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Electric Fields 2015
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Your FREE Festival Guide
25– 31 August
2015–2016
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Dane Baptiste Tez Ilyas David Greig Jessie Cave Sam Simmons Trans Scripts The Encounter
25/08/2015 14:07
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10 Years of The Skinny Here are a few highlights from a busy decade
28 Feb, GFT, 8.40pm | 1 Mar,GFT, 11am
Lost in Music Mia Hansen-Løve discusses her brilliant new film Eden, an intimate epic telling the history of the French Touch music scene through one DJ's bloodshot eyes
M
ia Hansen-Løve is sitting legs folded, Buddhalike, on a straight back chair in a London hotel conference room. In her hand she’s unconsciously fiddling with a card of stickers covered in Disney princesses. She sees them catch my eye. “My daughter was playing in here before,” she explains. “I should put them away, really. People will think I’m weird.” She carries on
INTERVIEW: playing. One gets the impression the 34-year-old filmmaker doesn’t worry too much about what other people think of her. You can see this strength of character in her small but exquisite body of work. Her first three features (All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children and Goodbye First Love) reveal a filmmaker with a distinct voice all her own; one that is concerned with organic rhythm and gentle ironies rather than grand dramatics or convoluted scenarios. “I think it’s probably both my strength and my weakness,” she suggests of her low-key style. “It always brings me problems when I try to finance the script because people tell me there’s not enough drama, there’s not enough plot, not enough violence.
Jamie Dunn
The thing is, my own emotion works this way – I can’t help but trust it.” Take her latest film, Eden, which charts the rise of French house music from the early 90s to the present day. A more conventional filmmaker might want to tell the story from the point-of-view of one of the scene’s superstars, say Daft Punk. That electronic duo do make an appearance as baby-faced house party wax-spinners, but Hansen-Løve’s focus instead is Paul, a contemporary of Daft Punk’s (he’s at the party where they premiere Da Funk), who didn’t quite make it. Hansen-Løve based the character on her own brother, Sven Hansen-Løve, who was a DJ on the French Touch scene and ended up left behind by the wave. continues…
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IT SEEMS strangely fitting to be writing this introduction in a hotel room in London, as Scotland is about to be blown away into the Arctic Sea by the most infamous Bawbag since Michaelangelo sculpted David and scared the hell out of Renaissance Italy. Specifically, I’m coming to you from Shoreditch, in trendy post-industrial East London, where the pigeons have ironic moustaches and everything is a recording studio. A place where the cool cats come together to decide what’s hot, and they’ve just decided that the word ‘hot’ is out for this season. A place where trends are set, a wonderland where all the fun and exciting stuff happens before small chunks of it are sent off to the rest of us. Except that’s not really how things work. Fun, cool, interesting stuff happens everywhere, all the time, often right under your nose. Nice cups of tea or pints of craft beer are not confined to the M25, and no vermin with facial hair is going to tell me otherwise. Besides, none of us really pay much attention to V-necked poseurs with haircuts that look like the offspring of the Sydney Opera House and a ball of wool. When you want advice on what to wear, which films to watch or where to eat, you listen to your friends, workmates, and the other people you rub shoulders with day-in day-out.
‘Real people’, we’ll call them. People such as your good self. Hello. When we first came up with the idea for a food special, it became clear that we needed to somehow involve you ‘real people’. Like apes sat in front of a mirror, we are self-aware enough to know that if we had simply picked our favourite restaurants, pubs, and cafes and plonked them on the page that wouldn’t cut it. Luckily, unlike apes, we know how to set up online surveys and operate spreadsheets. So we decided to ask you for your suggestions on everything from the best pint in Edinburgh to the top place to grab a coffee outside the big two Scottish cities. After all, who better to ask for suggestions than the audience who’ll (hopefully) end up reading this? That’s you again. Hiya. We’ve waded through hundreds and hundreds of your votes to bring you a comprehensive list of some of Scotland’s top places to eat, drink, be merry, gorge in the wake of merriment, get your groceries, and impress the opposite sex. From the Highlands to the Borders, coast-to-coast, we read and counted them all, even the jokey ones. We’re looking at you, people who laughed at the idea of good vegetarian food or suggested that the Finnieston Crane was the best place to go on a date. Now your selections have been charted,
noted, whittled down and tabulated into one handy results page. We say one page, because as much as we’re grateful for your votes, eight solid pages of names and addresses would be a little dull for all of us. To that end, we’ve been out and about testing your favourite pubs at either end of the M8, in an entirely scientific and rigorous test of their merits. We also pop down to meet the team at Artisan Roast to find out just what makes their coffee so good, as well as speaking to Fence Collective supremo and noted Fife resident Johnny Lynch about the renowned and revered institution that is the Anstruther Fish Bar. (Oh, and we sent two of our readers on a blind date, to test the power of your favourite date place. Tee-hee.) So here they are, your choices in The Skinny Food & Drink Survey. Thanks to everyone who voted, consider this supplement a token of our appreciation. And remember, these results were chosen entirely by you, so if you disagree with them you only have yourself to blame. Well, yourself and your fellow readers. The ‘real people’. You certainly can’t pin it on us. However, if you really have to, I know a place where you can find some ‘trend-setters’ with naff haircuts to take the rap. [Peter Simpson]
We’ve waded through hundreds and hundreds of your votes to bring you a comprehensive list of some of Scotland’s top places to eat, drink, be merry
JANUARY 2012 FOOD AND DRIN K SURVEY
October 2015
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Arab Strap at Sleazy's, 2011
The Skinny Northwest launches in Liverpool and Manchester, 2013
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ILLUSTRATION: JACOB STEAD
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