The Skinny January 2022

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January 2022 Issue 192

THE SKINNY

Books

Les Colombes AT ST. GILes’ Cathedral by Michael Pendry Taking flight Spring 2022*

• 2,500 Origami paper doves • Evening illumination and soundtrack

January 2020

For details on making a paper dove for the installation and evening illumination tickets:

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*Rescheduled from January/February 2022. Full updated event information at BURNSANDBEYOND.COM. Tickets for original dates remain valid for rescheduled dates.

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Art January 2020

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The Skinny's favourite songs by our artist of 2022 Jazmine Sullivan — Put it Down ATARASHII GAKKO! — Fantastico English Teacher — R&B Olivia Rodrigo — Good 4 U HYYTS — Blue & White Maranta — Stop Pretending Wet Leg — Too Late Now Anna B Savage — A Steady Warmth PinkPantheress — Just for me Nu Genea — Marechià Quiet Bison — Call it Even The Oozes — Blah Blah Blah Remi Wolf — Grumpy Old Man Bo Burnham — All Eyes on Me

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

Issue 192, January 2022 © Radge Media Ltd.

January 2022

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Championing creativity in Scotland

Meet the team We asked – What are going to be the top trends of 2022?

Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief "Investing in guillotine futures."

Peter Simpson Digital Editor, Food & Drink Editor "Everyone loudly but unironically talking about a 'second roaring twenties'."

Anahit Behrooz Events Editor "Me :)) Chilling out :)))"

Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist "Paisley prints, even more banana bread and a violent uprising where we reclaim all property from our avaricious landlords, Purge-style."

Tallah Brash Music Editor "Wet Leg. Oh, and Hypercolor T-shirts are going to make a comeback!"

Nadia Younes Clubs Editor "Manic Pixie Dream Boyfriends and crypto – for me at least."

Polly Glynn Comedy Editor "Those really great knockoff band t-shirts you used to buy off the market for like a fiver. Only now they’ll be £50.

Or vajazzles. I literally had a full-blown convo the other day about no-one having vajazzles any more. I think they’re due a comeback. "

Katie Goh Intersections Editor "Mid-workday naps."

Eliza Gearty Theatre Editor "Apocalypse-proof streetwear and hopetinted glasses."

Heather McDaid Books Editor "Not getting our hopes up again, probably."

Sales & Business

Production

Dalila D'Amico Art Director, Production Manager "Storm chasing, Doomsday preps and rat tails harcuts. "

Adam Benmakhlouf Art Editor "Remember after World War II, that big shared misery was the mandate for the welfare state?

Pandemic Edition of that, please."

Phoebe Willison Designer "All of my outfits, people liking my tweets, people name dropping me for clout, me making Forbes 30 Under 30, just generally me."

Sandy Park Commercial Director "The return of leaving the house for anything other than exercise being illegal."

Tom McCarthy Creative Projects Manager "Rejecting the Tories, welcoming refugees, destroying the patriarchy, dismantling the structures of white supremacy and more people wearing yellow trousers."

George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist "Bebo's gonna make a big comeback."

Laurie Presswood General Manager "Dating Pete Davidson."

THE SKINNY

Editorial Words: Rosamund West

O

ur early print deadline on the January issue always feels a bit risky, but never more so than this year. Please view this publication through the prism of it having been made in mid-December, when we are not entirely sure if things will actually be open by the time it hits the streets. This could be a handy guide to all the things you can go out and do in January, or a bittersweet artefact describing an alternate timeline while we all sit in our houses again. Impossible to tell at this stage, although clarity will no doubt arrive immediately after we send the pages to the printer. All of the following information comes with the strong recommendation to check the web for details.

To the issue in hand! You will find an interview with one half of Malian musical legends Amadou & Mariam, who will hopefully be performing at Celtic Connections at the start of February.

Either way, the interview is insightful and you should listen to their music if you haven’t already. We also have a rundown of five other acts we are looking forward to possibly seeing in the festival programme.

Other festivals currently scheduled to return in January include Fokus film festival, back with a programme celebrating German cinema from the last 12 months. Manipulate, Scotland’s leading celebration of puppetry and visual theatre, has a programme jam-packed with exciting and challenging performance exploring themes of folk-myth, identity, taboo and desire.

We meet a couple of the artists involved, Sadiq Ali and the Snap-Elastic collective, to hear about their shows, The Chosen Haram and Eat Me. We are fairly confident that album releases will continue to happen! We talk to James Smith, frontman of Leeds four-piece

Yard Act, to learn more about their soon-to-be-released debut documenting modern life in Britain. Books, too, will still come out. We talk to sometime contributor and now bona fide published author / poet Andrés N. Ordorica about his debut collection, At Least This I Know. Film release plans remain impossible to predict. We meet actor Philip Barantini to hear about the making of one-shot restaurant thriller Boiling Point.

V&A Dundee’s blockbuster exhibition celebrating club culture, Night Fever, comes to an end this month anyway.

Alongside the exhibition they have been accumulating Scottish clubbers’ memories for a digital archive called Everyone in the Club – we pick out a few highlights to share. Staying in Dundee, a new exhibition of work by Rae-Yen Song opens in DCA. We talk to the artist about building a complex visual language rich in symbolism and meaning.

As the world continues to be on fire, Intersections editor Katie Goh tasked one self-described radical pessimist, Rosie Priest, with penning a reflection on the power of hope during times of despair. The resulting piece on radical optimism offers a beacon to help navigate this difficult time. To borrow the concluding line, “Hope is a radical act of optimism when the world seems at its darkest.”

Finally, the magazine concludes with our traditional Q&A, this month featuring Sacred Paws whose email address turns out to be almost identical to that of a pet crematorium in Jacksonville, North Carolina. If you want the band, it’s sacredpawsband@. The pet crematory is sacredpaws@ and they will not answer you if you contact them asking them to do a Q&A.

January 2022 — Chat

Cover Artist Atika Bennamane is an Edinburgh-based artist and printmaker who specialises in producing bright and vibrant risograph prints. Growing up glued to a computer with a love of retro games (also currently working full time in digital to pay her bills), she tries to capture a feeling of being in a strange unknown 2D space that doesn’t quite exist.

Influenced by vapourware aesthetics, her prints have a relaxing ambient vibe with just a tiny hint of melancholy. When she's not printmaking you can normally find her going for long walks in all kinds of weather conditions, doodling in her sketch book and drinking in one of Edinburgh’s many pubs.

I: @atikamary

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Love Bites

Love Bites: On Audio Equipment This month’s columnist measures their life in podcasting equipment Words: Halina Rifai

T

January 2022 — Chat

here’s something deeply emotional and wonderfully satisfying about creating audio that you are not only proud of, but that connects with people.

Then comes the addiction.

My love of podcasting started 12 years ago. It was a means for me to express and promote other people and the things I was passionate about without the need to show myself. My social anxiety and self-body shaming is a constant in my life, and audio meant freedom.

Being a woman in audio can have its challenges, so learning things in my own time and on my own terms has been the biggest reward. But as my confidence has grown, so has my hunger for consumption. Software, gear (steady…), techniques… you name it, I am obsessed.

From 2009, the year I fell in love with podcasting, I can measure my life in sonic equipment: 1. First came a laptop with Audacity (FREE software!).

2. I was feeling braver and richer so next came the Zoom H4N, a handy portable recorder with unidirectional condenser microphones (which basically means the sound is decent).

3. There were fleeting relationships with lavalier microphones, which have popped into my life again like a forgotten friend, and some low-end dodgy microphones, comparable to those cringe relationships you would rather forget…

4. Then came the companions. Firstly, Rode have seen me take out a new pension fund with them. Their Procaster mic is broadcast quality, their Rodecaster Pro console is a gamechanger for those invested in podcasting. I have more USB mics than half empty mascara sticks: Rode, Blue Yeti and the latest is the Shure MV7.

This is a snapshot and while sonic rehab is calling, it’s been a life-changing investment. But, it’s important to remember that at the centre of all of this is the content, the smorgasbord of sounds and the voices of people.

Without that, my love (and equipment) would be nothing.

Crossword Solutions Across 1. TWENTY TWENTY-TWO 9. LAMENTING 10. CREDO 11. RULERS 12. PRETENCE 14. BLUE MONDAY 16. EWES 19. ESPY 21. GO TO PIECES 23. READJUST 26. TEAR UP 28. LIE IN 29. IMPROVISE 30. CROSS THE RUBICON Down 1. TOLERABLE 2. EMMYLOU 3. TANTRUMS 4. TOIL 5. EAGER 6. TACIT 7. THE KNOW 8. OZONE 13. UNDO 15. AVON 17. SISYPHEAN 18. TIME BOMB 20. PLACEBO 22. CARDIAC 23. RELIC 24. JANUS 25. SMITH 27. SPAR

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Heads Up

All of these great events are happening at the time of going to print - fingers crossed they're still happening when you read this!

Compiled by Anahit Behrooz

Photo: Andy Xplore

Celtic Connections

Heads Up

Various venues, Glasgow, 20 Jan-6 Feb The UK’s biggest celebration of Celtic music returns with a packed 18 days of some of the best names in folk, trad, and world music. There are workshops and talks aplenty, as well as dozens of large-scale concerts and intimate gigs: highlights include genre-defying sitar player Anoushka Shankar performing with the Orchestral Qawwali Project and Skye electro-Ceilidh outfit Niteworks accompanied by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

King Tut's New Year's Revolution King Tut's, Glasgow, 5-29 Jan Shake off the January cobwebs with the 11th edition of King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution, featuring some of the biggest names in Scottish live music. With a whopping 18 gigs happening throughout the month, and spotlighting the likes of Dundee synth-pop band Echo Machine, indie legends Club Beirut and Ayrshire rapper Bemz, there’s something to suit any and every musical taste.

Bemz

Photo: Laura Lewis

The Nutcracker Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 5-15 Jan Keep the Christmas mood going through gloomy January with this classic staging of the beloved Tchaikovksy ballet The Nutcracker. Featuring traditional festive frolics – from a warm, family Christmas Eve to the land of the Sugar Plum Fairy – and with choreography by Scottish Ballet founder Peter Darrell and live music by the Scottish Ballet Orchestra, this is a perfect visual and aural feast.

Image: Junafilm

Anoushka Shankar for Celtic Connections

R3SEARCH: Awards Artists in Focus Royal Scottish Academy RSA, Edinburgh, 8 Jan-6 Feb R3SEARCH spotlights art created by the winners of the 2020 RSA Award: John Brown, Sekai Machache, and Hannah Paterson. Featuring new work made as a result of the award, the mixed media exhibition encompasses photography, water-based media, and painting at the cutting edge of the fine arts landscape.

Image: courtesy of the artist

Photo: Andy Ross

Sleep, Fokus Film

Fokus: Films from Germany

Curated by the Goethe-Institut and presenting a selection of some of the best German films of the year, Fokus: Films from Germany is back in cinemas across Scotland, from Filmhouse Edinburgh to Shetland Arts. Blurring the lines between dreamy and reality in unforgettably disturbing ways is Michael Venus’ Sleep, while acclaimed actor Daniel Brühl makes his directorial debut in Next Door.

Marge Hendrick and Evan Loudon in Peter Darrell's The Nutcracker

The Divine Sky, Sekai Machache

Image: courtest of Fruitmarket

January 2022 — Chat

Various venues, Glasgow + Edinburgh, 11-31 Jan

Yoga in Jyll Bradley's Pardes Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 6+20 Jan, 10am If regular yoga is on your new year’s resolutions list, there is no better – or atmospheric – way to stick to the plan than with the regular yoga sessions held in Jyll Bradley’s Pardes, the first solo exhibition held in Fruitmarket’s recently renovated Warehouse space. Taking place on the first and third Thursday of every month, the sessions are open to all levels and pay-what-you-can.

Yoga at Pardes

CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, 6-9 Jan Image: courtesy of artist and CCA Walking through the Place, Jennifer Cuthill, Untitled 2021

Futureproof 2021 Stills, Edinburgh, Until 5 Feb Image: courtesy of artist

Photo: Jordan Hemingway

Wunderkammer: Walking Through the Place

Wolf Alice

Wolf Alice Barrowlands, Glasgow, 5+7+8 Jan, 7pm — 8 —

Miriam Ali, from 'Ghar Se Ghar' (2021)

THE SKINNY

Photo: Michael McGurk

Design for our Times V&A Dundee, Dundee, Until 13 Jun The climate crisis lies at the heart of this innovative exhibition presented by Design Exhibition Scotland, which explores the role design can have in offering sustainable and radical solutions to some of our most pressing problems. Grappling with ideas surrounding overconsumption and waste, Design for Our Times rethinks creative approaches to materiality and how art can sustain itself.

Having kicked off last year with the release of her much lauded single Peach Stone, Indoor Foxes' Martha Barr is set to reach even new heights in 2022 with her first set of headline shows. With sharply honest lyrics and a punk-edged voice, the fast rising star of Scottish music brings her dreamy bedroom pop vibe to her hometown with this intimate gig at Sneaky Pete’s.

Image: courtesy of Night Tube

Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh, 22 Jan, 7pm

V&A Dundee

Aletha

Indoor Foxes

Various venues, Edinburgh, 28 Jan-5 Feb For fans of the weird and wonderful, puppetry, visual theatre, and animation festival Manipulate is kicking off the year with another fascinating programme of theatrical curios. Head to the circus with Sadiq Ali’s devastatingly beautiful aerial piece The Chosen Haram, celebrate the return of Ljubljana Puppet Theatre with their intimate puppet-object miniature Moč, or attend the Scottish premiere of Italo Calvino adaptation Between Earth and Moon.

Night Tube take over both floors of The Bongo Club with an irresistible all-night session of DJs and dance.

Downstairs, Warehouse Project Resident Aletha makes her Edinburgh debut with a high-octane genre-bending mix of the best tunes going, while upstairs Edinburgh's own Jacuzzi General spins his own disco beats.

Cauleen Smith: H-E-L-L-O Collective, Edinburgh, 22 Jan-1 May This radically subversive exhibition takes as its starting point John Williams’ theme for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, translating the famous five-note motif into a greeting for sites around post-Hurricane Katrina. Exploring how rituals of music and procession can act as communion for wounded pasts and hopeful futures, Cauleen Smith’s H-E-L-L-O is a mesmerising testament to New Orleans.

Image: courtesy of artist and Collective

Photo: Glen McCarty

Manipulate Festival

The Bongo Club, Edinburgh, 19 Jan, 11pm

MANIPULATE Festival, The Chosen Haram, Sadiq Ali

H-E-L-L-O, Cauleen Smith

Photo: Kate Johnston

Sacred Paws St Luke's, Glasgow, 15 Jan, 7:30pm

All details were correct at the time of writing, but are subject to change. Please check organisers’ websites for up to date information.

Photo: Brian Griffith

Various venues, Edinburgh + Aberdeen + Stirling, 30 Jan-2 Feb Image: courtesy of Banff Film Festival

Photo: Owen Godbert

Banff Film Festival

Kate Bush

Buffet Lunch

Link Star

Broadcast, Glasgow, 15 Jan, 7:30pm — 9 —

Keta Bush Dance Party The Flying Duck, Glasgow, 22 Jan, 11pm

January 2022 — Chat

Acclaimed Scottish rock band Sacred Paws head to St Luke’s as part of First Footing – January’s month-long music festival across Glasgow’s indie venues. Having won the Scottish Album of the Year Award in 2017 for their debut LP Strike a Match, the Glasgow-based duo effortlessly add a gravelly, punk-like streak into their effervescent live performances.

Sacred Paws

Buffet Lunch

Heads Up

Image: courtest of artist and Sneaky Pete's

Indoor Foxes

Night Tube: Aletha and Jacuzzi General

January 2022

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Photo: Stuart Brooks Swiss Portrait

Stina Marie Claire

Photo: Magnus Huntly-Grant

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January 2022 — Events Guide

Photo: Paolo Scalerandi HAAi

Clubs Many of us enter the new year exhausted, penniless and stuffed, and it’s usually pretty visible from the lack of club bookings at the start of January. But for those sprightly souls, you can get right back into the swing of things with the first really exciting booking of 2022, as Club_Nacht brings Phantasy Sound and Huntleys + Palmers affiliate Jordan Nocturne to The Mash House in Edinburgh on 8 January.

Multi-city party Rare have not one but two shows lined up with Australianborn, London-based DJ HAAi this month, first at Room 2 in Glasgow on 14 January and also the following night at The Tunnels in Aberdeen. Meanwhile, on 19 January, Night Tube returns to Edinburgh, this time making its debut at The Bongo Club with Warehouse Project resident Aletha headlining and local hot tub enthusiast Jacuzzi General on support duties.

Speaking of local talent, Aquelarre invites Edinburgh-based experimentalist Local Carp to headline their first event of the year at Sneaky Pete’s on 21 January, with Pako Vega on support. Not quite local but just about close enough, MADE have Glasgow techno purveyors Clouds along to their latest party at Club 69 in Paisley on 22 January.

There are two big headline shows in Glasgow towards the end of the month.

Caribou finally makes it to Barrowland Ballroom on 24 January, following postponements due to COVID. Then, on 28 January, Ross From Friends takes his

The Twilight Sad

Photo: Craig McIntosh

Music While you could be forgiven for hibernating until February – January is bleak, we get it – choose to venture outside and there’s a whole wealth of good music to be enjoyed as (mostly Glasgow) promoters have been working hard to give us all something to look forward to in the new year.

King Tut’s New Year’s Revolution series is back for its 11th year. Running from 5-29 January, KTNYR is sticking to a formula that works, celebrating a wealth of up and coming Scottish talent. Dundee synth-pop outfit Echo Machine (8 Jan), Glasgow-based rapper Bemz (13 Jan) and Edinburgh pop troubadour Hamish Hawk (28 Jan) are all set to headline their respective nights, while on 27 January, Intercultural Youth Scotland – Scotland’s leading charity for Black and People of Colour youth – celebrate their third birthday as part of the run.

In a similar vein, 432 Presents’ First Footing series returns this month from 7-20 January with shows taking place at Nice N Sleazy, Mono, CCA, Stereo, St Luke’s and their own venue The Hug & Pint. As well as a plethora of Scottish talents like Sulka (Nice N Sleazy, 8 Jan), Rebecca Vasmant (CCA, 8 Jan), Swiss Portrait (The Hug & Pint, 12 Jan) and Sacred Paws (St Luke’s, 15 Jan), First Footing has an international flavour too with Canadian singer-songwriter Ada Lea playing Mono (14 Jan) and Big Thief’s Buck Meek playing the CCA (15 Jan).

Also bringing an international flavour to Glasgow this month is the Celtic Connections festival. Taking place from 20 January to 6 February, Celtic Connections infiltrates most corners of the city centre, with a whole host of venues coming to life for its two-and-a-half week programme. On 21 January, Isle of Skye electro-trad fusion party starters Niteworks celebrate their third album, A’ Ghrian, with a little help from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (Glasgow Royal Concert Hall), while The Twilight Sad perform a special stripped-back set at the Old Fruitmarket. Later in the month, back at the Royal Concert Hall, the extraordinary talent that is sitar player Anoushka Shankar performs alongside the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestral Qawwali Project (28 Jan), while the next night Kathryn Joseph and the Tinderbox Collective play a special show together. The following night, catch Honeyblood’s Stina Marie Claire at the CCA or Andrew Wasylyk at The Mitchell Theatre.

Finally, starting on 31 January across the country, look out for Independent Venue Week events happening near you. For more info head to independentvenueweek.com [Tallah Brash]

All details correct at the time of writing

Photo: Kat Gollock

What's On

Jacuzzi General

THE SKINNY

Photo: Martyna Maz Ross from Friends

January 2022 — Events Guide

Theatre What better way to ward off the January blues than with a feel-good musical?

Luckily, this month seems to be full of them. In Glasgow, the King’s Theatre is kicking things off with the legendary and multi-award winning Book of Mormon (6-22 Jan). Next, tumble outta bed for Dolly Parton’s 9-5 The Musical on the 25th, starring stage-musical stalwart Claire Sweeney (King’s Theatre, until 29 Jan). The Edinburgh Playhouse is serving up sweet nostalgia this season with Waitress (1822 Jan) and School of Rock (25-29 Jan).

Can’t quite let the magic of Christmas go? Scottish Ballet’s TheNutcracker arrives in Glasgow on 5 January and plays at the Theatre Royal until the 15th, before heading to His Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen on the 19th.

If you can go to just one event this January, don’t miss Manipulate Festival in Edinburgh (28 Jan-5 Feb), a highlight of, not just the month, but the annual Scottish arts calendar. Puppet Animation Scotland’s yearly celebration of innovative puppetry, visual theatre and animated film is returning with a programme that is quite simply breathtaking. It features forays into augmented reality graphic art installations (Fauna, 28 Jan-5 Feb), intricate puppet shows that play with strings, shadows, mirrors and your mind (Moč, 29 Jan), micro-cinema epics made up of tiny objects and huge ideas (Birdie, 29 Jan) and much, much more. [Eliza Gearty] Theatre Royal

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Licorice Pizza

Image: courtesy André Dino

Film Who is the greatest of the French New Wave directors? It’s a debate that’s raged between film school nerds for decades. If you were one of the polo neck-wearing pseuds who rolled your own cigarettes, you likely gravitated to the too-cool-forschool antics of Jean-Luc Godard. The romantics perhaps favoured the work of Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy. Those with more adventurous tastes preferred the esoteric puzzles of Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette. If you were of a playful and humanist vein, you likely dug Agnès Varda and Chris Marker, while those who were hung up on Hitchcock surely couldn’t see past his darker Gallic cousin, Claude Chabrol. But despite our differences, we could all agree on one thing: François Truffaut was great.

Film fans in Edinburgh have plenty of opportunities to come to this opinion as Filmhouse kicks off the new year with a huge Truffaut season. Rather than running chronologically, the retrospective takes a thematic approach, compartmentalising Truffaut’s rich and varied back catalogue into four distinct piles.

The first to screen at Filmhouse will be Truffaut’s five Antoine Doinel films, which follow the filmmaker’s alter-ego over 20 years, from his early teens to his mid-30s, each time played by the great Jean-Pierre Léaud as he ages with the character. The season begins 14 January with masterpiece The 400 Blows, but be sure to make time for those lesser-screened Doinel films, particularly the unsung gems Stolen Kisses and the short Antoine and Colette, which play as a doublebill on 14 and 20 January.

The second strand features the Truffaut films heavily indebted to Jean Renoir, such as the self-referential Day for Night, which stars Truffaut as a director trying to wrangle a chaotic film shoot, and the delightful Pocket Money (aka Small Change), his seriocomic look at the lives of a group of children growing up in a provincial town (both screen from 22 Jan). Later strands will consider Truffaut’s literary adaptations (eg. Jules and Jim, Fahrenheit 451) and his work most clearly influenced by Hitchcock (eg. Shoot the Piano Player, Mississippi Mermaid).

If you turn to page 45, you’ll find a circumspect review of Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, a star-filled remake of Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film noir classic. If you’re curious to see the original before catching del Toro’s take, Glasgow Film Theatre is screening a 4K restoration of Goulding’s film on 16 and 19 January – the new print's first airing in the UK! There are plenty of other brilliant films coming out on general release that we’re extremely excited about: Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming of age film Licorice Pizza (1 Jan), Andrea Arnold’s bovine documentary Cow (14 Jan), Kenneth Branagh’s sentimental Oscar hopeful Belfast (21 Jan), Pedro Almodóvar’s sumptuous melodrama Parallel Mothers (28 Jan – GFT have a preview on 18 Jan) to name a few. Let’s just pray to the movie gods that we get the opportunity to see them on the big screen. [Jamie Dunn]

Image: courtesy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc

Cow

brand new live show to SWG3, following the release of his second album, Tread, back in October on Flying Lotus’s label, Brainfeeder.

Finally, the new year brings a much-welcomed new venue opening in the capital, as Central EH1 becomes the latest addition on Edinburgh’s club scene, located right in the centre of town at 3 Princes Street and launching with a 12-hour party on 29 January. But if 12 hours just isn’t enough, keep the celebrations going into the wee hours at an after party at The Biscuit Factory, with special guests still to be announced. [Nadia Younes]

The 400 Blows

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Art

Image: courtesy of artist and Collective Cauleen Smith, H-E-L-L-O

Victoria McNulty

January 2022 — Events Guide

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Plankton Lace #1, Howardena Pindell

Photo: Kat Gollock

Photo": Courtesy of Websters Webster's Theatre

Poetry If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to get writing more, then why not join Dr Tawnya Selene Renelle in her two new Beyond Form Creative Writing courses?

The first seven week course, Archiving, Museums, and Personal Narrative, starts on 12 January, and will ask you to bring the imagined archive of your life to the page, in order to find the materials for writing. A new and experimental way to approach personal narrative, memoir and nonfiction, this course is ready to renew your approach to confessional poetry. The second course, Experimenting With, begins on 17 Jan and runs for six weeks. It’s designed to spark your curiosity and get you exploring and experimenting with your writing, and is suitable for writers of any skill-level or medium. Both Beyond Form Creative Writing Courses are set on a sliding scale pricing system, and you can find out how to sign up via the website.

Or if you’ve got some writing drafted, redrafted, and edited already, why not submit it to the Manchester Poetry Prize? The deadline for 2021 is later than usual, with your 3-5 poems due at 5pm on 28 Jan. The entry price is steep at £18, but with a prize of £10,000 you might think it’s worth it. This year’s judges are an excellent panel, with poets Romalyn Ante, Malika Booker, and Zaffar Kunial making the decisions.

Although this next one isn’t taking place until early February, I’d recommend getting your tickets booked now, because it’ll likely sell out quickly. Victoria McNulty is showing the premiere of her spoken word film, Exiles, in Glasgow’s Websters Theatre on 4 Feb at 7.30pm. McNulty is the recent winner of Scots Writer O the Year (Scots Language Awards) and Exiles was the short film winner of the John Byrne Award 2021. At the premiere, musician Calum Baird will be performing live alongside the film. Post-screening, Victoria will be discussing all-things-Exiles with poet Kevin P. Gilday and director David Hayman Jr. Wayne Holloway-Smith is releasing his fourth poetry collection, Lobsters, with Makina Books on 13 Jan. The collection explores mental illness, class, dysfunctional families, and loss, and is Holloway-Smith’s most personal work to date. He’s already been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the National Poetry competition in 2018, and Lobsters is set to be an exhilarating new work which not only explores the vulnerability of the poet, but also invites the reader to “take part in the performance yourself”, according to fellow poet, Will Harris.

[Beth Cochrane]

Image: Courtesy of the artist

Photo: Ruth Clark At the shore, everything touches, Tako Taal

Opening the 2022 art calendar, Hunterian Gallery’s new show Flesh Arranges Itself Differently runs from 14 January, with almost 50 artworks by artists who have evoked bodily experiences – often in response to the impacts of technology, spirituality or mortality.

The following week, from 22 January, Collective Gallery in Edinburgh opens its year with H-E-L-L-O by Cauleen Smith. Centred on a 2014 film work set in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, musicians from the city play the five notes of the coded extra-terrestrial hello at the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The interpretations ‘speak mournfully of New Orleans’ enduring spirit despite a troubled recent past and uncertain future.’

Also at Collective until 13 March, there’s Joey Simons’ exhibition The Fearful Part Of It Was The Absence, looking to histories of working class resistance in Glasgow, in new poetry, a wall drawing, audio and videos.

Radical politics are also at play in DJCAD’s Cooper Gallery exhibition Sit-in 2: To Be Potential, which brings together a breathtaking number of materials and artworks on liberatory ways of learning, living and politically organising together.

Three separate events run this month on revolutionary thinking (12 Jan), collective decision-making (20 Jan), and dance as a decolonial methodology for knowledge production (29 Jan).

Until 5 February, the annual showcase of the recent year of photography graduates Futureproof is in Stills Gallery, ranging from experimental and candid family portraiture to complex reworkings of found NASA images.

Also in Edinburgh in Fruitmarket Gallery, there is the continuing major solo show by artist and activist Howardena Pindell, which brings together her beautiful abstract and experimental paintings with her issue-based and film works. Visit theskinny.co.uk/art for Pindell’s interview feature, where she shares her experiences of being the first and only African-American woman in white-dominated art spaces over her six-decade career.

In Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), two new solo shows continue through this month. At the shore, everything touches by Tako Taal offers lyrical representations of Taal’s family’s home village in The Gambia, including sound work, new delicate watercolour paintings, film and the inclusion of two 1987 works by artist Maud Saulter, along with facsimiles of familial photographs and documents belonging to the artist. Next door, there is the richly symbolic new solo show titled ▷▥◉▻ by Rae-Yen Song, who is interviewed this month and shares some of the references made in the complicated and blockbuster-scale new exhibition.

[Adam Benmakhlouf]

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January 2022

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www.realfoods.co.uk natural healthy ethical shopping •

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THE SKINNY

5 Meet the Team — 6 Editorial — 7 Love Bites — 8 Heads Up 11 What’s On — 16 Crossword — 40 Music — 44 Film & TV 47 Food & Drink — 48 Books — 49 Comedy — 50 Listings 54 The Skinny On… Sacred Paws

Features 20 We speak with one half of Malian duo Amadou & Mariam ahead of their Celtic Connections show.

23 James Smith, frontman of Leeds four-piece Yard Act, on their debut album and documenting modern Britain.

26 Scottish clubbers share their favourite dancefloor moments as the V&A Night Fever exhibition comes to a close.

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28 Rae-Yen Song introduces new exhibition ▷▥◉▻, opening in DCA this month.

32 Fokus Film Festival returns to give a snapshot of the German documentary and narrative features released in the last 12 months.

33 Kevin Guyan, author of Queer Data, reflects on what the 2022 Scottish census could mean for communities that have been historically understood as ‘hard to reach’.

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34 One self-described radical pessimist reflects on the power of hope during times of despair.

35 Philip Barantini on the making of one-shot restaurant thriller Boiling Point.

37 Poet and fiction writer Andrés N. Ordorica on his debut collection, At Least This I Know.

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39 We meet the artists behind The Chosen Haram and Eat Me at Manipulate Festival 2022.

46 Introducing Design for Our Times, a new exhibition exploring sustainable solutions to overconsumption and material waste.

On the website...

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39 Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Julio Bandit; James Brown; courtesy of Laura McKenzie, Ruth Clark; Curveball; Miranda Stuart; Jonny Mowat; Boiling Point; Daniel McGowan; Matt Crockett; Glen McCarty; Michael McGurk

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The first episode of our clubs podcast Clubbing Together, extended round-ups of our Films of 2021 (including the films the writers *hated*), more film and gig reviews

January 2022 — Contents

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38 James Harkin and Anna Ptaszynski, fifty percent of the QI Elves, chat to us about their upcoming No Such Thing as a Fish live tour.

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Shot of the month Swim School at The Mash House, Edinburgh, 11 Dec by Kate Johnston

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Across 1. The new year, written as words, for some reason (6,6-3) 9. Mourning – bemoaning (9)

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10. Statement of beliefs (5) 11. Measuring implements – monarchs (6) January 2022 — Chat

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12. Claim – act (8) 14. Day in January dubbed the most depressing day of the year (4,6)

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Down 1. Fine (9) 2. 2012 song by First Aid Kit, named after a famous country singer – yule mom (anag) (7) 3. Outbursts (8) 4. Tiring work (4) 5. Keen (5) 6. Implied (5)

16. Lady sheep (4)

7. The loop – Kent who? (anag) (3,4)

19. Nickname for Portobello beachfront bar the Esplanade (4)

8. O₃ – a layer of it protects the Earth from radiation (5)

21. Break down – ego, it copes (anag) (2,2,6)

13. Ctrl + Z (4)

23. Get used to – adapt (8)

15. Yer da sells it (4)

26. Pre-cry – rip apart (4,2)

17. Fruitless and repetitive – he pays sin (anag) (9)

28. Sleep late (3,2)

18. It counts down before exploding (4,4)

29. Wing it (9)

20. Sugar pill (7)

30. Pass the point of no return – brioche costs run (anag) (5,3,7)

22. Relating to the heart (7) 23. Artefact (5) 24. Roman two-faced god of transitions and new beginnings (5)

Compiled by George Sully

25. Make metal things (5) Turn to page 7 for the solutions — 16 —

27. Play fight – argue amicably (4)

THE SKINNY

TINDERBOX ORCHESTRA

THE BLOOD THE WEIGHT THE WEARY BRAND NEW EP RELEASED JANUARY 29TH STUNNING ORCHESTRAL COLLABORATION

E� LAUNCH� �AN ��TH CELTIC CONNECTIONS GLASGOW HEAR �ST SINGLE �WEIGHT� � tinderboxcollective.bandcamp.com

“Receiving funding meant that

January 2022

someone had listened to my songs and heard a future for me – something worth investing in, and someone worth helping.

It was a confidence boost that I desperately needed. helpmusicians.org.uk

Grace Gillespie | Singer-songwriter

Registered Charity No. 228089

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November 2021

THE SKINNY

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Welcome to 2022

Graphics: Atika Bennamane

O

ur cover image, by Edinburgh-based artist Atika Bennamane, is one of the prints you will receive if you sign up for a subscription to The Skinny in 2022 (head to theskinny. co.uk/subscribe for more info!). Its abstract blend of balance and chaos feels like a fitting reflection of this particular moment in time.

The theme this month is hoping at least some of the stuff we’ve written about hasn’t been cancelled by the time the magazine hits the street. Enjoy!

THE SKINNY

Photo: Julio Bandit

Around the World Ahead of playing Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival, we speak with one half of Malian duo Amadou & Mariam and highlight five other must-see artists

January 2022 – Feature

Music

Interview: Max Pilley

W

hen Amadou Bagayoko met Mariam Doumbia at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind in 1970, he wasn’t just meeting his life partner, but his musical soulmate.

In the five decades since, Amadou & Mariam have gone from local favourites in the Bamako live music scene to global stars and Grammy nominees, building a contacts list that few can compete with along the way.

After moving to Paris in 1996, their music – up until that point a dusty, streamlined version of

the desert blues tradition of Mali and surrounding countries – began to expand to include rock guitars alongside diverse instrumentation from across the world. They befriended world music connoisseur Manu Chao in the early 2000s, who went on to produce their 2004 album Dimanche à Bamako, earning them major international acclaim and recognition. Three further albums have cemented them as among Africa’s most popular artists and have seen them share stages with names as intergalactic as Stevie Wonder, U2 — 20 —

and Coldplay, as well as being invited to play at the opening of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

Ahead of the duo’s performance at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 2 February, as part of the 2022 Celtic Connections festival, The Skinny catch up with Bagayoko to discuss the possibility of a new record on the horizon, the perks of collaboration and his reflection on the responsibilities that come with representing their culture around the world.

THE SKINNY

Your last album was inspired by the political turmoil in your home country at the time. Is the new material also going to tackle serious subject matter like that?

We are always inspired by the things that happen next to us. We listen to the news, the radio, and our community.

You have described every new album you make as having its own colour or tone. Do you have a sense of the colour of the new songs?

We are in a very initial step yet to tell you the whole vibe, but for sure it will be very rootsy and with some traditional sound. This is a long process, and you know, we are always open to new inspirations and fusions.

You have collaborated with a lot of great artists and producers. What are the advantages of working with others?

Indeed, we are very thankful and glad for all the collaborations we have done during our professional career. It is a great way to learn, share and create new things. This last year we did four collaborations and last week we filmed two new videoclips that will be coming out early January with United Nations (The Sahel Song) and with French rapper Hös Copperfield.

Now that you have an international audience, do you feel a responsibility to talk about issues that are currently affecting your home country and people, to bring the story to a wider audience?

Well, our music is based on what happens, about life, about love, about family and friends. We always like to send a message in our music; with La Confusion, we wrote songs about what was happening in our country, things that we were concerned about. We are aware that being public figures, our message reaches more people. So we have always taken that into account when we write our songs or participate in international cooperation projects etc.

What has been the best part of bringing your culture around the world? Have there also been challenges that you wouldn’t have expected?

We are honoured to be able to represent our culture around the world. It fills us with pride and responsibility. We have always treated things with respect so we have had no complications in that sense.

Who are some new artists that you are currently excited by?

Our playlist is very eclectic; we like traditional music but also mainstream artists like Rihanna, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder. Regarding new artists, we like Aya Nakamura and Black M.

Five other artists to check out at Celtic Connections this month This is the Kit City Halls, 22 Jan The alias of Winchester’s Kate Stables, This is the Kit have been darlings of the UK alt-folk world for more than a decade thanks to her mature, poetic observations and tightly crafted arrangements, culminating in 2020’s touching, reflective opus Off Off On. This performance will be a collaboration with Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble.

DakhaBrakha Old Fruitmarket, 22 Jan Ukrainian folk quartet DakhaBrakha describe their music as “ethno-chaos”, and their live shows certainly fulfil the second half of that description. Driven by a joyful, communal energy, they draw influences from every corner of the planet and weave mesmerisingly intricate vocal harmonies. Expect to have fun.

Over the years, you have played with artists like U2, Blur and Coldplay. What did you take away from those experiences?

Indeed, we have had the opportunity to meet and work with many artists throughout our career.

These experiences are very important, as it is a time to share, listen and learn. One can be inspired by everything from a word or a sound. The exchange of collaborations makes the experience even more enriching.

Aoife O’Donovan Mitchell Theatre, 26 Jan Irish-American singer-songwriter and former member of Grammy-winning Americana band I’m With Her, O’Donovan’s delicate vocals and gift for a sumptuous, ornate melody elevate her records into rarefied air. This performance will launch her third solo album, Age of Apathy.

You are playing Celtic Connections in Glasgow on 2 February. Do you have any memories of playing in Scotland before? What can people expect from the show?

The last time we were in Scotland was in 2019 at the International Festival in Edinburgh with The Blind Boys of Alabama. We have very fond memories as the public received us with great affection.

We are really looking forward to coming back, this time in Glasgow! We look forward to meeting you all there.

Anoushka Shankar Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 28 Jan Composer, singer and sitar playing royalty, Shankar’s music transcends genre and geography, revolutionising Indian classical traditions with contemporary ingredients and working alongside the likes of Ibeyi and Patti Smith. This performance, in collaboration with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, will include a performance of Anoushka’s father Ravi Shankar’s Concerto No. 3.

Amadou & Mariam play the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 2 Feb as part of the Celtic Connections festival, which runs from 20 Jan-6 Feb

Bob Mould Oran Mòr, 31 Jan Alt-rock legend Bob Mould has spent 40 years at the vanguard of underground music, from his early days with post-hardcore noiseniks and Kurt Cobain favourites Hüsker Dü to his melodic, power-pop-inspired project Sugar. Expect it all to appear in this career-spanning set.

amadou-mariam.com celticconnections.com

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January 2022 – Feature

You have been one of the best known and most respected names in African music for a long time now. Do you feel any pressure not to move too far away from the traditional Malian music that you started out making in the 1980s?

Actually no, because it’s part of our own music, this is our distinctive sound, identity. We always try to keep our essence, to base our sound from the tradition but give it our personal touch.

When you first started getting booked in Europe and North America after the success of Dimanche à Bamako, did it come as a surprise to you? Was it always the aim to have that kind of global success?

I think every artist wants their music to reach as many people as possible. We make music because it’s our driving force, it’s what we like. Throughout our career we have worked very hard and today we can be happy and satisfied that we have a very wide and international audience.

Music

The Skinny: It’s been four years since the release of your last album, La Confusion. With the live dates coming up, are you getting ready to release a new record?

Amadou Bagayoko: Yes, we are currently working on some new tracks that we would like to release in 2023. Despite the confinement, we have had the chance to work on some collaboration tracks, with North American duo Sofi Tukker on the song Mon Cheri, and with Spanish duo Fuel Fandango on the song Ruido. We are currently working on some new collaborations and videoclips.

January 2022 – Feature

Music

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THE SKINNY

Photo: James Brown

Music

As the accolades keep rolling in, we speak to James Smith, frontman of Leeds fourpiece Yard Act, about the band’s debut album and documenting modern Britain Interview: Nadia Younes — 23 —

January 2022 – Feature

The Big Reveal

THE SKINNY

Music January 2022 – Feature

“When you’ve got a kid you have to be a bit more sensible with money – you can’t really live hand to mouth” James Smith, Yard Act

orphan girl stood next to a stall full of lettuces [in the video for lead single The Overload] for months, and then have that come out [in recent single Payday],” he continues. “Or me doing a video [celebrating the band’s inclusion on the FIFA 22 soundtrack] in a Crewe Alexandra football shirt, running around with a load of kids, knowing that not until the end of January is that going to make any sense… Stuff like that is really fun.”

Exploring themes of capitalism, corruption and failing modernity, Smith’s lyrics cleverly tread that fine line between sarcasm and sincerity, and he often uses different characters to analyse various aspects of society. On Rich, he speaks from the perspective of someone who has put all morals aside in favour of pursuing wealth: ‘Please teach me how to be modest and how to be rich / I’ve done some terrible things because I’m rich’.

While on The Incident, he embodies the persona of a corrupt CEO, probably not too dissimilar to the one who fired 900 employees over Zoom last month: ‘Had a hundred youngsters under my guidance at any one time / Willing to learn / Eager to please / And salaried / With the implicit threat of an instant dismissal’.

“Dead Horse, Rich, The Incident, Witness and Tall Poppies... were all separate songs that were floating around and I sensed that there was this corruption and money theme running through them,” says Smith. “Then Payday, The Overload, Pour Another and Quarantine the Sticks were written to fit around those to shape this narrative.

“At the very end, there was a completely different track that was going to be the last track on the album…[then] Ryan sent me this 100% Endurance demo,” he continues. “He sent me a video of it on his phone, filming the computer screen... and I wrote all the lyrics to this WhatsApp video on a loop… It was a real sort of gut reaction to that song, and I think it’s the one that stands out the most.”

But the pandemic presented an obvious barrier to developing the kind of intricate character profiles we’re used to hearing from Yard Act, and with very little real-life human interaction to draw upon during lockdown Smith had to look elsewhere for inspiration. “A lot of the observational stuff came from the news, and digging back into my own past quite a lot, particularly Tall Poppies and 100% Endurance,” says Smith. “[They] were influenced just by me reflecting… and applying it to the current state of things.

“And then some of the tracks, like Land of the Blind, were written during the pandemic and that was just looking at the news,” he continues. “[But] I feel like the news always dehumanises people, doesn’t it? It makes everyone into factions and statistics almost, and you forget that people don’t actually all think the same thing just because they’re on a particular side of an argument.

They’re not set in stone and it’s not a complete picture of that person, or how they feel about one particular issue. So the album tries to balance that side of things, I think, with humanising people beyond the news.”

Rather than creating a world separated by heroes and villains, the characters in Yard Act’s world are sympathetic and multi-dimensional. Even the objectively pretty terrible Graham – who appears as a recurring narrator, first on the band’s

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Photo: James Brown

Y

ard Act’s world is constantly unravelling.

Through ‘Prosecco O’Clock’ posters, orphans selling lettuces, slices of buttered bread, Morris dancers and Sham 69 records, seemingly unrelated abstract ideas all come together to form elements of a much larger story and, just like any great story, the beauty is in the detail.

Formed by frontman and lyricist James Smith and bassist Ryan Needham in their hometown of Leeds towards the end of 2019, even the interruption of a global pandemic hasn’t prevented Yard Act’s meteoric rise over the last two years. During lockdown, the pair set up their own label (Zen F.C.) in order to release a string of sharp and witty singles – all of which garnered huge support from BBC Radio 6 Music – documenting modern life in Britain, and culminating in the release of their debut EP, Dark Days, last February.

Since then, Yard Act has become a four-piece – completed by guitarist Sam Shjipstone and drummer Jay Russell – and their captivating, energetic live shows have earned them a deserving reputation as one of the most exciting bands in the UK. But 2022 is really shaping up to be Yard Act’s year. Shortlisted for BBC Radio 1’s Sound of 2022 and part of DIY magazine’s Class of 2022, the band are also set to release their debut album, The Overload, this month, co-released via Zen F.C. and Island Records.

Coming from DIY backgrounds and both well-known within the Leeds music scene – with Smith formerly of Post War Glamour Girls and Needham of Menace Beach – signing to a major label like Island was, undoubtedly, a conflicting decision for the band. “We were just at a point where we couldn’t do it ourselves anymore,” says Smith. “It’s never where we thought we’d end up, but out of all the people we spoke to they were the ones that really got where we wanted to go with it, even beyond album one.”

From screen printing their own sleeves and packing their own records over lockdown to having the budget and resources to be able to fully explore their ideas, the band have been able to push their vision even further. Teaming up with director James Slater on the accompanying music videos for the album’s singles, Yard Act’s world has well and truly been brought to life. “I love the idea of how it’s revealed,” says Smith. “I love the fact that every track reveals a bit more of the world and reveals a bit more of the album, and that it’s got a story running through it. But you have to really commit to not making it obvious.

“The joy is in the Easter eggs really, and that’s not being able to explain why there’s an

Yard Act

breakthrough single Fixer Upper and, again, throughout The Overload – is merely a victim of circumstance and is almost endearing in his blissful ignorance; even if his insistence that he’s actually ‘very fucking nice’ may come across a tad aggressive.

But there’s also a very personal element to The Overload, with Smith forcing himself to question his own beliefs and morals. Having become a father during lockdown – and on childcare duties for his eight-month-old son during our conversation – Smith’s priorities changed, and so too did his outlook on life. “He was another reason that we had to look at the Island deal as well, because when you’ve got a kid you have to be a bit more sensible with money – you can’t really live hand to mouth,” he says.

“I feel like the news always dehumanises people, doesn’t it?

It makes everyone into factions and statistics” James Smith, Yard Act There are very obvious nods to the hold capitalism has over us all throughout the album, and there’s a very obvious resentment towards it.

But Smith’s analysis of the tickbox culture that exists within a capitalist society is no more poignant than on Tall Poppies: ‘A promotion followed / A mortgage / A marriage / A dog / And children / A loft conversion / A dead dog / And a second home on the Costa del Sol’, he drawls, over an ominous guitar riff and ticking snare, highlighting the cyclical and mundane nature of modern life.

By placing himself within the narrative on The Overload, Smith is opening up a whole other realm of Yard Act’s ever-expanding world, and in Yard Act’s world nothing is ever quite what it seems. The real thrill, though, is in never knowing when you’ll unpeel the next layer.

The Overload is released on 21 Jan via Zen F.C./Island Records Yard Act play The Caves, Edinburgh, 2 Mar; Mono, Glasgow, 3 Mar yardactors.com

THE SKINNY

January 2022

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Clubs

THE SKINNY

Memories from the Dancefloor With submissions to the V&A Dundee’s digital Scottish clubbing archive, Everyone in the Club, closing this month, we’ve picked out a handful of clubbers’ memories from dancefloors across Scotland Interview: Nadia Younes

Image: courtesy of Laura Mackenzie

January 2022 – Feature

I

n September last year, the V&A Dundee launched Everyone in the Club – a crowd-sourced digital archive documenting Scottish club culture over the years – to coincide with the museum’s Night Fever exhibition. As the exhibition comes to a close this month, so too does the opportunity for public submissions to be entered into the archive.

Featuring input from the promoters behind some of Scotland’s most famous parties from the 80s to the present day – including Subculture’s Harri & Domenic, Optimo’s JD Twitch, and trailblazing audiovisual DJ VAJ.Power – the archive provides a brief overview of Scotland’s vibrant club scene. But club culture is and always will be about the dancers, so we’ve picked out some of the recent submissions to the archive from members of the public to share some of the clubbers’ memories from the dancefloor.

Camel Beats

“Going to Pure or Camel Beats on Friday at The Venue in the mid to late 90s straight after my work at a posh French restaurant finished! It was joyous, leaving that staid and restrained atmosphere and diving headlong into the dark, hot, pulsating atmos-

phere of The Venue. Often still in my waitress uniform, I’d dance the tiredness out of my legs surrounded by wonderful, sweaty friends and strangers. There was nowhere and nothing else like it: open, friendly, cathartic and truly wonderful.

Memories to be cherished forever… Me and my husband still have our Camel Beats membership cards and he even has a T-shirt!”

– Laura Mackenzie on Camel Beats at The Venue, Edinburgh “Between 2000 and 2005, a bunch of very skint but imaginative individuals put on a collection of audio/visual club nights called LiveVEvil, and attempted to bring some fun and quality drum’n’bass to The Art School, and various other venues... We tried to do things slightly differently by placing a huge importance on the visual aspects of the events, as well as the audio, with a team of VJs and DJs. We also streamed the events live online, which was quite an unusual thing to do back in 2000…

“Along the way we introduced Glasgow to some amazing guest DJs with the likes of John B, Doc Scott, Black Sun Empire, Photek, Matrix, Pendulum, Tech Itch and many more passing through the doors… So many good memories! That final night was a bit emotional as we’d all put quite a lot of blood, sweat and tears over the years and we packed The Art School out one final time. Pretty sure we even did wee cringey speeches at the end – less said the better about that though...”

– Paul McFadyen on LVE at The Art School, Glasgow

“It was a religion, Fat Sams was our church, and DJs such as Ned Jordan and Dave Calikas...were our musical ministers” Mike McDonald on Fat Sams

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THE SKINNY

Image: courtesy of Paul McFadyen

Image: courtesy of Paul McFadyen

Clubs

LVE Flyer

“There was nowhere and nothing else like it: open, friendly, cathartic and truly wonderful”

LVE 4th Birthday

Laura Mackenzie on The Venue

Rezerection

Night Fever: Designing Club Culture, V&A Dundee, until 9 Jan Everyone in the Club is accepting public submissions to the archive until then

Rezerection

January 2022 – Feature

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Image: courtesy of Andrew Goulder

“I started my photography career shooting clubs in Aberdeen.

Between 2013 and 2017 I covered many of the events in the city and, although much of it is a haze, I do have some vivid memories of the hot, dark and sweat-dripping parties. Some things that really stuck with me were the short summer nights leaving a club at 3.15am and it being quite bright was something I never got used to… “[At Minival’s] season-ender in November 2015, one half of Âme (Kristian Beyer) played a five-hour all night long set at The Tunnels. When I was working nights I would have all my regular bars and clubs to shoot before these bigger one-off gigs, so would have to cram in a full event shoot into the last hour of the night, which was always super sweaty, maximum capacity and everyone suitably jovial. The Minival parties were always so much fun. I had enjoyed them as a partygoer, and it was ace to see Ravi and Cristof using unusual venues and spaces in the city.”

– Grant Anderson on Minival at The Tunnels, Aberdeen “My earliest clubbing memories were those from Fat Sams from 1988 and into the early 90s, waiting in the queue with anticipation, with the heavy bass you could hear above you coming from the club. Back then it was ‘regulars only’ and luckily I went with a few pals who were already regulars and had been going since it opened in 1983, so I then became a regular myself.

Before heading to Fatties, the squad would meet up in The Parliamentary, Laings, The Bread, Chevy’s, and sometimes Chambers – if our mate Seve was playing his trumpet in a band.

“Acid house had just hit the UK. Those sounds and the four-to-the-floor beat would stay with me, and it’s something I will always love. The atmosphere inside the club was incredible. We would sometimes go to Fatties from Thursday to Sunday. It was a religion, Fat Sams was our church, and DJs such as Ned Jordan and Dave Calikas, playing some of the best tunes from that era, were our musical ministers; especially Dave Calikas playing Secchi – Flute On as his last tune every Saturday night.”

– Mike McDonald on Fat Sams, Dundee

Image: courtesy of Andrew Goulder

“My Rezerection bomber jacket was a present from my parents for my 16th birthday. We regularly visited both Ingliston and Kinross Sunday markets, where there were stalls that sold rave tapes. I had nagged my dad to buy me something from the Rezerection mail order. I must have picked up a flyer at Sleeves Records in Kirkcaldy or something. I was proud as anything when I got this jacket: black with the Rez head on the back.

None of my school mates had anything like it. I stupidly took it to a mate’s ‘empty’ house party the following weekend, as you do when you are 16, and it was promptly stolen, never to be seen again. Gutted, and I had to tell my parents. Four years later, I’m now at uni in Dundee and scrolling through eBay instead of doing coursework, and what popped up? My black Rez head jacket, in Dunfermline. I bid and won it back! And that has formed the main part of my collection for the last 20 years.”

– Andrew Goulder on Rezerection at various venues across Scotland

THE SKINNY

Art

A New and Ancient Language Glasgow-based artist Rae-Yen Song’s first solo exhibition is now on at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Here, the artist shares some insights into making this new body of work, which is rich with symbolism and wellcrafted surprising details Interview: Adam Benmakhlouf

R

ae-Yen Song’s (R-YS) work is a whole universe, so it’s only appropriate that it’s constantly expanding across a prolific output of public performance, installation, costume, video, family collaboration and drawing.

What emerges is a multimedia practice that seems to have no bounds. For instance, in 2018 when R-YS appeared in The Skinny to speak about being in that year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, the exhibition included a gold-framed A0 lenticular image (the kind of ridged photograph that when tilted, gives the impression of a moving image) of R-YS’s family wearing bespoke costumes, including large pink-skinned heads with wide eyes and round “ooh-ing” mouths, with two of them in a handmade costume of a roaring beast, all standing in rolling hills in a green spot in Edinburgh.

This was one point in a timeline that now spans many years of R-YS dedicatedly building an ambitious and idiosyncratic network of characters,

January 2022 — Feature

Photo: Ruth Clark Rae-Yen Song ▷▥◉▻ 2021. Installation view at Dundee Contemporary Arts

settings and motifs, including stylised clouds, many-legged microbes, and a multi-headed figure with a huge open mouth on the torso where a belly would usually be. While the beasts are uncanny, and with impossible-seeming anatomies, there’s nevertheless a coherence to the world that is inviting and intriguing. Throughout different events and exhibitions, these inventions by R-YS's come convincingly together in their suggestion of form and believable dimension, suggesting a space that seems to have its own atmospheric conditions.

This is in no small part because all of its elements are made entirely by R-YS’s own hand.

There’s the strong sense of R-YS’s singular vision that unifies the many projects, exhibitions and events that R-YS's has formed so far.

Nevertheless, the settings and bodies within this world are subject to ongoing change. In DCA right now, you’ll find – for example – a huge-scale, long-bodied tent of a creature, tongue protruding.

From a certain angle, its many legs read as ribs, while from another perspective it seems like the hull of a boat. It looks like it could be microscopic bacteria or a deep-sea creature and it appears in several elements of the installation. In this way, motifs recur within and across R-YS’s works and exhibitions. “The space [in DCA] has its own logic or language... You don’t have to understand it, but you see it, you see that there’s a meaning there, a relationship, a world and a different way of existing.”

R-YS's also speculates about the physical ways an exhibition visitor might try to find their place within these works on a physical level. More specifically, there’s a shifting in perception across different impressions of “micro- and macro-scale, growing and shrinking. Things are shifting and permanence is uncertain; you are uncertain about the true scale of things, the scale of you within it all.”

Highly suggestive in their textures, bright colours and forms, R-YS’s works skilfully elude stable identities. “I find it very pleasurable making something that can be everything; nothing; what it wants/needs to be; it can be so big that it disappears or so small – it’s everywhere. In this way, I see myself in it all. I am a shoe. But also a microbeast, a boat to take you to a new life, a rock, an orifice, an eyeball, a pot, liquid, my grandfather, my mother, a smell for your belly, the trapped air you need to fart out.”

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Entering into the large-scale installation means being gently submerged in the carefully interrelated details and structures set up by R-YS's, which create layers of symbolism that are the rewards of slow looking. The multiple significances of each of the deftly-made elements proliferate, making for surprises as new details seem to appear, and the work encourages, in a literal as well as a broader sense that “we can keep revealing layers, become something else ... – it is slippy and totally free.”

The above mention by R-YS's of family members (“my grandfather, my mother”) is not made lightly. R-YS’s practice makes extensive references to fragments of family stories and histories, which appear and are transformed in R-YS’s works. The oral style that often characterises the transmission of knowledge among families is suggested in the title of the show itself, which is ▷▥◉▻. “There are no Roman characters used to spell the title, it’s only read through the symbols. I like the idea of [▷▥◉▻] being uttered orally, and that being understood through mouth and tongue and passed between people.”

There are further layers of delicate significance in the title, ▷▥◉▻ . “These four symbols… pictorially symbolise the body of the space, the architecture, but those symbols are pronounced as 'seoh', which is echoing my mother’s generation name in Hokkien dialect, and loosely translates as ‘precious’. All of this is an indication that this is precious space, this is family space, treasure that is uncovered but also still has a sense of mystery and ambiguity to it.” The title is another instance of the hints that glitter throughout the exhibition, allusions to its own internal logic and the structures and symbolisms that R-YS's builds piece-bypiece. Studied closer, the title reveals itself as a succinct blueprint of the entire installation, abstracting the largest elements into a small typographic version, as if seen from above.

At the suggestion that R-YS's is bringing materials and works alive, R-YS's replies, “I think they’re most alive when I’m making them. Purely there’s that energy that you’re just infusing into it, there’s energies being expelled and created fundamentally, heat is being created in sanding, in fettling, in using your hands around a material.

You’re warming it up, you’re warming up a body, you

THE SKINNY

Photo: Ruth Clark

Art January 2022 — Feature

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Rae-Yen Song ▷▥◉▻ 2021. Installation view at Dundee Contemporary Arts

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Art

Photo: Ruth Clark

January 2022 — Feature

Rae-Yen Song ▷▥◉▻ 2021. Installation view at Dundee Contemporary Arts

“I find it very pleasurable making something that can be everything; nothing; what it wants/needs to be; it can be so big that it disappears or so small – it’s everywhere” Rae-Yen Song know? It’s coming alive and it’s growing within your hands and within your touch and I think those are the most exciting things… the materials are breathing. That’s what I want to hold onto. That last stage of installation [when the works are hung, built and placed in the gallery], I loved. I see the work in its wholeness in those last moments of install, when it’s all being put together. [In ▷▥◉▻] there were some aspects I hadn’t even seen because it

was too large to have in the studio, so I was only seeing pictures of it through design. They were all being put together in the last few days, [which] were the most exciting, tiring and exhilarating moments for me. That’s when it’s truly roaring.”

During the conversation, R-YS's brings out two working jotters, and has them open on the table.

They are dense with carefully penned plans, and tight personal notes and quotations from research.

After this mention of the title as meaning – on one level – “precious”, R-YS's remembers one specific reference and starts to flick through the many full pages to find it. Around the time of reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, R-YS's took this note: “ancient artefacts from different cultures did not have a concept of art, not for its own sake. Most of the Ancient Egyptian images, for example, were accessories to religious observance and beliefs.” R-YS's adds: “I think the word 'art' has that sense… [that] it has to be something, whereas these things existed because people believed in them, they had to exist because they were part of life. [In ▷▥◉▻] I wanted to make work like that, rather than just calling it an artwork. It’s me, my family, it’s a memory. It’s imbued with so many different things, and the obsession to detail is so important because the memories are so blurred, the history is so blurred and scattered and fragmented so to fixate on these details is another way of understanding, or [making] an acknowledgement”.

— 30 —

When R-YS's mentions consciously fixating on the details of making, this draws attention to the labour-intensive studio practice that has for a long time been routine for R-YS's – who mentions in passing how this way of wholly concentrated working for endless hours goes back at least to when R-YS's was a teenager. Doing this every day, building these bronze or papier-mâché sculptures, crafting the ceramics, making the textiles, for R-YS's it’s a matter of “devotion”, a term that feels helpful “as it goes back to craft, to labour, to making, getting closer to these stories.”

One personal note that R-YS's shares during the interview describes a part of what’s at stake across the works: “Forming physical ways to acknowledge the bits that I don’t know. Maybe the material can tell me things one day.” In one sense, imagination is used to fill in the gaps. “Things have been lost through journey, through hardship, things unspoken or forgotten – imagination is a tool to fill in those spaces and create things… in order to answer things for myself within the work,” which involves “understanding and writing a story that is fading away, but also growing and morphing into a new being.” With neat complexity, R-YS's sums this up poignantly as “Telling past-future stories for my family.” ▷▥◉▻ is at Dundee Contemporary Arts until 20 Mar

THE SKINNY

All the Way Home | Shining a Light on Homelessness With contributions from...

January 2022

All the Way Home is an anthology by both young people and established writers who explore their perspectives of 'home', brought to you by Scottish youth homelessness charity Rock Trust and publishers Taproot Press.

The book is available to pre order NOW by scannning the below QR code. 50% profits will go to Rock Trust in their 30th year.

Helen Sedgwick

James Robertson

Val McDermid

Kirstin Innes

PRE ORDER

SCAN ME!

— 31 —

THE SKINNY

Sharp Fokus Fokus Film Festival returns to give a snapshot of the German documentary and narrative features released in the last 12 months. We cast an eye over the selection and find films with themes that resonate far beyond Germany

January 2022 – Feature

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hat do a jet setting actor, supernatural nightmares and a cross-cultural story of love and loss have in common? They are all subjects of films appearing in this year’s Fokus line-up, returning in-person for the first time since 2020. Curated by the Goethe-Institut, this selection of German films shines a spotlight on the best of the country’s storytelling and creative talent.

The selection is a small slice of a cinematic year at a mere seven films. The programming, however, reveals an ambitious global focus.

A purely German lens would be myopic, as the Goethe-Institut admits. “The topics [explored in the programme] are by no means tailored to Germany, but have worldwide relevance,” they said in a statement. Priorities for German foreign cultural policy include social coexistence and exclusion, migration and asylum, populism, antisemitism, and racism – issues that are by no means exclusive to Germany today.

While the global heart of Fokus 2022 is clear, this year’s selection encapsulates two key themes: ‘Cultures of equality’ comprising intersecting identities, abuse and globalisation; and ‘How the news enters the world’, which looks at changing communication methods, social media, bots, fake news, artificial intelligence and biases – conscious or not – that affect humans’ interaction with and understanding of the world around them. Both themes are hot button issues beyond Germany and the UK, and the Goethe-Institut’s hope is that such programming brings about a “lively and fruitful, mutually inspiring exchange.”

While the majority of these films have premiered at 2021’s physical and digital festivals, collecting them into one programme allows these two thematic strands to come to the fore in an environment conducive to dialogue. This, the Institut stresses, is more important than ever after almost two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Society, and therefore our communication with each other, has inevitably changed,” they say.

Image: Courtesy of Junafilm

Film

Words: Carmen Paddock

Sleep

“From this point of view, it is only natural that these themes appear more frequently in films in general and also in our personal choice of films.

It is also important to provide a safe platform where the topics can be screened but also for some films, like The Case You, explored further in a Q&A or talk.”

The Case You, directed by Alison Kuhn, is a documentary that flips the camera back on to the entertainment industry’s legacy of sexual abuse.

After a director made footage from auditions – including footage where actresses were assaulted in their pursuit of a role – into a documentary, Kuhn and other survivors rewrite the narrative, turning the abusive director’s camera back on itself in outrage, anger, and a quest for recognition – if not justice.

The Case You is one of three documentaries at Fokus 2022. Trans – I Got Life (directed by Doris Metz and Imogen Kimmel) follows Dr Schaff, a world-renowned gender affirmative surgery practitioner, as he helps patients in Munich and San Francisco’s world-class transgender surgery practices as well as his more covert work helping patients in Russia. The Guardian (Martina Image: Courtesy of Amusement Park Film GmbH Warner Bros Ent GmbH Reiner Bajo

Curveball - A True Story. Unfortunately

Next Door

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Priessner) has a much tighter geographic lens, and follows a Syrian Orthodox nun and the growing aggressions she faces in her isolated existence.

The four fiction films in the programme are no less diverse in topic and scope. Next Door – written and directed by its star, Daniel Brühl – is a day in the life of an actor more successful with film audiences than at his local restaurant. Anne Zohra Berrached’s Copilot is an aching love story set against a shocking real-life tragedy, exploring a relationship built on – or in spite of – secrets.

Michael Venus’s Sleep sees a daughter venture into her mother’s nightmares, only to find a centuries-old demonic curse. Lastly, the creatively titled Curveball - A True Story. Unfortunately (Johannes Naber) explores the absurdity of Germany and the West’s quests for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the lengths leaders would go to in order to justify their case.

Fokus 2022 is “not a talent scout,” says the Goethe-Institut. The excitement and relevance of the content come first. Star power is a happy accident: “When actor-personalities like Daniel Brühl bring these film narratives to an interested film audience [...], then this is a fortuitous sideeffect.” Pointing to The Lives of Others (2006) as a past German film that transcended seemingly difficult subject matter to find international acclaim, Fokus hopes that its selection this year – and every year – will challenge, inspire, and delight audiences who may not have encountered these films otherwise.

Fokus runs 11-31 Jan, with screenings at Filmhouse, Edinburgh; Dundee Contemporary Arts; Glasgow Film Theatre; Belmont Filmhouse, Aberdeen; Shetland Arts, Lerwick; Eden Court, Inverness; Ayr Film Society; and Goethe-Institut, Glasgow. Full programme at goethe.de

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Counting Communities Words: Kevin Guyan Illustration: Miranda Stuart

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“When a gap exists between those responsible for the census and those being counted, what do LGBTQ+ communities stand to gain from participation?”

hat happens when you can’t find yourself in a system designed to capture your existence? Researchers describe communities as ‘hard to reach’ when they struggle to engage them in their studies. But where does the fault lie when two things fail to reach: the researcher doing the looking or the community they expect to find?

Scotland’s next census is taking place on Sunday 20 March 2022. Describing itself as ‘The most complete source of information about who lives in Scotland’, the census shines a light on some communities and positions them as something ‘known’ to the Scottish Government. This issue is particularly pertinent this year as the census includes two new questions about communities that are historically understood as ‘hard to reach’: LGBTQ+ people.

Institutions will not protect you Being counted in a national census offers the promise of recognition and invites you to share personal information about yourself. Data given away that you might not get back. Or, even worse, data that is used to cause harm against you and your community. When a gap exists between those responsible for the census and those being counted, what do LGBTQ+ communities stand to gain from participation? What lives are showcased through the collection and analysis of more data? And how might the expansion of data practices in Scotland police

the possibilities as to who is understood as LGBTQ+?

In Scotland, campaign groups opposed to trans inclusion have attempted to use the census to tighten administrative rules about gender, sex and sexuality. The campaign group Fair Play for Women has initiated legal proceedings against the Scottish Government and wish to change how trans people record their sex in the census so that respondents answer according to the sex recorded on their birth certificate, rather than how they identify and live day-to-day. If the legal challenge succeeds, the number of people directly impacted by a change in guidance is likely to be small, perhaps under 1% of the population. However, a court case in the run-up to the census would have a chilling effect on what trans and other LGBTQ+ communities think about the count.

Efforts to police how trans people record themselves in data collection activities showcases how a census can function as a means to control who, according to the state, can and cannot exist.

Ultimately, census data about LGBTQ+ communities does more than simply represent ‘how things are’ – it also provides instructions for ‘how things should be’.

— 33 —

Data and activism The transition from one year to the next provides a moment to reflect on the relationship between data and activism. Data is a vital tool in the activist’s toolbox. As a form of evidence, data offers a foundation for protest and direct action, consciousness-raising and public information campaigns, and the lobbying of those in positions of power.

The census is a rare opportunity to collect data about the size of Scotland’s LGBTQ+ population.

However, the imparting of value to some (and not others) means that census data can offer a skewed vision of the world around us. When LGBTQ+ communities are repackaged as something ‘known’ to the state, ideas that do not align with those responsible for the repackaging are left by the wayside.

And for those who identify with communities historically positioned as ‘hard to reach’, we must ask ourselves what we stand to gain and lose by being counted? While data about LGBTQ+ communities can provide an evidence base to move things forward, data can also cause us harm. It is therefore vital that those using data reflect on what types of knowledge are valued, from where value derives and whether data can describe a world that advances social justice for all LGBTQ+ communities.

Kevin Guyan (@kevin_guyan) is a researcher and writer who investigates the intersection of data and identity. He is the author of Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality Data for Action (Bloomsbury Academic), which explores data about LGBTQ+ people in the UK and is published in paperback in January 2022 bloomsbury.com

January 2022 – Feature

An intersectional undercount Even with the best intentions, a census will not capture information about everyone in its target population. The gap between who census officials expect to participate in a census and who actually returns information is described as an undercount.

When capturing data about identity groups, the level of undercount is often unevenly spread.

Studies from the United States show that when racial and ethnic data is collected in a census, people of colour are less likely to be counted than white people. This uneven undercount means that, in theory, whereas 95% of white respondents might return information, this figure drops to 85% for communities of colour or lower for groups with intersecting identities, such as disabled people of colour. The reasons behind a differential undercount are multiple. But any suggestion that some communities are simply ‘harder to reach’ overlooks the influence of historical and social factors on data collection activities and locates the blame with the communities under investigation.

Intersections

The next Scottish census takes place in March 2022 and aims to shine a light on LGBTQ+ communities. Kevin Guyan, author of Queer Data, reflects on what the census could mean for communities that have been historically understood as ‘hard to reach’

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Beacons in the Dark As another year rolls around and everything is still on fire, one self-described radical pessimist reflects on the power of hope during times of despair

January 2022 — Feature

Intersections

Words: Rosie Priest Illustration: Jonny Mowat

R

ecently, my PhD supervisor asked me if I was a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person. I responded, “I’m a theglass-is-smashed-on-the-floor-and-there’s-bloodeverywhere kind of person”. A radical pessimist perhaps. Someone who always thinks about how close to the verge of collapse things are and dwells there. I linger in the “what if” part of my brain far too often and follow it down dark and anxiety-inducing paths.

Sitting down to write about radical optimism for the new year, my first worry is that it could encourage toxic positivity, a trait universally loathed. It gave me flashbacks to the depression I regularly dwelled in during my 20s, and my mother telling me to, “eat a banana and go for a walk”. The painful tension of ignoring the gloomy reality to fake positivity. Toxic positivity only stifles our emotions, gagging them with faux joy. It shames and excludes.

On a global level, we experience this toxic positivity time and time again. We face an imminent, irreversible, ecological collapse that could end life as we know it. The people in charge tell us “that the way to fix the problem is through science and innovation, the breakthroughs and the investment that are made possible by capitalism and by free markets” (a quote from Boris Johnson at the UN General Assembly in 2021). Perhaps the political equivalent to a banana and a walk.

“Hope can offer a spark of action. It brings us together to protest, to march, to sing and to shout for a better future” Together we’re facing new depths of a global depression. Economically exhausted, we are physically and mentally stumbling through crisis after crisis as political powers hold the map on how to make it out alive upside down. Collectively, we’re all lying on the kitchen floor with the lights off in the foetal position (a hobby I’m fond of). But the thing about lying on the kitchen floor with the lights off in the foetal position is that you see light creeping under the kitchen door. Suddenly you can see the outline of your surroundings and you’re no longer in darkness. It’s unstoppable. That one tiny crack of light is the brightest light you will ever see.

In her book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit talks about the power of that tiny light in the

darkness. It’s hope.

This hope isn’t based on an “everything will be alright” or “it’ll all work out in the end” belief. As Solnit herself says: “Hope is an embrace of the unknown.” It is the tiny spark that pushes us to imagine a better future.

Hope is the catalyst to see what surrounds us and to consider how it could be different.

Hope is most certainly not a banana and a walk.

The sparks of hope are bewilderingly bright when you are used to the darkness of pessimism.

In fact, so bright they can push you into action.

Last year, exhausted by the bleak realities facing artists and audiences attending the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I wrote about how we could imagine a better future.

It takes hope to envision a better future and to ask for one.

Of course, hope doesn’t just exist as bright sparks in brief moments of despair: it took almost a century of protest before women in the UK won the right to vote, for example. Hope was surely not just a spark for the suffragettes; it was a guiding light, a beacon they followed through imprisonment, hunger strikes and force-feedings over decades.

They could imagine a better future, and demanded it, from hope. At a time in history when we are used to immediate gratification, we need to remember that hope is something that can guide us even when change is a long and challenging task. This is what makes hope such a radical act – that it survives even when under centuries of attack. In among the deepest depths of despair, we can collectively imagine and ask for a better future. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the marches after Sarah Everard’s death, the protests — 34 —

surrounding COP26: these are moments of pure hope. Of radical optimism. These sparks of hope belong to timelines expanding back over hundreds of years of people demanding a better future.

Radical optimism isn’t the idea of only ever seeing the good in a situation. In some cases, there is nothing good to see and hope does not guarantee a better tomorrow. But what hope can offer us is a spark of action. It brings us together to protest, to march, to sing and to shout for a better future.

Hope is also a beacon, a far distant lighthouse when we’re navigating treacherous journeys, some of which are centuries long. Hope is a radical act of optimism when the world seems at its darkest.

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Hell's Kitchen Actor Philip Barantini makes a splash behind the camera with the breakneck restaurant thriller Boiling Point, which was filmed in one shot in a real London eatery. He discusses the tension of the long take and trying to complete the film before lockdown Interview: Rory Doherty

Film

“I

to keep up, pulled in various directions by every hospitality horror story that crops up.

Boiling Point walks a tightrope of tension, never overwhelming or disengaging the audience, a challenge Barantini engaged with at every turn. “We had the idea of having a score in there, and having it composed,” he says. “To see if we could add to that tension, and what it actually did was it took away from the tension.” Barantini found he could mine drama in less obvious ways. “I think tension, for me, comes in those quieter moments when you’re not sure what’s going to happen.” By showcasing more muted, delicate moments of conflict, he says, “You’re sort of drawn into it, aren’t you? All your senses are open and ready.”

It’s remarkable that every beat feels authentic. Barantini has a 12-year history of working in the culinary world (including a stint at Jones & Sons, the Dalston eatery in which Boiling Point was filmed), and so has a wealth of stories to draw from. But after coming up with a list of anecdotes with co-writer James Cummings that served as the script’s skeleton, Barantini turned to the cast. “We workshopped it with the actors, and that’s when the dialogue came in,” he says. “And once they did the dialogue among themselves and we worked on it a bit, then we wrote that dialogue into the script.

Even after that, I said to the actors, ‘I don’t want you to be tied down to those specifics.’”

This approach was crucial for incorporating a diverse range of perspectives in the film, such as the racist aggressions aimed towards Andrea — 35 —

(Lauryn Ajufo), a Black waitress, from a vexatious customer. “That was important for me to sit down with [Ajufo], and we chatted through it and we did some research, and I was educated on that from her for a period. Three hours worth of chat, it was an incredibly emotional three hours.”

But it’s not to say all his characters get a nice, neat ending. In fact, Barantini deliberately eschewed traditional resolutions for each member of his ensemble. “You decide to do a one-take film, you’ve got parameters, you’ve got a certain amount of time to leave it up to the audience to think about it, and have that feeling of ‘Ahh, I wish I could figure out how he’s doing, or how she’s doing.’ That’s what I wanted to get from it.”

The production was not without its real-life tension; it was one of the UK’s last productions to wrap before the COVID-19 outbreak in the UK in March 2020. The planned shoot was four nights, filming two attempts per night, but they ended up having only half that time to get it in the bag. The third attempt is what makes up the film.

“And looking back now, I wondered if we’d done six more takes, whether we’d have overdone it,” Barantini shares. “Overplanned or the actors would have been overacting or overthinking it. So you just think if it was meant to be. Think positively, right?” With a success like Boiling Point under his belt, thinking positively won’t be too hard.

Boiling Point is released 7 Jan by Vertigo

January 2022 — Feature

was in a hotel this morning” – Philip Barantini doesn’t mention the reason he was there, but his restaurant drama, Boiling Point, had picked up four awards at the British Independent Film Awards the previous night – “and I was watching the guys at breakfast.

And they run. Everyone runs around. And that’s what I want to achieve with this. Everyone’s on the same train going in the same direction and you can’t get off. Including the audience.”

Watching Boiling Point, it’s impressive how rarely Barantini turns down the heat. From the start, we watch Andy (Stephen Graham), the head chef of a trendy London restaurant, struggle to stop his personal troubles affecting his professional demeanour. Everyone has to sideline all their own problems as the restaurant opens up for the busiest night of the Christmas season, where the staff are undervalued and the customers obnoxious. Never has a kitchen been more nightmarish, but it’s made all the tenser by the fact that the drama is captured in one continuous shot.

In expanding his 2019 short (also one shot and starring Stephen Graham), Barantini’s intention wasn’t to impress the audience but to keep them in the moment. “We wanted to add that layer of tension,” Barantini explains. “We didn’t want it to be a show-off thing. Because when you’re in a busy service, it is one take; you don’t get the chance to stop for 20 minutes and have a chat.”

The audience feels like they’re constantly fighting

THE SKINNY

January 2022

!

N O O S G N I COM LARRY DEAN | FERN BRADY JAMIE MACDONALD | MATT FORDE MARC JENNINGS | LOU SANDERS GARY DELANEY | NATHAN CATON ADAM ROWE | MARK THOMAS GLENN WOOL | KIRI PRITCHARD MCLEAN AHIR SHAH | ANDY ZALTZMAN and many more

standedinburgh

standcomedyclub — 36 —

standcomedyclub

THE SKINNY

Knowledge is Changeable Interview: Beth Cochrane

A

t Least This I Know, the debut poetry collection from poet and fiction writer Andrés N. Ordorica, is a journey through grief and love to find belonging: both as an immigrant person in new countries, and as a queer person searching for a found family. Ordorica has read and loved poetry since he was a teenager, and he fondly recounts his first memory of falling in love with the form when hearing Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, aged seven or eight.

“I was just so enamoured with it… I don’t know why – I just thought the poem was really beautiful. I don’t even know if I totally understood what the poem was about, but there was something about the poem that really resonated with me.”

From then on, poetry had always been in Ordorica’s periphery. When he was 14, and had just moved schools midyear, he started writing more of the form, as a way to process this huge physical uplifting of his life. “Some of [the poems] are quite cheesy,” he chuckles. “But, also, some of them were quite profound. It was my way of dealing with a sense of unsettledness, and moving country and starting over again. My dad got stationed at an air force base in Japan, and I started school in the middle of the school year. I really was the new kid, and I did try to be brave with the move, but it did unsettle me.”

He wrote a lot of poems at that time and, he admits, the “funny thing is that one of those poems is in the collection – almost word-for-word.”

At Least This I Know is out now via 404 Ink, 27 Jan, £9.99 404ink.com

Andrés N. Ordorica — 37 —

January 2022 — Feature

Photo: Daniel McGowan

“I think there will always be that sense of driving along the highway and feeling like you’re not moving forward, even though you are”

What is so interesting about the inclusion of this poem, and his reflection on being an uprooted 14-year-old writing poetry, is that “a lot of those poems were trying to tease out ideas that I’m still trying to work out in my 30s.” This is a really striking statement: the acknowledgement that things we deal with as children – that shiver of not feeling that we completely belong where we are or who we’re with – can still be in flux, even now.

And it’s this journey of finding the poet’s self – both as an emotional, inward journey and as part of a physical space – which makes this collection so authentic and relatable. It encourages the reader to pause in reflection, which Ordorica does too, over one poem in particular, Breakdown on I-35. The poem is from a moment in his late 20s, when he was confronted by feeling a lack of accomplishment in his writing career. The narrative is set in that moment of breakdown; in that moment of, as he says, thinking, “God, it’s going nowhere.”

When asked what he would say to that past self, he replies: “If I were to speak to the ‘me’ in that poem, I would definitely say that it’s just going to continue,” Ordorica laughs.

“Which I know isn’t the happy answer, but I think if I was going to revisit that poem even in my mid-30s I’d still be trying to work through lots of stuff… I’m so excited and grateful to have this collection coming out, but I think once you hit a certain stage in your writing career, it then becomes about knowing what’s next, but not knowing what’s next. I think there will always be that sense of driving along the highway and feeling like you’re not moving forward, even though you are.”

At Least This I Know is such a moving, comforting, and well-crafted collection. With ambitions to continue with his poetry, as well as fiction work in progress, the debut is likely to cement Ordorica as a writer to watch closely. His poetry is not only a profound exploration of that struggle through the unknown, but also an inspiring celebration of that very same struggle. He sums this up perfectly when asked how he would like his readers to respond to his poetry.

“I hope it inspires this understanding that we’re allowed to lay claim to who we are, but also that we’re allowed to be malleable; that we’re always evolving and reflecting. And that’s okay. It’s okay to go through life and not feel like you have a total, full sense of yourself, because I think that is very true to the human experience. My hope for this collection is to even challenge its title: what can you really know? You can know many things, but what you know is changeable. And that’s okay too. It’s okay to feel that you’re moving through life and you don’t always know where you belong, because you will find it.

And you’ll find it in different ways, but there might be a struggle to get there.”

Books

Poet and fiction writer Andrés N. Ordorica discusses his debut collection, At Least This I Know, from his earliest memories of poetry, to the ongoing journey of the self

THE SKINNY

Nerd Immunity James Harkin and Anna Ptaszynski, 50 percent of the QI Elves, chat to us about their smash podcast and their upcoming No Such Thing as a Fish live tour

January 2022 – Feature

W

ho is the nerdiest person in the whole country? This is the question the QI Elves aim to answer during the first half of their latest tour show, Nerd Immunity. The assumption is that “the nerdiest person in [whichever town we’re in] will be at our show. We’ve decided that must be the case, right?” says James Harkin. “And then we go through and we ask people to send [in] what makes them nerdy.”

The range of results is what makes it so much fun, says Anna Ptaszynski. “The guy who wrote Hand-dryers of Europe was excellent, and specified that he was only halfway through what was turning out to be a three-volume series.” On another night, a particularly difficult toss-up could be between a “guy who’s a NASA engineer and the girl who says she’s broken the record for most hours spent playing on Goldeneye... They’re sort of equal there, in such different ways.”

The experience is a profoundly edifying one.

One that reminds Ptaszynski that the quartet’s listener figures are more than just numbers on a screen. They’re “curious, interested, weird, intelligent people,” from whom the Elves often hear their best facts. But when it comes to delivering the second half of the show, which more closely resembles an episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a crammed touring schedule presents some difficulties.

“I’m very much a last minute person,” says Ptaszynski. For an upcoming Sunday gig she will “probably start researching… on Sunday morning [...] I live in a constant state of extreme stress and anxiety and it’s how I like to do it.”

Harkin, on the other hand, is relaxed in the knowledge that his revision is already done. He says, “We all work in very different ways, I think, some of us are more crammers and some of us are more planners. [But] you don’t need to worry because it always will get done.”

“No one was expecting we were going to be any good whatsoever, so it was just always a pleasant surprise when we’d get onstage and could make a joke”

Photo: Matt Crockett, courtesy of QI Ltd

Comedy

Interview: Louis Cammell

The QI Elves

They are, after all, veterans of the form by now, recently hitting the milestone of 400 episodes.

However, both recall how paradoxically, neither of them having comedy experience took the pressure off when the podcast launched. “No one was expecting we were going to be any good whatsoever, so it was just always a pleasant surprise when we’d get onstage and could make a joke.”

The pair look back on the embarrassing moments of the show’s early days with surprising glee.

Possibly because the most vivid is not an on-stage fail, but rather an innocent case of mistaken identity by the international press. “We had that show in Belgium,” says Ptaszynski, “and what they picked up on was that one of our number was called Andy Murray, which he is, but of course they assumed they were going to get the Grand Slam tennis champion, Andy Murray. And so there was a little bit of hoo-ha... and possible disappointment when we turned up.”

The mix-up has stayed firmly in their memory-banks. But it’s only natural that, with so much to retain week-on-week, not everything does.

“There was one [fact] Andy had recently... We all said, ‘God that’s incredible, Andy! Wow, yes! Let’s do that!’ And then we did a search later through our archive of facts and turns out we’d said it about 200 episodes ago.”

Luckily, none of the team’s interests are too niche, continues Ptaszynski. “It’s more that everything that we start reading about or learning — 38 —

about, we find extremely interesting.” Which is what both she and Harkin feel they have in common with their listeners and A-grade guests alike, including Michael Palin and Mary Roach.

Harkin adds: “Mary [who has written such non-fiction bestsellers as Stiff and Packing for Mars] also has the same sense of humour as us as well, she just likes the rude things, she likes the – you know, she likes all the bodily functions…”

The QI Elves have four tour dates in Scotland this month, in Inverness, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Glasgow. “I got married on Arthur’s Seat,” says Ptaszynski. “So that’s probably the place I most look forward to going when I get back.”

“I got married in Bolton,” says Harkin, like a splash of cold water. “[But] no, I mean Glasgow. I think it’s the best place in the UK for gigs. Like if you like a band and you can get away from your closest place, I always think going to Glasgow is the best place to go.”

The Nerd Immunity tour comes to Eden Court, Inverness, 13 Jan; Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 14 Jan; Music Hall, Aberdeen, 15 Jan; and Theatre Royal, Glasgow on 16 Jan Funny You Should Ask... Again: More of Your Questions Answered by the QI Elves is out now via Faber & Faber New episodes of No Such Thing as a Fish are released every Friday wherever you get your podcasts

THE SKINNY

“The web is like a forest in a fairytale” Interview: Eliza Gearty

Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic Eat Me, Snap-Elastic

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Manipulate Festival runs in Edinburgh from 28 Jan-5 Feb The Chosen Haram is at Summerhall, 28 Jan Eat Me is at the Studio, Festival Theatre, 30 & 31 Jan

Eat Me The female-led collective Snap-Elastic were inspired to make their show Eat Me by an unnerving story that is almost too disturbing to print. A real-life incident of ‘consensual cannibalism’ led them to begin developing the piece in 2015 (google it at your own risk). “It interested us - the act of something being consensual, and the shifting complexities of consent,” explains Isy Sharman, one-fourth of Snap-Elastic. “The framing of what is normal and what’s sick – it kind of enters that conversation a little bit, in terms of what society deems as appropriate, even if it’s a consensual, private experience between two people. This is what drew us to the idea.” An unexpected dynamic — 39 —

manipulatefestival.org

The Chosen Haram, Sadiq Ali

January 2022 – Feature

The Chosen Haram Opening Manipulate Festival this year is The Chosen Haram, Sadiq Ali’s piece about a Muslim

at the heart of the show, which won’t be revealed here, subverts the traditional idea of what we consider when we think about violent acts like cannibalism. “This sort of violence is so hard for us to understand as a society,” says Eszter Marsalko, another member of the group who worked on the project. “But what if [they both view it as] an act of love? That was what interested us – the meeting of violence and love.”

The show also came out of the collective’s interests and frustrations with true crime and Nordic noir. “That image of women being chased through the forest by men, the glorification of the violence against women – we wanted to pick apart some of these tropes,” adds Snap-Elastic’s Claire Willoughby. Predator and Prey, as they are called in the show, meet one another on the dark web.

Willougby notes that the dark web can be “a place of escape for a lot of people, somewhere where if you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide.” The dark web “somehow reflects the idea of the woods in fairytales, where people disappear to and come back changed,” says Willoughby. “They can be a place of liberation or transformation, where you escape the restrictions of society. And that felt like a really clear connection to us.”

Photo: Glen McCarty

aybe it’s to do with the fact that it takes place in deepest, darkest winter, when most festivities have passed but the days remain short, dark and bleak. Or maybe it's because it’s Scotland’s leading celebration of puppetry, one of the world’s most ancient and most ritualistic forms of theatre. Whatever the reason, Manipulate has always felt a little Fairy Tale Noir. The Edinburgh-based festival, produced and delivered annually by Puppet Animation Scotland, commonly veers towards art that seems uncanny, inventive and unique, and stories that feel simultaneously age-old and cutting-edge.

This year’s programme is no exception. It features a range of shows with echoes of magic and myth, from Daniel Livingstone and Petre Dobre’s keenly visual interpretation of The Sandman to Adrien M and Claire B’s VR ‘odyssey’ fable. But all of these shows are also decisively contemporary – exploring current-day themes around identity, sexuality, climate crisis and global unrest – and push the envelope when it comes to form and style. We chat to some of the artists behind two very different shows at Manipulate this year, The Chosen Haram and Eat Me, about merging ancient motifs with new ideas, freedom, stigmatised desire and why the internet could be the dark forest or the locked door of the modernday fairytale.

man called Ahmad who falls in love with a man called Steve. Drawn from his experiences growing up in Edinburgh, where “one side of life was going to Mosque and prayers, and the other side of life was discovering I am a queer person,” the show blends Chinese pole with visual and physical theatre to tell a story of sexuality, faith, addiction and connection.

In a sense, The Chosen Haram follows the same narrative structure as the mythical ‘Hero’s Journey’. The show’s protagonist Ahmad goes on an ‘adventure’, where he is required to overcome a number of ‘barriers, both social and cultural’ in order to reach happiness and fulfilment. In the case of The Chosen Haram, this ‘adventure’ is symbolised by the dating app. “[Online dating] can be a chance to find liberation and freedom, especially if you’re in quite a restrictive environment or framework,” says Ali. “It can be quite a discreet way to get out of that.” But Ahmad’s leap into the unknown is, classically, not solely liberating, and throws up some of its own challenges.

“What I found, particularly from living in London for a number of years, is that on one side you have this opportunity for liberation and for freedom, and on the other you have the reality of the chemsex [scene] and drugs and sex underworld within the gay community that is very accessible through apps,” Ali says. “So you have a chance to find freedom but you also have a chance to find self-destruction.”

Music

Manipulate’s intriguing 2022 programme is full of themes around folk-myth, identity, taboo and desire.

We chat to artists involved, Sadiq Ali and the Snap-Elastic collective, about how these ideas surface in their shows, The Chosen Haram and Eat Me

January 2022 – Review

Music

THE SKINNY

Music Now January can often be a barren wasteland in terms of releases, but there’s new music this month from Niteworks, Goodnight Louisa, Kathryn Joseph and more Words: Tallah Brash

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ollowing a handful of performances with the Tinderbox Orchestra at the likes of Hidden Door and the Pianodrome, the inimitable Kathryn Joseph has been working with 30 musicians from the collective to deliver orchestral versions of three of her songs – The Weary and The Blood from SAY Award winning album Bones You Have Thrown Me and Blood I’ve Spilled, and Weight taken from her second album From When I Wake the Want Is. The resulting three-track EP, aptly titled The Blood, The Weight, The Weary, takes Joseph’s compositions and songwriting to new heights; careful not to lose the feel of the originals, it’s almost as if they’ve been coloured in here – keeping inside the lines – and given a new lease of life. In short, it’s quite something. The EP is set for a digital-only release via Bandcamp

THE SKINNY

Kathryn Joseph

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January 2022 – Review

Not long after the breakup of Edinburgh band SKJØR, 2019 saw lead singer Louise McCraw launch her solo project Goodnight Louisa, with the super catchy Hollow God marking a decidedly darker, more synth-led electronic direction for McCraw. On 21 January more of those lovely warm electronics, synth-pop and exceptional vocals can be heard across her debut album, Human Danger. “Each of the songs is about a different aspect of human danger,” McCraw explains, “of how dangerous the world has become when we disregard others so easily, and put our own desires ahead of them.”

The album tackles subjects from women’s safety (‘Fuck the dark / I’m sick of being scared / Of all that lurks behind my shoulders / When I walk alone / My keys between my fingers’ she sings on Only a Matter of Time, while she later pleads ‘Get your hands off my girlfriend’ on a track of the same name) to myths around female perfection which she tackles on Diana, an unsettling tale of a dream she had about Princess Diana when she was ill, resulting in Diana telling McCraw: ‘Gotta save the world, even if it kills you’. Human Danger is an exceptional debut, its 11 gleaming tracks as heavily indebted to 80s synthpop as they are to the likes of Daughter.

Following a longlisted nomination for their second album Air Fàir An Là in 2019, Isle of Skye electro-trad fusion outfit Niteworks return this month with their third record, A ‘Ghrian.

Due on 14 January, A ‘Ghrian is a grand affair, featuring more of what we’ve come to love about the band; pulsing dance grooves effortlessly and uniquely melded together with traditional Celtic sounds. As well as the Gaelic language being celebrated once more, for the first time the four-piece have incorporated English folk and Scots songs into their music to stunning effect.

“With this album we’ve sought to create a more expansive sound that’s cinematic in its nature,” drummer Ruairidh Graham says of the record. “We were partly inspired by our work writing the music for Edinburgh’s Hogmanay Fare Well film that reflected on what 2020 had been like for many during the pandemic.

The nature of the project required broad expansive sounds, and that led to us going further in that direction through the writing and recording of the album.” While this fusion of sound might sound jarring and perhaps not be for everyone, dance music fans and trad aficionados will definitely find something here to like.

Elsewhere, Glasgow band Twin Atlantic, now a duo, release new album Transparency (7 Jan), John Wills and Pinkie Maclure, aka Pumajaw, release their latest album Scapa Foolscap (21 Jan); Beerjacket releases his latest album Handstands (28 Jan), and on the following page you’ll find a full review of Euphoria, the debut EP from Glasgow post-punks VLURE. There’s a smattering of singles due this month too, with Edinburgh duo Slim Wrist, fka Super Inuit, releasing the atmospheric Shone (28 Jan), the second single under their new name; Lou McLean and Berta Kennedy release their debut collaborative effort, Shelf Life (24 Jan) and Jill Lorean releases Mothers (26 Jan).

Music

Photo: Marilena Vlachopoulou Niteworks

Photo: Kat Gollock

Photo: Craig McIntosh Goodnight Louisa

on 29 January and will be launched with a special collaborative performance as part of this year’s Celtic Connections festival at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on the same day, the sort of show that doesn’t come along too often.

Also celebrating the launch of a brand new record at Celtic Connections this month is Randolph’s Leap frontman Adam Ross, who releases his debut solo album, Staring At Mountains, on 14 January via Olive Grove Records.

Stepping away from the indie-folk collective he’s worked with for over a decade, Staring At Mountains sees Ross working with external musicians for the first time, with stunning violin accompaniment from Pedro Cameron (Man of the Minch) and gorgeous backing vocals from Jenny Sturgeon.

Although it’s a much more sombre affair than what we’re used to from Randolph’s Leap, Ross’s storytelling and songwriting is still second to none here, and his unique sense of humour and delightful rhyming couplets can still be found on tracks like Alice & Christine: ‘Alice lived in Berwick / Upon Tweed with her dad Derek / While Christine lived in Lerwick / Way Up in the Shetland Isles / They kept in touch by letter / Christine said the day she met her / She would send a Fair Isle sweater’.

Across the record there’s an effortless warmth in the stripped-back nature of the compositions made up of just acoustic guitar, violin and vocals, and it just sounds undeniably Scottish and like a big warm hug. Catch Ross at The Hug & Pint on 21 January as part of Celtic Connections.

There’s more exceptional songwriting from East Kilbride singer-songwriter Michael Timmons this month too as he releases his second album, The Lightness of the Dread, on 28 January via Gargleblast Records.

Produced by Andy Miller (Mogwai, Songs: Ohia, Life Without Buildings) and with input from The Twilight Sad’s Andy MacFarlane (Timmons is due to support the Sad on a run of January dates), The Lightness of Dread beautifully explores the grief Timmons experienced following the death of his father, and trying to find the light in dark times – something many can relate to. Instrumentally, the album is clean and uncluttered with additional flourishes here and there, only when absolutely necessary. Timmons’ voice is the true star here; full of so much delicate and heartfelt emotion, it’s hard not to get lost in.

Albums

THE SKINNY

Bonobo Fragments Ninja Tune, 14 Jan

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January 2022 — Review

Listen to: Tides, Otomo, Closer

MØ Motordrome RCA, 28 Jan

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isten To: Youth Is Lost, Cool to L Cry, Goosebumps

After wrestling with writer’s block through lockdown, Simon Green, aka Bonobo, has resurfaced with a masterpiece in wistful, cathartic electronica, his seventh studio album Fragments.

Its title refers to the ideas that he struggled to perfect alone, which only came unstuck through collaborations with artists like Jamila Woods, Joji and Jordan Rakei, offering new flavours to his contemplative stamp.

Influences from Detroit house emerge on Rosewood and Sapien, while a pootling synth on Shadows resembles Mr Scruff. The biggest surprise is Otomo, where O’Flynn has transformed Bonobo’s sample of Bulgarian choir 100 Kaba-Gaidi into a pulsing arrangement with an 808 drop and compulsive beat. The choir raises its voice to a wail as O’Flynn’s bass roars through, together evoking the euphoria of the dancefloor that Bonobo was missing last year.

True to form, Bonobo builds a heart-rending motif throughout the record from looped waves of Lara Somogyi’s harp. ‘We won’t be dry soon, here come the tides’, sings Jamila Woods on Tides, encapsulating the ebb and flow of nature, of lockdowns, and of unprecedented times. Bonobo has constructed a bittersweet yet hopeful companion to this late stage of the pandemic, holding space both for grief and a blissful renewal. [Becca Inglis] Despite lending her vocals to what was once one of the world’s biggest songs (Major Lazer’s megahit Lean On had the summer of 2015 in a headlock), Danish pop sensation MØ remains an alternative figure in the world of pop. Her unique blend of cool and collected electro-pop examines new depths on her third album Motordrome.

There’s lots to enjoy here. The violin-heavy opener Kindness sets the tone for an album which doubles down on the theatrics of the lyrics.

Her voice has rarely sounded better than it does on the menacing and seductive Youth Is Lost, a song which playfully namechecks The Little Mermaid one minute, lamenting the brevity of human life the next. Other highlights include anthemic sad gal singalong Cool to Cry, end-of-thenight yearning power ballad Goosebumps and the sexy guitardriven Hip Bones.

Brad Pitt is an ode to MØ’s childhood crush, and the actor’s relationship with Juliette Lewis. The song contains the refrain: ‘If we never make it, I’m OK with it’. You get the sense that – really – she’s far from OK with it. These are songs for dark evenings in big cities, dancing through heartbreak. For when you feel small, but anything feels possible. [Tara Hepburn]

Yard Act The Overload Zen F.C. / Island Records, 21 Jan

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isten to: Tall Poppies, Dead L Horse, The Overload

Fickle Friends Are We Gonna Be Alright?

Cooking Vinyl, 14 Jan

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Listen To: Pretty Great, Glow, IRL

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Of all the post-punk newcomers cluttering BBC Radio 6 Music right now, Yard Act might be the Fallest of them all. Frontman James Smith’s Northern grit is present and correct, not to mention the alternating cynicism, disgust and earnest desire for something more than the status quo.

A character-driven lyrical thread ties the album’s concerns together (i.e. the trappings of capitalism) but musically, Yard Act are all over the shop. They borrow from brooding post-punk (Tall Poppies), minimalism + woodblock (Rich), pseudo-electro (Payday) and even Britpop’s earwormy guitar-pop (The Overload, Witness).

But it all makes for a rich palette to wax lyrical about ‘concrete meadows of the soul’ or the brilliant summation of everything terrifying about little England: ‘Morris-dancing to Sham 69’.

It’s a little front-loaded as the first three songs are by far the most immediate and memorable. But luckily, Tall Poppies anchors the closing songs with its six-plus minutes, painting a grim portrait of dreary, provincial life without being condescending or reductive. It’s a beautifully nuanced tale that offsets the snarky nature of the rest of the album, something that makes the final note of sincere hopefulness on 100% Endurance earned rather than forced. [Lewis Wade] Continuing their brand of dance-worthy, 80s-influenced indie-pop, Fickle Friends return with a pure party of a record. ‘Isn’t it nice to just live in the moment?’ vocalist Natassja Shiner fittingly asks on fizzing single IRL. Like all good parties, there’s an overwhelming buzz of feeling alive that’s reflected sonically, jumping from one hook-laced chorus to another, with lyrics like honest drunken confessions and wholehearted discussions about life, love and every other struggle in between.

Yeah Yeah Yeah vents frustration at existing with a lack of purpose; Pretty Great is a pretty great jam that bops along to the story of kissing someone at a party and being too wasted to remember their name, while Glow is a buoyant thank you note to the person giving Shiner back her shine. Hell, they even know how to clear the room with the simmering down closer that hits like the brick wall of ‘time to go home’ sobriety at 4am.

Ironically, for an album called Are We Gonna Be Alright?, the record feels far more like a soundtrack for forgetting such big questions, and instead, favours just letting it all go to some seriously sugary pop for a little while. [Dylan Tuck]

THE SKINNY

isten to: Tissues (all four moveL ments in full)

Blood Red Shoes Ghosts On Tape Jazz Life, 14 Jan

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isten to: Murder Me, Give Up, I L Lose Whatever I Own

Blood Red Shoes have come a long way since the boring days by the Brighton sea of their debut in 2008.

2019’s Get Tragic marked the band’s first material for five years, ushering in a decidedly more digital sound, with members of 2:54 and Tigercub helping reproduce the electro odyssey live.

Ghosts On Tapes picks up on this synthesised sheen. Give Up finds Ansell channelling the new era of furious racketeers in his spit-fuelled vocals before we wig out into a cosmic synth wormhole. And, as the name suggests, the album deals with the spectres of BRS past and present, something Grammy-nominated producer Tom Dalgety plays up to with paranormal white noise and ominous mid-song segues looming.

For a pair that have been intrinsically linked for 17 years though, there’s a surprising amount of solo songs. Thankfully, the latter half of the record finally sees the pair fuse together into the die-hard dichotomy we’ve come to adore. I Lose Whatever I Own boasts an Elephant-sized glam riff while Dig a Hole gleans from Tropical Fuck Storm’s whirlwind of psych wooziness and welcome flange. Ever the musical misfits, Blood Red Shoes’ righteous spirit remains even if their sound is a shape-shifting entity. [Cheri Amour]

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isten to: Heartbeat, I Won’t Run L (From Love)

Years & Years Night Call Polydor, 21 Jan

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Listen to: Starstruck, Crave

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When it was announced in March last year that Years & Years would be continuing as a solo project, something about the band’s statement felt a bit off. Describing the upcoming album as “an Olly endeavour”, it seemed that the former trio – made up of Olly Alexander, Mikey Goldsworthy and Emre Türkmen – had different visions for the release. The resulting release, Night Call, sounds disappointingly dated.

Where the band’s previous records were packed with euphoric, club-ready anthems, the tracks on Night Call too often lean into pop music clichés. Lead single Starstruck is probably the album’s strongest moment, but even it sounds like it might have originally been written for another popstar, ironically, also called Olly.

Sweet Talker ticks all the usual chart hit boxes yet still falls flat; Immaculate sounds like a Pitbull B-side that almost didn’t even make the cut at all, while Strange and Unusual slightly breaks the mould but fails to reach the climax we’re longing for. Unfortunately, Olly Alexander’s first solo outing as Years & Years doesn’t quite hit the mark, but even though they may be few and far between, there are still some glimmers of potential on Night Call.

[Nadia Younes]

January 2022 — Review

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VLURE Euphoria So Young Records, 14 Jan

Glasgow’s music scene has long been known for leaning into the theatrics, and unashamedly so. With the likes of Walt Disco, The Ninth Wave and Lucia & the Best Boys all offering their own unique takes on goth, glam-rock and post-punk, fellow Glasgow-based five-piece VLURE present a darker edge.

Having reinvented their sound over lockdown, VLURE really embrace their electronic influences on their debut EP Euphoria. The influence of coldwave and techno is evident on Show Me How to Live Again and Heartbeat, with their pulsing synths and thrashing drums, while frontman Hamish Hutcheson’s snarly vocals channel the spirit of The Prodigy’s Keith Flint.

The Storm and Euphoria showcase the band’s softer side, though, incorporating more classical instrumentation like strings and piano.

Meanwhile, lead single I Won’t Run (From Love) is about as 80s-indebted as a track can come, with its glistening synths and wistful harmonies.

VLURE’s Euphoria EP is intense, menacing and, ironically, not particularly euphoric – or at least not in the traditional sense. But the EP presents an interesting new direction for VLURE, and it’s one that shows some very promising potential.

[Nadia Younes]

Albums

Pan Daijing Tissues PAN, 21 Jan

Taken from her 2019 exhibition-performance of the same name, Tissues continues Pan Daijing’s experiments in creating music that blends industrial electronics and operatic vocals into something that pushes through creeping disquiet into places that are ecstatically moving. Of course there is a sense of something being lost without the benefit of the performance the piece was meant to accompany, but the music more than holds its own. Though comprising a sonic palette familiar from Daijing’s previous work, the piece is a more expansive effort, both spatially and structurally, unfurling across 50 minutes as one extended track.

As such there are long passages that feel like some kind of inhaling, a piece gathering itself before bursting forth, which when it does is always impactful. These gathering moments never feel like aimless meanderings though, every moment has a tension to it, constantly teetering between the potential for something gorgeous or something terrifying. This patience and gradual development is key, as the rewards, such as the hammered chords accompanying the whole soundscape growling back to life in the piece’s closing movement, are spectacular. It adds up to a remarkable work of often queasy beauty that never releases its grip. [Joe Creely]

THE SKINNY

Film

Scotland on Screen: Will Hewitt and Austen McCowan We sit down with Will Hewitt and Austen McCowan, the duo behind production company Melt the Fly, at their studio in Leith to discuss the formation of their partnership, their recent Scottish BAFTA success and what we can look forward to next

Filmography: Long Live

My Happy Head (2021), Harmonic Spectrum (2021), Sink or Skim (2019), Instruments in the Architecture: Building the Pianodrome (2019)

January 2022 – Review

I: @meltthefly meltthefly.com

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Photo: Duncan McGlynn

iltshire-born Will Hewitt and Edinburgh native Austen McCowan are the creative minds behind the Leithbased production company Melt the Fly. We’re speaking to them at their studio on Pitt Street in Leith a few weeks after they won a Scottish BAFTA for Harmonic Spectrum, their splendid short documentary following a musician navigating life on the autistic spectrum through his piano work. The pair first began working together as teens while finishing their A-levels in Doha, Qatar around 2010. This change of environment exposed them both to an inspirational arts teacher, and for McCowan, it was his first real access to the potentials of photography. It also gave them plenty of time to ruminate.

As Hewitt puts it, “Doha made it much easier to focus on creative work, as there wasn’t a lot else to do.” On completing their schooling, Hewitt returned to England to study at Falmouth University, while McCowan went first to Stevenson College in Edinburgh, before studying at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee.

It was during McCowan’s period of study on Tayside that he and Hewitt began filming a local bluegrass band called Wire & Wool. Hewitt was still working in England at this point, but was travelling up to visit his good friend and pursue their mutual love of documentary. “These were pretty chaotic shoots and we managed to make our mistakes there, even if we didn’t have a film to show for it in the end,” says Hewitt.

By the mid-2010s, McCowan had begun establishing himself as a freelance cameraperson and drone operator. He was working out of Paul Bock’s Studio 128, where the Melt the Fly offices are now housed. Hewitt joined him in Edinburgh in March 2018, after which point the pair have never really looked back.

The early support and continued mentoring from documentarian Amy Hardie (The Edge of Dreaming, Seven Songs for a Long Life) was crucial in helping Hewitt and McCowan realise the true ambition and scope of their early short film project Sink or Skim. This delightful half-hour documentary about the World Stone Skimming Championship in Easdale was commissioned

by Louise Thornton at BBC Scotland, alongside works by Hannah Currie (Lumo: Too Young to Die) and Léa Luiz de Oliveira (Spit it Out).

Both filmmakers are also keen to acknowledge the opportunities and support given by Noé Mendelle at the Scottish Documentary Institute (SDI). Not only did Harmonic Spectrum emerge out of the SDI’s flagship short doc scheme Bridging the Gap, but their forthcoming feature debut, Long Live My Happy Head (2022), was offered invaluable support and networking opportunities through SDI’s pitching forum The Edinburgh Pitch. “It was really through conversations at the Edinburgh Pitch that we were able to get commissioned by Tony Nellany at BBC Scotland,” says McCowan.

Austen McCowan (L) and Will Hewitt (R) at the BAFTA Scotland Awards

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Image: courtesy of Melt the Fly

Interview: Rohan Crickmar

Behind the scenes of Harmonic Spectrum

When asked about their recent Scottish BAFTA success with Harmonic Spectrum, both filmmakers say they “never expected it to happen.” For Hewitt, it was just “really pleasing to hear that people outside of our little corner of the industry liked our film,” while for McCowan, “the audience that will now be brought to the film will be that much bigger.” The film is both a portrait piece, in keeping with the bulk of their documentary work thus far, and an exploration of the misunderstandings surrounding autism spectrum disorder (ASD). McCowan sincerely hopes that the film will “change people’s attitudes and ideas about neurodivergence” and continues by saying that a cornerstone of his work with Hewitt is that they look to “use film in a way that is also beneficial to society.”

Among the many influences they have had on their rapidly developing filmmaking careers, Hewitt wanted to give particular attention to Jerry Rothwell and his film The Reason I Jump and the work of Charlie Russell, especially Chris Packham: Asperger’s and Me and Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die. On Russell’s filmmaking, McCowan mentioned his “very personable and poignant style and his knack for teasing out information in interviews” as being particularly influential.

So what'snext for Melt the Fly? Long Live My Happy Head is set to air on BBC Scotland in the new year and is being represented for international sales by Berlin-based agency Rise and Shine, headed up by Stefan Kloos (Last Men in Aleppo).

The duo are also in the early stages of development on a new mid-length documentary about “Scotland’s very own homemovie action hero.” We look forward to hearing more beyond that mysterious logline, but Hewitt and McCowan tell us the project will explore the potential of a returnable format and will draw heavily upon some of those mistakes made in their early days, and some of the friends they met along the way. They are also looking to build a production slate at Melt the Fly and as a result, are keen to hear from new directors who have great access to interesting characters and stories.

THE SKINNY

Film A Hero Director: Asghar Farhadi Starring: Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee

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A Hero

Memoria Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul Starring: Tilda Swinton The films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul are impossibly tender and beguilingly strange – reorienting the way we relate to the mundane, they heighten the unassuming magic of the everyday with a gentle surrealism. Memoria is possibly Weerasethakul’s most sensorily transportative work yet, employing a cinematic language where what we hear takes full narrative precedence.

Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, an English orchid farmer in Colombia who’s haunted by a mysterious loud bang that only she can hear. As she attempts to unearth the nature or origin of the sound, it seems that Memoria (Weerasethakul’s first film outside Thailand) is deeply concerned with the problem of translation. As Jessica painstakingly moulds both Spanish and English to describe the bang, the film

Director: Pedro Almodóvar Starring: Penélope Cruz, Milena Smit

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A chaotic whirl of vivid colour and misunderstanding fit for the horniest and queerest of Shakespeare plays, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest proves his audacious sensibility is going nowhere, even when treading his most politically mature ground.

Parallel Mothers first meets its two titular mothers, Janis (a powerhouse performance by Cruz) and teenaged Ana (enchanting up-andcomer Smit), on the brink of expectancy and traces their paths in the following years as they – in contradiction to the film’s wry title – collide and intersect.

The turns of Almodóvar’s script are too delightful to spoil, but suffice to say there is enough melodrama here for the trashiest telenovela, and neither mothers nor babies are quite who they seem. Yet what strikes most amid the

Parallel Mothers

Memoria

unravels the deep fallibilities of language: how do we ever shape the verbal to perfectly approximate the aural, or communicate the isolating specificity of personal experience to someone else?

An answer is suggested, and Memoria rewards its most open-minded listeners with a quietly dizzying revelation.

Unreservedly patient with its stillness, the film creates space for the seamless erosion of boundaries between the past and the present, the earthly and the spectral. Reminding us that even a small stone carries centuries of rich history, Memoria invites us to become attuned to deep time, leaving us with the feeling that the landscapes around us are lush with secrets and memories – if only we would pay attention. A cerebral and elusive puzzle, Memoria creates echoes that reverberate long after we leave the cinema. [Xuanlin Tham] Released 14 Jan by Sovereign Film Distribution; certificate TBC

Nightmare Alley Director: Guillermo del Toro Starring: Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara

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There’s clearly been plenty of cash thrown at this bravura remake of Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film noir. The cast is spilling over with talent; the 40s sets are resplendent; the cinematography is sumptuous. Happily, the lustre hasn’t diminished the story’s seedy streak. In Guillermo del Toro’s hands, this tale following the rapid rise and fall of a morally ambiguous hustler remains thrillingly tawdry.

It’s a film of two halves. The first follows Bradley Cooper’s Stan Carlisle, a loner on the lam who finds a home at a travelling carnival trading in grotesque freak shows and saucy spectacle. He’s a born showman with an affinity for cheapjack mind-reading, which he masters under the tutelage of two seasoned mentalists

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relentless soap-operatic beats is Almodóvar’s subversively restrained approach, grounding each new plot twist in the emotional realities of these women: their quiet domesticities, their searing intimacies.

This unexpected sobriety is bolstered by a half-subplot, half-framing device in which Janis employs the services of her eventual baby daddy to excavate the mass graves of those killed in her village during the Spanish Civil War. Coupled with a visual language that stresses a nonsexual kind of voyeurism – babies seen through monitors, photographer Janis framing her subjects through her lens – Parallel Mothers transforms into an unforgettable interrogation of the instability of historical memory, and the imperative of gazing unflinchingly at our collective, bloodied pasts. Intoxicatingly alive even amid death, this might be Almodóvar’s most radically human work yet. [Anahit Behrooz] Released 28 Jan by Pathé; certificate 15

Nightmare Alley

(Toni Collette and David Strathairn).

The second half sees Stan wowing city folk with a slicker, more sensationalist version of this act, but it’s here he encounters Cate Blanchett’s Lilith, a psychiatrist whose ability to read a mark exceeds his own.

The performances make Nightmare Alley click. Blanchett is the standout as a wildly sultry femme fatale who’s part Barbara Stanwyck, part Hannibal Lecter. But the actors – and the jaw-dropping production design – are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Despite stretching the runtime (this version is 40 minutes longer than Goulding’s), del Toro doesn’t find much psychological depth. The characters’ murky motivations dampen some of the ghoulish fun, but you won’t have much chance to grumble while you’re reeling from the acid in the face ending. [Jamie Dunn] Released 21 Jan by Searchlight Pictures; certificate TBC

January 2022 – Review

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Released 7 Jan by Curzon; certificate TBC

Parallel Mothers

Film

Even in a cinematic tradition renowned for its unparalleled subtlety and moral thorniness, there is still no one doing it quite like Asghar Farhadi. With A Hero, the Iranian new wave director returns with another Catch-22 tale of ethical quagmire, a pressure cooker of a social realist piece that battens down Iran’s rigid structures of honour, propriety and obligation, and waits for the inevitable explosion.

The titular hero is Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a puppy-eyed divorcé imprisoned for an outstanding debt. When his girlfriend discovers a bag of lost gold, it sets off a domino effect of misunderstandings and ethical quandaries. As

with most of Farhadi’s films, the catalysts that sink his protagonist deeper into dilemma seem incidental, but Farhadi knows well how the ground beneath can collapse with the thinnest fracture, how the court of public opinion can turn on the smallest dime.

Set in Iran and definitively occupied with the country’s strict social mores, A Hero is nevertheless Farhadi’s most universal film yet, concerned less with categorising Rahim as hero or charlatan than with what it means to behave ethically and unselfishly in an increasingly visible world, where every act – even the quietest – is laid out for public consumption. “One can always prioritise good deeds over personal interest,” Rahim is told. Yet as the boundaries between public and private, moral and performative, collapse, who can say where the difference lies.

[Anahit Behrooz]

THE SKINNY

Advertising Feature

Image by: Michael McGurk

Design for Our Times Design for Our Times at V&A Dundee is a design exhibition featuring a variety of installations and objects from seven designers, exploring sustainable solutions to overconsumption and material waste Words: Stacey Hunter

N January 2022 – Feature

ew work by seven innovative designers has been brought together in the exhibition Design for Our Times by Design Exhibition Scotland (DES). Open until June 2022, this freeto-attend exhibition at V&A Dundee’s Michelin Design Gallery is a showcase of material innovation that offers inspiring, practical and desirable solutions to issues of re-sourcing, repurposing and reuse.

The selected design initiatives represent distinct practices working today in Scotland in the fields of product design, interior design, environmental design and construction. From established designers to recent graduates, these ingenious projects demonstrate the enormous creativity on our doorstep. Terrace, a sculptural seating installation by Andrew Miller, a Glasgow-based artist, is shown alongside pendant lights made of glass vases found in charity shops. Two stools by Fife-based Chalk Plaster explore the possibilities of gypsum, some of which is culled from waste plasterboard, as a new durable material.

Designs are explored through drawings, prototypes and interviews with the designers, highlighting how these materials present positive changes in how we consume and behave.

The exhibition illuminates the design process, from incubating an initial idea, through the trial and error of prototype development, towards production and potential applications in the wider world.

Susanna Beaumont, founder of Design Exhibition Scotland and curator of Design for Our Times, said: “We intend this exhibition to stimulate discussion and raise awareness of how adventurously and playfully working with materials has the potential to create a more sustainable world in which we want to live.”

Featured materials range from repurposed waste, such as K-Briq, a building brick made from over 90% construction and demolition waste in Edinburgh. K-Briq was developed by Gabriela Medero, Professor in Geotechnical and Geo-environmental Engineering & Head of Geomaterials and Sustainable Building Materials Research Group at Heriot-Watt University. Mirrl present the Dixon drinking fountain, developed in their Glasgow-based studio in 2021 for the London Design Festival. Their exciting new shop has just opened at 20 St Andrew’s Street, in Glasgow’s Saltmarket.

Recent GSA design graduate Catriona Brown presents Shroom, a biodegradable prototype tree shelter made of mycelium, derived from fungus. Draff is an eco-design and production company based in Dundee founded by the French-born Aymeric Renou who has developed a material made of spent grain from local distilleries and breweries. A modular aluminium exhibition design by emerging design practice Future Practical has also been developed to be environmentally sensitive in both process and material selection, as well as reusable and ultimately recyclable.

Francesca Bibby, Assistant Curator at V&A Dundee, said: “It has been great to collaborate with Design Exhibition Scotland to realise this exhibition and we're excited to showcase the huge potential of these seven design practices, all working right on our doorstep. We hope visitors are inspired by the innovative ways in which designers are rethinking waste materials and considering more environmentally sensitive processes.”

Design for Our Times, V&A Dundee, 10am-5pm, Thursday to Monday until 19 Jun

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THE SKINNY

GAGA BAR AND KITCHEN, GLASGOW

Words: Peter Simpson

The new place from the folks behind Julie's Kopitiam and The Thornwood brings together lovely furnishings, pan-Asian dishes, and some outlandishly good drinks

Mon-Sun, 12am to midnight gagaglasgow.com

L

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Prawn Toast

middle – we like a firm smack from our cucumber, and these were more of a pantomime slap than the ‘reality show reunion’ level of attack we were hoping for.

Approach Gaga as an intriguing, much-hyped restaurant with a great bar selection, and you might come away ever so slightly disappointed as it doesn’t quite reach the Kopitiam’s levels yet. But if you shift your perspective, shuffle things around in your mind’s eye, and see Gaga as an intriguing bar with some incredibly inventive and delicious cocktails and some pretty good food to go with them, you’re in for a treat.

January 2022 – Review

Chumpunker

habanero, and comes across like a cross between an alcoholic smoothie and an ice lolly that was melted down by smashing it with a salt block. Sumptuous, spicy, sour, sweet, smokey, and stupendous. That’s right – stupendous.

Gaga – just up from Partick station on Dumbarton Road – is also the new place from the team at Julie’s Kopitiam, the brilliantly homespun Malaysian restaurant in Shawlands. The menu is a varied collection of small and larger dishes from across Asia; the tableware is a pleasingly kitsch mismatch of bold patterns and pastel colours; there are enormous house-plants everywhere, and a green velvet chair hanging above the bar.

Back at ground level, the prawn toast (£9) is small but well-formed; it’s a crispy, fatty treat strewn with chilli flakes and Japanese mayonnaise.

There are nostril-turning levels of fish sauce and umami goodness in the breakfast nasi goreng (£12), shot through with tiny flecks of fried pancetta. The chop suey aubergine (£11.50) doesn’t look like much in its brown cooking broth, but who cares? It tastes fantastic, great texture, brilliant balance of sweet and savoury (plus, it’s always nice to have your expectations of brown food subverted).

A couple of dishes don’t quite hit those heights – sweetcorn fritters (£8) offer a good bite but without a whole lot else, and without nearly enough of their tasty tamarind sauce to go around. Meanwhile, in a genuinely surprising twist, the Taiwanese fried chicken (£8.50) is almost too crunchy for its own good, with a batter-to-meat ratio that went a little haywire on our plate. The smacked cucumbers (£4) sit somewhere in the

Image: courtesy of Gaga

Image: courtesy of Gaga

ev Kuleshov was a Soviet filmmaker, one of the founders of the Moscow Film School, and an early proponent of film theory.

One of his biggest contributions was so important they put his name on it – if you show, for example, a plate of sausages, then cut to a happy-looking dog, the viewer connects the two images together in a way that tells a greater story than the shots can manage in isolation. That’s the Kuleshov effect; the way that images in sequence give each other context and meaning.

Gaga – just up from Partick station on Dumbarton Road – is the latest venture from the folk behind The Thornwood, the fully glowed-up Edwardian pub around the corner.

And amid Gaga’s rattan light shades and extremely tasteful terrazzo tabletops, the bar team have come up with some absolutely incredible drinks.

The G and Tea (£7.50) is a classic cooler, with a punchy gunpowder tea and a tartness from a selection of smashedup seasonal berries.

The Chumpunker (£8) starts out like a kind of cucumber margarita, before the mint and the anise from the second half of its description start turning up.

Refreshing, light, brilliantly balanced, gold stars all round. Yet as good as those two might be, the Tipp Topp (£8.50) is operating on an entirely different plane. It’s a mezcal base with passionfruit, lime, mint and

Food

Image: courtesy of Gaga

566 Dumbarton Rd, Glasgow, G11 6RH

THE SKINNY

Books

Book Reviews

I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness

In the Seeing Hands of Others

Olga Dies Dreaming

Refractive Africa

By Xochitl Gonzalez

By Claire Vaye Watkins

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By Will Alexander

By Nat Ogle

It starts with a multiple-choice questionnaire. Since my baby was born, it reads, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. a) As much as I ever did. b) Not quite as much now. c) Not so much now. d) Not at all. Postpartum depression doesn’t seem like it would be full of laughs, and yet I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness pulls it from its toothy grip (where the teeth are, let’s leave to the imagination).

We follow Claire, who leaves behind her husband and baby daughter for a speaking engagement in Reno. What begins as a temporary escape turns to a romp, a dose of freedom and abandon, and in turn veers into a descent into years gone by. In the Mojave Desert, her past waits around every turn, with loss, exes and cults aplenty; unable to change what has been, instead it considers how to move forward.

A blurring of the lines of fiction, non-fiction, what we leave behind and what travels with us in these fragments of thought, letters and memoir from a wider cast: there’s a lot within the erratic format to parse.

For some this will unfurl thrillingly, elsewhere it may feel disconnected and a bit of work. There’s a palpable suffering and darkness often, a brittleness; there’s also a tenderness, and a lot of laughs to be pulled from its page. A book of bite. [Heather McDaid]

Comprised solely of documents from the accuser and the accused, In the Seeing Hands of Others by Nat Ogle is a startlingly original debut whose events unfold around the centrepiece of a rape investigation.

Corina is a young nurse working on a renal ward, dealing with her mother’s deteriorating health and her strained relationship with her brother. Cameron is Corina’s ex, a wannabe actor with a complicated past and the man whom she has accused of rape. From emotional blog posts and frustrating police interview transcripts to unintelligible text messages, the events which unfold reveal all the nuanced faces of the two protagonists in a multiviewpoint way that is utterly unique and forces the reader to answer confronting moral questions about empathy and who is deserving of it.

While the unusual format takes a while to get used to, this is an extremely compelling and genrebending read that seamlessly blends a thrilling criminal investigation with the delicate, emotional and very human story of recovery and learning to live life again after a traumatic event. In the Seeing Hands of Others is a story of assumed guilt, proclaimed innocence and the murky grey place in between the two.

Suspenseful, dramatic but with just the right sprinkling of uplifting moments, this is an inventive debut that is a sure-fire conversation starter.

[Kerri Logan]

“Everybody’s got a job, everybody’s got a dream,” sings Lin-Manuel Miranda in his scrappy debut musical In the Heights. About this, at least, the cult Puerto Rican-American writer and performer is correct.

From undocumented Dreamers to the ever-elusive American Dream, America has always – for better or worse – defined itself through vision.

It’s a declaration of optimism, perhaps, but also of fundamental dissonance: a tension between self-image and reality that unsettles everything.

The protagonists of Olga Lies Dreaming know this tension well. The children of Puerto Rican immigrants from a rapidly gentrifying area of Brooklyn, the two siblings – Olga, wedding planner to New York’s Successionlike elite and Pietro, an AOC-style Congressman – have won the dreaming lottery. Yet beneath their posterchild lives lie scars: their mother’s abandonment to fight for Puerto Rican independence, their father’s traumatising illness. Taking place in the months surrounding of Hurricane Maria, Xochitl Gonzalez’s exploration of diasporic identity is irresistibly warm yet entirely uncompromising, honing in on the weight of trying to make it in a country that has ravaged your own.

The narrative trips along with evocative rhythm, a straight-shooting prose that, like its heroes, hides a tender heart beneath a tough, wryly reflexive exterior. And when Hurricane Maria lands Gonzalez pulls no punches, centuries of oppression contained in devastated infrastructure and two siblings’ unshakeable anger. [Anahit Behrooz]

Refractive Africa is a powerful and visionary set of three long poems, revolving around the middle piece, The Congo, which settles and flits across the Congo River, with all its colonial and post-colonial histories.

The collection sings from the page; it celebrates, it prophecises, and it revels in the great spirits of Africa’s national heroes and literary giants.

Alexander’s writing is awash with innovation, ably straddling a world which is all too familiar, and a sparkling one of imagination.

In Alexander’s Preface, he writes that ‘in order to allow African selfenrichment to amplify, I lingually attempt to extend its palpable resistance through language that alters subconscious foreshortening... but language fortified via voice no longer populated by those whose thoughts remain white yet whose skin remains decidedly Black.’ This negotiation sits centrally to the collection; it ruptures through the historical atrocities and claims language, context, and content for the real and imagined Africa which Alexander paints. Even when the poet is charting, he refuses and refutes colonising the page with punctuation, instead leaving the words stark and celebrating against the white. It creates an at once forceful dialogue between page and reader and a soothing, mesmeric dance from the process of reading. Alexander is a critically acclaimed poet, philosopher, and visual artist, with a wealth of prizes under his belt. Refractive Africa is a bold and dazzling culmination of his contemporary thinking. [Beth Cochrane]

Quercus, 20 Jan, £14.95

Serpent's Tail, 13 Jan, £9.99

Fleet, 6 Jan, £16.99

Granta, 6 Jan, £10.99

quercusbooks.co.uk

serpentstail.com

hachette.co.uk

granta.com

January 2022 — Review

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THE SKINNY

ICYMI

Previous winner of the Leicester Square Theatre New Comedian of the Year Award, and a now-familiar face on the Scottish comedy scene, Sam Lake gives us his take on ground-breaking Ellen DeGeneres sitcom, Ellen Illustration: Juljia Straizyte was just terrific and no-one had any issues with it. At all.

JUST KIDDING, this was America in the 90s. Tolerance of gay people hadn't been invented yet. That wouldn't come until 2009 when Obama told everyone gays were actually, like, so chill. Ellen didn’t work for three years after the show finished. She was blacklisted in Hollywood, often called 'Ellen Degenerate' in the press. DeGeneres claims there was even a bomb scare on the day they recorded this episode, which just goes to show what attitudes were like.

In the Ellen Sitcom Universe, herein known as the ESU, Ellen plays....well, Ellen. Except in the ESU, Ellen is a bookshop owner, living in L.A. with her quirky friends who get up to all kinds of comical escapades. It's not a wild format, but perhaps this was intentional, allowing the focus of the show to be on Ellen and her quintessential Ellen-isms. As far as sitcoms go, it’s genuinely very watchable.

Admittedly, season one is a bit of a chore as it finds its feet.

Other than that, the writing is sharp, well delivered and the whole cast are giving delicious, characterful performances.

Public backlash aside, the episode itself is genuinely funny.

Ellen meets Susan, a proud lesbian woman who sends Ellen into a spiral of questioning her sexuality, culminating in accidentally announcing she’s gay to an entire airport. (FYI: Ryanair charge a fee if you out yourself on one of their flights). My favourite line comes when Ellen, desperate to appear as straight as possible, tells her friends about a wild night of hotel-room passion, which is so obviously made-up when Ellen utters “God I’m just a sucker for man-woman sex.”

For the first three seasons Ellen doesn't get up to anything too outlandish. Sure, she competes on American Gladiators, gets convinced her new boyfriend is a cocaine dealer, and walks in on her best friend cheating on her fiancé on their wedding day.

This is standard ESU. Then season four comes along with a different energy.

As a sitcom, Ellen is really enjoyable. It’s witty, it’s quick, it’s funny. It shows why Ellen was so beloved... I’d recommend a watch of at least the coming out episode, combined with the Oprah interview to understand the impact it had. Especially the bit where Oprah goes “Everyone look under your seats, it’s HOMOSEXUALITY!”

We’re drip-fed little clues about Ellen’s sexuality throughout the season. She makes jokes about not needing a husband and hides in a literal closet, then bursts out all “I was in the closet lol.” These teases culminate in The Puppy Episode, which was pretty monumental when it first aired in 1997. In this two-part special, Ellen comes out as lesbian, making her the first primetime sitcom character to be openly gay. Everyone thought this

Sam Lake brings his latest Work-In-Progress show, Cake, to Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, 22 Jan, 8pm, £7 Catch Sam's podcast, 'I've had a Rosé, Let's Talk about Feelings', wherever you get your podcasts

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January 2022 — Feature

Ellen’s main trait is being nice (foreshadowing much?).

She’s always the one trying to do the right thing and to keep everyone happy. Her friends around her are forever getting into crazy situations, and the comedy comes from how Ellen awkwardly tries to make everything right. You watch for her one-liners, her reactions. Her only continuing pursuit is trying to find the right man to settle down with (we’ll get onto why that might prove problematic for her in a moment).

After that historic episode, Ellen lasted one more season, which tackled a lot of queer issues. Many critics said the whole show was “too gay”, which seems unfair.

Having said that, there is one episode where Ellen learns to rock climb so she can go on a date with a lesbian spin instructor called Barbara. Fair play, that is textbook (stereotypical) lesbianism. But the same humour that made the first four seasons work hadn’t gone anywhere, just the storylines were about things lots of people didn’t want to hear about at the time.

Comedy

Brief caveat: this article isn’t about Ellen’s talk show or her recently discovered toxic behaviour. Yes, she’s problematic. Yes, she wants everyone to be kind to each other but also not make direct eye contact with her. This article is about the 90s sitcom that made Ellen a household name. My only prior knowledge of it was watching a clip of an interview between pre-talk-show Ellen and Oprah after Ellen came out (as lesbian, not talk show host) both in real-life and on her sitcom, which was creatively titled Ellen.

THE SKINNY

Listings Looking for something to do? Well you’re in the right place! Here's a rundown of what's happening across Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee this month.

To find out how to submit listings, head to theskinny.co.uk/listings

Glasgow Music Wed 05 Jan THE CHISEL THE GARAGE

Punk from the UK.

DANCING ON TABLES (WUKASA + LUBANA) KING TUT’S

BOOK KLUB (POST IRONIC STATE + GOODNIGHT LOUISA + VELVET)

Pop rock from Fife. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

Post-punk from Glasgow.

Part of New Year's Revolution.

THE HUG AND PINT

KING TUT'S

WOLF ALICE BARROWLANDS

Alt-rock from London.

DEADLETTER (GELATINE + THE ABSTRACT DANCERS)

Post-punk from South London. Part of First Footing.

Mon 10 Jan

THE SURFING MAGAZINES

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

Garage-rock supergroup of The Wave Pictures and Slow Club.

MOTHER ALL MIGHTY (ELOISE KRETSCHMER)

THE HUG AND PINT

Neo soul from Edinburgh.

Part of First Footing.

AVATAR

Sat 15 Jan

Heavy metal from Sweden.

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW

KIRSTEEN HARVEY NICO EV + RAE LENA

SWG3

GUNZ FOR HIRE

THE BOTTOM LINE

Singer-songwriter from Glasgow. Part of First Footing.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW

Rawstyle from the Netherlands.

THE HUG AND PINT

Thu 06 Jan

THE KATUNS (HAZEYDAYS + THE DECANITES + GHOSTWRITER) KING TUT’S

Indie rock from West Lothian. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

NEGATIVE HOPE

THE HUG AND PINT

Alt-indie from the UK.

MIKE MCKENZIE (AMIE HUCKSTEP + PIPPA BLUNDELL + SHORTHOUSE) THE HUG AND PINT

Singer-songwriter from Edinburgh. Part of First Footing.

Tue 11 Jan

FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW

Indie record label from Glasgow. Part of First Footing.

Post-hardcore from Wales.

Fri 07 Jan

Psychedelic garage from Glasgow. Part of First Footing.

SNASH (DROP THE BABY + WINE MOMS + LO RAYS) KING TUT’S

Punk from Glasgow. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

DOSS

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY

Shoegaze from New York.

Part of First Footing.

WOLF ALICE BARROWLANDS

Alt-rock from London.

January 2022 — Listings

Sun 09 Jan

SHREDD (JUNK PUPS + GLASS RASPBERRY) THE HUG AND PINT

Wed 12 Jan

AFFLECKS PALACE (PASTEL + VEGA RALLY) KING TUT’S

Indie rock from Manchester.

SAM RYDER SWG3

Singer-songwriter from Essex.

CLUB BEIRUT (SILVI + ST CLEMENTS + RYLAH) KING TUT’S

Indie from Scotland. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

BIFFY CLYRO SWG3

Rock from Scotland.

VIGILANTI

THE GARAGE GLASGOW

Rock from Glasgow.

BUFFET LUNCH BROADCAST

Indie pop from Scotland.

SACRED PAWS (KAPUTT + THE QUILTER + NEKKURO HANA) ST LUKE’S

Indie rock from Scotland.

Part of First Footing.

BROADCAST

ORAN MOR

80s pop from London

ECHO MACHINE (CUPID’S TOMMY GUN + TALKER _ PRESSURE RETREAT) KING TUT’S

Pop from Dundee. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

SULKA (LLOYDS HOUSE + PETER CAT) NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY

Lo-fi from Glasgow. Part of First Footing.

WOLF ALICE BARROWLANDS

Alt-rock from London.

REBECCA VASMANT

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

DJ from Glasgow. Part of First Footing.

LOST MAP SECRET PARTY THE HUG AND PINT

Indie record label from Eigg.

Part of First Footing.

Thu 13 Jan

BEMZ (WASHINGTON + ID + PSWEATPANTS) KING TUT’S

Rap from Glasgow. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

DINNER NIGHT (ENGLISH TEACHER + HOUND + DRAGGED UP) THE HUG AND PINT

Indie from Scotland. Part of First Footing.

Fri 14 Jan

CARLY CONNOR (PANDAS + LUNA J + JAMIE RAFFERTY) KING TUT’S

Alt-country from Glasgow.

Part of New Year’s Revolution.

SUN JUNE + ADA LEA MONO

Indie rock back to back.

Part of First Footing.

JAY ELECTRONICA

QUEEN MARGARET UNION

Rap from the US.

Indie rock from London.

Part of First Footing.

Wed 19 Jan

KARDO (ALI & THE PARADE + WHITE NOVELS + LAZY MONEY)

KING TUT’S

BLUSH CLUB (EADES + SCHOOL OF PARIS)

Indie pop from Glasgow.

CORTO.ALTO (NOUSHY 4TET) CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

Pseudo-jazz from Glasgow.

BRAT COVEN (BRENDA + DUSK AMADEUS) THE HUG AND PINT

Punk from Glasgow. Part of First Footing.

Electronic from Glasgow.

Part of New Year’s Revolution.

TREMONTI

Heavy metal from the US. DECO

THE GARAGE GLASGOW

Pop from London.

WAYNE SNOW (SCARLETT RANDLE) STEREO

Future soul from Berlin.

Part of First Footing.

Thu 20 Jan

NOISE (CAMEO HABITAT + WAVERLEY + THE NOTIONS) KING TUT’S

Alt-indie from Glasgow. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

OPENING NIGHT: ‘NEATH THE GLOAMIN’ STAR

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Part of Celtic Connections.

THE SHIRES

SEGA BODEGA STEREO

Multi-genre from London.

KID DAD

THE HUG AND PINT

Indie rock from Germany.

Tue 18 Jan

ORAN MOR

CLAIRO

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW

Singer-songwriter from the US.

SHETLAND 550: ROSS & RYAN COUPER + JENNA REID + HARRIS PLAYFAIR MACKINTOSH CHURCH

Fiddle music from Shetland.

Part of Celtic Connections.

SLIX (SHE + CHERRY + SCUNNURT) KING TUT’S

Indie punk from Inverclyde.

Part of New Year’s Revolution.

AMYTHYST KIAH

Americana from Tennessee.

Part of Celtic Connections.

QUEEN MARGARET UNION

Alt-rock from the US.

TATE MCRAE SWG3

SWG3

CIARAN RYAN BAND (FOURTH MOON + SUSANNA SEIVANE)

Singer-songwriter from Canada.

Trad folk from the UK. Part of Celtic Connections.

OLD FRUITMARKET GLASGOW

Folk from Ukraine. Part of Celtic Connections.

ADAM ROSS

THE HUG AND PINT

Guitarist from LA. Part of Celtic Connections.

KAMORA ROOM 2

Indie from Glasgow.

Sat 22 Jan THE MARY WALLOPERS

World folk from Scotland and Ireland. Part of Celtic Connections.

THIS IS THE KIT (RODDY WOOMBLE) CITY HALLS

EASY DAYS (THE EXHALES + LEMON DRINK + NANI) KING TUT’S

Indie pop from Glasgow.

Part of New Year’s Revolution.

THE LONESOME ACE STRINGBAND (THE MAGPIES) MITCHELL THEATRE

Bluegrass from Canada.

Part of Celtic Connections.

World folk from Scotland.

Part of Celtic Connections.

Folk from the Highlands.

Part of Celtic Connections.

Trad line-up. Part of Celtic Connections.

Trad from Ireland. Part of Celtic Connections.

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

SHETLAND 550: NORN VOICES

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Trad from Shetland. Part of Celtic Connections.

SIERRA FERRELL (ARLO MCKINLEY)

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Country folk from West Virginia.

Folk from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

Americana from Wales. Part of Celtic Connections.

BREABACH

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

THE NEW TRADITION: REJUVENATION

DRYGATE BREWING CO.

GERAINT WATKINS BAND (EMMA JANE)

JACK BADCOCK

FRANKIE GAVIN + MAIRTIN O’CONNOR (STUNDOM)

MULL HISTORICAL SOCIETY (YVONEE LYON) ST LUKE’S

NAAD-HARA WITH KAPIL SESHASAYEE

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

Electronica from Scotland.

Part of Celtic Connections.

NAKUL KRISHNAMURTHY THE GLAD CAFE

Trad and electronica from India. Part of Celtic Connections.

NEAL FRANCIS (UNOMA OKUDO)

DRYGATE BREWING CO.

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

ROAMING ROOTS REVUE

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Multi-genre line-up. Part of Celtic Connections.

BRIAN FINNEGAN (ROSS AINSLIE + TIM EDEY)

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Trad from Ireland. Part of Celtic Connections.

CHRISTIAN LEE HUTSON (ROSWELL)

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

Indie folk from LA. Part of Celtic Connections.

SARAH JANE SCOUTEN

THE GLAD CAFE

Country folk from Canada.

Part of Celtic Connections.

VELS TRIO

THE HUG AND PINT

Experimental prog from Brighton. Part of Celtic Connections.

Mon 24 Jan

BLOOD RED SHOES KING TUT’S

Singer-songwriter from Chicago. Part of Celtic Connections.

Indie rock from Brighton.

THE HUG AND PINT

CARIBOU

THE GOON SAX MONO

RHONA STEVENS

Synth pop from Brisbane.

Indie from Glasgow. Part of Celtic Connections.

BARROWLANDS

Sun 23 Jan

KARINE POLWART + DAVE MILLIGAN (DAOIRí FARRELL TRIO) CITY HALLS

Folk from the UK. Part of Celtic Connections.

Composer from Canada.

JOHANNA WARREN THE HUG AND PINT

Singer-songwriter from the US. Part of Celtic Connections.

Tue 25 Jan THE SCRATCH SWG3

RILEY (ANDREW DICKSON + CALUM BOWIE + CORTNE)

Rock from Ireland.

Country pop from Glasgow.

Part of New Year’s Revolution.

CHRISTONE “KINGFISH” INGRAM (BLUE MILK)

KING TUT’S

STONEBROKEN

THE GARAGE GLASGOW

Rock from Walsall.

MEGAN HENDERSON (AINSLEY HAMILL)

ST LUKE’S

CHLOE FOY

LIME CORDIALE

Multi-instrumentalist from the Highlands. Part of Celtic Connections.

Pop rock from Sydney.

CATHOUSE

BROKEN WITT REBELS THE GARAGE GLASGOW

Blues rock from Birmingham.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW

THE ZEBECKS BROADCAST

Indie rock from Elgin.

Singer-songwriter from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

ELEPHANT SESSIONS BARROWLANDS

Indie-folk from the Highlands.

LUCERO STEREO

Post-punk from Montreal.

DAKHABRAKHA (PROJECT SMOK)

Folk from Manchester. Part of Celtic Connections.

TRAMWAY

Rap from LA.

BARROWLANDS

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

HOMAGE TO HOME: IBRINA

DUCKWRTH

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR

THE BREATH (THE CHLOE BRYCE TRIO)

Folk rock from Winchester.

Part of Celtic Connections.

Indie from New York.

Pop from England.

KING TUT’S

Country from the US.

MACKINTOSH CHURCH

TEDDY THOMPSON

TRAMWAY

ST LUKE’S

DALLAHAN (STUNDOM)

THE HUG AND PINT

NOAHFINNCE (SOPHIE POWERS + THE OOZES)

Folk from Dublin. Part of Celtic Connections.

Folk from Dundalk.

AMARA

THE DRIVER ERA

Pop from Brighton.

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

ORAN MOR

ST LUKE’S

SWG3

FICKLE FRIENDS

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

INGRID ANDRESS

SWG3

Mon 17 Jan

NITEWORKS + ROYAL SCOTTISH NATIONAL ORCHESTRA

THE JEREMIAHS (THE CANNY BAND)

KING TUT’S

MITCHELL THEATRE

Bluegrass from the US. Part of Celtic Connections.

Trad electronica from Skye.

Part of Celtic Connections.

Fri 21 Jan

GHOSTBABY (ISABELLA STRANGE + FUZZY LOP + THE BLEEDERS)

DIY music from Edinburgh.

Part of First Footing.

THE HUG AND PINT

THE HUG AND PINT

Sun 16 Jan

Indie from Glasgow. Part of First Footing.

MARTIN KEMP

FIGHTMILK (COUNT FLORIDA + LATE FEES)

Indie from Scotland. Part of First Footing.

Indie from Paisley. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

Sat 08 Jan

Pop punk from Wales.

Indie from Glasgow. Part of First Footing.

THE HUG AND PINT

SWISS PORTRAIT (DAISY MILES + DAHLIA + AORTAROTA)

Indie from Arkansas.

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Country acoustic from England.

GRAVEDANCER

THE HUG AND PINT

WATCHHOUSE

BARROWLANDS

HAPPYTEARS (BIG GIRL’S BLOUSE + CHIZU NNAMDI)

DENHOLM PRODUCTIONS

BROADCAST

NECK DEEP

Country rock from Memphis.

— 50 —

MITCHELL THEATRE

Blues from Mississippi. Part of Celtic Connections.

THE HUG AND PINT

VEXED

Folk from Manchester. Part of Celtic Connections.

Alt-metal from the UK.

Wed 26 Jan

THE KVB (DREAM ENGLISH KID)

SPECTOR

Shoegaze electronic from Manchester.

IANN DIOR

STEREO

SHETLAND 550: A PEERIE FOY OLD FRUITMARKET GLASGOW

Folk from Shetland. Part of Celtic Connections.

MARTIN TAYLOR OLD FRUITMARKET GLASGOW

Folk jazz from the UK. Part of Celtic Connections.

ORAN MOR

Rock from London.

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW

Rap from the US.

JOSHUA GRANT (PRETTY PREACHERS CLUB + EUAN ALLISON + LINZI CLARK) KING TUT’S

Indie from Scotland. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

AOIFE O’DONOVAN (LERA LYNN) MITCHELL THEATRE

Bluegrass from the US. Part of Celtic Connections.

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

BRUCE MACGREGOR

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Fiddle music from the UK. Part of Celtic Connections.

DAVID LATTO

THE GLAD CAFE

Folk from Fife. Part of Celtic Connections.

Thu 27 Jan

DEAN WAREHAM ORAN MOR

Rock from the US.

BROCKHAMPTON

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW

Hip hop from Texas.

FARA (MICHAEL BIGGINS)

MACKINTOSH CHURCH

Chamber folk from Orkney.

Part of Celtic Connections.

INTERCULTURAL YOUTH SCOTLAND 3RD BIRTHDAY PARTY KING TUT’S

Hip-hop from Scotland.

Part of New Year’s Revolution.

HEARTLESS BASTARDS MONO

Space rock from Texas.

SAXON

BARROWLANDS

Heavy metal from England.

EFTERKLANG

OLD FRUITMARKET GLASGOW

Experimental electronica from Denmark. Part of Celtic Connections.

AK PATTERSON THE GLAD CAFE

Indie folk from Brighton.

Part of Celtic Connections.

ASTRID (EWAN MACFARLANE)

DRYGATE BREWING CO.

Acoustic folk from Orkney.

Part of Celtic Connections.

ANDO GLASO

THE RUM SHACK

Trad Roma music from Scotland.

VANITY FAIRY (NU GARCON + ALL CATS ARE BEAUTIFUL + SPEEDBOAT) THE HUG AND PINT

Lo-fi disco from London.

Fri 28 Jan

SPIERS & BODEN ORAN MOR

Folk from England.

THE STRANGLERS

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW

Rock from England.

HAMISH HAWK (MAGPIE BLUE + DEATHICS) KING TUT’S

Pop from Scotland. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

IAIN FRASER (JOSIE DUNCAN) MITCHELL THEATRE

Trad from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

ROSS FROM FRIENDS SWG3

Producer from Essex.

SHAMBOLICS SWG3

Rock from Fife.

THE SKINNY LORNA SHORE CATHOUSE

Deathcore from New Jersey.

ROY AYERS UBIQUITY THE GARAGE GLASGOW

Funk and soul from the US.

NATION OF LANGUAGE BROADCAST

Indie pop from New York.

SOUL II SOUL BARROWLANDS

Neo soul from London.

LE VENT DU NORD OLD FRUITMARKET GLASGOW

Folk from Quebec. Part of Celtic Connections.

ANOUSHKA SHANKAR + SCOTTISH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Sitar and trad from the UK. Part of Celtic Connections.

UAINE (GRAINNE BRADY)

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Folk from Ireland. Part of Celtic Connections.

DEAN OWENS (SINNER’S SHRINE + KIRSTEN ADAMSON)

FOG BANDITS

Folk from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

THE REMEDY CLUB THE GLAD CAFE

Americana and roots from Ireland. Part of Celtic Connections.

POLLY PAULUSMA THE HUG AND PINT

Singer-songwriter from England. Part of Celtic Connections.

Sat 29 Jan

MATT CARMICHAEL (SEONAID AITKEN) MACKINTOSH CHURCH

Jazz from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

THE BIG DAY (UNINVITED + THE NOISE CLUB + WRAUCCES) KING TUT’S

Indie from Scotland. Part of New Year’s Revolution.

Edinburgh Music Thu 06 Jan MARTIN KEMP LIQUID ROOMS

80s pop from London

Sat 08 Jan

THE OUTFIT (MADRE SUN) BANNERMANS

Blues rock from Chicago.

SOUTHSIDE OF THE TRACKS THE QUEEN’S HALL

Fiddle music from Scotland.

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY

Rock’n’roll from the UK. KYTES (SPILT MILK SOCIETY)

Indie pop from Munich.

INDOOR FOXES BROADCAST

Indie from Edinburgh.

ALOGTE OHO (BEMIS) TRAMWAY

Afro-pop from Ghana. Part of Celtic Connections.

TALISK (JIGJAM)

OLD FRUITMARKET GLASGOW

Trad folk from Scotland.

Part of Celtic Connections.

TINDERBOX COLLECTIVE (KATHRYN JOSEPH)

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Folk from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

DEAF SHEPHERD (GROSSE ISLE)

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Trad from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

THE QUILTER

THE VOODOO ROOMS

Indie pop from Glasgow.

Rock from the UK.

Thu 13 Jan

Britpop from Liverpool.

SNEAKY PETE’S

Guitar pop from South London.

Sat 15 Jan

THE DERELLAS BANNERMANS

Punk from the UK.

Fri 07 Jan

TEK-NO PRISONERS THE FLYING DUCK

THE RUM SHACK

Rave fueled techno.

Sub Club SATURDAYS SUBCULTURE

Cathouse WEDNESDAYS

CATHOUSE WEDNESDAYS

DJ Jonny soundtracks your Wednesday with all the best pop-punk, rock and hip-hop.

THURSDAYS UNHOLY

Cathouse's Thursday night rock, metal and punk mash-up.

FRIDAYS

CATHOUSE FRIDAYS

Screamy, shouty, posthardcore madness to help you shake off a week of stress in true punk style.

SATURDAYS

CATHOUSE SATURDAYS

Or Caturdays, if you will.

Two levels of the loudest, maddest music the DJs can muster; metal, rock and alt on floor one, and punky screamo upstairs.

SUNDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) HELLBENT

From the fab fierce family that brought you Catty Pride comes Cathouse Rock Club’s new monthly alternative drag show.

Folk and reggae from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

ED DOWIE

THE GLAD CAFE

Singer-songwriter from Dorset. Part of Celtic Connections.

BAB L’BLUZ (SIOMHA) DRYGATE BREWING CO.

THE FLYING DUCK

House and disco.

SUNDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH)

WEDNESDAYS

Pop party anthems & classic cheese from DJ Nicola Walker.

DJ Garry Garry Garry in G2 with chart remixes, along with beer pong competitions all night.

FLASHBACK

SUNDAYS (THIRD OF THE MONTH) CHEERS FOR THIRD SUNDAY

DJ Kelmosh takes you through Mid-Southwestern emo, rock, new metal, nostalgia and 90s and 00s tunes.

SUNDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH) SLIDE IT IN

Classic rock through the ages from DJ Nicola Walker.

The Garage Glasgow MONDAYS

BARE MONDAYS

Lasers, bouncy castles and DJ Gav Somerville spinning out teasers and pleasers. Nice way to kick off the week, no?

TUESDAYS

#TAG TUESDAYS

Indoor hot tubs, inflatables as far as the eye can see and a Twitter feed dedicated to validating your drunk-eyed existence.

GLITTERED! WEDNESDAYS

BROADCAST

Mon 31 Jan

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Folk and jazz from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

ORAN MOR

Singer-songwriter from the US. FRETS: NORMAN BLAKE + BERNARD BUTLER + JAMES GRANT (MONICA QUEEN + JOHNNY SMILLIE)

Pop rock from Scotland.

Part of Celtic Connections.

Indie from LA. Part of Celtic Connections.

THE SURFING MAGAZINES

BROKEN WITT REBELS

CULTDREAMS

Blues rock from Birmingham.

Lo-fi from Leeds.

THE MASH HOUSE

SNEAKY PETE’S

ABBIE MCCARTHY’S GOOD KARMA CLUB THE CAVES

Fri 21 Jan

Mon 17 Jan

THE REVIVE LIVE TOUR: THE HOWL & THE HUM + EDIE BENS SNEAKY PETE’S

Singer-songwriters from Yorkshire.

Alt-rock from Teeside.

Rock from Tippeary.

BANNERMANS

Fri 28 Jan

SNEAKY PETE’S

BANNERMANS

Indie from Edinburgh.

Sun 23 Jan SAINT PHNX

THE MASH HOUSE

Heavy metal from Stourbridge.

Trance and synth.

Synthpop and disco.

Party for queer people and their friends.

Sat 29 Jan

SNEAKY PETE’S

THE FLYING DUCK

Edinburgh Clubs Thu 06 Jan

VOLENS CHORUS PRESENTS: CASEMENT

Bass and percussion.

Fri 07 Jan

CLUB MEDITERRANEO (ANDREA MONTALTO B2B POLY 800) SNEAKY PETE’S

DJ and producer from Paris.

Wed 19 Jan

SNEAKY PETE’S

Disco and house.

Disco and house.

Sat 08 Jan

Thu 20 Jan

THE BONGO CLUB

SNEAKY PETE’S

SOULSVILLE INTERNATIONAL

GREENHOUSE RECORDS

Afrobeat and soul.

Deep dancefloor cuts.

Fri 21 Jan

ST LUKE’S

Rock from Pennsylvania.

DAVID GRUBB

THE HUG AND PINT

String composer from Fife.

Part of Celtic Connections.

Tue 01 Feb THE STREETS

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW

Garage rap from Birmingham.

SMOOVE AND TURRELL

THE VOODOO ROOMS

Soul and funk from Newcastle.

Sun 30 Jan GIN ANNIE

BANNERMANS

Rock from the Black Country.

DAVID GRUBB

THE PARROTS BROADCAST

Rock from Madrid.

HIPPO CAMPUS STEREO

Indie from the US. KATE RUSBY

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Folk from Yorkshire. Part of Celtic Connecions.

RACHEL BAIMAN (CAHALEN MORRISON) GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Singer-songwriter from Nashville. Part of Celtic Connections.

NATIVE HARROW (ARNY MARGRET + KIRSTEEN HARVEY) THE HUG AND PINT

Indie from New York.

Mon 31 Jan

SAMANTHA FISH

THE QUEEN’S HALL

Blues from Kansas City.

Tue 01 Feb BELLE AND SEBASTIAN USHER HALL

Indie pop from Glasgow.

String composer from Fife.

Part of Celtic Connections.

Dundee Music

THE LIQUID ROOM

Thu 27 Jan

THE VOODOO ROOMS

ROY AYERS UBIQUITY

Funk and soul from the US.

CHURCH

The Liquid Room

SATURDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) REWIND

Monthly party night celebrating the best in soul, disco, rock and pop with music from the 70s, 80s, 90s and current bangers.

DJs playing music by bands to make you dance: Grace Jones to Neu!, Parquet Courts to Brian Eno, The Clash to Janelle Monáe.

MIXED UP MONDAY

WEDNESDAYS HEATERS

Heaters resident C-Shaman presents a month of ambiguous local showdowns, purveying the multifarious mischief that characterises Sneaky’s midweek party haven.

SOUL JAM

SUNDAYS POSTAL

Multi-genre beats every Sunday at Sneaky Pete's, showcasing the very best of local talent with some extra special guests.

AQUELARRE (LONELY CARP + PAKO VEGA) SNEAKY PETE’S

ELEKTRIKAL

Garage and drum and bass.

LA BELLE ANGELE

— 51 —

THE DISTRICTS

The Hive

Queer industrial experimental noise.

THE BONGO CLUB

Folk and swing from Canada. Part of Celtic Connections.

TUESDAYS

Monthly no holds barred, down and dirty bikram disco.

THE BONGO CLUB

Upbeat disco.

MIDNIGHT BASS

Mon 17 Jan

NIGHT TUBE: ALETHA + JACUZZI GENERAL

SNEAKY PETE’S

TUESDAYS

SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)

MISS WORLD (APHID + FEENA + ICED GEM)

INTERCULTRUAL YOUTH SCOTLAND

The Bongo Club

Tropical house, disco and funk.

SNEAKY PETE’S

HEADSET

SESH

Dubstep and drum and bass.

HWTS PRESENTS: VITESS (HWTS RESIDENTS)

SNEAKY PETE’S

Garage and jungle.

MESSENGER

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Metalcore from New York.

Regular Edinburgh club nights

POPULAR MUSIC

HOT MESS

ANNABELLE CHVOSTEK (ELAINE LENNON)

SWG3

Rock from Sydney.

Fri 14 Jan Electro rave.

GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL

Hybrid indie from the UK.

Rock from Scotland.

House and disco.

KATE BUSH DANCE PARTY

LLOYD COLE

KING TUT’S

THE RUMJACKS (SHANGHAI TREASON)

Sneaky Pete’s

OVERGROUND

KING TUT’S

VITA CARTEL

PRONTO

Mon 10 Jan

THE BONGO CLUB

THE FLYING DUCK

Rock from the US.

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

SNEAKY PETE’S

Sat 22 Jan

THE LIQUID ROOM

BANNERMANS

THE RUM SHACK

Fundraiser for Glasgow and Clyde Rape Crisis.

DEAN WAREHAM

Wed 26 Jan

THE MASH HOUSE

SWAGADELIC

Rock from the North.

Sat 29 Jan

Funk and disco.

Fri 21 Jan

LOGOZ

Rock from Glasgow.

JORDAN NOCTURNE (FRANKIE ELYSE + CLUB NACHT)

Soul, funk and motown.

BANNERMANS

Sat 22 Jan

BANNERMANS

MOJO WORKIN’

Thu 27 Jan

SNIDE REMARKS

DIAMOND HEAD (ROCK GODDESS)

THE BERKELEY SUITE

SNEAKY PETE’S

CROW BLACK CHICKEN

INDOOR FOXES

Multi-genre line-up.

THE BONGO CLUB

Twister, beer pong and DJ Ciar McKinley on the ones and twos, serving up chart and remixes through the night.

BOB MOULD

MACKINTOSH CHURCH

THE HUG AND PINT

Garage by name, but not by musical nature. DJ Darren Donnelly carousels through chart, dance and classics, the Desperados bar is filled with funk, G2 keeps things urban and the Attic gets all indie on you.

SUNDAYS

Indie rock from England.

Part of Celtic Connections.

Americana from Paisley.

Part of Celtic Connections.

THE BONGO CLUB

I LOVE GARAGE

Pop rock from Scotland.

Part of Celtic Connections.

ST LUKE’S

OLD FRUITMARKET GLASGOW

Trance and synth.

SATURDAYS

EVERY TIME I DIE (THE BRONX + JESUS PIECE + SANCTION)

Indie from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

Ross MacMillan plays chart, house and anthems with giveaways, bouncy castles and, most importantly, air hockey.

Dance, chart and remixes in the main hall with Craig Guild, while DJ Nicola Walker keeps things nostalgic in G2 with flashback bangervs galore.

Country folk from Canada.

JILL JACKSON (LADY NADE)

THURSDAYS

FRESH BEAT

NOISY

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

Sat 15 Jan

FRIDAYS

WILLIAM PRINCE (MAZ O’CONNOR)

STINA MARIE CLAIRE

RESILIENCE (SIGNUM)

ELEMENT

FRETS: NORMAN BLAKE + BERNARD BUTLER + JAMES GRANT (MONICA QUEEN + JOHNNY SMILLIE)

Folk from Georgia.

A.O. GERBER

THE FLYING DUCK

Regular Glasgow club nights

MOLLY PARDEN

Rock from Morocco. Part of Celtic Connections.

DISCO LOVE FLIPSIDE (TALKLESS + DEAN GRAY B2B JACK SCREMIN)

Jazz from Dundee. Part of Celtic Connections.

FERGUS MCCREADIE (JUSTYNA JABLONSKA + JYOTSNA SRIKANTH)

Alt-rock from Manchester.

Sat 15 Jan

ANDREW WASYLYK (TWELFTH DAY + ESTHER SWIFT)

REGGAETON PARTY

Reggae.

MONDAYS

Monday-brightening mix of hip-hop, R'n'B and chart classics, with requests in the back room.

TUESDAYS

TRASH TUESDAY

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

WEDNESDAYS

SUNDAYS

SECRET SUNDAY

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

Subway Cowgate MONDAYS TRACKS

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

TUESDAYS

TAMAGOTCHI

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

WEDNESDAYS XO

Hip-hop and R'n'B grooves from regulars DJ Beef and DJ Cherry.

COOKIE WEDNESDAY

THURSDAYS

THURSDAYS

More classic Hip-hop and R'n'B dance tunes for the almost end of the week.

90s and 00s cheesy pop and modern chart anthems.

SLIC

HI-SOCIETY THURSDAY

FRIDAYS

FRIDAYS

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

Student anthems and bangerz.

FLIP FRIDAY

Yer all-new Friday at Hive.

Cheap entry, inevitably danceable, and noveltystuffed. Perrrfect.

FIT FRIDAYS

SATURDAYS

SLICE SATURDAY

The drinks are easy and the pop is heavy.

SATURDAYS

SUNDAYS

Saturday mix of chart and dance, with retro 80s classics thrown in for good measure.

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

BUBBLEGUM

MUTINY: DUBURBAN + JAHGANAUT (SIMPLY DREAD + TONY JUNGLE) THE MASH HOUSE

Jungle and reggae.

SUNDAY SERVICE

Sat 22 Jan

MUMBO JUMBO THE BONGO CLUB

Disco and funk.

HEADSET’S GAY GARAGE SNEAKY PETE’S

Garage and jungle.

January 2022 — Listings

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

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

BANNERMANS

Clubs LOOSEN UP (FERGUS CLARK + CHARLIE MCCANN + DAVID BARBAROSSA)

JASON WILSON’S ASHARA

DEADWING

Rock from Halifax.

Sat 08 Jan

Indie pop from Glasgow.

Thu 20 Jan

RHABSTALLION (UNDERVOLT) BANNERMANS

Glasgow Clubs

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS

Sun 16 Jan

Rock’n’roll from West Lothian.

BANNERMANS

EVERYDAY PHARAOHS (ATTIC CHOIR + HOG WYLD)

Fri 14 Jan BANNERMANS

Sun 30 Jan

MITCHELL THEATRE

Indie from Arkansas.

CHILDCARE

COLLATERAL (REVIVAL BLACK)

Trad and pop from Scotland. Part of Celtic Connections.

SNEAKY PETE’S

SPACE

Wed 12 Jan

ST LUKE’S

Garage-rock supergroup of The Wave Pictures and Slow Club.

GRAVEDANCER

THE COSMIC TRIP ADVISORS THE VOODOO ROOMS

PAUL MCKENNA BAND (HEISK + TRIP)

THE SKINNY CALIFORNIA LOVE

FLY

SAND

Nineties and noughties hip hop and R&B.

House and disco.

A shadow puppetry take on the Sandman and the potential of dreams. Part of Manipulate Festival.

LA BELLE ANGELE

TAIS-TOI: TOMMY HOLOHAN THE MASH HOUSE

SNEAKY PETE’S

Sat 29 Jan PULSE

THE BONGO CLUB

Techno and jungle.

Techno and house.

Thu 27 Jan

Mon 31 Jan

EDINBURGH DISCO LOVERS’ ITALO SPACE ODYSSEY II (AMY L’AMOUR + ANN TWEAK + FRANKIE ELYSE) SNEAKY PETE’S

Italo, future disco and new wave.

Fri 28 Jan SSL

THE BONGO CLUB

Bass and dubstep.

TAIS-TOI

SNEAKY PETE’S

House and disco.

Dundee Clubs

Office sexism is given the boot in this classic Dolly Parton musical.

Energetic techno.

A puppet miniature exploring power and manipulation. Part of Manipulate Festival.

25 JAN-29 JAN 22

BALLET BLACK 14 JAN 22

A blend of classic and contemporary ballet from world leading choreographers performed by a company of Black and Asian dancers.

BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS

19 JAN-23 JAN 22

9 JAN 22

25 JAN-29 JAN 22

Mysteriously vanished USB sticks, murders, and a race against time make up this chilling drama.

SCOTTISH BALLET’S THE NUTCRACKER 5 JAN -15 JAN 22, PRICES VARY

A lavish production of the beloved Tchaikovsky ballet.

GO DANCE

1 FEB-4 FEB 22

A diverse programme of community dance projects.

Edinburgh Theatre Assembly Roxy January 2022 — Listings

THE ADDAMS FAMILY

A hit, outrageous musical comedy from the makers of South Park.

LOOKING GOOD DEAD

THE GHOSTING OF RABBIE BURNS 29 JAN 22

A hit comedy about love, life, and Scotland’s premiere poet.

TAM O’SHANTER AND OTHER TALES 7 JAN-21 JAN 22

A raucous telling of some of Robert Burns’ most beloved and Gothic poems.

5 JAN-5 FEB 22

GoMA

Magical musical based upon the classic film.

Theatre Royal

CONSCIOUSLY RISING

29 JAN-30 JAN 22

28 JAN 22

MOC (POWER)

THE BOOK OF MORMON

6 JAN-22 JAN 22

Exhibition of five paintings celebrating the birth of renowned Scottish artist Joan Eardley.

FAT SAM’S

Award-winning musical featuring America’s kookiest family.

25 JAN-29 JAN 22

THE CHOSEN HARAM

LEGLESS: FRAZI.ER

The King’s Theatre

9 TO 5: THE MUSICAL

A boldly anarchic double bill exploring how loss and can shape life. Part of Manipulate Festival.

5 JAN-12 FEB 22

Fri 28 Jan

Festival Theatre

It’s time to go to Transylvannia in this thrillingly lascivious musical.

31 JAN 22

JOAN EARDLEY: A CENTENARY OF LIVES AND LANDSCAPES

Physical theatre and circus exploring queerness and faith. Part of Manipulate Festival.

Glasgow Theatre

31 JAN-5 FEB 22

RULES TO LIVE BY/ EIDOS (DOUBLE BILL)

Glasgow Women’s Library

A series of print works created under lockdown and probing the intersection between the personal and political.

Theatre THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW

30 JAN 22

BURN THE FLOOR

World-leading ballroom show from some of the best on the dance floor.

King’s Theatre Edinburgh ROUND THE HORNE 29 JAN 22

A one-night revival of the classic radio show.

MOTIONHOUSE PRESENTS NOBODY 28 JAN 22

Blending dance, circus, and projections, this innovative show is packed with visual magic.

Summerhall

AFTER METAMORPHOSIS 29 JAN 22

A politically and ecologically instable retelling of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Part of Manipulate Festival.

DINNER WITH...LARDS 29 JAN 22

A dinner and cabaret show featuring tongue-in-cheek performances from LARDS PICK 'N' MIX. Part of Manipulate Festival.

BETWEEN EARTH AND MOON 30 JAN 22

Inspired by Italo Calvino's surrealist story examining loneliness and relationships. Part of Manipulate Festival.

The Edinburgh Playhouse WAITRESS

18 JAN-22 JAN 22

This delicious slice of musical theatre follows a young woman in a smalltown striving to carve out her own happiness.

SCHOOL OF ROCK 25 JAN-29 JAN 22

Stick it to the man at this joyful musical based upon the cult classic film of the same name.

The Studio

PUPPET ANIMATION SCOTLAND: BIRDIE 29 JAN 22

A micro-cinema and puppetry exploration of migration and ecology. Part of Manipulate Festival.

Dundee Theatre Caird Hall

MUGENKYO TAIKO DRUMMERS 28 JAN 22

Powerful drumming and meticulous choreography from Europe’s longestestablished taiko group.

Dundee Rep

SUGGS: WHAT A KING CNUT 30 JAN 22

An exhilirating exploration of fame and Madness.

Art Glasgow Art Glasgow Print Studio 5 @ GPS

5-22 JAN 22

A group exhibition of monoprints, etchings, and paintings by five women artists who came together at Glasgow Print Studio to learn new ways of making.

DRINK IN THE BEAUTY 5 JAN-23 JAN 22

Inspired by Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking environmental treatise Silent Spring, this exhibition features artists engaging with our connection to the nonhuman, and thinking through the ethics and aesthetics of how we record nature.

Studio Pavilion at House for an Art Lover SIMON MCAULEY + CAMERON MORGAN 5 JAN-30 JAN 22

Collaboration between Studio Pavilion and Project Ability.

Tramway

KHVAY SAMNANG: CALLING FOR RAIN 5 JAN-6 MAR 22

Multimedia exhibition by Cambodian artist drawing on folklore to explore our relationship with the Earth.

AMARTEY GOLDING: BRING ME TO HEAL 5 JAN-27 FEB 22

Filmmaking, photography and textile exhibition exploring generational trauma and healing in Britain.

Edinburgh Art some of &Gallery’s most beloved artists.

5 JAN-1 JUN 22

Newly commissioned installation draws on her personal experiences of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, creating bewitching, almost sculptural forms that fill the museum’s gallery.

Kendall Koppe BETH SHAPEERO: TURNED THE WRONG WAY 5 JAN-29 JAN 22

In her first major show in Scotland, Beth Shapeero uses different mediums and techniques to explore the expressive potential of painting.

RGI Kelly Gallery

City Art Centre REFLECTIONS: THE LIGHT AND LIFE OF JOHN HENRY LORIMER (1856-1936) 5 JAN-20 MAR 22

The first retrospective of Fife painter’s work.

TAPESTRY: CHANGING CONCEPTS 5 JAN-13 MAR 22

Group exhibition of 19 contemporary artists associated with the former Tapestry Department at Edinburgh College of Art.

Collective Gallery

JOEY SIMONS: THE FEARFUL PART OF IT WAS THE ABSENCE 4 JAN-13 MAR 22

5 JAN-15 JAN 22

A multimedia exhibition of poetry, drawing and audio exploring the role of rioting in Glasgow.

South Block

Dovecot Studios

UNBOXED

A Christmas exhibition of RGI members.

HARRIET SELKA: BONES 5 JAN-8 FEB 22

An autobiographical exhibition exploring experiences of illness and bodily fragility.

Street Level Photoworks

FOREVER CHANGES 5 JAN-30 JAN 22

Contemporary Nordic photography addressing climate change.

28 JAN-11 JUN 22

The legacy of the great Victorian designer comes alive in this collection of over 130 pieces of his archived work.

Fruitmarket JYLL BRADLEY: PARDES

5 JAN-18 APR 22

Exhibition of sculptures paying homage to Fruitmarket’s industrial and agricultural past.

HOWARDENA PINDELL: A NEW LANGUAGE 5 JAN-2 MAY 22

Multimedia exhibition spanning the artist’s decades-long career and her anti-racism activism.

Open Eye Gallery

Kelvingrove &Gallery Art Gallery and ON PAPER 8 JAN-28 JAN 22 Museum A group exhibition featuring FRANCE-LISE MCGURN: ALOUD

THE ART OF WALLPAPER: MORRIS & CO.

MAKING NUNO: JAPANESE TEXTILE INNOVATION FROM SUDŌ REIKO 5 JAN-8 JAN 22

An innovative exhibition examining the life work of renowned Japanese textile artist Sudo Reiko, Making NUNO spotlights her unconventional practice and radical play with materiality.

KURT JACKSON: MERMAID’S TEARS 05 JAN-5 FEB 22

A series of paintings exploring the devastating effect of plastic pollution in the oceans.

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GORDON HUNTER + DON LEDINGHAM: EDINBURGH REVISITED 15 JAN-5 FEB 22

Black and white photography and poetry celebrating the city of Edinburgh.

CITY IN CONTRAST 15 JAN-5 FEB 22

A mixed exhibition of largescale paintings act as a love letter to Edinburgh.

Royal Scottish Academy RSA IRON: TRANSLATING TERRITORIES 8 JAN-13 FEB 22

Seven artists examine iron’s creative and material possibilities.

R3SEARCH: AWARDS ARTISTS IN FOCUS 8 JAN-6 FEB 22

An exhibition of work from the 2020 RSA Award winners.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

RAY HARRYHAUSEN: TITAN OF CINEMA 5 JAN-20 FEB 22

This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition brings together the life work of a giant of cinematic history and the grandfather of modern special effects, showcasing some of his most iconic designs and achievements.

JOAN EARDLEY: CATTERLINE 5 JAN-9 JAN 22

Celebrating the life and work of the artist Joan Eardley, this exhibition focuses on her post-war works created in Catterline.

Scottish National

Portrait Gallery

ALISON WATT: A PORTRAIT WITHOUT LIKENESS

FEE DICKSON

15 JAN-5 FEB 22

Large-scale paintings inspired by the Scottish landscape.

5 JAN-8 JAN 22

A body of new work created in response to celebrated eighteenth-century portraitist Allan Ramsay, Alison Watt’s paintings play with detail and ideas of femininity, exploring the art of portraiture beyond the subject.

THOMAS JOSHUA COOPER: THE WORLD’S EDGE 5 JAN-22 JAN 22

The only artist to have ever taken photographs of the two poles, Thomas Joshua Cooper is known for working in the extremes, pushing the boundaries of both creative practice and human endurance.

Stills

FUTUREPROOF 2021 5 JAN-5 FEB 22

A cutting edge exhibition of 12 graduates from across Scotland’s photography or fine art degree courses.

Talbot Rice Gallery

ANGELICA MESITI: IN THE ROUND 5 JAN-19 FEB 22

One of Australia’s leading artists explores how performance can be used as a mode of social and political storytelling, examining ideas of colonialism and environmental collapse through dance and sound.

The Scottish Gallery

GEOFF UGLOW: THE PLOUGHMAN 6 JAN-29 JAN 22

Sculptural paintings that take ephemeral moments and impressions as their subject.

MODERN MASTERS 180TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION 6 JAN-29 JAN 22

A celebration of contemporary art and the role of The Scottish Gallery in nurturing creativity over the years.

LINE WEAVING

6 JAN-29 JAN 22

A beautiful exhibition of brightly patterned, handcrafted baskets by the Baba Tree Basket Company in Ghana.

RED HOT AND BLUE 6 JAN-29 JAN 22

A dynamic selection of contemporary jewellery using contrasting colours of red and blue to striking effect.

Torrance Gallery

WINTER EXHIBITION 5 JAN-8 JAN 22

Annual winter exhibition featuring a range of artists and media.

Dundee Art Cooper Gallery SIT-IN #2: TO BE POTENTIAL

5 JAN-19 FEB 22

This dynamic exhibition by The Ignorant Art School interrogates the institutionalisation of knowledge by examining how artistic practice can challenge, resist, and demand liberation.

DCA: Dundee Contemporary Arts TAKO TAAL: AT THE SHORE, EVERYTHING TOUCHES 5 JAN-20 MAR 22

Glasgow-based artist brings together film, collage, and painting to explore Black subjectivities.

RAE-YEN SONG

5 JAN-20 MAR 22

Multimedia exhibition creating an immersive space to explore ideas of self-mythologisation and identity.

The McManus

A LOVE LETTER TO DUNDEE: JOSEPH MCKENZIE PHOTOGRAPHS 19641987 5 JAN-1 MAR 22

Turning to black and white photography from the 1960s-1980s, this exhibition charts the changing landscape of Dundee’s waterfront and the evolution of the City’s fortunes and its people.

THE STREET AT THE MCMANUS 5 JAN-22 OCT 22

Immersive exhibition looking at Dundee’s historical architecture.

V&A Dundee NIGHT FEVER: DESIGNING CLUB CULTURE 5 JAN-9 JAN 22

The perfect exhibition in the light of the last year, Night Fever explores the relationship between vibrant global club culture and fashion, architecture, and graphic design, giving an intoxicating glimpse into the art that informs our nights out.

THE SKINNY

January 2022 — Listings

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THE SKINNY

The Skinny On...

The Skinny On...

Sacred Paws Ahead of their show at St Luke’s this month, Eilidh Rodgers and Rachel Aggs from Sacred Paws take on our Q&A where we get let in on a secret involving a fiddle What’s your favourite place to visit?

Eilidh Rodgers: At this point I’d love anywhere that isn’t Glasgow.

Rachel Aggs: Category Is Books in Glasgow – I have to be careful not to go too often though because I buy too many books.

What’s your favourite colour?

ER: The blue you find in old 60s photos, obviously I wasn’t alive in the 60s but it makes me feel strangely nostalgic.

RA: Definitely green... My Telecaster is a really nice sea green and if I find clothes that colour I buy them so I match my guitar.

Who was your hero growing up?

ER: The whale from Free Willy.

RA: Sun Ra, because he said he was from outer space and I often felt like an alien as a kid… and as an adult too!

Whose work inspires you now?

ER: Anyone who did something creative during the pandemic. I especially loved Rachel’s solo tape [// TAPE 1// by R.AAGS]!

RA: Beverly Glenn-Copeland, I think his music is totally unique and full of soul.

Photo: Gaelle Beri

January 2022 — Chat

What’s your favourite meal to cook at home?

ER: My partner taught me to make a delicious dhal. It’s perfect comfort food for winter.

RA: Peanut and kale curry from Bryant Terry’s Afro-Vegan book – cheap and easy.

What three people would you invite to a dinner party?

ER: Someone who can cook and two of my friends.

RA: Mavis Staples, Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Marshall Allen from Sun Ra Arkestra – I just know there would great stories told and hopefully some singing.

What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen?

ER: A Castle for Christmas... I was forced to watch it!

RA: I recently saw Black Widow and was amazed by how unimaginative and boring it was. Even Scarlett Johansson looked bored.

What’s your favourite album?

ER: Maybe Arthur Russell’s Another Thought because it always feels as beautiful and inspiring as the first time I heard it.

RA: The Raincoats self-titled album never fails to inspire me. It sounds like something you would make with your friends, it makes things feel possible.

What are you listening to right now?

ER: Some songs from the forthcoming Molly Nilsson record. As always it’s amazing!

RA: The album Zöe by Nightshift is a beautiful kaleidoscope of different sounds and feelings, somehow calming and motivating at the same time.

Are there any artists you’re really excited about for 2022?

ER: Julie Doiron just released her first record in eight years – I really hope she tours next year!

Molly Nilsson’s new record! And the new Big Thief record will be amazing, I’m sure.

RA: Glasgow band Comfort have been playing new songs live lately and I’m really excited for their next record.

How have you stayed inspired since the beginning of the pandemic?

ER: I really didn’t. I lost months of my life watching Grey’s Anatomy, all 17 seasons.

RA: Honestly it’s been a struggle! I have played a lot of video games but also learned how to use various synths and samplers that lend themselves to different ways of writing music.

Sacred Paws

What book(s) would you read if you had to self-isolate for the next ten days?

ER: I’d read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for the second time because it’s beautiful.

RA: I love comics and at the start of lockdown I got into the Death Note series. I’m only up to book six so I’d probably get a few more of them.

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Who’s the worst?

ER: It feels like there are too many contenders to choose just one.

RA: People without empathy for the most vulnerable in our society.

When did you last cry?

ER: Post-pandemic I cry at the drop of a hat.

[Spoiler alert!] Probably season four of Dexter when his wife is murdered.

RA: Today, watching Maid on Netflix. It’s very moving.

What are you most scared of?

ER: The Tories, they’re terrifying.

RA: I know it doesn’t exist but I hate the concept of a human fused with a bird, like the mythical harpy, like that’s the most horrible scary thing I can imagine.

When did you last vomit?

ER: I rarely vomit but I recently got norovirus. It was bleak.

RA: A few months ago, I think I had a stomach flu.

Tell us a secret?

ER: Rachel plays fiddle in a band with their parents.

RA: I play fiddle in a band with my parents.

Which celebrity could you take in a fight?

ER: Someone weak. Woody Allen.

RA: Honestly, none, I’m very weak.

If you could be reincarnated as an animal which animal would it be?

ER: A baby elephant, they’re so cute and clumsy.

RA: A sloth because they just seem chill and happy.

What was the best thing that happened to you in 2021?

ER: To be honest, it’s been so nice to play shows again. The first one back felt euphoric! Oh and I learned to drive!

RA: My partner gave me a kayak and we went out to some lochs and paddled about. Scotland is beautiful and being on the water is so calming and blissful.

Do you have any exciting plans for 2022?

ER: Some shows with Fucked Up, which we’re psyched for! And a holiday outside the UK, literally anywhere.

RA: Make more music!

Sacred Paws play St Luke’s, Glasgow, 15 Jan as part of 432 Presents’ First Footing series; Sacred Paws support Fucked Up at Stereo, Glasgow, 4 Apr sacredpaws.co.uk

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