight ceramic dollhouses spill out the anxieties and paraphernalia of adolescence: braces, spot cream, razors, trainers, phones and booze.

Behind the playfulness is something considerably more painful. Mendick grew up in Muswell Hill in north London and had a difficult time at school, eventually overdosing as a teenager. ‘It’s this moment where you’re not quite fitting into your body,’ she says of adolescence. ‘You just feel deeply uncomfortable. You don’t know who you are. You don’t know that life gets better.’

Mendick says the commission allowed her to be ‘more experimental, to create weirder things’ than the commercial art world necessarily permits.

More significantly, despite making numerous exhibitions, she had never explored this period of her childhood before. Jupiter created, she says, ‘the perfect place to hold this story’.

That seems to encapsulate the organisation’s dual purpose: giving artists room to take risks while putting the resulting work in front of people who might never walk into a gallery. Wilson says Mendick ‘speaks absolutely unvarnished truth’ and that young people encountering her work ‘feel seen’.

Mendick, meanwhile, describes Jupiter as a ‘one-in-a-million sort of place.

Nothing is too big. Nicky always gets you to dream big.’

That freedom has had tangible consequences. An earlier Jupiter collaboration pushed Mendick to explore specific themes in her work and gave her a platform that she says ultimately led to a Sky Arts Award. ‘Having that openness and connection really does make artists better or allows artists to be free.’ Twentysix years after buying a crumbling house and some unwanted land, perhaps that’s what the Wilsons have really been building all along: not simply a sculpture park, but somewhere that gives artists permission to go big and go anywhere. jupiterartland.org/jupiter-plus

18 THE LIST September 2026

BARBIE

Plastic fa As a major new exhibition in Glasgow celebrates the world’s most famous doll, Greg Thomas ponders the beauty and the horror of Barbie

W

hy did they send a 40-year-old straight bloke who likes modernism to cover a Barbie show? I find myself asking this question as I shuffle past giant test tube-shaped display cases filled with skinny plastic dolls. They all look botoxed, though most of them predate by decades the cosmetic use of nerve-paralysing bacteria. It’s Glasgow Pride day and gaggles of mostly female pals in pink outfits and wigs have clearly planned their trip to Kelvingrove as part of a larger itinerary, ending at the march. There are mothers and young daughters too, including in the little playroom where a selection of period dolls are available to dress and pose, along with

20 THE LIST September 2026

colouring pencils. I hand a robust-looking doll to my baby son who starts chewing on her head. Barbie does nothing for me emotionally: as a brand, a cultural phenomenon or a work of Fordist mass design. But, of course, it is one of the most successful modern examples of all three.

Moreover, much like when I was sent by this venerable outlet to review the Banksy show at Goma in 2023, the levels of delighted enthusiasm all around sweep me up to some extent. I also have to admit that, by the end of this visit, I found myself ruminating on all the beauty and horror of Barbie (an icon of neo-liberal feminism to rival Hillary Clinton) in a way that is bracing if not straightforwardly affirming.

Barbie was launched in 1959, the creation of Ruth Handler, co-founder and first president of southern California’s Mattel toy company. She’d identified a gap in the market for a doll that looked like a grown woman rather than a baby, that allowed girls to fantasise about being adults rather than mothers: glamorous, fashionable, wealthy, independent, even working. Right from the start, Barbie embodied a paradoxical empowerment. Female success can be achieved on terms rigorously

art special BARBIE

fantastic circumscribed by the male gaze and consumerist fantasy, she seemed to say. It involves looking good, marrying well, earning buckets. Given the bigotry of 1950s America, the soupçon of liberatory potential in there wasn’t nothing.

Over the decades since, Barbie has both absorbed the influence of the catwalk and fed back to it, with designers including Ralph Lauren and Vera Wang crafting outfits. Sixties dolls like Barbie’s British friend Stacie reacted to swinging Carnaby Street style and there’s even a sort of grungelite Barbie called Corduroy Cool from 1999. The architecture of Barbie’s Dream Houses has also channelled the zeitgeist over the years, reflecting So-Cal desert modernism and post-war modular building techniques.

More significantly, Barbie has presented a surprisingly progressive set of tropes for how womanhood might be defined. Christie, Barbie’s first black friend, hit the market in 1968. Since then, facial features and body shapes have been adapted to represent different ethnicities.

The relaunched Barbie Fashionistas line of 2016 included thicker-set figures (though hardly fat) while a 2022 Laverne Cox Barbie celebrated

black trans femininity. Of course, all this has to be offset against the camply voluptuous original doll. More than that, the range of life choices presented to young girls through Barbie’s different styles, appearances and occupations, from 1965’s astronaut Barbie to the Eco-Leadership Team Dolls of 2022, are all subtly reduced to forms of consumption and display.

It’s healthy for children to project themselves into adult roles through play, but what if that play is all to do with what you’re wearing, what you could buy when you’re older? The irony of marketing a plastic doll to stop the planet being poisoned hardly needs pointing out. It’s been said that over the course of the late 20th century, the conservatives won on the economy and the liberals won on culture. Barbie is the pneumatic embodiment of that tension. Girls, you can be whatever you want to be, but it will always feel like shopping.

Barbie: The Exhibition, Kelvingrove Art Gallery And Museum, until Sunday 18 October.

September 2026 THE LIST 21

Sounds Good September Highlights

October Highlights

6th

Edinburgh Psych Fest

2nd Cast

7th

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

4th

Andy Irvine with Quilty

18th

SNJO: John Coltrane Centenary Celebration feat.

Emma Rawicz

9th

Breabach

11th Nai Barghouti 12th Michael Palin - In The Philippines

22nd Caitlin Moran: How To Be Hopeful

13th Between the Covers Live: Celebrating Agatha Christie

23rd Mike Wozniak - The Bench

14th Grace Petrie

24th Gilbert O’Sullivan

15th Gareth Malone

26th Nish Kumar: Angry Humour From a Really Nice Guy

16th Shawn Colvin 24th Dodie 25th Dr Richard Shepherd – Time of Death – More Unnatural Causes

Full Listings:

26th St.Paul and the Broken Bones

thequeenshall.net 0131 668 2019

22 THE LIST September 2026

31st Fin Taylor: The Pre-emptive Comeback Special

“

V

DESIGN & DISABILITY

Disabled design is in our everyday lives all the time The impact people with disabilities have had on design since the mid-20th century is explored in a new exhibition at V&A Dundee.

Jennifer McLaren finds out how the show is championing representation and giving disabled creativity the platform it deserves

&A Dundee’s Design And Disability exhibition celebrates and traces the radical ways in which disabled, deaf and neurodivergent people have influenced contemporary design and culture over the past 80 years.

Organised into three sections (visibility, creativity and living), the show spans design, art, architecture, fashion and photography. First shown at V&A South Kensington, curated by Natalie Kane, additional Scottish design stories have been added for its run in Dundee by curators May Rosenthal Sloan and Lily Barnes.

Among those additions are Jamie O’Donnell’s work to create airline seating that reduces anxiety for neurodivergent people, artist Kirsty Stevens who uses MRI scans of her brain to create images and patterns, and Flannery O’kafka’s work Wake Wake Island, a book created for disabled people who are adopted.

‘It feels important for a design museum to be engaging with what disabled creativity looks like across a broad spectrum of activity, from more formal design to people making, breaking, hacking and subverting existing designs,’ explains Sloan.

>> September 2026 THE LIST 23

DESIGN & DISABILITY

>>

Design And Disability, V&A Dundee, until Sunday 4 October.

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PICTURE: GRANT ANDERSON

‘Disabled design is in our everyday lives all the time, often in ways that don’t get recognised or acknowledged, and it felt very important to be bringing together a real diversity of disabled creative practice in a design museum and giving it the weight that other kinds of design are given in these kinds of spaces.’

Sloan adds that disabled people and their communities are not a monolith; like the rest of the population, they’re characterised by massive diversity. ‘I think it’s been wonderful for people, disabled and non-disabled, to see the extent of that and the richness of that.’ She also says learnings from the exhibition are already having an impact ‘in terms of the way we do things in the museum and trying to embed the lessons that we have learned from this process into our business as usual. There’s a real appetite here for making sure that we approach accessibility at the outset of all exhibition activity and beyond.’

Sloan describes being able to curate for the Scottish run as ‘joyous’, explaining: ‘It’s the bit that I love, working directly with artists and designers and finding works that you’re excited by and that you can feel other people will be excited by. It’s been a complete joy working with all these contributors, some of whom I knew before, some of whom I didn’t.’

Not all of the Scottish pieces were new additions. For instance, the University Of Dundee-led Hands Of X project that explores the design of prosthetic hands was previously in London, although the Scottish display has been changed slightly and a film about the project added.

‘First and foremost for our disabled visitors, I hope they will feel a sense of pride and excitement at the representation, the very different forms of representation here. And a sense of having the permission, almost, to take up space and be who they are in society,’ continues Sloan. ‘For our non-disabled audiences, I hope there is a sort of dawning realisation of the contribution that disabled creative people have made and continue to make every day in our society, which so often is unsung and unrecognised.’

Fife-based artist Kirsty Stevens was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007 while studying jewellery and metal design at Duncan Of Jordanstone College Of Art & Design in Dundee. MS is a lifelong condition that affects the brain and central nervous system, resulting in a range of symptoms: fatigue; tingling or numbness in the face, body, arms, or legs; vision problems; and coordination and balance difficulties.

Following her diagnosis, Stevens began turning MRI scans of her brain into beautiful patterns that could be printed on fabrics or etched on different materials. Her work in the exhibition is ‘Findings Triptych: Scattered, Inflammatory, Confluent’, layered drawings that act as visual interpretations of her brain scans, allowing her to make sense of a process that is otherwise unseen. ‘At first, I started to use it for myself to come to terms with MS. But after the response it got, I realised it was opening the dialogue with people, just talking about “the invisible”. It was really helpful and I found it easier to talk about my MS.’ She says it feels incredible to have her work included in the Scottish leg of the exhibition, which she’d already been aware of during its London run. ‘I’d planned to go see it, but time got away from me . . . I never thought I’d be approached to have my work in it.’

It was during lockdown that Stevens began to home in on ‘drawing’ her MS. Medication made her immunocompromised which meant she had to shield for longer, so she took this time to focus on her practice. The global pandemic placed additional pressure on health inequalities already in existence and Stevens describes the time as a ‘turning point’ when people began to see how society really works. ‘Lockdown was the time I realised the big guys don’t care about the unwell or the vulnerable,’ she says. And she believes the pandemic encouraged artists to be more overt about using their health to inspire their practice and to inspire change.

Stevens’ medication has thankfully slowed the progress of her MS, so she’s focusing firmly on the future for inspiration. ‘I’ve been looking at the words “stable” and “unchanged”, so I’m developing this at the moment. Having work in V&A Dundee feels like the perfect full stop.’

Body matters: (previous page) Ntiense Eno-Amoquaye: Jewellery Becomes Law; (clockwise from top left) Scallywag Fox: Drag Syndrome; Marvel Harris: First Swim After Rebirth; V&A Dundee; Maya Scarlette: The Birth Of Venus; Squeeze Chair; Kirsty Stevens

DESIGN & DISABILITY

PICTURE: GRANT ANDERSON PICTURE: TANASHA CHEGE

Dysfluent Magazine

September 2026 THE LIST 25

PICTURE: EUAN CAMPBELL

AUTUMN HIGHLIGHTS

DAVID BOWIE: ON TOUR

To mark a decade since his sad passing, Dundee hosts the first touring show of the archive that has been wooing visitors in London’s V&A. Across four sections is the behind-the-scenes story of how he created his ever-evolving persona, music and screen work.  V&A Dundee, Wednesday 4 November–Monday 15 February.

DUNCAN CAMPBELL

A New No is the Turner Prize winner’s first major work shown in Scotland since scooping that gong in 2014. At the heart of this exhibition is a flip-disc electromagnetic screen which animates graphic images using techniques from the ‘12 principles of animation’ formulated by early-years Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.  Gallery Of Modern Art, Glasgow, Saturday 10 October–Monday 4 January.

ELAINE MITCHENER

PICTURE: AURELIEN HASLEBACHER

This movement artist presents a site-specific performance installation over just two nights, performed in Mount Stuart’s Marble Hall, inspired by events and objects reflecting that building’s history. In particular, it draws inspiration from newspaper reports of the devastating 1877 fire which destroyed much of the original Georgian structure.  Mount Stuart, Isle Of Bute, Friday 11 & Saturday 12 September.

FRASER TAYLOR

Muddled Syncopation is the new exhibition from this interdisciplinary artist which aims to explore the shifting interplay between humanity and landscape as well as examining the tension and harmony between people and place. To that end, the Glasgow School Of Art alumnus exhibits a series of paintings as well as collaborative work in film and poetry.  Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock, Saturday 5 September–Saturday 7 November.

GLASGOW ART WEEKEND

Glasgow Art Map lay on another showcase of exhibitions and events occurring all across the city for four days. Among the artists involved are Martin Boyce, Josie KO and Zayd Menk while there are also publication launches from Broadside and Rosie’s Disobedient Press. And yes, there’s a closing day party.  Various venues, Glasgow, Thursday 17–Sunday 20 September.

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A

Art beat IDA APPLEBROOG

The late American creative described herself as ‘a woman artist with feminist concerns’ and whose ‘Angry Birds Of America’ series is part of this exhibition marking her first solo show in Scotland. These portraits of dead birds were drawn in 2019 and symbolised how most rational Americans were feeling during Trump’s first term.  Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, Friday 6 November–Sunday 7 February.

Billie Motiang: Materialist

ISAAC JULIEN

A previous hit at Edinburgh Art Festival, Julien’s film Lessons Of The Hour: Frederick Douglass explores the famed orator, philosopher and abolitionist’s time in Scotland and examines Perthshire’s connections to the transatlantic slave trade. During his visit, Douglass made several speeches on the very site where Perth Museum is now located.  Perth Museum, Friday 9 October–Sunday 11 April.

SCOTTISH PORTRAIT AWARDS

PICTURE: DAVID AEBI

A true celebration of Scottish creativity, well over 2000 works were entered for consideration in three categories with judges having the tricky task of narrowing them down to just over 100 pieces of fine art and photography and 60 works for a digital exhibition.  National Galleries Of Scotland: Portrait, Saturday 28 November– Sunday 11 April.

TAI SHANI

Another Turner Prize winner in these parts as sculpture, image, sound and architecture come together for M.I.A.S.M.A. which reimagines the Ancient Greek tragedy Antigone, asking several questions including what forms of love and resistance remain possible in this age of crisis.  Jupiter Artland, Wilkieston, opens Thursday 29 October.

PICTURE: TATE PHOTOGRAPHY (KATHLEEN RUNDELL)

UK AIDS MEMORIAL QUILT

Displayed in full for the first time in Scotland, the quilt represents over 600 people lost to HIV and Aids in the UK. Part of the world’s largest community art project, it was originated in America in 1985 by activist Cleve Jones to commemorate lost friends, family and loved ones. In the late 80s, Scottish activist Ally Van Tillo began coordinating the British version.  Tramway, Glasgow, Saturday 12 September–Sunday 4 October.

September 2026 THE LIST 27

AUTUMN HIGHLIGHTS

The galleries are alive with the sight and sounds of great art this autumn. Here’s a mere sample of top exhibitions to feast your eyes and ears on across the forthcoming season

ScreenList SceenList recommends must-see screenings throughout September at Filmhouse. This month, programme manager Raymah Tariq recommends an Indy classic, a formative footy mainstay, and one of the great unsung films from the 2000s

Raymah Tariq has worked within film exhibition since 2013 and is currently in post as Programme Manager for Filmhouse, where she especially loves programming noir and anything with a synth soundtrack

AUTUMN CONCERTS Berlioz Symphonie fantastique 2026/27 Season Opener

23-25 Sept, 7.30pm (7pm in Perth) Perth | Edinburgh | Glasgow

Bach St Matthew Passion with the SCO Chorus and celebrated vocal soloists

1-2 Oct, 7pm Edinburgh | Glasgow

Beethoven Piano Concertos with Sunwook Kim

8-10 Oct, 7.30pm Edinburgh | Glasgow | Aberdeen

Raiders Of The Lost Ark

Back in cinemas for one week only to celebrate its 45th anniversary, Raiders is undoubtedly one of my most favourite films. A pitch perfect adventure filled with charismatic characters, cracking oneliners and an iconic soundtrack. What else is there to say? n From Friday 11 September, various times

Bend it Like Beckham

How I adored this film and how formative it was for me as a teen. It was quite likely the first time I went to the cinema and saw a British South Asian actress in the main role. Thank you to Parminder Nagra for her nuanced role as Jess, a passionate 18-year-old who joins her local football team in secret after striking a friendship with Jules (Keira Knightley) in the park. This screening has been curated by our first cohort of Young Programmers as part of BFI Fan: Rip It Up. Come and hear the team introduce it, followed by a zine making workshop afterward. n Monday 21 September, 5.40pm.

The Fall

Our We’ve Got A Cinema And We’re Not Afraid To Use It pick in September is this sumptuous adventure fantasy directed by Tarsem Singh, selected by Mollie from our front of house team.

Known for its striking visuals, The Fall, at its heart, is a story about what it means to find genuine connection and emotional truth in a landscape of make believe. We’re excited to present this spectacle in Screen 1 for audiences to delight in. n Wednesday 23 September, 6pm.

Bend it Like Beckham

£6 FOR STUDENTS Explore our concerts sco.org.uk Company Registration Number: SC075079. A charity registered in Scotland No. SC015039.

In partnership with Photo: Christopher Bowen

28 THE LIST September 2026

SCOT TISH GAMING

THE NAME OF THE GAME

As Scotland produces two of gaming’s biggest releases this year in Silent Hill: Townfall and Grand Theft Auto 6, Kevin Fullerton examines the state of the country’s gaming scene and speaks to some of its major players about the push to forge a cultural identity in interactive worlds >>

SCOT TISH GAMING

I

n an imposing building in the centre of Edinburgh, the finishing touches are being made to one of the most expensive cultural products the world has ever seen. Grand Theft Auto 6 is rumoured to have cost Rockstar North more than $1.5 billion to develop, underscoring the series’ reputation as a hulking cultural monolith that makes Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey look like a low-budget indie flick by comparison.

Despite its global reputation, few gamers will be aware of GTA’s humble origins in Dundee or that a plethora of Scottish references are embedded in its ultra-violent urban playgrounds. That problem rings true for much of the Scottish games industry which, despite supporting a huge number of creatives and producing an array of artistically viable, boundary-pushing titles, is rarely championed (or even acknowledged) by Scotland at large. Why aren’t we flying the flag for our most successful cultural export?

‘We’ve got incredibly creative, really talented people across the whole of the country, but there’s no support,’ says Brian Baglow, founder of Scottish Games Network, an advocacy group for Scottish games development. ‘Everyone in the world who has a desire to make a game can do that, but how do you stand out? It’s skills like publishing and taking a game to market where the UK as a whole is falling behind. There are some systemic issues that we need to address, and because we are a devolved nation, we can. We can totally fix this. We just need the will.’

Baglow has been instrumental in the push to get the Scottish government more involved in games. His Games Action Plan, revealed at the start of 2026, forged a blueprint to institutionalise support for the sector which, for many, has been curiously lacking. Cara Ellison, a former journalist and long-time narrative developer for projects as diverse as Void Bastards and Dishonoured 2, shares similar sentiments. ‘Creative Scotland have not always been great at recognising that video games need that sort of help. I think that’s because of an old-school idea that games aren’t art or whatever, when obviously that’s completely false.’

Indeed, Scotland has become a hive of activity in gaming, in the past few years producing a bevy of indie projects, as well as AAA misfire Mindseye and the promising-looking horror game Silent Hill: Townfall, which takes direct inspiration from the East Neuk of Fife for the fictitious fishing village of St Amelia. It’s part of a wave of games that use the architecture of Scottish towns and cities as an intrinsic part of their environmental design.

The lack of infrastructure and representation leads to an inevitable brain drain, with some of the industry’s biggest players unable to help foster the community. ‘Michael Barclay is the lead level designer at Naughty Dog [developer of Uncharted and The Last Of Us] and he’s from round here,’ Ellison explains. ‘I know he would like nothing better than to come back here and head a studio. There’s just no willingness or investment for that sort of person. That’s a tragedy. That guy is world class, he’s from Dundee and he had to go all the way to America to find the level of work he’s good at.’

Yet many developers overseas are fascinated in Scottish identity itself. Musician Siobhan Wilson, who’s become a notable figure for her emotionally resonant contribution to Planet Of Lana and is currently scoring Heirloom, finds many developers from outside of the country bring her on board to imbue a Scottish identity onto games in a manner far removed from the shortbread tin kitsch of A Highland Song or Farewell North. ‘[The developers of Heirloom] have recruited a Scottish composer because they’re looking for a Scottish identity,’ she says. ‘Commercial game music relies quite heavily on cliché, so a lot of sonic identity associated with Scotland is driven by that.’ Her ability to eschew those tropes in the indie-folk space has given Wilson a widening range of opportunities in the gaming scene, expanding her repertoire into work with orchestras from around the world and opening doors to fruitful collaborations.

One of the most identifiably Scottish games of the past few years has been Still Wakes The Deep, a Bafta Award winner which thrust Karen Dunbar into the spotlight for her intense, no-nonsense performance as oil rig worker Eileen. ‘I didn’t know anything about games. The most I knew about was Sonic The Hedgehog, so I thought I could maybe act as Sonic The Hedgehog’s mum in a game.’ But much like Wilson, her stellar performance in Still Wakes The Deep opened her up to a new generation of fans and earned her a Bafta. ‘The Bafta win was overwhelming and I felt very much at home that night in the gaming community. I guess they still need actors for the games to exist. At least for now! Not long till Suno does it all, but Suno disnae know how cunts spoke in Glesga in 1976.’

>> 30 THE LIST September 2026

Top 5

Must-play Scottish games

Grease Trap ’99

APARTMENT STORY

A one-act play in videogame form, Sean Wenham’s grimy 2024 drama breathes the violent urbanity of smalltown living. Playing like The Sims directed by Shane Meadows, it revolves around a gun, a girl and a down-at-heel twentysomething as he manages his mental and physical health, fails to pay his leccy bill and fends off a violent psychopath knocking down his door. While rough around the edges, it features ingenious moments of high tension and a compelling slow-burn atmosphere.

GREASE TRAP ’99

Play time: Planet Of Lana and (above) Thick As Thieves; Siobhan Wilson (below left), Cara Ellison (below right); (previous page, from top) Grand Theft Auto, Silent Hill: Townfall, Still Wakes The Deep

While those studios are clearly enthusiastic about Scotland, Ellison has reservations about Scottish representation. ‘There are either studios that are not based in Scotland or studios that are not fundamentally filled with Scottish people that will make certain types of games about Scotland that I find kind of annoying,’ she admits. ‘There’s the American idea of what a Scottish person is, which is a dwarf in Dungeons & Dragons. And then you’ve got people who want to make quite twee games about the Highland experience and how beautiful our countryside is, or that we swear a lot, which is fair enough. But what I would like to see is the central belt part of Scotland’s identity come to the fore; that pop art, Trainspotting-style of urban, exciting, exhilarating experiences. That aspect of Scotland is really badly represented.’

Ellison herself has been part of the push to incorporate underexplored sides of Scotland’s architecture with her work on stealth action heist game Thick As Thieves. ‘I did design work on that and that’s why it’s basically Edinburgh. I based all of the background work on Edinburgh at the turn of the century, so there’s an end-of-the-Enlightenment vibe, where it’s going into industrial revolution-era Edinburgh.’

Baglow, meanwhile, thinks the industry is missing out on the chance to channel Scotland’s unique identity into gaming. ‘Games can be so insular. The only germination we do with other mediums are IP swaps, like the crimes that Electronic Arts committed with Lord Of The Rings, James Bond and Harry Potter in the 2000s. But we can change that in Scotland. Why has nobody made a game from the books of Iain M Banks?’

Silent Hill: Townfall is released on Thursday 24 September and Grand Theft Auto 6 on Thursday 19 November.

Fully voiced in Gaelic, James Muirhead’s job simulator aims to capture the low-rent grime of working in a good old-fashioned chip shop (that also happens to harbour a Lovecraftian horror in the basement).

It’s still in development but this darkly comic look at urban Scottish living has gained headlines from the BBC and is one of the few games to receive funding from Creative Scotland.

JUDERO

Jack King-Spooner and Talha Kaya’s stop-motion action-adventure draws on the long history of the Scottish Borders to create a woozy and hypnotic experience that sits somewhere on a continuum between A Link To The Past and Lynchian video art.

Self-consciously lo-fi, it embraces the nightmarish surrealism of Celtic legends.

JUNKSTER

Breathing the air of classic PlayStation 2 platformers, Dundee-based Stormcloud Games has forged a gorgeous cel-shaded explore ’em up about a robot tasked with cleaning up debris on a newly colonised planet. Adding some novelty to proceedings is a crafting system to aid traversal and combat, and a vibrant comic book style.

VIEWFINDER

Literally altering your perception in every level, Viewfinder gives you a magical instant camera that changes the environment in novel ways, with fiendish puzzles blocking your progress at every turn. It’s a little bit like Echochrome and has clearly taken its cues from Portal, but forges its own personality with colourful presentation and ceaseless invention.

September 2026 THE LIST 31

SCOT TISH GAMING

There’s more to the Scottish games industry than Grand Theft Auto. Kevin Fullerton has booted up Steam and found five pioneering titles from indie developers

32 THE LIST September 2026

E D I N B U R G H / G L A S G OW O P E N 7 DAYS A W E E K

If a bit of leaf-peeping and wild salmon leaping has always been on your autumnal bucket list, but you’ve been put off by the lack of 12-course tasting menus in the countryside, buckle up buttercups. Falls By Orry Shand is a beautiful new restaurant from the lauded eponymous chef, where diners can enjoy a luxurious and meticulously planned immersive tasting experience in the glorious Banchory countryside. It’s very much a ‘place yourself in chef’s hands’ type of affair, with no menu details published ahead of a three-hour, intimate meal based around stunning Scottish produce. (Jo Laidlaw) n Bridge Of Feugh, Banchory; fallsbyos.com

eat & drink

FALLS BY ORRY SHAND

PICTURE: KOBRIE MEDIA/FALLS BY ORRY SHAND

September 2026 THE LIST 33

EAT & DRINK

A cut above With meat becoming a treat in cashstrapped times, the choice for many comes down to cost versus quality.

But Suzy Pope discovers Butchery At Bowhouse in Fife’s East Neuk are fighting the corner for craft butchery, arguing their case on price, animal welfare and taste

E

Euan Simpson

uan Simpson is one of only 36 qualified craft butchers in Scotland. ‘I learned butchery here,’ he says, referring to Butchery At Bowhouse on the Balcaskie Estate in Fife’s East Neuk. ‘I used to be a supermarket manager, then I started working at Bowhouse and loved it. To me, it’s an art.

So I treated it like a real skilled profession and studied for a diploma in craft butchery.’ Simpson talks about meat cleaving with the precision of a surgeon, following the seams of the animal’s body and understanding intricate anatomy as well as knowing which sauces and spices bring out the herbal undertones of lamb or richness of beef, and how long to cook a sirloin steak.

If butchery is an art, it’s a dying one. Pre-packed meat, wrapped in plastic and filled with water, is just too convenient and, on the surface, seems cheaper than a carefully considered cut from a butcher. In a world where we’re all time-poor and a cost-of-living crisis has pushed any meat into the treat category, it’s small wonder consumers choose convenience and cost over quality. However, Sam Parsons, estate manager at Balcaskie, urges everyone to ‘take water weight into account, then price-check us. We’re the same as the budget supermarkets.’

34 THE LIST September 2026

Parsons leads seasonal Grass To Grill tours of the estate, where visitors come face-to-face with the Red Lincolnshire cows and Tamworth pigs in the paddocks, visiting the butchery before sitting down to a long-table feast of wood-fired mutton and beef. It’s a bold move, showing off the entire process from happily grazing cattle in the fields to facing their meat on the plate. But Balcaskie doesn’t shy away from honesty. At the butchery, there’s a window into the ageing room and carcasses are cut up in the open behind the counter, rather than taken behind a screen or to a back room. It’s no doubt confronting for some: a flash of feathers or ears as meat is prepped in front of you. Maybe not looking your food in the eye is worth the sacrifice of quality and taste.

And yet. There are no nitrates in Bowhouse’s bacon and every part of the animal is used and treated with care. ‘Even the mince is dry-aged,’ says Simpson. ‘Around 75% of the UK’s black pudding is made with imported dried ox blood. Ours is made with fresh.’

The Butchery shares a site with a huddle of other small-scale producers.

As well as buying a cut of meat directly from the butcher counter, you can sample rich black pudding and deliciously smoky steak at Baern Café And

side dishes Ailsa Sheldon finds a slew of new ventures taking over established locations as we round up the latest Glasgow and Edinburgh openings

K

Asu

Bakery next door. Their menu changes weekly, if not daily, depending on what’s coming out of the fields, veg patches and butchery that day.

You’ll often find mutton, aged (of course) and cooked until tender in a fluffy focaccia sandwich, or Lincoln Red (the cow of choice at Balcaskie) beef shin, rose-pink in the middle, brought to life with sour and aniseedy fermented fennel. The difference in taste from a watery packet of diced beef from any supermarket is truly mind-blowing.

People like Simpson are resuscitating the art of butchery across Scotland.

A carefully crafted cut of meat from a skilled butcher undoubtedly tastes better than any factory-hacked supermarket offering. According to both Simpson and Parsons, the difference in cost can be a lot less than you think and nothing is wasted. Their approach to butchery isn’t about hiding the mess, but showing the work and skill involved, honouring the animal and feeding people well, even as we choose to eat less meat overall. balcaskie.com September 2026 THE LIST 35

EAT & DRINK

icking off in Glasgow, The Liquor Store has opened on St Vincent Street. From the same team as Tabac, Devil Of Brooklyn and The Last Bookstore, it promises comfort food and cocktails in a cosy bottle-lined bar. Sagar Massey, the chef behind Cardonald’s Angeethi, has launched his first city-centre restaurant, Kalinga, on West Regent Street (replacing Grilled By Ajay Kumar). And Sprigg’s salad domination continues with a fourth site on Byres Road offering their combo of soups, salads and focaccia.

In Edinburgh it’s another new opening (or at least a new direction) for Nico Simeone as what was Six By Nico, then Somewhere By Nico, becomes a third site for new concept Lennox (do keep up). The focus is on open-fire cooking, dry-aged meat and fish, and sharing dishes with a casual late-night feel. Gulp Ramen, which preceded Mirin, has returned to Leith Walk with a new venue (walk-ins only) in the spot recently vacated by Churrito. Also new in Leith is French bistro and wine bar Chez Bernard on The Shore, just along the road from other newish pub The Keelson. Nearby, Asu joins the gang at Brown’s of Leith.

It’s from the team behind Glasgow’s Five March, with chef David Cleary at the helm. Expect Asian-inspired dishes like pho ga with poached chicken and kimchi salad, alongside Five March classics including fried chicken sandwiches with katsu and hispi cabbage, and their famous roast spuds. The lack of trams due to the Princes Street fire has hit Leith hard. With the street set to reopen by the start of September, it’s all the more reason to get down there and try somewhere new.

36 THE LIST September 2026

BISTRO

WHIRLYBIRD

EAT & DRINK

PICTURE: ALIX MCINTOSH

To succeed in the heart of touristville, Edinburgh’s restaurants tend to follow a bit of a blueprint: a promise of historic pedigree; quick table flipping; and long, unadventurous and often wipeable menus that definitely feature haggis. No surprise, locals tend to avoid them. That’s perhaps why there’s been lots of buzz about Whirlybird on Victoria Street; the word is ‘it’s in the Old Town, but actually good’.

Once you’ve squeezed between the folk queuing for the hog roast and the Harry Potter shop either side, Whirlybird has, despite the name, a relaxed atmosphere. Led by former Herringbone operations manager Ash Bairstow and head chef Lucia Gregusova, it’s set over four rooms and two floors. The 250-year-old building (that housed Maison Bleue for decades) has been stripped back to expose brick walls, stone arches and a listed spiral staircase. Cocktails are expertly shaken at a long, curved bar, with a tempting list by Jono McDowell (ex-Panda & Sons).

For lunch, chowder is a treat, with mussels, prawns and smoked haddock in a creamy potato and leek broth, split with herb oil: a worthy twist on Cullen skink served with Freedom Bakery sourdough toast. A big salad of smoked mackerel and marinated new potatoes comes with pickled fennel, and the crunch of coriander seeds and smoked almonds. It’s fresh, filling and well-balanced. A side of broccoli just misses the mark, the florets falling apart and a miso butter that doesn’t deliver the anticipated savoury note, but it’s a minor quibble.

Overall, it’s an excellent lunch spot and worth noting that while the dinner menu adds a few dishes, happily there’s no jump in price.

You may have to squeeze through the crowds, but this new spot is definitely worth a whirl. (Ailsa Sheldon) n 36–38 Victoria Street, Edinburgh; whirlybirdedinburgh.co.uk; average price £30 for two courses.

ITALIAN

CELENTANO’S

PICTURE: NAOMI VANCE PHOTOGRAPHY

After spending a few years in a hotel close to the cathedral, Anna and Dean Parker announced their well-received (and Bib Gourmand-awarded) Italian-inspired restaurant was moving due to the sale of that site. It’s taken several months to reopen in Arthouse, the refurbished Abode operation in Glasgow’s city centre, again throwing themselves at the mercy of a hotelier.

A hammered-metal bar dominates, bending round to a semiopen kitchen, the minimal aesthetic extending to stoneware crockery. Discreet half-window curtains don’t screen off the exhausting gym shenanigans opposite though: it’s not the prestigious locale of their old gaff.

Cocktails include a super Negroni hitting the aperitif spot, while a well-curated wine list includes decent, good-value kegged options. The food menu is super tight (way too tight on the set-price ‘chef’s menu’, which groups of 7+ must use). The à la carte is given over to antipasti, including wonderful little doughnuts filled with smoked cod and topped with kimchi for a spiky counterpoint. Primi pasta comes big or small, including a courgette-dominated agnolotti, in a rich, vibrant green, creamy sauce. It’s the dish that lingers, impeccably prepped and balanced.

Secondi include trout from renowned company Kames, dayboat monkfish and malt-glazed beef, slow-cooked and joyously tender yet retaining welcome fatty pops and pinky hues. Accompaniments are minimal: beef gets half a charred shallot and some creamy greens, but the additional potato strati (it’s that or salad) is over-generous: three slabs of addictive, crisp-edged, potato-layered luxe chips. The reimagined affogato has cold-brew coffee sitting in malted barley gelato, atop a mousse made with local Bare Bones chocolate. (Jay Thundercliffe) n 129 Bath Street, Glasgow; celentanosglasgow.com; average price £36 for two courses.

September 2026 THE LIST 37

Ask EADith

EAT & DRINK

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’s trying to help an old pal reconnect with his youth, minus the presence of small plates: a tough call around Glasgow’s Hydro

Dear EADith An old friend is visiting soon and we’re off to an event at the Hydro.

He’s a kind and sensible fellow who misses Glasgow dearly, so I want an evening that’s reassuringly familiar. But every restaurant we recall from back in the day has been refitted, rebranded or RIP. Please help a couple of old souls get their swagger back.

BlueMoon09

PICTURES: PAUL MCLEAN

Dear BlueMoon09, To make this a suitable homecoming for the ages, Auntie EADith must first understand what type of event you’re off to. A quick swatch at the listings pulls up Niall Horan (surely not?) and The Pussycat Dolls (surely not x 2). You describe your pal as gentle and sensible, which has me homing straight in on a certain former US president who also shares your liking for Blue Moon: I knew it! You’re going to An Evening With Barack Obama.

Either way, your request is a no-brainer: get booked into Fanny Trollopes. It’s been on the Finnieston strip since before the strip was a twinkle in a hipster’s eye, opening back in 2003 when a certain future POTUS was still teaching law in Chicago. It’s a bistro/brasserie affair, where you and friend will get a starter and a main, and plates will arrive in that order. I know. With two simple rows of tables (always ask for a booth) and an art deco-ish scheme of chrome and green, it never feels dated, perhaps because it was never meant to be trendy. Visiting dignitaries (I know 44 is not your plus one, but a girl can dream) will love its pleasing balance of heavyweight Scottish proteins (lamb, rabbit, cod, trout) with lots of global, modern nods to keep things relevant.

The last time I visited, I enjoyed a glossy, braised duck leg backed by a Moroccan chorus of couscous, pistachio dukkah and carrot purée that simply sang off the plate, while my veggie dining companion (don’t tell Mr E) raved about the simple joy of a shallot tarte tatin. The tone is easy, details are effortless and nothing is fussy for fussy’s sake; the perfect place for two old pals. (As told to David Kirkwood)  Fanny Trollopes, 1066 Argyle Street, Glasgow; fannytrollopes.co.uk; around £30 for two courses.

BAR FILES Creative folks reveal their top watering hole

ACTOR JENNIFER NEIL PICTURE: AMANDA MACNAMEE

It’s actually quite difficult to choose just one place in Glasgow as a favourite to wet one’s whistle. The State Bar on Holland Street, just off Sauchiehall Street, springs to mind if you love a cosy atmosphere and old tales. It has the most amazing vintage photographs and posters on the walls and is steeped in so much history, with its famous horseshoe bar, gorgeous stained-glass windows, an old-fashioned fireplace and a framed map of the city on the ceiling. It also has live music and stand-up comedy. If you like cask ales or whiskies, this is the place for you. They do a good Guinness too, just saying!  Jennifer Neil appears in Hen Night Horror, touring from Tuesday 29 September– Saturday 31 October, imaginetheatre.co.uk/hen-night-horror

TipList

Our TipLists suggest the places worth knowing about in different themes, categories and locations. This month, we’ve been pounding the streets to find the best plantbased spots in Glasgow and Edinburgh

PLANT-BASED PICTURE: HARRISON REID

THE 78

THE GLAD CAFÉ

1006a Pollokshaws Road; thegladcafe.co.uk This laid-back, music-minded, community-loving spot is a great place to hang any time of day, morphing from relaxed café to vibrant night-time bar with gigs in the backroom venue space. Food is all well-handled vegan offerings ranging from big plantbased burgers and mac and cheese to excellent crisp-based thin pizzas.

MONO

12 Kings Court; monocafebar.com Mono has kept music fans and vegans happy with good sounds and animal-free food since 2002.

Dishes are inventive, tasty and generous, featuring to-fish and chips, seitan burgers, and the Glasgow classic: deep-fried battered pizza crunch. There’s plenty of live gigs and in-house record shop Monorail Music provides the soundtrack.

SUISSI VEGAN KITCHEN

494 Dumbarton Road; suissivegankitchen.co.uk Since 2019, this family-run diner has kept droves of locals and tempted travellers very happy with their enticing Asian fusion delights. Food is pretty, vibrant and packing a flavour punch, from spring rolls and gyoza to noodle broths, tofu curries, Chinese stirfries, sweet fritters and more. They also mix up some mean Asian-tinged cocktails.

SYLVAN RESTAURANT AND BAR

20 Woodlands Road; sylvanglasgow.com Co-founded in 2021 by the former owner and the head chef at The Hug And Pint, Sylvan is more than just one of the best meat-free spots in town. There’s a warm, worn-in feel and an enticing menu of clever, globally inspired small plates, with most suitable for vegans. A big focus on wines includes a good selection of naturals. (Jay Thundercliffe)

Edinburgh ANTOJITOS CANTINA

Paradise Palms, 41 Lothian Street; instagram.com/antojitoscantina From the Antojitos team, this is very much a handson experience as you tuck into tacos, quesadillas and other Mexican classics on a 100% plant-based and nut-free adventure. Credible meat substitutes really work, while taco wins include soya carnitas with a chilli-citrus ping.

HENDERSONS

7–13 Barclay Place; hendersonsrestaurant.com Veggie with excellent vegan choices, this family-run spot has changed location and passed through the generations since 1962. Wildflower-speckled dishes of salt-baked celeriac and foraged mushroom risotto don’t just look the part; they prove natural plant-based trumps faux-meat menus any day.

NÓN VIET VEGAN

23a Brougham Place; instagram.com/nonvietvegan Nón Viet is fully vegan, but each flavour pairing and meat substitute has been so well considered that it can be hard to notice. Summer rolls are light and refreshing, while warming curries and noodle bowls are filling and flavoursome. For lunch, there’s a great selection of banh mi.

THE BLACKBIRD

37–39 Leven Street, Edinburgh; theblackbirdedinburgh.co.uk If you’ve been to The Blackbird before, you already know that the Bruntsfield spot has an excellent outside space, great drinks and a wonderful team. It’s also recently had a facelift and is looking fabulous: same spot, fresh look, new menu. That’s an excuse for a return visit next time the sun appears.

HERRINGBONE

1–3 Westgate, North Berwick; herringbone-northberwick.co.uk Just half an hour by train from Edinburgh, beautiful North Berwick is sandwiched between countryside and coast. There are many good spots, but Herringbone has great food, quality local beers and decent cocktails after a day exploring the outdoors.

UBIQUITOUS CHIP

12 Ashton Lane, Glasgow; ubiquitouschip.co.uk An absolute institution: if you haven’t been to the Chip, then you simply must.

The Wee Chip is a great spot to drop by for a malt, while the larger space is part-restaurant, part-botanical garden.

The food is top-tier but don’t skip the cocktails or rooftop either.

SORA DIANA

19–21 Causewayside; thevegansora.com Special occasion-appropriate Sora Diana is split into three dining areas, with comfy seats and plenty of natural daylight. It’s Italian with clear Roman leanings: carbonara and cacio e pepe are all present and correct alongside pinsa (Rome’s oval version of pizza).

SOUL VEGAN

46 West Richmond Street; soulvegan.uk With links to the beloved Kampong Ah Lee, this wee vegan Malaysian is picture-perfect, with attentive staff and a street-food slanted menu that leans towards deeply comforting, homely dishes.

Popular with the city’s student population, this is a place to fill up for a reasonable price, while receiving a cuddle in plant-based bowl-form. (Ailsa Sheldon, Jo Laidlaw, Paul McLean, Suzy Pope)

The Blackbird

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

September April 2026 THE LIST 39

EAT & DRINK

Antojitos Cantina

Glasgow 10–14 Kelvinhaugh Street; the78.co.uk This sister to Mono and Stereo blends chilled country pub and lively metro hangout, with outdoor seating and a big bar for plenty of local brews.

Excellent vegan food is courtesy of pop-up Mexican street fooders Antojitos, with headlining tacos lovingly constructed and satisfyingly faux-meaty.

PICTURE: DANIELLE BAKKES

Sylvan

Hendrick’s Brand Ambassador Calum Fraser joins us in celebrating all things plant-based with bars that tip a nod to Mother Nature, through location, outdoor space or green-fingered vibes

40 THE LIST September 2026

travel & shop

SEPHORA Prestige beauty retailer Sephora opened its doors in Scotland this summer, with new locations (labelled ‘temples of beauty’) in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Stocking all major brands, Sephora’s stores also offer gift-wrapping, engraving services and beauty consultations. These aren’t just any old consultations: their Scottish outlets are among the first to utilise Beauty Scan technology, allowing advisors to analyse clients’ skin for personalised advice and product recommendations. Customers can earn exclusive rewards, surprise gifts and early access to special events via the MySephora loyalty programme. (Isy Santini) n St James’ Quarter, Edinburgh; Silverburn Shopping Centre, Glasgow; sephora.co.uk; instagram.com/sephorauk September 2026 THE LIST 41

PICTURE: SEPPELTSFIELD

TRAVEL & SHOP

WanderList: Barossa When it comes to wine, South Australia is spoiled for choice, with 18 wine regions peppered across the state. Jo Laidlaw visits perhaps the most famous, the Barossa Valley, for a taster of its renowned food and drink scene

PICTURE: DRAGAN RADOCAJ

42 THE LIST September 2026

PICTURE: DUY DASH

PICTURE: SOUTH AUSTRALIA TOURISM COMMISSION

PICTURE: SOUTH AUSTRALIA TOURISM COMMISSION

J

ust an hour or so away from Adelaide, South Australia’s capital, lies Barossa. It’s an important name in the world of winemaking, planted with vines to create fortified wines that wouldn’t spoil after a long sea voyage back to the heart of the British Empire. In modern times, it became synonymous with big, bold reds. But a trip to today’s Barossa makes for a fascinating glimpse into current wine production, with big and small producers to explore.

It’s made even more charming by the tiny towns that dot the mainly rural landscape, like Tanunda. Home to around 4500 people, there’s a distinctly Germanic feel, thanks to Lutheran settlers who moved there to escape religious persecution in the 1840s. Built around a single main road, there are plenty of quirks to experience like the Tanunda Kegel Club’s skittles alley (established 1858), The Tanunda Town Band (the oldest brass band in the southern hemisphere) and Apex Bakery, where they’ve been making German pretzels and bakes daily since 1924.

Barossa is poorly served by public transport: another good reason to base yourself somewhere like Tanunda with its walkable breakfast and lunch options. So even if you normally despise anything that looks like organised fun, a tour is a great way to get around the vineyards.

Or go bougie and book private transfers from Wine Legends, where Ben Shillito shows off the best of the region with plenty of insider tips.

But back to the wine itself. Get orientated at Seppeltsfield Barossa, a slick, long-established estate that illustrates the region’s history alongside polished tasting experiences. It’s also home to Fino, one of the best restaurants around. David Franz Wines is a lower-key rustic cellar door, with a deck looking out over his beautiful vineyard.

Franz is wine-making royalty and his left-of-field approach creates small-scale wines that blend the best of old and new Barossa.

The Cutting is led by rising star Belinda van Eyssen, who won Barossa Winemaker Of The Year 2026. Her small-batch wines are rooted in respect for the First Nations people who originally tended the land, creating light, cool and contemporary vintages. Or head to Wonderground for a combination of winery, art gallery and gorgeous grounds; Mirus and Wonderground wines are on pour in their renovated barn where you can also take art lessons.

Maggie Beer is the South Australian equivalent of Nigella Lawson and her eponymous Farm Shop is a sprawling spot where you can take part in cocktail-making or cookery classes before shopping for local wine and produce to take back for dinner. Or head to Vintners Bar & Grill for a seafood-heavy menu that epitomises modern Australian cooking with a wine list to get lost in. barossa.com

on your doorstep Head outdoors for a cultural fix as Lucy Ribchester selects three public art highlights to gaze upon across the central belt PICTURE: MICHAEL JULINGS

THE DREAMER Hidden in the foliage of George Square Gardens, this peaceful, ethereal statue was created by sculptor Chris Hall in 1997 as a tribute to Edinburgh graduate and Jungian psychoanalyst, Dr Winifred Rushforth. It’s split into two pieces, representing the self and the shadow, with the former emerging, eyes-closed, hair flowing, from the stone. n atlasobscura.com/places/the-dreamer

BOW DOWN, HONOUR THE ROOTS

ST NINIAN’S FIFE EARTH PROJECT

I

PICTURE: IAN MCCRACKEN/WELCOME TO FIFE

my favourite holiday

Just off the M90 in Fife lies an ambitious piece of public art that lays claim to being Scotland’s largest. The landscape had already been carved up by the local mining industry when American-born artist Charles Jencks was commissioned to mould it into representations of continents, depicting Scottish migration. Sadly, the funders went bankrupt before it was completed, but it’s still a fascinating display of textures and Jencks’ trademark curious geometry. n fifearttrail.co.uk/artwork/st-ninians-fife-earth-project

Comedian Josh Pugh looks back fondly on getting gastro and being hospitalised on holiday

don’t think I knew you could go on a holiday that wasn’t booked as a package until I was 25. Even now as a fully grown man, a part of me panics when I land in a foreign country and I’m not immediately greeted by someone in brightly coloured t-shirt with a clipboard telling me which coach to get on. When I was seven, my mum, dad, sister and I flew to Mallorca for such a holiday. I collapsed on night two while walking up the stairs after an evening dancing to Whigfield. When I woke up, I was in a Spanish hospital with my mum.

A bad case of food poisoning and severe dehydration meant that our week in the sun was spent in hospital. My dad stayed with my sister in-resort, terrified to spend any money, unsure our insurance covered medical care. The saving grace was that the 1996 Olympics were on the portable TV on the ward and I spent seven days watching people from countries I’d never heard of doing sports I’ve never heard of and I loved every second. Eventually my shits stopped being green and I had to leave. Four stars.

St Ninian’s Fife Earth Project

Josh Pugh: Ha Ha, Yeah Sound, The Glee Club, Glasgow, Thursday 3 September; Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, Sunday 6 September.

September 2026 THE LIST 43

TRAVEL & SHOP

This homage to Glasgow’s South American Indigenous communities was created as part of COP26 by a group of artists led by Fearless Collective. It depicts Isidro Sangama Sangama of the Kichwa people and Puyr Tembé of the Tembé people, and is part of Glasgow’s awesome mural trail, a treasure hunt of vivid art covering greyfield sites and tenement end walls. n citycentremuraltrail.co.uk

DISCOVER THE MONKEY OLD FASHIONED

Artwork Final size = (H)280mm x (W)210mm Artwork set at 100% of final size=(H)280mm x (W)210mm Live area = (H)264mm x (W)194mm

000_folio_f67_monkey-shoulder.indd 1

SCOTTISH FOOD & DRINK SEPTEMBER From farm to fork, Scottish Food & Drink September brings Scotland's incredible food story to life.

Discover inspiring case studies and find out how you can support and celebrate local producers. foodanddrink.scot/september-2026

Every Bite Tells a Story.

44 THE LIST September 2026

13/04/2026 17:14:40

Fine print Ellie Hodesdon, founder of East End Press, chats to Rachel Morrell about her passion for all things paper and the joy of making creations that are treasured

B

TRAVEL & SHOP

ased in Glasgow, East End Press is a design studio created by Ellie Hodesdon specialising in highquality, tactile decorations that are homemade in nature. ‘I’ve always been inspired by printmaking, folk art and handmade things. I think that all feeds into the style of the work,’ says Hodesdon. After graduating from Glasgow School Of Art, she spent some time abroad before returning to the UK and beginning to create at Glasgow Print Studio. ‘I realised all the products I was making that were by-products of the prints, like garlands and decorations, were more popular than the prints.’

Now made sustainably in Jaipur, there is a special quality to the production process that adds to the aesthetic. ‘The paper itself is entirely old, reused textile; there’s no singleuse or first-use paper in anything and none of the packaging or the products are anything other than paper,’ she explains.

‘People love that the products are sustainably made, but also their tangibility. They have that printery, inky quality of being made by hand. You can literally feel and touch and smell the ink on them.’

With a vivid array of unique screenprinted flora and fauna lining the walls of her newly renovated shop, East End Press looks prettier than ever, giving Hodesdon a bright view of the future for both the brand and its products. ‘The shop is something that’s very much been a passion project for us as a team, somewhere people can come and see it all together.

I hope when people put up their Christmas decorations and they have one or two ornaments from us, it becomes their favorite thing to get out of the loft every year. They become a sort of heirloom and that’s lovely to think about.’

427 Great Western Road, Glasgow; eastendpress.com; instagram.com/eastendpress

This Must Be The Place

shop talk THIS MUST BE THE PLACE Colourful mugs, unique homeware, novelty ornaments and plenty more besides make up the Instagram-worthy displays in one of Glasgow’s most popular gift shops. This Must Be The Place also hosts a range of one-off workshops. Craft your own striped lampshade one month, then hand-bind a hemp-leaf journal the next. n 707 Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow; shopthismustbetheplace.co.uk; instagram.com/thismustbetheplace.glasgow

AN INDEPENDENT ZEBRA This maze-like shop is far bigger than it first appears and boasts a gift for every occasion, stocking over 250 UK-based artists and makers. Looking for a housewarming

Stuck for present ideas? Isy Santini has the answer with her pick of the gift shop crop

present? Try one of their upcycled chairs or botanical coasters. A baby shower gift? Opt for a handmade bib or dinosaur-print romper. n 88–92 Raeburn Place, Edinburgh; anindependentzebra.com; instagram.com/ indiezeb

HALIBUT AND HERRING With its bright colours and tropical greenery, dropping into Halibut And Herring is like stepping into summer. Their selection of gifts includes quirky books, intricate prints and bold jewellery. Don’t leave without browsing their vibrant ceramics which are sure to liven up any room. n 108 Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh; halibutandherring.co.uk; instagram.com/ halibutandherring September 2026 THE LIST 45

46 THE LIST September 2026

‘Life’s not fair, it’s fabulous’ runs the tagline for this glittery musical which has Christina Aguilera on exec producer duties (yep, her songs can be heard too). It’s not all just glamour and banging tunes though, as they’ve even crafted a story into the mix: Ali heads to New York in search of her mum, but instead finds herself drawn into a dazzling underground scene that will, you guessed it, change her life forever. (Brian Donaldson) n King’s Theatre, Glasgow, Tuesday 8–Saturday 19 September.

going out

BURLESQUE THE MUSICAL

September 2026 THE LIST 47

“

That was a moment I

• f il

m •f

f il m

For more than four decades, Juliette Binoche has been thrilling international arthouse audiences while also enjoying mainstream success with The English Patient and Chocolat.

She’s also scored Oscar, Bafta and César awards along the way, as well as acting prizes at the Venice, Berlin and Cannes film festivals. In her latest film, Queen At Sea, she plays a woman struggling with her mother’s dementia. She talks to James Mottram about bonding with co-stars, sex scene taboos and the film that almost killed her

ilm • PREVIEWS

What was your initial reaction to the script for Lance Hammer’s Queen At Sea? I read it and loved it, even though I thought it could evolve.

But I met with Lance on Zoom, and I loved the man.

He was very quiet, almost like a monk, and his need of cinema is so strong . . . I could feel that. So it really was pulling my interest, especially the way he was open to change things and wanted me to be part of the evolution of the script.

That included an extensive rehearsal period, quite rare in movies, with you as the daughter to the dementia-suffering character, played

by Anna Calder-Marshall and stepdaughter to Tom Courtenay’s Martin. Did that help you all bond? Yes. We were knitting relationships, with Annie and Tom’s sense of humour and Annie’s giggles and my giggles. It all came into a feeling of family. So there was two weeks of rehearsing, and then Lance postponed the shoot for one week for more prep, and I thought it was so brave of him because he was the producer, putting his own money into the film. That really touched me so much.

The story deals with the complex topic of sexual consent between a husband and his dementia-afflicted wife. What was your take on it? You don’t have a right answer. I mean, my character is right and she’s wrong, same as Tom’s character. The character of Annie wants to have sex. So you wonder, why not have it? It’s very complex because our mind wants to say no. She’s not conscious because she has dementia. But what do we know about dementia? There’s no answer.

How do you feel about showing older people making love in movies? In Hollywood it seems taboo? It could be beautiful, two old people making love. I mean, I don’t see it as being something horrible. Not at all. On the contrary, it’s quite moving.

There’s a care, there’s a tenderness . . . it’s not about physical attraction, it’s about something else and it becomes deeper.

48 THE LIST September 2026

GOING OUT

t I almost died. And I chose life Tom Courtenay told me that he was very taken with you in The English Patient. Which films of his were you particularly taken with?

I wanted to know everything about Doctor Zhivago, of course. So he told me many, many stories. He’s very theatrical and I love it. Annie too . . . they had lots of stories.

Aside from The English Patient, which won you an Oscar, what do you see as the key turning points in your career? The Lovers On The Bridge [Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf]. . . that was a moment I almost died. And I chose life. No matter what, I chose life. And I thought, ‘I will never kill myself for a film’. So that was a turning point. In Three Colours Blue, for example, even though the subject matter was quite heavy, we did it with such lightness and joy. It felt contradictory. But it just was so easy to make. There was no struggle. And some other films, you feel it’s gonna be so easy and it is not.

You became president of the European Film Academy in 2024. Do you feel European cinema is as strong as ever? Yes. European films are very strong in the world. And very unique. I love the fact that we’re so different, all of us, and still we find a unity. But it needs to be, I think, enhanced even more with the EFA, with the academy, and that’s really what I felt during the ceremony [of the European Film

It’s one of the key traits of your career, working with artists all over the world. What does it bring you? I always love working with people you think you’re not going to be that close to, because of different traditions and different educations, but it feels very close. It’s not the language or the country that make a big gap. As human beings, you can travel around the world and you see that. The big themes are common.

Queen At Sea is in cinemas from Friday 18 September.

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You never stop working. What is next for you? I’m starting a film [North Loire] on Monday. It’s a second film from a French director, Antoine Chevrollier.

It’s a secondary role I’m playing. I wanted to be part of that family and so I’m shooting two weeks there. And I’m doing a film [Merci, Charlotte] at the end of August with Berkun Oya. He’s a Turkish director. I like the script he wrote.

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Awards in January 2026]. I was so thrilled that Mark Cousins curated it . . . concentrating more on cinema and using presenters that are related to the job that they’re presenting. An editor for the editor award, for example. I think it’s so important. You understand that cinema is made with a lot of different artforms . . . many people together. When I said I’ve never felt as European as that night, I really felt it and it felt wonderful.

OIDHCHE NAM BÀRD

Ingrid Henderson

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The start of autumn brings together poets, musicians and the digital arts as Oidhche nam Bàrd unfolds at Glasgow’s Tramway, where Uist-born Rona MacDonald is based as Gaelic arts producer for Glasgow Life. MacDonald has created an event that aims to weave together Gaelic voices from the past and the words of acclaimed living poets. Contemporary work will also be put in historical perspective, with a retrospective piece written

by Ingrid Henderson, performed by a cast including Outlander’s Gillebrìde MacIlleMhaoil.

‘I hope that it will make a positive statement on Gaelic traditions, celebrating the richness, continuity and contemporary vitality of our cultural scene,’ says MacDonald of the event, co-curated with Scotland’s Makar, Peter Mackay. A hallmark of MacDonald’s curatorship is the event’s immersive contemporary setting, with a clear focus on a Glasgow Gaelic audience. ‘The project aims to increase the visibility and accessibility of Gaelic for Gaelic speakers, learners, young people and wider audiences, while supporting new artistic commissions, cross-genre collaboration and the creation of legacy content for future exhibition and digital engagement.’

Current Gaelic Bard, Anne Frater, and previous incumbents Martin MacIntyre, Niall O’Gallagher and Sandy Donaldson Jones (who have all appeared in recent anthology Sradagan san Iarmailt from Francis Boutle Publishers) will all appear.

The project also gives an opportunity to emerging digital artist Cashlin MacKenzie, who will add visual flair to the programme.

Poets are working with MacKenzie to represent their work visually through art that will be projected alongside their spoken words. (Marcas Mac an Tuairneir) n Tramway, Glasgow, Thursday 10 September.

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THE CEREMONY

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Depressingly, George Orwell’s 1984 (Dundee Rep, Wednesday 30 September–Saturday 10 October) never seems to lose its relevancy. In Chris Hannan’s new adaptation directed by Dominic Hill, Jack Tarlton plays Winston, Jessica Hardwick is Julia and Irene Macdougall takes on the role of O’Brien, with audiences ticking off the many iconic phrases that have long become part of our everyday language.

Before their recent Pitlochry run, Shirley Henderson and Alan Cumming had last performed on a stage together a mere 40 years ago. Written by the late Oliver Emanuel, A History Of Paper (Dundee Rep, Wednesday 16–Saturday 19 September) contains multitudes but is also simply a musical about a man, a woman and the small scraps of paper that quietly add up to a life together. Not for nothing did PP Arnold (Whitehall Theatre, Friday 18 September) call her autobiography Soul Survivor.

From starting out in the Ike & Tina Turner Revue at the age of just 17, she went on to have incredible highs and appalling lows. Here, she lets loose with a new tour featuring classic songs and amazing stories. (Brian Donaldson)

BBC broadcaster, author, actor, musician, DJ and List columnist, Mr Galloway flicks through some music listings to choose top September gigs in variously sized rooms and across different genres . . .

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ometimes we need take stock of how lucky we are to live in a world where Jonsi and his gang of ethereal Icelandic elves continue to perform and record their genuinely exquisite music.

Probably the closest emotional and sonic equivalent to experiencing the Cocteau Twins live in this day and age, Sigur Rós are forever triumphant in their grandiose, melodic melancholy and carve out new glacial soundscapes with every album and tour. I’ve witnessed this many times and they always bring something inspirational to the stage. Head along to the SEC Armadillo (Wednesday 2 September) and immerse yourself in all things epic, cinematic and hopelandic.

As summer fades to autumn, it doesn’t mean festivals need disappear. They simply move indoors . . . and that’s no bad thing. Originating years ago as the brainchild of The Black Angels, Austin Psych Fest (now renamed Levitation) is a swirling, stained-glass window into the past, present and future of mind-bending, psychedelic rock’n’roll.

The idea has now spread across the world for those who can’t make it over to enjoy the outsider side of weirdo Texas. With events happening in UK cities such as Manchester and Brighton, Edinburgh Psych Fest explodes across the capital, utilising the Usher Hall, Summerhall, Queen’s Hall and La Belle Angele (Sunday 6 September) for their fourth year. An extraordinary trio of headliners (Anglo-French art popsters Stereolab, garage-punk firebrand Ty Segall and viral, polkadot mathrock aliens, Angine De Poitrine) demonstrates the sheer diversity underneath the modern ‘psych’ banner. Grab yourself a wristband, if there are any left.

BBC Introducing and Sound Of Young Scotland SAY Award-winning songwriter Alice Faye is rightfully gathering a following for her wry, vulnerable compositions and humble stagecraft. Across various singles, EPs and the forthcoming album Vaude Villain,, she demonstrates an effortless, natural ability and a dab hand with melody and melodrama. Her star is in the ascendance, so catch her while you still can at La Belle Angele, Edinburgh (Thursday 17 September) and Café Drummond, Aberdeen (Friday 18 September) as she channels legends such as Edith Piaf, Judy Garland and Rufus Wainwright within her own unique song-world.  Listen to Vic Galloway every Monday night on BBC Radio Scotland, or anytime on BBC Sounds.

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The Drygate Brewery, Glasgow 7pm // Tickets £10

DEVIN CASSON

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JODIE RAE

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THE HIGH PRIESTESS

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Revel, the latest show from Company Chordelia, baulks at the idea that older dancers should just hang up their shoes and shuffle off the stage. Artistic director Kally Lloyd-Jones chats to Kelly Apter about learning not to care what others think and fighting for more visibility for performers of a certain age

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I want to be learning and doing interesting stuff until I drop

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‘coming of age’ story usually captures that pivotal moment between adolescence and adulthood. But with tongues firmly in cheeks, that’s exactly how choreographers Kally LloydJones and Steinvör Palsson are describing Company Chordelia’s new show, Revel. Their teenage years far behind them, the transition they’re focusing on instead is when you slide from your 50s into your 60s. ‘As I was approaching 60, I felt really frightened of it,’ says Lloyd-Jones. ‘I thought I would somehow seem lesser in

people’s eyes or that they might stop offering me work. Then when I actually turned 60, the fear subsided and great things started to happen. But that fear exists because it is, to some degree, real. I think we’re expected to just gracefully exit and disappear, but many of us still need to earn money and have something to say.’

Set to an eclectic soundtrack featuring everyone from Barry Manilow and Saint-Saëns to Ry Cooder and Shostakovich, Revel is a celebration of resilience, ageing and, of course, dancing.

Co-created by these two stalwarts of the Scottish contemporary

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Revel rebels: Kally Lloyd-Jones (left) and Steinvör Palsson

>> dance scene, the piece moves between a theatre dressing room (where Lloyd-Jones and Palsson are getting ready to perform) and their inner worlds as they reflect on life in their 60s. The duo first worked together 22 years ago, for a Dance Base gala showcase, and have been in and out of each other’s lives ever since.

‘I’ve gone to Steinvör’s classes regularly over the years and we’ve worked together several times in other people’s shows,’ says Lloyd-Jones. ‘I’ve done her work, she’s done mine, and although we’re very different, we have a shared sensibility and often the same things make us laugh.’

Which has come in handy during the creation of Revel, a show that offers a healthy dose of humour as well as pathos. And in a profession usually wedded to the notions of youth, vitality and strength, it’s a chance to see two older professional dancers prove their mettle.

‘I hope people of a certain age will see themselves reflected in the show,’ says Lloyd-Jones. ‘The more we talk about ageing, the better, because it’s going to happen to us all. And we absolutely 54 THE LIST September 2026

do not see enough older dancers on stage. But a couple of young people also came to see draft versions of the piece, and they found it funny and recognised things that happen to the older people in their lives. So I hope it has a universality to it.’

As for the nervousness that surrounded Lloyd-Jones’ 60th birthday, making Revel has put paid to all of that. ‘I decided I wasn’t going to care anymore, that I was going to do what I want and work with people who still value me. And if they don’t, then what can I do about that? Well, one thing I can do is make a show that says we’re still here and we have things to offer. Because I want to be learning and doing interesting stuff until I drop.’

Revel, Byre Theatre, St Andrews, Thursday 17 September; Studio Theatre, Edinburgh, Saturday 26 September; Paisley Arts Centre, Thursday 8 October; Dundee Rep, Thursday 22 October; Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, Friday 23 October.

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Freddie Fox has had quite the varied career, playing everyone from Bosie Douglas to Jeremy Bamber as well as a member of the Hightower clan in the Game Of Thrones universe. He gets quite the dapper makeover for his musical theatre debut in High Society (King’s Theatre, Glasgow, Tuesday 1–Saturday 5 September; Edinburgh Playhouse, Tuesday 8–Saturday 12 September) playing the undercover journo who was portrayed (if that’s the right word) by Frank Sinatra in the 1956 movie.

With a dream team of Dave Hook (music/lyrics), Orla O’Loughlin (direction) and Rob Drummond (script), Wallace (Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, Friday 25 & Saturday 26 September; King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, Wednesday 30 September–Saturday 3 October) aims to shine fresh light onto the myth and the man more commonly known nowadays as Braveheart. Talking of legends, the story of how Six (Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Tuesday 15–Saturday 26 September; Theatre Royal, Glasgow, Tuesday 29 September–Saturday 3 October) went from being a small-scale Edinburgh Fringe show to a global phenomenon is the stuff that many dreams are made of but very few come to fruition like this juggernaut. (Brian Donaldson)

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MY COMEDY HERO

MARK THOMAS

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My favourite comic could be Spike Milligan. I saw him on a school trip to see Treasure Island. Or perhaps Tommy Trinder, the music hall rival to Max Miller, and the first stand-up I saw. Or it could be Alexei Sayle whose album Cak! inspired me to do stand-up.

In truth, my comedy hero is a little-known performer from outside the world of 1980s alternative cabaret, Bob Boyton. The first time I saw Bob was at the Chisenhale Dance Space in the east end of London, a night of alternative cabaret. In a tobacco-hewn growl, he starts: ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen, my name is Bob Boyton and I’m a communist Marxist Leninist. A lot of my comrades tell me football is the proletarian sport but that’s bollocks. The real proletarian sport is motor racing, ladies and gentlemen. A few quid to get in, few beers with your mates on a nice sunny day, if you’re lucky you see some rich fucker burn to death.’ That was his opening gag.

He threw the gauntlet down for the audience, a challenge about where he might go, and demanded they followed. In a world of compromise, Bob was the real McCoy. I loved gigging with him. In the height of the Aids pandemic, when homophobia was unrelenting, Bob mischievously described the vagaries of cottaging as a bisexual man; of accidentally having sex with a policeman and leading strikes on the railway (which he did). I am proud to call him a friend and always delighted in seeing this little recognised trailblazer.  Mark Thomas: 40 In Stand-Up Years, The Stand, Edinburgh, Wednesday 23 September; Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, Thursday 24 September; The Stand, Glasgow, Saturday 12 December.

IN PERSON: Tickets Scotland Glasgow/Edinburgh. Venue Box Offices and all usual outlets.

regularmusic.com

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Despite the Scottish reputation for humour, there’s a dearth of local comedy in cinemas. Kevin Walls aims to reverse that trend with his lofi Glasgow-set romcom, Premature. Shot for £16,000 over 23 days last year, it’s about flatmates Cameron and Eilidh (James Rottger and Elle Watson) who find themselves facing unplanned parenthood.

‘Before writing the script, I watched several directors’ first feature films, all shot on tiny budgets: Christopher Nolan’s Following, the Duplass Brothers’ The Puffy Chair and Richard Linklater’s It's Impossible To Learn To Plow By Reading Books,’ says Walls.

‘That gave me the confidence to push forward, knowing that the characters and the journey they go on could carry the film.’

Walls, who cut his teeth making now-defunct soap River City, says: ‘When I explained our approach to making the film (a local, grassroots production with a tiny crew), most of the locations I approached were receptive and supportive. Places like The Griffin, Lychee Oriental and Glasgow School Of Art were incredibly accommodating, and we were delighted to bring such great Glasgow locations to the screen.’

So are the awkward couple featured in Premature a distant Scottish response to hit Hollwood comedy Knocked Up? ‘I actively avoided watching Knocked Up during the entire process. I wanted to avoid borrowing anything from the film . . . Premature feels like its own thing. I grew up admiring Jim Carrey, Leslie Nielsen and Steve Martin, which might explain some of the more heightened comedy. I think it’s closer in tone to Scrubs than anything else; I always loved how that show balanced absurdity with moments of poignancy. Maybe that’s what I was going for, but honestly, I didn’t give it much conscious thought. I just wanted to make people laugh.’ (Eddie Harrison)  In cinemas from Friday 18 September.

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It may only last four days, but Glasgow Cathedral Festival is packing quite the punch with its expanded programme this year.

Celebrating ten years of bringing music, film, talks and tours to Glasgow’s oldest building, the opening concert turns the festival’s magnificent home into as near to a Faroese sea cave as you’ll ever get in Glasgow. Echoes In Stone And Brass is led by trombonist Dávur Juul Magnussen, who grew up with the world’s largest sea cave as one of his local concert halls, albeit one with a reverberation like no other.

‘Klæmintsgjógv is something like 600 metres long and 50 metres high,’ he says. ‘It’s sort of cathedral-shaped and suits brass instruments really well.’ In recreating the cave in Glasgow, some sound trickery comes into play with musicians making a live echo as they perform and a gentle bit of reverb being used. ‘It’s not the real thing,’ says Magnussen, ‘but it makes for similarly interesting effects. In the cave, you have to play quite loud, but in the cathedral you can go quiet.’

Another advantage is the cathedral’s organ, played by artistic director and organist Andrew Forbes. Other artists taking part are from the cathedral’s choir, Wagner tubas from The Rookh Quartet and fellow Scottish orchestral trombonist, Cillian Ó Ceallacháin.

Much of the music will be improvised, alongside material composed

by Magnussen himself, a new commission by Neil Tòmas Smith and Claire McCue’s ‘Stalactites’, scored for two trombones and chorus, and first heard in 2024. (Carol Main)  Glasgow Cathedral, Thursday 17–Sunday 20 September.

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GOING OUT The Silence Of The Lambs (and bottom from left), Chantel McGregor, Balfour Reparations (appearing at Findhorn Bay Festival), Susan Calman, We Will Hear The Angels

GOING OUT FURTHER AFIELD Get yourself away from the central belt and out into various parts of Scotland where the cultural landscape is rich and varied.

Among the highlights are festivals in gorgeous surroundings, a bit of Bach and the return of a mighty Scottish stand-up

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THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

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SUSAN CALMAN

The trigger warning list for this production is pretty hefty but fans of the original books and iconic movie (ignoring the sequels here) will no doubt lap this up quicker than you can polish off some fava beans and Chianti. n His Majesty’s Theatre, Tuesday 1–Saturday 5 September.

Based on the book by Rod Campbell, Ben and Sally are after the perfect pet but are sent a wholly inappropriate elephant, camel and frog combo.

Not sure why a zoo would be doing that but let’s not question it. n Eden Court, Tuesday 29 September–Thursday 1 October.

She’s been away from the stage for a while, doing piles of TV work, but the wee lassie with the huge talent is back with Tall Tales featuring stories about tanks, cats and ageing. n Perth Concert Hall, Thursday 17 September.

KIRKCALDY

Featuring music from the diverse likes of Hank Williams, Orange Juice, Etta James and Bach, this revolves around a woman who is knocked sideways by her partner’s infidelity in a musical work that has echoes of both Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield. n Macrobert Arts Centre, Thursday 10 September.

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CHANTEL MCGREGOR

MACBETH: BLOOD & BLUEGRASS

With support from all-female AC/DC tribute band Heatseeker, this rock and blues powerhouse from Yorkshire will likely play tracks from her 2025 album, The Healing. n The Auld Gambling Hoose, Saturday 5 September.

New Zealand’s The Barden Party (see what they did there?) deliver singalongs, tunes and spooky stories for this musical rendition of The Scottish Play at this final date on their pre-autumn tour. n Adam Smith Theatre, Saturday 12 September.

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BORDERS MUSIC FESTIVAL

FINDHORN BAY FESTIVAL A feast of multi-arts fun in various terrific settings include the Phil Bancroft Trio, Farah Saleh’s Balfour Reparations, Scottish Dance Theatre’s Ray (and Little Ray for wee ones) and The Ayoub Sisters. n Various venues, Thursday 24 September–Sunday 4 October.

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MELROSE

Here come a whole ten days of quality choral, folk, jazz and orchestral music in the heart of the Borders including the likes of the SNJO Big Band, choral ensemble The Sixteen and the Lucie Hendry Trio. n Various venues, Friday 11–Sunday 20 September.

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SCOTTISH ENSEMBLE AND NYCOS More Johann Sebastian here as the acclaimed ensemble join forces with the wonderful voices of the National Youth Choir Of Scotland, performing Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ as well as pieces

by Arvo Pärt and David Fennessy. n St Mary’s Church, Wednesday 16 September.

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Saoirse Ronan is in bleakly comic form as a teacher taking things to extremes to deal with a nightmare pupil in the deliciously executed Bad Apples, says James Mottram

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high-wire act of a movie, Bad Apples is a black comedy so dark, it’s a wonder it ever got made.

After all, there’s an understandable sensitivity around child welfare; and with good reason. But in this crafty adaptation of the novel De Oönskade (The Unwanted)

by Swedish writer Rasmus Lindgren, you’ll find sympathies pushed from pillar to post, as Saoirse Ronan’s meek teacher finds her inner lion.

Educators in movies are usually cast as inspirational figures, who dedicate their days to moulding their children into impressive specimens. Think of films like the Sidney Poitierstarring To Sir, With Love or Dangerous Minds with Michelle Pfeiffer in the ghetto, and particularly Dead Poets Society, which romanticises the scholastic experience. But not Bad Apples, a film liable to turn any Oftsed inspector white with fear.

Ronan’s loner singleton Maria Spencer isn’t filled to the brim with confidence and doesn’t come armed with life-affirming speeches. Rather, she’s just trying to impart a little wisdom to her class before the bell rings. As the title hints, it only takes

one bad apple and, in Maria’s class, she has the ultimate unruly pupil. Danny (Eddie Waller) is violent and disruptive, the sort who makes learning a chore for everyone else.

While the boy doesn’t come from a terrible home, his lack of emotional nourishment is plain for all to see. His single father Josh (Robert Emms), a delivery driver under pressure at work, simply seems wrapped up in his own daily trials. At school, Danny’s a brute, a bully who thinks nothing of breaking the arm of fellow pupil Pauline (Nia Brown), a smart suck-up of a child who appears to have a girl-crush on Maria.

Do you sympathise with children whose own home life has shaped them into unpleasant, spiteful characters? Or do you throw them unceremoniously on the scrap heap? That seems to be one question lurking inside first-time screenwriter Jess O’Kane’s script, one that will have you laughing at the sheer outrageousness of a warped and wild story.

What follows will either have you in stitches or ever-soslightly horrified. A series of events, and some serious misjudgement on Maria’s part, lead her to abduct Danny, tying

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the month him up in her basement. Those who saw the recent film The Good Son, with Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough, may feel like they’ve already consumed this narrative, although the tone here is very different.

While that admittedly disturbing film is both morality tale and twisted family drama, Bad Apples takes a different path. As the weeks turn to months, Danny remains in captivity, as Maria tries to educate this feral child. In the outside world, searches continue for Danny, led by his heartbroken father who, despite the difficulties of raising him, is torn apart by the loss.

Directed with authority by Jonatan Etzler (making his sophomore feature here, following his 2023 Swedish-language debut One More Time), the set-up broods, allowing audiences to wonder how on earth this story is going to resolve itself. But the final act turns up the heat in unexpected and frequently hilarious ways, as Maria isn’t the only adult whose behaviour bears scrutiny.

Leading the charge here, Ronan never falters in her portrayal of Maria, walking that fine tightrope of sincerity and insanity.

For an actress who tends to veer away from comedy, towards more earnest productions like Little Women, Lady Bird and last year’s Blitz, this is both a step forward and a blessed relief.

There’s something quite marvellous about watching Ronan finetune her largely untapped comic instincts.

Likewise, Ronan’s youthful co-stars Waller and Brown are well cast, their inexperience set aside as they greatly add to the believability of a script that otherwise might stretch credulity.

Increasingly tense, their relations with Maria leave the story on ever-changing sands as power dynamics between all three shift.

While Etzler arguably over-eggs the symbolism (shots of rotting fruit arrive by the dozen), it’s a small misstep in an otherwise deliciously executed work, one that explores notions of parental hypocrisy, cruelty and the divide between haves and have nots. Ultimately, it’s less a film about poorly behaved children than it is about adults, and the way they bend the truth to fit their own agenda. Top of the class.

Bad Apples is in cinemas from Friday 18 September.

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This succinct career survey of South African photographer Jillian Edelstein is so emotionally dominated by her coverage of the Truth And Reconciliation Commission in her country’s post-apartheid era that it’s hard to get beyond it in considering the show as a whole. Sure, Edelstein is an accomplished portrait and travel photographer, with one section of wall featuring shots of activists and politicians such as Vanessa Redgrave and the great man himself, Nelson Mandela. Another shows her spirited snaps of Gilbert & George, Simon Callow and so on. The recent ‘Water Rats’ series captures the spirit of the Hampstead Ponds swimming community.

But the gravitas of the ‘Truth And Lies’ sequence from the late 1990s is on another level, both aesthetically and emotionally. Accompanied by entries from Edelstein’s diary, these images provide an almost unbearably lucid photographic essay on the Desmond Tutu-chaired commission which ran from 1995 to 2000. The aim was to hear from both the perpetrators and victims of human rights abuses committed under apartheid, with the possibility of amnesty upon full confession.

The images are mostly simply framed profiles, many depicting family members of the tortured and killed. A number of these relatives share the same stare, a kind of unswerving, grief-powered intensity: the brother of murdered anti-apartheid polemicist Steve Biko poses in a doorway beneath his sibling’s portrait; Joyce Mtimkulu holds a handful of her dead son’s hair which she kept for 20 years as evidence of him being fed rat poison by the security police. Here is an ANC pastor with his hands blown off; there, Tutu has collapsed with head in hands from the weight of his duty. You might almost wish for the whole show to be populated with these images, though the presence of just a few is enough to make a visit worth it. (Greg Thomas) n Stills, Edinburgh, until Saturday 24 October.

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Canary is, as Stuart Goldsmith puts it, a ‘show about the end of the fucking world’. Not normally a laugh-a-minute topic, perhaps, but we’re in good hands with Goldsmith. He’s been doing stand-up for 20 years, but it’s only in the last few that he’s found his niche as a climate comedian. He knows it’s not something anyone really wants to hear about, least of all when they’re looking for a good time. And indeed, in less capable hands, an hour of climate comedy may feel more like a lecture from your most annoying friend. But he’s self-aware enough to know that comedy with an agenda can ‘start to sound like christian rock’ and charismatic enough that he (mostly) manages to avoid coming across as too preachy.

His climate dread is all-consuming and he spends a lot of time grappling with what we can do about it, individually and collectively. A section of gentle crowd work encourages us to reveal our climate confessions, but his aim isn’t to shame anyone. He, too, is a hypocrite. Most of his work these days is at climate conferences all around the world which, yes, he flies to. Everyone should be a vegan, he politely admonishes us. But is he?

‘No fucking way’.

The end of the world is an inherently unfunny subject but Goldsmith handles it with warmth and self-deprecation, jumping between anecdotes about his own climate struggles. It’s an important message that’s well worth hearing, but you get the feeling that he is, perhaps, preaching to the converted. It doesn’t diminish the value of his work or his whip-smart delivery, but for a show that’s explicitly aiming to nudge the audience one notch further along on their climate journey, it mostly settles for communal laughter at a dread we already recognise. (Lauren McKay) n The Stand, Glasgow, Thursday 16 September; reviewed at Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh.

Buy tickets now

Gwen John Strange Beauties

1 August 2026–4 January 2027 Friends and under 18s go free Modern Two Belford Road, Edinburgh In partnership with

★★★★★ Gwen John, Girl in a Blue Dress, 1914-15. By permission of Amgueddfa Cymru — Museum Wales.

National Galleries of Scotland is a charity registered in Scotland (No.SC003728).

The Scotsman Guardian Independent The Times

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Gig-theatre show The Singer follows the highs and lows of being a musician, through the eyes and ears of a washed-up busker and a talented deaf artist. Craig McLean reckons Cora Bissett and KT Tunstall have created a dynamic and sparkling piece of theatre

REVIEWS

t’s the singer, not the song. Or, indeed, it’s the signer, not the song. In undercurrent and surtitles (and in, of course, its title), such is the theme of this joyous new play written and directed by Cora Bissett, adapted from she and Jamie Rea’s short film, with original music by KT Tunstall.

It’s a pacy, sparkling account of a young deaf man’s passion for music, and his determination to songwrite and perform. In the words of the narrator of this vivid four-person piece: ‘Music is never owned by the ear. It belongs to the body.’

Likewise, performing on stage isn’t just the preserve of anyone who’s a ‘hearie’.

Joe (co-screenwriter Rea) is a ‘deef ginger’ and lyricist in Glasgow who passionately signs the songs he can feel in his body, partly with the help of a haptic vest. Andy (Dylan Wood) is a failed recording artist but talented busker, plying the city streets with his acoustic guitar, soulful voice and rousing but (Joe thinks) vacuous self-written songs. Behind them and constantly moving around them are Joe’s grandparents (Hannah Jarrett-Scott, a hearie, and Petre Dobre, deaf). They also function as the Oracles, the play’s omniscient narrators, in both spoken English and British Sign Language, while also fulfilling various other character and musical roles.

After some fits and starts, Joe and Andy start writing together, with Joe the words man, Andy on the tunes. A buzz builds, the music industry that had previously rejected one-hit-wonder Andy comes crawling back and a date with destiny (aka the stage of Barrowland Ballroom) beckons. But then the partnership wobbles due to Andy’s ego and his messed-up private life (he’s struggling to be a dad to his four-year-old daughter, much to his ex-’s frustration). Meanwhile, Joe is fighting to save the local deaf centre from the usual landlord/development clusterfuck.

All of this drama is revealed by vividly dynamic, endlessly energetic staging.

Those surtitle captions relate the dialogue for any hearing-challenged audience members, even signposting the onrushing songs (‘rippling fingerpicked guitar’; ‘strutting beat’; ‘elevated triumphant chorus’). The songs of Bissett’s fellow Fifer Tunstall (whose younger brother is deaf), as good as any she’s written for her albums or other stage projects, drive the plot smartly along.

Jarrett-Scott, in particular, is a dynamo of accents, characters and singing/ multi-instrumentalist skills.

All of this is assuredly marshalled by Bissett, a music-savvy playwright who previously turned her own experiences in a band (90s indie outfit Darlingheart) into the hit play What Girls Are Made Of. Here are the highs and lows of songs, songwriting and performing, a soulful saga of dreams raised and crushed and reanimated. Music, says The Singer, belongs to all of us and all our senses, no matter how many we have.

The Singer, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, Tuesday 15–Saturday 19 September; Dundee Rep, Wednesday 23–Saturday 26 September; reviewed at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

September 2026 THE LIST 67

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This is a giant scathing sigh of a film that takes aim at a set of New York artistic elites who rediscover and reclaim a poet from the 1970s in a bid to boost their brands. Directed by Kent Jones and adapted

by Samy Burch from the Arthur Schnitzler novella, the setting is transposed from the 19th century to the modern day. Willem Dafoe stars as postal worker and forgotten poet Ed Saxberger who is approached by Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan) to hang out at his literary salon. Praising his work and engaging in a bit of stalking, Meyers eventually persuades the down-to-earth Saxberger to take part in a show.

This wonderfully observed satirical comedy, executive produced

by Martin Scorsese, strikes a bittersweet tone in its juxtaposition of arrogant youth and the maturity of a life full of experience and disappointment. Saxberger gets caught up in the drama and enthusiasm of a group of aspiring male writers who have the privilege of wealth on their side. It’s fun to begin with, until the dawning realisation that he is just a pawn in an ill thought-out game. Greta Lee pops up as infiltrator Gloria, an actor and Sally Bowles-type cabaret performer who is struggling to make ends meet but putting on a brave face. Saxberger and Gloria begin a flirtation and an alliance of sorts as the only two in the group who actually need to work in order to pay the rent.

The characterisation is nuanced and the performances all credible, with Dafoe deftly navigating Saxberger’s apprehensions with emotional and comical panache. Late Fame interrogates a world curated by entitled and unimaginative men. Often hilarious, it is spot on in its takedown of posers and the power structures that enable only a select few to rise to the top in creative professions.

(Katherine McLaughlin)  In cinemas from Friday 4 September.

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Mel Gibson, Outlander, Monarch Of The Glen: who gets to define Scotland? It’s what poet Martin O’Connor considers in this smart examination of Scottish tropes, myths and identity.

History is written by the victors, but what about the voices of the poor, the unhealthy, the insecure, he asks, weaving together the story of James McPherson (who faked translations of the thirdcentury bard, Ossian) and his own childhood in Glasgow, living with his mum and his grandad from Lewis.

Performed in Scots with Gaelic songs, O’Connor blends patronising stereotypes of the ‘Scotch’ in the style of a ropey comedian, alongside affectionate and poignant descriptions of Scottish qualities and foibles. Familiar expressions in Scots roll alongside clichés of sporrans, thistles and misty Highland vistas (he’s standing in front of one onstage.) The sections on suppressed identities, shame, cringe and emotionally unavailable men pack a particularly sharp punch, while a message of uprising pierces through, calling on Scots to use their voices as a weapon, regardless of the centuries-old narrative that Scots and Gaelic language is backwards or uncultured.

The trio of singers harmonising in Gaelic around him (Iona Mairead Davidson, Josie Duncan and Mairi McGillivray) create a gorgeous, soaring chorus, as O’Connor reclaims the language that many have tried to kill in the hope that Scottish stories and culture will perish with it. Neither tub thumping or twee, the rhymes and readings manage to both acknowledge Scotland’s weaknesses and limitations, while wrestling it free of the embarrassment imposed on a nation by its oppressors.

(Claire Sawers)  Glasgow Cathedral, Thursday 3–Saturday 5 September; Stirling Castle, Friday 11–Sunday 13 September; reviewed at Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh.

PICTURE: EOIN CAREY

68 THE LIST September 2026

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aberdeenperformingarts.com/aberdeen-comedy-festival September 2026 THE LIST 69

PICTURE: JENNY FORWARD-HAYTER

GOING OUT

COMEDY

KANAN GILL: NOT THIS AGAIN lllll Outwardly, Kanan Gill would seem to have so much going for him.

A stand-up career on multiple continents, a book deal and sufficient leisure time for the left-leaning comic to indulge his authoritarian fantasies in a computer game, trusting in the bread and circuses approach to civilisation-building. With lofty artistic ideals, he won’t deign to promote his book on social media, guffaws at the fools taken in by financial scams and is set on a path to self-improvement, absorbing ancient wisdom and connecting with his Punjabi roots by better learning the language.

Yet on a flight from Mumbai, sat next to an American comfortable in his ignorance, Gill’s insecurities bubble to the surface. Not so much an international jetsetter, he’s actually going quietly out of his mind. Some health issues prompt a drive-by blood test. And rather than marvel at the speed and efficiency of modern medicine, the supremely skilled observational comic and hypochondriac spirals into a projection of how his results might be abused. Similarly, he can’t properly focus on his online Punjabi, his tutor’s restless dedication prompting him to escalating lies about his own supposedly busy schedule.

Relating his language struggles, Gill has been gifted a 1980s textbook with wildly implausible scenarios ripe for his animated incredulity.

For sure, he’s shooting fish in a barrel here but it’s an uproarious, signature bit. And he proves himself equally adept at self-mockery in his pampered purchase of a top-of-the-line toaster, the epitome of first world problems piling higher and higher as he shows that, left to his own devices and appliances, he will invariably find disaster. Like many of the best anecdotal comics with a degree of financial comfort, Gill possesses the ability to not only seem relatable but endearingly, irredeemably pathetic, a frivolous idiot with a boundless capacity for personal harm.

(Jay Richardson) n The Glee Club, Glasgow, Sunday 6 September; reviewed at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh.

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The whole life to date of German teenager Luca (Maja Bons) has been compressed into short-form content. From her mother’s ultrasound to Luca’s first words, first kiss and first period, each and every milestone in her brief existence has been recorded, edited, uploaded and shared to a family YouTube channel by a pair of overzealous, botoxed parents armed with handheld tripods. Now 16, Luca has millions of followers of her own and vlogs her way through a life of sepia-filtered opulence within the minimalist walls of the family mansion. News of the pending arrival of a younger sibling comes with tension as Luca discovers just how far her parents will go to keep the content wheel churning.

Joscha Bongard’s Babystar opens with a group of young competition winners arriving at Luca’s house, overjoyed to be meeting their favourite influencer in the flesh. When given the chance to sit down with Luca and her parents, the children fire questions at their idol, enquiring about her love life, income and weight. When asked how many friends she has, Luca hesitates, responding: ‘I have 4.3 million followers on TikTok.’ Over the next 90 minutes, it slowly dawns on Luca that a successful life on camera does not necessarily translate to a happy one off it. Through passive-aggressive conversations with her data-driven parents and downbeat Facetime calls with her own AI clone, Luca learns she must free herself from the artificially sanguine world that has been crafted for her. Though it bubbles with a tension that never quite reaches boiling point, Babystar does succeed in illuminating what may have been considered a work of dystopian sci-fi 20 years ago, but is now just an accurate portrayal of contemporary society. (Danny Munro) n In cinemas from Friday 25 September.

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Practical Magic 2 (and bottom from left), Ballet Nights, Primal Scream, Damian Barr, Jack Rooke

OTHER THINGS WORTH GOING OUT FOR If you fancy getting out and about this month, there’s plenty culture to sample such as an anniversary comedy show with a sad happening at its core, a long-awaited magic-based movie sequel and a (sort of) anniversary album celebration

HIGHLIGHTS

COMEDY

FILM

SCOTTISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

JANET STREETPORTER

PRACTICAL MAGIC 2

One of the most distinctive voices (quite literally) on the nation’s tellies across the 80s and 90s, this will most likely be a masterclass in not growing old gracefully.  Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, Monday 28 September; Glee Club, Glasgow, Tuesday 29 September.

A long-awaited sequel has mesdames Kidman, Bullock, Wiest and Channing all reprising their 1998 roles, with younger pups such as Maisie Williams and Solly McLeod in there as the origins of the Owens family’s special talents come to light.  In cinemas, Friday 11 September.

JACK ROOKE

HER PRIVATE HELL

DAMIAN BARR

Been quite a decade since Rooke first performed Good Grief to much acclaim. As he puts it, this is a ‘retrospective of capitalising on my dead dad’; but write what you know, eh? It certainly helped give Channel 4 a shot in the arm with Big Boys.  Òran Mór, Glasgow, Wednesday 30 September.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest provocation follows a troubled young woman named Elle (Sophie Thatcher) searching for her father as a mysterious mist engulfs the futuristic dystopian city she inhabits.  In cinemas, Friday 25 September.

Nicola Meighan hosts this event with the author of The Two Roberts as they mark the paperback publication of his tome about Scottish artists Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun.  Royal College, Glasgow, Friday 25 September.

DANCE

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DEAR EVAN HANSEN

BALLET NIGHTS

PRIMAL SCREAM

Hosted by former Scottish Ballet soloist and Ballet Nights founder Jamiel Devernay-Laurence, the programme features dance pieces by the likes of Peter Darrell, Vasily Vainonen and Po-Cheng Tsai.  Theatre Royal, Glasgow, Wednesday 2 & Thursday 3 September.

An absolute delight for the hardcore fans of Bobby Gillespie and his crew as they perform their 2000 album XTRMNTR, the band’s sixth collection which reached number three in the UK LP chart.  Barrowlands, Glasgow, Thursday 3–Saturday 5 September.

72 THE LIST September 2026

To launch their new season, the SCO bring us a double bill of Berlioz, featuring ‘Harold In Italy’ and ‘Symphonie Fantastique’. Maxim Emelyanychev does his supreme conducting thing.  Usher Hall, Edinburgh, Thursday 24 September; City Halls, Glasgow, Friday 25 September.

TALKS

THEATRE

Following their recent King’s productions of Shrek The Musical, Annie and Sunshine On Leith, Pantheon return with their version of the story about a high school kid who does something odd to cope with his social anxiety.  King’s Theatre, Glasgow, Tuesday 29 September–Saturday 3 October.

September 2026 THE LIST 73

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74 THE LIST September 2026

Everyone from Lorraine Kelly to Mark Wahlberg and Bear Grylls to Ewan McGregor felt inspired enough to offer quotes for the book by Ewan, Jamie and Lachlan. The sibling trio (sons of iconic whisky writer Charles) broke the world record for rowing non-stop across the Pacific, raising an incredible amount of cash for charity along the way. But the story isn’t all about what happened on the water, as the journey to get there in the first place is just as compelling.

(Brian Donaldson)  Three Brothers In A Boat is published by Canongate on Thursday 24 September; full details of their book tour are at instagram.com/ themacleanbrothers

staying in

THE MACLEAN BROTHERS

September 2026 THE LIST 75

STAYING IN

MAKING A SCENE Paul Dale picks the cream of the cinematic crop with a round-up of this year’s best books about film

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he moving image is all well and lovely, but the cuts teach us we may be crazy.’ So ends the first chapter of A Sudden Flicker Of Light (Allen Lane), David Thomson’s revisionist history of the movies. Through one glorious chapter after another of twisted history, prevarication and dissection, Thomson attempts to hold onto the reins of those golden age beasts of cinema as they drag him towards the end of an illustrious career. The passion he has harboured and nurtured for half a century has also hidden a bending of reality, one filled with a rise of delusion, voyeurism and the promotion of a detachment from life’s wonders. This is Thomson in full flight, melding the register he found in his best non-fiction book (The Whole Equation) and fictional one (Suspects).

Like an aged philosopher he gasps, laughs, twirls and recants the story of film that no one else could tell.

If you love the films of Jean-Pierre Melville or Jacques Deray, or anything Alain Delon was in during the 60s and 70s, then Edward Chisholm’s smoky, evocative work of non-fiction, Murder in Paris ’68 (Monoray), is a must. It details the sex and politics scandal that emanated from the Markovic Affair, when Delon’s Yugoslavian bodyguard and fixer was found dead in mysterious circumstances.

Chisholm’s bold storytelling nicely balances the contrarian heart of any Gallic cineaste’s obsessions with the heady steam of Parisian anarchy in those cold-blooded old times.

For those with deeper pockets and big coffee tables, Roger Deakins’ Reflections: On Cinematography (Cassell) has got to be the film art book of the year. Lovingly but unusually curated by Deakins (don’t expect chronology), it’s full of the images and magic he brought to the films of Mendes, Scorsese and the Coens, to name a few. The gifted and prolific lens man is a reliable and generous messenger. Finally, beloved influencer, photographer and interviewer Thomas Duke’s debut The Film Lover’s Guide To London (Sphere) showcases his unique take on some favourite film locations in the capital, which he manages to convey through awe and reinterpretation. Unlike Thomson, he is blissfully, youthfully unaware that watching 4000-plus films can only lead to a distortion of reality.

LISTEN BACK

The undulations and ululations of the letter U will be examined in the latest edition of our alphabet-themed rundown of album recommendations Finding a sweet spot between Pavement’s Gen X malaise and Radiohead’s fin de siècle anxieties, Grandaddy’s Under The Western Freeway (1997) has become a bit forgotten in the recent surge of plaudits retrospectively doled out to 90s albums. Propelled by Jason Lytle’s cracking falsetto, it’s indie rock of the highest order which combines childlike electronic melodies and distortionheavy chords. Upbeat it may be, but Lytle’s vocals evoke a pathos that complicates the twee psychedelia.

To evoke PJ Harvey or Beth Gibbons is an unfair burden to place on any artist, but those melancholy merchants are the clearest touchstones of Martha Skye Murphy’s Um (2024), and her songwriting can more than shoulder the weight of those comparisons. Compositions snake between darkness and light while Murphy’s sorrowful howl bobs and weaves through lyrics of discontent and disconnection. Skirting on the edge of avant-garde, her keen eye for structure makes this a challenging but unforbidding adventure. (Kevin Fullerton)  Other U albums: The Universe Will Take Care Of You by Holden & Zimpel (2025), Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division (1979), Ugly by Screaming Females (2012).

76 THE LIST September 2026

PICTURE: LAURA MEEK

future sound dinburgh synth duo Both Hands came together in early 2023 as a result of some conscious matchmaking from Hailey Beavis.

Noting that synth whizz Brian Pokora was singerless following the split of his previous duo Slim Wrist, she nominated herself as his new partner in performance, liberated from her solo singersongwriter status to throw shapes and wear impractical costumes. It was a role Beavis had been in training for since childhood.

‘Way back I was showing signs of being quite a precocious child and doing lots of singing and dancing,’ she says. ‘We had Tina Turner concerts on VHS. I thought, “ok, so that’s how you perform”. I was in teenage high school bands with dreadful names but it would reach a point and then die; these volatile relationships in your teens and twenties.’

Pokora, meanwhile, grew up with little choice but to join the family tradition of Springsteen fanaticism. He also ditched his high school bands and opted for self-reliance but was open to finding his match in Beavis. An initial non-audition at his studio in Leith led to early demos and a flow of material which Beavis describes as ‘a pin in a map’.

‘I’m a natural lyricist and you are good on the machines,’ she says to her bandmate, ‘but we chip away at the roles.’ Pokora agrees: ‘We became more comfortable encroaching on each other’s sides.’ Their debut album Be Like a Mountain In A Moonlit Way was written and recorded against a backdrop of personal challenges with mental and physical health, as

well as Beavis’ pregnancy. ‘The album arc is resilience and friendship and the building blocks that keep us up and running,’ she says. ‘I think that’s woven through all the songs; positivity amid the chaos.’

‘Musically it is a loop,’ adds Pokora. ‘The first song relates back to the last song. I was really keen to have a wide variety of tones and energies on the album so there are peaks throughout and then toned-down sections.’

Lyrically, Beavis found inspiration in unlikely places. Forget Bowie and his use of cut-up passages from the works of William Burroughs; Beavis used the same technique on a Mills & Boon paperback she found on a bus.

‘His Miracle Baby in large print,’ she confirms. ‘I’ve never read it but I’ve cut so much out of it that I know every bit of it. Some important emotional poetry has come from this ridiculous book.’

The duo also bring some randomness to their gigs. ‘I like finding new sounds that are surprising for Hailey in the same way she surprises me with her theatrics,’ says Pokora. For her part, Beavis admits, ‘sometimes I try to bring elements that I can get in the door without Brian seeing so that I can surprise him. I want our shows to be dynamic, getting in and about people and getting silly.’

Be Like A Mountain In A Moonlit Way is released by Lost Map on Friday 18 September and launched at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh on Sunday 25 October.

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Our column celebrating new music to watch continues with Edinburgh’s Both Hands.

Hailey Beavis and Brian Pokora chat to Fiona Shepherd about encroaching on each other’s territory, unlikely inspiration and bringing surprise elements to their live shows

STAYING IN

first writes In this Q&A, we throw some questions about ‘firsts’ at debut novelists. This month, we feature Charlie Fox, author of Drool, a mash-up of girl-meets-wolf love story and body horror fable about trauma and transformation What’s the first book you remember reading as a child? The Monster Bed by Jeanne Willis, illustrated by Susan Varley. An 80s storybook about a little monster who can’t sleep because he’s scared a human child will eat him. Tells you to never go into the deep dark wood and then takes you there, which is what’s great about art in general. Probably set me on my path with the whole empathy-for-monsters thing. I don’t know if Pixar gave Jeanne any money when Monsters, Inc. came out, but she’s owed.

What was the book you read that made you decide to be a writer? The film history books I got from the library when I was seven or eight. I’d look at the pictures and dream up the story and do the voices in my room. I came up with a sequel to Beauty And The Beast. I think they ran off to Mexico and never came back.

What’s your favourite first line in a book? ‘I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I can remember was frightened of anything sexual.’ Story Of The Eye by Georges Bataille. Sort of like catching a fever. Fetch the milk, please.

Which debut publication had the most profound effect on you? The Safety Of Objects by AM Homes. It’s her first story collection. The married couple who smoke crack while their kids are away; the grown-up who remembers getting dumped by his abductor because he wasn’t cute enough; the boy who falls in love with his sister’s Barbie. All these confused people and their urges. She took that American minimalist suburban vibe somewhere perverse and dirty and hysterical, and I love her.

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up on a writing day? Cup of tea, biscuits, acting stuff out, looping ambient goo. Repeat for like five hours. I mean, it’s fun when it isn’t a nightmare, but from the outside I probably just look unwell.

What’s the first thing you do when you’ve stopped writing for the day? Cup of tea, biscuits, stare into void. Generally I will come down with a sitcom or something. Curb, The Royle Family. Six Feet Under was a great show.

In a parallel universe where you’re the tyrant leader of a dystopian civilisation, what’s the first book you’d burn? I’d give everybody a copy of Lynch On Lynch by David Lynch. Very uplifting and magical. And he loved fire. If you did burn it, the fire would probably start talking to you about cigarettes or bugs or something, in his voice: also very uplifting.

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Drool is published by Rough Trade Books on Friday 18 September.

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What’s the first piece of advice you’d offer to an aspiring novelist? Leave stuff alone. Go back to it and find out what’s wrong with it. Chew on it. Throw some glitter on it.

Finish it. Finish again. Doesn’t sound like much but . . . woof.

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Sharing its universe with the popular Alan Wake series, 2019’s Control was a surreal thirdperson action adventure set within the ever-shifting brutalist headquarters of the Federal Bureau Of Control, a location known as the Oldest House. Its stark monochrome architecture contrasted beautifully with the colourful, fluid enemies that invaded its corridors. The game was written by Remedy Entertainment creative director Sam Lake, one of gaming’s most distinctive auteurs and whose likeness became the face of Max Payne.

Last year, the developer released FBC: Firebreak, a multiplayer game set six years after the events of Control, but it struggled to find an audience and is now being maintained rather than actively supported. Remedy has put all of its resources into Control Resonant (again written by Lake), a direct sequel to the original game with a stronger focus on melee combat.

Taking on the role of Dylan Faden (brother of Control protagonist, Jesse), players will take the fight into the streets of Manhattan against an extra-dimensional threat. Similar to the first game’s shapeshifting ‘Service Weapon’, players will wield a new morphing firearm known as the ‘Aberrant’.

Preview reports suggest that enemy numbers are much greater, with encounters taking place across numerous expansive zones rather than the first game’s more contained environments. Whether these larger, more open battles prove as compelling remains to be seen, though Remedy has already shown through the Alan Wake games that it can create atmospheric encounters beyond the confines of the Oldest House. (Murray Robertson)  Out on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on Thursday 24 September.

Enjoy the perks of membership at Gleneagles’ first city outpost – a luxury hotel, all-day restaurant, rooftop bar and members’ club, right in the heart of St Andrew Square, Edinburgh.

September 2026 THE LIST 79

STAYING IN

TV

TV writer, director and producer Ryan Murphy is a one-man cultural juggernaut. Like our own Russell T Davies on steroids, Murphy’s prolific, sometimes dizzying ‘investigations of the other’ (from Glee and Nip/ Tuck to Pose and numerous true crime, showbiz and horror anthologies) balance titillation and tragedy like no else can.

His path to the top of the TV game has been a strange one. A former journalist and media grifter, he got his big break when he sold an unmade film script to Steven Spielberg. The cash allowed him to co-create Nip/ Tuck, inspired by his earlier unpublished investigations into the world of plastic surgery. His zeitgeisty obsession with singing teenagers then led him to create Glee. Six seasons and 40 Emmy nominations later, Murphy was an unstoppable force despite having spent some of that time unexpectedly pivoting into horror (American Horror Story).

Since then, Murphy has pocketed a cool £300 million in a 2018 deal with Netflix and gone on to dominate the small screen. With the exception of his dreary 9/11 franchise, his oeuvre is noticeable in that it plays to a liberal, pro-representation base. Murphy uses fictional and real-life cultural touchstones and clichés (Ratched, Halston, Capote Vs The Swans) to tell a very un-Maga history of the US, one that derides the conspiratorial authority of the right. And now with Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, he gives us the ultimate tale of disobedience of one’s elders not betters. (Paul Dale)  On Netflix from Thursday 17 September.

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In this column, we ask a pod person about the ’casts that mean a lot to them. This month, it’s journalist Livvy Haydock who, in the latest instalment of her Gangster series, focuses on Brian Brendan Wright aka The Milkman, one of the UK’s most notorious cocaine traffickers

dcast

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MONSTER: THE LIZZIE BORDEN STORY

Which podcast educates you? I’m a huge lover of Crime Junkie. Through telling stories

PREVIEWS

of the missing and the murdered, you learn so much about the workings of America’s judicial system.

Which podcast makes you laugh? Now You’re Asking hosted by Marian Keyes and Tara Flynn. The pair tackle really tough dilemmas brought to them by their listeners. They have such great chemistry and their humour is infectious.

Which podcast makes you sad or angry? Killing Death Row, a series I made for Radio

4. It explores the shortage of drugs on America’s death row and examines what the states are doing to maintain executions. No matter what perspective you come with on the death penalty, this series will have you questioning your beliefs.

Which podcast is your guilty pleasure? I am a big fan of Uncanny on BBC Sounds but

also love the rawer stories in Spooked, some of which have really stayed with me. I can’t listen when driving at night on my own anymore; I’m always convinced something’s going to pop up in the back seat!

Tell us someone who currently doesn’t have a podcast but totally should. And why do you think their one would be amazing? My mum. Every week when she cooks the

roast dinner, she comes alive with updates featuring, ‘what your father did’, ‘pictures of cute dogs’, ‘the parish piss-up’ and, my favourite category, ‘you need to eat more, so I got you these!’.

Pitch us a new podcast idea in exactly 25 words My Frenchie Toby: a bit of a Danny Dyer

type takes on Britain’s dog death row and questions why so many dogs are being destroyed.

Gangster: The Story Of The Milkman is available now on BBC Sounds.

80 THE LIST September 2026

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If Love does turn out to be Kevin Rowland’s farewell album, Neil Cooper rates it a fitting and emotional final chapter in the Dexys Midnight Runners story

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evin Rowland has never been shy of exposing himself emotionally in song.

From early incarnations of Dexys Midnight Runners almost half a century ago, Rowland has driven a restless musical potpourri of Celtic white soul that has veered between euphoric and mournful in its mercurial brilliance.

Now here he is with the latest edition of his newly rechristened group, after a decade as just Dexys, with what is hinted as being the grand finale to Rowland’s musical quest.

What we get in this David Holmes-produced affair is a Proustian trawl through Rowland’s personal back pages, awash with purging and redemption. This forms a companion piece of sorts to his candid 2025 memoir, Bless Me Father, and accompanying in-conversation shows.

From the opening remembrance of the dead-end kids he ran with as a Wolverhampton tearaway in ‘My Life In England Pt.1’, Rowland casts himself as an old sage reflecting on his lot by way of well-worn shaggy dog stories of times past. In between comes a resigned acceptance of the present and all the mixed fortunes that have come with it.

So while the Philly strings of ‘You’ve Got The Love’ is a 70s smoocher for traffic light dancefloors, ‘Once A Man And Twice The Child’ finds Rowland saying a moving farewell to a dying parent. The next generation is acknowledged in avuncular fashion on ‘You’re

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Alright’, in which words of wisdom to his grandkids are set to a Motown-ish backing. If a midlife crisis is on the cards in the gushy love letter of ‘I Want To Be Holding You Next Christmas’, drama is never far away, as the cha-cha kiss off after being dumped makes clear on ‘I’ll Always Love You’. The electric piano-led country-tinged plea of ‘Strange Feelin’’ continues the theme, while the northern backbeat of ‘It’s Over Now’ marks acceptance and a reality check as our Kev gets back in the saddle with a swagger.

‘Old Love’ that follows is a last ennui-laden hurrah as Rowland comes to terms with his mortality and reflects on the perils of getting on a bit. He may no longer be the sex god he might have once thought he was, but there’s life in the old dog yet, as the closing ‘My Life In England Pt. 2’s portrait of the artist as a young man testifies to.

There may be no bangers on a par with Dexys’ classics of old here, but that’s ok. This is a widescreen experience with a beginning, middle and end, full of the highs and lows only wisdom and experience bring with them. If Love is indeed Rowland walking off into the sunset at the end of his second act with a final spoken ‘goodnight’, on a record of grand gestures and matinee-idol styling, like all the best love stories, there is always room for a sequel.

Love is released by Heavenly Recordings on Friday 4 September.

REVIEWS

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ASSASSIN'S CREED BLACK FLAG RESYNCED

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The original Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (actually the sixth entry) is one of the most popular games in the long-running series. Released almost 13 years ago on PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii U (remember that?), it built on the naval gameplay introduced in Assassin’s Creed III and featured a gorgeous depiction of Caribbean islands. This full remake puts a real polish on the piratical proceedings courtesy of Ubisoft’s modern Anvil engine.

Set in the early 18th century during the Golden Age Of Piracy, the game follows the rollicking adventures of Edward Kenway, a roguish British privateer who can climb, fight and sail with the best of them. Borrowing several elements from last year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the remake expands parkour traversal and places a greater emphasis on stealth, making exploration and infiltration feel more fluid than before.

The few fans of the original game’s modern-day Abstergo elements will be disappointed at their excision but the game feels more settled as a standalone pirate/assassin adventure. The Caribbean is a stunning location to explore and it features some of the best-looking seas in gaming, although the new time-of-day and weather effects can turn sailing excursions into terrifying battles against the waves. These stormy sorties are supremely atmospheric, soundtracked by the various collectible sea shanties. These songs (including several new additions) remain one of the game’s great pleasures, giving personality to Kenway’s crew as his ship hunts enemies across the region. More than a decade later, Black Flag remains one of the strongest entries in the series and this remake brings it bang up to date for a modern audience. (Murray Robertson)  Out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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ANDREW PETTEGREE

The Bookshop: A History Of Bookselling From The Dawn Of Print To The 21st Century (Profile Books) 

REVIEWS

Remember when you used to nick your mum’s Jackie Collins novels and turn to the saucy bits when she was out shopping? I confess I did this, or a version of, with Andrew Pettegree’s new non-fiction title The Bookshop. Pettegree is an esteemed academic and historian, and this is a pioneering and meticulously researched history of not just bookshops (as we know and love them) but the 600-year evolution of print, publishing, booksellers, book culture and the social and political forces that have shaped the global industry.

This informative and at times entertaining tome is dense: you may have guessed. In sections where, as Pettegree makes plain, there are scant records, it swims with dates: rollcalls of American, Australian, European (you name it) printers, pamphleteers, publishers, booksellers and agents, with time-flips from medieval Florentines to railway-stand kingpin WH Smith to the dreaded Amazon, and back again.

So yes, I skipped to the salacious chapters; to 16th-century Spanish ‘chivalric’ lit (bonkbusters), the society-rocking scandal of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and, more brutally, censorship as a tool of totalitarian regimes (a stark reminder in neo-fascist times). Pettegree’s command of his sprawling subject is clear. Comprising two parts (part one covering the first four centuries of the handpress era), it is encyclopedic, an essential resource for anyone interested in the largely undocumented and precarious history of bookselling.

There are some standout anecdotes, especially in later chapters where improved records supply much-needed colour. But it is no page-turner.

Every scrap of research makes the cut and it lacks the narrative tentacles of truly readable non-fiction. Good news for booklovers, though. According to Pettegree, print (and by dint, bookshops) are not dead: you read it here first. (Ellie Carr)  Published on Thursday 17 September.

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MIRKO ILIĆ

Nightmares And Daydreams: AC 2020 (SelfMadeHero)  Bosnia’s fabled comic book artist and graphic designer presents a collection of wordless single-page visual essays, journalling the realities (and surrealities) of living through the covid pandemic in New York, his adoptive city. With a career that spans decades, from his early years producing work for Marvel’s Epic Illustrated through to ´his role as art director for Time magazine’s international edition, Ilic uses his first-love medium of comics as a panacea against the uncertainty and claustrophobia of lockdown.

The idea that the pandemic could be represented as a monochromatic gradient of emotions is central to the visual style and inherent sensibility of the book. Using the technique of chiaroscuro (literally the contrasted´ effect of light and shadow), Ilic marks out his experiences as selfcontained vignettes, sequential and standalone. Each page uses the comic book’s boxed-in format to communicate separation, physical disjointedness and the passing of time. By compartmentalising natural emotions and human desire, he nails down the monotony of covid’s unnatural daily routines, as well as the twin horrors of cooped-up claustrophobia and New York’s wide open, deserted landscape.

A forest turns into the legs of a monstrous pack of wolves, nature chasing us down and sinking its teeth in. Elsewhere, even his bed, that most primal fortress of comfort and safety, retreats into the floor like a grave. People endlessly fall, or disappear altogether, as their personalities are swallowed up by the very streets they walk upon. Nightmares And Daydreams works as an act of defiance, an artist’s compulsion to document the unprecedented. (Gary Sullivan)  Published on Thursday 3 September.

ALBUMS

PHOEBE BRIDGERS

Lost Weekend (Dead Oceans) 

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Lost Weekend is Phoebe Bridgers’ highly anticipated third album, a hefty 16-track meditation on the loss of her father that, in her signature style, is abyssal in its depth of introspection. Fans of 2020’s Punisher will be familiar with Bridgers’ preoccupations with death and the complex relationship with her father (see ‘Kyoto’, for instance). Honouring this continuity, she weaves in motifs from that album in the form of a haunting ‘Graceland Too’ melody and ghostly interlude ‘Lost Parade’ which feels like it could have been recorded behind the curtain of the Punisher tour.

In Lost Weekend, death isn’t abstract, it’s tangible. The opening line of ‘The Outside’ arrests us with gallows humour: ‘Crying in a suit and tie but you should see the other guy’. Delivered by a vocoder (a signature sonic accent throughout), it seems to embody the numb disassociation she describes. The whole album is littered with these lean, layered and precise one-liners that fall somewhere between funny and devastating (perhaps the influence of Bridgers’ partner and co-writer on many tracks, Bo Burnham). ‘Bobby’ is a gushing love song dedicated to him (‘this could be the end of wanting’) and sits in stark contrast to ‘The Governor’s Waltz’ which depicts a flatlining romance.

Many of these songs could live in the same universe as Punisher, but their emotional and sonic range is more extreme. Outlying folky moments come in ‘Never Going Back!’ and ‘Haunted’, featuring backing vocals from Boygenius bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker. King of abstract lyricism Cameron Winter appears on ‘I Can’t Wait’ which depicts the dual personality of an alcoholic with its hook ‘Hyde Jekyll Hyde’. ‘Lost Weekend (Reprise)’ is the record’s final eulogy, a sweet song of growing acceptance and nuanced grief. ‘He never made it a day in a shirt / He’s not coming back as a bird, he’s not coming back’ combines the foundational elements of this record: humour, pain and mortalism. (Megan Merino)  Out now.

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Claire Sawers goes square-eyed watching all the latest TV shows you won’t want to miss, encountering serial killers, sassy Aussies, painful prejudice and toxic dumping along the way

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Killer tales: (clockwise from above) Little Bird, Buried, My Brilliant Career, The Shards

REVIEWS

ret Easton Ellis’ 2023 novel The Shards (his first after a 13-year hiatus) gets a dark and glossy adaptation for the small screen. The book was excellent, an LGBT coming-of-age tale rolled into a nightmarish blur of metafiction and memoir, looking back on the author’s imaginary final year at high school in Los Angeles. Ellis has co-created The Shards (Disney) with the prolific Ryan Murphy (Pose, American Horror Story, The Assassination Of Gianni Versace), so a luscious wardrobe and on-point soundtrack comes with the territory (think classic 80s bangers and new Troye Sivan tracks). The serial killer plotline brings grotesque details of animal mutilation and torture to rub up against the cossetted lives of rich kids and nepo babies, with the striking Kaia Gerber (daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford) cast beautifully as the stunning Susan Reynolds, one of the most popular girls in school. Sinister and titillating telly.

Another book gets adapted for TV, this time Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel, My Brilliant Career. Franklin was a feminist writer from Australia (real name Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin) and after her book was knocked back by several Australian publishers, it eventually got picked up by Edinburgh’s Blackwoods, who also published Silas Marner by another woman using a male pseudonym, George Martin. My Brilliant Career (Netflix) follows teenager Sybylla Melvyn, a headstrong free spirit who is dead against marriage, but attracts various suitors when she is sent to live on a farm with her strict grandmother (Anna Chancellor). Set in rural New South Wales, the period drama has Philippa Northeast as the ebullient heroine, giving a sassy, modern voice to Sybylla, as well as a modern soundtrack featuring Australian female artists. It’s a playful, fun take on the story of one young woman’s attempts to reject the patriarchy and embrace a life of creativity and emancipation.

Taking an altogether more serious tone, Little Bird (Now) is a very beautiful if harrowing look at what was known as ‘the Sixties Scoop’ in Canada, where indigenous children were violently removed from their birth families and placed with white, affluent ones instead. Social services are portrayed as the heartless, do-gooder authority figures, casually causing generations of trauma to a community; decades later they would be harshly condemned for their illegal actions and millions of dollars were paid out in lawsuits. Darla Contois is magnetic as the 20-year-old Esther Blumenthal, doggedly trying to find her siblings before she can move forward with her plans to marry into a rich Jewish family. The opening episode is a painful watch, with an idyllic homelife torn apart by violence and prejudice; a colonial disaster plan that ruined lives. Hannah Moscovitch’s script brings dignity to this shameful tale of state-sanctioned abduction.

When the actor Michael Sheen got wind of a buried story about land contaminated by chemicals in South Wales (the original UK one this time), he set himself a mission to uncover the truth. The documentary series Buried (BBC iPlayer) begins with Sheen interviewing a dying man, the environmental campaigner Douglas Gowan, about the scandal. Gowan first blew the whistle over the pollution in the 1970s and was targeted by a smear campaign, led by US agrichemical company Monsanto. Sheen feels extra obligation to seek justice when Gowan dies shortly after their two days of filming together. Another astonishingly unfair story, this time about a biotech giant showing brazen disregard for human and animal life, Sheen does an excellent investigation into the toxic dumping which is believed to have led to cancers. In turn, the TV series has now led to fresh calls for a public inquiry into the scandal, led by Friends Of The Earth Cymru.

SAWERS ALSO SAW . . .

Tea With Judi Dench Featuring Ian McKellen on Sky Arts: ‘A delightful chat between two much-loved luvvies, now nonagenarians’ Hamza: African Birds Of Prey on BBC iPlayer: ‘The enthusiastic wildlife presenter heads to Kenya with spectacular results’ Forever Home on Channel 5: ‘Dougie Henshall and Denise Welch star in Graham Norton’s kitchen-sink thriller adaptation’

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Some Small Fortune (Ninja Tune) lllll It comes as no surprise to learn that Liam Shortall creates dozens of tracks as he begins to work on an album and then selects, in this case, the 15 that make the cut. In his role as multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, performer and leader of the Mercury Music Prize-nominated Corto.

Alto project, the Dumfries-born, Glasgow-raised Shortall has ideas coming out of his pores. Marshalling these ideas might be his strongest skill.

Some Small Fortune reveals Shortall to be a romantic as much as a grooving long-time fan of the hip hop and rap scenes. In among the intensely wrought detail of slamming beats and worming keys behind Nigerian lyricist Vector on the single ‘Go’, for instance, there are strings that might have sneaked in from a classic Hollywood soundtrack.

These strings also introduce the album itself on the brief opening title track and are used to fine effect to sweeten the hyperactive ‘Thief’. As well as Vector, Shortall calls on a range of voices including London-based French-Senegalese singersongwriter Anaiis, whose softly expressive vocal enhances the catchy ‘April’, and Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins on the moody ‘Whodis’. There are also contrasting contributions from South Londoner Bina (insouciant on the swampy ‘Something’) and Fife’s own Jacob Alon, who stretches operatically over the acoustic landscape of ‘Noblehill’.

Instrumentally there is much to admire also, not least Shortall’s lithe bass figure on ‘Nothing’ and Fergus McCreadie’s fluently searching piano solo on ‘Prayed We Would’. If the most memorable tracks are the ones that feature the simplest lines emerging through complex detail, there are numbers, too, that have the potential to be epic live. Shortall’s generation might not go for the hard rockers’ foot up on the monitor stance but the guitar riff and gradually building impact of ‘Ijustidontknow’ could be ripe for it. (Rob Adams) n Released on Friday 4 September.

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PODLANDIA: A–O REWATCH

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88 THE LIST September 2026

It’s been 15 years since the debut episode of Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen’s satirical sketch show Portlandia was released. The opening scene cemented the tone of the programme, as it lovingly poked fun at the non-conformist nature of Portland, Oregon, with an MTV-style music video, ‘The Dream Of The 90s’. The lyrics are a mischievous ode to a utopia where wearing flannel, not joining the capitalist rat race and saving the planet were of the utmost importance. In this podcast, they revisit each episode with a fine-tooth comb, celebrating the successful sketches and commiserating over the ones that haven’t stood the test of time.

Special guests so far include collaborator Jonathan Krisel and singer-songwriter Aimee Mann; the latter’s episode features a delightfully funny conversation about the woes of being a touring musician and the depressing nature of the music industry for women, in the era in which both Brownstein (as part of the band Sleater-Kinney) and Mann came up in the business.

The guest stars in Portlandia often included friends from SNL or the music scene.

As they dissect episode one, an examination of the farm-to-table movement (which featured Jason Sudeikis as a cult-like farmer), they reflect on how the subject has moved into the mainstream over the years. Another prescient sketch involves Armisen stuck in a frantic, never-ending technology/social-media loop.

In a time where objects such as Meta Glasses are being held accountable, it’s an idea that remains relevant. It all adds up to a podcast that is at turns uplifting and compelling. (Katherine McLaughlin) n New episodes available weekly.

One of the best novels I’ve read on popular music and musicians.

Humane and rich in detail of the ’80s, of London and the island.

IAN RANKIN

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sound A NOVEL

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Brothers (and bottom from left), Arab Strap, Eyre Llew, Ignore That Feeling

OTHER THINGS WORTH STAYING IN FOR A packed month of things to do indoors or consume on your travels include a blistering album from our favourite Falkirk-bred duo, the return of a beloved double-act podcast and a fictionalised TV show that might seem a little too real/contrived for some ALBUMS

TV

CATHERINE LIU

LAST SEEN

Sometimes it’s possible to imagine what it would be like had Arab Strap not got back together after that long hiatus. It would have been bad, people; very bad. Half-Told Tales is yet another full-blown classic.  Rock Action, Thursday 3 September.

Traumatized: The New Politics Of Public Suffering is the story of how shellshock became PTSD, how Oprah turned pain into profit, and how ‘authenticity’ became the ultimate brand.  Verso, Tuesday 29 September.

Adapted from author Ryan David Jahn’s book The Dispatcher, this stars Patrick Brammall (Colin From Accounts) and Maxine Peake in a tale of a police detective whose life fell apart a decade prior when his young daughter disappeared without a trace.  Apple TV, Thursday 9 September.

BEABADOOBEE

Poet, theologian and conflict mediator Ó Tuama gives us a new collection of writing entitled Love Between Men. Stephen Fry, Elif Shafak and Simon Mayo are fans.  Cheerio Publishing, Thursday 10 September.

The Filipino-London singer-songwriter describes being alone in hotel rooms writing her new album Pylon as reminding her of penning tunes aged 17 and feeling ‘sad as fuck’. Hopefully she has transferred that feeling into great music.  Dirty Hit/Interscope, Saturday 12 September.

HIGHLIGHTS

BOOKS

ARAB STRAP

EYRE LLEW Dubbed by 6 Music as ‘Britain’s answer to Sigur Rós’ (we approve) the Nottingham band’s latest single was called ‘Oban’ (again, up for that) and now a new album, Bloom, is upcoming.  Penance Music, Friday 18 September.

90 THE LIST September 2026

PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA

BROTHERS

IGNORE THAT FEELING

Remember that time Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey realised there was a chance they could be half-brothers? Well, here they are in a show playing fictionalised versions of themselves: ’[their] friendship is thrown into chaos when they uncover a decadesold secret: they might actually be brothers’. Ok . . .  Apple TV, Wednesday 23 September.

Great to have Fern Brady and Alison Spittle back for a second batch of their attempts to deny emotions. Among the recent topics since their summer return are Katie Price, gym men, Bonnie Blue (again) and EMDR therapy.  New episodes available every Tuesday.

Hypochondriac detective Martin Beck and his handpicked team yet again take on macabre crime in the seedy Stockholm underworld.  BBC Four, Saturday 5 September.

PODCASTS

BECK

“The Most Fun Way To Explore Edinburgh” It's a flash mob. It’s a silent disco. It’s a roaming, rhythmic riot through the sound-soaked streets!

11–13 September 2026

BOOK HERE

Tickets on sale from late July via jazzscotland.com

r Join our next Silent Disco Tou k co.u res. ntu dve silenta

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back PICTURE: MATT CROCKETT

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WITH MAISIE ADAM

Maisie Adam, she of Taskmaster, Last One Laughing and pretty much any comedy panel show you might think of (as well as co-host of the Big Kick Energy football podcast), is back on the road with her latest stand-up tour, Whatsherface. Before packing her bags and hitting the comedy highway, she tackles our Q&A to tell us all about existential dread, dirty baths and ‘brass tactics’ Who would you like to see playing you in the movie about your life? Who do you think the casting people would choose? Those are two very different questions, haha! The first answer is Margot Robbie, but the second answer is probably the bloke that played Jay in The Inbetweeners.

What’s the punchline to your favourite joke?

Describe your perfect Saturday evening? I’m

at home, sat outside in the garden with my best friends round for a barbecue and some drinks. One of them’s got some incredible gossip and we’ve got the entire evening to dissect it all!

If you were a ghost, who would you haunt?

‘Baaaaaaaaaa!!!’

All the politicians? Just to keep them on their toes.

If you were to return in a future life as an animal, what would it be? Probably my

If you could relive any day of your life, which one would it be? The day I was born. I’d just quite

parents’ jack russell. I’ve never seen someone be so spoilt; he’s living the life! He’s by far their favourite child.

If you were playing in an escape room name two other people (well-known or otherwise) you’d recruit to help you get out? Carol

Vorderman for the brains, Joe Marler for the brawn.

Not really sure what I’d bring to that team . . . good vibes? Snacks? An extra pair of hands?

When was the last time you were mistaken for someone else and what were the circumstances? I get asked all the time if I’m

What’s the best cover version ever? Ooooh great question! Arctic Monkeys covered ‘Love Machine’

by Girls Aloud when I was still at school; our art teacher used to have Radio 1 on in the classroom and they covered it in the Live Lounge. Of course, the lyric: ‘Loving me is as easy as pie’ sounds better in a Sheffield accent.

Whose speaking voice soothes your ears? John Cooper Clarke. I went to see him a few months ago and obviously his words are magical, but even just his tone is simply a tonic for the soul.

Tell us something you wish you had discovered sooner in life? That the phrase is ‘let’s get down to brass tacks’ and not ‘brass tactics’. Only learnt that this year. It would have saved me a lot of embarrassment.

What’s your earliest recollection of winning something? An Easter egg hunt on holiday in

France. I won a bucket and spade, with a beach ball too! I felt very smug on the beach that day.

Did you have a nickname at school that you were ok with? And can you tell us a nickname you hated? Spaghetti Legs was a popular one

in the sports’ teams. I never knew my legs looked particularly al dente but nice for people to let me know, I suppose. I didn’t really hate any nicknames at school, though my good friend Suzi Ruffell sometimes calls me Jeff Maizos which always winds me up, haha!

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 do love a bit of Dolly Parton.

She’s my go-to for karaoke. Dolly Pardon because I’d sing so badly you could hardly hear what I’m saying [editor note: this q&a was compiled several weeks before the great lady’s passing].

When were you most recently astonished by something? I went to Edinburgh for a weekend

and it was so lovely to realise you can go there and not be filled with a sense of existential dread at how your Fringe show is going. Just go literally any other month of the year: astonishing!

What tune do you find it impossible not to get up and dance to, whether in public or private?

‘Freed From Desire’ by Gala. It’s impossible to stay sat down for that one, especially at a football party.

Which famous person would be your ideal holiday companion? Jane McDonald; because DUHHH!

family came round to ours once and when her daughter came out of our bathroom, she said ‘your bath’s rather dirty’ and it was the funniest (and most humbling) thing you can hear a five-year-old say.

She was like a mini Kim Woodburn.

Tell us one thing about yourself that would surprise people? I’ve never seen an episode of The Simpsons.

When did you last cry? I watched a nature

documentary the other night where a leopard was having to jump through a flash flood and was at risk of being eaten by a crocodile. They managed to get to dry land just in time and I was a wreck. Then it went to a bit about a polar bear who wouldn’t be able to eat unless it caught some reindeer and suddenly I was all for animals being eaten alive.

Basically the programme decided who I rooted for and who I wanted to starve. Very clever.

What’s the most hi-tech item in your home?

Oh god, I have no idea, that’s my husband’s department. I find it all so dull, I just let him sort all the tech. The fridge? The telly? I don’t know and I’m bored thinking about it.

What’s a skill you’d love to learn but never got round to? I played drums as a kid and gave

up too soon. I should have persevered and who knows, I could have been on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, shredding away.

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? The utility room with all the ironing that needs doing.

If you were selected as the next 007, where would you pick as your first luxury destination for espionage? Ooooh, Mexico, just for the food!

That first scene in Spectre where James Bond is walking through the Day Of The Dead parade is the only time I’ve been jealous of a man in MI5. It’s such a cool country.

Maisie Adam: Whatsherface, Whitehall Theatre, Dundee, Monday 21 September; Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen, Tuesday 22 September; Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, Wednesday 23 September.

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Maisie Williams. We don’t look anything alike, it’s just that she is (quite rightly!) the much more famous Maisie. There are not many Maisies, so I think when people spot me and remember my name is Maisie, their brain just fills in the blanks automatically and says ‘Williams’. But I think Game Of Thrones would have looked a lot less cool if a lanky 32-year-old was attempting to take down a White Walker.

like to know what it was like meeting everyone for the first time, see what they thought of me and see what I thought of my first view of the world.

As an adult, what has a child said to you that made a powerful impact? Suzi Ruffell and her

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hot shots: festival special Scotland’s international crime writing festival Bloody Scotland (18–20 September) is back (with a vengeance) in Stirling and the big names are rolling on in. Denise Mina (pictured) is a guest programmer this year with Lee Child, Andi Osho, Chris Brookmyre, Robert Peston, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Richard Osman and Louise Welsh all appearing.

Jump in for another luxurious big-screen adventure as the Ocean Film Festival (Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 5 September) splashes back. There are short films about a 1973 expedition to cross the Pacific on wooden rafts, a photographer snapping away in icy Arctic waters and a look at the rise in octogenarian surfers.

Musicians, educators and community leaders from across Europe gather up for the Ando Glaso Roma Fest (University Of Glasgow and Destiny Church, 4 & 5 September).

Headlining this year is Jázmin, one of Hungary’s biggest Roma pop stars, and A Kovács és a Cigány Karaván (pictured), a celebrated Romani ensemble.

94 THE LIST September 2026

11 – 20 septemBer 2026

Borders Music Festival A celebration of

ms, mss and mmt

tn day of wold cla choal, folk, jazz and ochal uic in h ha of h scoih Bod.

For full event information and tickets visit

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September 2026 THE LIST 95

students get 20% off* with

download the soul club app then join + verify your student status to become an official member of the soul club student society. you’ll unlock loads more exclusive perks like this one *t+cs apply. valid sunday - thursday only. see website for details 96 THE LIST September 2026

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

Glasgow p98 Edinburgh p104 Dundee p109 STUDENT GUIDE CO-EDITORS: Danny Munro, Isy Santini and Rachel Smith, with contributions from Ananya Patankar and Rachel Morrell DESIGN: Seonaid Rafferty

Student Guide

2026

Glasgow

STUDENT GUIDE 2026 | GLASGOW

Freshers’ Hacks Fraser Brown, Union President at University Of Strathclyde, tells us his top advice for getting the best out of student life in Glasgow

FIND YOUR SPOT

Try the local down the road, your students’ union café or maybe a spot that won’t kick you out for using your laptop. New to the city? A coffee-shop crawl can be a great exploration and, when you find one with free alternative milks, that’ll be the one.

ENJOY THE SUN

Catch the last of the sun. Walk local parks or run down the Clyde. Get to a Merchant City or Kelvingrove beer

garden. Come exam time at the end of spring, you’ll know all the best places to relax.

TRAVEL THE REGION

First time in Scotland? Glasgow regular?

The region has plenty to explore. Grab a bus to Loch Lomond. Cycle up to the Campsie Fells. Catch a train to Ayrshire or Inverclyde, then a ferry over to Arran, Bute or Great Cumbrae for a day trip.

There’s more to living in Glasgow than Glasgow!

PICTURE: INDIE SLEAZE FOREVER

Let’s dance

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ou will be spoiled for choice when it comes to clubbing options during Freshers’ Week. Via jelly shots, Z-list celebrity appearances and overly complicated pre-drinks card games, students new to Glasgow will get a good feel for what going out in Scotland’s biggest city is like. But your time in the club doesn’t have to stop in midSeptember. The great thing about Glasgow is that there’s fun to be had across the calendar, long after the foam machines have been dismantled and Dick & Dom have gone home for another year.

Starting off on a suitably student-friendly note we have Trash Thursdays.

A weekly event, multi-storied city-centre haunt Buff Club plays host to the self-proclaimed ‘messiest night in Glasgow’. For music, you can expect noughties pop, indie sleaze and ‘guilty pleasures’. There’s free entry before midnight and drinks start at 99p, so it’s a safe bet for when SAAS is running low. A nice quirk is that Buff Club gives out a disposable camera every week, posting the resulting images on its Instagram. How very Y2K. One of Scottish nightlife’s best innovations in recent years is the

Danny Munro goes ‘out out’ to bring you some top club nights to help kickstart your student social life

formation of Polka Dot Disco Club (PDDC). Established shortly before the pandemic, musicians and sisters Frankie Elyse and Jozette set up PDDC with the aim of integrating more women into the club scene through free DJ workshops. Years on and PDDC is best known for its inclusive club night of the same name. Platforming flinta (female, lesbian, intersex, nonbinary, transgender and agender) artists, these loud and proud evenings float between Glasgow venues, so keep your eyes on their Instagram to find the next one.

Though not aimed at students specifically, you can’t mention clubbing in Glasgow without a nod to Subculture. A weekly Saturday evening affair, Subculture is a staple of the world-renowned Sub Club and, at 22 years old, is one of the longest running club nights in the world. Each week, veteran spinners Harri and Domenic take control of the decks, both of whom have forgotten more about electronic music than most will ever know. n instagram.com/thebuffclub; instagram.com/polkadotdiscoclub; instagram.com/subclub87

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on’t go straight to Google: if you’re looking for what’s going on in your city, check here first because The List is the place to find out about all the events you definitely don’t want to miss out on. Whether you’re music mad, into art, can’t get enough of culture or a food and drink fanatic, there’s loads to get involved with for newbies and longtime locals alike. But if you’re looking for a chill space to hang out with new mates or catch up after classes, our benches are where you’ll want to be. At wagamama, we make fresh, Asian-inspired food to order, packed with big, bold flavours and ideal for sharing. Think steaming bowls of ramen, saucy noodles, gyoza for the table and the sort of spice that sets your senses alight. Whether fuelling up between lectures, decompressing after a long day or getting a group together before heading out, we’re ready and waiting to welcome you. And, as if all that food isn’t already tasty enough, students who join our soul club loyalty programme get 20% off, Sunday to Thursday, by downloading the app and verifying their student status*. So, we’ll see you soon then? *Ts & Cs apply, see website for details.

98 THE LIST September 2026

STUDENT GUIDE 2026 | GLASGOW

Thirst for knowledge Pub quizzes are a great way to socialise while simultaneously enjoying a tipple and showing off your brain power to fellow freshers. Danny Munro picks three of the best Glasgow has to offer

PICTURE: THE HUG AND PINT

PICTURE: AFTON MURDOCH

Star Student JENNIFER WILSON, JOURNALISM APPRENTICE AT BBC NEWS SCOTLAND I was accepted into university on a completely different course with completely different career prospects during the wonderful time of covid. But I found my way to Strathclyde’s English and creative writing course, which allowed me to focus on my creativity and all the possibilities of what my life could become. It gave me the skills I needed to apply to the BBC as a journalism apprentice. Now, I’ve worked there for nearly two years. I would never have been able to do any of it without experimenting throughout uni. Although my university journey started unconventionally and with different goals to what I ended up doing, it allowed me to discover what I truly wanted to do.

Glasgow

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f the chat is running dry with your new flatmates, a pub quiz is a fairly safe way to sidestep those awkward moments of silence. Equally, learning that your friend has a competitive side that would make Novak Djokovic blush or watching a course mate reveal an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure flags, both serve as effective ways of breaking down social barriers.

Planted firmly in Strathclyde territory is a behemoth battlecruiser known as The Ark, in which students can gorge on continental lager at discounted prices. Try not to overindulge, however, as reaction time is key in this quiz. Rather than a good old-fashioned pen and paper, here you vote via the medium of smartphone, with additional points to those quickest off the mark.

Scholars at the University Of Glasgow can put their academia to good use in the notoriously difficult quiz at The Sparkle Horse. Like the band the pub is named after, the Horse’s Monday night trivia extravaganza is a muchloved quirky affair with a dedicated cult following. Previous team names visible on the pub’s Instagram include Jacob Rees-Mogwai and Sub-Atomic Partickles, if you’re looking for an indicator of the kind of vibe you can expect here. Cash behind the bar is on offer to the first and second teams, while third place is rewarded with an ‘acceptable’ bottle of wine.

If you make your way along to the far end of Great Western Road, you’ll find The Hug And Pint, a bar and music venue laden with cheap cocktails and excellent pizza. The Hug’s quiz takes place every Sunday with gig tickets up for grabs for the winner. Excitingly, their quiz is having a makeover this coming academic year. Ditching its speed-quizzing format, The Hug are reverting to pen and paper, and the festivities will be MC’d by local musician Fraser MacCallum. Even more excitingly, on the last Sunday of every month, the quiz will be taken over by friends of the Student Guide, Subcity Radio (see page 100).

Glasgow

STUDENT GUIDE 2026 | GLASGOW

Stay tuned

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Subcity Radio has been broadcasting and entertaining students and locals alike for more than 30 years from its base at Glasgow University. Danny Munro chats to some its current hosts to find out how they got involved and what the station means to them

Advice shop

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Key contacts and organisations to help keep you safe and well on your student journey in Glasgow

t’s important to remember that, above all else, being a student should be fun. But being at university doesn’t make you immune to life’s problems. If things are starting to feel like too much to handle, consider reaching out to a student wellbeing helpline: every university and college in Glasgow has one. Your institution will also offer financial advice to those who require it and if you’re feeling unsafe around somebody at uni, don’t hesitate to reach out to campus security. Your institution is also on hand to provide support for all visa-related matters.

LGBTQ+ students can access LGBT Youth Scotland’s (lgbtyouth.org.uk/get-support/livechat/) live chat service f(4–8pm Mon, Wed & Thu) and the Sandyford sexual health clinic (sandyford.scot) offers a comprehensive list of vital services including, but not limited to, emergency contraception, STI testing and PrEP appointments. Glasgow And Clyde Rape Crisis (glasgowclyderapecrisis.org.uk) have helplines both in Glasgow and nationwide for those in need of support regarding sexual assault.

With You (wearewithyou.org.uk/advice-and-information) provides free support for anyone struggling with substance issues, be it drugs or alcohol. And should you find yourself alone on a night out, Strut Safe (0333 335 0026) is a free, UK-wide helpline that operates through the wee hours every weekend and will stay on the line until you make it to your door.

100 THE LIST September 2026

PICTURE: DAPHNE FIELDHOUSE

ounded more than 500 years ago, Glasgow University is one of the most storied educational establishments in the English-speaking world. Nestled in its hallowed redbrick walls is an innocuous, graffitiwrapped studio, home to a modern-day institution known as Subcity Radio. ‘Subcity is a pillar in the community and an essential part of the culture in Glasgow, just as music is a pillar to society as a whole,’ explains Alannis VazquezMartinez. She is a masters student who volunteers at the station and hosts her own show, XOXO, Alannis. Raised in the deep south of the US, the finance student discovered Subcity online and was instantly enamoured by its eclecticism. ‘My favourite shows at the station seem to change every few days, since there are so many options and, depending on my mood that day, there is always something for me.’

Subcity was founded in the nearby Murano student accommodation in 1993, long before the majority of its current presenters and DJs were born. Despite decades of advancements in on-demand streaming services, the online station continues to draw in contributors and listeners from Glasgow’s West End and beyond, something Agglomeration host and tech volunteer David Blair attributes to the station’s community feel. ‘Radio, especially online community radio, can provide you with an avenue of endless exploration of music that feels organic, rather than force fed to you by a streaming service algorithm,’ he muses. ‘It allows you to become more inspired and switch on your brain to start discovering things in a different approach entirely.’

Though born out of the university, Subcity welcomes submissions from those with no affiliation to the institution: its impressive alumni includes Belle And Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, writer and author Lauren Martin and the late, great JD Twitch. So how do you get involved? ‘It’s never been more easy to apply for a show,’ Blair says. ‘If you have a brain that can form a cool concept, love cool music, want to share it with the world, want to chat nonsense with your friends live on air, or to become a superstar DJ (Hudson Mohawke is a Subcity alumni you know) . . . simply apply for a show on the website through a Google Form!’ n subcity.org

September 2026 THE LIST 101

STUDENT GUIDE 2026 | GLASGOW

Glasgow

ACTIVITY: Day trip | LOCATION: Loch Lomond

Non-alcoholic drink: Unless you’re planning on catching

ACTIVITY: Footgolf | LOCATION: Footgolf Cumbernauld (5 miles from Glasgow)

Loch Lomond on a rare sunny day, a hearty flask of tea, soup or coffee will help keep you warm on the bonnie banks.

Non-alcoholic drink: Erdinger’s Alkoholfrei is the best low and no beer on the market for my money, and it’s officially classed as an isotonic, meaning it contains the optimal sugar levels required to fuel your exercise. Perfect!

Glasgow can feel fairly industrial at times, so it’s important to remember that Loch Lomod can be accessed in just under an hour via the train to Balloch. Walk, run or kayak your way round the loch or go on the hunt for a new mythical creature to rival Nessie.

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Imagine golf but with your feet. A more accessible (and arguably more fun) take on a classic, Footgolf courses are less intimidating than traditional golf ones and students can get in for £14 at Cumbernauld.

Roam and dry Danny Munro leads the sober-curious on a tour of the city, with a non-alcoholic tipple to wet your whistle at every stop

ACTIVITY: Pickleball LOCATION: Glasgow Club Maryhill

ACTIVITY: Cinema LOCATION: GFT

Non-alcoholic drink: À la 007, why

Non-alcoholic drink: Dua Lipa went viral in 2024 for her, let’s say, intriguing take on Diet Coke. To prepare a DC like the ‘Levitating’ singer, simply fill a glass with ice, pour in your coke, a splash of juice from both a pickle and jalapeño jar and, to finish, add a couple of aforementioned pickles and jalapeños, to taste.

Glasgow Film Theatre’s very reasonably priced student tickets have saved many a young person from a boring weeknight; or at least distracted them from an impending deadline. Other Glasgow cinemas are available, though none programme as well as the GFT.

Pickleball plays a big role in the new wave of racquet sports that are taking over sports halls and playing courts across the globe. The appeal of pickleball is that it’s a little easier to play than badminton or squash, yet still fast-paced enough to remain interesting to new players.

not try showing up to the pictures looking suave with a virgin Martini, swapping the vodka for sparkling water or an alcohol-free spirit.

ACTIVITY: Pottery painting LOCATION: The Craft Pottery

Non-alcoholic drink: M&S recently released a new line of alcohol-free cocktail cans that feel as though they were crafted specifically for wholesome activities, like a trip to The Craft Pottery.

It’s always nice to come away from an activity with a sentimental keepsake and it’s even better to put your phone in your pocket for two hours and channel some creative energy. At The Craft Pottery, they don’t charge corkage for the luxury that is BYOB, whether it’s alcoholic or bevvy free.

ACTIVITY: Voi biking LOCATION: Wherever you like

Non-alcoholic drink: Once your bike is locked up and your ride complete, reward yourself for safely navigating the streets of Glasgow with something replenishing and high calorie, like a Lucozade or a chocolate milk.

Voi bikes are everywhere and you can sign up for a discounted rate if you’re a student. Why not swing by Pollok Country Park and check out the coos, or wheel over to Tramway, a contemporary art centre in the Southside, where Harold Offeh’s zany sci-fi exhibition, The Mothership Collective 2:0, is open, for free, until February 2027. Whatever you do, please wear a helmet!

Hot Shot

THE CLAYPITS

Yeah, the Necropolis and Kelvingrove Park are great. But what do you know about The Claypits? Once a key area in the industrial revolution before falling into disuse, the Hamiltonhill Claypits reopened in 2021 as a local nature reserve. A professionally maintained green space, the canal-side site is one of the most biodiverse areas of the city, plus you get a great view from the top.

102 THE LIST September 2026

A QUARTER CENTURY SUPPORTING THE DIY UNDERGROUND MUSIC COMMUNITY

+ FONTAINES DC + ROLO TOMASSI + YOUNG FATHERS KT TUNSTALL + FRIGHTENED RABBIT + GEOFF BARROW JONAH MATRANGA + GILLA BAND + WOLF ALICE + BEAK> FRANK TURNER + ZENI GEVA + WE ARE SCIENTISTS + ZU STEVE DAVIS + SUCIOPERRO + TWIN ATLANTIC + CLUTCH ADMIRAL FALLOW + AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR + 117 BATH STREET , GLASGOW

WWW . BLOC . RU

September 2026 THE LIST 103

Edinburgh

STUDENT GUIDE 2026 | EDINBURGH

Freshers’ Hacks Emeka Orji, President of Edinburgh Napier Students’ Association, shares his top tips for making the most of your time at uni in the capital

ENJOY THE CITY

From its stunning historic landmarks to its green spaces and iconic architecture, the city has plenty to offer beyond the classroom. Take time to explore, whether that means walking through the Meadows, discovering hidden corners of the city or simply soaking up its beautiful landscapes. Enjoy Edinburgh!

ALWAYS ASK QUESTIONS

Never be afraid to ask questions. Edinburgh is known for its friendly and welcoming people.

Asking for help can make settling in much

easier, whether you need directions, housing advice or the best student discounts.

JOIN A SOCIETY

That feeling of belonging is what most freshers crave as part of their student experience. Joining a society is one of the best ways to meet new people, find your community and make your student experience more rewarding. If you can’t find one, create it.

Day Tripper PICTURE: VISITSCOTLAND/KENNY LAM

PICTURE: VISITSCOTLAND/KENNY LAM

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All work and no play makes student life very dull.

Take a break from the books and get out of town with Isy Santini’s handy travel tips

t’s easy to spend your whole degree exploring Edinburgh’s historic buildings, green spaces and world-class cultural institutions without ever wandering further afield, but you won’t regret hopping on a train to these nearby gems Perhaps surprisingly, Falkirk was voted Scotland’s most beautiful town in 2011 and boasts some top attractions, including the majestic 98-foot Kelpies sculpture, the French chateau-style Callendar House and remains from the nearly 2000-year-old Antonine Wall. More low-key beauty can be found at Berwick-Upon-Tweed. Once the epicentre of England and Scotland’s long rivalry, this charming town lies just south of the Scottish border and is a thriving haven of independent shops and makers.

History buffs will find plenty to do in Linlithgow. Take a relaxing boat tour of the canal before visiting the 15th-century palace, birthplace of Mary, Queen of Scots, and nearby Linlithgow Museum. If you’re there on the first

104 THE LIST September 2026

Saturday of the month, don’t forget to check out the town’s artisan market.

Another great option is Stirling. Start with the Wallace Monument, which towers above the site where William Wallace led his troops to victory at the Battle Of Stirling Bridge, before heading to the city’s impressive castle, one of Scotland’s largest.

Slightly further afield is Dundee. Its ongoing rejuvenation has seen it named one of the best cities in the UK. Visit the only V&A museum outside London or step aboard the RRS Discovery, now a museum dedicated to Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition. And for those who’d rather experience the sea than hear about others expeditions on it, try Gullane. With one of East Lothian’s most picturesque and popular beaches, it’s an idyllic little town on the shore’s of the Forth, surrounded by a labyrinth of grassy dunes. It may take a few bus changes to get to, but the windsurfing scene and local wildlife are more than worth it.

Good times

Having reopened just over a year ago, the Filmhouse, Edinburgh’s independent arthouse cinema, still has that brand new sheen to it. Take advantage of their £7 tickets and discounted food and drink for under26s. Or go the whole hog and buy a £30 student membership, which comes with three free tickets a year plus discounts for friends and family.

The city also plays host to a variety of markets each week. Browsing with friends through the artisan soaps, local honeys, handmade trinkets and mouth-watering, freshly made snacks is a perfect way to spend the afternoon. On Sundays, your best bet is Stockbridge Market, while Leith and Grassmarket both host markets on Saturdays.

Start the day with a hike up Arthur’s Seat.

It’s one of Edinburgh’s most iconic landmarks, nestled in the middle of Holyrood Park, and it only takes half an hour to climb. Normally crawling with tourists, it’s blissfully empty early in the morning and offers stunning views across the city and beyond. Much more pleasant than an early-morning gym trip!

Isy Santini explores how to live life on the cheap in Edinburgh, around the clock

Edinburgh

Once you’re full up on the Filmhouse’s delicious nachos, head to Brass Monkey on Drummond Street for discounted drinks (beer, cider and wine options for students, all £4). Grab a seat in their lounge and sit back for their daily film screening.

STUDENT GUIDE 2026 | EDINBURGH

Next, it’s time to replenish that energy with breakfast at La Viola. This adorable yellow-fronted café in Tollcross has a fantastic range of cooked breakfasts, scrummy smoothies and sweet treats. Plus, their Mexican hot chocolate is to die for.

Edinburgh is home to a wealth of free museums and galleries.

Tucked away just off the Royal Mile is The Writers’ Museum, a monument to three giants of Scottish literature: Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, featuring personal items like Burns’ own writing desk and a rare plaster cast of his skull.

Star Student ANNA FRASER, DRUMMER IN PROG ROCK BAND EBB Music has been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember and I always dreamed of building a life in music. Studying BA Pop Music at Edinburgh Napier gave me the confidence, skills and connections to pursue that dream. I’m incredibly grateful to the lecturers who supported me along the way. One of the most important connections I made at uni was with The Lodge Arts Collective, where I now play with progressive rock band EBB, who have since been voted Best New Band in Prog magazine’s Readers’ Poll. I was also honoured to be voted No 9 Best Drummer alongside some of my personal heroes. Studying at Edinburgh Napier made all of this possible.

September 2026 THE LIST 105

Edinburgh

STUDENT GUIDE 2026 | EDINBURGH

On the make

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f there’s one benefit to studying in the artsiest city in the world, it’s the opportunity to get creative and Edinburgh has no shortage of options. It’s a case of stitch and switch at Edinburgh Remakery where they will teach you how to mend tech and textiles every Friday. If you want to change minds instead of machines, Edinburgh Summerhall Writing Group supports all kinds of writers with their weekly meeting in the venue’s Gallery Bar, where they follow the Pomodoro writing technique before a relaxed debrief.

For gutsy go-getters, Bedlam is the only student-run theatre in Scotland. They host regular auditions and there are multiple opportunities to get involved, whether you’re an actor, director or techie, with membership only £6. If you prefer a slam to the stage, Typewronger Books run a monthly anarchic open mic night for every type of performer (as long as you leave when the gong sounds). Speaking of being brave, try your hand at stand-up with the Edinburgh Revue, the University Of Edinburgh’s resident comedy society. Or check out Edinburgh Napier Pop Choir Society, a mere £10 for the year and open to all students, with pop, folk and jazz music rehearsals weekly.

If you’re not one for performance, The Creator might be more your scene. The University Of Edinburgh’s student-run creative writing and visual arts magazine publishes new issues each term and there are plenty of opportunities to contribute or work behind the scenes. Alternatively, develop your literary criticism skills at one of Lighthouse Bookshop’s free book clubs: Other Fruit, Women In Translation, Philosophy Of Hope and Decolonising Landscapes. Whether you have a pound or a penny in your pocket, Edinburgh offers plenty of ways to stretch those creative muscles.

Advice shop

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Rachel Morrell gets the artistic juices flowing with this round-up of fun activities for students in Edinburgh

Key contacts and organisations to help keep you safe and well on your student journey in Edinburgh

niversity is a time of new experiences, new freedoms and new responsibilities. It can be incredibly exciting but it’s also a big change that can bring with it stress and worry. If you find yourself struggling, don’t panic. Support is available. All of Edinburgh’s universities offer counselling services to support students’ mental health as well as academic support in the form of advisers and skill workshops.

The University Of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier also offer mindfulness sessions to provide coping skills and reduce anxiety.

Samaritans (samaritans.org)and the Edinburgh Crisis Centre (edinburghcrisiscentre.co.uk) both provide 24-hour helplines, with the latter also offering face-to-face support via same-day appointments in serious cases.

106 THE LIST September 2026

For many, university is a chance for sexual exploration, but it’s important to do so safely. Chalmers Sexual Health Centre (lothiansexualhealth.scot) is the place to go for STI testing and treatment. In situations of assault, Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre’s (ercc.scot) confidential services include information, advice, practical and emotional support, and advocacy for anyone who has experienced sexual violence at any time in their lives. They also have a survivor support group for students.

If you are struggling financially, check what bursaries are available from your uni or reach out to Edinburgh Council’s Advice Shop (edinburgh.gov.uk/benefits-grants/adviceshop) for help with benefits, rent, council tax and general money advice.

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tix

£7

1 –£

Explore our concerts sco.org.uk Dávur Juul Magnussen Manasamitra Scottish Ensemble NYCOS Richard Hills Rose Stachniewska Dylan Perez Ellen Arkbro plus tours, talks and workshops

17 – 20 september 2026

www.gcfestival.com music, art & film booking now open

GCF is produced by the Society of Friends of Glasgow Cathedral (SC006471) with grant support including: Bellahouston Bequest Fund, Cockaigne Fund, JTH Charitable Trust, MEB Charitable Trust, Russell Lang Charitable Trust, and The Society of Deacons and Free Preseses.

£6 FOR STUDENTS

Company Registration Number: SC075079. A charity registered in Scotland No. SC015039.

Photo: Christopher Bowen

September 2026 THE LIST 107

Edinburgh

STUDENT GUIDE 2026 | EDINBURGH

Ana Aritio tells Isy Santini how getting hands-on with a charity venture in her final year proved a rewarding experience she’d encourage other students to have a bash at

Grand designs

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he Edinburgh Charity Fashion Show is a mainstay of Edinburgh’s cultural calendar and the largest student-run fashion show in the UK. Each year, young designers have tthe he chance to show off their creations while raising money for charity. 2026 saw ECFS raise more than £16,000 for Capability Scotland, a charity providing care, education and support to disabled people.

At the helm of it all was Ana Aritio, chairperson and, at the time, final year student at the University Of Edinburgh. ‘Charity lies at the heart of ECFS and I really wanted to ensure that this was kept as the main priority,’ she says. Aritio’s chosen theme for the show was synaesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon that blends the senses. ‘Making the show a full-body experience was important to me,’ she explains. ‘I didn’t just want it to be a two-dimensional visual, but rather a four-dimensional immersion into what it means to feel, hear, taste, see, smell and imagine.’

Her application to take on the role was a spur-of-the-moment decision, inspired by a year abroad in fashion-forward Paris, but Aritio is glad she pushed herself. ‘I learned a lot,’ she says, acknowledging the hard-working team behind this year’s show. ‘I don’t think I realised how long it takes to edit photos and videos, so this experience really opened my eyes to the trials and tribulations of the creative world.’ She urges other students who may be interested in getting involved to take the plunge. ‘It’s such fun and so good if you want to work in a creative field after uni.’ Aritio also points out there are many different ways to contribute. ‘You might think you’re not creative and so something like this isn’t for you, but if you’re an amazing planner and love organising events, then logistics and production could be your perfect match.’

She is upfront about the challenges she faced: finding the line between professionalism and friendship, mediating when creative visions clashed and juggling the show with her academic commitments. ‘ECFS did consume me in fourth year, but I can look back on it and know that it was something we all enjoyed doing,’ she says. ‘The whole experience was incredibly rewarding.’

When asked about her favourite memories from the show, Aritio points to the volunteer work her team undertook for Capability Scotland behind the scenes, helping bedazzle shirts for a dance performance at one of the charity’s service centres. ‘It was these moments of working with the individuals for whom we were fundraising which really served to ground us in our purpose.’

Hot Shot

MEADOWS FESTIVAL

The Meadows Festival is a highlight of summer in Edinburgh. The Old Town’s central green space is transformed into a bustling hub of street food, live music, market stalls and community performances.

A favourite event at the festival is ‘The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever’, where fans of eccentric singer-songwriter Kate Bush gather en masse and in costume to re-enact her iconic music video.

108 THE LIST September 2026

STUDENT GUIDE 2026 | DUNDEE

Freshers’ Hacks Second-year student Ann Anyebe has already learned a thing or two about navigating uni life in Dundee. Here are her top tips for finding your feet BE YOURSELF

Starting university is a chance to grow, not become someone else. While there’s nothing wrong with experimenting with hobbies or interests, don’t lose the parts of yourself that make you unique. Hold on to your values, embrace what makes you different and you’ll attract the right people.

ASK QUESTIONS

Work hard, stay curious and don’t underestimate yourself just because you’re a first year. Set realistic goals, plan your

weeks and don’t let setbacks define you.

Most importantly, ask questions: everyone is learning, so don’t be afraid to speak up.

EXPAND YOUR HORIZONS

Join societies! You will never regret it.

They offer an escape from academic pressures, help you make friends and can inspire new opportunities. At the same time, keep investing in hobbies and passions you brought with you.

University should expand who you are, not replace it.

Dundee

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Student See, Student Do Rachel Smith checks out some of Dundee’s artistic and creative highlights, whether you just want to get to know the city or fancy a more hands-on crafty experience

THE MCMANUS

If you’re new to Dundee, The McManus is a good place to start. The city’s free museum and art gallery is packed with local history, offering a glimpse into the people and places that shaped Dundee, making it an easy way to get to know your new home.

V&A DUNDEE

4 THINGS TO SEE

Even if museums aren’t usually your thing, V&A Dundee is worth a visit. Scotland’s design museum sits on the waterfront, with great views across the Tay. Most of the collection is free to visit, making it a budget-friendly place to stop between lectures or a great rainy afternoon plan.

DISCOVERY POINT

Looking for something a bit different? Just along from V&A Dundee, Discovery Point is home to RRS Discovery, the historic Dundee-built ship that sailed to Antarctica with Captain Scott.

Climb aboard to explore the decks and cabins and get a feel for what life was like on one of the world’s most famous expeditions.

DCA

Part art gallery, part cinema, part café, Dundee Contemporary Arts is a much-loved institution. Catch a film, check out the latest exhibition or sign up to a creative workshop. Once you’re done exploring, pop into the Jute café bar for coffee, lunch or a cocktail with friends. DCA is one of those places you’ll keep coming back to.

4 THINGS TO DO SUNSHINE STUDIO’S PAINT & SIP

Looking for a slightly different night out? Head to one of Sunshine Art Studio’s Paint & Sip events. Bring your own drinks and snacks and join in with a guided painting session. Whether you’re the creative type or can barely draw a stick figure, this is a great way to have a good laugh with your friends.

DUNDEE CERAMICS WORKSHOP Whether you’ve always wanted to give pottery a go or are looking to learn a new skill, pop into Dundee Ceramics Workshop. With beginner-friendly classes available, it’s the perfect place to try wheel throwing, get creative and maybe even discover a long-term hobby.

DCA PRINT STUDIO Take a break from studying with DCA’s Print Studio. From screenprinting to risography, their workshops are a fun way to try something new and get hands on with printmaking. With taster sessions, tours and courses throughout the year, there are plenty of ways to get involved.

DUNDEE ART SOCIETY Open to both members and non-members, Dundee Art Society offers daytime and evening classes, making it easy to fit around lectures, studying and part-time jobs. From life drawing to relaxed sessions, there’s something for everyone. Better yet, they offer student discounts, making it an affordable way to get creative and meet like-minded people.

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STUDENT GUIDE 2026 | DUNDEE

Dundee

Come together

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Ananya Patankar checks out the social scene and support network for new LGBTQ+ students in Dundee

inding your crowd at uni can take a bit of digging around, but Dundee has plenty of places for queer students to get involved, whether you’re after a big night out, a creative afternoon or something a little more low-key.

If music and dancing are your thing, Prism is a good place to start. The LGBTQ+ venue hosts nights covering everything from rock, emo and metal to indie, alternative and pop, alongside regular dance nights throughout the week. With a zero-tolerance approach to homophobia and transphobia, it’s a place where you can let loose and be yourself.

Prefer something a little more chilled? Room To Be offers a more grassroots take on queer community. The Dundee-based group brings people together through gardening, arts and crafts, local meet-ups and creative activities, with a focus on nature, peer connection and getting involved in events such as Pride.

And if you’re niche lies somewhere between those two options,

there are plenty of other ways to get out and meet people. The Salty Dog mixes up its music, with DJs covering everything from 80s remixes and rock to metal, house, pop, classics and disco, along with drag and karaoke nights.

Lavender Socials, meanwhile, hosts monthly meet-ups around Dundee, with previous activities including board games at Cake Or Dice café, sip and paint evenings and craft nights. It’s a welcoming, trans-inclusive space and an easy way to meet new people away from the nightlife scene.

If you’re looking for something beyond socialising, The Corner has an LGBT worker offering support, advice and information around sexuality and gender identity, while its Allsorts youth group provides a space for LGBT young people and their friends. LGBT Youth Scotland and LGBT+ Switchboard are also on hand with wider advice and support.

So whether you’re looking for a night on the town or simply some friendly faces, Dundee has plenty to offer.

Star Student AOIFE CAWLEY, ARTIST

Hot Shot

DUNDEE LAW

While Dundee Law may look like a simple hill, it’s actually the remains of an ancient volcanic sill. Offering the highest views of the city and the River Tay, it’s the perfect place for a wander, fresh air or a moment to clear your head. Sunset is especially worth the climb.

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PICTURE: MARK THOMAS

PICTURE: ALAN RICHARDSON

What I would give to relive my time at university! I attended Duncan Of Jordanstone College Of Art & Design and studied contemporary art practice. I spent every possible moment in the studios. I loved my time there so much and it really encouraged me to grow into my professional career and into myself. I was surrounded by so many good friends where we could bounce ideas off each other, but we also had so much fun throughout the years. For anyone about to start uni, I would really encourage them to make the most of the facilities and resources available to them.

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