THE SKINNY June 2022

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June 2022 Issue 197

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June 2022 - Chat

THE SKINNY

The Skinny's favourite song by a visual artist / musician?

Robbie Williams — Angels FKA twigs — cellophane Vic Reeves and The Wonder Stuff — Dizzy David Bowie — Station to Station David Byrne — Lazy Björk – Hyperballad David Bowie — Win Joni Mitchell — Both Sides Now Plastikman — Spastik Max Cooper — The Blind Watchmaker Martin Creed — What the Fuck Am I Doing?

Beyoncé – Formation VCR — Creeper Deftones — Genesis David Bowie — Lady Stardust Solange — Cranes in the Sky

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

Issue 197, June 2022 © Radge Media Ltd. June 2022 - Chat

Get in touch: E: hello@theskinny.co.uk The Skinny is Scotland's largest independent entertainment & listings magazine, and offers a wide range of advertising packages and affordable ways to promote your business.

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Printed by DC Thomson & Co. Ltd, Dundee ABC verified Jan – Dec 2019: 28,197

printed on 100% recycled paper

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Championing creativity in Scotland Meet the team We asked – What's your favourite artwork you've seen IRL? Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief "I really like work that makes me openly cry in public spaces soooo John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea."

Peter Simpson Digital Editor, Food & Drink Editor "The many, many versions of Edvard Munch's The Scream at the Munch Museum, Oslo."

Anahit Behrooz Events Editor "Rodin's The Kiss is a masterpiece of horny art."

Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist "Christian Marclay's masterful 24hour film installation, The Clock. I saw four hours of it at CCA (10am till noon) in 2011 and another six at Tate Modern (noon till 6pm) in 2018.

Just another 14 hours to go."

Tallah Brash Music Editor "This one's hard, but these stand out: Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, Jean Dubuffet's Manoir d'Essor and Björk."

Nadia Younes Clubs Editor "The whole Utopia/Dystopia exhibition at the MAAT in Lisbon in 2017. P.S. if anyone says that big moon I will SCREAM."

Polly Glynn Comedy Editor "The Carlisle drunk street image.

The whole modern renaissance tableau business is where it's at."

Eilidh Akilade Intersections Editor "I'll say Van Gogh's Sunflowers, to keep my mum happy."

Eliza Gearty Theatre Editor "Prisoners Exercising by Van Gogh."

Heather McDaid Books Editor "My daughter's 'drawing' of our dog, and not just a wild scribble."

Business

Production

Laurie Presswood General Manager "Tracey Emin's My Abortion. It's how 11-year-old me learned what an abortion was."

Dalila D'Amico Art Director, Production Manager "My dad's Parmigiana. It's truly something else, guys."

Christian Gow Marketing & Commercial Assistant "The Burlington House cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci, blown away as a 12-year-old."

George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist "The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck – the mirror always trips me out."

Harvey Dimond Art Editor "Seeing anything by Rotimi Fani-Kayode in real life is a transcendent experience."

Lewis Robertson Digital Editorial Assistant "Glenn by Jean-Michel Basquiat."

Sales

Sandy Park Commercial Director "Columbus's Egg, Sant Antoni de Portmany, Ibiza (also known as The Egg)."

Tom McCarthy Creative Projects Manager "A room pasted floor to ceiling with Warhol's Mao wallpaper set up right next door to a room pasted floor to ceiling with his Cow wallpaper."

Phoebe Willison Designer "My own face when I look in the mirror x"

THE SKINNY

Editorial Words: Rosamund West

I

Hidden Door is also back, this time taking over the intriguing spaces of the Old Edinburgh Royal High School in the city centre. Maranta and Post Coal Prom Queen are opening and closing the festival – they talk to us about the collaborative process. We also have words with Moonchild Sanelly and Soccer Mommy, who is very much looking forward to experiencing Mother India’s Cafe on her return to Glasgow.

Food meets Ella Risbridger, whose new cookbook The Year of Miracles explores grief and joy over the course of one year of the everyday wonders of life. We also have a rundown of some of Scotland’s tastiest craft beer cans to be consumed in the park with the lads this summer.

As budgets tighten, Theatre has considered how you can still access the arts. We’ve got a guide to getting tickets on a budget, from low income subsidies to area-specific pricing to making friends with a reviewer.

Film anticipates the release of a new biopic of Swedish striker Zlatan Ibrahimović with a rundown of movies featuring football. As Studio Ghibli’s Porco Rosso turns 30, we celebrate this anti-war masterpiece. This month’s Scotland on Screen column talks to Mark Lyken, whose new film Notes from a Low Orbit is a feature-length study of the town of Hawick.

Clubs meets Australian-born DJ and producer HAAi ahead of her appearance at this year’s Riverside Festival and the release of her debut album, Baby, We’re Ascending. Comedy talks to Siân Davies, whose Best in Class showcase is quietly working to dismantle the economic and class barriers to performing in the Edinburgh Fringe. And Books meets Vicky Spratt, whose new book Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain’s Housing Emergency explores the true scale and cost of the housing crisis.

In Intersections, one writer considers the complexity of navigating changes in friendships as lives and experiences diverge. And, to mark the platinum jubilee, we talk to young Scots about abolishing the monarchy.

June 2022 — Chat

t’s exciting to see degree shows happening in close to normal form, although the exhibiting graduates’ art school experience has of course been as far from normal as it can be. In honour of their return, and in anticipation of a summer of stellar Scottish exhibition programming at home and abroad, we’ve themed this issue around ART. On the cover is a beautiful image taken from documentation of work in Abbas Akhavan’s exhibition in Mount Stuart on Bute. Created on residency in situ, the work looks incredible, enchanting, an immersive exploratory experience that is surely only enhanced by the epic journey to reach the gallery, over land and sea. We meet the artist to learn more about the development of the multifaceted, multi-media work study for a garden.

Harvey, our Art editor, also offers a consideration of why the selection of Black women of Caribbean descent representing Scotland, Britain and the United States – Alberta Whittle, Sonia Boyce and Simone Leigh respectively – at this year’s Venice Biennale is so important. We also have an extended review of Whittle’s exhibition, deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory, the final commission of former Art editor Adam.

In the middle of the magazine, you will find an extra-special 16-page supplement celebrating this year’s Glasgow School of Art degree show. Planned and written by students, it offers a first-hand insight into the work on display, and will also be available as a standalone guide on the degree show site itself.

Finally in the art theme, two exhibitions in Leith have caught our eye. In Custom Lane, artist and designer C. A. Walac presents Flat Versions, a range of collage and furniture. In new Ferry Road space Sierra Metro, Kate Owens and Morven Mulgrew’s collaborative exhibition SKU presents curtains and ceramics. Their Q&A, covering everything from squirrels to pitta chips, is on the inside back cover.

In Music, it’s time for the summer festivals! First up, our long-delayed stage takeover at Kelburn Garden Party. You can find an extensive guide to the acts gracing our stage for 2022.

On the cover you used to call it blue sometimes, 2022, Abbas Akhavan. On display as part of study for a garden, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, until 2 October.

Image courtesy of the artist, The Third Line (UAE) and Catriona Jeffries (Canada).

Photo: Keith Hunter

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THE SKINNY

Love Bites

Love Bites: Cutting Hair, Coming Together This month’s columnist finds care and community in haircuts Words: Paula Lacey

I

June 2022 — Chat

first cut my own hair crouched in a bathtub, while my best friend rinsed black dye down a plughole filled with the clumps of hair which had framed my 14-yearold face only minutes earlier. Stained fingernails gripping muddied porcelain. We shrieked with laughter at what we’d unleashed using a £4 razor comb, wondering what everyone would say at school come Monday.

Drastic changes in appearance are often seen as a worrying display of recklessness, but this isn’t always the case. Changing your hair can be an aesthetic manifestation of pain, but also of defiance, confidence, and rebirth.

There’s that familiar trope of locking eyes with yourself in a dimly lit bathroom mirror, clutching blunt kitchen scissors. But, while haircuts can be a deeply individual moment, they can also be a collective experience.

Cutting someone’s hair is a mundane yet powerfully intimate thing. When living in Montreal, I had a mutually-beneficial relationship with someone from a community Facebook page; they’d come over and trim my undercut in return for freshly baked goods. In March 2020, I cut my flatmate’s hair while they booked emergency flights home, sitting anxious and cross-legged on our living room floor. The following month, I bought cordless clippers and incrementally reinvented myself down to a shaved head over the course of a week. I relied on those I lived with to clean up my mistakes, tenderly tidying the nape of my neck.

Haircuts reach beyond aesthetics, becoming a concrete act of care for another. Where I sometimes struggle with the right words, I’ll be the first to enable a reverse-Samsonite release. I’ve built community through each break-up fringe for a tearful friend, all of the matching 2am boxes of bleach under the cold light of a student bathroom, and every buzzcut that lifted the weight from my shoulders.

Crossword Solutions Across 1. FRIDA KAHLO 6. ODDS 9. CARICATURE 10. DO UP 12. ISSUE 13. NOD 14. SCHWA 16. INDULGE 18. CHEER UP 20. EUNUCHS 21. TIMPANI 22. THEME 23. TBH 24. MEDIA 25. ROBE 27. INTOXICATE 28. TOTE 29. NCUTI GATWA Down 1. FACSIMILE 2. IN RESIDENCE 3. ABCDE 4. ATTENDEES 5. LURID 7. DUO 8. SEPIA 11. ESTEEM 15. HARD AND FAST 17. LACKEY 18. CUT-THROAT 19. PRIMAVERA 22. TAROT 23. TONIC 24. MCING 26. BIT

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THE SKINNY

Heads Up

To coincide with our art issue, we have a lot of art in all its forms this month (revolutionary, we know), from cutting edge exhibitions to avant-garde performance.

Compiled by Anahit Behrooz

Heads Up

Royal High School, Edinburgh, 9-18 Jun Another year, another stunning abandoned venue to explore. This year, Hidden Door is taking over the Old Royal High School on Calton Hill, with a remarkable programme of music, theatre and visual arts unveiled in its old classrooms and grounds. Taking place over two long weekends, highlights include Alan Greig's stunning dance piece and music by Nuha Ruby Ra and Penelope Isles.

Voka Gentle The Hug and Pint, Glasgow, 16 Jun, 7:30pm There’s a kind of sweet ethereality to Voka Gentle, a gentle avantgarde edge cut through with a comic sensibility that refuses to take anything too seriously – even their own music. Mixing achingly tender electronica with a heartfelt yet tongue-in-cheek lyricism, Voka Gentle is a celebration of the dreamlike wonder and sheer ridiculousness of what it means to feel life acutely.

Alan Greig at Hidden Door Photo: Paul Jennings

Image: courtesy of artist brownbear Photo: Andy Catlin

Voka Gentle

After Metamorphosis

Photo: Trent Davis Bailey

An Evening with Rebecca Solnit

June 2022 — Chat

Image: courtesy of Yardworks

Image: courtesy of Hidden Door

Hidden Door

The Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, 24 Jun, 7:30pm Beloved essayist Rebecca Solnit – renowned author of Hope in the Dark and Men Explain Things to Me – comes to Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms for a special event organised by Portobello Books. In conversation with Chitra Ramaswamy, Solnit will explore her two most recent books Orwell’s Roses and Recollections of My Non-Existence, and the political importance of blending the personal and structural.

Rebecca Solnit

SWG3, Glasgow, 18-19 Jun One of the biggest festivals dedicated to street art and graffiti in Europe, this year’s Yardworks Festival brings together artists from Scotland and across the globe – including Smug, KMG and Bublegum from Barcelona – for a weekend of mural paintings, workshops, and great food trucks. Taking place across SWG3 and creating permanent exhibition pieces for Glasgow’s Riverside and the University of Glasgow, this is art at its most active and evolutionary.

brownbear Beat Generator Live!, Dundee, 15 Jun, 7:30pm Hailing from Ayrshire, brownbear – headed by singer-songwriter Matthew Hickman – have fast made a name for themselves in Scotland’s indie circuit and have played with the likes of The Libertines and Michael Kiwanuka. Following the acclaimed release of their debut album in 2018, the band have released a number of singles, including the irresistibly charming One More Night, and are currently midway through a Scotland tour.

After Metamorphosis Summerhall, Edinburgh, 4-5 Jun, 7:30pm A genre-bending, balls-to-the-wall adaptation (or continuation) of Franz Kafka’s famed tale of existential transformation, After Metamorphosis uses physical theatre, puppetry, micro-cinema and intricately crafted soundscapes to consider the ecological and political implications of the original story, and the easily collapsible boundaries between humans and their arthropodic counterparts.

GSA Graduate Degree Show 2022

Image: Al White

Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, 1-19 Jun

The Jellyman’s Daughter

The Caves, Edinburgh, 15 Jun, 7pm

Huqiao Liu, MDes Communication Desig

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The Green Court: Bah Bah Black Sheep

The Green Court: Bah Bah Black Sheep

The Jellyman’s Daughter The Rapture at Cryptic Nights

Image: courtesy of Secure Scotalnd

CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, 8-10 Jun

Yardworks Festival

Image: courtesy of artist

Image: courtesy of artists

Cryptic Nights

Bublegum

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, 2 Jun, 6pm

THE SKINNY

Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 11 Jun-25 Sep Daniel Silver’s organic, roughly hewn clay sculptures are preoccupied by the act of looking: the viewer looking at the art, the art gazing back at the viewer.

Together, the London-based artist’s collection interrogates the relationship between art, its environment, and its audience, and the ways in which acts of looking and being looked at can be embodied.

Photo: Zackery Michael

Image: courtesy of artist and Frith Street Gallery

Daniel Silver: Looking

Kelburn Garden Party

Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 28 Jun, 7pm Unforgettable art rock musician and three-time Grammy Award winner St. Vincent makes the European debut performance of her acclaimed latest album Daddy’s Home in Usher Hall this month. A writhing yet precise investigation of her father’s incarceration and her own complex self-identity, Daddy’s Home is an irresistible fusion of glam rock and 70s riffs, staking its claim in the midst of St. Vincent’s already impressive back catalogue.

CinemaAttic Presents Adrift

Untitled, Daniel Silver

St. Vincent

Photo: ReCompose

Photo: Tristan Hollingsworth

Various venues, Glasgow + Edinburgh, Until 30 Jun Edinburgh International Film Festival is taking place in August again this year, but Edinburgh-based film exhibitors CinemaAttic have more than filled any gap left behind. ADRIFT is a six-week celebration of contemporary and classic cinema from across the globe, mostly shot in analogue. Highlights include Cannes Film Festival alumna Los Silencios and a 16mm screening of La Jetée and Un Chien Andalou.

Heads Up

Kelburn Castle, Fairlie, 1-4 Jul She’s back, baby! After frankly too many delays and cancellations, Kelburn Garden Party returns to Scotland’s West Coast in an explosion of music, colour, and pure joy. Wander the grounds to find pop-up installations, live theatre, and plunge pools, or head to one of the festival’s many stages for the most eclectic selection of live music this year: the Pyramid Stage, curated by The Skinny, features the likes of Free Love, NOVA and Buffet Lunch.

St. Vincent

Image: courtesy of CinemaAttic

Sama’ Abdulhadi

Kelburn Garden Party

Sub Club, Glasgow, 1 Jun, 11am One of the biggest names of the Palestinian underground rave scene comes to Glasgow for one unmissable night. Making her Sub Club debut, DJ and producer Sama’ Abdulhadi has a unique musical sensibility, informed as much by the Berlin techno scene as it is by electronic music from Beirut and the delirious beats of traditional Arab music.

Run the Jewels

Run the Jewels Barrowlands, Glasgow, 4-5 Jun, 7pm American hip-hop superduo Run the Jewels create political rap that is as unflinching as it is utterly joyous. Having made four studio albums – all released for free – their music is deft and fearless, digging into contemporary politics with a confidence that is matched only by their intoxicating live presence. The best part? You can see them twice in a row this month at the Barrowlands.

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

Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 14-19 Jun

Abbas Akhavan: study for a garden

Photo: Keith Hunter Image: courtesy the artist, The Third Line and Catriona Jeffries.

Photo: Johan Perrsson

Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, Until 2 Oct

Susan Riddell

TAAHLIAH

Susan Riddell: Living My Second Best Life (WIP) Six

Photo: Spit Turner

Photo: Mark Riddell

Six

Riverside Festival

Monkey Barrel Comedy Club, Edinburgh, 25 Jun, 8pm

you used to call it blue sometimes, Abbas Akhavan

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Riverside Museum, Glasgow, 2-4 Jun

June 2022 — Chat

Photo: Jonathan Mannion

Movement with DJ Sama’ Abdulhadi

Los Silencios

THE SKINNY

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THE SKINNY

Photo: Kelia Anne MacCluskey

What's On Music

All details correct at the time of writing

Photo: Paul Storr Jessie Ware

Billie Eilish

Photo: Paul Storr

June 2022 — Events Guide

Photo: PHOBYMO

As summer draws ever closer, music festivals are plentiful this month, with the family-friendly Eden and Solas festivals taking place on the second and third weekends of June respectively. Hidden Door’s arts and music festival returns to Edinburgh, taking over the Old Royal High School on Calton Hill (9-18 Jun), while creeping into July, Kelburn Garden Party comes into full view (1-4 Jul). Once again, we’re programming the Pyramid Stage this year – turn to p28 to find out about our 20-strong lineup featuring everyone from Bemz to Kapil Seshasayee via Maranta and Free Love.

Local shows are in abundance this month. The undeniably talented Lizzie Reid plays three nights at The Glad Cafe (1-3 Jun), while Theo Bleak celebrates her gorgeous debut EP Fragments with shows at Sneaky Pete’s (2 Jun) and SWG3’s Poetry Club (4 Jun). Also in Glasgow, rapper Tzusan plays a free show at Bloc (14 Jun), with support from the excellent Philomenah. Back at Sneaky’s, Broken Chanter plays on 9 June while Katherine Aly launches her debut album on the 17th. Staying in Edinburgh, Aberdeen’s The Little Kicks play Voodoo Rooms (18 Jun), Nicole Cassandra Smit launches her debut album at La Belle Angele (26 Jun) and Andrew Wasylyk plays Summerhall (30 Jun).

Huge shows are in abundance this month, too, with Harry Styles talking over Ibrox Stadium on 11 June. Billie Eilish (14 Jun) and Alanis Morissette (19 Jun) play the OVO Hydro; 50 Cent (14 Jun) and Biffy Clyro (25 Jun) play The Big Top at Edinburgh’s Royal Highland Centre; Green Day finally play That.

Show. at Bellahouston Park (29 Jun) before Red Hot Chili Peppers bring a ridiculous lineup (support comes from Thundercat and Anderson .Paak) to the same park a couple of days later (1 Jul).

On 3 June, catch Bloc Party at the Barrowlands. Also at the Barras, catch hip-hop heavyweights Killer Mike and El-P, aka Run the Jewels (4-5 Jun), quirky New Yorkers Parquet Courts (15 Jun), and Sharon Van Etten (21 Jun). Riot grrrl pioneers Bikini Kill land at Glasgow’s O2 Academy on 12 June, a venue which later in the month also welcomes Nine Inch Nails (15 Jun), Jessie Ware (22 Jun) and TLC(!!) (26 Jun); in Edinburgh’s O2 Academy catch Beck (14 Jun).

Back in Glasgow, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah play CCA (2 Jun), Yama Warashi plays The Hug & Pint (14 Jun) and Mannequin Pussy play Broadcast (26 Jun). The Avalanches (20 Jun) and Snail Mail (24 Jun) both stop by QMU, while Peaches (13 Jun), Battles (21 Jun), Tirzah (23 Jun) and Injury Reserve (29 Jun) all play SWG3, all the while Edinburgh welcomes the likes of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever to The Liquid Room (5 Jun), The Damned to Assembly Rooms (15 Jun) and St Vincent to Usher Hall (28 Jun). [Tallah Brash]

Bloc Party

Mannequin Pussy

Film The Folk Film Gathering makes a welcome return to Filmhouse in Edinburgh this month with a programme focused on themes of community resilience and local engagement. It’s apt, then, that the bulk of the programme is comprised of homegrown work, including Margaret Salmon’s Icarus (19 Jun), Alastair Cole’s Iorram (20 Jun) and a trio of shorts concerned with Scotland’s selkie folklore, which includes Hanna Tuulikki’s Seals’kin (23 Jun).

CinemaAttic’s ADRIFT film festival kicked off in May but there’s still Iorram

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THE SKINNY

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Photo: Alice Brook

plenty to see this month too, including Chema García Ibarra’s The Sacred Spirit, a skew-whiff comedy centred on a group of UFO believers; seminal classics Un chien andalou and La Jetée screening in a 16mm double bill; and two programmes of experimental short films.

A trio of films from this year’s Sundance are touring Scotland this month, with screenings at Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen, Glasgow Film Theatre and the Cameo in Edinburgh. There’s doc Free Chol Soo Lee, which details a Korean immigrant’s wrongful conviction and doubles as a portrait of the brutality of incarceration; tender romantic drama A Love Song, which tells the story of two childhood sweethearts, now both widowed, reuniting after 40 years apart; and Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, which stars Emma Thompson as a retired school teacher who embarks on a late-in-life sexual awakening with a young sex worker.

Also make time for GFT’s season dedicated to Polly Platt, a brilliant art director and producer who worked with Peter Bogdanovich, James L Brooks, George Miller and Cameron Crowe. She managed to get the very best out of these directors but her own contributions to their films often went overlooked. What’s Up, Doc? (5&8 Jun), Terms of Endearment (12&14 Jun), The Witches of Eastwick (19&21 Jun) and Say Anything… (26&29 Jun) all screen.

A small plug too for GFT’s new Scorsese of the Month season, in which a local film critic introduces one of their favourite films by Martin Scorsese.

The season kicks off on 20 June with a rare 35mm presentation of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. It’s one of Scorsese’s zestiest, most humane and most under-appreciated films, but then I would say that because this bittersweet drama starring Ellen Burstyn was chosen by me. I’ll be introducing the film on 20 June; come along, see a great film and also say hello! [Jamie Dunn]

What's Up, Doc?

Clubs

June 2022 — Events Guide

Photo: Daniel Adhami Bradley Zero

Theatre It’s a big month for Dundee Rep. June kicks off with Rep Stripped, a festival of new work (1-4 Jun). The programme looks strong, featuring stories about queer identity, class struggle, mental health and an experimental promenade performance called Cartography. On the 9th, the company will co-host the first of its Tayside Climate Beacon events, a series exploring the connections between culture, communities and climate action. Rounding off the month is David Colvin’s award-winning play Thunderstruck, about a Pitlochry bin man

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Sama' Abdulhadi

Photo: Viktoria Begg

It’s officially summer and Scotland’s promoters are bringing the heat! Terrible puns aside, there’s lots to look forward to this month, right from day one.

On the very first day of the month, Movement (the Glasgow version) brings Palestinian DJ Sama Abdulhadi to Sub Club for a night of eclectic belters. The following night, Electric Salsa celebrate their sixth birthday at Room 2 with Timedance boss Batu, Glasgow’s [underthunder] and residents on the warm-up.

Riverside Festival returns to Glasgow’s Riverside Museum from 2-4 June with possibly its best line-up yet. Headliners include costume change queen Róisín Murphy, dance music royalty Carl Cox and Belgian-born DJ Charlotte De Witte, with the entire Saturday line-up curated by renowned queer party Shoot Your Shot.

Speaking of festivals, Hidden Door makes a grand return this month, making use of a different disused venue this time around by taking over Edinburgh’s Old Royal High from 9-18 June. The line-up is stacked with some of the most exciting names in Scottish electronic music, including KAVARI, Kami-O, Proc Fiskal, Miss World’s Aphid and Nina Stanger.

Breakthrough jungle and drum and bass producer Nia Archives plays two shows in Scotland this month. The first is at Midnight Bass’s’ Glasgow edition at Broadcast on 7 June and the second is a collab between two Edinburgh promoters, George IV and Mango Lounge, at Sneaky Pete’s on 9 June.

Nestled in between is a truly unmissable show from Rinse FM regular Jyoty at Sneaky Pete’s on 8 June, courtesy of Heaters and Hypnotikk. And Heaters bring us another big party at Sneaky’s the following week, with Rhythm Section founder Bradley Zero playing all night long on 15 June.

It’s legends only as the month draws to a close. New-ish party Carte Blanche invite Blasha & Allatt, co-founders and residents of Manchester’s legendary Meat Free parties, to Club 69 in Paisley on 18 June. And last but by no means least, house music legend Robert Owens comes to Glasgow’s Berkeley Suite on 25 June, with support from local legend Junglehussi.

[Nadia Younes]

Photo: Jacob Khrist

Junglehussi

Dundee Rep

THE SKINNY

Òran Mór

Image: courtesy the artist

who defied tradition to play the bagpipes in an entirely new way. It will be on at Dundee Rep 17-18 June.

Over in Glasgow, Tramway are delivering CROWD_CTRL at the Queens Park Arena, a free dance and digital ‘live graphic novel’, choreographed by AndroidX (11-12 Jun). At the Òran Mór, A Play, A Pie and A Pint have programmed a delectable selection of lunchtime shows throughout June.

Standouts include Maryam Hamidi’s The Words, an exploration of home office asylum interviews (20-25 Jun) and the world premiere of a new musical called Scots from Noisemaker (27 Jun-2 Jul).

Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre will be revisiting a classic production 20 years after it was first performed – Tom McGrath’s Laurel & Hardy (3-25 Jun), reuniting Steven McNicoll and Barnaby Power. King’s Theatre will be hosting the classic Proclaimers musical Sunshine On Leith (7-18 Jun).

After a sold-out run on Silverknowes beach last year, theatre company Disaster Plan are touring their production of Julia Taudevin’s Move to ten beaches in Scotland including St Andrews, Ayr and the isles of Mull and Skye (10 Jun-8 Jul). The show weaves storytelling, choral soundscape and Gaelic song, and deals with themes of loss, migration and communal healing.

[Eliza Gearty] Art

Image: courtesy the artist Kristina Merchant, Silversmithing and Jewellery, GSA

Céline Condorelli

Poetry

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Photo: Naomi Woods

There is an abundance of new pamphlet titles from SPAM Press, their sixth season, with five new titles ready and waiting to be shipped right to you. Their poets include Jay Gao, Ian Mcartney, Parel Joy, Gonçalo Lamas, and Ali Graham; an incredible set of poets, working across just about any form of poetry you can think of.

Another exciting release, published just a few weeks ago, is More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry, edited by Kayo Chingonyi. The list of poets in this anthology is incredible, with multi-award winners such as Roger Robinson, Janette Ayachi, and Dean Atta all having works included.

Polaris, by Gaelic- and English-language poet Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, is out on 2 June. This is Tuairneir’s fourth collection of poetry and examines intersecting notions of ‘northness’, linguistic, and cultural identities.

Translations of the poems come in a mix of British native minority languages such as Welsh, Irish, Manx and Cornish.

On 6 June, Candlelight Open Mic will launch Ross McFarlane’s debut pamphlet Life Goals of the Millennials: or The Commune Manifesto. The launch will take place at 6.30pm in Glasgow’s Old Toll Bar, at the end of Candlelight’s usual open mic session. You can sign up in advance by messaging Candlelight Open Mic on Facebook. [Beth Cochrane]

Kayo Chingonyi

June 2022 — Events Guide

Photo: Kieth Hunter Image: courtesy the artist, The Third Line and Catriona Jeffries you used to call it blue sometimes, Abbas Akhavan

In Edinburgh, Dovecot Studios are celebrating the centenary of Alan Davie’s birth with Beginning of a far-off World, a retrospective of rarely seen works including early paintings following his graduation from Edinburgh College of Art, as well as both a tapestry and a rug created in collaboration with Dovecot (24 Jun-27 Sep).

Opening the following day at Talbot Rice is After Work, an exhibition by the London-based artist Céline Condorelli, who works at the intersections of art, architecture and design. Edinburgh College of Art holds its annual Degree Show, this year between 4-12 June, in the ECA’s Main Building at Lauriston Place. While in Edinburgh, you can also catch Robbie Lawrence’s Northern Diary at Stills (until 25 Jun), a snapshot of post-Brexit realities across Scotland.

Presenting an insightful look at the work of graduate artists beyond their degree shows, Generator Projects in Dundee are holding their annual group show They Had Four Years (until 19 Jun), which features the work of Fine Art graduates from Scottish art schools who graduated in 2021 – Melanie Chuaiprasit, Madeleine Kaye, Gianni Esporas and Josie KO. In Glasgow, Platform presents Everything Will Be Fine, a project developed with East End residents during the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 which has culminated in a group exhibition, running until 18 June. While in Glasgow, be sure to check out The Glasgow School of Art Degree Show, with the Master of Fine Art and the Fine Art/Design degree shows opening on 31 May and 1 June respectively.

Over on Bute, Abbas Akhavan presents study for a garden (until 2 Oct) at Mount Stuart House, marking his first time exhibiting in Scotland.

Following a residency at Mount Stuart, the artist has created an expansive site-specific commission in the house and grounds. [Harvey Dimond]

June June 2022 2022

THE SKINNY

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THE SKINNY

5 Meet the Team — 6 Editorial — 7 Love Bites — 8 Heads Up 11 What’s On — 16 Crossword — 62 Design — 64 Intersections 67 Music — 73 Film & TV — 77 Food & Drink — 78 Books — 79 Comedy 81 Listings — 86 The Skinny On… Morven Mulgrew & Kate Owens

Features 20 Abbas Akhavan on study for a garden, his enchanting site-specific commission at Mount Stuart.

23 Why Sonia Boyce, Alberta Whittle and Simone Leigh representing Britain, Scotland and the USA at the 2022 Venice Biennale is so important.

28 We take a closer look at the 20 artists lined up to play our curated stage at this year’s Kelburn Garden Party.

20

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30 We speak to future ghetto funk force Moonchild Sanelly ahead of the release of her latest record Phases.

31 Soccer Mommy on her new album Sometimes, Forever and working with Oneohtrix Point Never.

34 Ella Risbridger on The Year of Miracles, her new cookbook which blends grief, joy, love and loss.

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35 Maranta and Post Coal Prom Queen talk collaboration ahead of their Hidden Door performances.

37 A 16-page guide to Glasgow School of Art’s 2022 Degree Show.

53 As a new biopic of Swedish striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic arrives in cinemas, a brief history of football’s representation on screen.

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56 Australian-born DJ and producer HAAi on her debut album, Baby We’re Ascending.

58 We talk to Best In Class about creating opportunity for working class comedians.

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Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Keith Hunter; Marco Cappelletti; Clarissa Woods; Phatstoki; Sophie Hur; Elisa Cunningham; Dan Mosley; GSA; I Am Zlatan; Porco Rosso; Imogene Barron; Andy Hollingworth

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On the website...

Many reviews – Glasgow gigs by Charli XCX and Beach House, a whole host of films from Cannes 2022, and records from Purity Ring, Foals, Kelly Lee Owens and Automatic. Our weekly Spotlight On… new music features, Spotify playlists with our favourite new tracks, The Cineskinny film podcast every fortnight, and an in-depth look at nuclear catastrophes in Film & TV :)

June 2022 — Contents

54 We look back at anti-war masterpiece Porco Rosso as it turns 30.

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Shot of the month Beach House at Barrowlands, Glasgow, 23 May by Marilena Vlachopolou

Across 1.

Mexican painter (d.1954) known for Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (5,5)

June 2022 — Chat

1.

Copy (9)

2. (Of an artist) living on-site (2,9)

9. Exaggerated imitation (10)

3. The first five letters of the alphabet I guess? no I did not make this crossword the night before print (5)

10. Renovate (2,2)

4. Guests (9)

12. Matter – problem (5)

5. Garish (5)

13. Lower head in assent (3)

7.

14. Vowel represented by ə in the phonetic alphabet – c-wash (anag) (5)

8. Yellowish tint (5)

6. Chances – stakes (4)

16. Luxuriate – mollycoddle (7) 18. "Be less sad!" (5,2) 20. Castrati (7) 21. Kettledrums (7)

Pair (3)

11. Respect – admiration (6) 15. (Of a rule) fixed – inarguable (4,3,4) 17. Underling (6) 18. Extremely competitive (3-6)

22. Motif (5)

19. Painting by Botticelli – music festival in Barcelona (9)

23. Internet initialism for expressing honesty (3)

22. Fortune-telling cards (5)

24. I made (anag) (5) 25. Kimono (4) 27. Inebriate (10) Compiled by George Sully

Down

23. Antidote – goes well with gin (5) 24. Compering (5) 26. Small piece – skit (3)

28. Wield – type of bag (4) 29. Star of Sex Education set to be the next Doctor after Jodie Whittaker – tag a win? Cut! (anag) (5,5) — 16 —

Turn to page 7 for the solutions

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June 2022

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Theme Intro

Image: courtesy of the artist, The Third Line (UAE) and Catriona Jeffries (Canada). Photo: Keith Hunter you used to call it blue sometimes, 2022, Abbas Akhavan

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his month we’re celebrating visual art as Scottish degree shows return IRL, summer exhibitions launch and Scotland + Venice’s Alberta Whittle presentation continues to rave reviews.

We meet Abbas Akhavan, whose site-specific commission study for a garden, produced on residency in situ, inhabits the spaces of Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute. A month after the launch of deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory, Alberta Whittle’s exhibition in the Scottish pavilion of the Venice Biennale, we take our own deep dive into

this call to action against racist and colonial systems of domination. Still in Venice, our Art Editor considers why it’s so important that this year sees Black women of Caribbean descent representing Scotland, Britain and the United States.

At the heart of this issue, you will find a 16-page special celebrating the Glasgow School of Art Degree Show. Planned and written by GSA students themselves, it offers an exclusive insight into the works from across the schools, and an essential guide to help you navigate this year’s expansive in-person exhibitions.

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June 2022 – Art Special

ART!

Art Special

Photo: Keith Hunter Image: ourtesy the artist, The Third Line (UAE) and Catriona Jeffries (Canada)

June 2022 – Feature

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Abbas Akhavan

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Garden of Life We meet Abbas Akhavan to discuss his enchanting site-specific commission at Mount Stuart on the island of Bute Words: Harvey Dimond

is essentially a guest in that community, benefits financially. Akhavan’s storytelling challenges this extractive way of working and instead engages democratically with the environment. Recently, the artist has shifted his visual language towards theatre and film sets, and during our conversation, he references various “props” and “actors” that populate his practice.

One of these actors or props is the folly, which Akhavan has a long-standing interest in.

Found across the world, but with an abundance in Britain thanks to their fashionability from the 17th century, these decorative structures often mimic more grand, historically important buildings such as Roman ruins, castles and palaces. This concept of the folly as a decorative feature, rather than a fully realised architectural entity, links to the artist’s thinking around the study – as something whose meaning is not necessarily fixed or fully understood. Some may see follies as excessive or superfluous, but Akhavan finds solace in the folly’s self-conscious awareness that they are not ‘real’.

During our conversation, Akhavan references the writing of Elaine Scarry, who informed some of his previous research relating to the contradictions of the domestic space. The etymology of the word ‘house’ is drawn from ‘hos’, which is also the root of the words ‘hospitality’ and ‘hospitable’, but also ‘hostage’ and ‘hostility’. He describes this hostility as extending “beyond the doors to the garden, to the border, to border control”. This term

‘hostile’ inevitably points to Britain’s borders, to the ‘hostile environment’ policy instated by the Conservative government. While this was more of a concern in Akhavan’s previous work, this interest is still evident in the ways that the artist positions himself as a ‘guest’ in a new location, and how he sits in relation to the ‘host’. He describes this as a “negotiation of my own position both as a person who is not of that location, but also as a person who doesn’t want to take too much – as a guest, it involves the learning of a new etiquette.”

Akhavan’s work speaks to wider, global conversations about the imbalanced relationship between humans and nature, a relationship he describes as one of “translation, domestication and control,” where “even its conservation is about potential future extraction of resources for the wealthy in society”. In Akhavan’s commission, the garden becomes the site of this dynamic tension between the human and the natural. Assuringly, his work is seamlessly symbiotic to the natural environment, because it intends to complement it, rather than try to intervene or interfere with it. He says: “the garden for me is this space of transparency around control, about how to balance the imposition of the human on to natural elements.

But still, in the end, the hose is the Edenistic snake – the gardener decides what dies and what lives.” study for a garden is on show at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, until 2 Oct

June 2022 – Feature

Photo: Keith Hunter Image: ourtesy the artist, The Third Line (UAE) and Catriona Jeffries (Canada) you used to call it blue sometimes, 2022, Abbas Akhavan

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Art Special

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here is a material fluidity in Abbas Akhavan’s work that mirrors the burns that flow through the grounds of Mount Stuart, where his multi-faceted commission study for a garden reflects upon local topographies and hydrologies using sounds, subtleties and suggestions. The title of the commission embodies the artist’s method of artistic practice as an exploratory, open-ended endeavour that has a critical and intentional engagement with the subject. He uses the term study to enact a liberatory, self-conscious way of working that seeks to look beyond the fixed temporality of the traditional exhibition.

The exhibition unfurls across the buildings and grounds of Mount Stuart, collapsing the boundary between interior and exterior. For his installation variations on a folly, Akhavan has created an 11-metre elevated stream that snakes through the interior of the crypt. The work points to Akhavan’s understanding of the outdoors and indoors as ‘porous’ spaces, and the endurance of the outdoors in our interior worlds.

From here, you are guided out of the house and into the expansive grounds by a 20-minute audio piece that shifts between descriptions of the revelation of sight and the classification of birds. Akhavan talks of the challenge of producing work in a space that is already so saturated with natural and architectural beauty, and how he went about producing works that he says still “merit memory and attention”. Arriving at the octagonal glasshouse, the artist has done this with mesmerising effect, taking the form of a silent video work titled slug, and the installation of dichroic film on the structure’s windows, which alters the viewers’ perception of the internal and the external, and the boundary between the supposedly natural garden and the artificially conjured botanic garden. This installation, titled you used to call it blue sometimes, alongside the audio piece, formulates a multi-sensory, symbiotic reimagining of the natural environment. The artist’s work does not attempt to disrupt or redefine the setting but rather draws attention to elements that may have evaded the viewer. The artist explains that this method of working recasts the artist as author, rather than authority, and is symptomatic of his continued desire to work with the garden.

Akhavan has a strong sense of how his artistic practice operates in relation to site-specificity. He says explicitly that his work, although involving a number of ‘actors’ in its making, is not collaborative. He points to the glaring imbalances and inequalities that are often inherent in collaborative work, where stories are extracted from a community (who are not given recognition or compensated for their work) while the artist, who

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Ballet Meets Punk The exuberant life and career of iconic Scottish choreographer Michael Clark – often dubbed ‘the enfant terrible of British dance’ – is the subject of a vibrant exhibition at V&A Dundee this summer

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o discussion of Britain’s post-punk subculture would be complete without mention of the groundbreaking Scottish dancer and choreographer Michael Clark. Despite many mischievous escapades, this farmer’s son from Aberdeenshire emerged as a star pupil at the Royal Ballet School, which he joined at 13. Upon graduating, he traded in his ballet shoes for modern dance at Rambert.

But then, when he was only 22, he helped change the face of British modern dance forever by taking his rigorous formal training from both venerable institutions and colliding it with the anarchic spirit of the music, art, fashion and club culture in which he immersed himself in 80s London.

Those who didn’t experience this icon’s years as ‘the enfant terrible of British dance’ can do so right now thanks to a vibrant new exhibition at V&A Dundee that’s as wildly imaginative and energetic as his work. Titled Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer, the show takes audiences on an intimate journey into Clark’s career, exploring his influence on and collaborations with artists, fashion designers and musicians.

This V&A Dundee show – curated by The Barbican in London – is an amazing opportunity to get a unique insight into one of Scotland’s most remarkable creative minds. The highs and lows of Clark’s life are presented as an immersive collage of video work, costumes, music, sculpture and graphic design, with special attention paid to the headspinningly broad range of artists who’ve been intertwined with Clark’s practice over his four-decade career.

Clark’s most famous partnership is probably his many projects with the raucous Manchester post-punk group The Fall, but Cosmic Dancer also explores his collaborations with the likes of designers Leigh Bowery and Alexander McQueen and visual artists Sarah Lucas and Peter Doig. The show also tells of Clark’s own formative influences, who include David Bowie, Patti Smith, T.Rex and composers like Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky.

What’s likely to strike you first about Clark’s choreography is how contemporary it feels. Like many

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Words: Jamie Dunn

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of his 80s peers, his work emerged in harsh opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s iron rule. In the face of her government’s stifling conservative values, Clark’s work challenged orthodox notions of masculinity and sexuality through gender-bending costumes and dance performances. Viewed through a 2022 lens, these performances very much speak to today’s conversations and debates around identity and their punk spirit continues to fly in the face of today’s Tory rulers.

Blending punk, ballet and popular culture, Cosmic Dancer is a celebration of a technically brilliant dancer and provocative artist, and a true Scottish radical who helped revolutionise dance in the UK. The chance to see it on Clark’s home soil should not be missed.

Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer, V&A Dundee, until 4 Sep For tickets, head to vam.ac.uk

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Life Between Islands Art Special

This year’s Venice Biennale sees Black women of Caribbean descent representing Scotland, Britain and the United States – this is why this rendition of the Biennale is so important Words: Harvey Dimond

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Bayoh, who died in police custody in Kirkcaldy in 2015, which made it tragically evident that police brutality is an issue that Scotland is not immune from. Footage shot at Bunce Island, an island off the coast of Sierra Leone where tens of thousands of enslaved people were held and then shipped to the Americas, which was administered by two Scottish men for several decades in the 18th century, attests to Scotland’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.

Sonia Boyce is exhibiting at the British Pavilion, a long-overdue recognition of an artist who has been creating multi-faceted and discipline-defying work since the early 1980s. Boyce’s commission Feeling Her Way brings together video works featuring five musicians of colour, as well as sculptural and wall-based installations. This new work expands on the artist’s Devotional Collection, which spans three centuries and honours Black British female musicians and their contribution to diasporic culture. Boyce has always been concerned with the ability of the archive to speak for the absences in Britain’s social and cultural history.

Meanwhile, Simone Leigh is exhibiting in the American Pavilion, where her monumental sculptures fill the stately building. Titled Sovereignty, her works bridge transatlantic artistic traditions from Africa, Europe and the USA to create hybrid — 23 —

Brick House, 2019, Simone Leigh

forms that the American scholar Saidiya Hartman describes as “an architecture of possibility”. Leigh also examines ideas of exploitation and mimicry; the low hanging thatch she has installed around the exterior of the building references a structure that was displayed at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, where people from France’s colonies were put ‘on display’ alongside architectural replicas of their domestic spaces.

On top of their radical commitment to surfacing and archiving transatlantic histories and their connections to the Caribbean, what binds the work of Whittle, Boyce and Leigh together is a celebration of community. As part of her commission for the American Pavilion, Leigh is co-programming Loophole of Retreat: Venice with Rashida Bumbray, a convening of Black women scholars and creatives in October this year. This communion is a method of extending the temporality of important conversations beyond the Biennale, within the context of an art world that still views Black artists as a trend. Sonia Boyce’s exhibition platforms five musicians of colour, while Alberta Whittle’s commission continues her collaborative practice with a variety of collaborators whom she calls ‘accomplices’.

The 55th International Venice Biennale runs until 27 Nov

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t may seem an odd comparison to make, but there are some commonalities between the islands of the Venetian lagoon and the islands of the Caribbean. Both archipelagos are creolised spaces, with histories that are entangled with migration, colonialism and the trade in enslaved people from Sub-Saharan Africa. It is widely believed that Venice itself was founded by refugees fleeing an invasion of mainland Italy nearly 2000 years ago, but now a new wave of refugees, many from Sub-Saharan Africa, find themselves on the margins of the floating city. In 2017, a Gambian man drowned in the Grand Canal in front of hundreds of onlookers, who, instead of helping him, shouted racist abuse.

Alberta Whittle, representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale this year, examines Venice’s complicated relationship with Blackness. One scene of her film, Lagareh – The Last Born, features statues of enslaved Black people that can be seen in the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari Church in the city. The statues, with torn clothing and tortured expressions, are an apt reminder of how Venice is inevitably tied up in European histories of slavery and colonialism. Whittle’s film exceeds simply just displaying Venetian representations of Black people but instead creates the possibility for their liberation. The film is dedicated to Sheku

Feeling Her Way, Sonia Boyce

Photo: Roberto Marossi Image: courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Photo: Marco Cappelletti Image: courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Photo: Cristiano Corte Image: courtesy the artist, Scotland+Venice (pause) at deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory., 2022, Alberta Whittle

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Art Special

Photo: Cristiano Corte Image: courtesy the artist, Scotland + Venice & Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory, 2022, installation shot, Alberta Whittle

Invest in Love June 2022 – Feature

Alberta Whittle’s Venice Biennale exhibition is a cogent call to action against racist and colonial systems of domination Words: Adam Benmakhlouf

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eep dive (pause) uncoiling memory begins with a large gate-like metal sculpture that reads: ‘WHAT LIES BELOW’. The words are carefully rendered into one of several deep, green grates. The ambiguous wording can be read as a question or a statement, and it forms the introduction for Alberta Whittle’s emotional, intellectual and spiritual excavation of the social structures of anti-Blackness.

The exhibition unfolds around and upon these gates, and they also serve to introduce elements of the architectural character of Venice into the gallery space. As they are metaphorically unfixed from hinges and doorways around the city, the bespoke fabricated gates still operate as boundaries, but they are now freestanding and easy to circumnavigate. The psychic effect is to create a space with prescribed points of flow, but still left as open as possible.

On the first grate after the entrance on the left, there is a tapestry that depicts graphically rendered arms that weave in and out of each other and lead to snake-tails at their ends. Images of diamond-shaped jewels are woven into the tapestry as decorations for these thick and wriggling arms.

The hands are more cartoonish than they are anatomical. They appear liquid, like splatters, or like graphic renderings of steam. Titled Entanglement is more than blood, this poetic phrase underlines the work as a symbol of complicated connection.

Behind the grate there is a painting from 1987

by Whittle’s mother, Janice Whittle, of her daughter Alberta sleeping as a child. A tenderness is extended through the painterly communication of intimacy, warmth and love. Whittle’s silhouette is carefully picked out as the centre of the work. Her mother describes an environment around her of warmth and fullness through thickly painted — 24 —

brushstrokes: a wish for her own child’s wellbeing, and a vision of the way the child’s spirit radiates around her. The mustardy ochres of the domesticscaled painting complement the densely pigmented purple of the gallery that is at points deep, lustrous, plush, regal, and satiny.

To the right of the painting of Alberta as a child is one of the many small and satisfying details around the exhibition: a tiny stool carved all over with a long snake. This motif occurs not only here, but in the previously-discussed tapestry and throughout the film in the second gallery space. So it is that the snake is able to slink, bend and twist between the different dimensions and elements of the installation. Cowrie shells have been cast on the snake stool, and seven are clustered together, all mouth side up. With these shells on the surface, the stool is charged with the suggestion of divination. The carved wooden stool

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Art Special

Photo: Cristiano Corte Image: courtesy the artist, Scotland + Venice & Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh Entanglement is more than blood - deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory, 2022, installation shot, Alberta Whittle

“Whittle demands that the audience withdraw their consent to police power: ‘Premature death at the hands of the state MUST END!’”

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of ancestors and a wish for transformation through observation, sensitivity and breaking the cultural amnesia that allows for horrific injustices to be ignored and forgotten.

This leads to the final chapter, Sunday. In a courthouse, the singer Kumba Kuyateh tells the story of Sheku Bayoh and his family. The film is dedicated to Bayoh, who died in police custody after the injustices inflicted by the police in Kirkcaldy in 2015. Kuyateh’s voice rings with fondness as she sings the epic tale of the Bayoh family travelling from Sierra Leone. The song is in the Mandinka language, but Kuyateh’s cadence and powerful vocals convey hope and heartbreak in equal measure. As the final visual of the film, Kuyateh holds our gaze for what seems like over a minute of silence.

The closing section is text on a black screen.

A list of names appear, one by one, of Black people who have died due to police violence in the UK. Whittle’s voice reads them out each in turn; the pain audible in her voice. Just before she begins, she reminds us ‘that we must recognise [these names] with love. That they were once someone’s baby, someone’s little one. Someone’s cherished darling.’ Whittle’s voice wavers at this, exerting the full combined emotional and intellectual weight of the film.

Throughout deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory, Alberta Whittle practises powerful resistance to social repression and the oppressions of anti-Blackness and state violence. With great care and a singular sense of purpose, Whittle reveals the terrifying stakes of social justice at the same time as she pronounces its beautiful possibilities: the radical expansion of love, and the true freedom that comes with systems of justice that are healing instead of lethal. A final reminder is emblazoned above the exit from the gallery: ‘Invest in love’.

deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory continues at Docks Cantieri Cucchini, S. Pietro di Castello until 27 November 2022, part of the Venice Biennale

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seems holy next to the image of the sleeping babe, a soft reminder of church kneelers.

The recurring symbol of the snake is further elaborated by the video next door in the second gallery, titled Lagareh, meaning ‘The Last Born’.

Like the installation, the film work fuses myriad emotional registers through different audio and visual textures. Lagareh takes place over seven chapters, named after the days in the week. They lead to Sunday’s emotional climax.

In the first part, Monday, a woman dances with a bright yellow snake. On-screen text says that Solariss (the dancing woman) lays libations for Mami Wata. Solariss pours rum on her feet, her wrists are laden with beads and shells, and her long, thick hair is bejewelled in gold and bends in loose curls. She sways, looking down sometimes, then beyond the gaze of the camera. All of this takes place in the courtyard of an ornate and colonial-style institutional building, whose perfect rows of windows and huge central statue are seen blurred in the background.

After this intriguing and enchanting opening, the second part, Tuesday, then moves to domestic comfort in an ethereal documentary setup. Two Black, queer women chat to each other and Alberta (off-camera) about some of the legal recognition that was given to them by marrying one another, and they imagine their future parenting style when they have a baby. Softly, the lens blurs in and out of focus following the hands of

Angela as she massages her partner Ama’s feet.

Wednesday sees dancer Divine Tasinda move in vigorous, fluid gestures and swoops as she holds two knives: one rusted, one still bright. Her dance under blue skies is punctuated by bright portraits of Divine herself and two of her family members. The filmic portraits of the three Black women glow in their beauty, and form the powerful counterpoint to the violence that is represented by the colonial architecture of their backdrop: Oswald’s Temple, set within an estate formerly owned by a Scottish slave trader. Some of this disturbing history is brought into the present through mobile recordings of police violence. At the same time, Whittle’s poignant poetry describes the felt effects of state-sanctioned oppression, and how to resist the mechanics of domination.

Thursday is narrated by Dr Isatu Smith, who tells the story of the unmarked graveyard on Bunce Island on the Sierra Leone River. Groundpenetrating radar recently revealed a hidden cemetery next to where the white Europeans are buried with tombstones and ornaments. At this point the film becomes more analytical, relaying Dr Smith’s dialogue about the horrific treatment of people forced into slavery. A drone camera surveys the land. One final note for Thursday comes on the screen: ‘Remember the dead are always with you.’

Thinking of the steel sculptures that frame the video, perhaps the Xs that decorate them are also the mark left in place of a signature for all those who are present but whose names have been ‘buried alive’.

Friday shows scenes of four Black women holding the line, symbolised by a long piece of red fabric against the blaring wind. This is shot like an epic battle, showing these women at the vanguard, while Whittle demands that the audience withdraw their consent to police power: ‘Premature death at the hands of the state MUST END!’ The pace of the film builds to a stirring climax as the audience is invited to ‘invest in love’, and deconstruct the violence and surveillance of incarceration and police power. For Saturday, Alberta reads out her poem, Looking the Snare in the Eye, while different imageries from the previous days recur. The poem is an embodied and emotional remembrance

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Explore Edinburgh, the Festival City The Edinburgh Festivals return this summer, and Edinburgh is packed with live music, theatre, comedy and events all year round...

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Words by: Peter Simpson

Beltane Fire Festival

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his summer marks 75 years since an event which changed Edinburgh forever. The first Edinburgh International Festival took place in August 1947, alongside a group of shows that weren’t part of the official programme but turned up in town anyway – also known as The Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

In the intervening years, festivals of film, visual art and literature have joined the August ranks and transformed Edinburgh into the world’s leading festival city. But art, entertainment and culture don’t leave town at the start of Autumn – Edinburgh’s cultural scene thrives year-round, and there’s always something new to see.

LIVE MUSIC IN EDINBURGH Edinburgh’s live music venues offer an eclectic mix of genres and scale throughout the year. For intimate shows from up-and-coming bands, head to the cluster of venues around the Cowgate. Sneaky Pete’s is Edinburgh’s foremost grassroots nightclub, and the cosy 100-capacity space hosts new bands from around the world on an almost-nightly basis. The Mash House, La Belle Angele, The Caves and the Bongo Club on Cowgate are also great places to see bands on their way up, and catch gigs by some of the hottest acts on the scene.

For bigger names, head to the sprawling multi-arts space at Summerhall for their regular Nothing Ever Happens Here gig nights, or to the Usher Hall on Lothian Road. The 2,200-capacity venue is more than 100 years old, but refurbishments and revamps make the venue a great place to catch a gig in incredible surroundings. St Vincent, Fleet Foxes, Leon Bridges and Pavement all play at the Usher Hall this summer and autumn, and the Usher Hall’s Sunday Classics season brings some of the world’s finest orchestras to Edinburgh.

The Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival returns this July (15-24 Jul), with a line-up of musicians from around the world in — 26 —

a whole host of venues across the city centre, including a vintage Spiegeltent in George Square Gardens. And speaking of unique venues, Hidden Door Festival takes over the former Royal High School next to Calton Hill (9-18 Jun) for a bumper programme of art, theatre and live music. The programme includes unique collaborations headed by Edinburgh bands Post Coal Prom Queen and Maranta, site-specific artworks and performances, and a huge roster of bands on indoor and outdoor stages.

The Edinburgh International Festival’s programme features a huge range of contemporary and classical music, while August brings a pair of contrasting music festivals to Edinburgh. If you want a boutique experience with avant-garde music and performance in the grounds of the incredible art park at Jupiter Artland, head to Jupiter Rising (26-28 Aug). For something on a larger scale, check out Connect at the Royal Highland Centre (26-28 Aug); the line-up is packed with big names including The National, Jon Hopkins, Little Simz and IDLES. STAND-UP COMEDY For decades, the Edinburgh Fringe has been the place to catch the rising stars of comedy before they go stratospheric, or to see your favourite comics in unique and unexpected places.

From the Cambridge Footlights groups that brought the likes of Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry to Edinburgh, to the pioneering stand-up comedy of Tony Allen and Alexei Sayle in the 1980s, the city has a vital place in the development of comedy as an artform.

The Fringe brings literally hundreds of clowns, sketch groups and stand-ups to the city each August, and the city comes alive with gigs in bars, cafes and any space comics can get their hands on. This year, you could catch the likes of Daniel Sloss working on new material in a community centre in the Southside, or you might check out Best In Class, a showcase of

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working-class comedians from across the UK; at the Edinburgh Fringe, you can do both, and throw in a lot more as well.

The full Edinburgh Fringe programme is released in July, but Edinburgh’s comedy scene is active year-round. There are two main hubs: the Monkey Barrel on Blair Street, and The Stand on York Place, and each host regular nights showcasing brandnew comedians. Monkey Barrel presents regular work-in-progress shows in the run-up to the Fringe each August, offering the chance to see a true one-off. Meanwhile, The Stand’s Red Raw night regularly features big names like Frankie Boyle and Dylan Moran trying out their new material.

Street performers at St Giles Cathedral

Usher Hall

offer behind-the-scenes tours and the chance to find out more about the brewing process. It’s a similar story at the distilleries, whether it’s Pickering’s Gin at Summerhall, the Secret Garden Distillery in the shadow of the Pentland Hills, or the Glenkinchie whisky distillery just 15 miles from Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is an ever-evolving city that never fails to entertain. It’s unrivalled in its ability to offer brand new experiences in the most historic of settings. Discover Edinburgh’s rich history yourself this summer and create your own memories for tomorrow.

Discover more entertainment in Edinburgh on Forever Edinburgh: The Official Guide To Edinburgh https://edinburgh.org/storyneverends/entertaining-edinburgh/ — 27 —

June 2022

EXPLORING EDINBURGH Edinburgh’s historic architecture, endless festivals and vibrant cultural scene mean that sightseeing can very quickly turn into something else entirely. Take the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF), for example. A stroll from South Bridge to Princes Street takes you past Dovecot Studios, the Talbot Rice Gallery, the National Museum of Scotland and the National Galleries, all of which host exhibitions as part of EAF throughout August. A trip to Leith Links at the end of August will see you bump into the Edinburgh Mela, a two-day celebration of music, fashion, food and art. The Mela (the Sanskrit word for ‘gathering’) brings together all ages, backgrounds and communities for a vibrant and engrossing weekend.

Later in the year, a walk through the Old Town could see you come across Samhuinn, the traditional Celtic fire festival that marks the passage from summer into winter. Organised by the Beltane Fire Society, the torchlit ceremony of drums, fire-play and immersive performance takes place on 31 Oct. Beltane also mark the beginning of summer with a vast celebration on 1 May. Edinburgh’s literary side comes to life each August with the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Based at the Edinburgh College of Art on Lauriston Place, the Book Festival combines talks and discussions involving world-renowned authors with a massive childrens’ programme and one of the best bookshops you’re ever likely to come across.

Guided tours of the city allow you to explore some of its hidden areas, and get a unique perspective on Edinburgh. A free walking tour of St Giles’ Cathedral on the Royal Mile will fill you in on the building’s storied past, from its role in past unrest and rebellion to its place in Edinburgh’s royal history. A tour of Mary King’s Close or the Blair Street Vaults will take you under the Old Town to explore the ways in which Edinburghers lived in the 17th century, while a trip around BT Murrayfield is a chance to get a one-of-a-kind look at Scotland’s national rugby stadium.

And if you fancy some refreshments while you explore the city, why not take a tour around one of Edinburgh’s distilleries or breweries? From Bellfield in Abbeyhill to Cold Town Brewery at the foot of the Grassmarket, many of the city’s craft breweries

Princes Street Gardens and the Ross Bandstand

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THEATRE IN EDINBURGH The Edinburgh International Festival is the jewel in the city’s theatrical crown, and the 75th anniversary programme is excellent. Alan Cumming stars in Burn, a new dance-theatre show challenging our perceptions of Robert Burns, at the Festival Theatre. At The Lyceum, a beautiful 19th-century building, Counting and Cracking tells the story of a Sri LankanAustralian family over four generations, while Liz Lochhead’s gripping retelling of Medea takes up residence at The Hub. On the Fringe, the Summerhall programme is packed with exciting, high-quality new theatre, with About Money (a drama following a teenage fast food worker caring for his young sister), and A Sudden Violent Burst of Rain (a modern fable tackling an impenetrable immigration system) among the highlights. Summerhall is also a great place to see brand new theatre all year round, whether as part of their multi-arts programming, or as part of grassroots festivals like Manipulate, Edinburgh’s visual theatre festival, which takes place each January.

If it’s a spectacular you’re after, head over to Edinburgh’s largest venue, and the UK’s largest all-seater theatre, the Playhouse. It’s home to touring shows direct from the West End – catch The Book of Mormon, The Commitments, and the queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in the next few months.

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Kelburn’s Got Talent Music

With the Kelburn Garden Party within touching distance, we take a closer look at the 20 artists lined up to play our curated stage at this year’s festival Words: Tallah Brash

June 2022 – Feature

Clarissa Woods

Clarissa Woods Following the release of her exceptional 2021 EP, Honey I’m Gone, Govanhill’s Clarissa Woods was nominated in the Best Hip-hop category at the SAMAs. Combining thick beats with smooth R’n’B vocals and a hip-hop flow that’s full of attitude, Clarissa Woods is not to be missed. instagram.com/ clarissawoods_

NOVA Since winning the 2020 Scottish Album of the Year award for Re-Up, rapper and producer Shaheeda Sinckler, aka NOVA, went on to win Breakthrough MC/Vocalist at the 2021 DJ Mag Awards. Expect a mix of hip-hop, grime and more from our Friday night headliner. novascotiathetruth.bandcamp.com Saturday 2 July Miss Leading Pairing lo-fi alt-pop beats with her often challenging spoken word passages (which cover everything from self-help culture to the hypocrisy of virtue signalling), ...Miss Leading – returning from New Zealand to Edinburgh this summer – opens the Pyramid Stage on day two. iammissleading.com Echo Machine This Dundee five-piece released their debut album, Instant Transmissions, at the start of 2020 and then the pandemic struck. With a sound heavily indebted to the New Romantic stylings of the 80s, you’ll be taken back in time by this synthpop outfit. echomachine.bandcamp.com Squiggles Former Spook School drummer Niall McCamley is now a mental health fighting superhero and he’s coming to Kelburn to help make all your woes go away. Musically, he’ll provide a moshable emo indie party, with boppable guitars and guaranteed comic relief – the perfect antidote to tough times. squigglescult.bandcamp.com Katherine Aly Following a knockout performance at this year’s Wide Days, Katherine Aly is bringing her catchy pop stylings to Kelburn this year. And as her appearance comes just two short weeks after the release of her glorious debut album, you’ll be able to learn all the words ahead of time. katherinealy.com

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Bemz

Photo: @excipiovicis

Friday 1 July Russell Stewart Opening the Pyramid Stage on Friday night is Glasgow singer-songwriter Russell Stewart, whose single Citrus was on heavy rotation for us throughout 2021. Within his jazzy alt-soul oeuvre, expect squelchy rhythms, silky smooth vocals and to not be able to stop swaying your head. instagram.com/itsthisrussell

Bemz Jubemi Iyiku is no stranger to these pages, and following a SAY-Award longlisted nomination for his Saint of Lost Causes record in 2021, more recently he was crowned Scottish Act of the Year by BBC Introducing Scotland. We can’t wait for him to bring his bouncy brand of hip-hop to Kelburn. instagram.com/bigbemz1

Photo: Andy Xplore

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t feels like we’ve been planning this one for ages, and, well, thanks to the pandemic, we kind of have been. Preparations for this year’s takeover of the Kelburn Garden Party’s Pyramid Stage has been in the works since winter 2019, when we started work on the never-to-see-the-light-of-day 2020 festival. That year we were set to programme the stage for both the Saturday and Sunday, but a few years on and we’re taking on Friday too, the full shebang, meaning this year will be our biggest yet at Kelburn, and we can’t bloody well wait.

Before we tell you what we’ve got in store, we just want to send out a heartfelt thanks to all the artists we had booked for the 2020 edition who have stuck by us throughout, and to all the artists that donated a track to our Bandcamp fundraiser when times were tough and we didn’t know what the future of the magazine might look like. Of course, plans change, so we’re sad to have lost a few artists we had confirmed for 2020 along the way – Swim School, Bikini Body, Edwin Organ, Happy Spendy and Kubitaru, we’re looking at you – but, we’re delighted to say we’ve added a whole host of exceptional talent to the bill that we can’t wait to share a weekend with on the west coast.

With all that in mind, from SAY Award winners to talent on the rise, covering everything from dreampop to hip-hop, R’n’B to alt-soul, art-rock to existentialist nerd rock and more, here’s a blow-by-blow account of what you can expect from the 20 artists set to play the Pyramid Stage at Kelburn Garden Party from 1 to 3 July.

Miss Leading

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Photo: Sophie Dunn

Swiss Portrait With their recent Safe House EP a masterclass in dreampop, Edinburgh’s Swiss Portrait may very well be the ultimate summer soundtrack. We just hope the sun is shining for their Saturday evening set at Kelburn this year, which is sure to provide the perfect day-to-night energy. swissportrait.bandcamp.com Tupper Werewolf We’ve said it before but it bears repeating: Gordon Barr, aka Tupper Werewolf, is Scotland’s answer to Dan Deacon. Think swirling keys, heavy, busy and twisted electronics, occasionally combined with droll vocals akin to Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat, and you’re just about there. tupperwerewolf.bandcamp.com

Music

Photo: Patrick Campbell Kapil Seshasayee

Kapil Seshasayee With his music having gone in a more electronic direction of late, since the release of 2018’s A Sacred Bore, Kapil Seshasayee continues to spread the word of India’s outdated caste system, effortlessly combining classical Indian influences with contemporary western sounds to mesmerising effect. kapilseshasayee.bandcamp.com

Free Love Glasgow’s Free Love bring their bouncy, cosmic HI-NRG electronica for an unforgettable Saturday night headline slot on the Pyramid Stage. Expect danceable bangers from across their back catalogue, with a little help from some pals who will take the performance to the next level. freelovenrg.com Sunday 3 July Fistymuffs ‘Fuck the patriarchy, we’ve had enough / We’re Fistymuffs, we’re Fistymuffs!’ is what you’ll be chanting after experiencing the riot grrrl prowess of Girls Rock School Edinburgh graduates Fistymuffs. Opening proceedings on Sunday, we promise you’ll feel empowered and you’ll have a nice time. fistymuffs.bandcamp.com Moonsoup A perfect antidote for all those hangovers you’re sure to have after a big Saturday night, part of the Olive Grove Records family Niamh Baker aka Moonsoup’s laid-back brand of breezy indie-pop takes on everything from heartbreak to vegetable consumption. moonsoup.bandcamp.com

PINLIGHT Jenny Laahs, aka PINLIGHT, is a multi-instrumentalist and hearing-impaired alt-pop musician based in Edinburgh. She’s making some of the purest and crystalline pop we’ve heard and her 2020 single Grow Slow is one the likes of Carly Rae Jepsen would be proud of. pinlightmusic.bandcamp.com Nicole Cassandra Smit Edinburgh-based Indonesian/Swedish singer-songwriter Nicola Cassandra Smit is set to release her debut album, Third In Line, via her own label a week after Kelburn. Traversing blues, R’n’B, hip-hop, jazz and electronica, Smit’s music is a wholly exciting listen. nicolecassandrasmit.bandcamp.com Slim Wrist Fka Super Inuit, we’ve had the pleasure of welcoming the bubbling electronics of Brian Pokora and Fern Morris to Kelburn before, but this year they’re back as Slim Wrist; on the precipice of releasing their debut album, the pair sound rejuvenated and their music continues to dazzle. slimwrist.bandcamp.com Slime City It’s impossible to not grin from ear-to-ear when witnessing the musical ride that is Slime City, especially when they get their musical shoe out. Describing their sound as ‘existentialist nerd rock’, come for the musical shoe, stay for their unabashed, pure joy-filled pop-punk. slime-city.bandcamp.com

Photo: Craig McIntosh

Photo: Deborah Mullen

Maranta After bringing the sound of the summer to Kelburn for us in 2019, Edinburgh duo Maranta return this year to headline our Sunday night. Performing alongside visual artist Chell Young and art collective VOMITON, expect their dancefloor-ready beats to be transformed into a colourful parade. marantaa.bandcamp.com

June 2022 – Feature

Buffet Lunch Having released their debut album, The Power of Rocks, via noteworthy indie label Upset the Rhythm in 2021, art-rock four-piece Buffet Lunch combine angular guitars and excitable percussion with often nonsensical lyricism, so they’re bound to offer up a lovely way to spend your Sunday afternoon. buffetlunchband.bandcamp.com

Maranta

Kelburn Garden Party takes place at Kelburn Castle, Nr Largs, 1-4 Jul kelburngardenparty.com Free Love

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Fistymuffs

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Bright Side of the Moon Music

Ahead of her latest record release, we speak to future ghetto funk force Moonchild Sanelly on beauty contests, bad breakups and the importance of being yourself Interview: Cheri Amour

“Having a vagina is an adventure sport and if you survive you might as well own who you are” Moonchild Sanelly

June 2022 – Feature

animatedly. Feeling frustrated by the shackles of big band arrangements, Sanelly was ready to step out alone.

“When I was in that jazz space, I was like ‘Hmm, I see this [but] I need more. I need something that I can create myself. I need to have fun!’”

The arrival of ghetto funk in 2007 sparked something in Sanelly.

Her debut record, Rabulapha!, brought to life with composer and drummer Tshepang Ramoba, marked her first official release under the moniker Moonchild Sanelly. But don’t be confused about the namesake being some kind of Sasha Fierce stage persona, as Sanelly is quick to attest. “This is the same look that I was rejected for. My biggest fight is showing the kids that there’s no uniform to success, you can be yourself.”

Expression and empowerment are central themes in Sanelly’s upcoming release, Phases. An album that, as the name suggests, is a masterpiece of cosmic proportions.

Written during the dissolution of her engagement to model and rapper Gontse More, the artist found writing the 19 songs that appear on the record was actually one of the silver linings to the last few years. “Shout out to COVID because that allowed me to go into my feelings and acknowledge my vulnerable ones. [Before that] I didn’t have time to even think because things were moving so fast.”

Breakup banger Over You dishes out airy amapiano drum pads over The Streets-style synth lines as Sanelly reasons: ‘Ima get over you / Because when I get over you / I won’t need tissue’.

On Too Late Sanelly offers a safe space for all forms of relationships. “I wrote it for the people that want to be side chicks,” she explains. “It celebrates, it doesn’t shun. Having a vagina is an adventure sport and if you survive you might as well own who you are.”

While Sanelly might’ve been leaving one relationship, Phases finds her forging unions with a whole legion of equally talented performers.

Strip Club reunites the South African musician with London MC Ghetts, following their previous team up on the grime star’s 2021 single Mozambique where Sanelly dishes out a verse in — 30 —

Photo: Phatstoki

S

o many artists are renowned for making remarkable entrances. From the fabled days of the king of stage theatrics Alice Cooper to Pink’s piñata, circa 2010 where she exploded from the party trick only to fall to the stage in a sea of balloons. South African musician Moonchild Sanelly doesn’t need the pyrotechnics to arrive. On entering the video call, she’s a vision of loud colours (her signature vivid blue curls framing her face) and brilliant bombast with pastel acrylic nails that go on for days swaying back and forth as she waves hello from her home in Johannesburg.

Sanelly, born Sanelisiwe Twisha, has never been shy of the limelight. Growing up in Port Elizabeth on South Africa’s Eastern cape, she was surrounded by aspiring artists. Her brother was a hip-hop producer and her Mum an established jazz vocalist. From as young as four, Sanelly was entered into beauty contests and encouraged to sing Brenda Fassie songs to the panel of judges.

Often referred to as the Queen of African Pop, the symbolism isn’t lost on Sanelly, the now-international performer. “Even now, people always connect my personality and the way I move to her [Fassie’s] attitude. I was brought up knowing that it’s okay to be yourself.”

Fassie wasn’t the only strong woman shaping Sanelly’s self-belief from a young age. “It’s also something that my mum instilled in me. I used to get scolded more for walking behind a group of friends, than for coming home late. She’d say, ‘I don’t ever want you to follow. I want you to be in the same lane learning how to be a leader, or they’re following you. But never follow.’” Strapped firmly into the driving seat by her teens then, Sanelly went from high school to study fashion in the coastal city of Durban and was immediately immersed in a raft of musical genres and styles.

For the songwriter though it wasn’t so much the scene but the stage that she was seeking once more. “I never knew what genre was on the table. I just needed that mic so I’d say yes,” she says,

her native Xhosa tongue. No stranger to chartopping collabs, Sanelly also featured on Beyoncé’s MY POWER as part of her 2019 Lion King-inspired project, The Gift. She admits it was quite a whirlwind experience. “I was in London when they called me. I literally landed and went straight back to the airport!”

With international travel back on the cards, Sanelly is finally making it over to UK shores this summer. But even with a recent SXSW performance under her belt and the fields of Worthy Farm calling, beneath the blue curls and the tapered talons is still the same ambitious fashion student spinning straw into gold. “I used to carry a domestic machine to sew every morning before the show,” she recalls proudly. “I’m getting a machine delivered in London so that wherever I still have my waves, I can create.” On record and off-rack, Moonchild Sanelly eclipses them all.

Phases is released on 10 Jun via Transgressive Records instagram.com/moonchildsanelly

THE SKINNY

Magical Sounds Soccer Mommy talks to us about her new album Sometimes, Forever, working with Oneohtrix Point Never, and Nintendo GameCube game Kirby Air Ride Interview: Laurie Presswood Music

Photo: Sophie Hur

“I always have these big picture ideas of the mood and the feeling that I need to get, but no idea how to get there” Sophie Allison, Soccer Mommy

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Sometimes, Forever is released on 24 Jun via Loma Vista; Soccer Mommy plays QMU, Glasgow, 24 Sep soccermommyband.com

June 2022 – Feature

hen Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison suggested that her new album was less dark than her last, her record label were unconvinced – it was hard to imagine that an album featuring a song entitled Darkness Forever could be a step down in gloom. She’s right though – Sometimes, Forever still delivers the crushing lows that enabled hours of shower-crying following the release of color theory, but this time the heavy moments are balanced against flashes of light. Sometimes, Forever takes Soccer Mommy’s talent for catchy melodies and applies them to a select few hopeful tracks – Shotgun and With U are even honest-to-goodness, soaring love songs.

Her lyrics are just as intimate as they’ve always been, whether the song is happy or sad – no doubt an influence of the heartfelt country music that infuses life growing up in Nashville. As you might expect of a teenager coming of age in the country music capital of the world, she grew sick of the genre that constantly surrounded her and mostly shunned it until she was an adult, so you won’t hear a lot of classic country in her work. But the one giveaway of her Tennessee roots are the compelling confessional narratives that live in her lyrics. She says: “If you can write a song that can

be just guitar and vocals, and can be capturing people – even if you don’t want to just have it sound like that – it’s like you can’t really do anything wrong having that kind of core.”

Allison knows where a listener’s nostalgia pressure points are – profiles on her are filled with comparisons to Liz Phair, Sleater-Kinney and Natalie Imbruglia – but she doesn’t set out to make music that sounds like it’s from the past, and if anything, the quintessential Soccer Mommy sound has come to consist of a blend of 90s grunge with more futuristic, electronic effects. Sometimes, Forever is her first time working with Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin, who has taken over from long-time Soccer Mommy producer Gabe Glass.

“I had the same feeling with Dan that I always had with Gabe,” Allison says, “where I was like, ‘you get what I’m talking about.’ Because I’m just very scatterbrained… I always have these big picture ideas of the mood and the feeling that I need to get, but no idea how to get there, and I can’t really describe it well. I’ll just be like, ‘we need magical sounds.’ [It’s great] when you find somebody who can hear that and knows exactly what you’re talking about.”

Lopatin’s presence is an exciting influence on Sometimes, Forever. Soccer Mommy has never shied away from electronic tools, but now the subtle drum machines are gone and the sequencers and synthesisers have arrived in full force.

Unholy Affliction, a bracing lament to the pursuit of perfection within the machinery of the music

industry, was led by a sequencer track Lopatin had messed around with back at his Airbnb.

“We went in and recorded a full live band take that was just straightforward, similar to the demo, and was basically exactly like the portion you hear later on in the song.” Allison later adds: “We were like, we should just have Rollum [Haas, drums] go in there and just kind of go crazy over it and see what happens.”

The resulting track merges two distinct recordings of Unholy Affliction – the high-quality live-band track (albeit with vocals taken straight out of Allison’s home-made demo, complete with headphone bleed), and the synthesised version.

This feels almost symbolic of the album as a whole, where an emphasis on getting a live sound has led to incredible drum-driven moments (like the live band in the second verse of Unholy Affliction, or the popping drums that ricochet throughout Shotgun), which sit perfectly alongside electronic flourishes, like With U’s kaleidoscopic intro.

The place where Allison most consciously seeks out nostalgia is actually in her visuals – anyone who has been following her career up to this point will have noticed her fondness for 2000s gaming. At this point more of her music videos have featured gaming visuals than not, but last year’s rom com 2004 was the first to offer a fully fleshed out playable world of its own (think Gen Z’s answer to the video for Californication).

“I miss the fluffy little stuff,” Allison says.

“One of my favourite ones was this game Kirby Air Ride, where you’re one of many Kirbies riding around in a city trying to…” she tails off, before concluding: “I don’t really understand the point of the game except that it was fun. And it was almost a free-roam type thing. I wanted [rom com 2004] to have that kind of vibe, like this ridiculous free-roam GameCube city.”

Allison and her band are set to tour the UK in September, and though she’s been open about not quite knowing what to make of the weather, or the food, when she first toured here, she says she’s come to love it. She doesn’t even need any recommendations for where to go when she reaches Glasgow on 24 September, she has the name of the restaurant she’s headed for locked and loaded...it’s Mother India.

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Sunshine in Scotland A selection of exciting venues and brands looking to welcome you this summer

Photo: Sabrina Gali

Photo: Steve Marsh Hula

Hula Hula is a juice bar but they are also so much more! They thrive on delivering healthy fresh food and drinks every day.

They aim to be “an island in the city” where you can come and relax while enjoying amazing food and drinks that nourish your body and soul at the same time.

Banditti Club Rum

Banditti Club Rum Banditti Club Rum – Port Cask Finish. A brand new limited-edition small batch release from the innovative Glasgow Distillery Co. This aged rum has been finished in first-fill tawny port casks to give it incredibly rich summer notes of strawberries and dark chocolate. Bottled at 52.4% ABV, only 974 individually numbered bottles exist and can be purchased for £28.

June 2022 – Feature

103-105 West Bow, Edinburgh EH1 2JP, 94A Fountainbridge hulajuicebar.co.uk @hulajuicebar

Cask Smugglers

Cask Smugglers Cask is a bustling cocktail and wine bar situated on Waverley Rooftop on Princes Street, in the heart of Edinburgh. With panoramic views of Arthur's Seat to the Castle, from our beautiful terraces, it's the perfect al fresco spot to welcome Lichen, our kitchen resident. Their concept champions Scottish produce in the style of small plates, complemented by flavours from around the world.

Waverley Mall Rooftop, 3 Princes St, Edinburgh EH1 1BQ casksmugglers.com @cask_smugglers

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8 Deanside Rd, Glasgow G52 4XB www.glasgowdistillery.com @glasgowdistillery

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Image courtesy of Céline Condorelli

Photo: Jay Dawson The Stand

The Stand Almost a quarter-century since it was established in 1998, The Stand Edinburgh and its sister venue in Glasgow have become synonymous with Scottish comedy. Frankie Boyle and Kevin Bridges often grace its stage, upon which they and every name on the circuit have performed for years – and not just during the Fringe. Weekly pro and newcomer nights run year-round from £5.

5 York Pl, Edinburgh / 333 Woodlands Rd, Glasgow thestand.co.uk @StandComedyClub / @StandGlasgow

Talbot Rice Gallery

Image courtesy of Summerhall

Talbot Rice Talbot Rice Gallery is proud to announce the first survey exhibition of Céline Condorelli. In After Work, not all will be as it appears. The threshold to the gallery will be activated – dislocating us from one neighbourhood to another, the outside will be brought inside, labour will converse with leisure, the technology of colour will be explored and play will animate the whole exhibition.

University of Edinburgh, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL Opens 25 June trg.ed.ac.uk @talbotricegallery

The Garden at Teviot The Garden at Teviot is an Edinburgh beer garden gem! Its bookable beach huts, widescreen TVs and DJs every Friday and Saturday night give it that festival feeling. Enjoy an impressive range of cocktails and sharing drinks, plus plenty of food choices from locally sourced suppliers. Welcoming everyone (including your four legged friends!), seven days a week, all summer long!

Potterrow, 5/2 Bristo Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9AL eusa.ed.ac.uk/eatdrinkshop/findaspace/thegardenatteviot @thegardenatteviot

Summerhall Summerhall is a space for everyone. Whether you’re engaging with the performance programme, partying at one of the club nights, grabbing a drink in the pub, or simply soaking up the atmosphere in the hidden courtyard, there is something at Summerhall for you to explore, discover and enjoy.

1, Summerhall, Edinburgh summerhall.co.uk @summerhalledinburgh / @summerhallery

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June 2022 – Feature

Summerhall courtyard

The Garden at Teviot

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Food

Making Connections Ella Risbridger’s new cookbook blends grief, joy, love and loss into its pages – the author talks us through the stories and relationships behind The Year of Miracles Interview: Anahit Behrooz Illustration: Elisa Cunningham

June 2022 – Feature

E

lla Risbridger, bestselling author of Midnight Chicken, was originally intending to make her second book about dinner parties. After the intense haze of her debut (a half-memoir, half-cookbook documenting her determination to fall in love with living after a suicide attempt) and the loss of her partner at the age of 28, a book about dinner parties, tinkling and bright and cheery, felt like the appropriate tonic. But then, of course, the pandemic happened, and grief continued – as it always does – and instead The Year of Miracles was born. It’s a year-long account of the small, everyday wonders of life that can occur in the wake of even the hardest of circumstances.

It might seem a funny place for grief to so unabashedly make its home: a pastel-hued cookbook filled with recipes dedicated to the tactility and sensuality and sheer aliveness of food. But for Risbridger, Miracles was a natural place for both.

It is, she explains, an attempt to “bring grief into the forefront. To be like, this is important. This matters.” The kitchen, she adds, is as much a place of death as it is life, of expiry as it is nourishment and energy. “We live in a very sanitised world,” she says, “[but] in the kitchen stuff rots, it goes wrong. I guess that’s why a cookbook felt like a good way to talk about death. Everything we eat has a cost.” She pauses to sing a line from the Circle of Life, cracking up. “When you’re cooking, you’re engaging with this very ancient act of making food to feed yourself and your family.

There’s something almost magic about it. I find it very moving.”

The result is a book filled with joy and grief simultaneously, wary bedfellows made old friends. It is, as Risbridger knows, near impossible to live a life without experiencing both, and near impossible to write about food

without interweaving life, replete with all its charm and loss. “I see people separate the two and I’m like how?” she laughs. “I worry that when we try and take the human out of food and make it one size fits all or objective rather than subjective, that’s when we run into trouble. We run into trouble with stuff like putting calorie counts on menus, which is a mad initiative. Or when people cook with an ingredient they’re not culturally familiar with and don’t acknowledge they’re doing that.

“What we can do is tie together the idea that every food has a story,” she continues, earnest and serious. “Every meal has a story, and only by telling your story and listening to other people’s stories are you really going to get a sense of connection.”

This connection is deeply felt throughout Miracles, a book that crackles with the precise warmth and generosity of a dinner party, lockdown or no. Much like in Midnight Chicken, a cast of loving and loved friends flit in and out of the pages. The book, ostensibly taking place through 2020 – although Risbridger notes that it actually compresses three years’ worth of proceedings – is an account of how the author fell in love again after the death of her partner, but is as much a love story between her and her flatmate, to whom the book is dedicated, and the host of other friends who come through her life and kitchen.

Ideas of connection, intimacy, and family have always been broadly conceived across Risbridger’s writing – a year before the pandemic, she wrote a Guardian piece about the centrality of her friendships in helping her cope with grief.

Miracles is, in many ways, a manifesto of the alternative, beautiful ways in which households and communities can be formed beyond bloodlines and through food. “The legal definition of household,” Risbridger explains, thinking back to the strictures of lockdown, “is: ‘Do you share one meal a day?’ That’s really beautiful.” During the pandemic, Risbridger would spend hours on the phone to a faraway friend, carving out a daily routine through FaceTime and Zoom. “I’d get up, make my coffee, put Georgie by the toaster and we — 34 —

“In the kitchen stuff rots, it goes wrong.

I guess that’s why a cookbook felt like a good way to talk about death” Ella Risbridger would just chat through the day and cook on Zoom. It made an intimacy all of its own.”

It feels reminiscent, in some ways, of Greta Gerwig’s observation in Lady Bird, about the relationship between love and attention. “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing?” Lady Bird’s teacher asks her.

In Miracles, a recipe for birthday blackberry miso cake sits happily alongside instructions for takeaways, everything documented with precision to the intimacies that surrounded and shaped each meal.

It is a testament to how food is but an exercise in love and attention, an election for joy even in darkness. “Not to sound like, ‘oh, there’s always a bright side’,” Risbridger laughs wryly, “but in my experience there is usually a lesson to be learned, or some nice thing. And I feel confident saying this because some quite terrible things have happened to me. But I wouldn’t change any of them.”

The Year of Miracles: Recipes About Love + Grief + Growing Things is out now via Bloomsbury Ella Risbridger reads from The Year of Miracles at Ukrainian Community Centre, 14 Royal Ter, Edinburgh, 14 Jun; The Portobello Bookshop, 46 High St, Portobello, 15 Jun

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The Art of Collaboration We chat to Maranta and Post Coal Prom Queen to find out more about their forthcoming collaborative performances on the opening and closing nights of Hidden Door Music

Interview: Tallah Brash Photo: Dan Mosley Maranta, VOMITON and Chell Young @ Hidden Door 2021

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“Hidden Door are great for just giving you space to be ambitious and do silly things” Lily Higham, Post Coal Prom Queen

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“It’s helped me think about ideas in a different way, not just through the prism of music” Callum Govan, Maranta Cypher (rapper), Jai Sharma (‘The Navigator’), Ashley Crawford (‘Propagandist 1’), Fraser McLoughlin (‘Propagandist 2’), Jen McGregor (director), Phil McBride (studio engineer) and John Farrell (photography and videography), who will help bring this one-of-a-kind performance to life.

As with all PCPQ music, the pair’s shared love of science fiction lies at the heart of Music for First Contact. Drawing inspiration from Cixin Liu’s The Remembrance of Earth’s Past series and his ‘dark forest theory’, their space opera will be told through the lens of Scottish identity. “You don’t often see Scotland in a very futuristic sort of story or environment,” Johnstone says, “or if you do, it’s quite parochial. We’re trying to imagine what Scotland’s identity would actually feel like in 1000 years, maybe when Scotland doesn’t exist anymore.”

With one ending simply not being enough for the pair to focus their creativity on, as part of the interactivity of the performance the audience will get to cast a vote via QR codes as to how the space opera will end. “The thing that everybody’s voting on is, we’ve received a message from an intelligence other than our own: do we speak back to it or do we stay quiet and pretend we’re not here?” Johnstone goes on to later add: “I don’t think anyone’s tried anything quite like this,” before admitting: “We wouldn’t want to be doing this anywhere other than Hidden Door.” “[Hidden Door] are great for just giving you space to be ambitious and do silly things,” Higham says. “They don’t really rein us in at all, which is good and bad.” While both nights promise to offer something completely unique to the Hidden Door crowd, we’re sure it will all be very good indeed, depending on your choice of ending, of course.

Hidden Door runs at the Old Royal High School, Calton Hill, Edinburgh, 9-18 Jun; Maranta in Microsteria takes place on 9 Jun; Music for First Contact takes place on 18 Jun hiddendoorarts.org

June 2022 – Feature

he idea of musical collaborations is not a new one – as Russian Doll’s Nadia would say: “Collaborations. What a concept.” But some of the best music has come from artists working with other artists: Run the Jewels and Zach de la Rocha, Rihanna and Jay-Z, Vince Staples and SOPHIE, Elton John and Kiki Dee. The list is endless and the possibilities infinite.

Edinburgh’s Hidden Door is no stranger to a collaboration, and this year’s festival is no different, with six official collaborative projects taking place across the ten-day-long festival, where contemporary musicians collide with the classically trained, visual artists, choreographers, actors, set designers and more to bring a unique slice of excitement to an already stacked programme.

The opening night will see Gloria Black and Callum Govan, aka alt-pop duo Maranta, come together with visual artist Chell Young, costume design collective VOMITON and choreographer Hannah Draper for Maranta in Microsteria, the seed of which was sown during one of the

pandemic’s early lockdowns. “Chell was contacted

by Hidden Door to do a lockdown show, and she asked for Maranta to be the music,” Black tells us.

“She asked us to perform, and then when that went really well we got asked to do Hidden Door last year. David [Martin, Creative Director of Hidden Door] hinted at the idea that we bring in another collaborative element, and I discovered VOMITON on Instagram over lockdown and thought about asking them to do a music video with us. So when David suggested that, we were like, yes, VOMITON, let’s ask them.”

“It seemed like a good transition in progression from the live stream show,” Govan adds, “because obviously the pieces that VOMITON make are very physical and textural, so it tied together really well at the last Hidden Door show, the sort of visuals that were on the screen behind us, bringing us and the visuals altogether.”

Where last year’s performance was an audiovisual feast, this year, in the surrounds of the 360 degree Debating Chamber of Edinburgh’s Old Royal High School, it’s going to be even more impressive; the show will be performed in the round with Young helping to build a live set, and they’ve brought in choreographer Hannah Draper to help bring the many characters of VOMITON to life through movement.

“This sort of collaboration is exciting,” Govan says. “The music is only one part of it, but I’ve felt a lot more connected to the other processes that need to happen to create this show. It’s helped me think about ideas in a different way, not just through the prism of music.”

As well as the evening performance, Maranta and co have also been given the green light to take over other parts of the venue throughout the day where you can expect specially curated sound pieces, projections and more. And that same rule applies to Lily Higham and Gordon Johnstone – aka Post Coal Prom Queen – who, on the day of their performance, will be covering the walls of the venue in competing propaganda, projections of public service announcements, satirical adverts and various news stories. All of this will be in anticipation of Music for First Contact, their choose-your-own-ending space opera – yes, you read that right – which will close out this year’s Hidden Door festival.

Also taking place in the venue’s Debating Chamber, PCPQ’s collaborators include Stephanie Lamprea (soprano), Baichuan Hui (piano), Laura J Wilkie (violin), Calum Cummins (sax), Johnny

Theatre

THE SKINNY

Theatre on a budget: a short guide The cost of living crisis means that going to the theatre can feel like a luxury we can’t all afford. Here’s how to do it on the cheap Words: Eliza Gearty

June 2022 – Feature

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onservative politicians haven’t shown the greatest sympathy towards people affected by the cost of living crisis lately. In response to growing numbers of people turning to food banks after inflation and energy cost hikes this year, MP Lee Anderson blamed the increase on poor cooking and budgetary skills. “There’s not this massive use for food banks in this country,” he claimed. “We’ve got generation after generation who cannot cook properly... they cannot budget.”

Anderson came under fire for his remarks, but fellow Tory MPs backed him up. “Absolutely spot on,” tweeted Brendan Clarke-Smith ; “you’re not going to be able to break the cycle of poverty... if you aren’t honest about poor basic skills around cooking and budgeting,” argued Ben Bradley.

Comments like these make it clear that we cannot rely on the people in charge to understand the pressures that many of us are under. And when we’re being encouraged to make meals from 30p a pop, and feeling the squeeze when it comes to energy and inflation, it’s easy to understand why artistic activities can fall by the wayside. But, as Judy Collins once sang, ‘give us bread, but give us roses’: art is good for the soul, and shouldn’t be the preserve of the wealthy. So, in an attempt to make the best out of a bad situation, we’ve rounded up some of the ways you can see theatre on a budget – to keep that soul of yours well fed and watered as times get dark.

“Better yet, make friends with a reviewer – they sometimes get +1 tickets”

Check in with your local theatre Some theatres have schemes where you can get heavily discounted tickets if you live in the area.

Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre building may be shut right now for refurbishment, but they are still staging shows at the nearby Tramway. If you have a G5 postcode and a Gorbals Card, you can get tickets to any Citizens show for just £2. Over in the city’s East End, Platform offers £4 tickets to members of the free Local Links programme, eligible across eight postcodes.

Comb through free festival programmes Summer is on its way, which means the arrival of Festival season. You’ve probably heard of the Free Fringe, the Edinburgh Fringe’s more budget-friendly counterpart. It’s a fantastic way to see shows without spending a penny. Keep an eye out for smaller local community festivals too – touring productions will often hit them en route. The Govanhill International Festival, an anti-racist festival in Glasgow’s Southside, has a diverse, annual programme of free events, sometimes including theatre and dance. The Southside Fringe, Glasgow Mela and Leith Festival also tend to programme theatre and dance, for free or at affordable prices.

Head to the previews Previews, meaning the first few days of a show, are always cheaper than the rest of a run. Why? The show technically hasn’t opened yet, at least not to critics. Think of it as getting an exclusive look at a show in its purest form, before press have had the chance to break or make the entire company’s hearts.

Check out concessions and affordable ticket schemes Are you young, a student, a senior, unemployed, a person with a disability, receiving low-income benefits or someone with an Equity or other Entertainment Union card? You’ll be eligible for a discount at most major theatres in Scotland. The Traverse offer limited £1 tickets to people under 25 — 36 —

or people receiving low-income benefits. The Citizens also offer a great 50p ticket scheme for full capacity show runs. It’s available to everyone – punters just need to queue up outside the theatre the Saturday before the show opens.

Become a reviewer OK, this one’s a bit different from the others: you do actually have to have a keen interest in arts journalism and strong writing skills to become a reviewer. You can’t just do it for the free tix, but, if you do tick the first two boxes, and are up for swapping your labour for a free show, it could be a good option for you. Whether you’re a student, aspiring critic, or a worker with some spare time who enjoys writing, numerous publications are often looking for new contributors. Check out sites like A Younger Theatre, Broadway Baby and The Wee Review to see if they’re recruiting: you don’t need to be an expert to give it a go, especially if it’s on a voluntary basis. We’re always keen to hear from new writers here at The Skinny too.

Become friends with a reviewer Better yet, make friends with a reviewer – they sometimes get +1 tickets. If you haven’t got a reviewer friend already, they’re quite easy to identify. Just look out for the people desperately trying to write in notebooks in a dark theatre, or annoying everyone else by tapping on their Notes app during the show’s most significant silences.

Then corner them at the bar afterwards.

Don’t feel like it’s fair to have to go to these lengths? Reckon that high-quality theatre should be accessible for all without having to scrimp, scheme and schmooze your way into one of those plush, upholstered, restricted view seats? Shame on you, you lazy culture fiends! We’ve given you the tools, now you just need to budget better! Of course, the government could always introduce a windfall tax, scrap the National Insurance rise and introduce a universal basic income to target rising energy prices and stop theatre tickets from sky

THE SKINNY

June 2022

FREE

Graduate Showcase 2022 June 2022

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elcome to The Skinny’s preview of The Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2022. This year sees the in-person return of one of the most exciting events in the Scottish arts calendar for the first time since 2019 – a proposition that graduating students have responded to with typically bold, provocative work.

In this supplement, you’ll find an in-depth look at each area of the Degree Show, spanning the GSA’s five specialist schools of Architecture, Fine Art, Innovation, Design and Simulation and Visualisation. These previews are written by third year students from GSA, who share their peers’ inquisitive nature, fascination with materials and process, and deep concern with sustainability, climate justice and social issues. Creative practice is always a reflection of the times, but this year Degree Show feels even more urgent than before, with students from across the School engaging in the problem solving and sustainable processes that all creative practitioners must bring to the multifaceted challenges facing our world today.

As this year’s cohort have been working towards their final presentations, the graduates of 2020 and 2021 have been making their way into the wider creative world. In this issue, we take a look at events and exhibitions initiated by graduates and supported by the GSA that have taken place from Glasgow to Seoul in the past year. We also speak to the students whose collaborative work makes up this year’s Degree Show poster – currently gracing the streets of Glasgow – and in the Heads Up section, we highlight some upcoming events at the GSA and beyond.

The Degree Show begins with the Fine Art, Innovation, Design and Simulation and Visualisation exhibitions from 1-12 June, and continues with the Architecture show from 11-19 June – all at the GSA’s campus in Garnethill. Also running until 12 June is the annual Master of Fine Art Degree Show at Florence Street, where you can see work by second year MFA students. If

you miss these dates, or can’t travel to Glasgow, you can still access the work online via our Degree Show digital showcase, where you can also keep up to date with opening times, locations and special events.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many of us to turn to digital technologies to maintain social, professional and cultural ties.

For creative practitioners and artists, this moment also prompted a major adaptation of traditional approaches to meaningfully incorporate digital elements into their work. This was a daunting and challenging process but one that has, in moments, opened up new and exciting ways in which to collaborate, organise and deliver projects across the creative disciplines.

The Degree Show opening digital event, hosted by writer Huw Lemmey, explores the new ways of working in the creative disciplines that have emerged from the first two years of the pandemic, and how these can help us to imagine and design better social and physical environments. Our global panel comprises Professor Penny Macbeth (Director, GSA and artist), Rae-Yen Song (visual artist), Orsod Malik (digital archivist, curator), Raheela Khan-Fitzgerald (architect, whole life carbon & sustainability designer) Robyn Steward (autism trainer, writer) and Tara Fatehi Irani (performance artist) – join us at 5pm, 1 June.

We hope you enjoy this exclusive look at the GSA’s class of 2022, and that you’ll join us to discover more of this year’s work IRL or online. gsashowcase.net @glasgowschoolart #GSADegreeShow22 Degree Show 2022 is sponsored by citizenM with previews by Innis + Gunn

June 2022

Graduate Showcase 2022

Welcome

Abbey Campbell, Textile Design

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THE SKINNY

Contents

Features

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42 From queer community spaces to textiles made from recycled waste, School of Design graduates respond to pertinent contemporary issues.

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44

Graduate Showcase 2022

40 Graduates from the Mackintosh School of Architecture take the city of Glasgow as their starting point for a series of sustainable, adaptable projects.

44 The School of Fine Art presents a cacophony of materials, processes and ideas, from eco-sculpture to biographical painting.

46 New technologies become tools for communication, education and disconcertion in the School of Simulation and Visualisation.

47 This year’s Innovation School cohort tackle issues as diverse as food origin, sexual education and performance running.

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48 Catch up with the classes of ’20 and ’21, as we look at Graduate-Initiated Projects from the last two years.

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50 Meet the four GSA students whose work graces this year’s Degree Show Poster.

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Image Credits: (Top to bottom, left to right) Carl Jonsson, Kristina Merchant; Josie Swift; Gabby Morris; Max Wardle; Graduate Drive Thru; Sophie Ammann; Alan McAteer

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Cover image: Untitiled Diptych 1 Fleur Connor, Painting and Printmaking

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51 Want a Heads Up on the summer ahead? We highlight some of the best exhibitions, courses, and cultural events at the GSA and beyond.

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June 2022

Graduate Showcase 2022

Architecture Re-use, adaptability and community-focused placemaking emerge as uniting themes through the work of Mackintosh School of Architecture students Words: Nathan Gunnn

Shona Beattie, Stage 4, Architecture

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021-22 saw a full return to studio working for students at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, and with that the panoramic views and open plan spaces of the Bourdon – the dry-docked brutalist spaceship of a building, situated on the west flank of the GSA campus.

All stages of graduating students this year have Glasgow, in all its shades, as the perennially inspiring testing ground for their work. The common thread is an awareness of the biggest design challenge of our time – the twin climate and biodiversity crises and the future of the city.

Stage 3 students look beyond the strict boundaries of ‘site’ to rethink the sometimes myopic process of urban development, grabbing — 40 —

Carl Jonsson, Stage 5, Architecture

with both hands what survives of our city’s industrial infrastructure and re-programming it as both the scaffold and conduit for an ultra-low energy, urban food revolution. This loosely takes shape in the Urban Food Exchange or Urfex – a polymorphic building typology defined more by its function than any one form.

Hamid Habibi takes a deep-dive into the canalside communities around his north Glasgow site to produce an integrated and comprehensive development. By resolving a challenging slope into useful circulation, he prioritises accessibility through placemaking. The result is a terrace of gently winding pathways doubling as a stepped seating area, made from masonry reclaimed

THE SKINNY

The Mackintosh School of Architecture Degree Show runs 1119 Jun at Fleming House, 134 Renfrew Street, and the Grace and Clark Fyfe Gallery, Bourdon Building, Glasgow. It is also available to view online at gsashowcase.net

June 2022

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Marc Stewart looks to the artist Agnes Denes’ 1982 provocation on world hunger – a guerrillaplanted wheatfield on a high-value, vacant, Manhattan plot – as the inspiration for Sustainable Living Centre for Calton, addressing the neighbourhood’s striking dichotomy of deprivation and development. Referencing local repositories such as The Scottish Storytelling Centre and Glasgow Women’s Library, Rachel Crooks’ Barras Storytelling Archive scrapes back centuries of well-trodden Calton routes to reveal and re-establish cultural knowledge obscured by time. This process extends her vision through the layers of culture laid down in Glasgow’s historical phases of growth, particularly The Highland Clearances, to redress what she identifies as a Scottish culture of forgetfulness.

The final year students of Stage 5 build their own theses around the theme The Ethical City.

The quality of work represented in the cohort is breathtaking, and impossible to summarise here, but a slice in any direction reveals a wealth of visual material recasting Glasgow in myriad ways.

Chester Chesney presents an alternate reality to the tenement city by flipping the relationship of street and back court, reclaiming the common back buildings and bringing them into the experience of the street. His vision to ‘reclaim the common’ is informed by his own experience of life in Govanhill, and his work is a powerfully graphical exploration of that densest of neighbourhoods.

Philip Elverson cites Cedric Price’s Fun Palace – a seminal though never realised thought experiment in polyvalent space – in his possible repurposing of the cathedralesque undercroft of the Kingston Bridge. He reimagines the vaulting space as a framework for gradual occupation, using resource-friendly, modular interventions, directly benefiting local communities displaced by the construction of the motorway. The project shares DNA with the Hielanman’s Umbrella – once also a temporary gathering place for persons displaced. Elverson acknowledges that our current vehicular infrastructure can become a palimpsest for the post-car planning of a not-distant future, by reusing what is, largely, already there.

Carl Jonsson envisions what the safeguarding of an environmental legacy means in an age of climate disruption and biodiversity death. The site he selects is the Govan Graving Docks, a Taggartscape of post-industrial decline. His proposal yields to the natural re-integration into the wild, already underway in the surrounding ecology. His project is framed within the post-COP26 narrative that argues that protecting the natural world is not only a matter of collective legacy, but also fundamental to human nature. The different parts of the programme – a seed bank, interior garden and exterior garden – overlay the docks at varying scales and impact, reflecting a desire to respect not only the site’s current state, but its transformative history and uncertain future.

For anyone interested in the city of Glasgow, model-making, drawing, illustration, or simply the creative process itself, experiencing the work of these students first-hand in a gallery setting is unmissable.

Graduate Showcase 2022

directly from local demolition. This anchors the project within the landscape, is sensitive to our climate future, and ties the programme together on multiple axes.

Ryan Woods evokes the collective memory of place, by interposing his site’s industrial vernacular and cultural identity with the material and practices of industrial agriculture. The result is a scheme which provides a place to exchange knowledge, expertise, skills and experiences, framed by the activities and environments of food cultivation, production and distribution.

His conception of the Urban Food Exchange is ultimately expressed in the material choices and construction of the project; assembled from a

modular kit intended to facilitate adaptive growth and ensure longevity.

Emelie Fraser sees her project as a means to connect the disparate and diverse communities on the fringes of her site, at a centrally located herb garden within her scheme. Shared experience through the common language of the senses are the basis for the exchange of cultural knowledge through food. The provision of a well-equipped kitchen, and communal indoor and outdoor gathering spaces, provide the setting for further interaction and extend the possibilities for allweather usefulness.

Arin Chance Beaver bridges the gap between the urban realm and nature at his site at the Maryhill Locks, drawing agriculture right into the heart of Glasgow’s urban fabric. Two low-rise buildings are placed in direct conversation with a 20-storey tower block, expressing a shared DNA with Alvar Aalto’s experimental Muuratsalo House and Sigurd Lewerentz’s Blomsterkiosk. Natural and reusable materials, in standardised material dimensions, make the building easy to break down and re-use at the end of its life.

Projects from Stage 4 close in on the streets and buildings in the oxter of London Road and Gallowgate in Calton, known to most as The Barras, for their investigations on themes of domesticity and labour. Adam Cowan’s Barras Materials Bank is an armature for the practical application of the circular economy – a synthesis of the Barras market itself. Surplus or waste materials generated in the ongoing demolition/ re-construction of the area are collected and re-distributed for projects within the community. By offering sustainability as a practical pursuit, the project entrenches community resilience by increasing opportunities for meaningRyan Woods, Stage 3,Architecture ful participation with lasting outcomes.

With the return to the studio, model-making as a design and presentation tool is strongly represented. Shona Beattie tests the form, mass, and material character of her Materials Skills Centre proposal via assemblages of clear and opaque casting, acrylic and timber. They work equally well as standalone pieces and as an experiential journey through her project.

Andreea Stanuta’s physical models are tangible articulations of her architectural language.

Her proposal for Barras Play Centre recognises the need for accessible family-friendly places in the neighbourhood, which ranks among the most deprived in the city according to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Graduate Showcase 2022

THE SKINNY

Lorna Feggans, Interaction Design

Lois Jones, Product Design Engeneering

Andrea Xinjing, Fashion Design

Agnes Xantippa Boman, Communication Design

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Design This year’s design graduates focus on tactility, sustainability, and relationships with the ecosystem Words: Vytauta Bikauskas and Alissa Monova — 42 —

ptimistic and future-oriented, occasionally with a wry sense of humour, students from the GSA’s various design programmes present a critical appraisal of the value of materials and ideas. Many have made incredible use of the reopened studios and workshops, with work spanning a vast range of materials and processes.

Interior Design considers both relationships to, and the value of, spaces. Mollie Forsyth’s dreamy urban oasis Wonderlust proposes to convert abandoned Govan docks covered in layers of graffiti into an open space for the community to explore and shape. The docks are remnants of Glasgow’s industrial past, which Wonderlust would turn into public gardens, dance halls, community spaces and meditative installations. Forsyth imagines the space growing and transforming beyond its initial state, shaped by each visitor.

Safe space and freedom of expression are particularly important for Aidan Rabbitt, whose Inside Out City is a forum to celebrate and unify the LGBTQIA+ Community in Glasgow and beyond.

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Kristina Merchant, Silversmithing and Jewellery

Sophie Allardyce, Textile Design

Hanya Kamel, Interior Design

of art as a symbol of a new, self-made chapter for the area. Further exploring the human condition, Shannon Best focuses on cycles of life and death.

Grass above the dead takes inspiration from the life and poetry of Elisabeth Siddal – the model for Ophelia in Millai’s famous painting. Best’s photographs depict a body drowning in nature, reclaimed, and absorbed. The message is nevertheless hopeful – death is the basis of new life, and seeds sprout from the remains.

Design graduates this year have addressed our relationship to space, nature, and heritage through a series of challenging, but forward-looking works. They closely examine the cycles of daily practices, social structures and suggest imaginative ways to reshape them.

The School of Design Degree Show runs 1-12 Jun in the Reid Building, 164 Renfrew Street, Glasgow. It is also available to view online at gsashowcase.net

June 2022

speaker is an out-of-the-box design that allows for customisation to individual genres of music by adjusting materials. The process of learning through play is explored in a toy designed by Morgan Rodgers, which aims to aid understanding in children undergoing radiotherapy. The toy captures the real-life movements, lights and sounds of a linac machine, and allows children to treat a teddy with support from a play therapist.

The relationship between humans, nature and technology is central to this year’s Interaction Design cohort. Dayna Lamb’s work explores the intersection of these three worlds in a multi-layered installation. Firstly, a trained algorithm predicts audience members’ personalities from a quiz, then media is chosen for them as they are led through a narrative of nature and synthesis. Lamb’s work spans a variety of outputs, from thermochromic prints to projections and a book.

Lene de Montaigu’s piece addresses our relationships with the tangible world, focusing on memories objects hold. Her work is a response to the assumed cleanliness of interactive art, presenting a discarded-andfound piano – crumbling away, repaired using 3D printed parts, which the viewer can play. The suggested interaction is imperfect, human, and carries a living history. It wants to remember the forgotten, repair instead of replacing and thoroughly engage with the complexities of the everyday.

Communication Design graduates tell complex stories in engaging and imaginative ways. Some focused on how our emotional lives are shaped by our experience online.

Agnes Boman’s frame-by-frame animation Cookies illustrates the transition from real to virtual spaces and anxieties that follow. Her animation loops, leading the viewer to look through the work twice, mimicking our distracted time online. Digital experiences are like empty calories – we have been entertained, but do not feel fulfilled. The exhausting overload of information we experience online is also explored by Emma Ruth in her work on the daily news. Using code, she scrapes repeating keywords in articles from news sites, arranging them alphabetically and seeking patterns. Emma’s work focuses on the design of a process, rather than an outcome, having her work change constantly and reflect on the multiplicity of representations.

Representation alters the lives and fates of communities. Katherine Wallace addresses its importance in her reimagining of Miracle in the Gorbals, a seminal ballet from 1944. Historically the Gorbals community has experienced neglect and negative portrayal, which the ballet itself echoed with distanced pity. Katherine’s version rethinks this paradigm, reshaping an archival work

Graduate Showcase 2022

Based on lived experience of a lack of community spaces that aren’t nightclubs, Inside Out City is open to various age groups and needs. Housing libraries for children and adults, a queer archive, a space for making, café and exhibition spaces, it would become a haven on Buchanan Street.

The urban Glasgow environment is also a visually rich source for Textile Design graduates, with Arouge Salim’s embroidery taking night-time lighting as its inspiration by depicting the gradient and colour of lights and lasers in textiles. Circular frames create a spotlight while the threads form beams and bars of light, capturing the effects of lighting in nightclubs and retro arcades. Abbey Campbell’s Illusions of Colour are striking woven textiles exploring the interaction of colour, and how contrasting and complementary hues alter the tone of the original. Patterns in the work take inspiration from elements found in street scenes, including graffiti and crates.

The idea of incorporating discarded items is taken to the next level in Sophie Allardyce’s work.

Her textiles are entirely made from found textile waste, including leather off-cuts salvaged from an interior seating manufacturer, discarded laser-cut MDF pieces, and beads and threads found in the GSA studios. These materials are bound and manipulated to create new forms, with sustainability at the core of the work. From reusing textile waste, to reconnecting with nature, Rosie Ridley’s work encourages the wearer to embrace the outdoors with coats filled with reclaimed yarn. Her collection is inspired by the Japanese concept of shinrin yoku, or forest bathing – a mindful approach to taking in, and being in, the atmosphere of green spaces. Her designs capture the delicacy of nature, allowing one to envision oneself within the natural world as opposed to shielding oneself from it.

Silversmithing and Jewellery graduates explore links between nature and recycling waste.

Amy Findlay’s collection takes inspiration from slugs, overlooked creatures that play a vital role in the nutrient cycle, recreated in silver and bronze with inset stones. Her collection is a set of precious and tactile slugs that crawl up and wrap themselves around the body, their various forms reflecting stages in the life cycle. Further exploring the dichotomy of filthy and precious, Kristina Merchant’s collection is inspired by discarded items found littering the streets. Chewing gum carved from bone is incorporated in several pieces, while amber is used to create cigarette filters, alluding to traditional amber smoking pipes. Silver is thinly rolled, oxidised and manipulated to emulate burnt or crinkled paper, with ground waste amber used as tobacco filling. Taking an unorthodox approach to silversmithing, Caitlin Murphy’s XYZ is inspired by geometric patterns and mathematical precision, using oxidised copper and bronze to weave optical illusions at a large scale. She is able to capture the malleability of metal through the influence of origami in various pieces in her collection.

A variety of prototypes exploring healthcare, play and sound can be seen from Product Design Engineering graduates this year. Optimisation in healthcare is the focus of Lois Jones’ Pill In, which stores, organises, distributes, and dispenses large quantities of pharmaceuticals in an easy and efficient manner. Charlie Cumming’s tubular

June 2022

Graduate Showcase 2022

THE SKINNY

Fine Art This year’s School of Fine Art cohort interrogate materials and ideas with equal fervour and ambition Words: Isgard Hague and Corrie Jennison

The Head Massager, Katie Curry, Sculpture and Environenmental Art

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The School of Fine Art Degree Show runs 1-12 Jun in the Stow Building, 64 Shamrock Street, Glasgow. It is also available to view online at gsashowcase.net

June 2022

HARLING, Josie Smith, Painting and Printmaking

forced upon him by small town mentalities when he was growing up between small towns in the north of Scotland. In his paintings this cathartic process of unravelling plays out, and emerging narratives spiral across the canvases.

In Fine Art Photography, Nora Mackenzie’s work also conveys themes of memory, as well as the fragility of time, change and the marks we leave behind. In a world where everything is constantly changing, Nora captures scenes that are remnants of the past. While there is a physical absence of people in her photographs, their traces are made known through chalk scratchings made by kids on a winter’s day, or an old football shirt tied to a fence to remember a loved one. Loud Hand by Kaya Erdinc attempts to document an intimate collaboration with philosopher Bibi Straatman, with whom Kaya closely read several texts from the Christian mystical tradition. Her work includes a silent portrait moving image shot on Super 8 film, accompanied by a long prose poem.

Within his exhibition space, Louis SyedAnderson has constructed and curated his own floor-based landscape, as well as spatially engaging with the physical architecture of the exhibition space. Influenced by the architectural structures and materials of the urban landscape, his designs emulate the experience of navigating through those spaces, echoing both the contours and structural forms of the urban environment.

Megan Auld’s work Burning Dust centres on the history of women in the industrial age in Scotland. Her work references the volatile landscape through a range of materials and objects, revealing the labour-intensive and fatal past of factory workers. Also utilising a myriad of materials is Spencer Dent, whose work explores the concept of genderlessness. A series of self portraits use costume and make-up to distort the body and figure, screen prints and sculpture depict a genderless figure, and weaving reflects make-up design processes.

Graduate Showcase 2022

questioning of how functional objects are appreciated, by playing on the contradictions of functional objects in a gallery setting. Failing to Serve explores ideas of imperfection, the process of making, and whether meaning is static or always changing.

Painting and Printmaking student Sasha Ballon’s experience working as a tree surgeon is important in her practice. Recycled wood from job sites is combined with chainsaw woodcarving, welding and weaving in her exploration of craft as a site of resistSpencer Dent, Fine Art Photography ance. The work is inherently queer in its potential to upend categorical ways he School of Fine Art final year students of making, and critique of gendered stereotypes in have been busy. Their dedication and hard trades and craft. Expect a collage of moving image, work is clear to see in this year’s highly sculpture and textiles, with live performances on anticipated Degree Show, the first in the Stow preview night and the evening of 1 June.

Building for three years. Across the disciplines Josie Swift’s installation HARLING is an there are interrogations of ways of making, proexploration of modern Scottish mythology, via a cess and material, as well as a questioning appebbledash sofa and video in which Swift and proach to the world, resulting in work that is open, women from her hometown recite her poem to the innovative and exciting. ‘gods’ of harling (Scots for pebbledash). Drawing In Sculpture and Environmental Art, Zane on the physical make-up of homes and common Drees takes life in the post-digital age as his generational memories of spending hours on subject-matter, using methods and materials such YouTube, it’s dedicated to “the women of the as hand-carving, weaving and quilting to demoncommunity I grew up in, an ode to the women that strate a rejection of modern technologies. Yet, birthed our generation.” used as a tool to ground and reflect on his own Nancy Pilkington works with painting and life, the work evokes contradictory feelings. While objects, which she uses to imagine an ‘exit from critical, he is – like the rest of us – dependent on linear time and logic’ within the setting of the modern technology. The viewer experiences child’s den – a shape-shifting place where creative feelings of intimacy and fear, humour and discomrepair is possible. You are invited to take shelter in fort: the ambiguities of modern life, a domestic this refuge from conflict and aggression. James surrealism. Cydney Lovett-Downey’s Super 8 Johnson expands print and image making into collage film And Once He Used To Love Me is sound and sculptural installations, where the idea constructed from found home movies and is an of print emitting sound has led him to create eerie, dreamy, compassionate meditation on the hybrid stretcher sound systems. The work comes passing of time and the human experience. There from a combination of physical material experiis a double sense of loss: we grieve for the figures mentation and digital image sampling. Johnson is who exist only on spools of film, but also the loss interested in spaces and feelings that are in limbo, of an art form – a ‘video rendered requiem’. between states – a notion which emerges in his Angus Rushin’s work centres on the narrative subject matter and material. encapsulated in the grain of trees. Symbols of Loss Through the process of documentation, is an invocation to celebrate and memorialise restoration and reproduction of family photoGlasgow’s ash tree population, which currently graphs of her mother and grandmother, Chloe faces extinction. Where the saw is used as a ‘biogra- Beddow finds a physical material connection to pher of the material’, the archiving of the grain of the her grandmother, whom she never met, articulatwood serves to materialise the memory and life of ing the passing of time. The imagery in Finn the tree. Joseph Weisberg’s ongoing project Mounds Robinson’s paintings comes together in a collage consists of the documentation and installation of of personal experience, online culture and art urban, suburban, and rural piles of used, to-be used, history, where his identity is appropriated and and unwanted piles of miscellaneous material. imitated. Intensely personal, his work represents Weisberg shows an appreciation of their sculptural an attempt to finally make sense of his identity, qualities and the ‘covert creatives’ – the people and after the ‘facade of fear and second-guessing’ machinery who make them – in an act of recognition for the overlooked in our surroundings.

An in-person exhibition also allows for interactive installations, such as Katie Curry’s The Head Massager, where personal responsibility in the age of the internet is explored through the concept of action and unknown consequence.

This is brought into the physical realm, as the person in control of the head massager (the action) cannot see the results of their actions (the consequence). The objects in Rosa Gally’s installation embody her

Prunus Avium (Figure II), Sasha Ballon, Painting and Printmaking

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Simulation and Visualisation Graduate Showcase 2022

Creativity at The School of Simulation and Visualisation moves in tandem with the development of new technology and digital software, making each year unique from the last Words: Michiel Turner and Zoe Young

Inside the Metallurgist's Workshop, Max Wardle, Immersive Systems Design

June 2022

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his year’s School of Simulation and Visualisation cohort have developed a dynamic spectrum of work, exploring themes spanning spatiality to immersive investigation to ecology. Many of the students utilise contemporary techniques and digital software to realise their concepts. Max Wardle from the BSc Immersive Systems Design programme has created a virtual experience entitled Inside the Metallurgist’s Workshop, in collaboration with the Casa del Alabado Museum of PreColumbian Art in Quito, Ecuador. As the name suggests, Wardle’s work allows participants to interface with museum objects related to Ecuadorian indigenous heritage using a computer. The simulation features a rich colour palette with softened pixels, evoking a welcoming atmosphere for users to investigate.

The Sound for the Moving Image programme has been significant in its fusion of digital artforms, inspiring students to merge their sonic practices with visual content. Much of the work showcased is driven by user experience, which is notable in Craig Hamilton’s Tributary, a game that invites audiences to trigger musical loops with a Nintendo games controller hooked up to both Ableton Live (a digital audio workstation software) and Max MSP (a music programming application). In the first version of Hamilton’s exhibit, players can arrange a lo-fi style piece of music featuring a rotation of jazz harmony and staggering beats. The second version includes a lush myriad of piano, synth, bass and percussion that can be assembled to create a dreamscape of sound. The aim is to make the music-making process a more accessible experience for those lacking knowledge of music theory or the resources to learn.

Influenced by Mulholland Drive director David Lynch, Margarita Lioli’s Hypnagogia uses highly creative and detailed

sound design to immerse the listener into a transient hypnotic state, offering a truly unique and evocative experience. A glimpse into the world of altered consciousness and dream sequences is established using hauntingly designed sonic elements through experimental recording. Through experimentation with different microphone techniques, including hydrophones (microphones that can record underwater) a highly unusual and unique soundscape has been crafted. A series of different frequencies were captured in order to reveal this otherworldly dimension, along with expert audio processing to transform the sounds.

The arrangement begins with an eerie pulse, reminiscent of mechanical horror sounds, which induce uncomfortable sensations and prepare us for a journey into another realm.

Composed using wavetable synthesis, a peacefully synthetic and atmospheric passage encapsulates us further into this authentic representation of a different reality. The sweeping, carefully panned industrial sounds gradually induce an unusual, yet somewhat pleasant state. It ends on a pitch-affected, saturated and cleverly edited version of Minnie Ripperton’s Lovin’ You, turning this once simple love song into a hauntingly captivating sound interpretation, fitting rather uncannily into the soundscape. If you are interested in exploring different states of human consciousness, this soundscape offers a lucid alternative which successfully leaves you feeling as though you’ve just been on a weird and wonderful journey. A must hear!

The School of Simulation and Visualisation Degree Show runs 1-12 Jun in the Haldane Building, 24 Hill Street, Glasgow. It is also available to view online at gsashowcase.net

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Innovation Graduate Showcase 2022

Product Design graduates investigate connections, celebrate differences and reinvent narratives through their future-focused designs Words: Holly McPaul

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Dish The Dirt, Gabby Morris, Product Design

Scotland has granted nature constitutional rights and becomes a refuge for all species in light of climate change and the ongoing sixth mass extinction. Roche re-evaluates our relationship with nature through policy, senseware, and mapping, using various memorabilia to imagine the changes that the city of Glasgow goes through after the introduction of the act.

Many of us find the topic of sexual health uncomfortable and daunting to talk about. Rachel Corrie’s project Join In is an experiential pop-up safe space with a twist. Join In dives into how we can have informed, but informal, discussions in environments where we feel the most comfortable.

Imagine the relaxed setting of a pub layered with informative data on sexual health. With this combination, Join In hopes to encourage open communication and conversations while also offering the opportunity to gain more information on sexual health, and provide support within local communities.

Victoria Jamieson’s project In the Noe is a communication toolkit designed to engage people in discussions about menopause. In the Noe aims to overcome stigma by addressing perception and reality through the means of education and emotional awareness. It invites those who may not be experiencing menopause to engage and begin to understand the effects it can have on a daily basis – enabling us to all be in the know.

Amandine Fong’s project Clota aims to address how we can use All-In, Lesley McCluskey, Product Design — 47 —

Join In, Rachel Corrie, Product Design

design to think about new ways to connect to an environment, and its involvement in the creation of more-than-human narratives. Using the River Clyde and Glasgow as an environment for exploration, the project looks at the Clyde’s role within the city, and asks how we can rethink our relationship with it and collectively imagine its future.

Looking into the future of performance running, Lucas Cheskin investigates the question: will the product come before the athlete? Cheskin delves into topics of fairness, equality, and the essence of future sport through speculative design practice. The resulting project The Melius Games aims to create a conversation surrounding technological evolution and its impact on performance running athletes in 2052.

Do you have possessions around your home that are worn and tired, that you rarely interact with but just can’t bear to throw away? Molly Nicoll’s brand Re-bonding redefines how we look at and treat our tired belongings. In contrast to mass consumption, Re-bonding offers the user a chance to reconnect with their tired possessions and discover new value.

At this year’s Degree Show, there is much more to unpack and discover. Product Design graduates have worked incredibly hard to produce passionate, engaging and unique projects. It is clear to see that innovation has well and truly materialised within the GSA.

The Innovation School Degree Show runs 1-12 Jun in the Haldane Building, 24 Hill Street, Glasgow. It is also available to view online at gsashowcase.net

June 2022

his year, Product Design students at the Innovation School were finally back in the studio, once again surrounded by the remarkable atmosphere, culture, and community of The Glasgow School of Art. Not even a global pandemic could stop them from producing refreshing and innovative designs.

This year’s graduates focus on a wide variety of topics including shaping experiences for the future, designing through evolutionary and speculative lenses and more, all on display at the Degree Show.

Do you enjoy eating? Are you curious about where your food comes from? Would you like to experience something new? Gabby Morris’s project Dish the Dirt is a multi-sensory dining experience that aims to help visualise the impact soil has on the food we eat. Morris has created hand-crafted ceramic plates, each unique to the eating experience, and is also running a multi-sensory tasting during the Degree Show.

Lesley McCluskey has designed an innovative brand consultancy titled All-In. This project supports small businesses to collaborate and produce one-off experiences that help create community cohesion and build upon the local economy.

Speculating on the future of Glasgow, Hannah Roche explores evolution and extinction in 2080. This work revolves around a speculative ‘multispecies integration act 2030,’ where

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Graduate Showcase 2022

Image by: Alan McAteer

In the Wild June 2022

Graduates from the last two years make an international impact with an inventive series of exhibitions and events

Graduate Drive Thru, Image by Alan McAteer

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Image by: Alan McAteer

Josie Ko, Alternative Degree Show Festival

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Yena Park, A Remix of Damage

for two years in the newly reopened Reid Gallery, the GSA’s main exhibition space on campus. Held in February and March 2022, A Remix of Damage was a group show by the Strata Collective, eight artists who graduated from the MLitt Fine Art Practice Sculpture pathway the previous year.

During lockdown, the graduates continued to support each other to find innovative and imaginative ways to continue their practice, resulting in work encompassing casting, sound, textiles, ready-mades and more. In the gallery, Alex Anderson’s primary coloured paintings and Abbey Corbin’s wax shell sculptures sat beside Yena Park’s Soil Processing Table, a transplant from a sci-fi laboratory handling artificial urban debris.

The way we experience art and culture has changed, but the inherent inventiveness and adaptability of art school graduates has risen to meet these challenges – it feels natural to experience this work in such a variety of contexts. The GSA is continuing to support graduate projects both within and outside gallery walls – perhaps by the time you read this, something new will have taken over a building, garden, or car park in your neighbourhood. thealternativedegreeshowfestival.com Interludefilms.co.uk wunderkammer-exhibition.com graduatedrivethru.com gsa.ac.uk/remix 2020 GSA graduates who have not yet participated in a physical exhibition/event can contact marketing@gsa.ac.uk to discuss the range of support available.

June 2022

Image by: Alan McAteer

thought-provoking discussion on the experience and mutual benefits of mature students in classes of younger peers.

As part of the Alternative Degree Show Festival, graduates programmed two evenings of film screenings at Transmission and SWG3. Post-festival, this grew into Interlude Films – a showcase of contemporary moving image works by 28 graduates, hosted by Glasgowbased firm ISO Design over three evenings in October. True to the tradition of moving image in Scotland, this was an expansive programme, spanning animation, narrative film and experimental techniques – with films ranging from a documentary on the River Kelvin, to algorithmically-generated VR. Perhaps the most ambitious graduate-led project to date, Project Wunderkammer was an international programme of six exhibitions across four months, led by 2020 graduate Aeji Seo. Featuring the work of 44 graduates across venues in Stockholm, Glasgow, London, Phuket and Seoul, the project drew upon the spirit of Fluxus – a group unified not by style, but by the youthful energy of artists. Each individual exhibition was proposed as a ‘wunderkammer’ – another name for curiosity rooms presented in Renaissance homes – presented via the esoteric interests of its curator.

Through their curation, Seo, Antonio Parker-Reese, Robert McCormack and Demi Zatumatmetee explored organic materials, action, empathy and communication, drawn from gatherings of work by their fellow 2020 graduates.

In sharp contrast to the gallery presentation of Wunderkammer was the Graduate Drive Thru, held in September 2021 as part of Glasgow Open House Festival. Glasgow artists are known for taking advantage of unusual venues, and this was no exception: an open-air exhibition held on the rooftop of an NCP car park, juxtaposing sculpture and installation with breath-taking views across the city.

The wit and energy of the 23 artists’ work was a perfect match for the idiosyncratic venue, from Council Baby’s blown-up graffitied train tickets (“YUPTAE” “NOWT”) to Sam Welch’s installation in the back of a parked van.

The latest graduate-initiated project was also the first exhibition

Graduate Showcase 2022

hile final year GSA students were busy in their studios, graduates from the last two cohorts were out in the world, sharing their work at physical events for the first time. When ongoing lockdowns and restrictions prevented in-person Degree Shows in 2020, the GSA committed to support future IRL graduate-led activity, which has been coming to fruition with exhibitions, screenings and events over the past year – in locations from Glasgow to Seoul.

Something of a prelude to this activity came in late 2020, when – due to local allowances – a group of GSA graduates were able to exhibit at a major FutureLab showcase in Shanghai. In the absence of Degree Shows around the world, the international art and design education platform presented an exhibition of work by Chinese graduates – including 52 from postgraduate programmes at the GSA. From May to July 2021, as some venues began to tentatively open to visitors, a group of 2021 Fine Art graduates spearheaded the Alternative Degree Show Festival – a three month-long takeover of the city’s galleries, public spaces and civic buildings.

Venues ranged from the airy main hall of the Briggait, to the open spaces of Woodlands Community Garden, with over 100 graduates from Painting and Printmaking, Fine Art Photography and Sculpture and Environmental Art showing work.

After over a year without in-person exhibitions, visitors had the opportunity to come face-to-face with Josie Ko’s life-size sculptures, experience the sinister shadows of Ella Campbell’s Human Cave, and watch a durational performance by HUSS. As well as showcasing their work, the graduates took the opportunity to reflect on a number of pertinent issues facing artists and art students today, in a series of online talks.

The programme included a panel on sustainability that took in not just climate issues, but the need for financial and creative support, and a

Image by: Alan McAteer

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Project Wunderkammer

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Group work Sophie Ammann Ghost Signs “My main interests lie in analogue processes such as print, bookbinding and sign painting, with a focus on typography and lettering. Humour is an integral part of my work. Some of my recent work has been finding and digitally preserving letterings from ghost signs around Glasgow and re-introducing them into a new context. If I could be any letter of the alphabet, I would be an S.”

June 2022

Graduate Showcase 2022

We hear from the GSA students whose work came together to create this year’s beautiful Degree Show poster and digital campaign

Leonie Hiller Errand's “I am a multidisciplinary designer and photographer, graduating this year in Communication Design. I am interested in themes of culture and society, which go further into nostalgia and heritage/ identity. This has influenced the typeface, created as part of a collaborative project that deals with the marketing language of domestication. As well as being used on the Degree Show poster, the typeface was originally created as a display font for the Errand's shop – created by myself and Abigail Allen – based on old supermarkets from the 1950s, and will also be presented as part of the Communication Design work at Degree Show 2022.”

Fleur Connor Untitled Diptych 1 “This diptych was produced by adapting during lockdown to what little space I had and the few physical resources I had to create. That’s why it follows a grid pattern, because the painting is made from lots of little tiny paintings. It’s really exciting for me to have the diptych now become a symbol of something positive. It’s really wonderful to be featured alongside the work of my fellow students and for that work to be celebrated.”

Billy Paterson Capsule “I am a Glasgow-based Graphic Designer and year 3 Communication Design student exploring concepts of hauntology, temporality and technology primarily through typography and print media. Capsule is a modular typeface inspired by Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo – a key building from the Metabolist architectural movement. This movement fused ideas of architectural megastructures with those of organic biological growth in post-war Japan. Since designing the typeface, the building began its disassembly in March 2022, which has prompted the release of the typeface for free via billypatersonstudio.co.uk.”

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Heads Up Image by: Louise Stewart

Open Studio Summer School Glasgow, 20 Jun-22 Jul

Room Image by: Kialy Tihngang

Image by: Bori Gheorghita

Image by: Catherine Johnston Open Studio Summer School

Race, Rights and Sovereignty

Graduate Degree Show 2022 Glasgow and online, August

Race, Rights and Sovereignty Glasgow and online, throughout the year The Students’ Association and GSA Exhibitions curate this public series, exploring the relationship between race, place, and creative practice. The current programme strand, Caring Between Practices, invites practitioners working at the intersections of art and somatic practices to deliver workshops, walks and talks, to help us consider how somatic and healing practices can be used as ways to care for ourselves and each other within our own practices.

Image by: Alan McAteer

Graduate Degree Show 2022

Image by: Belle Breslin

Hot on the heels of the undergraduate Degree Show comes the annual showcase of postgraduate work, which also makes a return to the physical realm this year. From fashion collections to innovative service design, heritage visualisation to painting, this is your chance to explore the work of GSA’s master’s students both on campus and online.

This group show brings together painting, printmaking, drawing, textiles and performance from 12 artists, exhibiting together for the first time since graduating from the GSA’s MLitt Fine Art Practice programme in 2020.

Portfolio Preparation Course Glasgow, from September

GSA OPEN

GSA OPEN Glasgow and online, throughout the year

Portfolio Preparation Course

Whether you’re just starting to consider coming to art school, or you’re almost ready to hit ‘send’ on your application, GSA OPEN has an event to help you. Our year-long programme encompasses virtual open days, student-led campus tours, portfolio advice sessions and more, for whatever stage of the application process you’re at.

Open House: RGI Graduate Award Winners GSASA Degree Show After Party

GSASA Degree Show After Party SWG3, Glasgow, 31 May

Street Level Open 2022

Open House: RGI Graduate Award Winners Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, Glasgow, 8-30 Jul

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Dressing Above Your Station Online and around Glasgow, until 26 Jun Image by: Steven Campbell

Image by: Indre Bylaite

Image by: Yeon Ju

Image by: GSASA

Street Level Open 2022 Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, until 7 Aug

June 2022

Are you working on your application to art school? The GSA’s Portfolio Preparation Course gives you the time and space to develop your portfolio in a collaborative, dynamic studio environment. The course is structured to help you choose a specialist area of art and design to study, and has a track record of getting students places at top art schools across the UK.

Graduate Showcase 2022

After two years online, Open Studio returns to the studios of the GSA for a month-long programme of short courses. Whether you’re looking for an intro to illustration, or want to try your hand at screenprinting or life drawing, there are courses for all levels covering art, design and craft – and a discount for full-time students.

Room Reid Gallery, Glasgow, 30 Jul-13 Aug

Dressing Above Your Station

June 2022

Graduate Showcase 2022

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Eyes on the Ball With a biopic of the self-mythologising Swedish striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic heading to cinemas, we look back at the history of the beautiful game on screen Words: Ben Nicholson Film Image: courtesy of Signature-Entertainment

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Granit Rushiti in I Am Zlatan

In the dugout sits Tom Hooper’s biopic The Damned United (2009), charting Brian Clough’s (the chameleonlike Michael Sheen) short-lived tenure as Leeds United manager. At the other end of the spectrum, Ricky Tomlinson was Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001) in a satirical mockumentary and Jason Sudeikis is currently charming everyone as the eponymous Ted Lasso (2020-) in the award-winning comedy.

Up in the stands, one might come across Colin Firth sporting an Arsenal scarf in the Nick Hornby adaptation Fever Pitch (1997), or Sima Mobarak-Shahi as an unnamed girl desperately trying to circumvent the ban on female spectators to watch the match between Iran and Bahrain in Jafar Panahi’s excellent Offside (2006) – two vastly different films but linked by the feverous passion of the football supporter. However, the less said about the ‘fandom’ portrayed in The Firm (1989) or Green Street (2005) the better.

Then we come to films that approach football from an angle slightly more askew. Silent caper Harry the Footballer (1911) depicts a kidnapped player being rescued by a daring female fan. The Arsenal Stadium Mystery (1939) goes one further – a star player is murdered and a detective must solve the crime. Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric (2009) sees a football-mad postman receive personal advice from Eric Cantona after a potent joint. Diamantino (2018), meanwhile, is a slapstick — 53 —

tale of an empty-headed star who unwittingly becomes the poster boy for a nationalistic political campaign. And in a duo of football docs, director Corneliu Porumboiu explores the subtext of the Bucharest derby in The Second Game (2014) and engages in some leftfield revisions of the rules in the entertaining Infinite Football (2018).

The 2017 documentary Untitled features a sequence where amputees play football on the beach accompanied by a voiceover recalling filmmaker Michael Glawogger’s experience of being unable to communicate with some local boys in West Africa. Their only shared vocabulary is footballers’ names, and he proposes a new dialect: “…instead of ‘he,’ ‘Rooney’ because he is the most masculine… instead of ‘winner,’ ‘Drogba’ because he really is one.” It’s a silly idea, but it gets at something that all of these football films trade in: cultural recognition. Whether they are about the political anxieties of 80s Romania or WWII derring-do, whether they are set in contemporary Iran or 30s London, or whether their stars are fictional airheads or real-life icons, football offers a fast and relatable route into the subject.

On reflection, Glawogger’s observation about the potential of football as a universal language doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Surely Zlatan would agree.

I Am Zlatan is released 3 Jun by Signature Films

June 2022 – Feature

t may be the most-watched sport on the planet but translating association football to film has been a funny old game. Despite being a topic in moving pictures for over a century, bringing football to life on screen remains a challenge.

When director Jens Sjögren revealed he was going to make a biopic about iconic striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic, he was asked if he was suicidal. That film, I Am Zlatan, is released in the UK this month and follows the titular Swede from childhood to his 2004 transfer to Juventus. As far as football dramas go, it works well, perhaps because the filmmakers cast a footballer, Granit Rushiti, in the lead, rather than an actor. While the primary interest may be in what’s happening off the pitch, a lot of the film takes place during training sessions and youth matches, which feel far more natural and convincing than is typically the case.

I Am Zlatan is perhaps a bit of an outlier as, in recent times, football films have been dominated by documentaries. On one hand are player profiles: Ibrahimović was himself the subject of Becoming Zlatan (2015); contemporaries have inspired the likes of Messi (2014) and Ronaldo (2015), while legends of the game headline films such as George Best: All by Himself (2016) and Diego Maradona (2019). However, history is littered with different depictions of the beautiful game on the silver screen which could be roughly split into three approaches.

The first depicts the action on the pitch.

Typically accompanied by the challenges the protagonists face in their lives, they often draw attention to the democratic opportunity offered by footballing success. This is where we might find the likes of When Saturday Comes (1996), in which Sean Bean played a brewery worker given his shot at the big time. Elsewhere, Sly Stallone and Bobby Moore took on the Nazis in Escape to Victory (1981); Kuno Becker starred as Santiago Muñez in the rags-toriches fable, Goal! (2005); Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna played battling brothers from rural Mexico competing for success in Rudo y Cursi (2008); and Parminder Nagra fought both social convention and the opposition in order to play the game she loved in Bend It Like Beckham (2002).

Somewhat more fantastically, Stephen Chow reunites the disciples of his old master to harness their unique talents and bring martial arts to the masses in the raucous Shaolin Soccer (2001). In the documentary mode, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) focuses on the physical side of things, tracking the French midfielder over the course of a single match in 2005, hypnotically presenting the heights of elegance and ugliness in close-up.

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I’d Rather Be a Pig Than a Fascist Film

Porco Rosso, Hayao Miyazaki’s enchanting adventure film about a First World War fighter pilot who helps battle fascists in Italy, even though he’s transformed into a pig-man, turns 30. We look back at this anti-war masterpiece Words: Zoe Crombie

June 2022 – Feature

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t a glance, Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso seems like something of an outlier in Ghibli’s filmography. The fantastical worlds removed from our own time and space are replaced here by the decidedly fixed-point of 1930s Mussolini-era Italy. The story is one of Miyazaki’s own original creations as well, being based on his 1989 manga The Age of the Flying Boat rather than on an existing tale or mythology by another storyteller.

Most significantly, rather than starring a determined young woman, our eponymous protagonist is a gruff, sometimes morally ambiguous pig-man who smokes, drinks, and enters the fray with a level of reluctance. Looking at the differences between this black sheep in the Miyazaki canon and his more popular works, one message becomes clear; this isn’t a film that emphasises action over passivity, and isn’t one that’s willing to pander to its audience.

In some senses, it feels as though Fio Piccolo, the young woman who helps fix Porco’s plane and insistently joins him on his adventures, is the more conventional hero of the film. She’s upbeat, compassionate, clever; a Ghibli girl through and through. Though this might have made the film a more overtly feminist text, it would have come at the cost of ignoring much of the discomfort and darkness that Miyazaki plays with beneath the sunny Mediterranean exterior. Fio is someone to aspire to, while Porco might be closer to who you really are, torn between your own personal comfort and the moral duty you find yourself burdened with when you become aware of any kind of injustice.

This hits harder because of the invisibility of the fascists. They aren’t moustache-twirling buffoons like the bumbling pirates or hotshot American Curtis, who are ultimately (like so many other Miyazaki ‘villains’) just flawed, selfish individuals. Instead, they lurk as an ever-present background threat without a single face, the war machine itself rather than any of the individual people driving it. Porco Rosso entered production as a simple in-flight film for Japan Airlines, but when Miyazaki and his team heard stories from the war in Yugoslavia, it evolved into something more complex – they couldn’t just depict the flights and fights of the film without acknowledging what drove them.

And what of the pilots? Miyazaki would discuss the clash between his love of planes and hatred of aerial war more explicitly in The Wind Rises, but this tension is still ever-present in Porco; underneath all the fun lurks the fact that many of the planes exist to end lives. The dogfights between Porco and his many enemies make for some great animated spectacles, but the film doesn’t hesitate to remind you – despite the miraculous survival of the central characters through it all – that these characters are just as capable as Mussolini’s soldiers of turning their skill to the slaughter of innocent people if they were convinced effectively enough.

That is why Porco’s defiant, explicit refusal to engage with fascism, summarised by his nowiconic line, “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist”, is so important; you have to make a conscious effort not to let these systems swallow up those around you.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re the gallant Hollywood hero that Curtis strives to be or an outcasted criminal kidnapping little girls for a ransom pay-out – you have a responsibility to fight against state-sanctioned injustice if you’re capable. Leaning back on being a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ person while avoiding true conflict isn’t going to cut it.

This is perhaps best communicated in the narrative by the nature of Porco’s curse itself. You may assume that the curse came about due to greed or hedonism, a la Pigsy from the legendary Chinese classic Journey to the West. Instead, the cause is much vaguer – all we see is that his best friend was killed in a dogfight, and that he has — 54 —

taken a half-man, half-animal form ever since.

More explicitly, a press release revealed that Porco became ‘disillusioned with humanity’ after this incident, leading to his transformation – a far cry from a God or witch smiting him with their moral judgement.

By the close of the film, Porco has regained his human form, and in the grand tradition of The Wizard of Oz, it seems as though the power was with him all along. All he needed was the push to believe in humanity once again, and to find a reason to fight; his reversion to a human form doesn’t signal a return to the status quo, but a drive to improve it. Porco Rosso isn’t about breaking the curse – it’s about finding the will to fight against a cursed world.

Porco Rosso is streaming now on Netflix

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Say it Loud Figures of Speech is a new cross-artform series of live events that will bring together writers and artists to take us on a road trip through Scottish literature. We look ahead to what’s in store Books

Words: Jamie Dunn Photo: Colin Hattersley

Details of the upcoming Figures of Speech events are below Friendship: Michael Pedersen & Val McDermid Friendship is the topic of discussion during this tour through Scottish literature with celebrated crime author Val McDermid and poet and Neu! Reekie! host Michael Pedersen. Be it Peter Pan and Wendy from JM Barrie’s childhood classic or Renton and his gang of ne’er-do-well pals in Trainspotting, passionate and problematic friendships can be found throughout the history of Scottish literature. This should be a fascinating chat.

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh. 24 Jun, 7.30pm

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ith 2022 being hailed as Scotland’s Year of Stories, it’s the perfect opportunity to dive into our nation’s most iconic books, as well as explore the dazzling array of new Scottish voices on the horizon.

New literary series Figures of Speech promises to do both. It’s a programme of literary events taking audiences on an odyssey across the curious contrasts and contradictions that define Scottish literature, aiming to offer a fresh look at Scottish classics new and old.

Figures of Speech takes the form of six live, in-person nights of discussion featuring expert guides who will be covering six universal themes – Music, Friendship, Future, Love, Place, and Big Ideas – in relation to Scottish literature. Each event sees two writers paired together to offer

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh. 22 Jul, 7.30pm their takes on one of the above themes.

In addition to these six events featuring 12 writers, Figures of Speech will also be supported by eight newly commissioned pieces of work from contemporary artists inspired by the themes.

These new works will offer creative interpretations and reimaginings of some of Scotland’s most well-known and well-loved stories.

The first event, held on Friday 20 May, centred on the music theme. Two razor-sharp music writers were assembled for a talk: journalist and broadcaster Nicola Meighan and music critic Arusa Qureshi, who recently published Flip the Script – a book about women in UK hip-hop. The pair’s conversation explored what characterises and defines Scottish writing when music and words come together.

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Figures of Speech: Season Two Another trio of Figures of Speech events are coming up later in the year covering three more universal topics. Gaelic poet Peter Mackay and romance writer Jenny Colgan will be talking Love on 23 September, while visual artist and writer Amanda Thomson will be discussing the importance of Place in Scottish literature with poet and filmmaker Roseanne Watt on 21 October. The season comes to a close on 30 November with a discussion of Big Ideas in relation to Scotland with professor David Farrier sitting down with climate activist and author Jessica Gaitán Johannesson.

Tickets for the second season of Figures of Speech will go on sale later in the year

June 2022 – Feature

Future: Russell Jones & T.L. Huchu The final event in the first season of Figure of Speech takes audiences to the future. Poet Russell Jones and author T.L. Huchu will be exploring how Scottish writing on the future has exemplified both the hopeful optimism and wry pessimism of our nation. They’ll be delving into utopias, dystopias and heterotopias from some of Scotland’s most loved sci-fi stories, from Iain M. Banks’ the Culture series to Josie Giles’s Deep Wheel Orcadia.

THE SKINNY

Ascension Time Following the release of her long-awaited debut album and ahead of making a return to Glasgow’s Riverside Festival, we catch up with Australian-born DJ and producer HAAi

Clubs

Interview: Jo Dargie

T

eneil Throssell, aka HAAi, is now very much a household name in dance music. The Australian-born artist has made her mark by DJing in primetime slots at some of the biggest clubs and festivals across the world, and with a string of releases on her own label, Coconut Beats, and Mute Records.

Having just released her debut album, Baby, We’re Ascending, and with an upcoming set at Glasgow’s Riverside Festival this month, we catch up with Throssell to discuss the making of the album, collaboration, and introducing green riders.

Tell us about the making of Baby, We’re Ascending.

It came into its own rather than me going in with a vision, which is a common theme in my creative process. I’d been chipping away at what I knew were album tracks then, lo and behold, the world sort of fell apart due to the pandemic and I had a lot more time on my hands. I was learning a lot about myself during that time so, in some ways, it became quite a self-reflective body of work.

June 2022 – Feature

Photo: Imogene Barron

Renowned producer Jon Hopkins features on the title track.

What sparked this collaboration?

Jon and I have been friends for years so this track came about really organically. Mute [Records] were excited about me singing on something and Daniel Miller really gave me the confidence to explore my own vocals. Three quarters of the way through Baby, We’re Ascending, I hit a brick wall. I shared a snippet on my Instagram story and Jon instantly messaged me. I explained that I was in a bit of a funk, and he asked if I’d be up for collaborating on it with him. It was as simple as that. We’re so proud of what we’ve created. Our bond feels stronger and it’s certainly not the last time we’ll work together.

HAAi

How did you come to collaborate with spoken word artist Kai-,Isaiah Jamal on Human Sound? What message do you take from their monologue?

They used to live downstairs from me so we’d often bump into each other and chat about music. I knew that I wanted to have them on the album but I didn’t have the confidence to approach that kind of thing. One day Kai asked how I’d feel about us working on some music together.

Coincidentally I already had a track, and Human Sound was born.

There’s an obvious message about the emotions you feel when you’re in a club and how important that is to some people’s wellbeing. Closing your eyes and being on the dancefloor; escapism in some ways. I could be projecting what our previous conversations were, but I also felt like there was an undercurrent nodding to the white-washing in techno.

Have you had the chance to play some of the tracks live and what have the crowd reactions been like?

I haven’t played many of them. I’ve been with Jon a few times when he’s played Baby, We’re Ascending. I’ve had this conversation before with friends, but what do you do when your own vocal comes on in your track that you’re DJing – mime along?

From the nice messages I’ve been getting since Baby, We’re Ascending was released, I feel like I will play it more confidently in a club… and won’t feel like such a twat.

Are you excited to return to Scotland for Riverside Festival’s Saturday lineup curated by Shoot Your Shot?

It’s my second time playing Riverside and I’m really excited for this one because it’s more of a queer party with a bunch of friends.

I love partying with the Scots! From the moment that people go out until the moment that they go home they give it their all. It’s unparalleled!

"The Blessed Madonna and Richie Hawtin took a chance on me when I was starting out so it’s important for me to do the same for others" Teneil Throssell

Can you tell us about how you’ve introduced green riders?

It’s something that’s really important to me. I started with basics like having no plastic in the booth and using trains where possible. I’m working on a project with Potato Head Beach Club in Bali on finding ways to repurpose our industry waste into DJ products.

We’re making DJ bags out of billboard posters and looking into repurposing festival plastic waste to make headphones.

Years from now, what legacy do you hope to have left on the music industry?

I believe that as soon as you have a platform to be able to make any kind of positive change, you’re duty-bound to use it. People such as The Blessed Madonna and Richie Hawtin took a real chance on me when I was just starting out so it’s important for me to do the same for others. I just hope that it has a knock-on effect in paying it forward and making our whole industry as inclusive as possible.

Baby We’re Ascending is out now, via Mute Record HAAi plays Riverside Festival, Glasgow, 4 Jun

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THE SKINNY

June 2022

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THE SKINNY

Comedy

Championing Working Class Comedy With preparations for this year’s Fringe well underway and spiralling costs a focal point for many, we talk to Best in Class about creating opportunity for working-class comedians Interview: Emma Sullivan

Photo: Andy Hollingworth

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Image: courtesy of the BBC

June 2022 – Feature

Photo: Andy Hollingworth

Tom Mayhew

– “you’ve spent so much and still, you need to spend more.” Thinking of quitting comedy altogether, when Davies created Best in Class the following year, it was hugely encouraging – a sense that “there is a place for us here, we are allowed to play in Kathryn Mather this playground.”

For Kathryn Mather, also on the 2018 line-up, it was “the only time before and since I’ve been able to consider doing the Fringe,” and like Mayhew she loved the solidarity of it – “working together on a common cause” as well as the relief of returning home “not having haemorrhaged money.” It’s the same for William Stone, who did the show in 2019, and relished feeling part of a graduating year; seeing it as a worker’s co-op version of Footlights, or an old boy’s network for working class comics.

Of this year’s cohort, Anna Thomas, who won the 2021 BBC New Comedy Award, says that even with that prestigious win behind her, “going to the Fringe was a pipe dream… comedians talk about the debt you get into, but at this stage the bank wouldn’t even give me a loan – maybe in te years, if I save up.” Jed Salisbury picks up on the camaraderie of the project: “Edinburgh is daunting and doing it as a collective feels safer.” Getting a spot on the line-up is an accolade he’s deeply proud of, and says, “being a working-class comic, coming from the background I do… I wear it as a badge of honour.” Lovdev Barpaga is similarly proud – he’s been on Fringe line-ups before, but this is different: “I really admire that Siân’s created this whole thing on her own and it’s all for other people – it makes me want to do it even more.”

With a history of sell-out shows and strong sales already this year, the project is clearly thriving, and donations continue to come in from within the industry (Turtle Canyon Comedy, Country Mile Productions, Objectively Funny and Hat Trick for Photo: Adrian Tauss at Swiss Chocolate Pictures

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or working class comics in particular, the financial barriers to participation in the Edinburgh Fringe are a real, timely issue. Not only central to a comedy career path, the Fringe is vital in terms of craft, offering the opportunity for comics to hone their act over a sustained period of time, compared with a short spot at a regular comedy club. Siân Davies’ Best in Class initiative, a showcase of working-class comics, is one imaginative response to the problem – although, as Davies says, it’s only “a Band-Aid”, and not the structural change that’s so urgently needed.

Davies’ motivation for action stems from her own painful experience. After a successful audition for one of the big showcases in 2018, she was ordered to pay £1,800 to secure her place, but when a friend started Siân Davies crowdfunding the fee, Davies was abruptly dismissed from the gig – the implication being that revealing the financials too explicitly was in some way grubby, or bad form. At first devastated at the thought that she’d blown her chances, Davies decided to create what was noticeably missing: a genuinely transparent showcase (both crowdfunded and profit-sharing) for acts who would otherwise be unable to afford the Fringe.

If showcase fees are one aspect of the Fringe costs often swept under the carpet, PR is another. As Davies says, “it’s far from a meritocracy” when some acts can afford to throw thousands at increasing their visibility; particularly important given the sheer quantity of shows. Audiences tend to be oblivious to the hidden costs that determine success, so Tom Mayhew, and alumnus of Best in Class 2018, is dogged in communicating just how prohibitive they are.

He brought his debut show to the Fringe in 2017; costing 70% of his yearly income and all his annual leave. It then lost him money. People were puzzled that he hadn’t spent anything on PR, oblivious to the fact that he simply couldn’t afford to

Anna Thomas

THE SKINNY

Photo: Glee by Peter Medlicott

William Stone

Photo: Anete Sooda

Donate to Best in Class at gofundme.com/f/best-in-class-house-of-class Siân Davies: About Time, 5.40pm, Gilded Balloon Turret, 3-28 Aug, £8-13 Best in Class, 8.45pm, Laughing Horse @ Counting House Lounge, 4-28 Aug, Pay What You Can £5-12. Full line-up at bestinclass.org.uk

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June 2022 – Feature

Photo: Rebecca Need Menear

Tamsyn Kelly

issues more broadly.

Both Kelly and Thomas are optimistic that Tamsyn Kelly things are changing, citing the recent BAFTA wins for Big Zuu (Big Zuu’s Big Eats), Kayleigh Llewellyn (In My Skin) and Sophie Willan (Alma’s Not Normal), as evidence that working class representation is improving. Thomas is especially delighted by the inspiration offered by these new role models, having felt the lack of it when she was growing up. Thomas says: “You simply don’t expect more because you don’t see it. Seeing Sophie Willan talking about living with her gran so openly – I hope loads of working-class children see that.”

If there was greater interest in investing in Best in Class, though, Maher is dubious: “Siân’s done a beautiful thing and in some ways it would be sad to see it taken over, and made into something it isn’t.”

Mayhew is frustrated that there are so many potential avenues for supporting working-class talent (an award for best ‘independent’ show to applaud those without access to PR, as just one example) but he’s also quick to celebrate organisations who demonstrate that it is possible to do things differently, mentioning The Stand and Monkey Barrel as two venues whose deals make it harder for acts to lose money.

Davies herself is Jed Salisbury characteristically indefatigable. She’s already looking forward to getting out there: introducing the acts, having conversations, “changing minds and winning hearts”, showing audiences that while a working-class line-up is “just as varied and nuanced as anything else at the Fringe”, tangible support is vital for these comics to survive in the industry.

Photo: Jiksaw Media

Photo: Matt Crockett

instance, among the production companies, Lovdev Barpaga and individual donations from Darren Harriott and Frankie Boyle). This year also sees an additional accommodation bursary partly funded by a Fringe recovery grant, and there’s some chat, too, about a benefit gig at one of the big venues, so the initiative is being recognised. But there’s seemingly little appetite for any large-scale assistance or more formal intervention, despite the increasingly steep costs facing performers. Many of the Best in Class alumni felt that the Fringe was reaching a tipping point. Stone says the fear is that it’ll “become a totally different festival – that’s just for people who are really established.”

Rising accommodation and travel costs also affect audiences, and Hannah Platt, who was part of the showcase in 2019, says bluntly, “it’s just going to be wealthy performers performing to wealthy audiences”; a “purely middleclass arts festival.” Platt also makes the point that increasingly homogenous audiences can impact the success of those comics who address working class issues. “I’m punching up and they’re going to feel punched in the face... they’re not going to be up for that.” Salisbury suggests that his comedy becomes less believable Hannah Platt or “less authentic” when it’s a purely middle-class crowd, when in actuality, “No, this is what it’s like.” Tamsyn Kelly, of this year’s line-up, says middle-class audiences can find material about her “benefits class” experiences “confronting”, and wearying to have to do the work of unpacking it all. Kelly says, “this is just my life – it’s their issue: they need to manage their defensiveness, and recognise their own privilege. As a culture, we’re supposed to be on a journey about recognising privilege: why does it become so problematic when it’s about class?”

Given this defensiveness, articulating the experiences that define working-class life is clearly stressful – and many worry about being seen as complaining or rocking the boat. However, it’s evidently not a level playing field when there’s no financial safety net and none of the more intangible benefits of privilege (networking opportunities, confidence, a general sense of entitlement). As Platt says, “failures hit harder when you’re working class – all that money, all that time wasted. If you’ve got money behind you, you can bounce back easier.”

Perhaps though, despite the problems with the Fringe context, there is an increasing sense of confidence in articulating these

Comedy

“As a culture, we’re supposed to be on a journey about recognising privilege: why does it become so problematic when it’s about class?”

THE SKINNY

Everyone In We talk to Vicky Spratt about her eye-opening new book on tenancy in Britain’s housing emergency

June 2022 – Feature

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othing holds society together or tears it apart like housing,” says Vicky Spratt, author of Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain’s Housing Emergency. She has been writing about housing for a decade, and still the numbers have the power to shock her. Across the UK there are 22 million adults and children without a safe or secure home. In the first few months of 2021, an average of 400 households were evicted every day in England. “I fear we become desensitised to the numbers.”

What she really wanted to do with Tenants is to “humanise the statistics. To show the reader behind the numbers.” It examines the story of renting, from when Britain built the first council houses to when Thatcher’s government sold off millions of them. It examines the numerous politicians and their policies that have gradually destroyed the chance for people to live in a safe home. And importantly, it examines the psychological effect that renting, being evicted, and living in unsuitable or temporary accommodation can have on people.

“Homelessness, eviction, the financial stress of not being able to pay your rent – it’s really important to give it a language which is not just, ‘this is bad for people’s mental health’,” continues Spratt, noting she wanted to “help people understand what is too often dismissed as a lesser symptom of housing.

Losing your home is a traumatic experience and it can send you into a spiral and its effects can last for years.”

Spratt delves into the complete experience of renting by interviewing several people in a range of situations. A single man over 60 who is being evicted, a family with young children who simply can’t afford the rising rent, a single mother who is forced into temporary accommodation, a woman in the shockingly insecure accommodation called guardianships (whose contracts are so disturbing they are told not to talk to the press). Each story represents thousands, often millions, of people like them.

Spratt was keen to “let the stories breathe a bit more and give the people I meet day in and day out the space they deserve. You are actually able to see the bigger picture and that was really important to me.”

That picture is not good. It is estimated that poor housing could be costing the NHS £1.4 billion a year.

The charity Shelter estimates that the UK needs 3.1 million new social and affordable homes to help those trapped by the high cost of rent.

“The government [in Scotland] recognises that housing and a home is an important piece of people’s lives.”

Yes, she says, “there is still homelessness, rents are still going up, houses can be unaffordable, but you have rent pressure zones, longer tenancies.

None of that has insulated the Scottish people from the effects of Britain’s overheated housing market.

But at least there are some measures in place.

And the will to keep looking at it.”

Scotland is also leading the way with a scheme called ‘Housing First’, which was conceived as a solution to homelessness. It’s a simple idea: instead of telling someone who is rough sleeping to, for example, get a job to access support, they are given a house first. In the first two years of the project, 82% of people stayed in the homes they were given. Spratt notes that, “nobody can live a stable and fulfilling life without housing security.”

So, is there hope? When the pandemic started, things changed very quickly. Homeless people were given accommodation in a scheme called ‘Everyone In’ where they could self-isolate, there were mortgage holidays for homeowners and all evictions were halted. But mostly, private renters were overlooked.

“That safety net that had been so carefully constructed in the 20th century to protect people, and social housing was a huge part of that, had been so badly undone that we weren’t prepared when something huge happened. And we’re still not properly protecting people now.” During COVID, Spratt talks about how our homes were initially our best form of defence. But things did happen and they happened quickly. “For the first time since the Second World War, what the government did directly impacted the lives of everybody – not just select groups.”

Tenants are faced with rising rents, housing which damages their health, and the constant threat of evictions.Spratt states: "Everyone needs to understand the structure of entrenched unfairness within which people [who are renting] are struggling.

“Housing impacts everyone and everything, regardless of where you are in the ladder or the market, although I don’t like those metaphors as they obscure what we are really talking about – we’re talking about homes, not ladders and markets.”

Tenants themselves can read this as “there are people in the private rental sector who don’t know what rights they have.” A copy should be handed to the “people who make decisions about policy” and to anyone who thinks that young people can’t buy homes as they “don’t work hard enough” – just read this.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency is published by Profile Books, out now, £20 profilebooks.com/work/tenants

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Photo: Poppy Thorpe

Books

Interview: Rebecca Smith

Vicky Spratt

THE SKINNY

Mock Trial We meet Secure Scotland’s Luke Padfield and Jessica Wheeler to learn more about their moot debating the environmental ethics of wool scouring in the textiles industry Interview: Jodie Leith

The Skinny: What made you focus your first moot on the issue of wool scouring?

Padfield: I went on a journey to a tweed mill, following on from doing sewing during lockdown, and got chatting with one of the weavers there.

He mentioned lanolin and wool scouring and I didn’t know anything about it. I just sort of latched on to that part of the process because we had been talking about human rights, the environment, and ecological security. I brought that back to Secure Scotland who started talking a little bit about it and learning more about the process.

What issues do you expect the moot to bring up?

Padfield: It’s a good hanger to illustrate some of the problems or issues that crop up with human rights, environmental rights, and environmental law in Scotland. There has been loads of talk that we should have an environmental court in Scotland. The idea to do the moot was to talk about some of the issues that might come up that we’re not necessarily talking about at the moment, because they aren’t getting to court yet.

John Bett

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Luke Padfield being said on different levels on issues that you care about. It’s a chance to review your own relationship with the law in relation to the environment. If you feel let down by the law, then this might restore your faith in it. Whereas if you’re one of the faithful then it might make you think twice.

It’s about getting a better understanding of what the law says in these areas, and sort of changing expectations.

What do you hope the moot brings?

Wheeler: This is the first moot I’ve done, so I’m really excited about participating. I think it’s a really good way of approaching the issue because it’s not real, but it’s got the potential to really influence the way we are moving forward and what we think of as important. Giving other things a voice and giving the environment a voice.

Padfield: It's just about creating a sense of momentum and that’s what I hope it does. The last two moots I’ve experienced after the debate and the judge has announced the decision, there’s a big conversation that goes on and that’s the part that I’m really looking forward to. That’s the part I think most people get a lot out of.

Wheeler: It is really interactive in that sense.

You are able to participate and you’re not sitting watching a play unfold before you. After COP26, I think this is a really valuable thing to be doing because it’s so easy to have all that bluster and then it gets forgotten and we move on to the next thing. I think people do want to feel they can have an influence on the way we move forward in what we are doing with the environment and how we can help to support it.

The Green Court: Bah Bah Black Sheep, Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh 2 Jun, 6pm Follow Secure Scotland on their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, website for further updates securescotland.scot

June 2022 – Feature

Image courtesy of Secure Scotland

What would you say to people who are interested in participating in or attending the moot? Is it important for the public outside of Secure Scotland to get involved?

Wheeler: Yes! It’s a very wide conversation that we’re trying to have through Secure Scotland, though our main purpose is to have conversations about issues that would help to support Scotland to be safer place to live, like food security and clean water and air. I think it’s really interesting when you get people involved from other disciplines in that and a part of the conversation.

Padfield: It’s an opportunity to bring people together from different walks of life and try and translate some of the stuff – especially the legal language – so people can understand what’s

Theatre

W

ool scouring, the process by which ‘raw’ wool is cleansed in order to produce usable wool, is a highly multifaceted practice due to its environmental impact. A study in Spain found that for every kilogram of ‘clean wool’ produced by aqueous cleaning, around 17 litres of polluted effluent were produced. (LIFE European Commission, 2016). Given wool’s centrality to Scotland’s textiles industry, environmental organisation Secure Scotland want to debate the issues around scouring, and plan to do so by holding a mock judicial trial, known as a moot, on Thursday 2 June in the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh.

The proposed ‘Green Court’, the first of its kind held by the organisation, will see the ‘prosecution’ and ‘defence’ present cases for and against the activity of wool scouring by calling witnesses, citing evidence, and later opening the discussion to the audience. The court will also be overseen by a judge, a role held by actor John Bett, a member of the celebrated 7:84 theatre troupe, and original performer of The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil. The event will be open to the public alongside an invited audience composed of relevant political and environmental influencers. The Skinny speaks with Luke Padfield and Jessica Wheeler, associates of Secure Scotland, about the event.

“If you feel let down by the law, then this might restore your faith in it. Whereas if you’re one of the faithful then it might make you think twice”

June 2022 – Feature

Books

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Image: Both images courtesy Studio Walac

Local Heroes

C.A. Walac

C.A. Walac

Domestic Abstraction

This month Local Heroes invites design writer Alyn Griffiths to introduce Flat Versions, the latest work by artist and designer C.A. Walac at Leith'sCustom Lane

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not immediately obvious. This idea of creating furniture from flat elements informed the project’s title, which references the word used in Scotland for an apartment – the setting Walac sees as being most suitable for these pieces.

The furniture’s forms and functions evolve during the design process, as Walac intuitively combines the shapes in three dimensions. A further element of chance is introduced as she makes use of the negative areas and offcuts produced by removing shapes from wooden sheets. “I have a preconceived idea on the computer but it always changes as I assemble the components,” Walac points out. “This way I always have an element of surprise and it gives me flexibility as I work in the studio.”

The seemingly random shapes are informed by a wide range of references, including modern art, Victorian curiosities, witchcraft, topiary, Art Nouveau architecture and the patterns made by fog in the Scottish countryside. Walac creates compositions she finds visually pleasing before introducing meaning and names to the works, such as Reach for the Moon and An Arm Around the Legs. Some of the shapes from the collages reappear in the functional objects, which are intended as the antithesis of contemporary high-street furniture.

“I really try to fight the generic aesthetic of mass production which I find insanely boring,” she adds.

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“I really try to fight the generic aesthetic of mass production which I find insanely boring” C.A. Walac Flat Versions presents an insight into Walac’s mind and methods, which focus on finding joy in randomness. She tries to distance herself from the idea of ‘design’, which fails to capture the artistic approach that informs her projects. With this exhibition, Walac says she hopes to provoke a conversation about how to create furniture and interiors that feel more special and unique. “I think we can sum it up as design that creates an atmosphere,” she concludes.

Flat Versions, Custom Lane, Edinburgh, until 5 Jun, free @studio.walac @custom_lane

June 2022 – Feature

he world of French-born, Scotland-based artist and designer C.A. Walac is filled with wonder, surrealism and uncanny practicalities. In it, abstract organic shapes combine to take on meanings or functions that elevate otherwise mundane moments in everyday life. For her solo exhibition at Custom Lane, titled Flat Versions, Walac chose to explore the potential of under-appreciated domestic spaces including entryways and corridors. The artist has created a range of collages to enliven these interstitial areas, along with furniture that provides useful surfaces on which to sit, hang a coat or place your keys.

The artworks start out as shapes drawn on the computer or as hand-cut pieces of card that Walac uses to compile simple black-and-white collages. She says the digital drawings, in particular, lack any sense of scale until they are brought into the physical world, at which point they could be cut from any material and used to create anything from collages to furniture or even architecture. “I have a sense of a universe I would like to inhabit and it can take many forms,” the artist explains. “The outcomes can be very fluid, ranging from collages to sculpture, furniture, pastries and fashion. As long as it can be cut, it can happen.”

Among the pieces included in the Flat Versions collection are shelves, coat racks, side tables and a chair. Each object incorporates useful and versatile surfaces, although the functions are

THE SKINNY

Friendships in Flux Friendships are complicated – they form, fall apart, and come together again. One writer considers navigating these changes

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’m maybe 14-years-old, sitting in the passenger seat of my dad’s silver Honda Accord. Maybe one of my brothers was quietly sitting in the back of the car, maybe it was just my dad and me, I can’t quite remember.

I’m telling him how I can feel my oldest friend and I drifting apart. I can feel it happening slowly and steadily. She’s slipping away and because I don’t know why, I don’t know how to stop her. I don’t want to lose her. I’ve known her since I’ve known myself; I knew her before I knew myself.

My dad’s gently explaining to me that sometimes you can’t stop a friendship from drifting. The love and the care is still there but what you represent to them in that moment, because of what they’re navigating in their own life, means they may push you away.

I’m looking out the window now, at the Meadows, watching the sun set over university students lounging on the grass.

“Tom-Tom, we don’t have much family here, your friends are your family,” he tells me. I’m still looking out of the window, but I feel him. There’s that mixture of his own hurt and sorrow that as

each year passes it becomes harder to go back, left with no choice but to make the most of what we have and to hold it, tightly.

But families are complicated. Nobody asks to be born, and we don’t choose where, or to whom.

We’re bonded by genetics, told to love rather than taught. It is a love that isn’t created and nourished through mutual feelings between us but forced upon us because of who we are in relation to each other. It is a love further cemented by the images telling us, shouting at us about how our multiple roles should be played – eldest daughter, big sister, little sister, eldest niece, my list goes on.

As a teenager and into my early 20s, I struggled with my identity, and so I held on to my friends. We may not have shared genetics; in fact, ours couldn’t be further away from each other. But it’s not just genetics families share: it’s time too.

That’s what I clung to. Time became a badge of honour, linked to my identity, the greatest display of my loyalty and empathy; we’ve been friends for – insert number – years. So, we’re family.

And then, after 25 years, I moved myself out of my comfort zone, to a new city with a

June 2022 – Feature

Intersections

Words: Tomiwa Folorunso Illustration: Amy Lauren

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“Time became a badge of honour, linked to my identity, the greatest display of my loyalty and empathy; we’ve been friends for – insert number – years.

So, we’re family” different time zone and two different languages. I had to make new friends. In family relationships you create your boundaries during the relationship, but they should be part of the foundation. It can be difficult to establish these boundaries and leave room for growth in already established relationships. So, when you have an opportunity to begin afresh, it’s kind of exciting.

What kind of friend am I and what kind of friend do I want to be? What am I willing to give and not to give? What do I need, what does this person need, and can I provide that?

In the last 18 months I’ve made new friends, who I thought would become family, who are no longer friends. Maybe they didn’t respect my boundaries; perhaps our values were in opposition; maybe we realised that we move through the world too differently and that the friendship simply couldn’t continue. Whatever the reason, it’s OK. I know my boundaries, they’re an extension of me.

Some of them change as I do, some of them do not. But I won’t allow them to be disrespected.

It’s led me to reflect on the friendships that I’ve held on to because of time. They aren’t perfect. They don’t align with all my values, my thoughts, or ways of life – but should they?

Nothing is perfect but am I lying to myself that these relationships work simply because of the time we’ve shared? And yet my dad’s words still echo in my head whenever I try to slip away.

That friend, the one who I felt was slipping away from me at 14 – she did slip. We both drifted from each other. Then we came back together again, on our own terms, like no time had passed between us even though we were older and different, we found our flow. She feels like home, she is my family. I’m lucky to be able to call her my oldest friend, so maybe time does count for something...

THE SKINNY

Reigning in Scotland With the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee coming up, we talk to young Scots about abolishing the monarchy, Scottish independence, and symbols of the state Words: Eilidh Akilade Illustration: Heedayah Lockman

make ends meet.” The event only further highlights Tory Britain’s ever widening wealth gap. Rosie echoes these concerns, noting the class hierarchy the institution perpetuates.

“It’s dystopian. It feels very Hunger Games to me, that they’re willing to put that display of wealth so publicly on show when there’s so many people suffering,” Rebecca continues. Coming of age alongside the surge in the 2010s teen dystopian genre, it’s unsurprising that Rebecca draws these parallels. Right now, however, there seems little sign of anything close to the genre’s characteristic dramatic uprisings.

“It’s a very long process to get rid of a head of state. I don’t imagine it happening anytime soon,” says Rosie. While Barbados removed the Queen as head of state in 2021 and Jamaica has recently begun the process, it looks unlikely in the UK. Only earlier this year, the SNP Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, stated that the Queen would remain head of state in an independent Scotland.

Like many young people in Scotland, Rebecca and Rosie are in favour of independence; for both of them, this remains true regardless of the Queen’s position. However, independence ought to bring certain changes with it. “If the Queen was to be head of state in an independent Scotland,” says Rebecca, “I would absolutely expect there to be a complete strip back of the

Rebecca, 21 amount of money that they take from the general public for their own gain.”

The issue transcends finances: it’s also a matter of ideology. “I don’t think we need a queen,” Rebecca continues. “Scotland doesn’t need to hold on to any British symbols that are just that at the end of the day – symbols of wealth and status, flaunted in the face of a struggling general public.”

This heavy symbol – of corruption, colonial power, and mass wealth – is looking increasingly unappealing to Scotland’s young people. But Scotland’s past is a partially British past; a British symbol is, in many ways, a Scottish one. Letting go of the ideological weight of that symbol is complex.

Detaching from the union is certainly a lot more straightforward when little thought is spared for the preservation of some grand legacy. “I think it becomes easier to be pro-independence if you don’t have that feeling towards the idea of the ‘Queen of Great Britain’,” says Rosie.

“I don’t really feel particularly nostalgic towards that idea at all.” Seemingly, the monarchy already feels somewhat past tense.

Instead, Scotland’s young people are looking toward the country’s future.

While the Platinum Jubilee may be celebrated with a union-jacked long weekend, young Scots will largely be opting out of the celebrations and all that they represent.

June 2022 – Feature

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“It’s dystopian [...] that they’re willing to put that display of wealth so publicly on show when there’s so many people suffering.”

Intersections

T

he PVC bunting seems sweaty under the June sun; the red, white, and blue icing of each celebratory cupcake sinks into the too-sweet sponge; condiments and liquors have been temporarily renamed with monarchy-inspired puns. There is something suffocating about the inescapability of the Platinum Jubilee.

It feels naïve to suggest that 2012, the year of the Diamond Jubilee, was a simpler time; but, frankly, for much of Scotland’s gen Z, it really was.

Rebecca, 21, from Glasgow, was 11 at the time and spent the run up to the big day completing a Jubilee-inspired baking badge for Girlguiding, thinking little of it. The whole thing felt fairly non-monumental: “At the time, I remember thinking, ‘This is good fun – I don’t really know who the monarchy are but at least it’s getting me a day off school and free cakes.’”

For some, it was even less significant. “I don’t remember,” says Rosie, 22, from Perth. “I don’t remember because we would never talk about it or celebrate it.” Growing up, Rosie’s family were never fans of the monarchy. It’s not an uncommon feeling in Scotland and it’s only persisted in recent years: a recent poll by British Future found that only 45% in Scotland reported they wanted to keep the monarchy. In the last decade or so, the monarchy has featured heavily within the press: two royal weddings, several royal births, a sexual assault trial, and the stepping down of senior royals all while the family’s colonial ties only rust the crown further. There’s a feeling that their reign may no longer be so steady. “I couldn’t care less about the Jubilee. I’ve got no attachment to it whatsoever,” says Rosie.

“Some people are getting a day off – which is nice.”

Much of this collective apathy is rooted in the specific crises of our times. Rebecca now feels fairly unsupportive of the monarchy and the massive expense that is the Diamond Jubilee only furthers these feelings. “It’s an incredible waste of money given we’re in a cost of living crisis and coming out of a pandemic,” says Rebecca. She and many of her loved ones are currently on minimum wage: “We’re all working our arses off just to

Marchw 2020

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THE SKINNY

Album of the Month

Album of the month Soccer Mommy — Sometimes, Forever Released 24 June

by Lorna Vista rrrrr Listen to: Bones, Shotgun, Still

captured in photographic remarks throughout, from comparisons to Sylvia Plath on the ominous Darkness Forever, to being utterly ‘worn down from everything’ and longing to run away and ‘drive out where the sun shines’ on country-laced Feel It All the Time.

Arguably, Allison’s most audacious moment comes on Unholy Affliction, an understated, unsettling post-rock confession on the frailty of careerism that’s dark, doom-ridden, and unlike anything she has penned before. In microcosm, the track is a perfect representation of Sometimes, Forever’s subtle success, building on her trademark shimmering pop-rock and adding Lopatin’s wild, rocket-fuelling electronics, shooting her sound to exciting, cosmic heights.

On the whole, each track exudes its own disposition euphoniously. Her staple shimmering, shoegaze sensibilities (Bones, Shotgun) ooze in and out of new-sounding grungy, perturbing post-rock (Darkness Forever, Following Eyes), while moments of sonic audacity (Unholy Affliction) collide with heartwrenching confessions (Still) to complete what might be Soccer Mommy’s most dynamic and daring release to date. Few artists can toe the line between melancholy and miracle like Allison, making Sometimes, Forever a record worthy of accolades for some time, perhaps even forever. [Dylan Tuck]

Read more online: theskinny.co.uk/music/reviews/albums

Kelly Lee Owens LP.8

RRrrr “sounds unfinished”

Purity Ring graves

RRRrr “play it safe”

Foals Life Is Yours

RRRRr “infectiously upbeat” — 67 —

Automatic Excess

RRrrr “scholars of sound”

June 2022 — Review

Following on from the spectacular color theory was never going to be easy, and yet, Sophie Allison’s adventurous third album as Soccer Mommy delivers another sublimely unpredictable rollercoaster ride replete with remarkable signs of growth, nuance and bravery.

Sometimes, Forever sees Allison’s enchanting lo-fi pop-rock riffery slot seamlessly alongside Daniel Lopatin’s (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) eccentric, agitative production – a collaboration that, while contrasting on paper, in action blossoms beautifully across 11 magical and discomposing tracks. The concept of contradictions is integral throughout as crushingly dark lyricism and doleful vocal delivery weds mesmerising musicianship. Here the queen of bedroom pop cracks open her window and peers at the stars on ethereal tracks newdemo and With U, where Lopatin’s sparkling influence is as clear as the night’s sky.

Ever the piercingly poignant lyricist, Allison weaves through warming melodies and undercuts them with a staunch sense of sadness and bleak, sometimes grisly imagery. ‘I cut a piece out of my side, I felt my heart go skydiving / It got me high for a little while, I don’t know what I was thinking’, she sighs on the stunningly confessional closer Still, a track that captures both the hurting artist and her cathartic release. Allison’s honesty about her all-time high anxiety levels post-color theory is

Albums

THE SKINNY

Angel Olsen Big Time Jagjaguwar, 3 Jun

rrrrr

June 2022 — Review

Listen to: Big Time, Right Now, This Is How It Works

Hatis Noit Aura Erased Tapes, 24 Jun rrrrr Listen to: Jomon, Inori, Himbrimi

Angel Olsen’s sixth full-length record might be one of the most aptly-titled of recent years. Big Time thematically chronicles a period of considerable transition in her personal life and feels as if it might represent her break into the big time; regardless of whether it’s trading in drama or intimacy, it’s her most accessible work to date.

Those familiar with the eccentric stylistic slalom of Olsen’s third album, My Woman, will know how it sounds when she tilts towards Laurel Canyon-inspired alt-country there were similar flashes of on 2017’s Phases and 2020’s Whole New Mess. On Big Time, she takes that rustic inclination to its natural conclusion, from the gorgeous, wistful longing of All the Good Times to the woozy, doo-wop-inflected Ghost On, via the haunting Through the Fires and folk-pop breeze of the title track.

Long time fans will know that she’s at her most potent when she aims for the epic, and the album’s centrepiece comprises Right Now and This Is How It Works, both of which are gradually unfolding epics.

Big Time is a strong argument for Olsen being her generation’s finest songwriter; perhaps now, the rest of the world will recognise that, too.

[Joe Goggins] Hatis Noit’s debut album Aura is teething, plaintive, long-anticipated and devoted to performance. It builds on her 2018 EP Illogical Dance with a clarity of purpose. It refines her numerous curiosities, her vocal styles. All takes were recorded in an eight-hour stint in Berlin before the pandemic, and between various lockdowns, producer Robert Raths had the idea to reamplify the vocals in a London church, adding a spacious, unifying reverb throughout.

Only one track, Inori, includes sounds not produced from Noit’s voice and Aura, altogether, demonstrates her dynamic, growing range; it’s the throat that whirls, fades, throbs and lives on the eerie limits of the wordless.

We are invited into its misty, enveloping crystalline landscapes with the rhythmic loops in Himbrimi, the layered sirens in Jomon and the pop lullaby refrain of Inori. Borrowing all at once from Gregorian chanting and Gagaku, it reminds us that the voice, our bodies, act as junctures of past and present. Where this pops is in the lament: ‘Words cannot describe everything we feel’. This drives Aura’s ability to evoke, communicate and flow without lyrical, or semantic, underpinning. This is a stunning vocal experiment, one that constructs immaculate, dreamt and abundant worlds. [Tommy Pearson]

Vieux Farka Touré Les Racines World Circuit, 10 Jun rrrrr Listen to: Gabou Ni Tie, Adou, L’Âme

Horsegirl Versions of Modern Performance Matador, 3 Jun rrrrr Listen to: Bog Bog 1, Option 8, Billy

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After distinguishing himself from his father, the late Ali Farka Touré, on Les Racines Vieux Farka Touré returns to his roots and explores the traditional so-called desert blues of Northern Mali. The title of Vieux Farka Touré’s latest album translates as ‘the roots’, reinstating his own relationship with the Songhai music of Northern Mali.

The album breathes in the hot sun and treads delicately with opener Gabou Ni Tie, which features Amadou Bagayoko from Amadou & Mariam on guitar. This track takes on the journey of rejecting traditional education and echoes the importance of preserving traditional values with a uniting ensemble of ‘Iwoimai ni ma gabou ni tie woga’.

Les Racines teases the mind through its deep beats and hypnotising guitar picking; it’s a full circle of personal exploration, where origins are found the further you delve into the tracks’ layers. With songs like Adou and L’Âme tributing to Vieux’s own father and son, the album becomes not only an ode to familial connections but a marrying of heritage and community – what it means to belong. Les Racines is a personal project that reinstates Touré's own identity and unique skill, while thanking the roots that he grew from. [Maeve Hannigan] The two college freshmen and a high school senior of Horsegirl weren’t even born when you were idolising your favourite now-legendary indie rock band, but they get them way better than you ever did. Over the course of their unabashedly DIYsounding debut, these songs walk the same line of art rock as Goo and Dirty-era Sonic Youth.

Lo-fi pop-leaning jams are interspersed with experimental, borderline ambient passages. Perhaps most confounding is how fun that can be. Horsegirl understand that Kim Gordon and Kurt Cobain (and all of those stars’ heroes) could write with tongues firmly in cheek – most contemporary versions of this music dispense with that altogether in favour of humourless posturing. This is most evident in their inversion of the classic Gang of Four lyric – ‘Sometimes I’m thinking that I lust you, but I know it’s only love’ – of which they manage to stick the landing.

Like The Linda Lindas, Horsegirl are a band of young women reimagining the guitar music of the late 80s and early 90s in their own, very modern image, channeling all the humour and lacking the conceitedness that retellings of those bands’ stories have all but forgotten.

[Tony Inglis]

THE SKINNY

Listen to: Soak Me, Every Swimming Pool Runs to the Sea

Listen to: Photograph, Pop Song, Herem

Listen to: Woman (feat. ANOHNI), Buddy X (feat. Greentea Peng)

Hercules & Love Affair In Amber Skint/BMG, 17 Jun rrrrr Listen to: Grace, One

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“I could not in good conscience make something comfortable,” says Andy Butler in the press release for In Amber, his first album as Hercules & Love Affair in five years. It makes sense then that it’s an album utterly riddled with discomfort. For the most part, In Amber is a harsh listen; it’s sparse, jarring and often feels quite confused. On it, Butler reunites with past collaborator ANOHNI, and he credits her involvement as crucial to the making of the album.

It gets off to a strong start, as lead single Grace sets out the album’s gothic leanings immediately, before veering into the dancefloorready One. But from then on it all gets a bit odd. Christian Prayers and Killing His Family find Butler wailing despairingly, and it’s expectedly unpleasant, while You’ve Won This War and The Eyes of the Father are disturbingly hypnotic. In amongst all the heaviness, there are moments of reprieve on Dissociation and Who Will Save Us? but even these softer moments feel weighted.

If creating something uncomfortable was what Butler was hoping to achieve with In Amber, then it certainly succeeds in its mission.

Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t achieve much else. [Nadia Younes]

June 2022 — Review

Perfume Genius Ugly Season Matador, 17 Jun rrrrr

Mike Hadreas has always done drama better than most, so using music from his immersive dance prduction, The Sun Still Burns Here, for Ugly Season is not an unthinkable leap. However, the difference compared to previous albums is that the arrangements drive the mood, meaning Hadreas’ vocals and evocative storytelling mostly take a backseat. This makes sense as the music was conceived to be part of a visual performance, and the album doesn’t really mess with that, mostly adding vocals to provide texture rather than taking focus.

Pop Song and Photograph are two of the more ‘regular’ songs, with discernible vocals, though the former has some interesting percussion under the surface, while the latter is reminiscent of Nothing At All, except with even more abrasive guitar. Experimental tendencies are throughout, as on Scherzo’s jazz piano or the proggy, motorik vibes of Eye in the Wall. Even songs that feel normal have extra dimensions, like Hellbent’s industrial beat or Teeth’s dramatic woodwind.

The constantly shifting mood makes it difficult to settle into a rhythm, which may be due to the missing visual element, but there are more than enough well-executed left turns on Ugly Season to make a solid standalone album. [Lewis Wade]

Neneh Cherry The Versions EMI, 10 Jun rrrrr

On The Versions Neneh Cherry is back, this time as commissioner, curator and composer of a collection of covers of songs from her first three albums; an exercise in transposing music with a tangibly 90s sound into something for 2022’s ears, it’s broadly pretty successful, with references to ‘gigolos’ swapped out for ‘fuckboys’. Both Jamila Woods’ take on Kootchi and Greentea Peng’s Buddy X could have been released independently this year and received a warm reception.

Robyn’s version of Buffalo Stance featuring Mapei kicks the album off, and unfortunately it’s a bit of a limp interpretation. It feels like the work of someone who has missed what makes the original exciting – it’s slowed right down, and lacks the momentum of the continuous hi-hat and tambourine that are explicitly introduced at the start of the original. As experienced on Buffalo Stance, the album is plagued by a tendency to take itself too seriously. While tracks like Woman are meant to be sombre (ANOHNI is the perfect artist to deliver this), several of the featured artists have attempted to transpose Cherry’s tongue-in-cheek asides into sincere parts of the melody and in doing so have undercut the fun of the songs.

[Laurie Presswood]

Albums

Rachel Sermanni Every Swimming Pool Runs to the Sea self-released, 16 Jun rrrrr

Almost exactly a year on from the release of her EP Swallow Me, Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter Rachel Sermanni returns with another four-song collection, curiously titled Every Swimming Pool Runs to the Sea. Echoing the short format of its predecessor, the new release feels like an answer to a question; it’s comparable in its wisdom and fierce empathy, and while it lacks the dark and brooding edge of Swallow Me, the songs and Sermanni’s delivery brim with playfulness and childlike wonder.

The EP is in many ways a celebration of water. We find Sermanni in a mystical dream, kissing an old school friend in the watery glow of an aquarium. Later, she’s swimming in the River Dart, where she spent time resetting and creating music. At the record’s centre are two bright, joyful indierock songs where Sermanni’s vocals are wild and sparkling, bookended by the softer and more curious Aquarium Kisses and the title track.

Arriving just as the season turns to summer, Every Swimming Pool Runs to the Sea feels like a gift: a joyful quartet of songs that encapsulates everything that’s precious about Sermanni’s music.

[Katie Cutforth]

THE SKINNY

Music Now June is as busy as ever for new Scottish music – we take a look at releases from Susan Bear, Katherine Aly, racecar, Becca Starr, Elizabeth Fraser and more

— 70 —

racecar

Susan Bear

Photo: Marilena Vlachopolou

effortless, leading us to question why anyone would constrict themselves to just one style or genre anyway.

Another one worth wrapping your ears around this month is Speak No Evil, the new album from Paisleybased Becca Starr, which sees her combining spoken word poetry and snarling rap bars – ‘truth bombs’ – with the kind of vocal acrobatics any diva would be proud of. Due on 25 June, Speak No Evil covers everything from falling in and out of love to comments on the political landscape, fears of death, gentrification and more. Starr always knows exactly when to unleash each facet of her vocal ability.

Elsewhere, the sublime and unmatched vocals of Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser can be found this month on Sun’s Signature, her collaborative EP with her life and musical partner Damon Reece, and Rachel Sermanni is back this month too with her latest EP, Every Swimming Pool Runs to the Sea, which you can read more about on p69. More albums come from Edinburgh-based collective Atom Eyes who release their debut album Blue Into Gold (3 Jun), Baby Strange return with World Below (17 Jun), electro-trad duo Valtos release their self-titled debut (10 Jun) and Dundee punks ALLDEEPEND release Throwing a Pit to Nothing via MakeThat-a-Take Records.

When it comes to singles, there’s the delightfully glitchy new one (The Soft) from Edinburgh duo Slim Wrist (24 Jun), Ask Alice releases the dark and menacing Demonia (10 Jun),and Jack Brotherhood release their “queer scream into the void” – Heteronormativity (8 Jun). Finally, if you give a fuck about the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, there’s also Erland Cooper’s curious royal commission Music for Growing Flowers (1 Jun), created as part of the bio-diverse superbloom event set to take place at the Tower of London.

Photo: Beth Chalmers

June 2022 — Review

W

ow. May was the month that kept giving, with new music from Glasgow’s Medicine Cabinet, The Plastic Youth, Shears and AMUNDA; I Solar released their North Sea Jupiter EP via Paradise Palms and Poster Paints, the pairing of Carla J. Easton and Simon Liddell surprise-released their debut EP, Blood Orange.

Moving into June, no stranger to these pages, Susan Bear has stepped out from behind the guise of her Good Dog moniker. If that’s gone over your head, then maybe you’d recognise her from behind the keyboard of Pictish Trail’s live band, or as a member of duo Tuff Love, or maybe even from behind the drum kit of Cora Bisset’s play What Girls Are Made Of; she’s also been busy producing various music of late for Hen Hoose, and when we last spoke with her it was about an 8-bit-inspired soundtrack for Journey to the End of the Jelly World, a computer game she’d been working on alongside Faith Eliott. Needless to say, Bear is something of a musical chameleon, and her latest musical move, Alter, due via Lost Map Records on 10 June, sees her wearing her heart on her sleeve more than ever before.

Given what you now know of Bear, it should come as no surprise that from her Glasgow studio, she wrote, recorded and mixed the entirety of Alter herself. Describing the album as a journal, Alter was written from a point of reflection and covers a period in Bear’s life from around 2017-2020. As Bear puts it, she’s “observing the past from a safe place in the present” on Alter, a record that is lo-fi, woozy and soft around the edges. Its compositions come from Bear’s thoughtful introspection and her questioning of past decisions, and what she’s created is altogether a tender and soothing balm for anyone who wants to find the courage to embrace change.

From Glasgow to the other end of the M8, Greece-born, Edinburgh-based genre-defying artist Katherine Aly releases Shadows Are Made of Light Too on 10 June. Working tirelessly over the past few years to get to this point, Aly’s debut album goes full throttle from the off, opening with the explosive Glow & Ignite, with her gorgeous vocal over fizzing synths before its delightfully infectious 60s girl band-indebted chorus comes into view. It’s a single that lights the way for the rest of the record which explores every nook, cranny and decade of pop, as Aly embraces “diversity, collective pain and trauma and turning them into empowerment.” It’s a real joy to behold and a thrill to see an artist fully come into her own.

Just as Aly is refusing to be bound by genre, so too are East Lothian’s racecar, made up of childhood friends Izzy Flower, Robin Brill and Calum Mason. Mining from every corner of contemporary pop, the three-piece self-release their debut album Orange Car on 10 June. Across its 11 tracks' rubbery basslines and thick grooves collide with fast-paced synthpop, glitchy manipulated backing vocals and Flower’s bright and unwavering lead. There’s also sniffs of classic guitar rock, techno, PC music, jazz, funk and more to be found here. And while some would perhaps struggle to combine all these influences into one cohesive sound, racecar make it sound almost

Image: courtesy racecar

Local Music

Words: Tallah Brash

Katherine Aly

THE SKINNY

June 2022

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June 2022

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THE SKINNY

Film of the Month

Film of the Month — Il Buco Director: Michelangelo Frammartino RRRRR

theskinny.co.uk/film

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between the sound of his laboured breathing and the wind echoing through the cave.

Just like Frammartino’s previous film, which was inspired

by Pythagoras’ theory about the transmigration of the soul, Il Buco is another philosophically minded work that defies easy classification. Part ethnographic documentary, part historical re-enactment, the film could be read as a study of geological time compared to the impermanence of human existence, or as a tender portrait of a way of life on the brink of extinction.

However, it’s perhaps best viewed as an allegory for the economic disparity between the north and south of Italy. Early in the film, before the Piedmontese speleologists’ arrive from Turin to map the Bifurto Abyss, we observe a crowd gathering to watch a news broadcast about the construction of the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan. Compared with the speleologists’ 700 metre descent into the bowels of the Earth, this 32-storey skyscraper speaks to the diametrically opposed fortunes of Italy’s industrialised north and its poorer, southern regions.

Devoid of almost any dialogue, and told in a deliberately unhurried fashion, Frammartino’s latest might sound like a difficult proposition, but the experience of watching it is anything but. From a herd of curious cows that gather at the entrance of the cave to observe what’s going on, to a wayward football that falls into the abyss, the film is imbued with a gentle humour and moments of incidental magic that speak to the many undiscovered mysteries of the world around us.

[Patrick Gamble]

June 2022 — Review

Released 10 June

by New Wave Certificate U

Michelangelo Frammartino’s long-awaited follow-up to 2010’s Le Quattro Volte recreates a 1961 speleological expedition in Italy’s southernmost region of Calabria.

This ambitious attempt to chart the Bifurto Abyss (at the time thought to be the third deepest cave system in the world) is observed by an ageing shepherd who lives near the spelunking site. The epic sweep and grandeur of the Pollino massif is juxtaposed with the eerie darkness of the cave, in which the only light source comes from the speleologists’ headlamps or the magazine pages they ignite and throw into the chasm to judge its depth. Frammartino and his director of photography Renato Berta worked with a team of professional cave divers to recreate this expedition as truthfully as possible. The result is an immersive, often claustrophobic experience, like plunging the audience into the depths of the abyss and leaving them to blindly search for a spark of revelatory light.

Above ground, we observe the shepherd as he calmly watches his livestock graze at the foot of the mountain. At times, it’s impossible to separate him from the surrounding landscape; the deep furrows and cracked skin of his weatherbeaten face are almost indistinguishable from the nearby rockface. These parallels between the shepherd and the Pollino massif reach another level when he suddenly falls ill. Through a series of intelligent edits, it becomes clear that the speleologist’s expedition might somehow be connected to the shepherd’s illness. As they near the apex of the Bifurto Abyss, his health deteriorates and it becomes difficult to differentiate

THE SKINNY

Scotland on Screen

Scotland on Screen: Mark Lyken During a six-month residency with Alchemy Film & Arts, Mark Lyken developed Notes from a Low Orbit, a feature-length study of Hawick in the Scottish Borders, where Alchemy is based. Lyken reflects on making the film and its rapturous hometown premiere Interview: Jamie Dunn

Filmography: Notes from a Low Orbit (2022), Waiting for the Buff to Rub Me Out (with Allana James) (2021), 1300 SHOTS (2020), LAW, VEX & THE STEPS (2020), Rue du Dernier Adieu (2020), New Town New Wave (2018), Táifēng and the Motorway Saint (2018), Hell Valley (2017), HAME (with Emma Dove) (2015), boneshaker (with Emma Dove) (2016), The Terrestrial Sea (with Emma Dove) (2016), Mirror Lands (with Emma Dove) (2014)

June 2022 — Review

i: @mark_lyken marklyken.com

T

he very first films of the late 19th century did not feature glamorous movie actors or emoting thespians. Their stars were ordinary people, like the women spilling out of their workplace at lunchtime in Louis Lumière’s Workers Leaving the Factory, considered the first-ever motion picture. In that 50-second cinema landmark, the subjects were both the film’s actors and its future spectators.

Last summer, the residents of Hawick in the Scottish Borders were in a similar position as those Lumière employees. As part of a six-month residency with Alchemy Film & Arts, filmmaker and sound artist Mark Lyken was embedded there with his camera to make a study of the town and its people. The result of the residency was Notes from a Low Orbit, which premiered last month at Alchemy’s annual festival, with many of its subjects sitting in the audience.

Notes from a Low Orbit begins with a fakeout. It opens on a series of long static shots of rolling hills shrouded in mist and a lonely telecommunications mast standing sentinel at the edge of town. There’s a whiff of arthouse pretension, like Lyken is attempting a Caledonian impression of a James Benning landscape documentary. But the spartan rigour is undermined after a few minutes when a nippy dog and its owner stumble upon Lyken in the forest and break the spell. “I love Benning’s films and I love slow cinema, in general, but it can be very serious,” says Lyken. “It has its place, but that’s not necessarily who I am, or who the people that I was encountering are either.” What follows instead is a series of vignettes – some observational and some staged; many of them comic – focused on mini-dramas within Hawick.

The title suggests Lyken is an alien visiting earth to document it. And like most movie extraterrestrials, from Starman to ET to The Man Who Fell to Earth, he clearly got wrapped up with the earthlings. “Yes, Mr. Newton is very tired,” says Lyken, referencing David Bowie’s character in the latter film. “That is how I felt after the shoot.” Attempting to give a flavour of the multitude of experiences and rituals happening within this small town was one of Lyken’s chief ambitions. “Folk often talk about community as if it’s a singular thing,” he says, “but it always strikes me as plural. That struck me really early on in Hawick, how many parallel things there were going on, with these little groups and organisations kind of squirrelled away doing their own thing.”

The communities Lyken comes across include musicians, pint-sized boxers and a video club where some sleepy school kids are being introduced to Buster Keaton. He cites one of his favourite discoveries as the town’s Scrabble club – and clearly, the first rule of Scrabble Club is, you don’t talk about Scrabble Club. “They’ve been running for 14 years but it was almost impossible to find out who they were or where they met. So it became this really funny search, like they were the Illuminati, but I really liked that. I had to do some detective work to find these organisations.”

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Notes from a Low Orbit

There were two keys to breaking down barriers. First was the association with Alchemy Film & Arts. “Because Alchemy have been embedded there for 12 years, they have a certain standing in the community. That opens a bunch of doors and they could put me in touch with certain folks; that got the ball rolling.” The second was simply the generous time of the residency. “By me being a visible presence, just the time being out with the camera, folk would just come up to me. I’d turn around and there’d be, like, three folk standing behind me, looking through my viewfinder. So it was quite easy to start chatting, and by just living and filming there I quickly got a sense of what was going on.”

We’re speaking to Lyken a few weeks after the premiere of Notes from a Low Orbit, and what surprised him most from the rapturous response from the Hawick audience was just how much laughter there was in the room. “There are bits that I think are funny,” he says, “and they’re in there intentionally, but to the home crowd, it played way funnier than I imagined.” You’d expect getting a room full of people to crack up would be a pleasant feeling, but Lyken was sick to the stomach for a moment. “When spirits were high in that audience, I was really worried that the humour might come across in bad faith. I really care about the people in the film, I have this personal relationship with them now, and I wouldn’t for a minute want them to think I was laughing at them. Because that’s never the intention; we made this thing together.”

Lyken needn’t have worried. The film captures the absurdity of small-town Scotland, but the audience clearly realised Lyken wasn’t laughing at this absurdity, he was simply documenting it. The result is an absolutely charming love letter to the town that’s wry, sweet and brimming over with affection.

Like they appear to have done with its maker, Hawick’s residents embraced Notes from a Low Orbit wholeheartedly.

Notes From a Low Orbit had its world premiere at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival and is currently touring other festivals

THE SKINNY

Film Moon, 66 Questions Director: Jacqueline Lentzou

Starring: Lazaros Georgakopoulos

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Moon, 66 Questions

Everything Went Fine Director: François Ozon

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François Ozon is best known as a master of taut and playful erotic thrillers like Swimming Pool and In the House. Less celebrated is his inclination to make social issue pictures in which viewers are forced to forensically engage with taboo subjects over a generous running time. Everything Went Fine falls into this second category.

It sees a daughter wrestle with her father’s request that she euthanise him following a severe stroke from which recovery is unlikely. This drama takes place against the backdrop of revelations about the man’s past, her depressed mother’s Parkinson’s disease and various family tensions. It’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying a film so firmly fixated on the banal misery of

Director: Todd Stephens

Starring: Udo Kier, Linda Evans, Jennifer Coolidge

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Todd Stephens draws inspiration and filming locations from his hometown of Sandusky, Ohio in a unique spin on the one final job sub-genre. Ageing hairdresser Pat Pitsenbarger (Kier) is adrift, finding small rebellions at his care home having lost his partner to AIDS and his business to his former student-turned-cutthroat rival salon owner (Coolidge). A surprise visit offers one last chance to show his well-honed craft: town socialite Rita (Evans) has died and requested Pat do her hair and makeup for the funeral in her will. Accept, and Pat gets $25,000.

Refuse, and he comfortably keeps the door closed on a town that moved on without and around him.

The plot of Swan Song wanders through clichés and paths well-trod, rendering few beats novel. But these

Everything Went Fine

existence, but Ozon’s approach is sufficiently cinematic that at least our attention does not wander.

Flashback scenes show our protagonist interacting with her father when she was a young girl, and parallel the dynamics between the pair in the present, even as we find one in an incapacitated state.

Meanwhile, a disruptive figure whose relationship with the family is initially unclear, threatens to throw an already precarious situation off balance.

Ozon has always been one to pepper his realism with a certain amount of flair, but here he ultimately goes too far with salacious plot points.

Rather than allow us to reflect on the ethics of euthanasia or the relative value of life, a film that threatens to deliver a hefty emotional punch turns out to be more interested in frustrated family dynamics and administrative headaches. [Lewis Porteous] Released 17 Jun by Curzon; certificate 15

Swan Song

Bergman Island Director: Mia Hansen-Løve

Starring: Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska, Anders Danielsen

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Where does a married filmmaking couple travel for a romantic getaway that doubles as a work retreat? Fårö Island, of course. The quaint Swedish coastal community has only a few hundred inhabitants, but sees tens of thousands of visitors arrive at its shore each year due to its deep connections with Ingmar Bergman, who lived and died on the island and shot some of his most famous films among the ancient rock formations by the sea.

It is in the very bedroom from Scenes From a Marriage (1973) that Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) sleep during their visit, charmingly joking about the impact the miniseries had on Sweden’s divorce rate at the time. Out of the two, Tony enjoys the bigger success

— 75 —

quiet reckonings and revelations are explored with heart and honesty, and Stephens’ tonal balance of whimsy and wistfulness finds magic in the everyday. Kier is perennially rakish, commanding every room he enters with a sharp tongue and sartorial mischief; only in moments of reflection do the weight of lost years and lost connections surface. As the mentee who brought about his downfall, Coolidge delivers a barbed dramatic turn. In a standout sequence, Pat shares memories with a young gay bartender at what used to be his haven in the 1980s, marvelling at the different universes they inhabit. What starts as a last request becomes a last chance to connect, and Swan Song understands the infinite kindnesses and rebellions that make every memorable journey possible.

[Carmen Paddock] Released 10 Jun by Peccadillo Pictures; certificate 12A

Bergman Island

as a director, hosting Q&As on Bergman as young film students sing his praises. It is Chris’s work, however, that director Mia HansenLøve chooses to explore in depth, going full meta as she creates a film within the film.

It is compelling to observe the restless nature of Chris through the eyes of Hansen-Løve, who ponders on philosophical dilemmas bereft of any sense of urgency, granting the characters room to rummage through feelings without the need of resolution. Alas, the very same lethargy that allows for existential contemplation feeds a sense of aimlessness that prevents full engagement. The result is a film that, despite its beauty, comes and goes with the fleeting brevity of the waves that hit the coast of Fårö. [Rafaela Sales Ross] Released 3 Jun by MUBI; certificate 15

June 2022 — Review

Starring: Sophie Marceau, André Dussollier, Géraldine Pailhas

Released 24 Jun by Modern Films; certificate 15

Swan Song

Film

After a number of internationally acclaimed short films, Jacqueline Lentzou’s long-awaited feature-length debut has finally arrived. A heartfelt exploration of the fluid boundary between childhood and adulthood, the film follows Artemis (Sofia Kokkali) a young woman who is forced to return to Greece to care for her estranged father (Georgakopoulos) after he suffers a sudden and debilitating illness. A film of raw emotions and messy feelings, the reversal of their parent-child dynamic reopens old wounds and signals a fraught period of self-reflection as they attempt to adapt to their newly assigned roles.

Combining the deadpan style we’ve come to expect from

contemporary Greek directors such as Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari with her own unique astrological approach to life’s many mysteries, Lentzou’s debut immerses us in a peculiar, yet empathetic story of self-discovery. From a cathartic dance sequence to Bomfunk MC’s Freestyler to a moment of opaque role play in which Artemis mimics her father during a recreation of an argument they had when she was a teenager, the film walks a fine line between the tragic and the absurd. That is until an intergalactic dialogue with the universe reveals a long-buried secret that provides the pair with an opportunity for reconciliation.

A wildly energetic coming-of-age tale with a distinctly intimate style, Moon 66, Questions confirms Lentzou’s position as a visionary director worth getting excited about.

[Patrick Gamble]

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THE SKINNY

SCOTTISH SUMMER BEER With the days getting longer and slightly warmer, we head to the fridge to check out some sweet summer beers from a few of our favourite Scottish breweries

Words: Peter Simpson

Food & Drink

Photo: Peter Simpson

simplethingsfermentations.com newbarnsbrewery.com beerswobeards.com otherworldbrewing.com vaultcity.co.uk fyneales.com overtonebrewing.com pilotbeer.co.uk

T

he smell of the barbecue, the faint wailing of the Bluetooth speaker, your nose sealing over after inhaling many tiny particles of grass. These are all key signs that the summer is here, but they pale in comparison to the greatest summer tradition – the big bag of cans. Down the park with your pals, sun shining, more wind than you expected, bag of cans, lovely stuff.

In preparation for the sunny months, we’ve pored over some recent offerings from a host of Scotland’s best craft breweries, then poured those offerings into a glass and written about them. Grab your biggest bag and your best lads, it’s time for cans.

Newbarns & Beers Without Beards, Architects of Society Next up is one of a number of recent collaborations from Newbarns. This time it’s a team-up with Beers Without Beards, the Edinburghbased women’s beer and brewing group. The beer itself is a 5% Kolsch,

Otherworld, Grapefruit and Talus Hazy Pale Eskbank-based brewery Otherworld are new on the scene, and they have two things going for them straight away. One: lovely can art. Two: excellent beers, like this 4.2% pale.

It’s very immediate, and the fresh grapefruit gives it a real zing. It also reminds us a lot of the beer we made with Stewart Brewing a few years ago (a 5% lemon and grapefruit pale called Hop The Presses, very good, surprisingly fizzy), so of course we like it.

Vault City, Peach and Mango Sour It’s sour time, baby! While we’re not sure about the concept of a ‘session sour’, this new four-percenter from Vault City might be the closest it’s possible to get. Tastes like a beery Rubicon, surprisingly light and quaffable, almost entirely opaque, ideal if you want a sweet treat after eating a whole block of barbecued halloumi.

— 77 —

Fyne & Newbarns, BOLD Back to Newbarns, and another collab – this time they’re with Fyne for a 4.2% “generously hopped pale”.

Reader, they are not kidding about the hops. A bit drier than some of the others we’ve tried, but still tastes great; probably more of a ‘picnic lunch’ beer than a ‘bag of crisps and a frisbee’ beer.

Overtone Silence is… Citra The Silence series from Glasgow brewery Overtone focuses on individual hops, and this 5% Citra pale is an absolute banger. It’s really refreshing, light and silky smooth, but it’s still endlessly fruity and showcases the hops really well.

Delicious! Delightful!

Pilot, Trop Trop We finish back on sour island with Leith’s own Pilot. Their latest beer is this 5.2% sour, with passionfruit, pineapple and mango. It’s a similar profile to the Overtone but sour and sharp instead of mellow and laid back. It’s tangy, citrusy and complex (as in, it tastes of many things, in a good way). It’s summer in a can, we tell you. Summer in a can!

June 2022 – Review

Simple Things Fermentations, Table Beer We kick off with this 3% table beer from Glasgow’s Simple Things. It’s an ideal place to start: a citrusy kick but without too much sweetness, some bitterness but still very light. It’s a great park beer, although the in-can conditioning does mean it loses a bit of its oomph over time. It also means that cracking one of these is a bit like popping a bottle of champagne; very dramatic, very foamy.

and fantastically balanced. The hoppiness is there with a real fruity kick, but it’s extremely drinkable.

This is great, grab a can while you still… have the opportunity.

THE SKINNY

Books

Book Reviews

Vladimir

More Fiya: A New Collection of Black British Poetry

Cyberman: An on-screen documentary

Edited by Kayo Chingonyi

By Veronika Muchitsch

More Fiya is a passionately curated anthology showcasing a breadth of Black British poetics. Edited by Dylan Thomas Prize-winning poet, editor, and DJ, Kayo Chingonyi, this anthology follows in the footsteps of Lemn Sissay’s seminal The Fire People first published in 1998.

In More Fiya, Chingonyi has drawn together his dream mixtape of both new and established voices including Janette Ayachi, Dean Atta, Malika Booker, Rachel Long, Roger Robinson, and Warsan Shire. The anthology balances quiet reflections on family and love with searing takedowns of the hostile environment and systemic oppression. Many of the poets experiment with form and language to address the haunting shadows of empire and colonisation while allowing for joyous examinations of diaspora. The collection is rich for its array of imagery, lyricism and rhythm which brings to life ancestral homelands throughout the African continent and Caribbean isles while also highlighting what it means to be Black and British in the 21st century.

In his introduction, Chingonyi acknowledges a rise in diverse Black voices being published, programmed, and lauded. However, he is careful to argue this move toward diversity is still in its infancy and visibility as a sign of systems changing cannot be where the work stops. More Fiya serves as a powerful reminder of what is possible when communities are given the opportunity to champion and celebrate themselves outside the confines of homogeneous understandings of poetics. [Andrés Ordorica]

There’s a lot of chat about how people are sharing their lives online 24/7, but for Ari Kivikangas, that was the truth. Hosting his life at cyberman.tv, he showcased his life in its normalcy for all to see, a self-imposed Big Brother.

Soft and gentle in its illustration, Muchitsch uses simplicity to capture what is, ultimately, extremely ordinary. A man went about his life, invited people in, chatted some. And that’s what Cyberman does: invites readers into Ari’s life, just like his stream. There’s no refined start point, plot twist, crescendo. It’s simple, pleasing, even comforting.

It’s not seedy (“I’ve masturbated on webcam before though. That was not cool. It was really stupid”); it captures fun back and forths (“Rammstein is rocking your pants”), and moments that dip into the life beyond the camera, like Mark Zuckerberg as a personal hero (“He is a very good programmer… Also he is fucking rich and I’m very poor”).

It’s also a very sweet ode.

Muchitsch writes in an epilogue that the pair kept in touch and she shared some of the work going into the book; he passed away before being able to see the graphic novel in its final form. Often wordless, the pages all blur together to capture a normal person doing normal things, and showcases how not all stories and lives need to be astronomical in scale to leave its lasting impact and be worthy of documenting.

[Heather McDaid]

Picador, 26 May, £14.99

Canongate Books, 19 May, £16.99

Myriad Editions, 26 May, £18.99

Picador, 26 May, £12.99

panmacmillan.com

canongate.co.uk

myriadeditions.com

panmacmillan.com

By Julia May Jonas

June 2022 — Review

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Vladimir is a dark, propulsive debut which is, on the surface, a tale of two parallels. It’s the story of a wife who struggles to support her English professor husband in the face of a slew of accusations from his former students at the college where they both work. Equally, it is the story of a married woman who becomes increasingly obsessed with a charismatic younger colleague and the ever more drastic lengths she will go to in a bid to become the object of his desire. As the story progresses, the two strands weave together and hurtle towards an inevitable, explosive end.

Part of what makes Vladimir compelling is the narrator’s honesty which is unashamed, at times uncomfortable and causes the reader to undulate between admiration and disdain for a woman who seems hellbent on chasing down the attention of a married man while grappling with emotions about her own husband’s betrayal which, in many ways, mirrors her own behaviour. The narrator’s obsession with Vladimir inverts the typical older man, younger woman trope which is nonetheless addressed through her husband; his impending behavioural conduct hearing creates an interesting dichotomy which forces the reader to examine multiple viewpoints of an extremely complex web of desire, deceit, power and immorality. Bold, confident and sexy, Vladimir is a debut that is sure to divide opinions and start conversations.

[Kerri Logan]

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We Had to Remove This Post

By Hanna Bervoets, translated by Emma Rault

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We Had To Remove This Post follows social media content moderator, Kayleigh, who is forbidden from mentioning the platform; indeed, it is never given to the reader (although a quick glance at the Selected Sources is a good indicator of who it could be based on). The story encounters all sorts of characters who Kayleigh works with, including her new girlfriend and rag-tag bunch of colleague-friends.

Together, they spend their days watching the worst of humanity on their screens, only making it through with the promise of a drink at the end.

The thing about this novella, though, is that it feels somewhat out-of-date. If published a few years ago, it would have more impact, provoke more thought. Back then, we, as a society, were shocked by the idea of being desensitised. This new idea of our brains being numbed by the internet was fresh and horrifying, but we struggled through it (by consuming more content). As it stands, in 2022, we are all too aware that our brains are desensitised, and that is no longer a surprise. The internet has changed how we think, the internet’s normal has become our normal.

It’s sad that this novella can be picked up, read, and shrugged off as old news. That’s not to say that the writing isn’t good, with clean sentences and well-developed characters.

Bervoets does try to flesh out the world which surrounds content moderation, but the core questions she proposes (who, or what, determines our worldview, what is normal?) are questions we have been asking throughout the 2010s and are, perhaps, no longer enough to fuel a novella. [Beth Cochrane]

THE SKINNY

ICYMI

Glasgow-based comedian and TinselGuts Cabaret co-founder Gabriel Featherstone watches The Office (US) Illustration: Miranda B Stuart

Of the other episodes I watched (Murder, Threat Level Midnight, The Injury and Dinner Party), Threat Level Midnight was my favourite. Focusing on Michael’s endearingly silly and frequently bizarre homemade action movie of the same name, it reminded me a lot of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace – a show that is objectively one of humankind’s greatest achievements – and gave Michael a very charming emotional arc that genuinely brought me close to tears.

Bottom line: I like the jokes, I like the characters, but I’ll mainly keep watching to find out what the deal is with that mysterious scarecrow.

Comedy

H

“According to my friend, the difference between Season 1 and Seasons 2-9 of The Office (US) is as vast as the difference between a mouldy satsuma and a freshly baked apple pie” The Office (US) is currently available to stream on Netflix You can see Gabriel Featherstone in TinselGuts Cabaret, McChuills, Glasgow, 20 Jun and 18 Jul 7.30pm, £5 Featherstone & Co.:Laughter O’Clock, Pilgrim’s Bar, Edinburgh, 6-28 Aug, 4.15pm, PWYW

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June 2022 — Review

ere’s everything I knew about The Office (US) before I started watching it for the first time an hour and 40 minutes ago: Steve Carell plays an annoying boss named Michael, there’s some kind of love story in it that loads of people allude to in their Tinder bios, and there’s an episode where someone burns their foot on a grill.

Knowing almost nothing about the show and its history, I thought it would be a good idea to watch the first season for this article, but a friend of mine, who loves The Office (US) with the same intensity of feeling that another man might have for his spouse or his religion, informed me that the first series is basically a Gus Van Sant’s Psycho-style remake of The Office (UK) Office’s first series: the narrative of which the US version immediately deviates from at the start of Season 2.

According to my friend, the difference between Season 1 and Seasons 2-9 of The Office (US) is as vast as the difference between a mouldy satsuma and a freshly baked apple pie, and making conclusions about one based on your experience of the other would make as much sense as watching Hobo With a Shotgun to write an article about Smurfs: The Lost Village.

Taking this into account, I decided that the best (and quickest) way to properly absorb the true essence of the show would be to watch the best five episodes, as determined by Troy L. Smith in an article on Cleveland.com, a website that seems to be mainly devoted to reporting the news in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio.

According to Troy L. Smith of Cleveland.com, the fifth best episode of The Office (US) is the season finale of the final season, so that was the first episode I watched. Inevitably, I didn’t understand the full significance of a lot of the stuff that happened. Dwight said that Creed did a bunch of crimes, but I don’t know why that’s funny because I don’t know who Creed is.

Dwight’s friend kidnaps his fiancée and stuffs her into the boot of his car, and I feel like I’m missing some kind of vital context that would explain why she doesn’t immediately call off the wedding when she finds out that the kidnapping was some kind of weird family tradition that Dwight didn’t warn her about.

At one point, the kidnapper gives a knowing glance to a solitary scarecrow in a field. Does he have some kind of relationship with this scarecrow? Are they friends? Lovers?

Business partners? (Tantalisingly, in one of the other episodes I watched, Dwight mentions a farm that’s hiring people to be human scarecrows. Maybe that scarecrow in the field was a person and there’s an episode I’ve not seen that explains the kidnapper’s pregnant gaze?)

Despite the obvious gaps in my understanding, I still thought the episode was funny, and I enjoyed finding out that loads of people I like who I didn’t know were in The Office were in The Office (Catherine Tate! Ellie Kemper! Craig Robinson! It was very nice to see you all).

I also enjoyed the show’s winning mixture of sweet sincerity and absurd darkness, which prevents it from being overwhelmed by either, but also makes both forces stronger by contrasting them against each other. It is epitomised by the scene where a deeply moved Michael sentimentally remarks at Dwight’s wedding: “I feel like all my kids grew up and then they married each other. It’s every parent’s dream!”

THE SKINNY

THE SKINNY

Listings Looking for something to do? Well you’re in the right place! Find listings below for the month ahead across Music, Clubs, Theatre, Comedy and Art in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee.

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

Glasgow Music Tue 31 May GO WEST (PAUL YOUNG)

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Pop from London.

MC LARS (RULED BY RAPTORS + LASER OF THE DOUBLECLICKS + SCHAFFER THE DARKLORD) KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00,

Hip hop from the US. THE MUSIC

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

Fri 03 Jun

THE NATIVE

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00,

Indie from Plymouth.

GINGER WILDHEART & THE SINNERS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Singer-songwriter from England.

FLAT WORMS (MATTERS)

ASTRID (PETTY CASSETES + VICTORIA SPONGE) NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:30–22:00,

Pop rock from France.

Wed 01 Jun

SUGARAY RAYFORD

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Soul and blues from the US. NOISY (BARNY FLETCHER + KEIR STIRLING)

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00

Alt from Worthing.

MADISON VIOLET

CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, 19:30–22:00

Folk from Canada.

THE DEEP BLUE

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Indie folk from Manchester.

Thu 02 Jun FINLEY QUAYE

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Reggae from Scotland.

ALFIE HETRUNHC (LO RAYS + STEPHEN MCLAREN) BLOC+, 21:00–22:00

CONAN GRAY

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Pop from California.

MEGALOMATIC (EL MOONO) NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:30–22:00,

Metal from Glasgow.

THE SUMMER SET

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Arizona.

DELIGHTS

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Pop rock from Manchester.

KASSIDY

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

Alt folk from Scotland.

QUEEN + ADAM LAMBERT THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00,

Pop from the UK.

GLASGOW STREETSOUND PRESENTS MATTHEW GIBB + MEGAN BROOM + LIAM DOYLE + LUNA J ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00,

Eclectic indie lineup.

Fri 10 Jun U.K. SUBS

Mon 06 Jun

FLY ANAKIN

THE ZEBECKS (CLOAKS + THE FIN)

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Alt indie from New Zealand.

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Indie rock from Elgin.

BLOC PARTY

Rock from England.

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

Avant-pop from Switzerland.

MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND ST LUKE’S, 19:30– 22:00,

Rock from Liverpool.

QUEEN + ADAM LAMBERT THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00,

Pop from the UK. JESHUA

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

Indie from Scotland.

Sat 04 Jun STEVE VAI

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from New York.

VALTOS

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00,

Electro-trad from Skye.

ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00,

Indie rock from Australia.

THEO BLEAK

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Dundee.

VINE (UNDETERMINED + THE SQUINTS) THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Indie from Glasgow.

LEAVING BORDEAUX BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Alt indie from Glasgow.

RUN THE JEWELS

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

Hip-hop from Brooklyn.

CS + KREME (JOANNE ROBERTSON + FERGUS CLARK)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:30–22:00,

Experimental from Australia.

ATOM EYES

THE BLUE ARROW, 19:30–22:00,

Jazz from Scotland.

Sun 05 Jun BLOSSOMS

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00,

Indie pop from Stockport.

MAYDAY PARADE

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Florida.

Rock from Oxford.

GRAVEDANCER

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Folk from Scotland.

Tue 07 Jun

SAMANTHA HARVEY

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00,

Pop from the UK. NICK MULVEY

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00,

Singer-songwriter from England.

Punk from the UK.

Wed 08 Jun S-X

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00,

Producer from Wolverhampton.

DADI FREYR

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

Pop from Iceland.

MACY GRAY

R’n’B from the US.

CROWDED HOUSE

GREGOR BARNETT (THE MENZINGERS)

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

Americana from the US.

CHRISTONE “KINGFISH” INGRAM AND BLUE MILK ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Blues from Glasgow.

STEPHANIE LAMPREA (JAMES BANNER DUO) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:00–22:00,

Avant-garde from the UK.

Thu 09 Jun TEDDY SWIMS

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

Indie from Atlanta.

THE RAMPANTS (THE INSOMNIACS + KLAISE) BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Punk from Sydney.

STRAID

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

Indie from Glasgow.

EVENTS RESEARCH PROGRAMME THE FLYING DUCK, 20:00–01:00,

Weirdo and experimental.

CRASH TEST DUMMIES

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Tue 14 Jun POND

EXTERIOR (GAMING + NINA STANGER)

BLUES PILLS

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Melbourne.

Dance from Edinburgh.

HANG MASSIVE

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00,

Electronica from Sweden and the UK.

DEAD POET SOCIETY KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00,

Groove rock from Boston.

WILLIAM MICHAEL MORGAN

MONO, 19:30–22:00,

Country from Nashville.

OMEGA TRIBE (THE SYSTEM)

THEORY OF A DEADMAN

Noise rock from Japan.

JIM WHITE

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00,

Singer-songwriter from England.

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Electropunk from Canada.

Singer-songwriter from California.

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–22:00,

BO NINGEN

Rock from Florida.

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

Alt rock from Scotland.

SAM RYDER

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

PEACHES

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

Sat 11 Jun

Electronica from Tokyo.

Mon 13 Jun

Rock from Seattle.

DEL AMITRI

Funk from Texas.

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

Pop from Australia.

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00,

Rap from Virginia.

THE RUM SHACK, 20:00–22:00,

ANCHORSONG (CYRANO)

THE FAIM

DRAGGED UNDER

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

GHOST-NOTE

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Noise rock from the US.

A DAY TO REMEMBER

Hip-hop from Brooklyn.

SUPERGRASS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

Post-punk from London.

RUN THE JEWELS

HUMAN IMPACT

Punk from the UK.

Rock from Australia.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Sweden.

THE PARROTS

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Rock from Madrid.

TIM BURGESS

Rock from Canada.

FEET

Alt rock from Scotland.

1990S (BRENDA)

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

Indie from Glasgow.

TRIPLE NEGATIVE (VIDIV + SIMON WEINS)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 20:00–22:00,

Alt rock from London.

ALESIA + ECKO + THE SKINS ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00,

Experimental from Paris.

Sun 12 Jun

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Cleveland.

CHASE AND STATUS

Rock from New York.

DELILUH

THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00,

Art rock from Toronto.

BAKED BEANS ON THE DOORSTEP: HORACIO POLLARD (JACK PATON) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:30–22:00,

Alternative from the UK.

GOODBYE MR MACKENZIE

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

Rock from Bathgate.

WODAWATER

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

Eclectic indie lineup.

EVRIPIDIS AND HIS TRAGEDIES (PETER CAT) THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00,

Singer-songwriter from Athens.

THE WAR & TREATY ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Rock from Michigan.

DIANA ROSS

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00,

Motown from the US.

TRYPL (PAUL TOWNDROW TRIO)

DRYGATE BREWING CO., 19:30–22:00,

Latin jazz from the UK. THE HUG AND PINT, 20:30–22:00,

JAMES TAYLOR QUARTET

Jazz from the UK. Part of Glasgow Jazz Festival.

THE WONDER STUFF O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Alt rock from the UK.

REPULSIVE VISION (COFFIN MULCH + RANCID CADAVER) THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00,

Death metal from Carlisle.

MARIANNE MCGREGOR

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Jazz from Scotland. Part of Glasgow Jazz Festival.

GEORGIA CECILE

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Jazz from Edinburgh. Part of Glasgow Jazz Festival.

BLK JKS

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Rock from Johannesburg.

BUSTER WILLIAMS QUARTET (RACHEL DUNS) ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Indie rock from LA.

THE SHIVAS (LAS ACUARELAS) THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00,

Rock ‘n’ roll from Portland.

Thu 23 Jun MORGAN WADE

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00,

Jazz from the US. Part of Glasgow Jazz Festival.

Country from the US.

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00,

Alt indie from England.

MAYA DELILAH

Singer-songwriter from Canada.

ALANIS MORISSETTE

Singer-songwriter from Canada.

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

Jazz from the UK. Part of Glasgow Jazz Festival.

Mon 20 Jun JESSIE WARE

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

TIRZAH

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

ALEX HENRY FOSTER BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

PHOEBE BRIDGERS

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

Indie rock from LA.

POP MUTATIONS: WERKHA (REBECCA VASMANT)

STEREO, 20:00–23:00,

VOKA GENTLE

Indie folk from California.

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

Alt indie from London.

Rock from Canada.

— 81 —

Electronic from Melbourne.

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

Singer-songwriter from Canada.

COLLEEN GREEN (BEN KATZMAN)

Protest music from the UK. BARRY MANILOW THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00,

Singer-songwriter from New York.

FIGHTMILK (COUNT FLORIDA + LATE FEES) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Indie rock from London.

SHOVELS & ROPE

THE SKIDS (BIG COUNTRY)

Indie pop from LA.

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Folk from South California.

Tue 21 Jun

OH BOY RECORDS SHOWCASE

Fri 24 Jun

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 18:30–22:00,

Rock from Scotland.

BILLY MITCHELL (THE RAHS + THE ROOV)

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00,

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00,

TREMONTI

SNAIL MAIL

Eclectic indie lineup.

Indie from Dundee.

Heavy metal from Florida.

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00,

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

VELVET STARLINGS

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

BATTLES

Indie rock from Maryland.

Rock from New York.

THE BOTTOM LINE

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Pop punk from England.

AUNTIE FLO & SARATHY KORWAR

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

Pop from Boston.

Ska from Birmingham.

MELLE MEL (SCORPIO)

Indie rock from New Jersey.

Hip-hop from New York.

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

New Wave from Glasgow.

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

THE AVALANCHES

BRASS AGAINST

FUTURE TEENS (SNOW COATS + JACK BROTHERHOOD)

BLOC+, 21:00–22:00,

Singer-songwriter from Seattle.

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00,

Indie from LA.

Thu 16 Jun

DÄLEK (HOLY SCUM + HELENA CELLE)

Pop from London.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

THE LOW HANGING FRUITS

Indie rock from Brighton.

Rock from LA.

Experimental from Leeds.

Indie pop from San Diego.

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

ORAN MOR, 20:30–22:00,

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

CATHOUSE, 19:00–22:00,

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

PHOEBE BRIDGERS

Wed 15 Jun

Indie pop from Bristol.

THE MILK CARTON KIDS

DIRTY HONEY

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00,

Country from North Carolina.

TATE MCRAE

BLOOD RED SHOES

Rock from Georgia.

WITCH OF THE EAST (HEALTHY JUNKIES)

Indie from Glasgow.

TV GIRL

Sat 18 Jun

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

DRIVE BY TRUCKERS

Singer-songwriter from Wales.

BROADCAST, 19:30– 22:00,

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

YAMA WARASHI

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00,

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00,

MIPSO

Rock ‘n’ roll from Wales.

Pop from LA.

LAURA VEIRS

Punk from the US.

SCHEME

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00,

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00,

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00,

Hip-hop from New Jersey.

BIKINI KILL

VIOLET SKIES

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

Rock from the UK.

Jazz from the UK. Part of Glasgow Jazz Festival.

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

THE BUG CLUB

PARQUET COURTS

DEL AMITRI

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00,

Pop rock from Texas.

Indie rock from London.

BILLIE EILISH

Electronica from London.

Indie from Coventry.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Electronic jazz from Glasgow.

Singer-songwriter from England.

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

WATERPARKS

RYAN QUIGLEY BIG BAND

TRIBES

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

NINE INCH NAILS (YVES TUMOR)

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Fri 17 Jun

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:30–22:00,

NOUSHY 4TET (INDIA BLUE)

Jazz from Scotland. Part of Glasgow Jazz Festival.

ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00,

Sun 19 Jun

WITH LOVE, FROM GLASGOW

ORAN MOR, 15:00–22:00,

Jazz lineup. Part of Glasgow Jazz Festival.

Synth from Scotland.

THE BEAT

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

SHARON VAN ETTEN

PINS (DRUMHELLER + HEATNAVI + CARTILAGE + BLEAKS)

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

CRO MAGS

AUDIO, 19:00–03:00,

Eclectic punk line-up from Glasgow.

Wed 22 Jun

THE INVAINES (TEMPE + THE SUMMITZ + THE WITS)

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00,

Indie rock from Glasgow.

Punk from New York.

BOB MOULD

Alt rock from the US.

ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00,

June 2022 — Listings

Electro pop from Scotland.

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

KELSY KARTER

FUTURA GLITCH: LIVIA RITA

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

SORRY

Pop from Glasgow.

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00,

UNSCHOOLING (BRENDA)

Pop emo from Glasgow.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Alt rock from Leeds.

Singer-songwriter from the US.

Punk from LA.

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:00–22:00,

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00,

DAVID GRAY

BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

THE RARELY SOCIAL

THE SKINNY

Sat 25 Jun GEESE

KING TUT’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Indie from Brooklyn.

THE BEAT

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00,

Ska from Birmingham.

KRYSTHLA

JEDWARD

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Pop from Ireland.

Tue 05 Jul JIGJAM

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

Bluegrass from Ireland.

SOFT KILL (CHOIR BOY) BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

Pop from Texas.

WENDY KIRKLAND THE BLUE ARROW, 19:30–22:00,

Jazz from the UK.

Sun 26 Jun

MANNEQUIN PUSSY BROADCAST, 19:00– 22:00,

Indie rock from Philadelphia.

CAHALEN MORRISON THE HUG AND PINT, 19:00–22:00,

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 20:00–22:00,

Rock from London.

ELECTRIC LADIES (TOYAH + LENE LOVICH + SAFFRON) THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:00,

Edinburgh Music Tue 31 May

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

Indie rock from Edinburgh.

DUBINSKI

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

Indie rock from Edinburgh.

ALFONZETTI

Wed 08 Jun

Hard rock from the UK.

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

MEMORIAL (ELARNOR MOSS + JACK HINKS)

WOLFSBANE

Rock from England.

THE BUICK 55S

DRUG CHURCH

DELIGHTS

Post-hardcore from Albany.

Pop rock from Manchester.

Hardcore punk from NY

Reggae from Scotland.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

THE FELICE BROTHERS

Thu 02 Jun

LAGWAGON

ASTRID

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00,

Rock from Nashville.

Wed 29 Jun INJURY RESERVE

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

Hip-hop from Arizona.

REIGNWOLF

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Indie from Seattle.

Thu 30 Jun FATAMORGANA

MONO, 20:00–22:00,

Synth pop from Barcelona.

THE BEVIS FROND

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

Psych from England.

ROBERT VINCENT CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, 19:30–22:00,

Americana from Liverpool.

Fri 01 Jul

IONA ZAJAC (ETAIN + HECTOR SHAW) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00,

Folk and blues from Glasgow.

Sat 02 Jul

OLIVIA RODRIGO

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Scotland.

Fri 10 Jun

2SEVENS + FRAUDS + THE GUILLOTINES

CATRIN FINCH + SECKOU KEITA

Singer-songwriter from London.

THEO BLEAK

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Dundee.

STEVE FORBERT

KINGS OF LEON

BROKEN CHANTER

USHER HALL, 19:00– 22:00,

PALOMA FAITH

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

Pop from Mississippi.

Punk rock from Belfast.

Pop from Glasgow.

Fri 03 Jun

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00,

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Punk rock from California.

THE OUTCASTS

MEOW

Punk rock from Prague.

JIMMY WEBB

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:00–22:00,

Classic pop from Oklahoma.

JACK LUKEMAN

SUMMERHALL, 19:00– 22:00,

Singer-songwriter from Ireland.

Sat 04 Jun OPENSIGHT

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

Metal from Colombia.

LIGHT WATER IS BLACK WATER

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:00,

Experimental music from Scotland.

THE COSMIC TRIP ADVISORS

Punk rock from Scotland.

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:00,

Folk from Wales and Senegal.

THE PHANTOM PROJECT SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Edinburgh.

ATOM EYES

THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00,

Jazz from Scotland.

Sat 11 Jun

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00,

Punk from the UK.

Sun 12 Jun

THE COURETTES

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

Rock from Denmark and Brazil.

FEET

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

Indie from Coventry.

Tue 14 Jun

Americana from Austin.

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

Tue 21 Jun SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

JESSIE WARE

VELVET STARLINGS + DOVV + BLACKBIRDS + WEEKEND AWAY

Pop from London.

Eclectic alt pop lineup.

Hardcore from New York.

O2 ACADEMY EDINBURGH, 19:00–22:00,

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

URAL THOMAS AND THE PAIN THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

Folk from Scotland.

THE CAVES, 19:00– 22:00,

Indie folk from Edinburgh.

Sun 03 Jul

LUCID LIARS

Singer-songwriter from Seattle.

Rock from Inverness.

SUMMERHALL, 19:00– 22:00,

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.

SUNDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) FLASHBACK

Pop party anthems and classic cheese from DJ Nicola Walker.

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.

WEDNESDAYS

GLITTERED! WEDNESDAYS

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

FRIDAYS

FRESH BEAT

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

SATURDAYS

I LOVE GARAGE

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

SUNDAYS SESH

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

THURSDAYS ELEMENT

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

MEURSAULT

SUMMERHALL, 19:30– 22:00,

NICOLE CASSANDRA SMIT (FROM THE LABYRINTH)

ULTRABOMB (SHOCK & AWE + BUZZBOMB)

Punk rock supergroup.

Tue 05 Jul

COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

CHRYSTABELL

Singer-songwriter from Arizona.

Pop from Texas.

USHER HALL, 19:00– 22:00,

Dundee Music

Tue 28 Jun

Sat 04 Jun

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

R’n’B from LA.

ST VINCENT

Soul pop from the US.

USHER HALL, 19:00– 22:00,

GANGSTAGRASS THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00,

Indie rock from the US.

Bluegrass and hip-hop from the US.

Wed 29 Jun

Thu 23 Jun

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

WREST

TAILGUNNER

Heavy metal from Sweden.

THE CAVES, 19:00– 22:00,

ALAS DE LIONA

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

Indie folk from California.

Fri 24 Jun

CRASHED OUT (ZERO TOLERANCE + PANIC ATTAK + RARE BREED) BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

Thu 30 Jun THE FROOT

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

Prog rock from Hull.

JON BISSETT

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

HORSE

Singer-songwriter from the UK.

Pop from Scotland.

SUMMERHALL, 19:30– 22:00,

Punk rock from England.

Indie from Ayrshire.

Thu 16 Jun KAE TEMPEST

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 19:00–22:00,

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

LEON BRIDGES

SUMMERHALL, 19:00– 22:00,

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 19:30–22:00,

Rock from Indiana.

Mon 27 Jun

JOAN AS POLICE WOMAN

Eclectic rock lineup.

BROWNBEAR

Fri 17 Jun

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00,

Surfer indie from Melbourne.

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

Wed 15 Jun

Mon 04 Jul

Blues from Edinburgh.

GOOD MORNING

ROCK & ROLL CIRCUS AT BANNERMANS: JASON SWEENEY + SUPPORTS

THE COLD STARES

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00,

BRASS AGAINST

Sat 02 Jul

Indie rock from Scotland.

Soul from the US.

Indie rock from Australia.

THE JELLYMAN'S DAUGHTER

CATHOUSE FRIDAYS

Spoken word performer from England.

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

Americana from Winchester.

MAVIS STAPLES

Wed 15 Jun

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

Sun 26 Jun

JON ALLEN

Alt rock from Berlin.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

Hip-hop from Poland.

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

USHER HALL, 19:00– 22:00,

Indie rock from Australia.

THE BONGO CLUB, 19:00–22:00,

CRO-MAGS

BLACK MAGIC TREES

ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER

DONGURALESKO

Wed 22 Jun

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00,

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 20:00–22:00,

Sat 25 Jun

Indie pop from LA.

THE BEAT

KRIS DREVER

FRIDAYS

COLLEEN GREEN

O2 ACADEMY EDINBURGH, 19:00–22:00,

Blues and rock from the US.

CATHOUSE WEDNESDAYS

UNHOLY

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

Singer-songwriter from LA.

Sun 05 Jun

WEDNESDAYS

THURSDAYS

Rock from Edinburgh.

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00,

Cathouse

DARDEN SMITH

BECK

Rock from West Lothian.

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

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

Mon 20 Jun

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

Pop from the US.

Hard rock from Boston.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Yorkshire.

LAURA VEIRS (JONI)

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

MATCHBOX OCEANS

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

U.K. SUBS

Soul party feat. 60s R'n'B, motown, northern soul and more!

SUBCULTURE

Protest music from the UK.

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00,

DIAMANTE

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

RHABSTALLION

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

MOJO WORKIN’

SATURDAYS

Alt rock from Scotland.

STEREO, 19:00–22:00,

Pop from Oklahoma.

KATHERINE ALY

THE SMILE

Thu 09 Jun

SATURDAYS (THIRD OF THE MONTH)

Sub Club

Eclectic rock lineup.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

SHOW ME THE BODY

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00,

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00,

HANSON

GLASGOW + PRIMA DONNA RISING + STAR CIRCUS

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:00–22:00,

FINLEY QUAYE

Punk rock from New York.

Fri 17 Jun

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–22:00,

Rock from Cape Cod.

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00,

Roots from Canada.

The Rum Shack

THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00,

Indie pop from Aberdeen.

SWG3, 19:00–22:00,

GOLDEN DAYS

WILLIAM PRINCE

Singer-songwriter from Leicester.

KILLDEER (FAT FAST BOBBY)

SUNDAYS

Weekly house and techno night for losing yourself in the beats.

Prog rock from France.

THE LITTLE KICKS

Wed 01 Jun

Rock from England.

JESSE MALIN (KELLEY SWINDALL)

THE CAVES, 19:00– 22:00,

Sat 18 Jun

HIGHLY SUSPECT

Tue 28 Jun

The Flying Duck

FRANCK CARDUCCI & THE FANTASTIC SQUAD

Rockabilly from Scotland.

Folk from Scotland.

Americana from New York.

Folk from Scotland.

JAMES MADDOCK

Indie folk from the UK.

USHER HALL, 19:00– 22:00,

ST LUKE’S, 19:00– 22:00,

Regular Glasgow club nights

Alt pop from Edinburgh.

Rock ‘n’ roll from New York.

Mon 27 Jun

HANNAH RARITY

THE CAVES, 18:00– 22:00,

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

GRAVEDANCER

Country from New Mexico.

June 2022 — Listings

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00,

DUBINSKI

Post-punk from Portland.

CHRYSTABELL

Thu 16 Jun

TIM HOLEHOUSE

80s pop from the UK.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00,

Metal from the UK.

Mon 06 Jun

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 20:00–22:00,

ANDREW WASYLYK

AULD SPELLS

Composer from Scotland.

BAD MANNERS (MAX SPLODGE) CHURCH, 19:00–22:00,

Ska from London.

JAMES GRANT

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 20:00–22:00,

Singer-songwriter from Glasgow.

Wed 08 Jun

MOVING TARGETS (DIAZ BROTHERS + KADDISH) RAD APPLES, 21:00– 22:00,

Post-hardcore from Massachusetts.

Sat 11 Jun

BROKEN CHANTER (M. JOHN HENRY + MT. DOUBT) THE HUNTER S. THOMPSON, 19:00–22:00,

Rock from Scotland.

SUMMERPUNKS

RAD APPLES, 16:00– 22:00,

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00,

Eclectic rock lineup.

CHAMELEON LADY

U.K. SUBS

Folk pop from Edinburgh.

Punk from the UK.

Dream pop from Scotland.

Sun 12 Jun

THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00,

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 19:30–22:00,

— 82 —

KAKIHARA (BED OF WASPS + DEMONSTRATION OF POWER + NOTHIN’ BUT ENEMIES) RAD APPLES, 19:00– 22:00,

Rock from Edinburgh.

Glasgow Clubs Wed 01 Jun VAT (UKRAINE FUNDRAISER)

LA CHEETAH CLUB, 23:00–03:00,

Electro and techno.

MOVEMENT WITH DJ SAMA ABDULHADI + DOMENIC CAPPELLO + KAIROGEN

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00,

Arabic techno.

Thu 02 Jun

RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL

BY NIGHT (SLAM + HELENA HAUFF + PARFAIT + WALLIS + DJ SMOKER + FARNAZ) SWG3, 23:00–03:00,

House and techno. Part of Riverside Festival.

FLINT

THE FLYING DUCK, 23:00–03:00,

Techno, bass and garage.

ALL U NEED XL - SKIN ON SKIN

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00,

Techno and dance.

Fri 03 Jun

FENIX: STEVIE COX + IRIS PERTEGAZ NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 23:00–03:00,

Dance and techno.

RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL

BY NIGHT (SLAM + GARY BECK + COACCUSED + MOXIE + NIGHTWAVE + WARDY + KILIMINJARO) SWG3, 23:00–03:00,

House and techno. Part of Riverside Festival.

JAIVA + DESIREE + BUTHOTHEWARRIOR

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00,

Afro house and techno.

Sat 04 Jun

RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL

BY NIGHT (INDIA JORDAN + LEZZER QUEST + ABSOLUTE + AUSTIN ATO + EDDY MURF + EDINBURGH DISCO LOVERS + X ALL NIGHT PASSION) SWG3, 23:00–03:00,

House and techno. Part of Riverside Festival.

CLUB UPRISING: CLIMBERS FOR UKRAINE (SAM SCRIVEN + MICHAEL BLEAZARD + ALEX WEILER + LAURIE MCLEAN)

STEREO, 23:00–03:00,

Disco, techno and trance from Glasgow.

SURGE (INERTIA) THE FLYING DUCK, 23:00–03:00,

Techno from Glasgow.

Sun 05 Jun

HANG TOUGH PRESENTS: BREAKA B2B BAKEY WITH FEENA NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 23:00–03:00,

Bass, dance and trance.

Fri 10 Jun

FUSE: J OH ZEE (ISO YSO + DRUMHELLER + IRA + VAJ.POWER) STEREO, 23:00–03:00,

Bass, grime and breaks from London and Glasgow.

YER AULD DA’S

THE FLYING DUCK, 23:00–03:00,

DJ and dance from Glasgow.

RETURN TO MONO: SLAM + DARRELL PULSE + FARNAZ + OPTIMISTIC SOUL

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00,

House and techno.

THE SKINNY

Sat 11 Jun

HAWKCHILD DIY: DOSS + OLI XL

STEREO, 23:00–03:00,

Leftfield club from New York and Stockholm.

Thu 16 Jun

ANIMAL FARM: VAULT 44 AFTERPARTY + DYEN + QUAIL + AISHA + PILA B

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00,

Rave and techno.

Sat 25 Jun

THE FLYING DUCK, 23:00–03:00,

STEREO PRESENTS: TOMU DJ (SOFAY + KTAB)

Fri 17 Jun

Footwork and bass from California and Glasgow.

VERSA

Electronica.

WODA X FUNDAMENTALS (APRES ANORA + BRANDON LEE VEAR + JOEY DESKTOP + TRSSX [LIVE])

STEREO, 23:00–03:00,

Techno and electro from Poland.

EUPHORIA

THE FLYING DUCK, 23:00–03:00,

House and techno.

Sat 18 Jun GETDOWN

SWG3, 23:00–03:00,

Rap, drill and afro.

POP MUTATIONS: BAE BAE (DORICA + RAJ CHANDRA) STEREO, 23:00–03:00,

STEREO, 23:00–03:00,

Edinburgh Clubs Wed 01 Jun EDINBURGH UNDERGROUND THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00,

Club and dance.

WHAT GOES UP X NUTS PRESENTS: DJ STREAKS & KAPRISUN THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

Dancehall, amapiano and club from LA and Glasgow.

Fri 24 Jun

NIGHTS LIKE THIS: RESIDENT PARTY

STEREO, 23:00–03:00,

House and disco from Glasgow

SAVED BY THE 90’S LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00,

Pop.

OVERGROUND

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

Underground and electronic.

Sat 04 Jun

EHFM (LUPINI + XIVRO) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

Leftfield dance.

Electronica.

BREATHE

Fri 03 Jun

Thu 02 Jun THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00,

Dance and techno.

DEEP JUNGLE WALK THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

Psytrance.

BALKANARAMA SPECIAL: 15TH BIRTHDAY EXTRAVAGANZA LA BELLE ANGELE, 22:30–03:00,

FEEDBACK. PRESENTS ‘FREINDS AND FAMILY’ (INEZ + DV60 + SMIFF + JACK.JOSH + OISIN) THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

House, techno and disco.

Sat 11 Jun

HAND-MADE WITH LOVE (HAND-MADE + GOOD COLL) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

CIRCLE WITH NOEMIE (ONA:V + VIOLET HAZE + VXYX + PENSTKART)

Regular Glasgow comedy nights

Techno.

The Stand Glasgow

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

Sat 18 Jun

HEAL YOURSELF & MOVE (OTHER LANDS + HOUSE OF TRAPS) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–23:00,

House and techno.

House and disco.

DECADE

CALIFORNIA LOVE

LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00,

LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00,

Pop punk party.

Hip-hop and R’n’B.

TONTO TECHNO

CLUB NACHT

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

Hard techno.

Balkan beats.

House and techno.

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

CHAOS IN THE COSMOS

MORRISON STREET COLLECTIVE (NITE FLEIT)

House and techno.

Electro.

SAMEDIA SHEBEEN

Tropical.

Wed 08 Jun

HYPNOTIKK (JYOTY) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

Bass.

Thu 09 Jun

GEORGE IV & REFRACTA PRESENTS (NIA ARCHIVES) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

Jungle.

Fri 10 Jun

SWIFTOGEDDON

Mon 20 Jun

Mon 13 Jun SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

MIDNIGHT BASS

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

FRIDAYS (THIRD OF THE MONTH) ELECTRIKAL

Sound system and crew, part of a music and art collective specialising in BASS music.

FRIDAYS (MONTHLY, WEEK CHANGES) SOUND SYSTEM LEGACIES

FRIDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH) DISCO MAKOSSA

Disco Makossa takes the dancefloor on a funk-filled trip through the sounds of African disco, boogie and house – strictly for the dancers.

FRIDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH) OVERGROUND

A safe space to appreciate all things rave, jungle, breakbeat and techno.

FRIDAYS (FIRST OR LAST OF THE MONTH) HEADSET

Skillis and guests playing garage, techno, house and bass downstairs, with old school hip-hop upstairs.

SATURDAYS (FIRST OR SECOND OF THE MONTH) MESSENGER

Roots reggae rocking since 1987 – foundation tune, fresh dubs, vibes alive, rockers, steppers, rub-a-dub.

SOULSVILLE INTERNATIONAL

International soulful sounds.

SATURDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH) PULSE

Techno night started in 2009 hosting regular special guests from the international scene.

Sneaky Pete’s MONDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) HEADSET

Scottish rave label with a monthly, guest-filled night.

TUESDAYS

POPULAR MUSIC

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

WEDNESDAYS HEATERS

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

THURSDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) VOLENS CHORUS

Resident DJs with an eclectic, global outlook FRIDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) MISS WORLD

All-female DJ collective with monthly guests

FRIDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) HOT MESS

A night for queer people and their friends.

SUNDAYS POSTAL

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

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.

The Hive MONDAYS

MIXED UP MONDAY

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

COOKIE WEDNESDAY

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

THURSDAYS

HI-SOCIETY THURSDAY

Student anthems and bangerz.

FRIDAYS

FLIP FRIDAY

Yer all-new Friday at Hive.

Cheap entry, inevitably danceable, and noveltystuffed. Perrrfect.

SATURDAYS BUBBLEGUM

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

THE FRIDAY SHOW, 20:30

The big weekend show with four comedians.

Electro.

Bass and breaks.

FUSION

Fri 17 Jun

ATHENS OF THE NORTH (FRYER + LEL PALFREY) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

Techno.

Fri 24 Jun

TELFORT’S GOOD PLACE

Funk and soul.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

House and techno.

ROMANIAN BITS

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

SUNDAYS

SECRET SUNDAY

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

Electronica.

Subway Cowgate

Mon 27 Jun

TRACKS

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

TUESDAYS

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

Techno.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

House and techno.

Wed 29 Jun B2B PRESENTS SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

House and techno.

TAMAGOTCHI

WEDNESDAYS

Glasgow Comedy

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

The King’s Theatre

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

XO

THURSDAYS

CHRIS RAMSAY

SLIC

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

FRIDAYS

FIT FRIDAYS

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

SATURDAYS

SLICE SATURDAY

The drinks are easy and the pop is heavy.

SUNDAYS

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

The Mash House

SATURDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH) SAMEDIA SHEBEEN

Joyous global club sounds: think Afrobeat, Latin and Arabic dancehall on repeat.

SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH) PULSE

The best techno DJs sit alongside The Mash House resident Darrell Pulse.

RED RAW, 20:30

Legendary new material night with up to eight acts.

FRIDAYS

THE FRIDAY SHOW, 21:00

The big weekend show with four comedians.

SATURDAYS

THE SATURDAY SHOW (THE EARLY SHOW), 17:00

A slightly earlier performance of the big weekend show with four comedians.

SATURDAYS

THE SATURDAY SHOW, 21:00

The big weekend show with four comedians.

TUESDAYS (BIWEEKLY)

THE EDINBURGH REVUE, 19:00

The University of Edinburgh's Comedy Society, who put on sketch and stand-up comedy shows every two weeks.

WEDNESDAYS

TOP BANANA, 19:00

Catch the stars of tomorrow today in Monkey Barrel's new act night every Wednesday.

THURSDAYS

SNEAK PEAK, 19:00 + 21:00

Four acts every Thursday take to the stage to try out new material.

FRIDAYS

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY'S BIG FRIDAY SHOW, 19:00

Monkey Barrel's flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.

SATURDAYS

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY'S BIG SATURDAY SHOW, 19:00

Monkey Barrel's flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.

SUNDAYS

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY'S BIG SUNDAY SHOW, 19:00

Monkey Barrel's flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.

PULSE

TAIS-TOI

MONDAYS

MONDAYS

Monkey Barrel Comedy Club

4-5 JUL, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

Funny storytelling from professional podcaster.

The Stand Glasgow

FRANKIE BOYLE: WORK IN PROGRESS 8-16 JUN, 4:30PM – 6:00PM,

New material from Scottish comedy legend.

ADAM ROWE: IMPERIOUS

7-9 JUN, TIMES VARY,

Host of the smash-hit Have A Word podcast returns with a new stand-up show.

STEVE BUGEJA: TRIED TO START HIS OWN NICKNAME 29 JUN-3 JUL, TIMES VARY,

ANTH YOUNG: FAMILY MAN 27-28 JUN, 7:30PM – 9:00PM,

A authentically wry look at parenting.

KEVIN BRIDGES: WORK IN PROGRESS 2 JUN, 7:00PM – 9:00PM,

Beloved Glasgow comedian returns to his hometown.

MARC JENNINGS: MARC-IN-PROGRESS 15 JUN, 7:30PM – 9:00PM,

Edinburgh Fringe preview.

BILLY KIRKWOOD: ENERGETIC 16 JUN, 7:30PM – 9:00PM,

Livewire, genre-bending comedy.

Theatre Royal SANDI TOKSVIG LIVE! NEXT SLIDE PLEASE€¦

26-27 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

The QI quizmaster lays out the case for remaining cheerful even amidst the wrong answers.

Tramway

PATRICK KIELTY: BORDERLINE

1-4 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM,

Bittersweet comedy extravaganza.

Edinburgh Comedy

Festival Theatre

STEWART LEE: SNOWFLAKE/ TORNADO

19 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

One of Britain’s best comedians turns a sharp eye onto our current political climate.

AL MURRAY THE PUB LANDLORD: GIG FOR VICTORY 23 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

A satiric take on Britishness.

SANDI TOKSVIG LIVE! NEXT SLIDE PLEASE€¦

26-27 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

The QI quizmaster lays out the case for remaining cheerful even amidst the wrong answers.

SARAH MILLICAN: BOBBY DAZZLER 2-3 JUL, 8:00PM – 10:00PM,

Outrageous comedy from British comedy stalwart.

Monkey Barrel Comedy Club

SUSAN RIDDELL: LIVING MY SECOND BEST LIFE (WIP) 25 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM,

A self-deprecating look at ideas of success.

STEPHEN BUCHANAN: WORK IN PROGRESS 1 JUL, 8:00PM – 10:00PM,

New stand-up from BBC New Comedy Award winner and Scottish Comedian of the Year 2018.

AURIE STYLA: GREEN (WIP) 2 JUL, 8:00PM – 10:00PM,

A look at comedy as transformation and rebirth.

STEVE BUGEJA: TRIED TO START HIS OWN NICKNAME 29 JUN-3 JUL, TIMES VARY,

One of comedy’s rising stars takes to the stage.

JULIA MASLI: CHOOSH!

11 JUN, 6:00PM – 8:00PM,

Host of the smash-hit Have A Word podcast returns with a new stand-up show.

The Queen’s Hall

7-9 JUN, TIMES VARY,

STAMPTOWN

NO UPCOMING DATES, 8:30PM – 10:00PM,

Trademark blend of joyful songs and silly stand-up.

18 JUN, 6:00PM – 8:00PM,

— 83 —

A hilarious mediation on class and modernity.

A debut solo comedy hour from the talent behind the hit show Legs.

JONNY & THE BAPTISTS: DANCE LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED 4-5 JUN, TIMES VARY,

18 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM,

ADAM ROWE: IMPERIOUS

A raunchy, full-on fringe experience, this late-night variety show features the best from the international scene.

One of comedy’s rising stars takes to the stage.

JACOB HAWLEY: BUMP (WIP)

SHELF: HAIR (WIP)

A sharply relevant comedy music act.

PATRICK KIELTY: BORDERLINE 1 JUN, 8:00PM – 10:00PM,

Bittersweet comedy extravaganza.

The Stand Edinburgh

FRANKIE BOYLE: WORK IN PROGRESS 8-9 JUN, 4:30PM – 6:00PM,

New material from Scottish comedy legend.

June 2022 — Listings

Exploring the legacy of dub, reggae and roots music and sound system culture in the contemporary club landscape.

SATURDAYS (MONTHLY)

The perfect way to end the working week, with four superb stand-up comedians.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

Sat 25 Jun

Monthly no holds barred, down and dirty bikram disco.

FRIDAYS

FRIDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

Techno.

SOUL JAM

Legendary new material night with up to eight acts.

FRIDAYS

The Stand Edinburgh

PLANT BASS’D

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00,

Everything from disco, funk and soul to electro and house: Saturday night party music all night long.

MUMBO JUMBO

RED RAW, 20:30

The Glee Club

Thu 23 Jun

SIGNAL (REPTANT)

BOUND IN SOUND

TUESDAYS

TUESDAYS

An evening of awardwinning comedy, with four superb stand-up comedians that will keep you laughing until Monday.

SATURDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00

Thu 16 Jun

Pop and dance.

SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)

Host Billy Kirkwood and guests act entirely on your suggestions.

The big weekend show with four comedians.

Regular Edinburgh comedy nights

LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00,

SATURDAYS (MONTHLY)

MONDAY NIGHT IMPROV, 20:30

SATURDAYS

THE SATURDAY SHOW, 21:00

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00,

Regular Edinburgh club nights The Bongo Club

FIRST MONDAY OF THE MONTH

SATURDAYS

THE SKINNY

STU & GARRY’S IMPROV SHOW

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

Resident duo Stu & Garry weave comedy magic from audience suggestions.

Mysteries and imposters abound in this adaptation of Robert Thomas' Trap for a Lonely Man.

7 JUN, 7:30PM – 9:00PM,

JONNY & THE BAPTISTS: DANCE LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED 4 JUN, 3:00PM,

Trademark blend of joyful songs and silly stand-up.

ANTH YOUNG: FAMILY MAN 28 JUN, 7:30PM – 9:00PM,

A authentically wry look at parenting.

Tramway

THE DANCE SCHOOL OF SCOTLAND PRESENTS THE WORLD GOES ROUND 23-25 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

An award-winning revue paying tribute to the star-dazzled history of Broadway.

Glasgow Art GoMA

AFROSCOTS: REVISITING THE WORK OF BLACK ARTISTS IN SCOTLAND THROUGH NEW COLLECTING 1 JUN-3 JUL, 11:00AM – 4:00PM,

Bringing together new acquisitions and existing works from Glasgow Museums’ collection, including pieces by Alberta Whittle and Barby Asante, this exhibition examines ongoing conversations around race and postcolonial legacies in Scotland.

Glasgow Theatre

Edinburgh Theatre

Oran Mor

Assembly Roxy

TASTE!

31 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:30PM,

Featuring work by Andy Warhol, Sarah Forrest and David Shrigley, this exhibition looks at how taste is created and art archives are curated.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: ALRIGHT SUNSHINE 1-4 JUN, 1:00PM – 2:00PM,

A police officer responds to a mass brawl on The Meadows in this exploration of gender, power, and the politics of public space.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: THE BODY ELECTRICIAN

6-11 JUN, 1:00PM – 2:00PM,

As our bodies go with us, womb to tomb, the Body Electrician figures the cost of our mortal lives.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: INHERITANCE 13-18 JUN, 1:00PM – 2:00PM,

When the landowner of a remote Highland estate dies, leaving all to his longlost daughter, the struggling locals are astonished to hear her radical plans.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: THE WORDS 20-25 JUN, 1:00PM – 2:00PM,

An urgent exploration of home office asylum interviews and the stories people tell to survive.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: SCOTS!

27 JUN-2 JUL, 1:00PM – 2:00PM,

A story about Scotland - its past, present and future - all fit into one hour-long musical adventure.

The King’s Theatre JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT

June 2022 — Listings

27 JUN-2 JUL, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

14-25 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

Andrew Lloyd-Webber goes Biblical in this musical classic.

THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW 27 JUN-2 JUL, TIMES VARY,

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

MAMMA MIA!

1-11 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:30PM,

A LOVER’S DISCOURSE

Bringing together a series of creative, genre-defying responses to Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse.

Festival Theatre

DON GIOVANNI

5-11 JUN, TIMES VARY,

Scottish Opera put on a lavish production of the Mozart masterpiece.

King's Theatre SUNSHINE ON LEITH

7-18 JUN, TIMES VARY Soundtracked by The Proclaimers, this Edinburghbased musical is an apt dose of warmth.

Royal Lyceum Theatre LAUREL & HARDY

3-25 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

A revival of the warmhearted Tom McGrath play about two of comedy’s larger-than-life legends.

Summerhall

AFTER METAMORPHOSIS 4-5 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

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

The Edinburgh Playhouse THE LION KING

2 JUN-2 JUL, TIMES VARY,

Leave all your worries behind with this lavish theatrical adaptation of the beloved Disney film.

The Studio

INNOVATIONS DANCE PLATFORM 2022 3-4 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

Four different companies put together a cutting-edge programme.

Dundee Theatre

Head to Greek paradise with this all-singing, alldancing Abba musical.

Dundee Rep

Theatre Royal

17-18 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

DON GIOVANNI

5-24 JUN, TIMES VARY,

Scottish Opera put on a lavish production of the Mozart masterpiece.

DANCE SCHOOL OF SCOTLAND SHOWCASE 2022

10-11 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

A 1920s-inspired showcase of ballet, jazz, and contemporary.

THUNDERSTRUCK

The true story of a Pitlochry binman who changed the Scottish music scene forever.

KIPPS: THE NEW HALF A SIXPENCE MUSICAL 8-11 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:00PM,

Julian Fellowes updates the classic British musical.

1 JUN-31 DEC, 11:00AM – 4:00PM,

DOMESTIC BLISS

1 JUN-31 DEC, 11:00AM – 4:00PM,

as a former house, a Royal Exchange and civic space.

Building on the gallery’s space as a former house and civic space, Domestic Bliss examines how artists develop practice alongside social and political change, and the ways in which public and domestic labour intersect with art.

RGI Kelly Gallery

YEAR OF STORIES EXHIBITION

7-25 JUN, TIMES VARY,

Showcasing a range of artistic practices, this opencall exhibition celebrates Scotland’s Year of Stories through works dedicated to stories, fairy tales and the art of storytelling.

Street Level Photoworks

STREET LEVEL OPEN 2022 1 JUN-7 AUG, TIMES VARY,

Featuring numerous Scottish lens-based artists pulled from an open call, this exhibition is a celebration of the diversity of photography in Scotland.

The Briggait ALAN CAMPBELL: LOST LEAVES

21 JUN-17 JUL, TIMES VARY,

Screenprint art from Glasgow-based artist engaging with ideas of storytelling and workplay.

The Modern Institute @ Airds Lane

JIM LAMBIE + EVA ROTHSCHILD + SUE TOMPKINS + MICHAEL WILKINSON: ‘STATUS NEED A WORLD INTERLUDE’ 1-18 JUN, TIMES VARY,

A group exhibition featuring sculpture, painting and installation from four of The Modern Institute’s most ambitious artists.

LEWIS MILLER: CURTAINS

1-18 JUN, TIMES VARY,

A body of paintings interacting with the distinctive architecture of the gallery to offer new and imaginary windows into the outside world.

Tramway

HUMAN THREADS

1 JUN-28 AUG, TIMES VARY,

Curated by Artlink and informed by individuals with profound and multiple learning disabilities, this exhibition crafts a interactive landscape through creatively sensory encounters.

CHRISTELLE OYIRI: GENTLE BATTLE

1 JUN-14 AUG, TIMES VARY,

Exploring the symbolic political potency of objects and music, this exhibition examines how warfare and colonialism continue to make themselves felt.

Edinburgh Art

Edinburgh Printmakers WORKSHOP

1-26 JUN, 11:00AM – 4:00PM,

Taking its cue from Edinburgh Printmakers’ history as a working artist space, this exhibition delves into the archives to examine how the space has shaped experimental printmaking in Edinburgh.

Ingleby Gallery KATIE PATERSON: REQUIEM

1-11 JUN, 11:00AM – 5:00PM,

Gathering dust from materials dating from pre-solar times to the present day, this exhibition tells the history of our planet through a single object.

LORNA ROBERTSON: THOUGHTS, MEALS, DAYS

25 JUN-17 SEP, 11:00AM – 5:00PM,

&Gallery

MICHELLE BENOIT + JON THOMAS + MOLLY THOMSON: LINE, COLOUR & FORM 1 JUN, TIMES VARY,

A group exhibition playing with ideas of composition and harmony.

ANDREW CLAUSEN + SUSAN LAUGHTON: STRUCTURE & FRACTURE 4-29 JUN, TIMES VARY

Architecturally inspired works exploring the natural and urban essence of materials.

Arusha Gallery CONNIE HARRISON

1-19 JUN, TIMES VARY,

A series of dreamy, figurative landscapes by Londonbased artist.

City Art Centre NATIONAL TREASURE: THE SCOTTISH MODERN ARTS ASSOCIATION 1 JUN-16 OCT, TIMES VARY,

Spotlighting work by the Glasgow Boys, Scottish Colourists and artists such as William McTaggart and Joan Eardley, this is a celebration of Scottish art at the dawn of modernism.

WILL MACLEAN: POINTS OF DEPARTURE

Glasgow-based artist plays with notions of scale and expression through expressive, figurative canvasses.

Jupiter Artland TRACEY EMIN: I LAY HERE FOR YOU

1 JUN-2 OCT, 10:00AM – 5:00PM,

Tracey Emin’s first Scottish show since 2008 takes the form of a larger-than-life yet strangely intimate bronze sculpture reflecting on the possibilities of love after hardship.

Open Eye Gallery

CHRIS BUSHE RSW: CHASING LIGHT

4-25 JUN, TIMES VARY,

Landscape paintings capturing the shifting light and water of the Scottish islands.

Out of the Blue Drill Hall SARAH PHELAN: A PUBLIC FAX FORUM 1-11 JUN, 10:00AM – 4:00PM,

Out of the Blue’s artist-in-residence explores risoprinting through the medium of fax machines.

Royal Scottish Academy RSA THE 196TH ANNUAL EXHIBITION

4 JUN-2 SEP, TIMES VARY,

1-12 JUN, TIMES VARY,

This major retrospective spans construction, drawings, prints, sculptures, and video productions to examine the history, archaeology, and literature of the Scottish Highlands.

Exactly what is says on the tin: the 196th edition of the RSA Annual Exhibition, one of the largest contemporary art exhibitions in the UK.

Dovecot Studios

Angus artist, better known for his sculptures, crafts elegant explorations of formalism in collage, pencil and pen.

THE ART OF WALLPAPER: MORRIS & CO. 1-11 JUN, 10:00AM – 5:00PM,

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

ALAN DAVIE: BEGINNING OF A FAROFF WORLD

24 JUN-24 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM,

Celebrating the centenary of Scottish artist and tapestry-worker Alan Davie.

Edinburgh College of Art

DOUG COCKER: WORKS ON PAPER

1-12 JUN, TIMES VARY,

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

BARBARA HEPWORTH: ART & LIFE 1 JUN-2 OCT, 10:00AM – 5:00PM,

The largest exhibition of Barbara Hepworth’s work since her death in 1975, this ambitious retrospective examines the personal and political in her groundbreaking art.

ECA GRADUATE SHOW 2022 4-11 JUN, TIMES VARY,

The annual degree show by Edinburgh College of Art’s graduating class.

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Scottish National Portrait Gallery

COUNTED: SCOTLAND’S CENSUS 2022 1 JUN-25 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM,

Inspired by the 2022 census, photographs old and new come together to consider complex notions of identity formation and performance.

Stills

ROBBIE LAWRENCE: NORTHERN DIARY 1-25 JUN, 12:00PM – 5:00PM,

Scottish photographer Robbie Lawrence embarks on his first solo exhibition, documenting post-Brexit life across Scotland’s cities, rural locations and coastal towns.

Summerhall

BLACK BOX: KINSHIP 1-9 JUN, 12:00PM – 5:30PM,

A curatorial cinema project exploring ideas of kinship and science through a 90-minute programme of short films.

G-LANDS: AN OUT OF BODY EXPERIENCE 1-6 JUN, 12:00PM – 5:30PM,

Drawings, sculptures, and creative responses based in the medical research done on salivary glands.

SONIA MEHRA CHAWLA: THE ROOTED SEA 1-6 JUN, 12:00PM – 5:30PM,

An interdisciplinary inquiry into human/nonhuman relationships and the fragility of coastal ecosystems across both India and Scotland.

Talbot Rice Gallery

CÉLINE CONDORELLI: AFTER WORK 25 JUN-1 OCT, TIMES VARY,

A groundbreaking survey of design and installation exploring the ethics of labour and production.

The Scottish Gallery

JAMES MORRISON: A CELEBRATION

1-25 JUN, TIMES VARY,

A major retrospective of one of Scotland’s most distinctive landscape artists.

Dundee Art DCA: Dundee Contemporary Arts DOUGLAS GORDON: K364 1 JUN-7 AUG, TIMES VARY,

A major film installation that offers a powerful mediation on trauma and recovery.

The McManus THE STREET AT THE MCMANUS

1 JUN-22 OCT, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Immersive exhibition looking at Dundee’s historical architecture.

TROY: BEAUTY AND HEROISM

1 JUN-13 AUG, 10:00AM – 5:00PM,

Depicting the story of Helen and Paris, an Etruscan urn on loan from the British Museum is complemented by other mythic items from the McManus and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design collections.

V&A Dundee MICHAEL CLARK: COSMIC DANCER

2 JUN-4 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM,

A groundbreaking exhibition exploring the life and works of acclaimed Scottish choreographer and dancer Michael Clark.

DESIGN FOR OUR TIMES

2-13 JUN, 10:00AM – 5:00PM,

Using materiality to explore how design can offer sustainable solutions to the climate crisis.

THE SKINNY

SECRET DOOR: DUNDEE’S BUZZIEST NEW NIGHTCLUB D

popular spots. But alongside Rosscraig’s personal ambitions, he felt there was a need to reconnect Dundee’s musical community.

Rosscraig says: “Through lockdown, I had conversations with myself: ‘When lockdown lifts, what do you want to happen? What do you want to see happening here in Dundee?’”

“I wrote down a lot of things and realised that I wanted to come up with something that would be totally different – something that Dundee hadn’t seen before. I just think there’s a real need to connect everything in Dundee, for it to be put back on the map again.”

Having never run his own venue before, Rosscraig was admittedly nervous when it came to Secret Door’s opening night. “I can be quite apprehensive and paranoid and it’s easy to think the worst,” he says. But after defeating those initial nerves, he was pleased to see a positive response to his new venture. Polka Dot Disco Club, Fold and AVNU are just a handful of the local and national names who have brought house, techno and disco to the venue’s minimalist space so far.

Exclusivity is another important element to Secret Door with its website reserved for members only; over time, Rosscraig hopes to grow Secret Door’s following whilst retaining its tight-knit feel. “I want people of all kinds to be able to come here, feel safe, feel like they want to be there, and above all enjoy themselves,” he explains. “The acts that we’ve booked, we think, are some of the best up-and-coming DJs not just in Dundee, but in Scotland.”

Rosscraig also adds that emulating the success and stature of the city’s former nightclub The Reading Rooms is a huge ambition for Secret Door. “The Reading Rooms was a hub for the underground scene here,” he recalls. “They did so much in terms of attracting top talent to the city and helping young talent — 85 —

come through. I made so many friends for life there and if we can do half of what that venue did for Dundee, we’d be happy.”

Secret Door may still be in its teething stages, but this hasn’t stopped Rosscraig from harbouring further adventurous plans. Accessing multiple secret venues across Dundee for a weekend festival is just one of his aims to bring something brand new to the city, but for now, keeping focus on his debut venue venture is paramount.

“There’s a lot of wee ideas that I’ve got. But I’m predominantly focusing on making sure the club is cool, safe and ensuring the music is exactly what people are wanting to hear,” Rosscraig enthuses.“There’s so much emerging talent around here and I don’t think there’s enough of a shop window for it. If we can be the main shop window for these DJs, artists and creatives, that would be unreal.”

June 2022 — Listings

undee is a city known for the ebbs and flows of its music scene. From the highs of The View’s breakout back in 2007 to the lows of being branded a ghost town ten years later, success and excitement for music here tends to come in cycles.

One local looking to bring the next wave of musical buzz to the city is Jon Rosscraig, who runs Dundee’s newest nightclub and music venue Secret Door. The 30-year-old opened Secret Door on 23 April, a little over a month after taking the keys and giving the disused nightclub space on South Ward Road a facelift. And the transformation isn’t just aesthetic. A close-knit community feel is at the heart of Secret Door’s ethos: in the short time since its opening, the venue has already provided a platform for emerging local DJs and has bold plans for the year ahead.

However, Secret Door is a project that Rosscraig started not just to rejuvenate music in Dundee, but also himself. “To be honest, I’d been getting too comfortable in my life sitting around not doing anything for too long,” Rosscraig says. “I wanted to push myself out my comfort zone again because I think that brings out the best in me as a person. This was a key factor for me going ahead with Secret Door.”

Rosscraig’s sense of place is deeply rooted in Dundee – his dad owns the independent clothing shop Manifesto, which first opened back in 1986. He has been a keen Dundee United football fan throughout his life and spent time in the USA on a football scholarship before returning back home to lend a hand in the family business.

“Music has also been huge for me,” Rosscraig explains. “When I first started going out in town, The View had really kicked off and Dundee was buzzing – it was so vibrant.” Yet Rosscraig felt that the city’s music scene had been lacking that vibrancy more recently. Newer venues like The Hunter S Thompson have become

Interview: Jamie Wilde Photo: Lauren Kellie

Secret Door 21 S Ward Rd, Dundee

Venues

We chat with Secret Door, a new nightclub and music venue in Dundee that’s looking to bring together the city’s musical community

THE SKINNY

The Skinny On...

The Skinny On...

Morven Mulgrew & Kate Owens Artists Morven Mulgrew and Kate Owens, whose collaborative exhibition SKU is currently showing in Sierra Metro, share their favourite (and not favourite) things

What’s your favourite place to visit?

Morven MM: Sierra Metro 13-15 Ferry Rd, Edinburgh for coffee, where Kate and I have a show on until 19 June open 10am-2pm most weekdays and weekends. Which is entirely coincidental to the great coffee, obviously.

Kate KO: I can’t share my favourite place to go because I don’t want anyone else to go there and ruin it.

What’s your favourite food?

MM: Probably Turkish food from Dalston Kingsland, I’d go Mangal, Stone Cave or Umit 2000. The pomegranate marinated onions...KO: Soffles Pitta Chips, made in Tottenham where we both used to live. You only need a few, they’re so substantial and not greasy at all! Rosemary & Thyme are the best flavour.

June 2022 — Chat

Favourite colour?

MM: Blue, because Kate hates the colour blue and I think that’s quite harsh to hate a whole colour.KO: Green: nature-ally.

Who was your hero growing up?

MM: Never had a hero, just people I was jealous and embittered by which can be seen as ALSO motivating in a way.KO: No heroes as such but I did really want to be a dancer after seeing Cats the musical at the Edinburgh Playhouse. MM: I take it back, my hero is Old Deuteronomy, the Judi-Dench-as-a-cat-wearing-a-fur-coat-eventhough-cats-already-have-fur version.

Whose work inspires you now?

KO: I’m genuinely inspired by seeing the work of my peers (from way back on my BA at ECA) develop and mature as we all grow up. Katie Orton, Tessa Lynch, Ruth Ewan, Alberta Whittle, Alexa Hare, Rabiya Choudhry, Craig Coulthard, Jenny Hogarth, Kim Coleman, Katie Paterson and Peter Donaldson etc.

MM: Kate Owens.

KO: Obviously Morven Mulgrew too! Her capacity for making stuff happen in a short space of time is inimitable!

MM: I’m very deadline-motivated.

What three people would you invite to your dinner party and what are you cooking?

MM: I find inviting people over generally exhausting due to my desperation for everyone to like me haha. So three people I don’t need to please. I like making salads that are mostly nuts and cheese

and meat and vinegar. Or a smoked sausage supper with chippy sauce.

What’s your all-time favourite album?

MM: I like to listen to things like Nirvana and Pixies (best of albums) to remind myself of my horrendous teenage years.

KO: Anything by Django Django!

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

MM: I like bad films better than good films tbh. I LOVE Magic Mike XXL – is that the worst film I’ve ever seen? It's feckin brilliant though. So no. I don’t like slow meditative takes on the human condition so probably one of them is the worst.

KO: Django Unchained.

What book would you take to a desert island?

MM: I need to finish Moby Dick but the thing is it’s completely unsuitable reading matter when the weather is good. I’d absolutely hate to be on a desert island. I’m scared of the dark and I hate sand.

KO: Thinking Through Craft by Glenn Adamson.

It’s sort of funny in bits, has pictures and you need somewhere quiet to read it (Wait is Morven going to be on this island too?!?)

What’s your all-time favourite artwork?

MM: I like a big experiential smack-in-the-face populist art like the Olafur Eliasson sun in the Turbine Hall, or Jeremy Deller’s Stonehenge bouncy castle, or this brilliant thing I saw in a church which was death metal played on the organ... I just googled it and it was by Matt Stokes.

I like to feel my feelings, not think.

KO: Vollmond by Pina Bausch. It’s a dance piece that feels a lot to do with the sensory quality of materials including the body.

MM: I also like dance, there is a great Olafur Eliasson work with dancers set in his artist studio, you can google that too.

Who’s the worst?

MM: Slightly older men who say “good girl” to me.

I’m fucking 40!

KO: At what? Writing witty responses to questions? Me. When did you last cry?

MM: Probably ten minutes ago, I leak easily.

KO: I don’t know! Now I’m anxious, I know I’ve been very sad about things that have happened in the last few years but I can’t — 86 —

Morven Mulgrew outside SKU at Sierra Metro

remember crying!!

MM: I’m wet, she’s dry. It works!

What are you most scared of?

MM: Death, the populist answer.

KO: Being exposed to any trauma or sharks.

When did you last vomit and why?

MM: 10 Downing Street, June 2020. No one found out though so it’s fine.

Tell us a secret?

MM: We have a show on in Sierra Metro until 19 June showing curtains and ceramics, and we would love you to go! There are free posters!

KO: We’re sponsored by Soffles Pitta Chips and Lind & Lime Gin. Which artist could you take in a fight?

KO: None, I’ve got poor upper body strength and don’t like confrontation.

MM: Kate Owens If you could be reincarnated as an animal, which animal would it be?

KO: A grey squirrel? They seem to have a relatively easy time of it. I don’t think they’ve got many natural predators in the UK and I like the idea of living in trees and eating nuts.

MM: A seal (rat of the sea), a pigeon (rat of the sky) or a rat (…).

KO: So basically we’d both be vermin.

Sierra Metro presents SKU, a collaboratively presented exhibition by Morven Mulgrew and Kate Owens, until 19 Jun, Sierra Metro, 13-15 Ferry Road, Edinburgh www.sierrametro.org

THE SKINNY

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June 2022 — Chat

The Skinny On...

THE SKINNY

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