The Skinny May 2022

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May 2022 Issue 196

MAY DAY( DAY(S) Celebrating the workers

THE SKINNY

The Skinny's favourite song/band relating to 'work': The Spinners – Working My Way Back To You Marie Davidson – Workaholic Paranoid Bitch Elvis Costello – Shipbuilding Sheena Easton – 9 to 5 (Morning Train) Wham! – Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do) Britney Spears – Work Bitch Florence Reece – Which Side Are You On Dolly Parton – 9 to 5 Bo Burnham – How the World Works Faith No More – We Care A Lot Glen Campbell – Wichita Lineman The Nightwatchman – Union Town Hozier – Work Song Marie Davidson – Work It (Soulwax Remix) Rush – Working Man Donna Summer – She Works Hard for the Money

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

Issue 196, May 2022 © Radge Media Ltd.

May 2022 - Chat

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printed on 100% recycled paper

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Championing creativity in Scotland Meet the team We asked – What's your favourite cultural depiction of workers' rights?

Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief "90s documentary A Bug's Life."

Peter Simpson Digital Editor, Food & Drink Editor "The Simpsons, series four, episode 17, 'Last Exit to Springfield'."

Anahit Behrooz Events Editor "The whole genre of miners' strikes/anti-Thatcherite cinema.

Especially the last five minutes of Pride which makes me WEEP."

Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist "King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread, a rhapsodic celebration of community featuring a nailbiting action scene in which a makeshift commune has to build a long ditch. Cinema!"

Tallah Brash Music Editor "Superstore episode 'Sandra's Fight' is the start of a run of episodes with a focus on unionising. I love how empowered it makes Sandra, whose voice often isn't heard."

Nadia Younes Clubs Editor "Buffy Summers singlehandedly taking down the forced labour system that has existed for generations when she gives up the power of being the slayer."

Polly Glynn Comedy Editor "Pride."

Eilidh Akilade Intersections Editor "Has anyone said Pride yet?"

Eliza Gearty Theatre Editor "Pride!"

Heather McDaid Books Editor "Just basically everything Superstore."

Business

Production

Laurie Presswood General Manager "Kelly Kapoor slapping Michael Scott..."

Dalila D'Amico Art Director, Production Manager "Parasite."

Christian Gow Marketing & Commercial Assistant "Antz. "Be The ball" – an eternal life motto."

George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist "The Belters in sci-fi series The Expanse.

Humans born, raised and forced to work on the Asteroid Belt, they're basically oppressed space miners. Beltalowda!"

Harvey Dimond Art Editor "It's a popular one... Pride!"

Lewis Robertson Digital Editorial Assistant "Robots (2005)."

Sales

Sandy Park Commercial Director "Pride? No, The Irishman. He was part of a union after all.

Does that count?"

Tom McCarthy Creative Projects Manager "Star Trek: Deep Space 9 'Bar Assoiciation' in which the workers at Quark's bar form a union. It's great to hear a Ferengi quoting Marx."

Phoebe Willison Designer "Nae Pasaran "

THE SKINNY

Editorial Words: Rosamund West

A

May 2022 — Chat

rriving in the Royal Lyceum this month, Red Ellen is a play inspired by the life of 20th-century workers’ rights activist Ellen Wilkinson. We meet playwright Caroline Bird to learn more about what inspired her to delve into this historical character at this point in time. The parallels between the political battles Wilkinson was fighting in 1930s Britain and the present climate are impossible to ignore – workers’ rights being eroded, debates around school children being fed, a corrupt government and widespread resistance to immigration all feel very 2022. There is also a desire to memorialise this impactful female leader, and prevent her struggles from being forgotten.

Inspired by this, we are marking May Day (or multiple May days because this magazine lasts all month) with a look at how the current climate – the ‘cost of living crisis’ and erosion of said rights – is impacting creative workers. In a context where bills are rising but wages are not, it becomes increasingly impossible for those without private wealth to survive in the cultural sector. It was already near impossible; now we are looking at the very real possibility of a mass exodus from the creative industries. And to be clear, a diverse cultural sector is essential – surely the pandemic proved its value in offering solace to the nation in times of crisis. As well as all its other demonstrable benefits. It shouldn’t be a luxury for people to do jobs they like and are good at.

We speak to creative workers at different stages in their careers and it is clear they are all struggling. The exponential rise in bills is crippling people and forcing them to make hard decisions about how they work and where. It’s been said many times, but cancelling a Netflix subscription will not fix this.

In Glasgow, a group of historians, artists, writers and teachers are working together to revive the Red Sunday School, a place for learning and community building from Glasgow’s radical past. Non-religious, non-party-affiliated, the school creates a space for children to explore, learn and think about the world around them. They are teaching them about the city’s history of protest and resistance, topics seldom covered within the formal curriculum, and finding the positive, the space for individual agency, to inspire a new generation to make things better.

Beyond the theme, we talk to Kathryn Joseph, appearing this month at the Great Eastern festival, about her pain-filled new album, for you who are the wronged, penned in lockdown and recorded in the Highlands. We talk to Stuart Murdoch and Chris Geddes of Belle and Sebastian about their latest album, A Bit of Previous, their first to be recorded in Glasgow since 2000.

This month’s Spotlight falls on Edinburgh-based artist and musician Swiss Portrait, who’s playing our stage at Kelburn Garden Party in July and has just released a new EP, Safe House.

A group from Edinburgh-based anti-racism charity Intercultural Youth Scotland have been working away, putting together a new zine which unapologetically platforms the perspectives of their young members. Called No Permission Needed, its first issue launches this month and they’ve kindly allowed us to share some of the proofs. We continue to celebrate independent publishing as Books meets Glasgow-based BHP Comics’ Sha Nazir to learn about their new Bold Collection which creates stories that aren’t being published elsewhere.

Comedy meets Flo & Joan aka sisters Rosie and Nicola Dempsey to hear about their upcoming UK tour, Sweet Release, a feel-good show that isn’t purposefully feel good. Clubs meets DJ Haram and Moor Mother, back after a four-year hiatus to revive their collaborative project 700 Bliss with a debut album, Nothing to Declare.

In Art, we welcome new section editor Harvey Dimond.

Their first feature is an interview with curator Saoirse Amira Anis, whose exhibition Mis(sing) Information is on display at Perth Museum & Art Gallery until June. The show platforms Black artists and poses urgent questions around the decolonisation of museums, reparations and repatriation.

In big The Skinny news, we are branching out to launch a new monthly Film Club at Summerhall. The first event is on 18 May, and features a retrospective of the work of Glasgow-based filmmaker James Price – dubbed ‘The Springburn Scorsese’ on these very pages – alongside a screening of the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time. You’ll find a discussion of Price’s work on p27.

We close the magazine with The Skinny On… Kathleen Hanna, who shares many inspiring and enlightening words alongside the news that she could probably batter Danny DeVito.

Cover Artist Based in Edinburgh, Angela Kirkwood is an illustrator and animator interested in experimenting with the endless possibilities of animation. She enjoys creating weird and wonderful topsy-turvy worlds filled with expressive characters that inspire joy in the people that view them. You'll find a pull-out poster of another of her works, Friends, in our centre pages. angelakirkwood.com @angelakirkwood

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THE SKINNY

Love Bites

Love Bites: Running with my Pegasus This month’s columnist reflects on running through life’s ups and downs Words: Deborah Chu

“T

May 2022 — Chat

hey’re on sale too,” said the shop assistant at Run4It. “That is, if you don’t mind the colour.”

I didn’t. It was April 2021 – we were inching back towards ‘normal’, whatever that meant. It was hard to say which felt more strange and terrifying: the outside world, or my inside brain. A continent away, my grandfather was dying. I was about to leave my job. At that point, I would have happily strapped dynamite on my feet, just to keep the walls from closing in.

Amid the lashing wind and rain of that spring, I wheezed through a few wobbly circuits of my local park in my new pair of Nike Pegasus trainers. I wasn’t a natural runner – I’m not, still – but the act lifted me out of my panicked haze. One gaudy purple foot in front of another. I could do that much, at least.

Gradually, I felt stronger; ran longer. My Pegasus and I hydroplaned over slick cobblestones and climbed new, hilly neighbourhoods. I ran around Holyrood Park – there’s that turn in the road, where the city vista suddenly appears. Seeing that view unfold felt like magic, every time.

When things ‘opened up’ and picked up speed, so did my runs. As someone who has always struggled to set boundaries, running helped me carve out a much-needed solitude when pre-pandemic rhythms and obligations rushed back into place. With my trusty trainers in hand, I could duck out of any family function and overstimulating gathering. I wasn’t a nervous wreck – I was a runner.

A few weeks ago, I developed a shooting pain up my shin. Another trip to Run4It confirmed my fears: the Pegasus were worn through. The electric blue Asics I now run in are sturdier, better for longer distances.

But they’ll never carry me as far as my first love.

Crossword Solutions Across 1. SEVERANCE 6. KIOSK 9. ROLES 10. AUTOMATON 11. KAFKAESQUE 12. VETO 13. WEARY 14. BLOC 19. AWRY 20. FAGIN 24. LOUD 25. TOUCH AND GO 27. APATHETIC 28. ALARM 29. X-RAYS 30. WILKINSON Down 1. STRIKE 2. VILIFY 3. RESHAPED 4. NOAH'S ARK 5. EATS UP 6. KPMG 7. ON THE SLY 8. KEN LOACH 15. KARL MARX 16. BROUHAHA 17. FARCICAL 18. MIYAZAKI 21. KOWTOW 22. IDEALS 23. COMMON 26. THUS

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THE SKINNY

Heads Up

Festival season slowly unfurls its wings this month: find the best gigs, art shows, and performances to fill those lengthening days.

Compiled by Anahit Behrooz

Heads Up

Various venues, Edinburgh, 19-21 May Never has a conference been so chic. Wide Days may technically be aimed at international delegates across the music industry to chat business and network, but their stellar public programme is open to all and promises an excellent time. Choose from three lineups of the best of local talent, from Kapil Seshasayee to Katherine Aly, or head to their showcase of Welsh and Canadian talent.

Image: courtesy of artist and Kendall Koppe

Photo: Kulvir Bhambra

Wide Days

Kapil Seshasayee

Photo: Adam Rosenbaum

Hak Baker SWG3, Glasgow, 13 May, 7pm Completely reconfiguring what we mean by folk music, East London musician Hak Baker pulls themes of urbanity and modernity into his music, crafting a new genre which he lovingly refers to as grime folk. Having made waves with his tender and reclamatory debut album Babylon, Baker is touring after the release of his equally stirring EP Misled, released last year.

Kiss of the Sun, Mark McKnight

Mark McKnight: Kiss of the Sun

Photo: Holly Revell

Kendall Koppe, Glasgow, Until 28 May Los Angeles-based artist and photographer Mark McKnight is known for his investigations into queer expression, documenting the movements and textures of the United States’ desert landscapes interspersed by queer bodies and acts. His stark yet beautiful black and white photographs redefine the politics of landscape art by interweaving geographical space with ideas of history, trauma, and memory.

Hak Baker

All of Me

Various venues + online, 4-24 May Taking place across Scotland and online, this year’s edition of Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival revolves around the theme of “gather”, considering what it means to come together and build community. Highlights from the programme include Caroline Horton’s All of Me, a heady and intimate account of what it means to want to live, at Tron Theatre, and physical theatre piece One Mississippi touring around Scotland.

Newen Afrobeat Image: courtesy of 432 Presents

May 2022 — Chat

Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival

Image: courtesy of Knockengorroch

Knockengorroch

deep tan

Various venues, Edinburgh, 21 May Taking place over a single day across venues in Edinburgh, The Great Eastern may be small but it is certainly mighty. A single festival pass (barely the price of some gig tickets) gets you access to shows across Summerhall, The Queen’s Hall, and King’s Hall to see the likes of Porridge Radio, Free Love, and deep tan all in a single day.

Zinzi Minott: BLOODSOUND

Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic

Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Until 14 May

Dumfries and Galloway Dance present #DGDanceDare

Various venues, Dumfries & Galloway, 20-29 May

Zinzi Minott at Transmission

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Art Bookmarket, Fruitmarket

Edinburgh Zine Fair + Artist’s Bookmarket

Dumfries & Galloway Festival The Hope River Girls

Photo: Chris Scott

The Studio, Edinburgh, 9-12 May

The Great Eastern

Photo: Matthew Arthur Williams

Photo: Kirsten Mcewan

The Hope River Girls

Kirkcudbrightshire, 19-22 May Set in the picturesque Carsphairn Hills in southwest Scotland, Knockengorroch is one of the first large-scale musical festivals of the year, and one of the first to return after a very (very) long break.

Spread out over numerous folksy stages and tents across the festival grounds, the lineup includes psychedelic turbo folk group Don Kipper, 2020 Scottish Album of the Year Award-winner Nova, and the magnificent Chilean 13-piece orchestra Newen Afrobeat.

Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, 14-15 May, 10am-6pm

THE SKINNY

Image: courtesy of Heavenly Recordings

Photo: Colin Hattersley

Mattiel Òran Mór, Glasgow, 10 May, 7pm Attention, fans of True Detective, The Beguiled, and William Faulkner: there’s a new vibe in town. Atlantabased duo Mattiel are bringing their particular brand of Southern Gothic to the halls of Òran Mór following the release of their rapturously acclaimed third album Georgia Gothic. Championed by the likes of Jack White, this is music at its most jangly, haunting, and deliciously fun.

Antigone, Interrupted

Figures of Speech: Music

Mattiel, Georgia Gothic

Photo: Maria Falconer

Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, 20 May, 7:30pm Part of a new series of literary events in collaboration with Edinburgh City of Literature and the Scottish Storytelling Centre to celebrate Scotland’s Year of Stories 2022, this inaugural evening sees Arusa Qureshi, author of Flip the Script, and broadcaster Nicola Meighan exploring new conversations around music before a newly commissioned dance piece from poet and performer Katie Ailes.

Heads Up

Figures of Speech, Year of Stories 2022

Dundee Rep, Dundee, 26-27 May Following a sold-out tour from London all the way to Shetland, Scottish Dance Theatre’s Antigone, Interrupted is returning to its original home at Dundee Rep for two nights only. This avant-garde, one-woman physical retelling of the visceral Greek tragedy is as heartstopping as it is heartrending, bringing Sophocles’ story defiantly into the modern age.

We Should Hang Out More with Ahadadream The Berkeley Suite, Glasgow, 6 May, 11pm Founder of London-based label More Time Records and No ID, a London party dedicated to South Asian DJs, polymath and DJ extraordinaire Ahadadream is heading to Glasgow for a night of unparalleled electronic music. Known for his unique edits and dubs, Ahadadream blends desi influences with the cutting edge of UK club culture for a joyous celebration of nightlife.

Tracey Emin: I Lay Here For You

Image: courtesy of the artist

Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, 28 May-30 Sep Tracey Emin’s first Scottish show since 2008, I Lay Here For You is proof that some things are well worth waiting for. Taking the form of a giant bronze sculpture of a woman curled against the atmospheric woodlands in Jupiter Artland, this installation is a heartstopping, vulnerable examination of loneliness and vulnerability, continuing Emin’s career-long investigation of the politics of intimacy.

Photo: Sam Hiscox

Photo: Alan Pollok Morris Courtesy Jupiter Artland

Antigone, Interrupted, Scottish Dance Theatre

I Lay Here For You, Tracey Emin

SOAK The Caves, Edinburgh, 29 May, 7pm Having recently toured Scotland in support of Lucy Dacus, Derryborn indie artist SOAK is returning for their own tour. Their charmingly diffident stage manner belies a staggering talent: with introspective, offbeat songwriting and a 90s grunge edge, SOAK’s music acts as a perfect document of a time of collective uncertainty, transformation, and longing.

Ahadadream

May 2022 — Chat

SOAK

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

Wuthering Heights

Photo: Drew Forsyth

Image: courtesy of the artist

The Stand Edinburgh, 17 May; The Stand Glasgow, 18 May, 8:30pm

King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, 2528 May Image: courtesy of Capital Theatres

Image: courtesy of CARTOCON

Tarot: Cautionary Tales

Esa

Yazzus

CARTOCON SoundSystem presents Esa Tarot

Miss World: Yazzus

Beat Generator Live!, Dundee, 21 May, 11pm

Wuthering Heights

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Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 6 May, 11pm

THE SKINNY

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THE SKINNY

Photo: Aidan Wyldbore

What's On All details correct at the time of writing

Music

Priya Ragu

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May 2022 — Events Guide

Film It’s gauche, but screw it: we’re beginning this month’s Film Event Column with some shameless self-promotion. On 18 May we’re launching the CineSkinny Film Club at Summerhall in Edinburgh. We’re going to be screening a programme of the soulful short films of talented Glasgow writer-director James Price alongside the Safdie Brothers’ breakneck crime thriller Good Time. It’s a feature that we feel chimes well with Price’s poetic aesthetic, which blends

OSEES

Photo: Emily Lipson

Photo: Beth Chalmers AMUNDA

Welcome to May, the month which signals the start of summer festival season in Scotland. Kicking off with the family-run Knockengorroch, set in the gorgeous Carsphairn Hills of Kirkcudbrightshire, the festival takes place from 19-22 May and features the likes of Nova, Callum Easter and the Afro Celt Sound System. In the central belt, Wide Days takes place in Edinburgh on the same weekend (19-21 May), with conference panels galore and live music every night; you’ll find all of this year’s selected showcase artists (Bemz, Calum Bowie, Chef, Cyrano, Katherine Aly, Savage Mansion and Swiss Portrait) playing free shows at The Caves and The Liquid Room on Friday 20 May. The following day also sees a return to the capital of multi-venue festival The Great Eastern. Based in the city’s Southside, the day will feature performances from Kathryn Joseph, Porridge Radio, Free Love, Anna B Savage, Soccer96 and The Wave Pictures among others. Outwith festivals, some pretty big names in the world of music bring their tours to Scotland this month too. Michael Kiwanuka swings by Glasgow’s O2 Academy on 6 May before Aussie electro-dance troupe Confidence Man celebrate their latest, TILT, the following night at Edinburgh’s Liquid Room. Also celebrating a new album this month, LA four-piece Warpaint bring Radiate Like This to SWG3 on the 13th, before their San Franciscan neighbours OSEES tear up QMU the following night.

The sound of the summer is winging its way to Glasgow this month in the form of Charli XCX’s Crash tour at the O2 Academy in the middle of the month (15 May), while New Zealand’s Lorde brings 2021’s divisive Solar Power (and hopefully some Melodrama bangers too – that green light, we want it!), to Edinburgh’s Usher Hall towards the end of the month (26 May).

Elsewhere, Tamil-Swiss singer-songwriter Priya Ragu brings her glorious damnshestamil LP to Glasgow’s The Garage (6 May), while C Duncan celebrates his latest, Alluvium, at The Caves (11 May) and King Tut’s (14 May).

Poster Paints, featuring Carla J. Easton, finally get to play their debut headline shows at Nice N Sleazy (17 May) and Sneaky Pete’s (18 May), while Baltimore dream pop duo Beach House bring their eighth record Once Twice Melody to Barrowlands (23 May). Meanwhile, at a more grassroots level, AMPLIFI celebrate the final night of their three-part series at The Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh (25 May) featuring AMUNDA, jayda and Djana Gabrielle.

[Tallah Brash]

Charli XCX

Good Time

THE SKINNY

The Hateful Eight

May 2022 — Events Guide

Photo: Vasso Vu

Theatre The brilliant Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, now in its 16th year, is back this month with events taking place across Scotland. Theatrical highlights include One Mississippi, a verbatim play about childhood experiences and masculinity, from Revolution Days playwright Mariem Omari (touring across Scotland until 14 May). Also check out The White Chip, a funny and honest look at addiction in theatre (various locations, 18-20 May) and Though This Be Madness, Skye Loneragan’s portrayal of motherhood, sisterhood and mental illness (The Studio, Edinburgh, 21-22 May).

In Glasgow, head to the Tron to see the UK premiere of Who Killled My Father, the stage adaptation of French author Édouard Louis’ novel (11-14 May).

Clemency

Photo: Ben Collins

Danny L Harle

Clubs May gets off to a flying start, as one of the most influential producers in modern pop music, Danny L Harle, brings his virtual club experience, Harlecore, to life on his UK tour. The PC Music affiliate – known for his collaborations with the likes of Caroline Polachek and Charli XCX – will be playing two back-to-back dates in Scotland at the start of the month, stopping off in Edinburgh’s Sneaky Pete’s on 5 May and Glasgow’s Broadcast on 6 May. And the big hitters just keep coming from there. Plant Bass’d and Mile High join forces to bring the duo on everyone’s lips – or at least all over Twitter – Two Shell to The Bongo Club in Edinburgh on 5 May. The following night, Miss World bring former member of 6 Figure Gang and recent resident at Berlin queer party Mala Junta, Yazzus, to Sneaky Pete’s.

There’s a Berkeley Suite doubler on 6 and 7 May. First up, We Should Hang Out More bring the brains behind London’s DialledIn Festival – focused on showcasing the sounds of the South Asian underground – Ahadadream to Glasgow. Then, Shoot Your Shot invite a DJ and producer that needs no introduction, Midland, along for their latest party.

We would say pause for breath here, but there’s no rest for the wicked as we get into May’s festival highlights. And, this month, they take us to some extremely varying locations; from Stirling Old Town Jail, where Shapes at the Jail takes place on 14 May, to Aberdeen’s Beach Esplanade for Cultivate Festival from 14-15 May, to the palatial setting of Hopetoun House in South Queensferry for FLY Open Air from 21-22 May. Round off the month with a few more, as Industrial Estate return to The Mash House for their second party in the capital on 20 May, with a big techno B2B from Animal Farm resident NEOMA and Eutony boss VXYX. Houseplants bring London-based DJ Lady Passion up to Glasgow for a vinyl-only set at The Berkeley Suite on 26 May, and Stereo team up with Manchester collective Mutualism on 27 May, to bring us sets from BFTT, Clemency and Iceboy Violet. [Nadia Younes]

Bahar

Photo: Ella Mitchell

Ahadadream

gritty realism with a real style and swagger. Price will be joining us for a Q&A following the mini-retrospective; we hope you can join us too.

If you’re interested in other great Scottish short films, get yourself to Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival’s Made in Scotland night (13 May, CCA Glasgow). The eclectic selection features shorts rooted in personal experiences that explore various themes, and includes excellent films like Douglas King’s Do No Harm, Sean Lìonadh’s Too Rough, and Maryam Hamidi’s Bahar in the lineup. There are plenty more film highlights at SMHAF, including the premiere of A Way From Rage, a collaboration between filmmakers Adura Onashile and Laura Cameron-Lewis and singer-songwriter Kathryn Joseph, which pays tribute to the late Beldina Odenyo Onassis (aka Heir of the Cursed). A Way From Rage is part of the opening event Gathering (4 May, CCA Glasgow) – full details at mhfestival.com The Italian Film Festival returns with screenings at Filmhouse, GFT, DCA, Belmont Filmhouse and Eden Court Theatre, running 20 to 29 May. A highlight will surely be The Hole, the much anticipated new film by Michelangelo Frammartino (Le Quattro Volte), while there’s plenty of classic Italian cinema on offer too, with retrospective screenings celebrating the work of Monica Vitti and Francesco Rosi. For the full programme and screening times, see the venues’ respective websites.

Talking of great Italians, both GFT and Filmhouse are paying tribute to Italy’s – perhaps the world’s – greatest composer, Ennio Morricone, in May. GFT shows Once Upon a Time in the West (8-9 May), The Mission (15 and 19 May), and The Hateful Eight (22 and 24 May). Filmhouse is truly spoiling Edinburghers, however, with ten Morricone-scored movies, among them The Thing (4-5 May), Days of Heaven (4-5 May), Cinema Paradiso (7-8 May) and The Untouchables (9-10 May). [Jamie Dunn]

The Tron

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THE SKINNY

Red Ellen

Mis(sing) Information

Art The 7 May marks the opening of Douglas Gordon’s k.364 at Dundee Contemporary Arts, with the namesake film of the exhibition making its premiere in a UK public gallery. The multi-screen film installation follows two Israeli musicians of Polish descent on a train journey between Berlin and Poland, reflecting on " the power of music against the subtly drawn backdrop of a dark and unresolved social history".

Also in Dundee, this year’s Duncan of Jordanstone, University of Dundee’s Art, Design and Architecture Degree Show takes place in the city from 21 to 29 May, with the work also available to view on an online platform.

Down the road, the V&A presents Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer, which showcases the Scottish dancer and choreographer’s diverse and varied practice from the 1980s up to the present day.

At Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Dundee-based artist and curator Saoirse Amira Anis has curated Mis(sing) Information, featuring work by four Black artists with a relationship to Scotland – Tayo Adekunle, Nkem Okwechime, Tako Taal, and Natasha Ruwona. This timely and urgent exhibition continues until 19 June.

Over in the southside of Glasgow, two new exhibitions open at Tramway.

The first is the debut solo exhibition of the Paris-based artist Christelle Oyiri, whose multidisciplinary practice explores alternative ways to understand and unravel histories of colonialism and conflict. The exhibition, titled Gentle Battle, continues until 14 August.

Also at Tramway, opening 11 May, is Human Threads, a partnership between Edinburgh-based ArtLink and the Cherry Road Learning Centre in Midlothian, which supports adults with complex developmental disabilities and complex autism. Showcasing the work of artists and performative collaborators whose works are informed by adults from the Learning Centre, it promises to be a multifaceted and multisensory experience. [Harvey Dimond] Poetry For a friendly, informal night of poetry, head down to Sketchy Beats Cafe, Leith, for Poetry & Pints, on 6 May. This casual open mic night promises to be a relaxing space for performers of all experience levels, so if you’re looking to dust off some performances now spaces have reopened, this would be the perfect opportunity. Doors open at 7.30pm for an 8pm start, and guests are welcome to BYOB, if they like. Ticket entry is a suggested £5 donation, with the money being given to the host venue, which is a not-for-profit community space. If you’d like to sign-up for an open mic slot, just email the organisers on poetrypintsleith@gmail.com Another open mic night has sprung up in Glasgow’s Tchai-Ovna House of Tea. Tasseomancy (the reading of one’s fortune in tea leaves), takes place every second Wednesday, with the next scheduled for 4 May. The event runs from 7-9pm, and is sure to have a real mix of fresh poetry.

Performance poet Imogen Stirling is touring her new book, Love the Sinner, and will be in Edinburgh on 6 May. Published by Verve Poetry Press in 2022, this long-form poem brings together a myriad of characters and is set to be adapted for stage by Vanishing Point Theatre Company.

Tapsalteerie is publishing an exciting new book, the first part of a series of Scots texts. Modern Makars Yin, edited by Christie Williamson, was released at the end of April and features a wide range of excellent poets: Irene Howat, Ann McKinnon, and Finola Scott. The series is a celebration of the diverse language that Scots is, as well as explores how it’s used in contemporary poetry. [Beth Cochrane]

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V&A Dundee

Tchai Ovna

May 2022 — Events Guide

Photo: Perry Jonsson Imogen Stirling

All of Me, a sequel of sorts to Caroline Horton’s 2013 hit show about anorexia, Mess, also at the Tron, sounds equally tender and hard-hitting (19 May).

Dundee Rep will host the world premiere of Michael Burnett and Joseph McCann’s new black comedy/gambling-themed thriller The Bookies (3-21 May). The venue will also receive a homecoming this month in the form of Joan Clevillé’s hit dance production Antigone, Interrupted, returning to Dundee Rep after a triumphant, UK-wide tour (26-27 May).

In Edinburgh, don’t miss Red Ellen, Caroline Bird’s new play about unstoppable socialist trailblazer Ellen Wilkinson (The Lyceum, 4-21 May).

Find out more in our interview on p22.

Last but not least, if you’re planning a spring getaway this month, why not check out the Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival? The programme includes Tickbox, a one-woman, bilingual play in Urdu and Scots (23-24 May), and Egg, Paper Doll Militia’s aerial theatre production about female fertility, sexuality and choice (29 May). [Eliza Gearty]

May 2022 Guide May 2022 — Events

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 — 36 Poster — 49 Music — 55 Film & TV 58 Design — 61 Food & Drink — 62 Books — 63 Comedy — 65 Listings 70 The Skinny On… Kathleen Hanna

Features 20 Costing out creatives: how the rising costs of living crisis is impacting creative workers.

22 Caroline Bird on turning the life of workers’ rights activist Ellen Wilkinson into a play, Red Ellen.

24 Ten films to watch for International Workers’ Day 26 Glasgow’s Red Sunday School are encouraging children to think differently, and engaging with Glasgow’s radical past.

20

22

24

27 A look at the work of talented Glasgow filmmaker James Price ahead of our retrospective at Summerhall this month.

30 We speak to Kathryn Joseph about her beautiful and painfilled third album for you who are the wronged.

32 Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch and Chris Geddes on new album A Bit of Previous.

26

27

30

38 Intercultural Youth Scotland’s new zine No Permission Needed shares the uncensored work of their members.

40 Glasgow-based BHP Comics’ Sha Nazir on their new Bold Collection.

44 Musical comedy duo Flo & Joan, aka sisters Rosie and Nicola Dempsey, chat to us about their current UK tour.

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46 Saoirse Amira Anis on her latest curatorial endeavour posing urgent questions about institutional misinformation, reparation and repatriation.

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Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Angela Kirkwood; Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Nottingham Playhouse; Man of Marble; AJ Higgins; Diamonds into Dust; Harry Clark; Hollie Hernando; Intercultural Youth Scotland; Agents of Mi7; Matt Crockett; Isha Dipika Walia; Saoirsa Amira Anis

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On the website...

A look at Russian Doll and TV’s love of time loop narratives; reviews of very good Metronomy and Dua Lipa gigs among others; Alchemy Film Festival; fortnightly episodes of The Cineskinny podcast; a chat with Glasgow party-starters Good Clean Fun; weekly Spotlight On… features on new Scottish music; and a look at TV’s love of time loop narratives

May 2022 — Contents

32

45 700 Bliss, aka DJ Haram and Moor Mother, discuss their debut album Nothing To Declare.

THE SKINNY

Games Across

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Adam Scott learns about work/ life balance in this Apple TV+ programme (9) 6. Stall (5) 9. Positions – parts (5) 10. Robot (9) 11. Nightmarishly bureaucratic – fake quakes (anag) (10) 12. Reject (4) 13. Tired (5) 14. Alliance of parties or countries (4) 19. Amiss (4) 20. Leader of the thieves in Oliver Twist (5) 24. Gaudy – clamorous (4) 25. Precarious – gotcha, undo (anag) (5,3,2) 27. Uncaring (9) 28. Concern (5) 29. Electromagnetic waves used for looking at ya bones (1-4) 30. Ellen ___, Labour politician (d.1947), workers' rights campaigner and the subject of the 2022 play Red Ellen (9)

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Refuse to work (6) Disparage (6) Altered – she pared (anag) (8) Big biblical boat (5,3) Devours (4,2) One of the ‘Big Four' accountancy organisations (4) Secretively (2,3,3) British filmmaker (b.1936) known for Kes and I, Daniel Blake (3,5) Author of Das Kapital (d.1883) (4,4) Hub-bub – a boar, huh? (anag) (8) Ludicrous (8) Studio Ghibli co-founder (b.1941) (8) Genuflect – grovel (6) Principles (6) Shared (6) Consequently (4)

Turn to page 7 for the solutions Compiled by George Sully

May 2022 — Chat

Can you find these words in this puzzle?

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN BENEDICTION BIKINI KILL BITTERSWEET CHLOE PETTS ELLEN WILKINSON FLO AND JOAN JACK LOWDEN JAMES PRICE KATHLEEN HANNA KATHRYN JOSEPH LA COMMUNE MAY DAY NATASHA RUWONA RED SUNDAY SCHOOL SAOIRSE AMIRA ANIS SOLIDARITY SPRINGBURN SCORSESE STRIKE SWISS PORTRAIT TAYO ADEKUNLE THE GARMENT JUNGLE THE THICK OF IT They could be horizontal, vertical or diagonal, forwards or backwards

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THE SKINNY

May 2022

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THE SKINNY

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THE SKINNY

Theme Intro

May Day Illustration: Angela Kirkwood

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May 2022 – May Day Special

A

new play Red Ellen, celebrating the life of workers’ rights activist Ellen Wilkinson, arrives in Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre this month. This forms the jumping-off point for an issue marking May Day, exploring the theme of workers’ rights then and now. As our writer points out, the parallels between Wilkinson’s 1930s political context and the present day are disturbing – war in Europe, the erosion of workers’ rights, a corrupt government, animosity towards refugees.

Against this backdrop, as the cost of living crisis impacts workers across the board, we talk to some from the creative industries about how this is threatening their immediate survival and long-term ability to remain within the cultural sector. Fighting for workers’ rights at the most grassroots level, we meet the people behind the Red Sunday School, which revives a Glasgow tradition of secular community building to encourage children to think differently and connect to Scotland’s radical past.

Finally, if you’re looking for inspiration this International Workers’ Day, we present a rundown of ten films from all over the world exploring workers’ rights and the power of unionisation.

Intersections

THE SKINNY

Costing Out Creatives We’re already feeling the financial difficulties offset by the cost of living crisis – this is no different for those in creative industries. We speak to creative workers about how this economic instability is impacting their work Interviews: Ross Hunter Illustration: Angela Kirkwood

May 2022 – May Day Special

T

o call it the ‘cost of living’ is to obscure its reality. We haven’t woken up in sudden need of more daily calories or a chill in our bones that’s harder to shake than it was last month. It’s just the amount of money needed to pay this cost has increased. The cost of living has stayed the same; but the market price of living has ballooned beyond belief. It’s impacting most of us – including workers in creative industries.

The notoriously precarious sector is proving increasingly difficult to navigate amid this ongoing crisis.

Our anxieties on this topic justifiably centre themselves around the stagnant wages which fail to keep up with inflation and the 54% increase in the energy price cap, as reported by Ofgem. But, in doing so, our conversations tend to ignore the fact that merely being able to survive doesn’t make a life worth living.

Those whose lives have been so easily accompanied by wealth may try to make us believe that a Netflix subscription or Spotify account are frivolous luxuries to be foregone in favour of sensible asceticism. But this fails to consider the indisputable fact that, for many of us, culture is a necessary component of our survival.

“Art was one of the things that people consumed most during lockdown.” says playwright Oliver Emanuel, from his house in rural Kinross. “Let’s remember that leaning towards art was an important element of how we survived.”

For artists like Emanuel the increase in the cost of living will mean much the same as it does for everyone else: life, at its most basic, becoming more expensive for him and his young family. He talks about his electricity bill doubling from £150 to £300 a month; about using the car less; about pondering when he will have to start crunching the numbers on the food shop.

Oliver mentions how a Universal Basic Income would help a lot – for everyone, not just creative workers.

Moreover, even for a playwright with over a decade of success in the industry, the spiralling costs of survival will have an impact on the work he is able to do. “The cost of wood and timber have gone up so building sets is hugely expensive,” he says. “And people do say to you, ‘Can you write a play without any set?’ They push that expense onto you by saying, ‘Can you think creatively around this?’

“And, of course, you can,” he says. “One of the things we’ve always got going for us is that because we are thinking creatively a lot of the time, we try to think of ways creatively out of a hole.” But creative thinking can’t entirely overcome the economic reality facing the creative sector in Scotland. Nor should artists be expected to constantly rely on their creative wiles just to survive in a precarious economy. As household budgets are squeezed ever tighter and higher proportions of our wages are spent on food, heat, and taxes, it leaves people with less money to spend on the art they enjoy. And in some sectors – like theatre, where audience numbers in many venues continue to languish below pre-pandemic numbers – this ultimately means less work for everyone involved.

“I try not to project too much into the future because I don’t really know what’s going to happen in terms of work.”

— 20 —

Oliver Emanuel, playwright

THE SKINNY

Intersections

‘We seemingly consider art purer if it was forged in hardship’

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May 2022 – May Day Special

“Since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve been living week to week,” says Oliver. “I try not to project too much into the future because I don’t really know what’s going to happen in terms of work.”

He continues: “I don’t have any work at this point beyond June. And I need some.”

For those just starting out with a career in the creative sector the situation is even more difficult. 20-year-old Dominic Slaney runs his own business, designing and making corsets and performance costumes in Edinburgh. Already, he’s seeing a downturn in the number of people willing to spend money on his creations.

“If you want the scary figure, about 60% of the orders I had for the month are gone,” he says. “I’ve already seen prices rise for materials, too.”

Modelling his own designs, Slaney resembles a genderfuck nymph from a Botticelli painting, his waist snatched in with an added Victorian-era corset. The garments are delicate-looking, even wispy, but grounded in the skill of a dedicated tailor. It’s the kind of craft and creativity that, in earlier times, would have been nurtured by benevolent and wealthy patrons. It buzzes with potential. Nowadays, however, such freely-given financial backing is hard to come by – especially for those early on in their careers.

So, artists like Slaney are left at the mercy of political decisions that impact the amount of money people have to spend on businesses like his. The cost of living crisis is by no means a uniquely British problem. What changes the outcome for creatives, however, is the way governments in their respective countries choose to deal with it.

“I want to live and work in Germany because there’s a lot more options in terms of finding work and finding clients,” Slaney says. All taxpayers in Germany are also set to receive a one-off €300 payment to help with the increased cost of living.

With a largely queer clientele, Slaney probably would have more opportunities in a bigger city like Berlin or Munich. The political decisions that impoverish potential consumers of his work in Scotland will only force him, and other young artists like him, away. Home-grown talent may be lost, not out of a collective indifference to their art, but because the population simply cannot afford to support them.

Artists inevitably flock to the places where they can make enough from their work to dedicate themselves to it full-time.

But for some, like Irish singer-songwriter Étáin, who currently lives in Glasgow, the prospect of a full-time career in music just

isn’t realistic yet. The cost of living crisis simply adds to the far-fetched reality of this dream.

“People don’t realise just how expensive it can be to release music. With the cost of living [crisis], it’s not only the rise in prices, which can be astronomical, [the difficulty is] also how unpredictable it is,” she says.

“You might be saving up for a new piece of recording equipment and be thinking, ‘I’m definitely on track to afford this’. And then you might go and do your grocery shop and it’s twice what you thought it was going to be. Stuff like that just sets you back.” Étáin works full-time for a charity. As such, her music career is all a product of her free time; a balancing act of art and economic necessity.

“A lot of your creative energy will obviously go into your 9-5 job and you end up drained at the end of the day, too tired to even just sit down and practise,” she says. “Even in terms of things like taking time off to go to a songwriting camp that is going to support your development creatively can be really difficult when you’re working a full-time job.”

Certainly, there are many opportunities available through organisations, such as Creative Scotland, that support artists in their creative development by offering funding and fellowships.

Particularly for young artists, though, such avenues can seem overly complex.

“I think one of the biggest problems is that people don’t know how to apply,” says Étáin. “I know that coming into it fresh, it can be difficult to know what they’re looking for. So, training around that sort of stuff would be really helpful.”

The peculiar thing about being an artist is that destitution is almost an expectation, especially if you’re young. There is a certain romanticism surrounding the starving artist. We seemingly consider art purer if it was forged in hardship; as if creating art solely for the purpose of making money is to miss the point entirely. Good art comes from the soul, we say. It comes from a place within us that is un-motivated by wealth or fame or the need to pay the gas bill. And while it is easy to understand the beauty of this viewpoint – that we create art in answer to a primal necessity within us – it’s also easy to see the drawbacks.

Expecting artists to be poor isn’t good for art, for artists, or the people who love them. It is a career like any other, punctuated by uncertainty and precarity, much like many careers currently.

Culture, whether highbrow or (supposedly) lowbrow, is one of the first sectors to suffer during economic crises. And if, as a nation, we want to be proud of our home-grown culture – of Rabbie Burns, Annie Lennox, Alasdair Gray (Emanuel and Slaney and Étáin) – then it’s only right that more is done to support them, especially during this crisis. When artists can no longer create to pay the bills, many will no longer be able to create at all. And what a loss that would be.

THE SKINNY

Talkin’ Bout a Revolution Theatre

Award-winning poet and playwright Caroline Bird chats to The Skinny about turning the life of workers' rights activist Ellen Wilkinson into a play Interview: Rachael O’Connor

W

ho was Ellen Wilkinson? She may not be a household name but when poet and playwright Caroline Bird began writing a play about the prolific socialist, she ended up finding out so much it resulted in a five-hour long first draft. “I really let my head fill with as much soup and noise and complexity as possible,” explains Bird, speaking of the five-year period she spent researching Wilkinson’s life after being commissioned by the then Artistic Director of Northern Stage. Eventually, Bird decided to narrow it down and focus only on the final 15 years of Wilkinson’s life. “Ellen’s life encapsulates what happens to a person when they’re really trying to fight for everything at once,” says Bird, “and how that can tear you apart.”

Ellen’s story Wilkinson was born in Manchester in 1891, a time when there were no maternity or unemployment benefits and no welfare schemes. Her life was plagued by the consequences of childhood scarlet fever and chronic asthma, not helped by smoking, which was then believed to be beneficial to health.

Photo: Matt Crockett

May 2022 – May Day Special

Red Ellen: Leader of the Workers' Movement Bird’s play Red Ellen will have already toured from Newcastle to Nottingham by the time it hits Edinburgh’s Lyceum stage on 4 May – but the timing couldn’t be more perfect. May Day is traditionally a celebration of spring and the

resurrection of nature after winter. But when workers first marched for an eight-hour working day in 1865, 1 May became known as Labour Day, formalised as a national holiday under a Labour government in 1978.

Wilkinson first came to national attention when she played a prominent role in the 1936 Jarrow March. Two hundred unemployed men walked from the town in the North of England to Downing Street over a period of 26 days. They were marching for the reestablishment of industry in their hometown, following the closure of their local shipyard – and at the helm, leading them all, was a tiny, 4’8”, red-haired woman by the name of Ellen Wilkinson.

Red Ellen by Caroline Bird

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Wilkinson had a patchy education, disrupted by illness, but perhaps these formative, early experiences were partly what drove her. She had a fierce desire to be treated like an equal and was spurred on by the poverty and unemployment she witnessed all around her. The small, sickly activist who once led hundreds of men on a weeks-long march rose from local agitator to Education Minister under Churchill, and only stopped fighting when her ill health finally betrayed her.

Bird’s play invites us to bear witness to Wilkinson’s energy and vitality. “This was a woman who always acted as though time was running out – and it was, for her, in terms of her health,” she notes. Wilkinson’s extraordinary life and nature proved to be good dramatic material for a play. “[Wilkinson was] constantly tripping and falling in the House of Commons, being chased by MI5 for associating with communist spies, driving at 80mph, crashing her car into ditches or lorries, and turning up to work with a fractured skull,” says Bird. Like many well-meaning activists, she tried to spin too many plates. “She was never working on one thing at a time, because that’s not the way the world operates,” Bird explains. “She’d be organising the Jarrow March but at the same time war is breaking out in Spain or she’ll be running to Berlin to report on Hitler’s march on the Rhineland or flying to Belgium to apologise to Einstein for nearly getting him killed. She wanted to make change as quickly as possible because she constantly believed she was just about to die.”

Wilkinson wasn’t perfect. Because she wanted to get things done quickly, she often made terrible mistakes. When her communist lover presented her with a book called The Brown Book of Hitler Terror and told her it had been endorsed

by Einstein, she rushed to get it published with Einstein’s name on the front. Consequently, Einstein became known as a public enemy of Hitler and had to flee Germany. She was seen as flighty and an irritant, constantly raging against apathy. “She had this Cassandra thing of running around shouting ‘Troy will fall’ and [feeling like] no one was listening,” says Bird. “It made her fight even more fiercely for what she felt was right.”

What spurred her on in the face of so much apathy? Wilkinson “really believed in her ability to save the world,” muses Bird. She points out that “there was an element of narcissism” in it too: “she needed to believe she could change the world, and

THE SKINNY

Photo: Matt Crockett

Theatre

Red Ellen by Caroline Bird

“If your whole ethos is about caring, then it’s difficult to create soundbites – there’s just too much to care about at once”

Red Ellen’s relevance today Wilkinson’s life coincided with a European war, the erosion of workers’ rights, corruption in government, lack of support for refugees and an uncertain future.

In 1934, Wilkinson condemned the UK for being the most inhospitable country for refugees.

Ellen’s Legacy When Wilkinson’s achievements are picked apart, less than a handful were successful. In 1945, as Education Minister, she raised the school leaving age to 15 and introduced free milk and school meals. But she failed to secure deep shelters for

Caroline Bird

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Londoners during the Blitz, create an anti-fascist movement pre-Second World War or better the lives of the poor and unemployed.

But she tried and died trying. Wilkinson fought for everyone and forgot to protect herself or her equally ill sister. After attending an outdoor awards ceremony on a very cold night, she was found dead of heart failure following emphysema, bronchitis, and bronchial pneumonia, all accelerated by an overdose of barbiturates – her asthma medication. Whether the overdose was deliberate or not is not clear.

Writing the play, Bird was determined to get to the heart of who Wilkinson really was: “Regardless of people’s political stance, the play is about a woman, fighting for other people, every day of her life, but not being able to care for herself.”

And despite fighting for changes that she didn’t see in her lifetime, Wilkinson’s struggles left their mark. The Jarrow March may have been deemed a ‘failure’ at the time (the men were sent packing and not even given an audience), but it became a defining event of the 1930s. It helped to foster the shift in attitudes towards unemployment and social justice, and paved the way towards social reform measures after the Second World War. On Wilkinson’s death, an obituarist wrote that “wherever there was a row going on in support of some good or even fairly good cause, that rebellious redhead was sure to be seen bobbing about in the heart of the tumult.” Bird’s Red Ellen pays tribute to that ‘rebellious redhead’ – a brilliant woman whom Bird didn’t want to “be forgotten.”

Ellen Wilkinson’s name is one we should be proud to remember come Labour Day, for all she did and all she attempted to do on behalf of those who depended on her advocacy. This May Day, she is a reminder to us all: if you fight, you won’t always win. But if you don’t fight, you will always lose.

Red Ellen, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 4-21 May

May 2022 – May Day Special

there’s a certain type of madness in that.” Her extreme passion meant that she often neglected herself and her health. “Ellen’s life revolved around campaigning for social justice and educational reform, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism,” says Bird. “Her life encapsulates what that does to a person when they’re trying, really trying, to fight for everything at once.”

Faced with such a larger than life character, Bird was determined to write a play about a living, breathing “three or even four-dimensional woman” instead of delivering a history class. “I didn’t want to paint her as someone ahead of her time and always right,” she says, “because that wasn’t who she was.” Due to the fact that most of the action takes place in ‘closed rooms’ and across private conversations, Bird had to extrapolate from the facts and work on hunches, picking out the rumours and joining the dots. The play is a work of fiction, taking what is known and imagining what might have been.

It all sounds horribly familiar. How does Bird feel about the play’s relevance today – and has she achieved her goal to “write a historical play that doesn’t feel historical?”

Bird responds that while working on the play at times she’s experienced déjà vu. “When Ellen’s policy to provide free milk in schools was introduced, she said, ‘some things surely aren’t complicated that we can let our children go hungry’.

And yet, only recently, some people have been arguing that we don’t need free school meals.” Bird also compares the mountain of problems that Wilkinson faced, and the failure of the Left to produce a “coherent narrative and clear message” around how to fix them, to the situation today. “If your whole ethos is about caring, then it’s difficult to create soundbites – there’s just too much to care about at once,” she reasons. “Do you talk about education, or healthcare, or income support or workers' rights … where do you start?” What Wilkinson did was to try to attack it all at once.

Another issue, then and now, concerns infighting and schisms on the Left. In Wilkinson’s time, the Left failed to respond to Hitler’s rise to power coherently. The Labour Party refused to affiliate with the Communist party to oppose fascism, resulting in a weak and confused opposition. It greatly frustrated Wilkinson, who believed strongly in the power of unity.

Wilkinson also consistently fought against the slow pace of parliamentary politics. In the play, progress is likened to playing tiddlywinks – a game where pieces are moved forward slowly, one by one. Wilkinson was trying to move them all forwards at once – and sometimes she succeeded.

THE SKINNY

State of the Union Workers of the world, unite! And also watch these films from all over the world exploring workers’ rights and the power of unionisation

Film

Words: Ben Nicholson

I

t may only be 46 seconds long but Louis Lumière’s 1895 short Workers Leaving the Factory, often referred to as the first ever motion picture, casts a long shadow. In the more than 125 years since it was made, the subject of labour has been a frequent and fertile ground for filmmakers around the world, exploring its physical, philosophical and political dimensions in various modes and styles. Lighter treatments, like the satirical farce of the Dolly Parton-starring 9 to 5 (1980), exist alongside neorealist dramas about striking miners, such as Salt of the Earth (1954), which was penned, produced, and directed by members of the Hollywood blacklist. Further along that scale are documentaries like the Berwick St Collective’s collaborative and self-reflexive Nightcleaners (1975) and artist-filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson’s formally rigorous treatment of a dry cleaning production line in Quality Control (2011). In celebration of International Workers' Day, we pick ten films worth keeping an eye out for that engage with unionisation, strike action and the radicalisation of the working class.

May 2022 – May Day Special

Strike (1925) Sergei Eisenstein’s first feature-length film tells the story of a strike by factory workers at the turn of the century. Intended to convey the process of class struggle to the audience, Eisenstein himself described the work as “bristly and pugnacious”.

It’s best known for an astonishing montage sequence that cross-cuts suppressed workers with slaughtered cattle. Available on YouTube The Garment Jungle (1957) Film Noir might not be a genre you expect to see on an IWD list, but this peek at the seedy underbelly of the garment industry was described

by Robert Aldrich, one of its directors, as the “first pro-labour picture.” A simmering portrayal of union-bashing and mafia strong-arming, it features an excellent, snarling turn from Lee J. Cobb.

Available as part of the Columbia Noir #1 boxset from Indicator The Land (1969) An epic drama from Youssef Chahine about corruption and villainy at the expense of honest, hard-working farmers. Set in Egypt in the 1930s, it takes as its premise the halving of water rations which will spell disaster for local villagers. The antagonists are veritably moustache-twirling, but The Land is a complex portrait of selfdetermination. Available on Netflix Harlan County, USA (1976) Documentaries about industrial action hardly come more gruelling and electrifying than Barbara

Kopple’s exceptional Oscar-winner. It follows the unfurling of a dangerous conflict involving a beleaguered workforce and a mining company in the Appalachian Mountains, combining archival context with visceral first-hand footage of the picket line and clashes between strikers and the violent opposition they faced.

Available from Criterion Man of Marble (1977) Considered by some to have had a direct impact on Poland’s political progression, Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble is an epic tale of a socialist icon who was – in reality – ground down by the system. It was banned quickly after its initial release but was ultimately seen widely. Wajda went on to make a sequel in 1981, Man of Iron, about the Gdańsk Shipyard protests and the rise of the Solidarity Movement. Available from Second Run Man Marked for Death, 20 Years Later (1984) Eduardo Coutinho’s first attempt to make Man Marked for Death in 1964, as a docufiction about the murder of a peasant leader, was ended by Brazil’s military coup of that year. Two decades later, he repurposed the surviving footage into a more expansive documentary reflecting on the events of the past and the lingering, sometimes tragic, costs of resistance. Available from Mawu Films Sweet Sugar Rage (1985) This mid-length documentary explores the processes of the Sistren Theatre Collective in combating the exploitation of female labourers in the sugar cane fields of Jamaica. Blending talkinghead accounts of the conditions with theatre workshops run by Sistren, the film centres on dialogue and dramatic restaging as a way of conceptualising how they might affect change.

La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) A black and white docudrama about the Paris Commune in 1871, this is an extraordinary and ambitious project by Peter Watkins.

Reconstructing the spirit of 120 years prior in an abandoned Paris warehouse, Watkins injects an anachronistic video news crew to capture the drama as it unfolds. It’s a febrile and invigorating — 24 —

The Land

Man of Marble

provocation that is not easily forgotten.

Machines (2016) French philosopher Michel Foucault believed that people are cogs in the mechanics of power and Rahul Jain’s documentary expresses that cinematically through an experiential portrait of an Indian textile factory. Dotted throughout are interviews with workers and bosses discussing exploitation and union-breaking that allow complexities and contradictions to come to the fore in a thoughtprovoking way. Available from Dogwoof Solidarity (2019) Lucy Parker’s Solidarity seeks to expose the blacklisting of construction workers in the 90s as part of a mysterious anti-union effort that provided firms with tip-offs about ‘trouble-making’ employees. The film includes interviews, footage from activist meetings, archival materials, and the discussions of a group of student lawyers who are investigating the case. A worthy, relevant rallying

THE SKINNY

COMHAIRLE NAN LEABHRAICHEAN

THE GAELIC BOOKS COUNCIL

May 2022

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THE SKINNY

Learning Red

May 2022 – May Day Special

Intersections

Glasgow’s Red Sunday School is encouraging children to think differently. We chat to them about children’s agency, community building, and connecting to Scotland’s radical past.

Interview: Eilidh Akilade Illustration: AJ Higgins

“I

t’s supposed to be fun,” says Katherine Mackinnon, one of several committee members for Red Sunday School. And it certainly seems fun: children are singing about the rent strikes; they’re making May Day banners; they’re playing games in the rare Scottish spring sun. The children at the school, based in Glasgow’s southside, are most definitely having fun.

The school was pulled together by a group of historians, artists, writers, and teachers, among others. It’s been in the works for a couple of years but – like most things in the COVID era – was pushed back until recent months. “It’s not a party-affiliated thing and it’s not a religious thing,” explains Mackinnon. Rather, Red Sunday School is simply a space where children are encouraged to think freely about the world around them. Here, away from the rigidity of formal education, children can truly question things – and make some noise while doing so. It’s ultimately based on socialist principles but also draws on anti-racism, feminism, and climate justice.

The school is based at the recently reopened Kinning Park Complex. It was once occupied by members of the community (for 55 days, no less) and is now a vibrant, community-owned space. As such, it’s fitting that a certain radicalism continues to fill it.

But it taps into Glasgow’s radical past in more ways than one. From 1890 to 1980, the Socialist Sunday School movement flourished in Glasgow.

For children attending, the schools allowed children to learn about and engage with the workers’ movement. Now, Red Sunday School seeks to reconnect with this radical tradition, bringing it into focus under a 21st century lens. The committee has done plenty of digging around the archives: “Things have changed, but there’s lots of really cool stuff – there was colouring insheets!”

During each Red Sunday School session, the children go into age-based groups to complete activities surrounding socialist principles and radical history. After, everyone shares a sit-down meal. It’s about togetherness: Red Sunday School isn’t simply teaching children Marx; it’s also creating a real sense of community.

And such community is much-needed.

Outwith religious communities, it can seem like annual celebrations are few and far between.

For Mackinnon, however, Red Sunday School provides a community through which an “alternative calendar” may be formed. Within radical history itself, there are certainly dates that ought to be collectively remembered, dates that ought to be collectively celebrated – like May Day, of course.

“I really like the idea of [May Day] being something

we celebrate where we look at the history of it, what’s happening now, and what can be done,” Mackinnon says. There’s a real potential for a different kind of joyful togetherness – in an age where many of us are increasingly distant from our local communities, it feels very necessary and very exciting.

Crucially, this celebration-worthy radical past is children’s past, too. “So many of these things involve children, like the rent strikes – kids were there throwing bags of flour at the bailiffs,” Mackinnon says. “This was tailor-made for engaging children.” This is children’s history; this is their history – and they have a right to know about it.

“I feel like there’s something really joyful about kids being able to draw on that and feel like [they’re] part of a chain.”

Children’s place in all this is key. In the future, the school plan to introduce a children’s committee, through which children attending will have a say in the school’s running. In this, Red Sunday School rejects that stuffy, old-fashioned ‘do what I say and not what I do’: here, a collective which encourages children to think for themselves allows such thought to manifest into action,

— 26 —

directly impacting their curriculum. “Why shouldn’t kids have more autonomy over these things?”

Mackinnon asks. It’s their education, afterall.

“When it’s aimed at children, it makes you understand it better because it has to drill down to the very essence of the thing,” explains Mackinnon.

So many of us are guilty of throwing around the odd, radical-sounding term without truly understanding it. “Sometimes people can be a bit full-on with the theory [...] There can be a bit of gatekeeping.” Shifting the focus on to children breaks down some of these walls – for the kids, of course, but also for adults. Educating the next generation also means better educating ourselves.

Red Sunday School is full of joyful promise: the revival of this past movement seeks to make both the present and the future that bit better for all of us, children and adults. The school doesn’t terrify children with tales of Tory Britain horrors; rather, it educates, inspires, and unites. “You need to find something positive,” says Mackinnon. “You need to find something that you are able to have some agency over.” Red Sunday School seems to be exactly that.

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The Price is Right Ahead of The Skinny’s retrospective of short films by talented Glasgow filmmaker James Price at Summerhall in Edinburgh, we look back at what makes Price’s work so special with Glasgow Short Film Festival director Matt Lloyd Interview: Jamie Dunn Film

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“People keep calling James the Springburn Scorsese” Matt Lloyd

Diamonds into Dust

‘dark night of the soul’ movie following an exasperated young lad who’s walking his paralytic father through Glasgow’s neon-lit city centre and back to their flat in Springburn, in the north of the city.

Boys Night improves on the earlier film by marrying its gritty subject matter – alcoholism, toxic masculinity, sectarian violence – with absurdist wit and a slick visual vitality that doesn’t dampen in the slightest its authenticity or anguish. Like Dropping Off Michael, Boys Night won the audience award at GSFF. People have certainly taken note of Price’s talent. The Edinburgh International Book Festival commissioned him for their Reading Scotland series, teaming him with Graeme Armstrong, writer of the instant Scottish classic The Young Team, which tells of the author’s teenage years embroiled within gang culture, and challenged the pair to make a short film inspired by Armstrong’s novel. The result was the elegant and dreamy Infectious Nihilism and Small Metallic Pieces of Hope, a profoundly cinematic exploration into the swirling grief and drug-addled headspace of a young man being indoctrinated into the local gang after his brother’s murder.

And Price was recently tapped by Peter Mullan to direct a brace of episodes of the fantastic BBC4 monologue series Skint. The finest of the two, The Taking of Balgrayhill Street, which Price wrote, is a tragicomic and deeply humane study of poverty starring Mullan as a proud, hardworking guy who’s now contemplating the unthinkable: — 27 —

diving into his block’s food bank for the microwave curry sauce that’s he’s craving but can’t afford.

Price is not above his own self-promotion, however. Just ask The Sopranos’ actor and Zopa frontman Christopher Moltisanti. Dropping into Insta DMs, Price sweet-talked Moltisanti into hiring him to make the official music video for his band’s single Diamonds into Dust. Gallus? Too fucking right, but the resulting video has enough swagger and style to back up Price’s cocksure attitude. The promo was so good it led The Skinny to dub this young filmmaker the ‘Springburn Scorsese’. It’s a title that seems to have stuck.

“People keep calling James the Springburn Scorsese,” says Lloyd, “and the last thing I want to do is blow more smoke up his arse, but I do see a comparison. James has a huge appetite for and knowledge of cinematic storytelling, but he’s not just copying his favourite filmmakers – he’s not seduced by style. Instead, like Scorsese, he’s considering form and how it can serve the story he wants to tell. Also, he’s a cocky wee shite who seems to have no trouble persuading people to do what he wants.”

The Skinny is screening a retrospective of James Price’s films in a double bill with the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time for the first edition of The CineSkinny Film Club; Summerhall Cinema, Edinburgh, 18 Mar, 6.30pm Tickets at summerhall.co.uk/summerhall-cinema

May 2022 – Feature

ome filmmakers are so wedded to the milieu in which they live that it becomes hard to discuss their films without doing so in the context of their surroundings. Think of the work of Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee and one automatically pictures New York. Talk of Wong Kar Wai conjures images of Hong Kong while Pedro Almodóvar brings to mind Madrid; with Mike Leigh, it’s London. James Price has only made a handful of short films in his career so far, but already he’s staked a claim as one of our best chroniclers of Glasgow.

Anyone with one eye on Scotland’s film scene will be familiar with Price’s films and their roughhewn poetics. He’s been a regular fixture at Glasgow Short Film Festival (GSFF) since 2015, when Dropping Off Michael, a short written by Price and commissioned through Film City’s short-lived youth training scheme Jump Cut, won the festival’s audience award that year. Matt Lloyd, director of GSFF, recalls being immediately taken with the film and Price’s writing in particular: “Although well directed by a professional, Zam Salim, it was James’ script which really shone through; well-paced and structured, it held your attention without scrabbling for gimmicks or quirkiness.”

Over its fat-free 16 minutes, the film follows the young teen of the title during his last day of freedom ahead of sentencing at a criminal court hearing. He’s been cajoled into spending the morning with his uncle Duncan, a larger than life rapscallion who it soon becomes clear, doesn’t have the boy’s best interest at heart – far from it.

It’s a heartbreaking watch, but also angry, bellicose and peppered with the gallows humour that’s become Price’s trademark. “Dropping Off Michael had a confidence and polish you wouldn’t usually find in young people’s summer film school project,” says Lloyd. “I’m sure James would be the first to credit the support of Zam and Catriona MacInnes, who was running the scheme, but it was very much his project.”

Themes explored in Dropping Off Michael would crop up again in Price’s later work, which often focuses on young men forced to grow up quick in their tough urban surroundings and their uneasy relationships with the roguish authority figures in their lives. You’ll find both motifs in Price’s finest film so far, Boys Night. It’s a jagged

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Who was Dr David Livingstone, and why should we care?

David Livingstone's life was full of contradictions. He was a man of science and God. He was an abolitionist and key to the colonisation of Africa. He was celebrated as a lone pioneer but travelled with many companions. We unpick these paradoxes Words by: Jamie Dunn Image: Walnut Wasp

May 2022

W

ho was Dr David Livingstone, and why should we care? “When the legend becomes fact,” so the old adage goes, “print the legend.” That’s largely what happened to the Scottish explorer, geographer, medical missionary and abolitionist Dr David Livingstone. His epic and often treacherous expeditions across sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-19th century made him hugely famous in his own time and a larger than life hero of many a Victorian boy’s own adventure book.

His achievements became legendary. The stories go he “discovered” the Victoria Falls – although more accurately, he became the first white European to see the majestic Mosi-oa-Tunya situated on Zimbabwe’s border with Zambia, which he renamed in honour of the Queen. He’s also famous for being discovered himself, by Welsh-American explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley who’d been sent to find the Scot when he’d gone off-grid in Africa, greeting him with the famous line “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” He’s also remembered for battling a lion, clashes with the Boer, and his death while searching for the source of the Nile. Among all this adventure and derring-do, he also tried to end the East African Slave Trade.

Like all legends, there are grains of truth to be found in the potted history above but much has been elided. Thankfully it’s become easier to unpick and examine the various conflicting elements of Livingstone’s legacy thanks to the reopening last summer of the David Livingstone Birthplace in Blantyre. Located in the tenement where Livingstone lived as a boy and worked at a neighbouring mill, this redeveloped museum aims to break the various myths about Livingstone and dig into the many sides of the explorer that are still little-known or misunderstood.

For Natalie Milor, the museum’s curator, one of the chief preconceptions about Livingstone that she’s keen to quash is the romantic notion of him as a solitary pioneer. “I think the narrative around Livingstone, and all the statues

and art that was made about him, particularly just after he died, in the period of the late 19th and early 20th century, was really representing him as a lone explorer.”

Going back to Livingstone’s diaries and expedition papers, it becomes clear that Livingstone had many companions on his adventures, both white Europeans and Africans he recruited on his travels. At times, he essentially led a small village across the continent. “There’s an awful lot of evidence we can look through to learn more about his relationship with his crew members and about crew members themselves,” says Milor. “It has been convenient for specific people with specific political ideologies to see Livingstone through this lone explorer lens and as a lone spreader of Christianity in Southern and Central Africa. A lot of our exhibition is about looking at who’s missing from these narratives and showing that the story is much more interesting and relevant with everybody being represented as far as we can.”

The exhibition goes to great lengths to give Livingstone’s crew members their due, but particularly the vital roles played by two figures whose huge contributions to Livingstone’s story have been diminished, those of Abdullah Susi and James Chuma.

The pair, who hailed from Central Africa, began working with the doctor during his troubled Zambezi Expedition, which ran from 1858 to 1864. They were then recruited again to join him as part of the Nile expedition. “In prevailing narratives, Susi and Chuma were always seen as ‘faithful companions’ and they weren’t really given the kind of recognition that they deserved as really pivotal members of his crew,” says Milor. “Particularly during the Nile Expedition, where Livingstone was heavily dependent on them, not just helping with the expedition but literally physically taking care of him at some points when he got really ill.”

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Image: Walnut Wasp

This epiphany not only changed Livingstone’s career path but arguably changed the world, with history telling us that this one missionary from Blantyre was responsible for the spread of Christianity in Central and Southern Africa. But like much of the history written about Livingstone, this is only a small part of a story. “We show that Livingstone actually only baptised two people,” says Milor, “one of whom was Chief Sechele I of the BaKwena, whose commitment to the faith led to Christianity being widely adopted in places like Botswana. That’s something that’s still not widely known, and if you look at the origins for why it’s not widely known, it is inherently linked back to racism and historians’ biases in terms of who they thought deserved credit for what stories.”

Livingstone’s life undoubtedly caused a ripple effect across the world, and that legacy can still be seen today. It’s a story ripe for reappraisal, and one that can be used to examine all sorts of contemporary issues, from racism to climate change. The Livingstone Birthplace Museum attempts to put this story straight by cutting through the Victorian tall tales so that his life can be properly discussed and reflected upon. “Throughout the exhibition we outlined the good, the bad and the ugly of Livingstone’s legacy,” says Milor. “Ultimately we show he was human and full of flaws, but ultimately a man who made a difference in the world. I think that is more interesting than seeing him as an icon, really. Our job is to make sure people know and understand that there is a fuller picture, and they can make up their own mind as to whether or not they think Livingstone deserves to be on his pedestal still.”

David Livingstone Birthplace is open seven days a week, 10am-4pm Tickets are available at david-livingstone-birthplace.org

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May 2022

Natalie Milor

Image: Walnut Wasp

“As soon as you scratch the surface of Livingstone’s life, you do start to see these contradictions”

Image: Walnut Wasp

Their significance is certainly explored across the exhibition at David Livingstone Birthplace Museum, particularly in the Tales of the Tableaux, a series of animations created using a screenplay by Petina Gappah, that complement the newly restored Pilkington Jackson Tableaux, eight sculptures created by Charles d’Orville Pilkington Jackson in the late 1920s that helped perpetuate the romantic myth of Livingstone as a lone heroic figure in Africa.

Tales from the Tableaux bring Pilkington Jackson’s tableaux to life, expanding his story to include the various Southern and Central African people who helped make his expeditions possible. “Tales from the Tableaux make clear Susi and Chuma were missionaries and explorers in their own right,” explains Milor. “They’re not widely recognised figures. Given their contribution to Livingstone’s achievements, it is a travesty they’re not better known.”

Livingstone himself has become less well-known in recent decades, in part thanks to the complexities of his legacy. “Livingstone is seen as a very controversial figure in some respects,” says Milor, “and challenging for teachers to teach, which kind of explains why he’s fallen out of the curriculum essentially, even for local children.” With the best intentions, Livingstone tried to open up sub-Saharan Africa for trading, working with local communities, and his pioneering work undoubtedly did contribute to the abolishment of the East African Slave Trade. But his findings in Africa were put to more sinister use after his death, with his records used by the various European powers in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ that saw huge parts of the continent colonised and its resources plundered. “As soon as you scratch the surface of Livingstone’s life, you do start to see these contradictions,” notes Milor.

The Livingstone Birthplace Museum doesn’t sugarcoat these contradictions. The exhibition opens by exploring Livingstone’s humble beginnings working as a child labourer at Blantyre Works Mill, where he worked from the age of ten. Elsewhere, the exhibition explores the conflict he felt as a young man between his religious upbringing and his ambition to be a man of science.

“Livingstone did have a crisis of faith moment before he became part of the independent church movement,” says Milor. “Livingstone really wanted to be a doctor but his father, Neil, wanted him to have some sort of career that was related to his religious upbringing.” It was reading Thomas Dick’s Philosophy of a Future State, a book which essentially argued that science and religion could be married together, that helped Livingstone connect these two sides of himself. “It was reading Dick’s book, as well as going to visit him in Broughty Ferry, that helped Livingstone put his mind at rest in terms of what he wanted to do,” explains Milor, “combined with the rise of missionary societies, which meant becoming a medical missionary was a legitimate career option.”

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the sound of burning Ahead of her appearance at The Great Eastern festival, we speak to Kathryn Joseph about her beautiful and pain-filled third album for you who are the wronged Interview: Tom Johnson

May 2022 – Feature

‘L

et me drown / Let me go / Go where you don’t know’, the songwriter Bonnie Prince Billy sings in the closing lines of his 2003 Master and Everyone LP. A few whispered words at the end of a whispery half-hour of music, one so still you can barely move while listening. It’s this record that Kathryn Joseph cites as inspiration for her third album, the potent and powerful for you who are the wronged. A collection of 11 songs that sit like heavy silhouettes in a thick cloak of fog, it’s her first album in four years and for all of the pained weight at its core, it’s one that feels both bold and brave, resolute in its approach and unafraid to reach any further than it means to.

Just as we sit down to talk about her new album, a flurry of late-March snow briefly falls from bright blue skies; a flashing reminder that life’s rules are never as static as we so often ascribe. Such fragmented conventions ripple across Joseph’s new album, a collective document of the varying forms of abuse she has witnessed and heard about among her friends and peers over the years. Led by her parched voice, as dry as a winter’s bone, the album sings of broken love in so many forms; partner to partner, mother to daughter, and more.

Initially, Joseph hadn’t set out to cover such an overarching subject. She’d written one song before 2020’s lockdown set in, but that sudden containment left her wondering just what it meant to those who already found themselves in dangerous situations. “My most immediate feeling to being told we weren’t allowed to go outside was of people in abusive situations,” she says. “It made me think more about the people in my own life who have been in horrific situations or, worse, hadn’t got out of them at that point. And that soon became what all the songs were written about.”

With that seed of an idea and an endless stretch of time ahead of her, Joseph wrote more freely and quickly than ever before. She’d soon compiled a batch of songs that spoke to the abuse she’d experienced while also being careful not to

directly namecheck people and situations, both as a means of protection for those involved and also to make the songs somewhat more universal.

“There are definitely specific people and relationships in there but also some of the songs are based on how easy it is to end up in that situation, even when you’ve seen it happening to other people,” she adds.

“My most immediate feeling to being told we weren’t allowed to go outside was of people in abusive situations” Kathryn Joseph For the first time, Joseph left her own space to record the album, travelling north to the West Highlands to the studio of musician and producer Lomond Campbell. Built as a Primary School in the 60s, Campbell and his partner renovated the modernist building into a stunning work of art that now acts as both home and working studio for the pair. It wasn’t just the beautiful space that took Joseph there, she’d also arranged for Campbell to work on the album, the pair co-producing the finished work together. “It was one of those perfect weeks where you live in a minimalist school house that looks like you’re in Norway,” Joseph says, “and there are 40 herons nesting in the trees behind you, and a dog puts her head on your knee in the middle of recording.”

Joseph had admired Campbell’s own work for a long time, the pair crossing paths in Aberdeen before Joseph moved away, and then intermittently over the years. Initially, Joseph had envisaged — 30 —

travelling even further to make the album but when the chance came to work with him she jumped at it. She’d been following their renovation online and it made immediate sense to her to record the album there. “You can definitely hear the room in the songs,” Joseph states. “I was staring at the water as I played. You can hear me snuffling with joy when the dog is near me.”

Conjuring its own unique world from its shimmery beginnings to the breathless end, for you who are the wronged sounds remarkable, like hearing a siren call almost lost in the underwater. ‘the burning of us all’ creeps through five minutes of ghostly instrumentation and a cracked whispering vocal that you can’t take your eyes away from, while closing track 'long gone' shifts into a slightly different shape, the crackling percussive undercurrent always threatening to break loose but never doing so, like watching a storm brood miles away on the horizon. for you who are the wronged is, as always, framed by the keys that sit beneath Joseph’s voice and fingers, but here they are gently different like the sound has been smudged by rain, an unplanned characteristic that reshaped the whole record. “There’s a really beautiful piano in the studio and I thought that’s what we’d record everything on,” Joseph explains. “But I’d written one demo on a really weird electric piano and the sound just didn’t transfer, I couldn’t make it work.

The next day I tried again but using a Rhodes sound on a keyboard – and I immediately loved it.”

This mood was compounded by Lomond Campbell, whose own music drifts between minimal electronica and more conventional singer-songwriter work. Joseph initially envisaged all of those elements making their way into the record, but his direct imprint was much less imposing than that – the songs are only ever tenderly embellished, just enough to lay an eerie cloak over the whole piece. Joseph cites ‘the burning of us all’ as a keen example of this input.

“I think I always imagined it with a drum beat,” she

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Image: Harry Clark

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exactly what I want. I don’t have to explain myself.”

Even knowing the context surrounding them, the songs she’s made here feel both cryptic and ghostly. As always, we don’t get to hang on every word but we grasp on to the occasional lines that suddenly form outside of the fog: the repeated refrain of lead single ‘what is keeping you alive makes me want to kill them for’ a perfect example of this. “With this record, I definitely questioned if it’s just too much of the same feeling, the same sadness all the way through it. But that was on purpose. I don’t want to have it change. The repetition is supposed to be comforting, and I hope it is. The whole point of this record is to tell the people I love how amazing they are – for surviving, for coping, for escaping.”

For an artist so used to being candid, Joseph is fully aware that her songs alone can’t solve the problems that lie at their roots. But she wrote them anyway; for those who have survived, just as much as for those still suffering. “It’s for all of them,” she says plainly. “I’m really aware of the ego in that, but it’s for all of them. I know what it means to be under the spell of someone, and how anything might break that cycle. I know you think — 31 —

“The whole point of this record is to tell the people I love how amazing they are – for surviving, for coping, for escaping” Kathryn Joseph nothing else is going to make sense but there is always a better option, and there is hope, and no one should be staying in situations that hurt them.

It’d be amazing if [the songs] did help someone but I also want them to be a comfort to people who have gotten out. For me, it’s a celebration of that.” for you who are the wronged is out now via Rock Action Kathryn Joseph plays The Great Eastern, Edinburgh, 21 May kathrynjoseph.co.uk

May 2022 – Feature

explains, “but he just put this modular synthesiser sound on it and I don’t even really understand those noises but they’re so beautiful. They make my face feel warm when I listen.”

Joseph is conscious of the juxtaposition between the enjoyment she found in making this record and the stories that are central to it.

Though she admits it’s the first of her own albums she’s been able to enjoy – “I think even if this wasn’t me I might like it” – she’s aware that it wouldn’t exist as it does, without the pain of others. This balancing act is not a new thing for Joseph. Those who have seen her perform live will know that she fills the spaces between her delicate, often painful songs with searing self-deprecation that can confound newcomers. “I remember when I saw RM Hubbert for the first time that he was so funny in between songs and then he would make everyone cry, and I remember thinking that was such an odd but special thing,” Joseph says.

“It’s just me on stage, so it’d be really weird if I just stared into space. Unfortunately, the truth of me is to say ridiculously humiliating things. But that’s why I love writing songs,” she continues. “That’s the only time that I can rein myself in and say

THE SKINNY

Come On Home Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch and Chris Geddes on A Bit of Previous, their first album since 2000 to see them reconnect with the city that made them

May 2022 – Feature

A

s a rule, Belle and Sebastian don’t look back. Stuart Murdoch could, if he’d chosen to, have solely retained the songwriting reins after penning the entirety of Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister alone; justifiably so, as well, given that those albums are now seminal. Instead, he opened up the process to the rest of the group on 1998’s The Boy with the Arab Strap and, accordingly, the records that followed have found room for the influence of everything from Stevie Jackson’s love of 60s pop and rock to Sarah Martin’s preoccupations with synth, among myriad other diversions.

Their last full-length album proper, 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, slalomed through styles at breakneck speed, winding its way through the pulsating dance-pop stomp of The Party Line, the orchestral sweep of The Cat with the Cream, and the jazz-inflected The Everlasting Muse on its way to its closer Today (This Army’s for Peace), the closest the band have ever gotten to dreampop. And yet, now, their first LP in seven years threatens to be a disarmingly nostalgic affair at first glance; A Bit of Previous, which would make a good title for a best-of, opens with Young and Stupid, on which Murdoch yearns for his youth.

Add to that the fact that it was recorded entirely in their hometown of Glasgow, a city you can practically hear living and breathing on their early work, and that no touring was in prospect due to the coronavirus pandemic – just like in their formative years, when they seldom appeared live – and you begin to wonder whether an amble down memory lane was on the cards, when we might have had a record informed by California sunshine. Their best-laid plans to fly to Los Angeles to make this ninth studio album were nixed by COVID. Instead, Belle and Sebastian remain the band we’ve come to know, with A Bit of Previous the kind of gleefully diverse grab-bag that’s elevated them to the status of elder statespeople of indie pop over the past 25 years. Those longing for the Jeepster years will be sated by Murdoch’s melodic turns on Do It for Your Country and Come On Home, but new ground continues to be broken with the quiet drama of Sea of Sorrow, the freewheeling Unnecessary Drama and deft electropop of Reclaim the Night.

Perhaps we’d have gotten a similarly diffuse album if the pandemic had never happened; fresh off their glorious traversing of the Mediterranean on The Boaty Weekender in August 2019, the band began work late that year on an album they’d planned to have finished as soon as April 2020.

Photo: Hollie Fernando

Music

Interview: Joe Goggins

Instead, with flights booked and accommodation sorted, lockdown meant that their west coast jaunt was off. “You know when you see a line of ants, and they come up against a stick or a stone?” asks Murdoch over Zoom from Glasgow. “They just turn left, which is kind of what we did. Lockdown started, and we didn’t even entertain the notion of taking the record forwards. I went back to writing my book, which is a sort of biographical novel about the wilderness years between 1991 and 1993 for my best friend and I, when our ME meant that we couldn’t do much. It’s a document of the funny Last of the Summer Wine relationship we had.”

“I didn’t do much during that lockdown towards Belle and Sebastian, either,” agrees keyboardist Chris Geddes on a later call. “I didn’t do much of anything but practise piano and work with the local mutual aid group.” The uncertainty was such that it would be another six months until they’d finally concede defeat on the idea of heading to America, instead deciding to have Geddes, who — 32 —

admits to being “probably the techiest member” of the band, reconfigure their rehearsal space into a makeshift studio. Glasgow, not Los Angeles, would be the backdrop for album 10.

It makes A Bit of Previous the first Belle and Sebastian album made at home since 2000’s Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant.

Perhaps surprisingly, this is something that seemed to suit Murdoch, whose lyrics are often scored through with wanderlust, just fine. It led to a reconnection with the city, one that had begun in that first lockdown with their Protecting the Hive project, which saw drone footage of the city’s deserted streets backed by lyrics and music written in collaboration with fans.

It was not new territory for Murdoch; many of Belle and Sebastian’s earliest tracks were informed by a sort of childlike wonder about everyday minutiae, like riding around on city buses or strolling through Kelvingrove Park, because he was writing them at a time when his ME (or

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May 2022

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May 2022 – Feature

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Photo: Hollie Fernando

Belle and Sebastian chronic fatigue syndrome) had left him borderline housebound. “And it’s something I’ve known about more recently as well,” he explains. “Because I’ve two young kids, one of whom is on the autistic spectrum, and that’s set us in a semi-lockdown for years now; it can be quite restrictive. So, my wee

— 35 —

A Bit of Previous is released on 6 May via Matador Belle and Sebastian play Doune the Rabbit Hole, Cardross Estate, Port of Menteith, Stirling, 14-17 Jul; Beach Ballroom, Aberdeen, 21 Nov; Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 23 Nov belleandsebastian.com

May 2022 – Feature

Stuart Murdoch,

guys were quite happy to be away from school, and I’m kind of like that as well; I don’t need too much in my life, really. I don’t need the promise of a big party at the weekend, or to go windsurfing with friends. I basically just like making music and walking around.”

The two are intrinsically linked. With nonessential train travel discouraged, Murdoch instead “explored the four corners of our city,” for what he insists is an essential part of the creative process – listening to the day’s rough mixes while pounding the pavement or meandering through the city’s green spaces, something he imagines his wife might not have understood: “She might say, ‘I thought you were in the studio til late! Not wandering around bloody Yoker.’”

It led him to thoughts of past lives in the city that was the making of Belle and Sebastian, daydreams that were suddenly manifest when he penned the charming Young and Stupid in half an hour one morning. “Just for once, I was looking

Music

“When you start pining for your glory days, it’s not just a personal thing, you’re kind of speaking for your generation”

back,” he says. “And you realise that when you start pining for your glory days, it’s not just a personal thing, you’re kind of speaking for your generation; you look around, at pals and family, and realise you’re 53, and you’re at a point where it’s kids or no kids, but mostly it’s kids, pets or no pets, but mostly it’s pets, settled down or single, but mostly settled down. It was just a wee moment of being wistful, but there’s another song, Come On Home, that balances that out; that was a kind of stream of consciousness that ended up feeling optimistic about the passage of time.”

‘Give a chance to the old / Set the record straight on the welfare state / Give a chance to the young / Everyone deserves a life in the sun’, is one particular thought train from that track. Belle and Sebastian have never been an avowedly political band, though the recent, TikTok-inspired revival of the twee culture they’re often associated with has also led to thoughtful analysis of the scene’s radical political outlook in 1980s Britain. “On the last album, The Cat with the Cream was about the Tories getting another majority and just feeling like we were doomed to be stuck with them for years and years,” Murdoch reflects. “And that was probably the most political song I’d written in 20 years, since I wrote Love on the March about the Orange walk in Glasgow.”

This time around, If They’re Shooting at You has taken on a grim new meaning in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the band having released a powerful visual collage as a video for the song with images sourced from photographers on the ground in the war-torn country. All royalties for the track are going to the Red Cross. “It’s a song that starts from a place of me reflecting on a world where you really don’t have to go far to hear stories of violent oppression,” says Murdoch. “And it’s really about faith, which I can imagine that for a lot of people in that situation, might be all they have; the thought that the most positive outcome for their situation is that this life is actually very short and, depending on what philosophies you embrace, there might be more lives after this one, hopefully better ones.”

The band will resurrect another past life of their own, that of a touring band, when they finally make it back to the stage in the US this month, with a long-delayed UK tour to follow in November.

“What’s going to be really nice about that,” says Geddes, “is that it’ll be the first time we’ve all played together in the same room since 2019.

We’ve been rehearsing in separate little booths, because it would have been too much hassle to change the space back to how it was before we turned it into a studio. So, it’ll be nice to see each other’s faces, let alone anyone else’s. I’m very much looking forward to seeing everybody’s reactions the first time one of us makes a big, stupid fucking mistake! If we can keep it going after that,” he laughs, “then we’ll be OK.”

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Image: Angela Kirkwood

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Lewi Quinn aka Boiiing

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This month Intercultural Youth Scotland release their first zine, No Permission Needed, created by their members as a place for uncensored expression. They’ve kindly allowed us to share some extracts

May 2022 – Feature

Showcase

No Permission Needed

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Showcase May 2022 – Feature

Intercultural Youth Scotland (IYS) is Scotland’s leading charity for Black and Youth of Colour. This zine is created by TLC, an IYS programme for female and non-binary youth to come together and explore personal development and identity through creativity with other like-minded young people. This new seasonal zine will be packed with expressive writing, poetry and art which you can stay updated with on the IYS website. interculturalyouthscotland.org I:@interculturalyouthscot T:@InterculturalYS — 39 —

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Books

The Bold Type Glasgow-based BHP Comics’ Sha Nazir on their new Bold Collection, the challenges of indie publishing, and fostering more diverse voices in the Scottish comics scene Interview: Heather McDaid

May 2022 — Feature

T

here’s a certain joy that comes with running a publisher, discovering new writing talent and bringing that out into the world. But there are some projects that start at a more granular level; instead of seeing what writing is out there already, you’re able to start at square one and craft something from scratch. This is the origin story of the Bold Collection, the new offering from Glasgow-based BHP Comics. After weathering the past few years that threw up many challenges for small companies across the board, they’re returning with a whole new universe for readers to enjoy.

“Gary [Chudleigh] and I set out with a plan to create comics we wanted to read,” explains BHP founder Sha Nazir. “So we both made a long list of ideas and pitched them to each other. From there we created a shortlist of eight ideas and then wrote a short synopsis of each. We then threw it back and forth until we agreed on the four ideas we moved forward with. At that point, the focus was about making each story work in its own world and making that story as complete as possible. Most of this is done by Gary and I writing up a bible for each idea, with character breakdowns, synopsis and story beats long before it’s handed to a writer to execute.”

The resulting four comic books each tell a “jam-packed, self-contained story in 20 pages, but when combined, the comics tell a bigger story within a shared universe that explores the dynamics and consequences of power,” Nazir explains.

Readers can travel through the new Bold universe via Storm Hunter, by Gary Chudleigh, Lorna King

and Kat Hall, featuring mythical warriors fighting giant beasts; Principle, by Umar Ditta and Robin Richardson, featuring an immigrant superhero who fights for justice; The Losers' Club, by Tara Mallen and Chris Stefanova, with a group of superhero sidekicks in hiding; and Agents of Mi7, by Kumail Rizvi and Daniel Coloma, spotlighting the elite spy squad who take out supervillains, all lettered by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.

Though this project started as an idealistic ‘What would we want to read?’ affair, it too allowed the publisher to support exciting writing talent.

BHP are keen to not only be at the forefront of new, bold comics publishing, but to continue to foster emerging creators across both writing and illustration. “I’ve always mentored or tried to help others around me,” explains Nazir. “There was nothing there for me when I was coming up, and it’s in my nature to want to share knowledge. We support talent in lots of ways, from practical help, advice on pitches and their journey and importantly opening doors and shedding light on the industry knowledge I’ve accumulated. And equally it’s about getting more diverse voices out there in comics which is a predominantly white space in Scotland.

“We didn’t have any preconceived ideas [for the comics themselves] apart from quality – the look of each book and who we assigned to the projects for script and art duties almost came as a gut feeling. The artist had to have something to offer the characters and the writer challenged our ideas and made their own input without going out on a limb.

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Books

Principle

Storm Hunter

Agent of Mi7

Principle

“The Bold Collection comics each tell a jampacked, self-contained story in 20 pages, but when combined, the comics tell a bigger story within a shared universe that explores the dynamics and consequences of power” Sha Navir

It is a testament to the indie scene that, in the face of numerous challenges, many publishers are emerging with new projects of such scale and ambition – new imprints, new series, and, here, new fictional universes. A lot of it comes from the creative desire to branch out, but a lot is also a nimbleness, adapting and reacting to increasingly difficult climates to publish in. “[The last few years have] been pretty tough, we’d eaten into all our reserves, sales have been down 80%, so finding the focus to hold it all together has been challenging.

Mixing up how we engage as a publisher has changed, mainly due to COVID and Brexit both playing a part in this form of publishing. By going back to shorter form comics it allows us to reduce costs in shipping and production, allowing us to be greener by only printing what we need and creating the oneshots as a suite which could be combined into a collected book, which makes sense in the book world as well as comic stores.

“Bigger publishers have been doing great guns with established IP, young adult graphic novels are still going strong.

Indies have taken a massive hit though, with rising costs of raw materials and shipping due to Brexit, low sales due to COVID and once-reliable sales platforms turning to blockchain has disrupted large sections of the indie scene and its ability to sell direct to readers.

“Our approach going forward is to create more one-shot, shorter form comics in print and digital, digitally publish larger collections and experiment with ideas as we transition our focus less about print and more about screen-based media.”

There’s so much continued excitement in the world of comics, whether that’s blockbuster movies with cornerstone characters, or the likes of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper, which started as a Tumblr webcomic and is now sweeping people up with its Netflix adaptation, or physical events and comic cons finally being able to return, and the continued brilliance of indie comics creators and publishers continuing to put new and vibrant stories out into the world.

“I really hope they enjoy a fun-filled adventure and action comics with strong messages for all ages,” says Nazir. And really, when launching a new comics universe, what more could you wish for.

For the latest on the Bold Collection, visit bhpcomics.co.uk — 43 —

May 2022 — Feature

“We had this vision that [tying the books together] was something we’d like to do but didn’t push it until it sort of naturally occurred,” he continues. “Once the moral spine of each story was solidified, we then organically started the ‘Kevin Feige’ part of subtly tying each book together into a shared universe. For us, it was an opportunity to have fun, and explore how our universe actually sat together across the whole timeline. From the larger picture, readers will see how the world unfolds for them and discover reoccurring characters across the four comics, as a whole giving a more satisfying read and leaving the door open for more story strands.”

The series, on top of its narrative merits, also includes firsts, such as the first mainstream non-binary super character, and first British South Asian superhero in UK comics. “As the only South Asian heritage publisher in Scotland and only South Asian comics publisher in the UK, I guess it kind of fell to me to do,” notes Nazir, “at least coming from a space where it gives the character some genuine background and empathy. It’s probably taken so long because of the system and timing, and decision makers not wanting to put their necks on the line. And yeah, for BHP it’s not important to do firsts, but we just happen to be the only ones saying yes to other ideas and more representative characters, like Jamie from The Losers’ Club, a first mainstream non-binary super character in UK comics.”

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Sisters With Voices Musical comedy duo Flo & Joan, aka sisters Rosie and Nicola Dempsey, chat to us about their current UK tour, their surprising Scottish influence and the current state of UK comedy in the middle of #MeToo

Photo: Matt Crockett

Comedy

Interview: Polly Glynn

“Some venues won’t have a sanitary bin.

You’re like ‘I think this is because most of these venues are run by men, and it’s really important for me actually to not go out with my leg covered in blood’” Rosie Dempsey

Flo & Joan

May 2022 — Feature

“I

listened to the new ABBA album the other day and it is a straight up musical comedy album. The lyrics are fucking batshit crazy.

The music is so weird and fun,” says Rosie Dempsey, the ‘Joan’ of Flo & Joan. About to embark on the next leg of their third UK tour, they’re bringing their trademark wit, tunes and energy to Aberdeen and Glasgow this month.

“I’ll often listen to something on the radio and be like ‘This song is funny’, like Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet”, by 70s disco band Gonzalez. “That’s a funny song. The fact you’ve not stopped dancing,” Rosie adds. The duo find inspiration in lots of music, as well as other comics. Nicola (Flo onstage) describes Rachel Bloom (from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) as her most recent musical comedy revelation. “I was like ‘Oh. This is exactly what I want to see and hear. This is the musical comedy that I like watching.’”

Catherine Cohen is similarly notable for Rosie, reminding her of a more traditional cabaret act with comedy songs woven in: “Like a Bette Midler kind of thing.” Her songs “don’t feel like these big set pieces, lights up, lights down.

They just feel like it’s her talking but singing.”

Closer to home, Scottish children’s favourites The Singing Kettle have much to answer for. The sisters grew up surrounded by their family friendly songs and shows. And thanks to a festive visit to Glasgow in the 90s, they saw them live. “We all got dressed up and didn’t know where we were going and we got to see The Singing Kettle Live and we LOST OUR MINDS,” Nicola laughs. “So they’re fully

responsible for a lot of the shenanigans we do now for sure.”

The tour comes off the back of a successful few years for Flo & Joan. Having appeared on Live at the Apollo, Horrible Histories and their own Amazon Prime special, things are looking up and up. Despite this, the sisters had their anxieties about the tour. “You think over the past two years that people forget about you 'cause you’re not gigging all the time but no, audiences have been up for it, numbers have been great, everyone seems to be in a good mood. No complaints. So far,” Rosie says, touching everything wooden in sight. The tour’s title Sweet Release “feels very apt” post-pandemic, she continues. “It’s a funny feel-good show, I think, without being purposefully feel-good. We’re not making everyone clap their hands and shout out things they love about the set. That’s very much just not in our wheelhouse to do.” “Difficult to rev people up and make them excited when our voices sound like this,” explains Nicola in a smirking monotone.

And although touring is a joy to them both, it’s still not easy in the era of #MeToo. Most venue staff are men. “It’s incredibly rare to find and work with women in those positions,” Nicola notices.

Finding the dressing room, ensuring there’s a makeup mirror and not touching your luggage before asking are often neglected. “It’s not that the men are doing a bad job at all, it’s just [about] working with people who consider things that you know you have to consider as well.” Rosie adds: “Some venues won’t have a sanitary bin. You’re like — 44 —

‘I think this is because most of these venues are run by men, and it’s really important for me actually to not go out with my leg covered in blood’.”

Luckily for Flo & Joan, they’ve not experienced the worst of #MeToo. Rosie expects it’s particularly bad for new comics. “You don’t have the power to be able to say ‘I don’t wanna work with that person’ or ‘I can’t take this TV job because I don’t want to be on the panel with this person’ because they have taken those opportunities.” She’s seen a positive change in that context, for more established acts, at least. If the duo didn’t feel comfortable working with someone, she’s confident they’d be listened to. Their agent “wouldn’t be like ‘Well, shall we get the facts?

Should we find out? Should we prove it?’ They’d just be like ‘Okay, that’s totally your choice.’” And if there’s one change which can be made, both agree that “more non-men in roles in positions of power on lineups” would help. More diversity in these positions encourages diversity elsewhere, making comedy a more supportive and welcoming place for all.

Flo & Joan: Sweet Release, Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 21 May; Òran Mór, Glasgow, 22 May Flo & Joan also play Edinburgh Fringe 2022, venue and dates TBC floandjoan.com

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Ignorance Ain’t Bliss After a four-year hiatus, DJ Haram and Moor Mother revive 700 Bliss, a collaborative project marrying forward-thinking noise rap with experimental club sounds Interview: Michael Lawson

DJ Haram

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DJ Haram Like much of Ayewa’s output as Moor Mother, Nothing To Declare is an uneasy listen at times, with lyrics ruminating on domestic violence and slavery vying for space amidst agitated beats and layers of sonic distortion. It would be easy to point to the seemingly never-ending catalogue of global crises that have characterised the last four years as ammunition for the record, but in reality most of the tracks were started long before that.

“We’ve been working on this album for a long time, but once COVID hit I was able to sit down and wrap things up pretty quickly,” explains Ayewa, before modestly suggesting that her powerful lyricism is merely her “responding to the beats” that DJ Haram crafted for her.

Nonetheless, a recent arson attack on LGBTQ-run Brooklyn nightclub Rash – on the same night that Muzeyyen was due to perform at the venue – highlights the stark reality that many artists from marginalised groups are still faced with. It reiterates the importance of making music that tackles social and political issues head-on.

“I was on my way to the club and suddenly received a message that was like ‘wait, don’t come – there’s been an attack’,” says Muzeyyen. “[I] quickly realised that this wasn’t a false alarm. It’s so surreal for something like that to happen not only in my community but at my own show.”

Although a man was charged with the attack, a motive was not given. But Muzeyyen stresses the importance of not jumping to conclusions, noting that “the queer and trans communities don’t need any more fearmongering.” Regardless of the reason, though, it’s an undeniably harrowing situation that’s shaken the local club scene to its core. “New York City feels very ‘Gotham’ right now,” she adds uneasily.

Looking ahead, a return to the experimental festival circuit is next on the horizon for 700 Bliss.

An exciting prospect off the back of a two-year live music blackout, it feels only right for one of the freshest, most forward-thinking collaborative projects on the scene to showcase their sound to a wider audience.

Nothing To Declare is released on 27 May via Hyperdub

May 2022 — Feature

“New York City feels very ‘Gotham’ right now”

“What’s the essence of hip-hop if not a DJ and an MC?”

Clubs

Photo: Isha Dipika Walia

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here’s a shared spirit of rebellion that isn’t tainted with too much resentment or jadedness,” says Zubeyda Muzeyyen, a DJ and producer who operates as DJ Haram. “It’s not always easy to thrive in the present while remaining engaged with important topics, but we try to find a balance between the two.”

Muzeyyen is describing the creative bond she has with Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, a poet and sound artist blurring the lines between hip-hop, noise and punk. The pair first met through Philadelphia’s thriving DIY scene almost

a decade ago, and have been collaborating, albeit intermittently, ever since.

Adopting the moniker 700 Bliss, the collaboration began in the form of a live project. Already prolific and well-established on the Philly circuit, Ayewa was on the lookout for a DJ to complement her hip-hop sets.

Muzeyyen, who had been turning heads with her experimental approach to the craft, appeared to fit the bill perfectly. “What’s the essence of hip-hop if not a DJ and an MC?” says Muzeyyen, with a smile.

Before long they were making music together and the maiden 700 Bliss EP, Spa 700 followed in 2018.

Meshing abrasive, politically-charged spoken word vocals with pulsating club sounds and beguiling Middle Eastern rhythms, the record was emblematic of the duo’s shared desire to both push the envelope, and make music informed by their activist backgrounds.

“I’ve been interested in anarchism and the Situationists from as far back as middle school,” explains Muzeyyen, who was previously a part of the Occupy movement. “That overlap of art and politics has always been intriguing.”

After a four-year hiatus, Ayewa 700 Bliss and Muzeyyen have now revived 700 Bliss with Nothing To Declare, the project’s debut album and largest body of work to date. Out on Hyperdub – the label responsible for releasing DJ Haram’s acclaimed debut EP, Grace, in 2019 – the LP builds on the frenetic, genre-eschewing energy of Spa 700. It also introduces a host of guest collaborators into the fray, ranging from avant-pop polymath Lafawndah and Palestinian experimentalist Muqata’a through to Philly R'n'B talent Orion Sun and Alli Logout of Special Interest notoriety.

The ability to attract such a wide-ranging list of guest features is illustrative of the rise in stature both artists have undergone in the time since their last release. Ayewa, in particular, has become something of a global jet-setter – at least in pre-COVID times – with Muzeyyen admitting to being proud to watch “this beautiful elevation of her career.” That said, “everyone on the record is a friend,” Ayewa insists. “We may have met on the road but, more importantly, we felt a connection with them.”

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Magnifying the Misinformation Art

We meet Saoirse Amira Anis to discuss her latest curatorial endeavour in Perth which poses urgent questions about institutional misinformation, reparation and repatriation Interview: Harvey Dimond

Tako Taal’s audiovisual work DUMP_out through the mouth_ features a screenshot of a news broadcast about Glasgow University’s recent decision to give £20 million in reparations to the Caribbean to atone for the financial benefits it received from the slave trade. Taal’s contribution to the exhibition involved her undertaking research into archives belonging to the museum, which informed the work in the show. Her work is the source of an unnerving soundtrack that fills the entire space, pointing to the conditions that Black people and people of colour face in accessing museums and art spaces, where colonial legacies translate into hostile attitudes. Anis is clear that this exhibition is an “outward call for the repatriation of stolen objects; stolen in the strictest sense of the word, or objects that were ‘sold and acquired legally’’ – legally, but immorally.” Much of the work in the exhibition points to processes of reparation and repatriation – from Adekunle’s images in Reclamation of the Exposition, which both adopt and mimic photographs of African

women from the colonial archives, through to Nkem Okwechime’s reinterpretation of postage stamps from colonial-era Nigeria. The title of the exhibition alludes to these institutional failures, referencing at once the missing information that museums fail to bring to light and the misinformation they willingly sell to the public.

While Anis sees the show as being born out of these conversations about repatriation (that resurfaced as part of the widespread institutional interest in Black artists in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests), she is also grateful for the space between 2020 and the opening of the show.

The exhibition was postponed several times due to the pandemic, which, although frustrating at the time, proved to be beneficial as the exhibition could “stand in its own right and not get lost in all of the performative projects that museums were doing.” We agree that while attention from the gallery and museum sector after the Black Lives Matter protests was welcomed, this sudden interest in the work of Black creatives felt reactive Image: Courtesy of Saoirse Amira Anis

May 2022 – Feature

S

aoirse Amira Anis’ multifaceted and multidisciplinary practice extends into performance, installation, sculpture and writing, all of which demonstrate a joyful relishing of the relationship between movement, materials and memory. Nowhere is this more evident than in her striking sculptural installation We can still dance, where the artist is shown lost in movement, the mural inscribed with the empowering words ‘I am my own light and I will be magical on my own account’. This year, she’s turned to curating, with a group exhibition titled Mis(sing) Information at Perth Museum & Art Gallery, which builds on Anis’ desire to curate work by Black practitioners while also encouraging debate on the decolonisation of museums.

The exhibition features two films by artist and researcher Natasha Ruwona. Umbilic explores water as a method for recounting Black lives, touching on Ruwona’s research into hydrofeminism. The second film, if there were two moons..., reflects on how Blackness and Scottishness are considered mutually exclusive identities, and, in one of many “beautiful coincidences” that Anis describes, Ruwona’s cosmologies of the moon harmonise with the work of Tayo Adekunle, whose photograph Yemoja is named for an orisha (deity) who is linked to the moon and to water. Anis feels a particular personal affinity to if there were two moons... “In my own practice I do a lot of thinking about my own personal cultural heritage and an inner reconciliation of that, and a lot of the works really speak to the kind of things I consider in my own practice.”

“This is what I want to do – if I’m in the position of being able to curate a show, I want to use that opportunity to display the work of Black artists” Mis(sing) Information

Saoirse Amira Anis — 46 —

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Image: Courtesy of Tayo Adekunle

Art

Reclamation of the Exposition. Tayo Adekunle

me… so I’ve really tried to make sure that the artists felt involved in the whole process. This was an opportunity for me to practise these gestures of care in an artistic professional context – which is not something radical, but it definitely isn’t standard either.”

These practices of care are particularly important when working in spaces whose histories are built on colonialism and extortion, and that continue to perpetuate these histories. The act of inviting artists from marginalised communities into white institutions can often create conditions for harm. Anis speaks further about this, reflecting on her experience as a Black artist and curator working in Scotland and her discomfort at being commissioned by white institutions. She feels that the first step galleries and museums can take to address these concerns is to recognise why Black artists are distrustful in the first place. Institutions should “make an active effort to be aware that we — 47 —

might not trust them for very valid and real reasons – you have to prove why we should trust you.” Anis explains the changes she envisions: “to be able to go into a situation as a Black artist who’s been invited by a white person, and not have to wonder whether this is tokenistic or whether being selected for something is just on the basis of EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) optics.

She calls for a heightened “awareness of the power dynamics of an entirely or majority-white institution working with a freelance Black artist, and for salaried employees to actively reduce the intensity of that power imbalance, and to be aware of the types of labour that are being asked of Black artists by majority-white institutions.”

Mis(sing) Information is on show at Perth Museum & Art Gallery until 19 Jun

May 2022 – Feature

and tokenistic. While recognition of artists of African descent was long overdue, the hyper-visibility suddenly thrust upon Black people was challenging and alienating to confront, and this was compounded by the responses of the UK government and the far right.

Anis explains her frustrations at the failure of museums to be drawn into conversations around repatriation. “It feels quite transparent that it’s actually not that it’s too complicated, but that there are things they don’t want to share with the rest of us because they don’t want it to be held under public scrutiny any more than it already is.

It’s a way to maintain ownership, to maintain power by implying that ‘normal people’ don’t understand everything that goes into it.” Anis has worked with and in a vast array of spaces in Scotland, but this is the first time she has worked in a more traditional, civic space. The formalities of working in such a historically-charged space were sometimes difficult to navigate, although she found great joy in having aesthetic agency over the exhibition, with the opportunity of ‘dressing a room’ being particularly influential on her own practice as an artist who works with installation.

She explains the trajectory of her career and the turning point where she fully realised her commitment to working with Black artists and artists of colour.

“When I started at Generator Projects (an artist-led gallery in Dundee) I knew right off the bat that I was only really interested in working with Black artists and artists of colour,” says Anis. “But I didn’t really feel confident in that desire, and so I tried to find ways around it – because I wasn’t vocal about it, I was seeking out projects that would allow me to do that without actually saying this is what I want to do as a curator. Then A Quest That’s Just Begun happened [a group exhibition of 16 Black artists that took place in Dundee in the summer of 2020] and I was like, this is what I want to do – if I’m in the position of being able to curate a show, I want to use that opportunity to display the work of Black artists.”

The fact that Anis is a practising artist herself has provided her with an insight into how practices of care and compassion should be woven into the curatorial process. “I’ve been involved in projects before where the gallery has got my work, but they don’t necessarily care about

Marchw 2020

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Album of the Month

Album of the month Zola Jesus — ARKHON Released 20 May

by Sacred Bones rrrrr Listen to: Lost, The Fall, Dead and Gone

Named for the Gnostic concept that Gods can be corrupting influences on humanity, and the power of such influences, the latest album from Zola Jesus is a welcome return to the histrionic darkness that Nika Roza Danilova has been mining for over a decade now. Lost is a fantastic opener, with eerie vocals and a beat constructed from feverish breathing. When the actual percussion comes in it’s suitably tribal, replete with shakers and background chanting courtesy of a Slovenian folk choir.

It’s basically the Zola Jesus oeuvre in one song.

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

Belle and Sebastian A Bit of Previous

Warpaint Radiate Like This

Everything Everything Raw Data Feel

“a wide-ranging suite”

“considerably laid-back”

“deepfaked pop”

RRrrr

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RRrrr

May 2022 — Review

Elsewhere, Sewn and Fault have propulsive, heavy drums that bring an industrial edge that Danilova has mostly shed since her early albums.

This is probably due to the influence of Randall Dunn, best known for producing drone-doomsters like Sunn O))) and Earth. He helps to provide a more urgent palette that can either frame Danilova’s voice, or drown it out, depending on the needs of the moment. Sandwiched between these two songs is Desire, the most unadorned track, held together with just keys and voice, that provides an emotional counterpart to the brute force, showcasing a different way to convey power.

Many songs, like Efemra and Undertow, follow the standard Zola Jesus pattern of atmospheric, reverbed vocals and big, flat drums which keeps the album grounded amid experimental cuts like The Fall – an excellent excursion that starts foreboding, then takes a surprise turn into the club, similar to the best of Darkside. But even a “standard” Zola Jesus song comes with brilliant details that are sometimes missed during a casual listen. For example, the shimmering synths of Into the Wild or the luxuriant strings (courtesy of Louise Woodward) on Dead and Gone that seem a hopeful caveat to the song’s overwhelming grief.

Danilova believes that “we are living in arkhonic times”, but rather than wallowing in the negative aspects of the world she’s taken a musical leap forward, using sonic force to rail against the inertia that can sometimes grip so many of us. An album of just Danilova’s entrancing voice would be sufficiently good, but ARKHON shows a restless creativity that warrants all of your attention. Darkness may suffocate on all sides, but there’s a sense that there just might be light at the end of the tunnel.

[Lewis Wade]

Albums

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Gentle Sinners These Actions Cannot Be Undone Rock Action, 13 May rrrrr

May 2022 — Review

Listen to: Let Them Rot, Date & Sign, Don’t Say Goodnight

Sigrid How to Let Go Island Records, 6 May rrrrr Listen to: Thank Me Later, A Driver Saved My Life, Mirror

When James Graham first announced this new collaborative side project last November, with the release of Killing This Time, he’d only reveal that it comprised himself and “someone else”. But those looking for clues as to who he’d been working with might have found clues in Killing This Time’s dramatic bursts of strings and off-kilter groove.

It’s the sort of thing we’ve heard flashes of before from Aidan Moffat, both in his solo work and with Arab Strap, but the opportunity to write music for somebody else’s voice seems to have cracked open a whole new world for him. These Actions Cannot Be Undone unfolds in impressionistic fashion, Moffat’s instrumentals often coming over more like sound collages, especially on stylistically mercurial tracks like Rent Free and Don’t Say Goodnight.

For his part, Graham matches Moffat’s adventurousness, with a broader vocal range across the album than we’ve ever heard from him. It’s entirely possible that Gentle Sinners may prove too off-the-wall for fans of the Sad but for those willing to make the same leap of faith that Graham and Moffat did in choosing to veer away from their bread and butter, These Actions Cannot Be Undone is a consistently thrilling listen.

[Joe Goggins] Winner of the 2018 BBC Sound Of poll, the 25-year-old Norwegian songwriter racked up rave reviews for Sucker Punch the following year. But unlike fellow Nordic peer AURORA, How to Let Go isn’t a collection of Mother Earth cries. This record positions Sigrid as an alumna of fellow chart-topper Dua Lipa (A Driver Saved My Life) or even wannabe rock ‘n’ roller Miley Cyrus in the lamenting guitar solo in Mistake Like You. Thank Me Later and Burning Bridges both wade through the sentiment of leaving on a high rather than trying to scale a sinking ship, while feel-good anthem Mirror is the body confidence balm we all need a dash of this summer. The record isn’t all righteous pop bangers though.

There are some tear-jerking numbers that even Adele would be proud of (see: Last To Know and High Note).

The outlier of the record appears in Bad Life – a duet with Bring Me the Horizon frontman Oli Sykes.

It’s an emo-heavy ballad that will probably lure a whole new fanbase to the Scandi songwriter. But if they come for the crooning, here’s hoping they stay for the full length. They can thank me later. [Cheri Amour]

Just Mustard Heart Under Partisan Records, 27 May rrrrr Listen to: Still, Seed, In Shade

Lykke Li EYEYE Play It Again Sam, 20 May rrrrr Listen to: CAROUSEL, HAPPY HURTS

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Dundalk quintet Just Mustard are a bit like the darker, estranged offspring of My Bloody Valentine. Their 2018 debut Wednesday was nothing short of a sonic powerhouse; brimming with haunting soundscapes, it offered a modern take on shoegaze. Four years on, follow-up Heart Under showcases Just Mustard at their best yet.

The band mention in a press release that they want the listener to feel like they’re in a train tunnel while listening to Heart Under. The vortexlike sounds of opening tracks 23 and Still channel this straight away with their metallic clanging and cacophonous guitars. The latter track forms the highlight of the album – its brooding drums, eerie guitar wails and chilling vocals ominously palpable.

Twangs of Irish folk melodies permeate singer Katie Ball’s distant, delicate vocals in tracks like Sore and Seed. She forms the transfixing focal point of the band, and her often minimalistic and open-for-interpretation lyrics channel an obvious sense of sorrow. The use of whirring machinery in Blue Chalk evokes an industrial aura while the swelling guitar effects throughout correlate with the theme of water flowing across the album. Heart Under is an ear-piercing piece of intuitively crafted work. [Jamie Wilde]

Lykke Li’s fifth offering toes the line between cinematic grandeur and quiet intimacies. While her previous album so sad so sexy marked a departure from her trademark sound, with the artist experimenting with elements of trap, on EYEYE, Li continues her foray into experimentation, focusing on dreamlike soundscapes with the intention of creating something akin to a “voice memo on a macro dose of LSD”.

The stripped back production allows for Li’s vocals, breathy, chanting and layered, to really shine through at times, used to great effect on tracks like HAPPY HURTS. Similarly, the understated simplicity of lyrics such as ‘Back in my bed, back in my heart / Back in my, back in my arms’ on opening track NO HOTEL showcases the vulnerability that Li has always found strength in channelling; heartbreak captured via the lens of minimalistic, catchy pop is Li’s forte.

However, at times on EYEYE the quiet spaces linger just a little bit too long, and it simply feels like something is missing. Ultimately, while there are a few moments that are undeniably hypnotic, the album as a whole feels just slightly less full in scope and vision than her previous bodies of work. [Anita Bhadani]

THE SKINNY

Listen to: Sugar, New Man, Tinko Tinko (Don’t Play Me for a Fool)

Listen to: Saku Saku (サクサク), Umi No Mon (海の門), Yuru Yuru (ゆ るゆる)

Listen to: Nightflame, Capitol, Lead Level 15

Arcade Fire WE Columbia, 6 May rrrrr Listen to: Age of Anxiety I, The Lightning II

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Arcade Fire’s WE, marked as a return from the depths of their career monstrosity Everything Now, is unfortunately anything but. It’s a record filled with trite sentiments and well-trodden musical ideas.

Ostensibly split into two competing halves, the first side mimics the anxious disco of Everything Now and Reflektor, building to the multipronged Beatles-esque suite of End of the Empire I-IV, the movements of which have no discernible sense of contrast or evolution.

When the violins tune up on side two opener The Lightning I, II and Butler gives his familiar count-in rallying cry, the sense of communion is a breath of fresh air in comparison.

Listening through, it feels like experiencing Arcade Fire’s entire discography and sonic progression in reverse, which would be a neat concept if it didn’t give up on it by the penultimate track.

What’s left is a washed, shallow nostalgia. It’s perhaps no surprise after such a poorly received misfire that they should go here, and some of WE will trigger your sentimentality for this once great band, but ultimately it leaves a void. It’s not the end of the empire, and probably not the end of Arcade Fire, but it sounds like it should be. [Tony Inglis]

May 2022 — Review

Yama Warashi Crispy Moon PRAH Recordings, 27 May rrrrr

Every 2022 album release has been shaped by pandemic society, so it’s unusual at the moment to hear songs about busy streets, or seeking out places to be alone – but here enters Yama Warashi. Crispy Moon journals the Japanese artist through a period of adjustment after moving to London, and tracks like Makkuroi Mizu (まっくろい水) and Yuru Yuru (ゆるゆる) deal explicitly with resisting the city’s hustle and bustle.

This locational shift is matched with a musical one, and as a result the album is much fuller sounding than Warashi’s first two solo efforts – the instrumentation is more filled out and there’s more movement to the tracks. We also hear more of the global influences that have always characterised her work.

The album is at times a bit thin melodically and most of the vocal lines rely a bit heavily on repetition – a pattern that is highlighted every time the instruments and singer are in unison. But that being said, the album is anchored throughout around gentle but solid grooves, and whenever the rhythm section gets to lead is when Crispy Moon is at its best. [Laurie Presswood]

700 Bliss Nothing to Declare Hyperdub, 27 May rrrrr

When Philadelphia DIY mainstays DJ Haram and Moor Mother coalesced into 700 Bliss for 2018’s Spa 700 they found a specific space of noise rap few others were touching.

There’s nothing with the sheer stuttering urgency of 700 Spa’s magnificent breakout Ring the Alarm, but when the record hits its stride there’s some genuinely great stuff. Capitol is constantly shaking off its rhythm, buoyed by Special Interest’s Alli Logout, while Orion Sun’s vocals on Nightflame bring a twist of tenderness to a tune that sounds brilliantly frayed and dead-eyed.

That being said, at 16 tracks the album does slightly outstay its welcome. It’s particularly evident on Sixteen which seems to simply circle the drain, never finding anything to develop into. It’s only on closer Lead Level 15 that the record receives another shot in the arm, building and collapsing over and over; with blares of horns and pummelling rhythms, it feels loose and free in a way swathes of the album don’t, and in a minute-and-a-half it wriggles its way into being something clatteringly anthemic. It’s emblematic of a record that, when it manages to properly click into momentum, is startlingly good. [Joe Creely]

Albums

Obongjayar Some Nights I Dream of Doors September Recordings, 13 May rrrrr

Despite releasing a string of singles and EPs over the last few years, it wasn’t until Steven Umoh, aka Obongjayar, featured on two of 2021’s biggest tracks – Little Simz’ Point and Kill and Pa Salieu’s Style & Fashion – that he really became one to watch. Umoh’s distinctive voice and incredible energy guided those features and that’s also what guides his debut album, Some Nights I Dream of Doors.

There’s a richness to Umoh’s voice that sounds as good on the more delicate tracks (All the Difference) as it does on the punchier ones (Message in a Hammer). It’s on the more Afrobeat-leaning tracks, though, like Sugar and Tinko Tinko (Don’t Play Me For a Fool), where Umoh really excels. But there is a slightly subdued quality to the record, and the same urgency that was heard on those 2021 features doesn’t surface.

Some Nights I Dream of Doors feels like a real expression of Umoh’s wide-ranging influences and it succeeds in showcasing his diverse vocal range. However, at times it feels restrained and, for an artist as unique as Umoh, it feels like a missed opportunity.

[Nadia Younes]

THE SKINNY

Music Now This month we get stuck into new music from C Duncan, Theo Bleak, Lady Neptune, Phillip Jon Taylor, Vanives and more

Photo: Marilena Vlachopoulou

May 2022 — Review

W

hile the middle of April saw Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite announce his literary debut, Spaceships Over Glasgow: Mogwai and Misspent Youth, towards the end of the month his band released brand new single Boltfor, a satisfyingly glitchy and expectedly epic track from the winners of 2021’s Scottish Album of the Year Award.

C Duncan, whose last three albums were shortlisted for The SAY Award, is also back with new music this month. Neatly described as a “palate-refresher”, Alluvium arrives on 6 May via Bella Union and sees Duncan drawing on a number of influences, from his partner (Upon the Table) to conversations with his late grandmother (We Have a Lifetime). Upon the Table somehow brings to mind Edelweiss from The Sound of Music (while really sounding nothing like it), while I Tried offers perhaps the most gleaming synthpop moment on the record.

There’s also shimmering pop to be found on Pretending, instrumental interlude Lullaby is charming albeit a bit creepy, and there’s an uneasy, almost Sherlockian feel to the harpsichord-embellished titular track.

“I wanted to make a positive record with lots of different musical ideas,” Duncan says, “and lyrics that could move from serious to playful to over-the-top romantic in a fluid way.” We’re happy to confirm Duncan has succeeded on Alluvium, a record that one minute feels cut straight from a musical, quickly becoming nostalgic, or eerie, before suddenly it’s brimming with hope.

On 20 May, Katie Lynch – who you may know from her work in Dundee duo st.martiins – releases the sublime Fragments, her debut EP as Theo Bleak, a character she’s created to help her view life more objectively. On it Lynch tackles mental health, poor relationship choices, every day mundanity and how she’s affected her family. At the centre of it all is Lynch’s bittersweet lyricism, beautifully juxtaposed to the bright, hazy warmth found in her voice and the rubbery sway of the instrumentation. Across its six tracks, Fragments ebbs and flows, just like the natural highs and lows of life.

Glasgow alt-pop duo Vanives also release their debut album Thanks this month (27 May). A theme of love, both romantic and platonic, threads its way through the record, with lines like ‘Your heart has stolen my focus’ (Love Like I’m Falling) and the painfully honest ‘It would all be worth it if you loved me back’ (BARDENNOCH). The alt-electronic, R’n’B and hip-hop tinged production across Thanks flexes when it needs to; it can one moment be sparse, while the next it bounces, always feeling fluid. Studded with Lady Neptune

samples mined from family VHS tapes, instrumental flourishes paired with Stuart Ramage’s rich timbre is at times utterly beguiling; it’s a compelling cocktail.

One of the best experiences we had in 2021 was seeing Moema Meade, aka Lady Neptune, at Jupiter Rising. With flashing eyelashes, the neon-clad Meade offered up a feast of toothsome beats, and it’s something we think about often. More of those face-melting sounds can be found across NOZ this month, Meade’s latest EP due on 6 May via Night School Records. NOZ provides 23-minutes of gabber, hardcore and swirling cacophonous synths that don’t let up once, birling around your head like a Waltzer. As she promises on the closing track of the same name: ‘Time 2 Make You Feel Good’.

Whether the change in pace for PAWS frontman Phillip Jon Taylor was spurred on by the pandemic or not doesn’t matter.

What matters is that by returning to the Highlands, where he was born, Taylor is now harnessing a tenderness not really heard in the boisterous scuzz of PAWS. This tenderness is present across his new EP Supportive Partner Please Stand Here. It’s in the cracks in Taylor’s voice, in the softer more ambient instrumentation; even the way guitar and piano lines lilt and sway are washed in emotion. Lyrically, inspired by everything from Burt Reynolds’ turn in All Dogs Go To Heaven (Good Dogs), to making friends on the road while on tour with PAWS (Rear Window), SPPSH shows signs of an artist ready to embrace the future rather than dwelling on the past.

Turn back a page and you’ll find words on the debut album from Gentle Sinners, James Graham and Aidan Moffat’s new project, while on p32 you’ll find an in-depth chat with Belle and Sebastian about their new album A Bit of Previous, due on 6 May. This month also sees Emeli Sandé release her fourth studio album (6 May); Malcolm Middleton’s 2007 album A Brighter Beat gets a 15th anniversary reissue thanks to Full Time Hobby, with updated cover art from David Shrigley (6 May); Dublin-based Scot Iona Zajac transforms poetry into music on her debut EP, Find Her in the Grass (20 May); and jazz-funk outfit Nimbus Sextet release Forward Thinker (27 May). There are also a whole slew of singles out this month from the likes of Luke Jay and Russell Stewart, Aphelion, Celestial North, Pizza Crunch, Kapil Seshasayee and more.

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Photo: Nathan Dunphy

Local Music

Words: Tallah Brash

Theo Bleak

THE SKINNY

Spotlight On...

Swiss Portrait Following the release of his stunning new EP Safe House, we get to know Edinburgh-based artist and musician Swiss Portrait a little bit better

O

n Monday 25 April, Edinburgh-based artist Michael Kay Terence, who writes and records music under the name Swiss Portrait, released his gorgeous new EP Safe House.

Made for hazy sun-filled days, its six tracks are dreampop at their absolute finest, filled with delicate instrumentation, perfectly placed flourishes and sublime vocals which float by like the seeds of dandelion clocks on a breezy summer afternoon.

Turning to music during the pandemic, Safe House is the third full release from Swiss Portrait.

Following an EP (Moods) in 2020 and an album (Familiar Patterns) in 2021, this year looks set to be his biggest yet, with a slot at Wide Days just around the corner and a slew of festival dates through the summer, including a turn on our curated stage at Kelburn Garden Party. With all that in mind, we shine a spotlight on Swiss Portrait to find out more.

There’s a haziness and lightness of touch across all of the music you’ve released so far – was this summery, dreamlike state something you always aspired to create with your music?

Yeah, I think so. I just really wanted to make music that I wanted to listen to. I listen to a lot of postpunk bands and dreampop bands. Artists like Turnover, Mom Jeans, Joji and Vansire are probably my most played on Spotify.

I love your new EP Safe House – can you tell us a bit more about the themes on the record?

It is out now! So please go listen! I think lyrically it speaks about moments of change, difficulties, depression and solitude. I looked back for moments in my life to pull from to create a narrative that felt cohesive. But really it’s up to the listener to make of it what they will.

There’s a very beautiful collaboration on the record with New York band Phantom Handshakes – how did that come about and how did the writing and recording process work?

Both our bands released music on a DIY label called Z-Tapes, so I became aware of them through

that last year. They have a very similar story to mine, where they started the band during lockdown. I wrote the music for the song, and I thought about asking Federica [Tassano] from Phantom Handshakes to sing on it. So I asked and she said yes! I sent the recorded song to Federica and said she can take her time to record the vocals, but she had finished in about three hours.

Beyond the release of the EP, you’re playing Wide Days in May followed by our stage at Kelburn in July. What else does this year have in store for you and what can people expect if they come to see you live?

Yeah, we are very excited to be playing these shows! We are also playing Over the Bridge Festival in Edinburgh on 30 July, which is really cool! We also play in London on 7 June and Inverness on 10 July, and another couple of headliners in the summer. Our live shows are very energetic, and everyone has a good time. The songs have an extra bounce to them when we play live!

Safe House is out now; Swiss Portrait plays Wide Days, The Caves, Edinburgh, 20 May; Kelburn Garden Party, Kelburn Castle, Nr. Largs, 1-4 Jul; Over the Bridge Festival, Stockbridge, Edinburgh, 30 Jul swissportrait.bandcamp.com

Where does the name Swiss Portrait come from?

I came up with the name Swiss Portrait when I started this project because I didn’t want anyone to know it was me. But basically my wife Josie (I got married in lockdown) has Swiss heritage and I am/was an artist. So Swiss Portrait sounded like the

Swiss Portrait

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May 2022 — Review

Photo: Leonardo Sartain

The Skinny: You started releasing music as Swiss Portrait during an early phase of the pandemic in 2020 – what inspired you to get creative and what was the process of recording music in isolation like for you?

Michael Kay Terence: Before the pandemic I was a working contemporary artist. I had a couple of really big exhibitions cancelled due to the pandemic. So really I was just bored at home and was looking for something to do. I wanted to start writing music, but I just didn’t have the time. But when the horrible situation we all found ourselves to be in came about, I decided to have a go.

My process for recording is more like an experiment. I had never recorded anything on my own before and really had no idea what I was doing. I just watched loads of YouTube videos on how to do things and really just took it from there. I recorded, mixed and mastered my first album Familiar Patterns all on GarageBand. I have now upgraded to Logic Pro!

perfect fit. But if it wasn’t for Josie convincing me during lockdown to actually share my music with people none of this would have happened. So, thank you Josie.

Spotlight On...

Interview: Tallah Brash

May 2022 — Review

Film of the Month

THE SKINNY

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THE SKINNY

Image: courtesy of Mer Film

Film of the Month

Sam Ashraf, Rakel Lenora Fløttum in The Innocents

Film of the month — The Innocents

RRRRR Released 20 May

by Signature Certificate 15 theskinny.co.uk/film

N

ine-year-old Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum), the central character in Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents, has a cherubic face, but those features can so easily slip into malevolence. In the back of the family’s car, unnoticed by her parents, she pinches the thigh of the autistic Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), knowing that her non-verbal elder sister cannot express her pain. When she sees a worm crawling through the grass, she has no hesitation in stomping it into the mud, with a detached, mildly inquisitive gaze on her face.

The Innocents is about the curiosity and casual cruelty of children who are testing their boundaries and have little sense of consequences. All children act out and hurt each other, of course, but Vogt imbues his story with an extra layer of danger by granting some of them supernatural powers, which allows a genuinely troubled kid like Ida’s new friend Ben (Sam Ashraf) to do serious damage.

This is territory that Vogt has ventured into before, having co-written Thelma with his frequent collaborator Joachim Trier in 2017. That was a film about a teenage girl coming to terms with her own powers, but with The Innocents he has made something quieter, stranger and more unnerving. The inexplicable telekinetic feats that these children are capable of are presented in the most matter-of-fact way, with cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen usually keeping the camera at the kids’ level, and his combination of tight close-ups and expansive, brightly lit wide shots has a disorienting effect. Vogt makes unpredictable and risky choices throughout the film, notably the — 55 —

way Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) can hear Anna’s thoughts and can somehow unlock the autistic girl’s speech, but everything that Vogt shows to us feels rooted in the everyday, and it’s easy to believe in what we’re seeing.

It’s easy to believe in these performances too. The casting of the four children at the heart of the story couldn’t be better, each possessing a genuine guilelessness but also being perfectly capable of handling the film’s darkest tones. As the sociopathic Ben, Sam Ashraf is particularly impressive, bringing a truly disturbing coldness to his performance but also drawing our empathy as a lonely, bullied child from a broken home. The inability of parents and children to communicate constructively is a central theme in the film. “What do you do if somebody is mean?” Ida asks her mother (Ellen Dorrit Petersen, star of Vogt’s superb debut Blind). “Tell a grownup,” the mother responds, but the look on Ida’s face shows us how futile she knows that would be.

Vogt takes his time unfolding this story and his pacing could be described as too deliberate, but his chilly, mysterious picture exerts an irresistible grip. At times The Innocents feels like it’s going to turn into Scanners Junior – and it does contain a couple of jarring, gruesome moments – but Vogt’s take on the telekinetic battle is about as far from Cronenberg’s exploding heads as you can get. This director favours implosions, building to a climax so underplayed it goes unnoticed by the bystanders on screen, but one that is likely to haunt audiences nonetheless. [Philip Concannon]

May 2022 — Review

Director: Eskil Vogt Starring: Rakel Lenora Fløttum, Alva Brynsmo Ramstad, Sam Ashraf, Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim, Ellen Dorrit Petersen

THE SKINNY

Scotland on Screen: Jack Lowden Film Film

From that infamous Irn-Bru ad to his current role in spy thriller Slow Horses, Jack Lowden has always been a sparky and compelling screen presence. We speak to him about his finest performance yet, as tortured war poet Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction Interview: Jamie Dunn

Film: Benediction (2021), Kindred (2020), Capone (2020), Fighting with My Family (2019), Mary Queen of Scots (2018), Calibre (2018), Dunkirk (2017), England Is Mine (2017), Tommy’s Honour (2016), A United Kingdom (2016), Denial (2016), ‘71 (2014) TV: Slow Horses (2022), Small Axe (2020), War & Peace (2016), The Tunnel (2013) Stage: Measure for Measure (2018), Electra (2014), Ghosts (2014), Chariots of Fire (2012), Black Watch (2010)

May 2022 — Review

I: @jack.lowden

I

t’s not often we get to speak to a rising movie star who we regularly see buying milk at the “Big Tesco” in Leith, Edinburgh. But that’s the case with Jack Lowden. The 31-year-old, who grew up in the village of Oxton in the Scottish Borders, has quickly become a familiar face of British stage and screen. In his short career, he’s been in high demand in two genres: war films (Dunkirk and ‘71 – his big break was in National Theatre of Scotland’s celebrated Black Watch), and biographical films, where he’s played people like Morrissey (England Is Mine), Tony Benn (A United Kingdom) and Lord Darnley (Mary Queen of Scots). His new film, Benediction, fits roughly into both categories: with great tenderness and wit he plays the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon.

“It’s not a conscious decision,” Lowden says when we ask about his propensity for playing real people. “I’m still getting to that point where I can be picky about my roles, but I do seem to play a lot of them. And I’ve also played a lot of people who I don’t look anything like. When I’m offered those I’m always like, ‘oh shit, you want me?’”

Lowden is speaking to us in a bougie Glasgow hotel ahead of Benediction’s Scottish premiere at Glasgow Film Festival. It’s a town he knows well, having studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, although some of his memories are murkier than others. “I’ve been walking around, trying to remember again where the Buff Club is. I have fond memories of all those nights when I was a student, getting kicked out of there at the end and then walking down those lanes.”

Also hazy is the moment he decided he wanted to be an actor. “There isn’t a particularly romantic story about it,” he says. “But the major thing is the fact that my brother is a ballet dancer, he’s in the Royal Swedish Ballet, and he wanted to do that since he was a kid. He’s younger than me, but I went along with him, and didn’t really get on that well at the dancing; I wasn’t very good. I was encouraged instead to narrate the ballet shows. So I did that, and fell in love with being on stage.”

While there wasn’t a Eureka moment when he realised he wanted to act, he has a clear memory of when he started to think of himself as an actor. “It’s quite funny, I was talking about that the other day. I went to drama school, and I did Black Watch, which was just my favourite play and a great start, but it wasn’t until I did an Ibsen in London [Ghosts in 2014]. I had to do an English accent, and I remember getting the part and going back from the train after the audition, and thinking, ‘I’m a real actor now, because I can do an accent.’ Which is of course nonsense, but admittedly accents are all I do now.”

Benediction

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Benediction

It was certainly good training for playing Sassoon. Peter Capaldi appears as the poet in his bitter dotage but the majority of Benediction focuses on Lowden as the young Sasson. It’s a complex role. This is a man who survived the horrors of war, was decorated for his courage, and condemned his country’s treatment of his fellow soldiers. After the war, meanwhile, he became a star of London’s literary scene and embarked on a string of passionate affairs with men, only to retreat into marriage and religion in his older age.

Like most people in the UK, Lowden studied Sassoon’s poetry at school, but it’s his prose that the actor found most useful when researching the role. “His poetry is great, but his diaries, to me, are far better,” says Lowden. “His diaries are of being on the front line in the trenches, and they’re so heartbreaking. But he’s incredibly sarcastic and cynical and very pettily jealous, and vain as anything, but he admits this.

Instantly I liked him.”

Lowden was also helped immensely by his exacting director, Terence Davies. “Terence is incredibly specific. He’s acted the whole film our before you turn up, because I think he definitely would have been an actor if he’d had the chance.”

Lowden also reckoned that Davies saw so much of himself in Sassoon’s story that the film was essentially a self-portrait. “It was fairly evident fairly quickly that I was playing [Davies] as well. So more than any director I’ve ever worked with, Terence felt every single moment. He had a strong opinion on every line, which at first is a bit against your instincts as an actor, because you feel that you’re there give your slant on it. But once you get into that, it’s quite a cool experience; you’re really working on someone’s vision. It’s also wonderful to know that you’re in the hands of somebody who knows exactly what they want. The opposite is not fun.”

Benediction is released 20 May by Vertigo

THE SKINNY

Film Benediction Director: Terence Davies

Starring: Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi

rrrrr

Released 20 May by Vertigo; certificate 12A

Benediction

Vortex Director: Gaspar Noé

Starring: Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz Vortex begins with elderly couple Lui (Dario Argento) and Elle (Françoise Lebrun) rising from their wheezing slumber to empty their bladders and begin shuffling through their morning routine. Bedrooms and bodily fluids are common sights in Gaspar Noé films but usually not quite like this.

Immediately, the screen splits itself in two – half the frame following Lui, half following Elle. It’s a conceit which will be maintained throughout the entire film and at first it seems to give us a playful sense of how perfectly in tune this couple are.

They move around the apartment, pouring coffee and getting dressed in easy harmony, flitting in and out of one another’s frames without needing to exchange a single word.

But the true nature of the

Director: Colm Bairéad

Starring: Catherine Clinch, Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett

rrrrr

Light seeps through the kitchen window, sunrays resting on an impeccably clean table where anxious hands lie waiting for small feet to come tumbling down the stairs. The hands belong to Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley), and the feet to Cáit (Catherine Clinch). The former is a childless mother; the latter is a child who has never known motherly love.

This is Ireland, somewhere in the 1980s, and Cáit is dropped off at Eibhlín and Seán’s (Andrew Bennett) for the summer with very little ceremony, her father much more concerned with coming back to his ever-growing brood than making sure his daughter is settled. The girl is as quiet as the film suggests. Walking through the pristine house she resembles a fidgety mouse, the

Vortex

border between them becomes painfully clear when we discover that Elle has dementia and is rapidly declining. Their son, Stéphane, played with an almost saintly grace and patience by Alex Lutz, does what he can to bridge the divide but it’s clear that this family will never again be together as it once was.

Noé’s style remains as confrontational as ever, battering the viewer with shuddering cuts and then using agonisingly long, static takes for the film’s harshest moments. It’s only in the final minutes that the full, awful power of the bisected screen becomes clear. Vortex isn’t a cruel film; just a long, hard look at the sad and lonely way in which even the richest lives can end. A gruelling but undeniably powerful watch. [Ross McIndoe] Released 13 May by Picturehouse; certificate TBC

The Quiet Girl

The Road Dance Director: Richie Adams

Starring: Hermione Corfield, Morven Christie, Mark Gatiss, Will Fletcher, Tom Byrne, Ali Fumiko Whitney

rrrrr

The Road Dance is, on the surface, a typical period piece. Following Hebridean teenager Kirsty (Hermione Corfield) as she comes of age amid the height of the First World War, its set-up is unsurprising. Look deeper, however, and you’ll find a film concerned with the devastating impact of war on isolated communities, as well as the harsh realities of patriarchal oppression.

American director Richie Adams’ film is a strikingly beautiful homage to the rough Scottish coastline, and its harsh, isolated setting – a village in the Outer Hebrides – is made more alluring by the undeniable sense of community.

Adams’ cast, which boasts some excellent up-and-coming Scottish talent in Corfield, Will Fletcher, Tom Byrne, and Ali Fumiko Whitney, builds a

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memories of her crowded, musky home making it hard to assimilate with the reality of the new space. The skilful work of the production design team abet this questioning of the idea of homeliness.

In Colm Bairéad’s arresting feature debut, quietness not only aids the tension of those initial days spent in discomfort but also allows for the tenderness of small acts of kindness to linger – be it a custard cream slipped in mischievous complicity or dirty nails carefully brushed back to cleanliness. Words are rarely wasted, punctuating conversations long-held in thoughts as the trio slowly transforms from strangers into something new – something almost magical. By the time the devastating final scene comes to be, every single heartstring has been masterfully pulled. [Rafaela Sales Ross] Released 13 May by Curzon; certificate 12A

The Road Dance

convincing sense of interconnectivity in the village, wherein the loss of one citizen is felt by all.

For all these charms, The Road Dance does succumb to clichés. An enthusiasm for romantic letters read in voiceovers and the ever-looming promise of an escape to America minimise the sensitivity with which Adams attempts to handle certain plot points. It also undermines the film’s portrayal of sexual assault. Instead of an introspective look at the violence and injustice of patriarchy and war, the film leans too heavily into fulfilling period drama genre tropes.

Adams ultimately fails in his attempt to make a compelling drama concerned with the scars war inflicts on far-flung communities, but as a visually stunning and generally enjoyable period drama, it’s a welcome addition – and a rare Scottish one. [Alix Hudson] Released 20 May by Parkland Entertainment; certificate 15

May 2022 — Review

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The Quiet Girl

Film

Benediction, Terence Davies’ elegant, haunting biopic of queer war poet Siegfried Sassoon (played at different ages by Lowden and Capaldi), is unapologetically expansive yet astonishingly laser-focused for a runtime of over two hours, acting as a staggering and courageous memorial to an obliterated generation.

Relatively little of the story takes place during the 1910s, yet war is – thematically and visually – everywhere. Davies’ collage-like use of archival material merges Lowden’s Sassoon with grimy, nightmarish footage of trenches and decomposing bodies, as the horrors of the battlefields dog his footsteps well into old age. A series of eager, delightfully

catty love affairs meanwhile, conducted in the heady arrogance of youth, make a case for life amidst the relentlessness of death, yet also recall the continued hostility of a world that renders them illicit, war or no.

As the older Sassoon, Capaldi is reliably acerbic, but Lowden is Benediction’s heartbeat-like meter, his performance of inexorable trauma both tender and gutting in equal measure. The final scene in particular – set against the heartbreak of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Wilfred Owen’s Disabled – offers one of the year’s most devastating closing shots.

Throughout Benediction, the laconic smiles and tight-lipped defiance of Lowden’s Sassoon seem to conceal a howl of fury threatening to break through. Barely concealed it may be, but every moment resounds with it all the same. [Anahit Behrooz]

THE SKINNY

Spirited Waste Juli Bolaños-Durman and Aivaras Simonis join forces to uplift discarded waste and render it into objects of beauty

May 2022 — Review

Photo: Aivaras Simonis Photography Studio

Local Heroes

Interview: Stacey Hunter

J

uli Bolaños-Durman and Aivaras Simonis’ new series, SPIRITED WASTE, showcases a process that they describe as approaching “the unwanted with compassion and patience instead of contempt for what these represent”. The beauty of waste material is reimagined and revealed during a one-day play session between Bolaños-Durman, a Costa Rican artist designer, and Simonis, a Lithuanian photographer. They worked together for the first time in order to produce and document a new and experimental dialogue between unwanted objects collected from both their local community and their recycling bins.

A disposable coffee cup; a green plastic bottle; a cosmetic glass container; and a piece of foam are juxtaposed with embellished hand-cut glass. These come together as “threedimensional portraits of courage”. Simonis brings a photographer’s eye and advertising-industry-insider’s attention to detail to these intimate portraits, while Bolaños-Durman brings a blend of fearless composition building to a poetic sensibility that marks her out as an emerging force in Scottish craft. The two creatives have worked together to materialise waste into spirited beings; driven by compassion and reinvention.

Bolaños-Durman is increasingly known for her highly original approach to working with glass. Her signature aesthetic

has been forged through the repurposing and subsequent transformation of found objects into precious artefacts – always with strong underlying narratives that deal with topics like memory and remembrance. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts (MUDAC) Collection and Bolaños-Durman – who is based at Custom Lane – regularly exhibits internationally in places like Design Miami (2016), Design Days Dubai and London Design Festival (2021).

With a background in both business and design, Simonis brings a fresh approach to his images, centring his subjects in striking, conceptual worlds. Born and raised in Lithuania, Simonis is now “nourished by the vibrant creative communities of Glasgow, London and Amsterdam.”

By giving breathing space to waste material, objects have the chance to become infused with charm and depth. “The ultimate purpose is to invite a shift in our perception of the potential of waste and how we can reimagine it into something of beauty.”

View the photographic series at both julibd.com and aivarassimonis.com @julibd_com @aivaras_simonis

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THE SKINNY

May 2022

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May 2022

THE SKINNY

BITTERSWEET, LEITH A slice of Italian aperitivo culture arrives in Leith with Bittersweet, the new bar from the team behind the Old Poison distillery

Words: Peter Simpson

Tue-Thu 10am-11pm; Fri-Sat 10am-midnight; Sun 10am-10pm bittersweetleith.co.uk

Food

Image: courtesy of Bittersweet

24 Henderson St, Leith, EH6 6BS

B

Image: courtesy of Bittersweet

like it was put together by someone who has their own distillery on hand.

Bittersweet’s House Spritz (£5) is made with the distillery’s own aperitivo liqueur, sweet and refreshing with a blood orange twang, and the Bellini (£6) is the kind of sharp and fruity sipper that would go down a treat on a summer day in the Bologna sunshine.

The Coconut and Chilli Margarita (£8) hits ludicrously hard, with a real spice and a lip-puckering amount of citrus, in a short glass with a thick rim of salt, chilli and desiccated coconut. Our only note would be that the design of this drink may leave you licking the entire perimeter of your glass like some kind of boozy horse; that’s not a problem per se, just something to bear in mind.

The food comes in small but well-formed portions, so take a tip from us and grab a seat at the bar. When you finish your Twisted Arancini (£7) stuffed with mushrooms and blue cheese and served with a deliriously funky dipping sauce, being able to see through to — 61 —

the kitchen and work out what’s up next before immediately flagging down one of the bar staff is ideal.

The arancini are fantastic, as is the calamari (£6.50) which also comes with an impressively punchy dip (spicy rather than cheesy, still cuts right through). The parmigiana (£5.50) is a dinky little pile of cheese, sugo and aubergine, the potato crocchè (£6.50) are chunky wee lads full of starchy goodness, while the proportions of the cheese board (£7) are... a bit odd. A considerable volume of four tasty cheeses paired with two quite small bits of focaccia feels strange, but the cheeses are great so this is really just nitpicking.

Scotland’s pub culture is fantastic – the wood panels, the cask pints, the low-key-incredibly-valuable whisky collections, the pies! – but sometimes it’s nice to take a little vacation to another place for a post-work drink or two. That’s what Bittersweet offers, the chance to trade your pint for a spritz, and that bag of crisps for some olives and a collection of lovely fried things. And what better way to roll up to your next night out than with the swagger of someone who’s already had some tasty nibbles and an extremely effervescent drink or two? Trust us, you won’t regret it…

May 2022 – Review

reakfast is the most important meal of the day, and everyone loves a hearty dinner, but when it comes to mealtimes, aperitivo is the unsung hero. You’re at a friend’s house for dinner, and while they’re preparing everything, you’re chit-chatting with a drink and eating quite a lot of snacks – that, in essence, is aperitivo. Meet up with pals after work, grab a spritz or a glass of wine, and have a selection of nibbles before your actual dinner.

An Italian tradition, a great thing, lovely stuff.

Bittersweet, the new cocktail bar from Leith-based distiller and mixologist Fabrizio Cioffi, offers a glimpse of that way of eating. Among the exposed brick and copper accents in the corner bar just off Junction Street you’ll find small dishes, light bites, and an enormous list of cocktails, beers, spirits, Italian wines and aperitifs.

Cioffi’s distillery Old Poison is based across Leith at the Biscuit Factory, and the drinks menu reads

THE SKINNY

Books

Book Reviews

The Arena of the Unwell

Walking on Cowrie Shells

All the Lovers in the Night

The Memory Librarian

By Liam Konemann

By Nana Nkweti

By Mieko Kawakami, translated

by Sam Bett and David Boyd

By Janelle Monáe

May 2022 — Review

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After a gig from his favourite band Smiling Politely turns sour, twentysomething Noah finds himself panicked on the streets of London.

He soon falls into the arms of Dylan, the cheeky, charming local barman Noah’s never quite had the courage to approach, who takes him back to his flat. Soon, Noah’s embroiled in the toxic, codependent relationship between Dylan and his enigmatic flatmate, Fraser. As Smiling Politely gear up to their first album in five years, he finds himself navigating their intense relationship, all while counting down his NHS-allocated therapy hours and spiralling mental health.

In the strange and shifting dynamics between Noah, Dylan and Fraser, Konemann speaks to the sometimes messy, often complicated nature of queer relationships and desire – especially with a supposedly straight boy in the mix. North London life is perfectly captured in all its hazy, boozy glory, as Noah moves from grotty pub to even grottier indie venue, in prose that hums with the smell of stale fags and spilled beer.

It’s when he’s writing about music that Konemann really sings, with passages on gigs and club nights that capture the sticky, heady intensity of night life with writing that thrums off the page.

With its secret shows and record shop stockrooms, The Arena of the Unwell already feels like it belongs to a bygone era of indie sleaze, and is all the better for it.

This is the classic coming of age, queered, from a writer who’s one to watch. [Michael Lee Richardson]

Walking on Cowrie Shells takes readers on a whistlestop tour of genres in a dynamic package.

Whether the dualling perspectives of an adoptive mother and the family’s adopted daughter, a subsequent leveraging of position to fast-track fortunes, or a PR’s spin on a zombie apocalypse subverting the arc; with a quick stop at a comic on the way for good measure, the collection deftly travels far within its few tales. This feels like a taster of an author who could craft novel after novel, each pivoting to a new realm.

Story forms blend and bend around one another effortlessly – mystery, horror, myth, realism, even the nod to graphic novels – as Nkweti focuses on the lives of those whose lives span Cameroonian and American cultures. As we traverse cultures and countries, there’s so much to revel in. Within this blend, readers feel in good hands – Nkweti is a master of language, twisting and subverting genres, building up lush, vivid prose, and comfortably swerving across them all with ease.

As with any journey with so many varied stops, some shine brighter than others, dig deeper, but that’s the nature of such a range.

There is no one note: not the genre, the journey, the writing, the response – whether a laugh, or heartrending moment. The complexity, ambition, variety – it’s a debut collection that sings from the page, story after story. [Heather McDaid]

404 Ink, 26 May, £9.99 404ink.com

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The listless Fuyuko has reached her mid-30s trapped in her own life. A freelance proofreader with little interest in the literature she is meticulously fact-checking, Fuyuko lives and works alone in her boxy Tokyo apartment.

Work-obsessed, her only significant contact with the outside world is with her editor, the glamourous Hijiri, often through long phone calls.

When she does eventually leave her home, interactions are minimal but intense: drinking too much, falling asleep in public and feeling nothing but isolated surrounded by a cascade of strangers. On an unusually eventful day, a chance encounter leads to meeting a physics teacher, Mitsutsuka, and the two spark up a tentative friendship over light, a source of great inspiration and significant meaning for Fuyuko.

Like her other novels that have been translated into English – Breast and Eggs and Heaven – in All the Lovers in the Night, Mieko Kawakami presents an achingly lonely character at the centre of a world that has little tolerance for her. As a single woman who has reached her 30s, Fuyuko has slipped between the cracks in Japanese society.

Kawakami compares her protagonist’s life to Hijiri’s, a successful career woman with a family who should, surely, be more fulfilled, but both women are presented as moving towards their middle age with anxious fatalism. With her piercing and unhurried prose, deftly translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, Kawakami unravels the image of modern womanhood, pulling apart its insecurities, its complexities and its bewilderments, until only threads remain. [Katie Goh]

Janelle Monáe has built worlds throughout their musical career: expansive, Afrofuturist science fictions that pull from the literary and cinematic genre. Through “emotional pictures” and concept albums, Monáe has been an android, a bot and, most recently, a dirty computer – an outsider whose gender, race and sexuality are perceived as “dirty” and in need of “cleaning”.

The Memory Librarian is Monáe’s debut literary offering and, from an artist who draws on Blade Runner, Metropolis and the novels of Octavia Butler in their futuristic pop, an exciting prospect. This anthology of stories is co-authored with five writers and set in an authoritarian dystopia in which the all-seeing New Dawn persecutes those considered “dirty” – almost always Black, queer women. Monáe and their co-authors draw on familiar canonical tropes to create New Dawn: bureaucracy, weaponised technology and mind-control stimulants feature, as do forbidden love stories, repressed memories and secret rebel communes.

While The Memory Librarian presents five different windows into this world, the stories offer frustratingly little depth. The collection aims for the epic in world-building and emotional heft, but often falls into sci-fi cliché.

There’s no backstory to the surveying state – other than a generic intolerance – and characters operate with meaningless motivations. Timebox, co-authored with Eve L. Ewing, about an out-of-time pantry, is the stand-out story: a self-contained exploration of spaces and psyches. It’s a shame that not more of this rich originality is injected into The Memory Librarian’s stale world. [Katie Goh]

The Indigo Press, 5 May, £10.99

Picador, 12 May, £14.99

HarperVoyager, 19 Apr, £20

theindigopress.com

panmacmillan.com

harpercollins.co.uk

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THE SKINNY

ICYMI

Chloe Petts, co-founder of queer-inclusive comedy night The LOL Word and soon-to-be on her debut tour, takes on the mighty The Thick Of It for this month’s ICYMI Illustration: Miranda Stuart

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May 2022 — Review

Chloe Petts: Transience, Sat 28 May, The Stand Edinburgh. She will then debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August. Tickets for the Edinburgh run will be on sale later this year. For full dates and tickets, visit chloepetts.wixsite.com/chloe-petts

Comedy

I

f I’m being polite, politically the last five to ten years have been challenging. If I’m being honest, politically the last five to ten years have been a chaotic shitshow of overprivileged greedy bigots promoting self-interest with a blatant disregard for the good of the people. Regardless of how you describe this decade though, it’s always been accompanied by the bemused refrain: “it’s like something from The Thick of It.” I’m sure I’ve even used this phrase in recent years (despite never having seen The Thick Of It until now). It acts as useful shorthand to demonstrate the bumbling chaos of modern politics. When it comes to The Thick of It, truth is neither stranger nor more normal than fiction. It’s an outstandingly acted and believable depiction that could be lifted straight from a documentary about the current Cabinet (albeit sans smartphones and social media). It almost reminds me of a comedy version of Pablo Larrain’s recent Diana biopic, Spencer, which he calls “a fable from a true story”.

The brainchild of Armando Iannucci, the first two series of TTOI focus on Hugh Abbott, the hapless and out-of-touch minister of the Department of Social Affairs, and his advisers, Glenn, Ollie and Terri. All are under the watchful eye of the Prime Minister’s ‘enforcer’, the shouty Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi). The latter is the most recognisable, but my personal favourite is Terri Coverly (the always incredible Joanna Scanlan).

She’s Hugh, Glenn and Ollie’s punching bag while clearly being the most able − that’s not saying much though. One of the funniest genres of comedy is people, usually idiots, being mean to a perfectly nice person for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

It might be basic to compare TTOI to The Office with its behind-the-scenes style, however, it’s less fly-on-the-wall and more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants thanks to its use of jerky handheld single camerawork which enriches the frantic nature of our incompetent protagonists.

Teenage me in 2005 simply glossed over the series, thinking: “Look at these boring men talking about boring policy in a governmental setting that I have no understanding of.” That’s not to say there aren’t eminently mature and politically engaged 13-year-olds, I just didn’t happen to be one of them. I was in my waking up early so my parents wouldn’t see that I was still watching the Tweenies phase, with nothing more to worry about than where I’d put my Crystal Palace pencil case and my sexually confusing feelings towards Rihanna.

As I aged and became more politically engaged and understood the world of idiotic adults, I think I was then put off by the idea that it would be a sprawling Iannuccian drama that was impenetrable in its jargon, with a vast cast of characters that I needed a whiteboard, pens and string to keep a track of. In fact, TTOI’s very beauty is the exact opposite − it follows a tight cast of stupid people and takes joy in the banal. These politicians aren’t geniuses that operate on a different plane to the general public; they’re pompous idiots, easily recognisable from our experience of the British Cabinet, who are so concerned with their own power and advancement that they make up policy on the hoof.

Indeed, in Series 1, Episode 2, Hugh, Glenn and Ollie approach Terri with two directly conflicting policies and ask what she thinks will be the more politically expedient − it’s a choice between ‘apples’ and ‘oranges’ (latterly translated as something like ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’). It’s not about a deeply held feeling of moral obligation but instead, how will I keep my job and get an even better one by backing the right horse. And sorry to do the stranger-than-fiction thing but when Hugh hides in a cupboard because of his latest monumental eff up, I couldn’t help but recall Boris Johnson sequestering himself away in a walk-in freezer during the height of his December 2019 election campaign.

I think missing out on cultural phenomena is often a feeling accompanied with guilt or inferiority but I’m now a firm believer that we find the things we’ll come to love at the right time − my enhanced understanding (achieved through an intense commitment to ageing) of both politics and comedy means that I’ve found something that will stand in my mind as one of the finest comedies ever. Iannucci and co have created a satirical masterwork that is both specific and timeless.

May 2022

THE SKINNY

MIS(SING) INFORMATION

Curated by Saoirse Amira Anis.

Featuring work by Tayo Adekunle, Nkem Okwechime, Tako Taal and Natasha Ruwona.

19 March - 19 June 2022

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Perth Museum

78 George Street, Perth PH1 5LB

& Art Gallery

Tel: 01738 632488

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 03 May

TEDDY THOMPSON

ORAN MOR, 19:00–23:00

Folk from London.

SUNGLACIERS (BLUSH CLUB) BLOC+, 21:00–23:00

Indie rock from Calgary.

BAD BOY CHILLER CREW

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–23:00

Rap from the UK. LORD APEX

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 23:00

Hip-hop from London.

ROBYN HITCHCOCK MONO, 20:00–22:00

Rock from London.

JOANA SERRAT

BROADCAST, 19:30–23:00

Singer-songwriter from Catalonia.

EARTHLESS

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Psych rock from San Diego.

POP MUTATIONS: MODERN NATURE

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:30–23:00

Indie folk from England.

PYNCH

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–23:00

Indie from London.

Wed 04 May THE BACKSEAT LOVERS (WUNDERHORSE)

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00

Rock from Salt Lake City.

WATER FROM YOUR EYES

BROADCAST, 19:30–22:00

Electro pop from Brooklyn.

JOHN MYRTLE (LOUP HAVENITH + BRENDA) THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00

Jangle pop from London.

WHYTE HORSES

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

Psych pop from Manchester.

THE SHEE (PAPER SPARROWS) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Folk from Scotland.

THE BLUE ARROW, 19:30–22:00

Folk from Ireland.

Thu 05 May SPIRITUALIZED

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Space rock from Rugby.

CAMERON BARNES SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Fife.

JAMES & THE COLD GUN

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Rock from Cardiff.

MAZ & THE PHANTASMS

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Grunge indie from Glasgow.

FLYYING COLOURS

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Shoegaze from Melbourne.

HOT GLUE (BREAGHA CHARLTON + JAMES MACKAY + MEGAN KERR + CRPNTR) THE FLYING DUCK, 20:00–23:00

Trad, jazz, Hip-hop and R'n'B from Scotland.

Pop from Scotland.

TEKE::TEKE

Singer-songwriter from the UK.

MEDICINE CABINET (HONEYGLAZE + FOLLY GROUP) KING TUT’S, 19:00– 22:00

Pop rock from Glasgow.

FLETCHER

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Pop from New Jersey.

MARGO CILKER

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Americana from Oregon.

THE DEAR HUNTER

ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00

Sun 08 May GRACIE ABRAMS

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from the US. HIPPO CAMPUS

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

HERON VALLEY

PILLOW QUEENS

Rock from Amsterdam.

Indie rock from Ireland.

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

THE STRANGE BLUE DREAMS (KITTI) THE RUM SHACK, 19:30–22:00

Pop rock from Glasgow.

KATHRYN ROBERTS + SEAN LAKEMAN

Folk from Devon.

WHEN RIVERS MEET

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Blues rock from Essex.

DEAD PONY (SPRINTS + TAIPEI HOUSTON + MOMMA) KING TUT’S, 19:00– 22:00

Indie rock from Glasgow.

THE MONOCHROME SET MONO, 20:00–22:00

Post-punk from London.

JERRY LEGER

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Canada.

ST DUKES

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Indie pop from Glasgow.

NORTHERN UNREST (KRUELTY + REVOLVE)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Glasgow.

SLOW DOWN MOLASSES (FROG FOUNTAIN)

Indie pop from Saskatoon.

PEACH PIT

Indie pop from Vancouver.

ANDY SHAUF

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:30–22:00

Indie from Toronto.

REBECCA BLACK

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Pop from the US.

STANDARDS (FES) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

Indie rock from the UK.

ARCHITECTS

Math rock from LA

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00

ANAMANAGUCHI

Pop from New York.

TALLIES

Rock from Japan.

Metalcore from Brighton.

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Indie from Toronto.

Mon 09 May VIAGRA BOYS

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00

Punk rock from Stockholm.

THE MIDNIGHT

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Synthwave from the US.

Pop from Canada.

OH SEES

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00

Rock from California.

STATE CHAMPS

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Rock from New York.

CARTEL MADRAS

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Hip-hop from Calgary.

STATIC SATELLITES

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

SPINN

VIGILANTE

MONO, 20:00–22:00

MADISON CUNNINGHAM

Thu 12 May

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00

Composer from Scotland.

Indie from Glasgow.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Electro pop from Brisbane.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

EL TEN ELEVEN

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Post-rock from LA

TWIN ATLANTIC

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00

Alt rock from Scotland.

WHITESNAKE + FOREIGNER (EUROPE) THE OVO HYDRO, 18:00–22:00

Hard rock from London.

PARTY DOZEN

THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00

GLOW LINE (TOM JAMES SCOTT + NATIONAL BEDTIME)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 20:00–22:00

Indie from the UK.

Sun 15 May GEOFF TATE

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Rock from Queensryche.

CHARLI XCX

Rock from London.

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Fri 13 May

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:30–22:00

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

BENEE

Singer-songwriter from Ireland.

CHARLIE SIMPSON

INSULA

Pop from Suffolk.

Pop rock from Croatia.

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

DARWIN DEEZ

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

Alt rock from Aberdeen.

KATE BOLLINGER

PLATFORM, 20:00–22:00

Indie from New York.

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

STEREO MC’S (STEG G)

Hip-hop from Nottingham.

WARPAINT

Folk pop from Virginia.

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Tue 10 May

HAK BAKER

MATTIEL (LE REN)

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Americana from Atlanta.

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

BLUE VIOLET

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00

Alt pop from Scotland.

PINEGROVE

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00

FRANKIE AND THE WITCH FINGERS (GELATINE) THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00

Garage rock from LA

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

Alt country from London.

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Grime folk from London.

DEAD KENNEDYS

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Punk rock from San Francisco.

AVAWAVES

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Instrumental from London.

THE 121S

ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00

Indie punk from Dundee.

N.O.A.H

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Rock from Indonesia.

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Pop from the US.

Alt pop from New Zealand.

THE WANDERING HEARTS

Indie rock from LA

MAN ON MAN

Indie punk from Glasgow.

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

THE CAPOLLOS

Singer-songwriter from London.

Mon 16 May CHRISTIAN LEE HUTSON

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00

Singer-songwriter from LA

Singer-songwriter from the US.

SHAMBOLICS

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00

GHOST WOMAN

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Psych folk from Canada.

Tue 17 May

VACANCY RECORDS TOUR (ASHLEY CAMPBELL + BARRIEJAMES + PAUL MCDONALD)

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Eclectic lineup.

POSTER PAINTS

Singer-songwriter from the UK. SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Fife.

PLANET

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Indie rock from Sydney.

BITTERWOOD (INFERIEM)

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Punk from Aberdeen.

TRIATHALON

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Indie from New York.

MEGAN BLACK

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Glasgow.

Singer-songwriter from Livingston.

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Alt pop from LA

SHELTER BOY

Dream pop from Leipzig.

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Garage rock from LA

Wed 18 May

ROBERT JON & THE WRECK

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Roots rock from California.

LIL DARKIE

Trap metal from California.

DEANO MONSOON THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00

Synth-pop from Glasgow

THE WAVE PICTURES (HATER) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Rock from England.

MICKEY 9S

ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00

Punk disco from Glasgow.

MEN I TRUST

Sat 21 May

Indie from Montreal.

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

MAHALIA

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Alt R'n'B from the UK.

JOESEF

Soul pop from Scotland.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

BIG AC RECORDS SOUL REVUE (THE HANG UPS + THE SOLID BAND)

PROJECT SMOK

Eclectic lineup.

Neo-trad from Scotland.

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

SOFTCULT

Shoegaze from the US. THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Thu 19 May

BEMZ (WASHINGTON + ID + PSWEATPANTS) KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00

Rap from Glasgow.

HELMET

CATHOUSE, 19:00–22:00

Alt rock from New York.

DECO

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Synth-pop from London.

AODHAN

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Australia.

QUELLE CHRIS

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Rap from Detroit.

MILDLIFE

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Psych jazz from Melbourne.

EVENTS RESEARCH PROGRAMME

Weirdo and experimental.

— 65 —

TOM ROBINSON

GREGORY PORTER (LADY BLACKBIRD)

THE FLYING DUCK, 20:00–23:00

Rock from New Jersey.

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00

LA WITCH

Experimental from Brighton.

MARK CAPLICE

BLANCO WHITE

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

Pop from Essex.

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Ska from the UK.

Jazz no wave from Sydney.

Neo-trad from Scotland.

Soul jazz from Melbourne.

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

TALISK

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:00–22:00

BOMBSKARE

AVIVA

Hip-hop from New York.

ALLYSHA JOY (RAE LENA)

Heavy metal from Michigan.

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

BLOCKHEAD

FAT BLACK CATS (BROGEAL + THE CRAILS)

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

KING 810

Folk rock from San Diego.

VELS TRIO

BLACK ORCHID EMPIRE

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

NICE ‘N’ SLEAZY, 19:00–22:00

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Industrial synth-pop from the UK.

EVERYDAY PHARAOHS

MILES KANE

C DUNCAN

Rock from London.

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

CONFIDENCE MAN

SACRED PAWS + KAPUTT + THE QUILTER + NEKKURO HANA

Indie from Scotland. Part of First Footing.

Rock from Atlanta.

Sat 14 May

Indie pop from Liverpool.

GARY NUMAN

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

LUNAR VACATION

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Instrumental from London.

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Trad from Scotland.

THE FLYING DUCK, 18:30–22:00

Hardcore from Japan.

Fri 20 May

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00

Punk rock from London.

Singer-songwriter from England.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

SILVER HAAR (MATCHBOX OCEANS + KATE MCCABE + JAKE ROBERTS)

Indie rock from LA

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

THE OVO HYDRO, 19:00–22:00

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

RED SNAPPER

BLOC+, 21:00–22:00

PERSONAL TRAINER

ANNE-MARIE

Alt rock from Scotland.

Singer-songwriter from Scotland.

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

CRUEL HEARTS CLUB

Power pop from New Orleans.

CLOCK OPERA (GYM CRUSH + JIGSAWTIGER)

EMELI SANDÉ

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00

SEAN NICHOLAS SAVAGE (PINK POUND + SIMONE ANTIGONE)

Psych rock from Canada.

Indie rock from Minnesota.

THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from the US.

TWIN ATLANTIC

Wed 11 May

Prog rock from the US.

SILVER SYNTHETIC (ORDER OF THE TOAD)

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

CATHOUSE, 19:00–22:00

JOJO

Sun 22 May

THE ROYSTON CLUB (THE MOTIVE + THE NOTIONS) KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00

Indie from Wales.

TODRICK HALL

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

R'n'B from Texas.

LILY KONIGSBERG

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Pop from New York.

PUPPY

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Rock from London.

Mon 23 May THE BIG MOON

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Indie from London.

BEAR’S DEN

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Folk rock from London.

BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00

Rock from Cambridge.

LOWKEY

SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Rap from London.

BEACH HOUSE

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00

Alt indie from the US.

ABSTRACT ORCHESTRA PLAY J DILLA

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Hip-hop from Leeds.

BRYAN ADAMS THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00

Pop from Canada.

IAN SWEET

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Indie rock from LA

Tue 24 May ERRORR

BLOC+, 20:00–22:00

Shoegaze from Berlin.

GEORGE CLINTON & PARLIAMENT/ FUNKADELIC

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Funk from the US.

THE LUKA STATE

MONO, 20:00–22:00

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00

TROMBONE SHORTY & ORLEANS AVENUE

NICK WATERHOUSE

Jazz from New Orleans.

TRANSMISSION

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Post-rock from the UK.

NATHANIEL RATELIFF & THE NIGHT SWEATS BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00

Folk Americana from Colorado.

REV MAGNETIC

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Alt indie from Glasgow.

BUFFET LUNCH (SHAKE CHAIN + ROBERT SOTELO) THE FLYING DUCK, 19:00–22:00

Pop from Scotland.

APOLLO (VERCES + ELECTRIC MELONS)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS, 19:30–22:00

Eclectic lineup.

CHAINSKA BRASSIKA THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Ska from London.

Indie rock from Cheshire.

MONO, 20:00–22:00

Psych garage from California.

JULIEN BAKER (RATBOYS)

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Tennessee.

BRIAN FALLON & THE HOWLING WEATHER SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Folk rock from New Jersey.

DONNY BENÉT

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Post-disco from Australia.

THE FAMILY RAIN (THE HOWLERS) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Blues rock from Bath.

Wed 25 May MIDLAND

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Country from Texas.

KIM GORDON

QUEEN MARGARET UNION, 19:00–22:00

Alt rock from LA

May 2022 — Listings

YE VAGABONDS (IONA ZAJAC)

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00

ILLUMINATI HOTTIE (DUCKS LTD)

Sat 07 May

Rock from Stourbridge.

DEACON BLUE

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

MICHAEL KIWANUKA

Country soul from Portland.

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

New Wave from Scotland.

Fri 06 May

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

SPAIRS

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

THE RUM SHACK, 19:30–22:00

THE DELINES (JERRY JOSEPH)

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

THE BLUEBELLS (SISTER JOHN)

THE SKINNY THE LUNAR YEAR

CATHOUSE, 19:00–22:00

Rock from the UK and Croatia.

BROWNBEAR

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Ayrshire.

DANIEL ROSSEN

ANDY SHAUF

FATHERSON

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00

Indie from Toronto.

Rock from Kilmarnock.

WATER FROM YOUR EYES

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Indie punk from Glasgow.

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00

TOPS

CHAOS 8

Alt rock from Durham.

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Thu 26 May

FUTURIST BAGS (LAURIE TOMPKINS + OTHERWORLD)

Fri 06 May

Singer-songwriter from LA EMELI SANDÉ

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Scotland.

SURFBORT

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00

Punk rock from Brooklyn.

ASHE (SAM FISCHER) SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from San Jose.

VISCERA

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Deathcore from the UK. THE SCORE

Pop from Montreal.

THE OLD HAIRD RESSERS, 20:00–22:00

Electro pop from Brooklyn.

RENOVATIONS (IMMORTAL OMEN + UNDER-VOLT)

SETH MULDER & MIDNIGHT RUN (THE FOUNTAINEERS)

ST LUKE’S, 19:00–22:00

Bluegrass from Tennessee.

SWEEPING PROMISES THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Synth-pop from Boston.

Fri 27 May ROACHFORD

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from London.

THE PLASTIC YOUTH KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00

Jangle pop from Glasgow.

JELANI BLACKMAN SWG3, 19:00–22:00

Rap from London.

SIX YEAR SILENCE

CATHOUSE, 19:00–22:00

Alt metal from Glasgow.

THE SCORE

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Alt rock from New York.

WHARVES

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Australia.

THE FLAMING LIPS

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00

Psych rock from Oklahoma.

Sun 29 May VANIVES

Pop from the UK.

KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00

Singer-songwriter from London.

MACHINE GIRL

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Electronica from New York.

PET SHOP BOYS THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00

Synth-pop from London.

MOTHER ALL MIGHTY (LIONADH + GEFAHRGEIST + ELOISE KRETSCHMER) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Neo-soul from Edinburgh.

Mon 30 May BOB VYLAN

HYBRID

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00

Sat 07 May

HAPPY TEARS (BIG GIRL’S BLOUSE + CHIZU NNAMDI + GRAYLING) THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Indie from Illinois. Part of First Footing.

HIPPY + MARK COPELAND + KEV HOWELL

ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00

Eclectic lineup.

Sat 28 May ROACHFORD

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from London.

CLUB BEIRUT (SILVI + ST CLEMENTS + RYLAH) KING TUT’S, 20:30– 22:00

Indie from Scotland.

KING TUT’S, 20:00– 22:00

Rap from the UK.

KNUCKLE PUCK

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

Rock from Chicago.

CEDRIC BURNSIDE

BROADCAST, 19:00–22:00

Electric blues from Memphis.

MESHUGGAH + ZEAL & ARDOR BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00

Extreme metal from Sweden.

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00

Rock from New Jersey.

Post-punk from London.

CONFIDENCE MAN THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00

Electro pop from Brisbane.

PERSONAL TRAINER (PRESSURE RETREAT) SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Rock from Amsterdam.

SHAMBOLICS

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–23:00

WARD XVI (DEATH INGLORIA + SPLINTERED HALO) BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00

Metal from the UK. HOT CLUB OF COWTOWN

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:00

Western swing from Texas.

JENNY STURGEON THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

Folk from Scotland.

JOZEF VAN WISSEM THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

Composer from the Netherlands.

THE SHIRES

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00

Country from the UK.

Mon 09 May

Edinburgh Music Tue 03 May

GARY NUMAN

TOMBERLIN

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

Folk from the US.

PICTURE THE SCENE (THE ROCKETTES) SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Alt rock from London.

Wed 04 May THE GRAHAMS

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

Alt pop from New York.

NICK MASON’S SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS

HAILEY BEAVIS

Pop rock from the UK.

THE CAVES, 19:00–22:00

AC RID (ELSIE MACDONALD)

Rock from the UK.

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

THE MONOCHROME SET

Sun 08 May

USHER HALL, 19:30– 22:00

HAPPYDAZE

Blues rock from Georgia.

SILKY

ANCHOR LANE (THE HOWLING TIDES)

CATHOUSE, 19:00–22:00

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 18:30–22:00

Rock from England.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Indie folk from Scotland.

BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00

Weekly house and techno night for losing yourself in the beats.

The Rum Shack

SATURDAYS (THIRD OF THE MONTH)

Sub Club SATURDAYS

BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00

SUBCULTURE

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

Glam rock from Paris.

WILL VARLEY

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

Folk from the UK. PEACH PIT

NICKY LIPP

GOLDEN DAYS

Soul party feat. 60s R'n'B, motown, northern soul and more!

HARSH (VENDETTA LOVE)

THE ROBERT CRAY BAND

SUNDAYS

MOJO WORKIN’

Thu 12 May

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Fife.

Rap from London.

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–23:00

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

Punk rock from Canada.

Rock from Dublin.

Composer from Scotland.

Acoustic pop from Scotland.

Lo-fi rock from Lancaster.

THE OVO HYDRO, 18:30–22:00

THE CAVES, 19:00–22:00

Electronica from the UK.

ROOM 2, 19:00–22:00

THE LOVELY EGGS THE SCRIPT

C DUNCAN

Folk from Ireland.

THE FLATLINERS

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

Rock ‘n’ roll from LA

DENI SMITH (FAT MANTRA + ADAM THOM)

Indie from Glasgow.

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:00

Blues rock from Moray.

Rock from Melbourne.

BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00

CARA DILLON

KATE NASH (REVENGE WIFE)

STEREO, 19:00–22:00

The Flying Duck

THE MERCURY RIOTS (RICHY NEILL & THE REINFORCEMENTS)

THE HUG AND PINT, 19:30–22:00

Electro grunge from Edinburgh.

BARROWLANDS, 19:00– 22:00

TROPICAL FUCK STORM

Wed 11 May

Rock from Wales.

JILL LOREAN (ALI SHA SHA + RAVELOE)

Alt rock from New York.

Reggae from Birmingham.

Regular Glasgow club nights

PHILL CAMPBELL & THE BASTARD SONS

ORAN MOR, 19:00–22:00

UB40

SUMMERHALL, 19:00– 22:00

BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00

Psych electronic from the UK.

BAD ACTRESS (NINTH DEGREE + FIRING AT STATUES)

THE GARAGE GLASGOW, 19:00–22:00

May 2022 — Listings

Thu 05 May

RUN INTO THE NIGHT

Cathouse WEDNESDAYS

Indie pop from Vancouver.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Indie from the UK.

CATHOUSE WEDNESDAYS

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

THURSDAYS

THE SUN RA ARKESTRA

UNHOLY

SUMMERHALL, 19:30– 22:00

Afrofuturism from the US.

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

RUMER

Wed 18 May

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:30–22:00

OH MY GOD! ITS THE CHURCH THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

Pop from London.

Alt pop from Scotland.

IDER

THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

Rock ‘n’ roll from New York.

KAMORA (PRIMES + TEN EIGHTY TREES) SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

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.

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.

Thu 26 May

Thu 19 May

NITEWORKS

USHER HALL, 19:00– 22:00

BRAVE RIVAL

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00

WIDE DAYS (ALEX AMOR + KAPIL SESHASAYEE + LIZZIE REID + THE JELLYMAN’S DAUGHTER)

Sat 14 May

SCRUFFY BEAR (DEADWING + MOONRUNNERS)

BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–23:30

Fuzz rock from North Yorkshire.

Eclectic lineup. Part of Wide Days.

THE DUTTY MOONSHINE BIG BAND

Fri 20 May

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

Electronica from the UK. KANALOA

THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00

Alt rock from Edinburgh.

Sun 15 May TOVA

DEMI MCMAHON (AARON WRIGHT)

BANNERMANS, 20:00– 22:00

Singer-songwriter from Dundee.

WIDE DAYS (KATHERINE ALY + BEMZ + CHEF)

THE CAVES, 19:00–23:30

BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00

Eclectic lineup. Part of Wide Days.

Rock from the UK.

THE JAZZ BAR, 21:15– 22:00

Mon 16 May

KICKIN VALENTINA (THE LA MAYBE + SHE BURNS RED) BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00

Rock from Atlanta.

THE NAKED FEEDBACK (THE FËAR) SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Rock from Atlanta.

VALTOS

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

LA BELLE ANGELE, 19:00–22:00

LUNAR VACATION SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–23:30

NOVO AMOR

Tue 17 May Art pop from Wales.

WIDE DAYS (CALUM BOWIE + CYRANO + SAVAGE MANSION + SWISS PORTRAIT)

Neo-trad from Scotland.

Rock from Scotland.

MARINA

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

Eclectic lineup. Part of Wide Days.

Tue 10 May

Psych rock from Geneva.

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

BARE MONDAYS

Indie from Glasgow.

Blues rock from Portsmouth.

Rock from Glasgow.

Alt rock from London.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

HELLBENT

MONDAYS

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

EMILY DUFF

O2 ACADEMY EDINBURGH, 19:00–22:00

L’ECLAIR (MARANTA)

SUNDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)

The Garage Glasgow

POSTER PAINTS

Rap from Detroit.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

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.

Classic rock through the ages from DJ Nicola Walker.

TARYSIAN

Punk rock from New Hampshire.

Jazz from the UK.

BLUE VIOLET

CATHOUSE SATURDAYS

SLIDE IT IN

Eclectic lineup from Wales and Canada. Part of Wide Days.

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00

O2 ACADEMY EDINBURGH, 19:00–22:00

Jazz, classic and soul in aid of the Ukraine humanitarian appeal.

SATURDAYS

Sundays (Last of the month)

UB40

JO HARROP

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:00–23:00

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

FOCUS WALES MEETS BREAKOUT WEST FESTIVAL

THE QUEERS

Country from England.

Rock from Edinburgh.

WE STAND WITH UKRAINE

CATHOUSE FRIDAYS

Fri 13 May

QUELLE CHRIS

Industrial synth-pop from the UK.

FRIDAYS

Folk indie from Wales.

Sat 21 May GEOFF TATE

BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00

Rock from Queensryche.

THE CAVES, 19:00–22:00

HIS LORDSHIP

Rock ‘n’ roll from the UK. THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00

Electro-celtic from Skye.

Sun 22 May

CRASHDIET (SHIRAZ LANE + VELVET INSANE) BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00

Reggae from Birmingham.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Metal from Glasgow.

LORDE

Indie pop from New Zealand.

ROACHFORD

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from London.

BROWNBEAR

Rock from Sweden.

THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00

THE QUEEN’S HALL, 19:00–22:00

Fri 27 May

THE UNTHANKS

Indie from Ayrshire.

FINN ANDERSON

IAIN PROWSE AND AMSTERDAM

Folk jazz from Scotland.

Indie from Liverpool.

Folk from Northumbria.

Dundee Music Thu 05 May

NEWSHAPES (THE JUNGLE CATS + RUDEFACE + UGANDA’S MOONSHINE EPIDEMIC)

CHURCH, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Scotland.

Sat 07 May SEA GIRLS

CHURCH, 19:00–22:00

Indie rock from London.

Fri 13 May CHINA CRISIS

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 20:00–22:00

Synth-pop from Liverpool.

Sat 14 May THE 121S

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

THE VOODOO ROOMS, 19:30–23:00

CHURCH, 19:00–22:00

YORKSTON/THORNE/ KHAN

THE GOA EXPRESS

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 20:00–22:00

SUMMERHALL, 19:30– 22:00

Folk from Scotland.

Mon 23 May

MOTHER VULTURE

BANNERMANS, 19:30– 22:00

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Psych rock from Yorkshire.

Indie punk from Dundee.

ECHO MACHINE

Pop from Dundee.

NICKY LIPP

Sat 28 May

THE HUNTER S. THOMPSON, 19:00–22:00

THE LIQUID ROOM, 19:00–22:00

Sun 15 May

WHEN RIVERS MEET

Blues rock from Essex.

Indie from the UK. CUTCHY CASH

HAMISH HAWK

WHARVES (TANGLE + EMBASSY)

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Edinburgh.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Indie from Australia.

Singer-songwriter from Glasgow.

THE LOVELY EGGS

Wed 25 May

Punk rock from Bristol.

THE CAVES, 19:00–22:00

Tue 24 May

HORSE

TRASH BOAT

THE MASH HOUSE, 19:00–22:00

Punk rock from St Albans.

Sun 29 May

Singer-songwriter from Scotland.

THE CAVES, 19:00–22:00

Fri 27 May

THE BONGO CLUB, 19:00–22:00

Lo-fi rock from Lancaster.

TONY HADLEY

SOAK

USHER HALL, 19:00– 22:00

Singer-songwriter from England.

Wed 25 May

SPIKE & TYLA’S HOT KNIVES BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00

Rock from the UK.

AMPLIFI (AMUNDA, JAYDA & DJANA GABRIELLE) THE QUEEN’S HALL, 20:00–22:00

Pop and Hip-hop from Scotland.

— 66 —

USHER HALL, 19:00– 22:00

DUNDEE REP, 19:30– 22:30

Indie folk from Derry.

PETE SMITH

SNEAKY PETE’S, 19:00–22:00

Singer-songwriter from Dundee.

LIVIA RITA (AVANTGARDENERS)

Dreampop from London.

Mon 30 May

NOCTURNE WULF (ONCE BURNED + DECEMBER TENTH) BANNERMANS, 19:00– 22:00

Heavy metal from Glasgow.

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 19:00–22:00

THE SKINNY

Glasgow Clubs Thu 05 May JOHNNY JOHNNY (SENSU)

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 22:30–03:00

Thu 12 May

ALL U NEED XL (DANCE SYSTEM + JORDAN NOCTURNE)

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00

ISOTOPE PRESENTS VAJ.POWER (NAMAN)

Fri 20 May

Dance and club.

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00

House and club.

Fri 06 May

Fri 13 May

STEREO, 23:00–03:00

EUROVISION OBSESSION

R'n'B, Hip-hop and pop.

SWG3, 23:00–03:00

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00

SWEATY PALMS & FRIENDS (COMFORT + LAURA ST JUDE + I SOLAR + CALLUM EASTER + RIBEKA)

MAGIC CITY (MARTELLO MULLEN + TOO GALLUS + IRA)

Hip-hop, rap and bass.

WE SHOULD HANG OUT MORE WITH AHADADREAM

Disco, pop and electro.

STEREO, 20:00–03:00

Pop and indie.

Dub, desi and electro.

RETURN TO MONO: SLAM + BLACK LOTUS + KAIROGEN

Sat 07 May

House and techno.

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00

WE GOT THE BEAT

BLOC+, 23:00–03:00

Indie and pop.

SWG3 PRESENTS SAM DIVINE SWG3, 22:00–03:00

House and club.

TAIKANO (MATRHEIM + DJ SMOKER + AJAY C) STEREO, 23:00–03:00

Techno from Paris.

SHOOT YOUR SHOT PRESENTS MIDLAND (BONZAI BONNER)

DOUBT X ROO HONEYCHILD

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00

House and techno.

PUSH IT

Thu 19 May

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00

Sat 14 May ABBA DISCO WONDERLAND

SWG3, 23:00–03:00

Disco and pop.

SOILSE (LEONCE + OVID + VAJ.POWER)

STEREO, 23:00–03:00

Bass from Atlanta.

LOOSEN UP

THE RUM SHACK, 21:00–03:00

Afro and disco.

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00

Techno and trance.

SWIFTOGEDDON

SWG3, 23:00–03:00

Pop.

JACQUES GREENE (JUNGLEHUSSI) SWG3, 23:00–03:00

House and techno.

BÉTON BRUT

STEREO, 23:00–03:00

Breaks, garage and bass from Sheffield.

CURATED WAX 2ND BIRTHDAY

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00

Underground and techno.

Sat 21 May

SUB CLUB, 23:00–03:00

Dance and house.

THE BERKELEY SUITE, 23:00–03:00

Underground and garage.

Fri 27 May

HEADSET001 LAUNCH PARTY (CREEP WOLAND + FEENA + IRA & SKILLIS) STEREO, 23:00–03:00

Launch of the label’s first release.

Thu 26 May

PICKLEHEADS (JAY JAY + EMISHKA)

Jungle, garage and techno from Glasgow.

TUESDAYS

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

Exploring the legacy of dub, reggae and roots music and sound system culture in the contemporary club landscape.

Sat 28 May

TRANSPARENCY BY FRAZI.ER SWG3, 21:00–03:00

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

Offering a new breed of lofi, raw house 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.

Monthly no holds barred, down and dirty bikram disco.

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.

CALL ME MAYBE

LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00

Pop.

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00

House and techno.

Sat 07 May

House and techno.

SUBCITY RADIO

STEREO, 23:00–03:00

SOUL JAM

SUNDAYS POSTAL

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

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.

FIRST MONDAY OF THE MONTH MONDAY NIGHT IMPROV, 20:30

Host Billy Kirkwood and guests act entirely on your suggestions.

TUESDAYS

RED RAW, 20:30

Legendary new material night with up to eight acts.

FRIDAYS

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

Blends.

THE BREAK UP CLUB LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00

RED RAW, 20:30

Edinburgh Clubs

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00

STORYTIME (AXEL BOMAN)

House and techno.

Mon 09 May PRONTO

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

House and techno.

Techno, footwork, and dubstep.

Thu 12 May ECFS: THE REFORMATION

GEORGE IV & MANGO LOUNGE PRESENT (SALUTE)

SUNDAYS

SECRET SUNDAY

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

Subway Cowgate MONDAYS TRACKS

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

TUESDAYS TAMAGOTCHI

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

WEDNESDAYS XO

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

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

UK garage.

Fri 13 May

WEE DUB (O.B.F + SR.WILSON + HOMETOWN SOUNDSYSTEM)

LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00

Dubstep and bass.

EDINBURGH UNDERGROUND PRESENTS MURDER ON THE TRANCEFLOOR

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.

MONDAYS

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.

Sat 21 May FIRST EDITION: COURTESY

Monkey Barrel Comedy Club 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.

Fri 13 May

SWIFTOGEDDON

CHURCH, 22:30–03:00

THE CAVES, 23:00–03:00

Pop.

HEYDAY (PROSUMER)

Fri 20 May

Techno and trance.

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

Queer house.

DECADE

LA BELLE ANGELE, 23:00–03:00

Pop, punk and party.

THE ABBA VS FLEETWOOD MAC DISCO

CHURCH, 23:00–03:00

Disco and pop.

Sat 21 May ONE DIRECTION

Sat 14 May

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

Thu 26 May

Afro disco and techno.

CLUB NACHT

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

KOLEKTIV PRESENTS: SKIN ON SKIN

ELYSIUM (PAUL COPPING)

House and techno.

EROL ALKAN ALL NIGHT LONG

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00

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

The perfect way to end the working week, with four superb stand-up comedians.

CARTOCON SOUNDSYSTEM PRESENTS ESA

Trance and techno.

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

FIT FRIDAYS

FRIDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00

Mon 23 May

House and techno.

FRIDAYS

FRIDAYS

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00

THURSDAYS SLIC

The Glee Club

Regular Edinburgh comedy nights

Sun 08 May

PLANT BASS’D X MILE HIGH: TWO SHELL

An evening of awardwinning comedy, with four superb stand-up comedians that will keep you laughing until Monday.

SATURDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00

PALIDRONE (TEKI LATEX)

House and techno.

Thu 05 May

The big weekend show with four comedians.

The big weekend show with four comedians.

The Stand Edinburgh

SWG3, 16:00–22:00

SATURDAYS

THE SATURDAY SHOW, 21:00

THE FRIDAY SHOW, 20:30

Pop and disco.

TRANSPARENCY BY FRAZI.ER

SATURDAYS

House and techno.

Mon 16 May

TURN THE TABLES (KILIMANJARO) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

House and techno.

Wed 18 May UPLANDS ROAST THE BONGO CLUB, 22:00–03:00

Bass and breaks.

Thu 19 May

GREENHOUSE RECORDS (SPOOF-J) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

House and techno.

Fri 20 May

AQUELARRE (MR TC, PAKO VEGA) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

Leftfield.

INDUSTRIAL ESTATE (NEOMA + VXYX + WRISK) THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00

House and techno.

— 67 —

CHURCH, 22:30–03:00

MORRISON STREET COLLECTIVE

Pop.

House and techno.

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 23:00–03:00

EDINBURGH DISCO LOVERS (ARTWORK)

Disco.

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00

Trance and techno.

Fri 27 May

LIONOIL (PERCY MAIN + PRIVET)

Sat 28 May

TAIS-TOI (ASQUITH) SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

Techno and breaks.

Dundee Clubs

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.

The Glee Club THE MUSLIMS ARE COMING

22 MAY, 6:00PM-8:00PM

Just in time for Eid, Tez Ilyas, Eshaan Akbar, Nabil Abdulrashid and Kae Kurd arrive in town with a delicious new set.

The OVO Hydro BILL BAILEY: EN ROUTE TO NORMAL

10 MAY, 8:00PM-10:00PM

Bill Bailey looks at the chaos of human history to discover how we come through times of strife.

The Stand Glasgow

SPONTANEOUS POTTER: THE UNOFFICIAL IMPROVISED PARODY

TAROT: CAUTIONARY TALES

Oran Mor SHANE GILLIS

GEOFF NORCOTT: I BLAME THE PARENTS

Mon 30 May

SATURDAYS

Glasgow Comedy

THE BIG GREEN - A CLIMATE POSITIVE PARTY (JEDDA [THE BIG GREEN] + BOWLCUT)

Disco, house and funk.

Monkey Barrel's flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.

8 MAY, 8:30PM – 10:00PM

9 MAY, 7:00PM – 9:00PM

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY'S BIG FRIDAY SHOW, 19:00

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE!, 23:00–03:00

SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

House and techno.

FRIDAYS

New York stand-up brings his new show.

19 MAY, 7:30PM – 9:00PM

Fourth stand-up tour from politically incisive British comedian.

FLO & JOAN

22 MAY, 7:00PM – 9:00PM

Sharp and innovative musical comedy from comedy duo and sisters Flo and Joan.

JOSH BERRY + RAFE HUBRIS

24 MAY, 8:30PM-9:30PM

Back to back sets from two of Britain’s brightest.

Grab your wands, don your house robes, and apparate yourselves to The Stand.

18 MAY, 8:30PM – 10:00PM

A new show from the creators of Chortle’s number one show of 2019, directed

by Kiri Pritchard-McLean.

PAUL CURRIE

26 MAY, 8:30PM – 10:00PM

An absurdist work-inprogess show that will look at depression, anxiety and intrusive thoughts.

CATHERINE BOHART: THIS ISN’T FOR YOU 29 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

A take on the pandemic from a self-confessed control freak.

May 2022 — Listings

FRIDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH)

Everything from disco, funk and soul to electro and house: Saturday night party music all night long.

SOULSVILLE INTERNATIONAL

House and techno.

House and techno.

SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)

SATURDAYS (MONTHLY)

THE MASH HOUSE, 23:00–03:00

THE BONGO CLUB, 23:00–03:00

SATURDAYS (MONTHLY) MUMBO JUMBO

MILKIT

METROPOLIS PRESENTS: REFACTA & PALS

Regular Edinburgh club nights The Bongo Club

The Stand Glasgow

Experimental club from Manchester.

STEREO, 23:00–04:00

Sun 29 May

Dance and Electronica from Melbourne.

Hardcore.

Fri 06 May

SWG3, 23:00–03:00

WILL SPARKS

Regular Glasgow comedy nights

STEREO PRESENTS: MUTUALISM (BFTT + CLEMENCY + ICEBOY VIOLET + SI B)

Indie and pop.

BLOC+, 23:00–03:00

DANNY L HARLE PRESENTS HARLECORE SNEAKY PETE’S, 23:00–03:00

HOUSEPLANTS PRESENTS LADY PASSION

Eclectic club mix from Glasgow community radio station.

MONSTER HOSPITAL

STEREO, 23:00–03:00

Club and dance.

CELESTE AT SUB CLUB

THE SKINNY

Theatre Royal

RHOD GILBERT: BOOK OF JOHN 24 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:30PM

Beloved Welsh comedian returns after a six-year break.

BRYDON, MACK AND MITCHELL: TOWN TO TOWN 25-27 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Rob Brydon, Lee Mack and David Mitchell come together for a night of irrepressible antics.

Theatre Royal DYLAN MORAN

23 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:30PM

New comedy from the star of Black Books.

Edinburgh Comedy Monkey Barrel Comedy Club CHRISTOPHER MACARTHUR-BOYD: OH NO 6 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

A work-in-progress show from a delightful Glasgow comedian.

FIN TAYLOR: WORK IN PROGRESS 7 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

Fin Taylor pushes boundaries in preparation for his Edinburgh Fringe show.

BOBBY MAIR: COCKROACH

8 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

Host of Killer Camp returns with an hour of dark stand-up.

MICKY BARTLETT: CANCEL THIS 9 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

Following a sold-out Irish tour, Micky Bartlett brings his new work-in-progress to Edinburgh.

JACK BARRY: WORK IN PROGRESS 13 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

Funny man from the likes of Feel Good, Starstruck, and This Is Going To Hurt.

OLGA KOCH: JUST FRIENDS 14 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

Edinburgh Comedy Awardnominated comedian tests out funny chest-achingly new material.

JUDI LOVE: WORK IN PROGRESS

May 2022 — Listings

16-17 MAY, 8:30PM – 10:00PM

Loose Women panellist returns with an hour of new material.

THE MUSLIMS ARE COMING

22 MAY, 4:30PM-5:30PM

Just in time for Eid, Tez Ilyas, Eshaan Akbar, Nabil Abdulrashid and Kae Kurd arrive in town with a delicious new set.

JOSH BERRY + RAFE HUBRIS

24 MAY, 8:30PM-10:00PM

Back to back sets from two of Britain’s brightest.

ALEX KEALY: WINNER TAKES ALL 25 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

Rising star takes on the big guns with hilarious aplomb.

KRYSTAL EVANS: WORK IN PROGRESS 27 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

Krystal Evans casts a wry eye on the disasters that have shaped her life.

STAMPTOWN

30-31 MAY, 8:30PM – 10:00PM

A raunchy, full-on fringe experience, this late-night variety show features the best from the international scene.

The Edinburgh Playhouse BRYDON, MACK AND MITCHELL: TOWN TO TOWN 23-24 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Rob Brydon, Lee Mack and David Mitchell come together for a night of irrepressible antics.

BILL BAILEY: EN ROUTE TO NORMAL

25 MAY, 8:00PM-10:00PM

Bill Bailey looks at the chaos of human history to discover how we come through times of strife.

KATHERINE RYAN: MISSUS 28 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:30PM

New perspectives on life and love from the Canadian comedian.

The Stand Edinburgh STU & GARRY’S IMPROV SHOW

10 MAY, 8:30PM – 10:00PM

Our long-running improvised comedy show.

Resident duo Stu & Garry weave comedy magic from your suggestions.

TAROT: CAUTIONARY TALES 17 MAY, 8:30PM – 10:00PM

A new show from the creators of Chortle’s number one show of 2019, directed

by Kiri Pritchard-McLean.

CHLOE PETTS: TRANSIENCE

28 MAY, 5:00PM – 7:00PM

Chloe Petts uses her trademark cerebral laddishness to examine her desperate attempts at living in the moment.

PAUL CURRIE

29 MAY, 8:30PM – 10:00PM

An absurdist work-inprogess show that will look at depression, anxiety and intrusive thoughts.

CATHERINE BOHART: THIS ISN’T FOR YOU 30 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

A take on the pandemic from a self-confessed control freak.

The King's Theatre DYLAN MORAN

15 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:30PM

New comedy from the star of Black Books.

Usher Hall

BIANCA DEL RIO: UNSANITIZED 17 MAY, 7:00PM – 10:00PM

Sharp comedy from New Orleans drag queen.

The Queen’s Hall SIMON AMSTELL 19 MAY, 8:00PM – 10:00PM

Confessional stand-up from England.

The Caves TADHG HICKEY

22 MAY, 7:00–10:00PM

A darkly humorous half-stand-up, halftheatre piece looking at the comedian’s struggle with alcoholism.

Glasgow Theatre CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art CUE

19 MAY, 8:00PM – 9:00PM

An eerie, collaborative piece merging performance, filmmaking and installation.

Oran Mor

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: ABSOLUTE BOWLOCKS 2-7 MAY, 1:00PM – 2:00PM

A madcap farce about gender, determination, and the great sport of bowling.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: HELLO IN THERE 9-14 MAY, 1:00PM – 2:00PM

A sweet, moving exploration of the ghosts that memories can leave.

TWO’S COMPANY

11-12 MAY, 7:00PM – 10:30PM

A fresh, unexpected take on the pitfalls of modern dating.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: THE INFERNAL SERPENT 16-21 MAY, 1:00PM – 2:00PM

Adam and Eve, devoted snake rights activists, are faced with a tough choice in this delightful consideration on how and why we protest.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: NOT NOW 23-28 MAY, 1:00PM – 2:00PM

A sharp-witted comedydrama from award-winning playwright David Ireland.

The King’s Theatre JERSEY BOYS

2-7 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

A whirlwind look at the lives behind Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.

EVITA

10-14 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Andrew Lloyd Webber musical telling the story of the First Lady of Argentina.

MAMMA MIA!

24 MAY-11 JUN, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Head to Greek paradise with this all-singing, alldancing ABBA musical.

Theatre Royal DON GIOVANNI

15-21 MAY, TIMES VARY

Scottish Opera put on a lavish production of the Mozart masterpiece.

THE WHITE CHIP

20 MAY, 8:00PM-10:30PM

A comedy looking at a life spinning out of control fresh from Off-Broadway.

Part of Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.

Edinburgh Theatre SKETCHED

4-5 MAY, 6:30PM – 8:30PM

A dynamic, inventive anthology performance by students from the Dance and Drama degree at Edinburgh College.

ONE MISSISSIPPI

A hard-hitting play that explores the impact of childhood on modern masculinity through storytelling and physical theatre. Part of Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.

LITTLE TOP

8-11 MAY, TIMES VARY

A magical circus experience for babies and families. Part of Edinburgh International Children’s Festival.

LITTLE MURMUR

12-15 MAY, TIMES VARY

Combining visual storytelling with technology, this play looks at the experience of living with dyslexia. Part of Edinburgh International Children’s Festival.

HAY FEVER

18-21 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Hilarious misunderstandings ensue in this classic Noel Coward play.

WOODED

27-28 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Told through music and movement, this atmospheric play explores the weight of female relationships.

Festival Theatre

A devastating play by acclaimed playwright debbie tucker green. Tandem at the Tron 5 MAY, 7:45PM – 10:30PM

Three brand new, topical short scripts by playwrights Amy Hawes, Jennifer Adam and Mhairi Quinn.

BALLET BLACK

4 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

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

NEDERLANDS DANS THEATER: NDT 2 6-7 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Three dance pieces blend daring choreography with remarkable athleticism.

OTI MABUSE: I AM HERE 8 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

WHO KILLED MY FATHER

MENOPAUSE THE MUSICAL 2

27-28 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

The Studio

THE HOPE RIVER GIRLS

9-12 MAY, TIMES VARY

An eerie coming of age told through explosive choreography and multimedia storytelling. Part of Edinburgh International Children’s Festival.

KEEPERS OF THE LIGHT

6-7 MAY, TIMES VARY

Years after three lighthouse keepers mysteriously disappear, three technicians find themselves stranded on the same island.

LIGHT!

13-15 MAY, TIMES VARY

A duet between dancers and swirling spots of light.

Part of Edinburgh International Children’s Festival.

THOUGH THIS BE MADNESS

21-22 MAY, 7:30PM – 8:30PM

A fragmentary, poetic exploration of motherhood and mental illness. Part of Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.

THE ODD COUPLE

25-28 MAY, TIMES VARY

Traverse Theatre I AM TIGER

9-11 MAY, TIMES VARY

A thought-provoking, comic exploration of living with grief. Part of Edinburgh International Children’s Festival.

BIRDBOY

12-14 MAY, TIMES VARY

A young boy navigates the noise of his mind through visually stunning fantasy.

Part of Edinburgh International Children’s Festival.

THE WHITE CHIP

18-20 MAY, TIMES VARY

Strictly Come Dancing champion puts on an explosive show.

ANYTHING GOES

Cole Porter musical filled with high jinx and tap dancing sailors.

25-28 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Scottish Ballet take on Franz Liszt’s claustrophobic tragedy.

King’s Theatre Edinburgh A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED

3-7 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Classic rock musical featuring the likes of Journey and Bon Jovi.

Tensions arise in the original flatshare farce.

THE SCANDAL AT MAYERLING

3-7 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

The story of Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, whose life intersected with some of the biggest political moments of the 20th century.

Four women go on a cruise in this take on ageing.

6-7 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Four women go on a cruise in this take on ageing.

HANG

4-21 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

10-14 MAY, TIMES VARY

11-15 MAY, TIMES VARY

Tron Theatre

RED ELLEN

The Edinburgh Assembly Roxy Playhouse ROCK OF AGES

MENOPAUSE THE MUSICAL 2 28 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

Royal Lyceum Theatre

Miss Marple investigates an intriguing murder in this classic mystery.

A comedy looking at a life spinning out of control fresh from Off-Broadway.

Part of Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.

Dundee Theatre

Dundee Rep THE BOOKIES

3-21 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

A black comedy about the biggest wins - and losses.

ANTIGONE, INTERRUPTED

26-27 MAY, 7:30PM – 10:30PM

A mythical dance retelling of the classic Greek tragedy.

11-14 MAY, 7:45PM – 10:30PM

An intimate, devastating exploration of masculinity and queerness.

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Glasgow Art David Dale Gallery and Studios

JENNIFER BAILEY: SMALL ROOM

5-21 MAY, 12:00PM – 5:00PM

Experimental work that explores the relationship between art production, patriarchy and labour.

Glasgow Print Studio ELIZABETH BLACKADDER

3-28 MAY, 11:00AM – 5:00PM

A retrospective of the career of Elizabeth Blackadder, a groundbreaking Scottish printmaker whose work at Glasgow Print Studio goes back to 1984.

Glasgow Women’s Library

WHERE THE WORLD MEETS AS NEIGHBOURS

2-7 MAY, TIMES VARY

Archival exhibition marking 50 years of the Dundee International Women’s Centre.

OUT IN THE ARCHIVE 2-21 MAY, TIMES VARY

A look back at 30 years of queer activism at Glasgow Women’s Library.

GoMA

DRINK IN THE BEAUTY 1-22 MAY, 11:00AM – 4:00PM

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

AFROSCOTS: REVISITING THE WORK OF BLACK ARTISTS IN SCOTLAND THROUGH NEW COLLECTING 1 MAY-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.

TASTE!

1 MAY-31 DEC, 11:00AM – 4:00PM

Featuring work by Andy Warhol, Sarah Forrest and David Shrigley, this exhibition looks at how taste is created and art archives are curated.

DOMESTIC BLISS

1 MAY-31 DEC, 11:00AM – 4:00PM

Street Level Photoworks

THIS SEPARATED ISLE 1-15 MAY, TIMES VARY

Exploring the intersection between identity and nationhood, this series of photographic portraits examines the tensions and divisions in contemporary British life.

STREET LEVEL OPEN 2022 28 MAY-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 Modern Institute

ANDREW J. GREENE: HOPE

2-28 MAY, TIMES VARY

A group of sculptures that reform and recontextualise Americana kitsch, and ideologies of Western material culture.

The Modern Institute @ Airds Lane

ANDREW SIM: FOUR HORSES AND A SUNFLOWER (ACTUAL SIZE) 2-28 MAY, TIMES VARY

Drawing on symbolism and archetypes, these large-scale paintings explore ideas of duality and queerness.

GREGOR WRIGHT: GREYSCALE ACID

2-7 MAY, TIMES VARY

A new body of digital pieces, holographs, and collage exploring the functionality of drawing and painting in the digital age.

Tramway

HUMAN THREADS

11 MAY-28 AUG, TIMES VARY

Curated by Artlink and informed by individuals with profound and multiple learning disabilities, this exhibition crafts an interactive landscape through creatively sensory encounters.

CHRISTELLE OYIRI: GENTLE BATTLE

1 MAY-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.

Transmission Gallery ZINZI MINOTT: BLOODSOUND

1-14 MAY, 11:00AM – 5:00PM

A series of newly commissioned works of prints, moving image, sound and sculpture commemorating the Windrush Generation.

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.

Edinburgh Art

Kendall Koppe

7 MAY-1 JUN, TIMES VARY

MARK MCKNIGHT: KISS OF THE SUN

4-28 MAY, 12:00PM – 6:00PM

An exhibition of photography exploring queerness and the body by New Mexico-based Mark McKnight.

&Gallery

MICHELLE BENOIT + JON THOMAS + MOLLY THOMSON: LINE, COLOUR & FORM

A group exhibition playing with ideas of composition and harmony.

Arusha Gallery KIM L PACE: KINDRED 1-22 MAY, TIMES VARY

Inspired by the writings of Angela Carter and the art of Leonora Carrington, these surreal, dainty ceramics present a kind of archaeological folktale.

City Art Centre NATIONAL TREASURE: THE SCOTTISH MODERN ARTS ASSOCIATION 21 MAY-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.

Dovecot Studios

THE ART OF WALLPAPER: MORRIS & CO.

2 MAY-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.

Edinburgh Printmakers WORKSHOP

1 MAY-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.

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop

KATIE HALLAM: STATE OF LIMINAL 2-28 MAY, 11:00AM – 5:00PM

An installation exploring the physicality of ancient geology and the dematerialised aesthetics of contemporary technology.

Ingleby Gallery KATIE PATERSON: REQUIEM

4 MAY-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.

Jupiter Artland TRACEY EMIN: I LAY HERE FOR YOU

28 MAY-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

ANDREW SQUIRE: CHANGES

7-28 MAY, TIMES VARY

A new series of paintings exploring the interplay between humans and their environments.

WILLIE RODGER: LIFE’S A BEACH! 7-28 MAY, TIMES VARY

31 works pulled from the artist’s estate examine the freedom and possibility of summer holidays.

GEOFFREY ROPER (1942-2020)

7-28 MAY, TIMES VARY

Impressionistic landscapes depicting rural and industrial environments.

THE SKINNY

Royal Scottish Academy RSA

The Scottish Gallery

1 MAY-12 JUN, TIMES VARY

5-28 MAY, TIMES VARY

THE 196TH ANNUAL EXHIBITION

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.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

1 MAY-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.

Scottish National Portrait Gallery

COUNTED: SCOTLAND’S CENSUS 2022 1 MAY-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

3 MAY-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.

BLACK BOX: KINSHIP 1 MAY-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 MAY-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

An interdisciplinary inquiry into human/nonhuman relationships and the fragility of coastal ecosystems across both India and Scotland.

MEET ME AT THE THRESHOLD

2-21 MAY, TIMES VARY

An exhibition of works by the first two Talbot Rice Residents cohorts, including Sulaïman Majali, RaeYen Song, and Tako Taal.

SYLVIA VON HARTMANN AT 80

5-28 MAY, TIMES VARY

An immersive exhibition bringing together wax painting, prints, painted furniture and objects that document everyday experience.

ANE CHRISTENSEN + DAPHNE KRINOS: A SHARED LANGUAGE 5-28 MAY, TIMES VARY

Bringing together work by two leading designers in silversmithing and jewellery making, this exhibition explores ideas of scale, architecture, and negative space.

Torrance Gallery

SPRING EXHIBITION 3-28 MAY, 11:00AM – 5:30PM

A mixed media exhibition of gallery favourites.

Dundee Art DCA: Dundee Contemporary Arts DOUGLAS GORDON: K364 7 MAY-7 AUG, TIMES VARY

A major film installation that offers a powerful mediation on trauma and recovery.

Words: Izzy Gray

COCORICO

96 JANE STREET, EH6 5HG

Leithers in need of a new roost, there’s a cosy new nest awaiting on Jane Street. Between colourful painted chooks you’ll find the doorway to Cocorico, a friendly neighbourhood cafe where the smiles are as warm as the coffee within. From the team behind the successful Water of Leith Cafe Bistro, this colourful gem offers up rustic Scottish nosh with a French flair. Their croque monsieurs are already proving the Talk of the Walk. There’s really something to suit everyone here, from cake and coffee duos sent from above to a cullen skink that’ll have you penning a shanty in your heid before you know it.

FAVA

248 MORRISON STREET, EH3 8DT

Haymarket is a hive of activity these days. The centre of the honeypot? The newly-opened Fava. This buzzing Greek kitchen radiates Mediterranean warmth, nicely balanced with boho decor. Colourful mezze plates take centre stage, with tasty tidbits ranging from keftedes (potato croquettes) to dolmadakia (stuffed vine leaves) and a spinach and feta tart that’ll have you thinking sunny thoughts into the next week. Vegan offerings are plentiful, but the seafood choices sing out too, with the prawn saganaki, kalamari and musselinfused pasta all vying for first place. There’s larger offerings too if you ain’t carin’ for the sharin’. Gyros for one? It’s an “OPA!” from us.

Cocorico

The McManus THE STREET AT THE MCMANUS

3 MAY-22 OCT, 10:00AM – 5:00PM,

Immersive exhibition looking at Dundee’s historical architecture.

TROY: BEAUTY AND HEROISM

19 MAY-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

1 MAY-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

1 MAY-13 JUN, 10:00AM – 5:00PM

Using materiality to explore how design can offer sustainable solutions to the climate crisis.

ROKKO ROKKO DESU

112 ST STEPHEN STREET, EH3 5AD

“There’s no such thing as bad weather,” Billy Connolly once declared, “just the wrong clothing, so get yourself a sexy raincoat and live a little.” Aye sure, a decent Mac might counteract Scotland’s blustery ways, but you know what else can help warm the cockles? A hearty bowl of ramen done right, and we know just the place. If you’re in need of thawing out this chilly spring, head on down to Stockbridge where Rokko Rokko Desu’s Japanese noodles will see you through.

Their Inferno Ramen packs a fair punch, so you might want to pair it with a soothing cocktail. The informal bar top seating gives this place a laidback charm, which trickles nicely into the menu. Their small-but-perfectly-formed snack dishes are ideal for those needing to grab a bite on the hoof. Venison tataki, steamed pak choi, crispy cauliflower? The floorplan may be wee, but the flavours are big.

BOOM BATTLE BAR

Rokko Rokko Desu

OMNI CENTRE, GREENSIDE PLACE, EH1 3AU

The not-so-distant bells of raucous nights ahead are calling, with news that Boom Battle Bar are set to open their second Scottish venue in the Omni Centre. Inner children can be firmly unleashed, with a range of devilish battles to choose from. Beer pong? Classic. Augmented reality darts? Trippy! Bavarian axe throwing? Sign us up.

Young ‘uns are welcome until 7pm, when the bar becomes open to over 18s only and the colourful cocktails begin to flow. There’ll be street food on hand too to help keep the energy levels topped up.

Image: courtesy of venue

Talbot Rice Gallery

As spring creeps (very slowly) into Edinburgh, we explore some of the city’s newest and most exciting venues, from buzzing Greek restaurant Fava to charming Leith cafe Cocorico.

Boom Battle Bar

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May 2022 — Listings

1 MAY-6 JUN, 12:00PM – 5:30PM

A series of landscape paintings developed after a residency in Kirkcudbright.

Image: courtesy of venue

Summerhall

Edinburgh Venues

Photo: Ana Mesle

BARBARA HEPWORTH: ART & LIFE

EWAN MCCLURE: INSIDE AND OUT

THE SKINNY

The Skinny On...

Kathleen Hanna The Skinny On...

Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna(!!) takes on this month’s Q&A, telling us about some vital projects she’s involved in as well as which celebrity she could take in a fight What’s your favourite place to visit?

Mexico City because my life was forever made better by the work of Luis Barragán and many of his projects are there. There’s also so many fascinating historical sites and the best food I’ve ever eaten.

What’s your favourite colour?

Pink and red together because they vibrate.

Who was your hero growing up?

Billie Jean King because she helped pass the law that allowed girls to do sports in school which meant I finally got to run super fast and play soccer.

Whose work inspires you now?

I love the band Problem Patterns because they make weird music for right now that sounds like no one else and I am addicted.

What’s your favourite meal to cook at home?

I just put spinach, garbanzo beans and any leftover vegetables in a bowl with olive oil and lemon and mix it up. I like it because it is fast and healthy and utilises leftovers. Also I have THE BEST OLIVE OIL AT MY HOUSE.

What’s your favourite album?

I love Isaac Hayes’ Live at The Sahara Tahoe because he not only leads a fully orchestrated band and sings beautifully but he tells great lead-in stories for many songs. As a feminist musician dudes have always yelled at me to “just shut up and play” when I’m telling a story; Hayes reminded me that this is actually a valuable part of a musician’s performance and that I should keep doing it. He also motivated me to add more humour and get better at banter.

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

I got very depressed, barely exercised and ate shitty food during most of the pandemic. The only thing that kept me at all inspired was doing creative stuff for my T-shirt company Tees4Togo (each shirt I sell sends a girl in Togo, West Africa to school for a year). Making videos and designing new shirts and doing press for this project helped me feel like I was involved in something positive while the US was plummeting into a white supremacist, trans-hating, anti-woman vortex.

Photo: Debi Del Grande

May 2022 — Chat

What three people would you invite to a dinner party?

There’s no party, it’s just me and Christopher Walken.

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

I saw You Light up My Life, a movie based on the hit song by the same name starring Didi Conn when I was 11 and I started crying so hard my Mum had to take us out of the theatre. When we got to the car she asked why I was crying and I said, “Because people spent money making that.”

What book would you read if you had to selfisolate for the next ten days?

I would read Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit.

It’s about untold histories about how people in various places got together and did things that ultimately had progressive impacts. She really makes a good case for staying commited to doing our best in a shitty world.

What are you most scared of?

Being eaten by an alligator because what if I was swimming and all of a sudden these fucking eyes popped outta nowhere and then I am being rolled really fast and I almost pass out and then my head is in its mouth and…

Which celebrity could you take in a fight?

I’m a lover not a fighter, but I could probably take Danny DeVito down.

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

Whatever bird that lives the longest and can fly.

Our issue this month focuses on workers’ rights.

Do you think festivals are doing enough in terms of promoting diversity and gender balance on their lineups? If not, what should they be doing to get girls and more people from minority backgrounds to the front?

Many festivals are doing way better from what I can see, but most are still very lopsided. I’m not an expert in this stuff but it seems like having more LGBTQ, BIPOC people as the curators would be a great first step.

After many cancellations, your extensive run of tour dates with Bikini Kill is finally set to commence at the end of April, with a date in Glasgow this June.

What else does 2022 have in store?

Me and Kathi Wilcox just played on this stellar benefit record Bikini Kill’s new guitar player Erica Dawn Lyle put together during COVID. It has Kelley Deal, Kim Gordon, Brontez Purnell and a bunch of other amazing artists on it and is actually, dare I say it, a really really good record. It’s coming out on 7 June. It’s only going to be available as a download on Bandcamp so all proceeds go directly to NEFOC, an indigenous and POC-led grassroots group that helps POC/Indigenous farmers acquire land and administer it as collectively owned land trusts. They also lobby corporate landholders to simply give land back to Indigenous tribes.

Bikini Kill play O2 Academy, Glasgow, 12 Jun

Bikini Kill

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bikinikill.com

THE SKINNY

October 2020

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May 2022 — Chat

The Skinny On...

THE SKINNY

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