Francoise Hardy – Comment te dire adieu (Remasterisé en 2016)
Shiny Toy Guns - Le Disko
Tinie Tempah - Pass Out
3OH!3 ft. Katy Perry, STARSTRUKK
O-Zone, Dragostea Din Tei
Blue Foundation - Eyes on Fire [AKA the hoa hoa hoa song]
SOPHIE - Faceshopping
N-Dubz - I Need You
The Carpenters - Rainy Days And Mondays
Macklemore - Thrift Shop
The Rolling Stones - Moonlight Mile
Listen to this playlist on Spotify — search for 'The Skinny Office Playlist' or scan the below code
The Skinny is Scotland's largest independent entertainment & listings magazine, and offers a wide range of advertising packages and affordable ways to promote your business. Get in touch to find out more. E: sales@theskinny.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the explicit permission of the publisher. The views and opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the printer or the publisher.
by DC Thomson & Co. Ltd, Dundee
Meet the team
Championing creativity in Scotland
We asked: What's your favourite historial time period (and why)?
Senior Editorial
Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief
"Archaic – love the statues, shout out to Homer, great storyteller."
Commissioning Editors
Cammy Gallagher Clubs Editor "Snowden, Gallon Smashing, and The Harlem Shake - 2013 had it all."
Peter Simpson Deputy Editor, Food & Drink Editor
"The 1780s had the storming of the Bastille, some early Western philosophy and a craze for hot air balloons despite repeated crashes/ explosions. Not my *favourite* period, but it is the one I most recently Wikipedia'd."
Eilidh Akilade Intersections Editor "Any time period depicted in flashbacks within teen vampire media has my heart & that won't be changing any time soon."
Anahit Behrooz
Events Editor, Books Editor "Approximately 12-24 months ago at any point."
Rachel Ashenden Art Editor "Interwar period because Surrealism."
Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist
"There were a few months in the late 90s, between Michael Portillo losing his seat and Lady Di's car crash, when the world didn’t feel like a hellscape."
Polly Glynn Comedy Editor
"The incredible period in the late 00s/ early 2010s where big groups of girls would stand in a line for a photo, with one hand on their hip, and lean so far back it looked like they were all in an invisible limbo competition. You can't tell me that's not a landmark period of history."
Tallah Brash Music Editor
"For architecture, give me the clean lines of Corbusier's early 20th century modernist architecture any day, or the repetitive, geometry of 1960s and 70s brutalist architecture."
Rho Chung Theatre Editor "I yearn for a time that does not yet exist."
Business
Laurie Presswood General Manager "1901-2018, the original Irn-Bru years"
Sales
George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist "Precambrian. Things were a bit quieter back then."
Production
Dalila D'Amico Art Director, Production Manager
"The MySpace Renaissance. A time of great cultural flourishing."
Sandy Park Commercial Director
"The mid-2000s. The sheer thrill of being allowed into a Cowgate bar when you weren't quite an adult yet, 50p drinks and red Aftershock shots, The Fratellis on repeat in Madogs, hazy memories. The good old days."
Phoebe Willison Designer
"Neolithic Scotland cause standing stones are cool and freaky. Wow I've just googled how many neolithic grans I have and it's ~6300000000 0000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000."
Ema Smekalova
Media Sales Executive "Ice Age purely based on the little squirrel's vibes... god he loved acorns."
Ellie Robertson Editorial Assistant
"Despite all the plague, war, and general terribleness, the Middle Ages really popped off with illuminated manuscripts. Those monks sure knew how to design a PDF."
Billie Estrine Editorial Intern "All I want is to be able to sit down in a downtown NYC venue next to Lou Reed and have him get really mad at me. So the early 1970s."
Emilie Roberts
Media Sales Executive
"I was obsessed with Elizabethan times as a kid, but my real answer is the 70s. Which were much like the Elizabethan era in a way: big collars, big hair...RIP Elizabeth I you would have loved disco."
Editorial
Words: Rosamund West
This month’s theme of nostalgia evolved through a combination of pitches and releases and the general overarching feeling that things used to be generally better and less fucking awful at some point in the past. To quote the AI that answered my Google search without my consent, ‘People can feel nostalgic at any point in life, but it often intensifies during transitional periods, like adolescence or when facing difficult times.’ Transitional periods like e.g. the end of days.
Film editor Jamie reminisces about the magic of discovering cinema through terrestrial TV in the 80s and 90s, with the late night Moviedrome series presenting cult films introduced by filmmaker Alex Cox. He meets the man himself to discuss the series’ return irl to the British Film Institute on the Southbank, with a collection of Moviedrome films, including a new short documentary about the series, also available to stream on the BFI Player.
Sensing that the Scottish nostalgia levels are currently perilously high, one writer unpacks the boom in throwback club nights and music. A new book, Glasgow’s Greatest Hits, tells the story of the city’s music scene – we meet author Fiona Shepherd to reminisce about gigs and venues past.
As Lorde’s fourth album, Virgin, is released, Anahit takes a dive into her back catalogue with a personal reflection on the tension between pleasure and limitation at her music’s core. We meet Gwenno, also in a reflective mood as she examines her past and present ahead of the release of her latest album, Utopia
A writer who works in dementia care offers a fascinating insight into how nostalgia for music can connect patients with their memories, with the right track from the right period in their lives offering the opportunity to unlock their past selves, albeit temporarily. We meet Hudson Mohawke to reminisce about
Glasgow’s 00s club scene as he returns from LA for a packed out Numbers showcase.
Books talks to American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney, whose collection Joy Is My Middle Name navigates the tragedy and comedy of both past and present, while novelist Saima Begum discusses giving voice to a long-silenced period of Bangladeshi history in her debut, The First Jasmines Intersections takes a walk through Scotland’s languishing regional shopping centres, and feels a sense of longing for times past.
We meet Climate Camp Scotland to learn more about their work reclaiming green space and building an inclusive climate justice movement. As comedy night Abnormally Funny People celebrates its 20th birthday, we talk to some of the comics whose careers have been shaped by the showcase.
Speaking of showcases, we’ve got reviews from this year’s art school graduate showcases (degree shows) in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Theatre looks forward to the Brian Cox-starring Make It Happen, which premieres this month in Dundee Rep before making a move to the Edinburgh International Festival.
As we go to print, CCA is in absolute crisis, with their senior management having escalated their response to a peaceful protest to such a degree it is difficult to see how the organisation can return. Curator Shalmali Shetty offers a considered reflection on Alia Syed’s solo exhibition, The Ring in the Fish, which is currently locked within the building.
We close with The Skinny On… C Duncan, who’s marking the tenth anniversary of the release of Architect with a show in Stirling. He too is on reflective form, remembering times when Chris Martin wasn’t rubbish, and his own youth soundtracking a ‘terrible, cryptic, pseudo intellectual garbage play’ on the Edinburgh Fringe.
Cover Artist
Jamie Johnston is a graphic designer based in Glasgow. He mainly works within the music industry with clients such as Sony Music, Callum Beattie and Spyres. His work often utilises handson methods like collage and printmaking to achieve tactile finishes to his work.
IG:@byjamiej byjamiej.com
Love Bites: Carrie Bradshaw and Co
This month’s columnist reflects on the enduring allure of Sex and the City
Words: Caitlin Merrett King
“Once upon a time an English journalist came to New York…” words that I must have heard at least one hundred times, are the first words of season one, episode one of Sex and the City (SATC). It all began at age 15 watching my friend’s mum’s DVD boxset collection. Now, watching again for the one hundred and oneth time at the thirty-something age of Carrie and her friends, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda back in 1998, I’m as in love as ever with this problematic fave.
The pilot successfully lays out the ways in which SATC and its 90s feminism has not aged well: everyone is white and middle class (apart from the faceless Al, Mr Big’s driver) and cis and heterosexual (apart from a bunch of Drag Queen waitresses and Carrie’s typically 90s gay best friend, Stanford Blatch) and there are jokes about sex workers, aging women and fat people, of course.
Carrie discusses the stru le for power in heterosexual relationships and decides that in order to win, women must have sex like men, i.e. without feelings. Carrie’s attempts at casual sex are thwarted through an embarrassing admission to Mr Big – who Samantha describes as the younger and hotter Donald Trump – that she’s never been in love. Stanford offers the most illuminating line of the pilot: “The only place one can find love in New York is the gay community, it’s the straight community that’s become closeted.”
So I got to thinking, after two films (one brilliant, one racist) and a pretty boring reboot (justice for Samantha) that attempts to heavy-handedly right all its previous wrongs, what is it that makes SATC so good? Carrie and her friends lived in a period of intense economic growth, on the cusp of the internet, in a hedonistic and carefree cultural landscape. Who wouldn’t want to be partying all night without consequence, somehow living in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, writing a sex column for Vogue? For anxious Millennials, SATC is a simple, nostalgic dream.
Heads Up
Adéráy & Stereo present: Synaesthesia
Stereo, Glasgow, 11 Jul, 7pm
Curated by queer artist Adéráy , this day-to-night event is a celebration of sound, movement and visual storytelling inspired by her experience of synaesthesia. Exploring artistic practices that blur the boundaries between the senses, find performers such as Femme Castratrice, DJs such as SOFSOF and ELANDA and visual artists such as Fibi and Noella.
It’s the quiet before the storm (the August festivals), but there’s still plenty of new exhibitions, gigs and the return of Filmhouse (!!) to look forward to.
Compiled by Anahit Behrooz
Glasgow Zine Fest
Various venue, Glasgow, 2-6 Jul
Community takes centre stage at Glasgow Zine Library’s zine festival, with a programme of events taking place at Tramway, Hidden Garden and online looking at the collective and radical potential of DIY publishing. Head to their photocopy party to make your own zines, attend a talk on climate justice, or learn how to make a risograph call to action poster or your own field recordings.
Miwa Nagato-Apthorp
The Hug and Pint, Glasgow, 9 Jul, 7:30pm
Part of The Hug and Pint’s Endless Summer programme, Hawick-based musician Miwa Nagato-Apthorp heads to the wee bar following performances at the likes of Celtic Connections and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. Her music draws on folk and trad practices to explore understandings of climate, history and gender – she’ll be joined on the night by experimental composer Mara Simpson and folk and Americana artist Grace Honeywell.
Mercedes Azpilicueta: Fire on the Mountain, Light on the Hill
Collective, Edinburgh, until 7 Sep
A new solo exhibition by Argentinianborn and Amsterdam-based artist Mercedes Azpilicueta, Fire on the Mountain, Light on the Hill comprises a mixed media installation spanning tapestry, soundscapes and sculpture that explore feminist and grassroots social movements across history, from the 1917 Potato Riots in the Jordaan neighbourhood of Amsterdam to contemporary collective Ni Una Menos who campaign against gender-based violence in Argen-
Wael Shawky
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinb urgh, until 28 Sep
Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine V&A Dundee, Dundee, open now
The V&A Dundee’s summer programme continues with this free exhibition on Palestinian textiles, exploring the history of Palestinian dress and the art of tatreez hand embroidery. Previously exhibited at Hayy Jameel in Jeddah earlier this year, and now in Dundee to mark 45 years of the city’s twinship with Nablus in Palestine, the exhibition is a gorgeous inquiry into the relationship between folk art and sociopolitical issues.
OVO Hydro, Glasgow, 7-8
Lucy Dacus
Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 30 Jun, 7pm
After the runaway success of her third album Home Video in 2021 and acclaim of her supergroup boygenius’ debut album the record in 2023, Lucy Dacus is back with Forever Is a Feeling, a tender and sweet collection of love songs about her relationship with bandmate Julien Baker. There’s a handful of tickets for her Edinburgh show left, with support from the excellent jasmine.4.t, or find her in Glasgow on 1 July.
Billie Eilish
Big Nights Out Queen’s Park Arena, Glasgow,
Photo: Memphis Indus tries
Photo: Marliena Vlachopolou
Photo: Petros Studio
Image: courtesy of Palestinian Museum Digital Archive
Photo: Shervin Lainez
Photo: Daniel Nicolas
Photo: Sean Patrick Campbell Image: courtesy of Stereo
Photo: Sanne Gault for Alchemy Film & Arts
Cabaret Crusades III The Secrets of Karbalaa
Simone Seales for Under Canvas Billie Eilish Yard Act
Thread Embroidery from Palestine
Lucy Dacus
Mercedes Azpilicueta
Adéráyo and Stereo present Synaesthesia
Glasgow Zine Fair
Miwa Nagato-Apthorp
Curated Wax x Houseplants
Strange Field, Glasgow, 19 Jul, 3pm
Party people Curated Wax and Houseplants are collaborating on another bash, this time taking place at Strange Field during the day. There’s an excellent lineup, including the head of Welt Discos label Joe Delon, Neurons and EHFM DJ noodle, Curated Wax cofounder Patch FD and Stereo CheckOut from Houseplants playing across house, techno and dub.
Filmhouse Opening Programme
Filmhouse, Edinburgh, open now
We (good cinema in Edinburgh) are so back. Beloved institution Filmhouse returns after almost three years of closure and shuttered doors, with brand new screens, a revamped bar, and a solid programme of rep movies and old releases in the first couple of weeks. Announced so far is The Skinny favourite La Chimera, sweet Iranian melodrama My Favourite Cake, and Wim Wenders’ tender and searching Perfect Days
SLUG All Dayer
The Flying Duck, Glasgow, 12 Jul, 1:30pm
There’s another all-dayer brought to you by band SLUG, who have curated several music lineups across Glasgow over the summer. Coming up in July is a day festival at The Flying Duck with aortarota, Leanover, NURSE, Fiendz YT, Breadstain, Sev Ka, Isabella Strange, Carsick Charlie and HEAT, and a night at Stereo with SULKA, BOAB and Stanley Welch (24 Jul).
Lamaya
King Tut’s, Glasgow, 24 Jul, 7:30pm
WSHWSH x Intibint
The Rum Shack, Glasgow, 26 Jul, 9pm
Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival
Various venues, Edinburgh, 11-12 Jul
The summer festivals kick off in Edinburgh with the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival. Although their scope might seem specific, the programme encompasses everything from funk and trad to swing and techno. Find the likes of Glasgow-based jazz collective Azamiah, New York singer Anaïs Reno or Scottish newcomers TAO in venues across the city.
Palidrone: Ma Sha
Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 18 Jul, 11pm New York-based DJ, producer and Kindergarten label boss Ma Sha is headlining Palidrone this month for her Sneaky’s debut, playing her signature mix of techno and bass-heavy sounds inspired by the New York underground scene. Support on the night comes from Palidrone residents Dansa and J Wax.
Ballet Nights
Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 4 Jul, 7:30pm
Ballet Nights makes its Scottish debut, celebrating three former stars of the Scottish Ballet: Sophie Martin, Eve Mutso and Constance Devernay-Laurence alongside Royal Ballet superstar Steven Mcrae. The programme of new and classic choreography includes work created and inspired by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Max Richter, and Amy Sherman-Palladino’s ballet show Étoile
Standing In The Shadows Of Giants
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 25 Jul-24 Aug, various times
The Mash House, Edinburgh, 11 Jul, 11pm
Pardee Bass
Photo:
Photo: Corinne
Photo: Nikita Hossain
Photo: Aidan Duckworth
Photo: Deborah Jaffe mage: courtesy of MUBI Image:
of Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival
Photo: Alina Cherubin
Lamaya
Salam Kitty for WSHWSH
Standing In The Shadows Of Giants
Hu-Sane
Ma Sha
Ballet Nights
Isabella Strange for SLUG All Dayer
Perfect Days at Filmhouse Azamiah
noodle for Curated Wax x Houseplants
What's On
Music
With festival season in full swing, the bi est date for the diary this month is Kelburn Garden Party (3-7 Jul). Set in the idyllic grounds of the Kelburn Castle Estate on the west coast near Largs, Kelburn is oodles of fun with a vibe that’s always off the charts. Enjoy art installations in the Neverending Glen, dance until the wee small hours in the trees at the Viewpoint Stage, partake in a ceilidh at the Square Stage, dance like nobody’s watching at The Landing Stage and find your new favourite Scottish artists at The Skinnycurated Pyramid Stage. TAAHLIAH, Man Of Moon and Dancer headline for us this year, with KuleeAngee, R.AGGS, Intibint, Roller Disco Death Party, Water Machine and loads more also on the bill.
In Glasgow, mega city fest TRNSMT returns from 11 to 13 July. Across the weekend at Glasgow Green, avoid the main stage headliners and take a deep dive into the lineup that includes Wet Leg, Confidence Man, Fontaines D.C., Brooke Combe, HotWax, Nxdia and Chloe Qisha, with loads of local talent like Bemz, Fourth Daughter and rEDOLENT to be found on the BBC Introducing Stage. Gutted that Kneecap were axed from the bill? Us too! Do what you can to snag a ticket for their O2 Academy show on the 8th.
In the capital, the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival returns from 11 to 20 July. Highlights include Mercury-nominated and recently signed to Ninja Tune Glasgow outfit corto.alto, who plays The Queen’s Hall on the 19th, as well as Unoma Okudo Quintet and Azamiah at St Bride’s Centre (12 Jul), Tenement Jazz Band with Nanna Carling at the Spiegeltent (13 Jul), Nathan Somevi: Future Afro Jazz at The Jazz Bar (15 Jul) and the Jazz Party at The Pitt (20 Jul) with ESINAM, Kai Reesu, Nimbus Sextet and DJ Astrojazz.
In Inverness, Under Canvas returns for its seventh series with shows at Eden Court from 2 July to 23 August. With shows every Wednesday through Sunday, this month’s highlights including Miwa Nagato-Apthorp (5 Jul), Kathryn Joseph (12 Jul) and Simone Seales (16 Jul). As well as a packed series in Inverness, Glasgow is also packing this month with The Hug & Pint’s Endless Summer and King Tut’s Summer Nights series showcasing a wealth of up and coming Scottish talent throughout July and August. On 24 July, pick between avant pop artist Gurry Wurry at the Hug or genre agnostic pop star in the making Lamaya at Tut’s.
Series aside, M. John Henry (De Rosa; Jewel Scheme) celebrates his solo album Strange Is the Way at The Old Hairdresser’s (5 Jul) and Leith Depot (6 Jul), while Carsick Charlie launches C2: Metamism at The Alchemy Experiment (3 Jul) alongside a collaborative exhibition focusing on the aftermath of love, loss and alien abductions that will remain open until 6 July. In Edinburgh, Andrew Wasylyk brings his six-piece to the Leith FAB Cricket Club (11 Jul), while Morgan Szymanski and Tommy Perman celebrate Songs for the Mist Forest at Voodoo Rooms (13 Jul). In Stirling, C Duncan celebrates ten years of his award-nominated album Architect at the Tolbooth (10 Jul), while Her Picture take their debut EP, Feed Me Hope, to Galashiels’ MacArts. For more big shows in Glasgow, Billie Eilish comes to the Hydro for back to back nights (7 & 8 Jul), while Kendrick Lamar and SZA take over Hampden Park on the 8th. There are also some Big Nights Out to be had at Queen’s Park with Arab Strap (4 Jul), Warmduscher (5 Jul), Yard Act (18 Jul) and Geordie Greep (19 Jul) all set to play, while Summer Nights at the Bandstand kicks into gear at the end of the month – catch Teenage Fanclub on the 31st. [Tallah Brash]
Photo: James Pearson Howes
Photo: Jackson Bowley
Photo:
Peadar
Ó Goill
corto.alto
TAAHLIAH
Kneecap
Film
Filmhouse returns after two long years, and it has plenty of talented filmmakers joining the cinema for Q&As in its first month. Matt Palmer presents a double bill of his two features, Calibre and Fear Street: Prom Queen (3 Jul); Athina Rachel Tsangari presents her poetic period film Harvest, which was shot in Oban (6 Jul); Amy Hardie screens her latest doc Love & Trouble (17 Jul); and the cult American director Whit Stillman will be in town for a screening of his wry 1990 comedy Metropolitan (25 Jul). A trio of mini-retrospectives also help Filmhouse kick off this new era; throughout July are seasons dedicated to Akira Kurosawa, Michael Haneke and Powell & Pressburger, with the latter running into August. See filmhouse.org.uk for full details.
At DCA, there’s a rare opportunity to see Derek Jarman’s 1988 film The Garden (15 Jul), which he shot in and around his own garden in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power plant. A dreamy, kaleidoscopic work blending New Testament imagery with an excoriating vision of late-80s Britain at the height of the AIDS crisis, The Garden is a deeply moving film full of rage and beauty, and should look and sound incredible in this 35mm presentation.
Talking of 35mm screenings, there’s a couple coming up at Cameo not to be missed. First, Velvet Goldmine (12-16 Jul), Todd Haynes’ underrated glam-rock epic, which grows in reputation with each passing year. And then, Nicolas Winding Refn’s moody crime drama Drive (26 Jul-9 Aug). Analogue nuts should also make it to GFT for 35mm screenings of Ran (9-10 Jul), The White Ribbon (3 Jul) and Raising Arizona (28 Jul) – the latter is part of the cinema’s ongoing Coen Brothers of the Month season.
GFT also celebrates the release of David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds with a retrospective of six of the Canadian filmmaker’s works: Videodrome, Scanners, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash and Eastern Promises (on 35mm), which run 5 to 30 Jul. And GFT’s essential Queer Cinema Sundays season continues to dig into lesser-seen corners of the queer canon with the 1996 erotic thriller Female Perversions starring Tilda Swinton (27 Jul). Elsewhere, GFT mark Glasgow Pride with Kenyan lesbian romance Rafiki (20 Jul) and 80s classic My Beautiful Laundrette (31 Jul) – the latter screens as part of the launch of Desi Queers, a new book on South Asian queer communities in Britain.
And on Glasgow’s southside, alfresco cinema returns with the annual Queen’s Park outdoor screenings (1-19 Jul). Once again, the lineup splits between family favourites (eg WALL-E, 10 Jul; The Wizard of Oz, 29 Jul), which screen early afternoon, then cult movies (eg Donnie Darko, 30 Jul; The Matrix, 10 Jul), horrors (eg Silence of the Lambs, 9 Jul; The Exorcist, 23 Jul) and comedies (eg Mean Girls, 15 Jul; The Grand Budapest Hotel, 17 Jul) in the evening. Tickets are sold on a sliding pay-what-you-can scale, starting at 50p. [Jamie Dunn]
Clubs
On Friday 4 July, Spirit by Bake is back, this time inviting good friends SnPLO to Glasgow’s Sub Club – expect maximal sound and minimal techno. On Saturday 5 July, check out Charlie Bones at The Rum Shack as the former NTS breakfast host brings a mixed bag of disco and soul to the Southside of Glasgow from 8pm. Later on, at The Berkeley Suite, house and techno legend Erol Alkan returns to North Street for his To The Rhythm residency. In Edinburgh, turn up the temperature at Sneaky Pete’s for Lucky Dip – think baile funk, soca, and hard house.
Videodrome
The Wizard of Oz
Photo: Tom Madwell
Image: courtesy of artist
Raising Arizona
Loose Joints
Erol Alkan
On Friday 11 July, there will be no-nonsense techno from Slam at Sub Club for the Return to Mono Summer Series. Meanwhile, in Edinburgh get your freak on with club, ballroom, and bass from Skillis and Leonce for Headset 10 years at Sneaky Pete’s. Alternatively, Pardee Bass is the new party pushing UKG and Desi clubs cuts in the capital via The Mash House with Hu-Sane, Rahul.mp3, and more. On Saturday 12 July, Bristol’s finest, Shackleton, takes his 140 and UK techno live show to The Berkeley Suite for Loose Joints. On Sunday 13 July, Deptford Northern Soul Club teleports their time machine from Manchester to Glasgow’s McChuills – via Edinburgh’s Sneaky Pete’s (12 Jul) – for an evening of Motown gems from 8pm.
On Friday 18 July, our favourite pensioner popstar Tony Morris takes to the Leith FAB Cricket Club amongst an all-star weird and wonderful bill at Aquelarre. On Saturday 19 July it’s Ponyboy Pride at The Art School in Glasgow – probably not one to miss! Alternatively, Stevie Cox and Roza Terenzi rail out squelchy techno and house at Subculture.
At the end of the month, Hometown Sound hosts two nights of sound system music at a yet-to-be-revealed destination somewhere on Arran for the annual Island Vibe (25 & 26 Jul). [Cammy Gallagher]
Art
As we edge closer to August (AKA Edinburgh Art Festival), a flurry of exhibitions open across the capital.
From 12 July until May 2026, works by Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick and Robert Mapplethorpe are on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One. Think giant spiders representing maternal kinship and flowers cast from snow-filled moulds shaped by streams of piss. ARTIST ROOMS: Bourgeois, Chadwick and Mapplethorpe is free and perhaps the perfect accompaniment to the recent publication of Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, the first critical biography of the feminist sculptor.
At Talbot Rice, Wael Shawky presents the UK premiere of Drama 1882, an operatic film that chronicles the nationalist Urabi revolution, a café fight in Alexandria and the conflict that led to Britain’s 70-yearlong colonial domination of Egypt. The work was a must see at the 60th Venice Biennale, forming Egypt’s Pavillion, and runs in Edinburgh until 28 September.
Artist Mike Nelson creates arresting and politically imbued installations from scavenged materials. Framing Fruitmarket’s Warehouse (until 5 Oct) as the ‘driving force’ for a new body of work – Humpty Dumpty: a transient history of Mardin earthworks low rise – that spills across three rooms in the gallery. Nelson found inspiration in photographs taken between London and a city in Eastern Turkey, the installation refers to political leadership during the early 2010s.
In Glasgow, Margaret Salmon: Assembly continues at the Hunterian until 19 October. This solo exhibition by the socially engaged artist-filmmaker foregrounds the diverse voices of residents in Kelvinside and Maryhill. Provoking reflections on power hierarchies, Assembly interrogates the impact of years of austerity on Glasgow’s communities.
On 13 July, the Art Car Boot Sale takes over SWG3. Dreamt up by Patricia Fleming Gallery, the Art Car Boot Sale offers an affordable alternative to traditional art fair, bringing together artists and artist-led organisations from Glasgow and beyond. Numerous artists including Sam Ainsley and Xinyi Yang, as well as arts community Project Ability, will be there to sell their goods. Ticket prices vary. [Rachel Ashenden]
Image: courtesy of Keep
Hush
Photo: Michael C Hunte
Photo: onyboy and El Ho
Spider Louise Bourgeois (1994). ARTIST ROOMS National Galleries of Scotland and Tate.
Art Car Boot Sale
Ponyboy
Skillis
Margaret Salmon
Theatre
Edinburgh-based Half Trick presents their original play, Waiting for Wonka (2-7 Jul), a dark comedy based on the events of the (in)famous Roald Dahl story, at Augustine United Studio. The play follows the naughty children from the book, now grown up and reckoning with their chocolate factory trauma.
Pitlochry Festival Theatre kicks off their run of The 39 Steps (11 Jul-26 Sep), based on the 1935 Hitchcock film of the same name (and the 1915 novel by John Buchan). This acclaimed adaptation of an adaptation, and equal parts spy thriller and slapstick comedy is performed by just four actors portraying over 150 characters.
London-based series Ballet Nights makes its Glasgow debut at Theatre Royal on 4 July, featuring former Scottish Ballet principals Sophie Martin, Eve Mutso and Constance Devernay-Laurence with Royal Ballet (and Cats (2019)) star Steven Mcrae. The programme brings together seasoned artists and up-and-coming voices in an ambitious series of dances including world premieres and classics.
Dundee Rep presents a preview of James Graham’s new play, Make It Happen (18-26 Jul), before a run at the Edinburgh International Festival in August. The satire, which is a co-production by Dundee Rep, National Theatre of Scotland and EIF, follows the rise and fall of the Royal Bank of Scotland as told by Brian Cox as Adam Smith and Sandy Grierson as RBS CEO Fred Goodwin. The run at Dundee Rep is already sold out, but you can still catch it at EIF next month (30 Jul-9 Aug). [Rho Chung]
Comedy
There’s a handful of venues with seasons of Work-in-Progress gigs where you can see heaps of brilliant acts all in one place. Both Blackfriars and Leith Theatre are putting on WIP weekends – the former is 4 to 6 July (Various Times, £5 per show) boasting shows from Ayo Adenekan, Kim Blythe, Larry Dean and Marc Jennings, while Leith Theatre hosts four double bills across 10 to 13 July (Various Times, £12.50 per show), including previews from Krystal Evans, Laura Davis and Liam Withnail
And if you like bang for your buck, check out Good E Comedy’s programme of WIPs where you can get a dirt cheap season ticket for a bunch of shows. Edinburgh’s Dragonfly and Gael & Grain in Glasgow (the bar formerly known as Van Winkle West End, formerly known as McPhabbs) are putting on a huge number of gigs with access to all of the venue’s shows for £20 in Edinburgh and £30 in Glasgow, or just £5 per show. Full lineups at goode comedy.com, but we’d recommend catching Grace Mulvey (G&G, 12 Jul), Stephen Buchanan (G&G, 19 Jul) and Susan Riddell (Dragonfly, 16 Jul). If only the Fringe was this good value!
For one-off WIPs, you can catch a sneak peek of freestyle improv rapper MC Hammersmith’s latest hour at Monkey Barrel (9 Jul, 8pm, £7) while Edinburgh Comedy Award Nominee Ian Smith’s excellently-titled new show, Foot Spa Half Empty, previews at the same venue later in the month (19 Jul, 8pm, £7). Both will be there come August too.
And in non-Fringe related gigs, Glasgow Improv Theatre’s July offering is really impressive. Not only are they recruiting new members for their longform Harold teams (info at improvglasgow.co.uk, deadline 28 Jul), they also have a series of world-class guest teachers, including Upright Citizen’s Brigade regular Alan Starzinski. As a bonus treat, he’s doing his solo show Slut Boy, about his journeys through sex, as a one-off (The Old Hairdresser’s, 15 Jul, 8.45pm, PWYW). [Polly Glynn]
Photo: Laurence Winram
Photo: Matt Crockett
Photo: Mark Liddell
Photo: Becca A. Dobie (@visualsbybad)
Larry Dean
Waiting for Wonka in Edinburgh
Susan Riddell
MC Hammersmith
22 We talk to Alex Cox, presenter of Moviedrome, the TV series from the 80s and 90s that introduced a generation of cinephiles to weird and wonderful cult films.
25 Why nostalgia is Scotland’s favourite genre right now.
26 Author Fiona Shepherd on Glasgow’s Greatest Hits, a celebration of every aspect of Glasgow musical life.
28 In celebration of Lorde’s fourth album Virgin, Anahit Behrooz takes a deep dive into her back catalogue exploring its relatability.
30 Welsh experimentalist Gwenno revisits her past on Utopia
33 A writer with a day job in dementia care and education shares the life-altering effects of music on patients.
34 Glasgow’s Hudson Mohawke returns from LA in a reflective mood.
38 Sasha Debevec-McKenney on her poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name
42 Celebrating 20 years of pioneering comedy showcase Abnormally Funny People
45 Saima Begum on her debut novel The First Jasmines, which gives voice to a long-silenced period of Bangladeshi history.
46 Reflecting on Alia Syed’s solo exhibition, The Ring in the Fish, currently held hostage by the crisis at CCA.
50 Director Andrew Panton on Make It Happen, the credit crunch-exploring play premiering at Dundee Rep this month.
On the website... It’s nearly time – head online for a first look at our Edinburgh Festivals coverage, plus news of the Film and Book Festival programmes. Elsewhere, it’s new music Spotlights every Thursday, our Music Now playlist every Friday, The Cineskinny podcast fortnightly, and loads more Very Good Stuff.
Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Pearl Gray; Roosa Paivansalo; Glasgow's Greatest Hits; Thistle Brown; Claire Marie Bailey; Magda Michalek; Ruth Mitchell; Kasey Vidaud; Steve Ullathorne;
Shot of the month
Smag På Dig Selv at Hidden Door @ The Paper Factory, Edinburgh, 11 Jun by Mert Kece
Across
8. Autobiography – dissertation (6)
9. Brought back (8)
10. Multi-storey sleeping (4,4)
11. Mass departure (6)
12. Recording device (6)
13. "Nocturnal emission" – a dew term (anag) (3,5)
14. Like RAM but for brains (5-4,6)
18. Cleaned – formerly successful (6,2)
21. Boy feline (6)
23. Dotage (3,3)
24. Old spinning animation toy – poet zero (anag) (8)
25. Sayonara (8)
26. Parent (anag) – frame (6)
Compiled by George Sully
1. Hand down (8)
2. New recruit (6)
3. Archaeological find (8)
4. This! This thing! That you're doing right now! (9,6)
5. Climb – incline (6)
6. Ultrasound scan – or mangos (anag) (8)
7. Space cloud (6)
15. Warmed up (8)
16. Meant something (8)
17. Come back – paper era (anag) (8)
19. Buoyant – solvent (6)
20. More profound – further down (6)
22. Deserves – values (6) Feedback? Email crossword@theskinny.co.uk Turn to page 7 for the solutions
In this month’s advice column, one reader wonders whether they should start things up with a colleague
I think I fancy my co-worker… but I don’t know if it’s just out of proximity. Should I make a move to shake off the frustration? I can’t tell if they like me or not. It would be so hypocritical of me to tell you not to do this because all I do is enter into weird quasirelationships with people in my close intimate circles I cannot extricate myself from, but – I don’t think you should do this! I think it’s a very very bad idea! This is extremely hard-won advice brought to you by what has now been a several years-long breakdown and I promise you, it is better to be clueless and emotionally undevastated than wise and with the nervous system of a small prey animal. Whatever you think you will get out of this is simply, and I cannot stress this enough, Not Worth It.
I feel kind of weird about giving this advice because it’s a) so boring and b) very unlike my usual, every form of attachment and intimacy has its value and fuck anyone who tells you otherwise vibe. And to be honest, it would be one thing if you were like, I’m obsessed with this person, the vibes are off the charts, they make me feel insane, etc etc. It would still be, let me be clear, a terrible idea, but at least there would be some sort of pre-existing mental illness to justify it. But you… think you fancy your coworker? It might… just be the proximity? You just… want to shake off the frustration? Are you telling me you’re risking blowing up your entire life because… you’re bored?
If you’re genuinely, seriously interested in this person and you trust them enough to be able to have a conversation and set up safe systems for every eventuality, then fuck it, go for it. But in my experience, people are very keen to do this at the start when they’re high on the fumes of a new relationship, and very reluctant once everything is in pieces and it’s no longer sexy or fun. I don’t know, maybe your person is different! Who can say! Maybe you’ll be together forever! But it’s a big risk, and I think what you might get out of it needs to be at least as big as what you might lose.
Do you have a problem Anahit could help with? Get in touch by email on pettyshit@theskinny.co.uk, send us your quandaries with an almost-unhelpful level of anonymity via NGL, or look out for Ask Anahit callouts on our Instagram stories
THE UK’S LARGEST ANNUAL FESTIVAL OF VISUAL ART
FEATURING PERFORMANCE EXHIBITION INSTALLATION FILM LIVE MUSIC MOVEMENT WORKSHOPS CONVERSATION ARTIST RESIDENCIES AND MORE
+ 45 PARTNER GALLERIES AND VENUES ACROSS THE CITY
How can scientific explanations become poetic images? Amanda Seibæk's practice orbits around
– who can say what would prompt a general desire for past times or different times at this precise point in history. Everything? Generally
Our Film editor revisits cult film series Moviedrome – formative to many a film fan who grew up in the 80s and 90s – with a chat with its original presenter, Alex Cox. We take a look at the prevalence of throwback club nights and retro aesthetics in a piece on Scottish nostalgia. New book celebrates the city’s music scene past, plus we have a personal reflection on the impact of Lorde’s Virgin, drops. And we talk to Welsh experimentalist Gwenno as she reflects on her past with
One writer shares the incredible importance of music from our youth on our neural pathways and the real-time impact this can have in dementia therapy. We meet Hudson Mohawke, who reflects on the era of Glasgow clubs that made him. Poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney navigates the tragedy and comedy of both past and present in her poetry collection Joy is Her Middle , and in Intersections, one writer ponders the forgotten brilliance of Scotland’s ageing shopping centres.
From exhibition Anemoia - Nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known
Poster by Amanda Seibæk (p36-37)
Welcome to Moviedrome
Long before Netflix and torrent files, there was Moviedrome, the TV series from the 80s and 90s that introduced a generation of cinephiles to weird and wonderful cult films. We get nostalgic for this simpler time with Moviedrome’s presenter, Alex Cox
It’s the early 90s, and a young film nut sits cross-le ed in his pyjamas late on a Sunday night waiting for Mad Max 2 to start on TV. He’d recently seen and loved Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third part of George Miller’s postapocalyptic adventure series, and he’d read in this week’s TV guide that this earlier entry is even better. This was the way of the world for a young cinephile pre-internet. Nowadays, you can easily work your way through Letterboxd’s top 250 movies without leaving your laptop screen, but back then, it was more of a treasure hunt. Rather than binge, pre-internet cinephiles nibbled at crumbs they discovered on late-night Channel 4 or BBC Two.
The aforementioned Mad Max 2 was one such morsel, but there was something special about this TV broadcast: it was preceded by an introduction from a curious man named Alex Cox, whom the boy would later learn was a great filmmaker in his own right. Readers, that young film nut was me, and like many other impressionable minds who grew up loving film in the 80s and 90s, I was about to get my mind blown. Forget Thunderdome; I was about to be welcomed into Moviedrome
For those of you who didn’t grow up in this bygone era, Moviedrome was an idiosyncratic film season that ran on Sunday nights during the summers of 1988 to 1994 and then again from 1997 to 2000. Cox presented the first seven seasons while Mark Cousins presented the last five. All kinds of work screened – sci-fis, horrors, westerns, melodramas, gangster flicks – but the connective tissue was that the films were all offbeat in some way; they were lower-budget, edgy, political, daring and usually had some elements of excess (violence, sex or both).
Moviedrome has been off the airwaves for over a quarter of a century now, and the concept must sound positively prehistoric to younger audiences reared on streaming and video on demand, but it left a lasting impression on several generations of cinephiles. Ask any film fan from the UK of a certain age about Moviedrome and they’re sure to have fond memories of the weird and wonderful films it introduced them to. The lingering fondness for the series is so much so that BFI Southbank is marking 25 years since it left our screens with a two-month retrospective this summer of some of the most notable Moviedrome films. But the question is, why has Moviedrome left such a lasting impression?
The show was the brainchild of Nick Freand Jones, who was part of the BBC’s programming acquisition team at the time. Over video from his home in London, Jones explains that Moviedrome had lowly origins. “When you bought films in those days, say from Warner Brothers or Universal or whoever, you’d buy a handful of big titles, classics and whatever the new crop of premieres were, and with them, they would expect you to take library titles to make up the bulk of the deal. So the BBC ended up with this phone-book-sized catalogue of movies from all over the place, from the 1930s to the present day. Lots of those films were playing the afternoon slots or in primetime, but there were always the odd curiosities that nobody knew quite what to do with. And often they were the most interesting films, to be honest.” Moviedrome became the ingenious vehicle with which to unleash the most obscure and gonzo of this vast film archive onto the public.
Words: Jamie Dunn
Cox wasn’t an obvious choice as host, but his distinctive presentation style had caught Jones’ eye on Film Club, an earlier film series where noted British directors were invited each week to introduce a double bill. Many of these luminaries, like Lindsay Anderson, John Boorman and Terence Davies, took a professorial approach, but Cox was different. “He had kind of pungent opinions,” recalls Jones. “He’s very bright, obviously. He knew technical stuff, but he also had cultural references. And he didn’t look like anyone else you saw on telly in those days. So we thought, ‘Wow, this guy’s really good. He’s a natural television presenter but also, you know, a slightly odd type.’”
The reason the director of Repo Man (1984) and Sid and Nancy (1986) agreed to slum it on late-night BBC Two was quite straightforward. “Oh, I had no money,” Cox tells me over video from his home in Southern Oregon. “I just made a film called Walker, and the studio hated it. They blacklisted me – I’d never work for an American studio, or any bi ish British company, again. So I needed money, and Nick Jones very kindly asked me to present.” Jones picked the films and directed the wraparounds, while Cox wrote the intros and delivered them in his inimitable style. And one of the most bracing aspects of this style was he refused to paint a turd. If Cox didn’t like the film that had been programmed, he had no hesitation in showing his disdain. “The deal was that [Cox] could be as honest and forthright as he wanted,” says Jones. “We weren’t asking him to sell these films. We just asked him to contextualise them.” Cox reckons this lack of bullshit, the fact that he wasn’t trying to be a cheerleader for the film you were about to watch, was one of the reasons why Moviedrome worked so well. “These were marginal films, so it was possible to approach describing them in a different way,” explains Cox. “It wasn’t necessary to pretend that everything was absolutely great, you know? Whereas, if the BBC had spent a ton of money on a Harry Potter film, say, you couldn’t have the guy beforehand saying, ‘Well, you know, a lot of this is really shit.’ But with Moviedrome we could, not that I would have said anything so crude.”
Politics was also central to Cox’s intros. “Well filmmaking is a very political process because it involves getting hold of a lot of money, and that’s very political,” Cox says. “It involves going to a bank or a big corporation or wealthy individuals and trying to get them to spend money, and they’re only going to do that if they feel that the project fits their agenda. So it’s always fascinating to see how interesting films get made, in spite of that. In spite of the difficulty of wrestling money from the claws of its owners and putting it to good use.”
“Filmmaking is a very political process because it involves getting hold of a lot of money, and that’s very political”
Alex Cox
To anyone reading about Moviedrome who was born this century, this all might sound rather quaint. Not just having the idea of a mainstream media in which one could freely speak one’s mind, but the whole concept of tuning in to a TV show on a specific day at an allotted time to be introduced by a presenter to a film you’ve heard little about. Who would need such a contrivance in 2025 when there’s Netflix? But if I’m nostalgic for any aspect of Moviedrome, it’s the joy of not making the decision of what to watch; of not being fed by an algorithm or having to wade through a plethora of options available across multiple streaming platforms. I miss those days of less abundance when your movie choices were dictated by simply what’s on telly and the absolute elation you’d feel when you’d stumble across a masterpiece by pure happenstance.
“In theory, everything’s out there on the internet, pretty much,” says Cox. “If you just spend long enough looking for, say, The Mattei Affair, eventually you’ll find a bootleg copy that somebody’s uploaded. Maybe it will even have subtitles! But you have to know what you’re looking for, you know?” He compares Moviedrome to another anachronism: the video rental shop. “You might go in looking for Get Out, but it’s out on loan, and the guy behind the counter recommends Dawn of the Dead and you go home with that instead,” says Cox. “Maybe that’s what Moviedrome was doing: you could say that it was like a bunch of films on the shelf of a video shop, and I was the guy behind the cash register.”
Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing, though. Moviedrome is very dear to my heart. Over its 12 seasons, it presented some wonderful films. It helped fuel a passion for film in me and so many other people, but it wasn’t perfect. It certainly tended towards the macho end of the movie spectrum. While reminding myself of the films shown on Moviedrome, I was mortified to notice that of the 207 titles that screened, only one was directed by a woman – Ida Lapido’s fat-free noir The Hitch-Hiker, which appeared in the 12th and final season. It’s a pretty shameful statistic, and it can’t simply be put down to the dearth of women who got to make films in the first century of filmmaking. The team wouldn’t have had to look too hard to find work directed by women that fit
the Moviedrome ethos: Penelope Spheeris’s punky drama Suburbia, Kathryn Bigelow’s soulful vampire movie Near Dark or Liliana Cavani’s shocking The Night Porter sping to mind. The films of the New Queer Cinema are conspicuous by their absence too (no Todd Haynes, no Gre Araki, no Derek Jarman).
It would be wrong, then, to look at Moviedrome through rose-tinted glasses. But if it were to make a glorious return, these blind spots would surely be corrected, especially with a less macho host. When I ask Jones what young British filmmaker he might cast today if a 13th Moviedrome season were commissioned, he replies by email a few days later with a tantalising list that includes Prano Bailey Bond, Molly Manning Walker and Alice Lowe. But I’m not sure Cox’s punky energy could quite be recreated in the same way. I guess Thomas Wolfe was right, you can’t go home again, unless, that is, you’re in the vicinity of the BFI Southbank this summer, where Cox will be introducing films like The Great Silence, Sweet Smell of Success and The Wicker Man, the film that kicked off the first series.
Moviedrome: Bringing the Cult TV Series to the Big Screen is at BFI Southbank from 1 Jul-31 Aug; a collection of Moviedrome films, including a new short documentary about the series, will also be available to stream on BFI Player
bfi.org.uk/whatson
Alex Cox
Photo: Pearl Gray
Emotional Grounding
From club floors to comeback tours, retro is ruling Scotland’s music scene. But why?
From throwback club nights to band reunions and retro-styled releases, it’s clear: Scotland is in the grip of a full-blown nostalgia boom. Whether it’s the electric fuzz of an 80s synth-pop banger shaking the dancefloor or the buzz of ba ing tickets to a boyband comeback you thought was lost to time – nostalgia’s not just back, it’s stealing the spotlight. But this isn’t just about reliving your mum’s mixtapes, it’s a full-on cultural moment. And Scotland, a country already well-versed in communal singalongs and sentimental ballads, has taken it fully to heart. But what is it about the past that’s got such a hold on our present?
Head to any busy club in Glasgow or Edinburgh and you’re likely to stumble into a 90s or 00s night packed with punters shouting lyrics over each other to everything from Britney to
‘These aren’t just fun songs; they’re memory tri ers, portals to simpler times’
Busted. Edinburgh’s Club Tropicana is a total blast from the past, and the ultimate 80s party palace, blasting nonstop classic hits under vibrant neon lights that electrify the dancefloor. Every weekend, the place is packed with people throwing down moves like it’s 1985 all over again, fully living the retro dream.
Mark Martin, presenter on Edge 2 – Edinburgh’s Classic Tracks Station, explains why these throwback nights are such a hit: “It takes you back to a time special to you. Whether it’s the place you went with your best friends or that song you kissed to, throwing it back is about remembering it happened and it feels special.”
Sure, there’s comfort in familiarity, but it goes deeper. These events often sell out fast, with crowds spanning generations. It’s less ironic and more emotional. These aren’t just fun songs; they’re memory tri ers, portals to simpler times, before cost-of-living crises and algorithm-driven everything.
Words: Jenna Cockburn
And it’s not just happening in the big cities. Retro-themed nights are popping up everywhere, from Inverness to Dumfries, proving the pull of nostalgic tunes is truly national. Everyone’s chasing that euphoric rush that only a beloved throwback can deliver. It’s also not just the club scene, Scottish artists are embracing nostalgia in their own releases too. Acts like Joesef, Cloth, and swim school are blending hazy 90s guitar textures and early-00s aesthetics with modern production, creating a sound that feels both fresh and familiar.
Many of today’s rising producers credit their love for bands like The Cure, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and early Bloc Party as major influences. That era feels emotionally raw, lo-fi, and honest – a far cry from the hyper-polished, algorithm-chasing tracks of today.
And it’s not just about the sound. Visual throwbacks are everywhere: grainy VHS-style videos, vintage band merch aesthetics, and lo-fi cover art. Artists are picking up where their childhood soundtracks left off and using nostalgia as a lens to explore the now, reshaping old influences rather than simply recycling them.
Reunions are absolutely blowing up right now, and honestly, it’s the ultimate throwback party we didn’t know we desperately needed. Big names like Five, Pulp, Sugababes,
Black Sabbath, and Oasis are all gearing up to hit the road, reminding us why their tunes ruled our lives. Five’s cheeky pop bangers have us dancing like it’s the late 90s again. Pulp’s storytelling is still razor-sharp and iconic. Sugababes are bringing back their fierce girl power energy. Black Sabbath are reuniting the heavy metal faithful. And Oasis? We’ve waited 16 years for this – and now they’re finally ready to unleash their Britpop bangers all over again. Whether it’s massive headline festival sets or smaller comeback gigs, these reunions feel like catching up with your lifelong best mates – the ones who know every lyric, every riff, every moment. Fans are screaming, jumping, crying, and loving every minute. It’s nostalgia turned up to 11, and we’re here for every glorious second.
There’s a theory that nostalgia peaks during times of uncertainty, and let’s be honest, we’ve had more than our fair share. With political chaos, digital burnout, and rising everything, retreating into the comfort of familiar music makes perfect sense. It offers joy, connection, and a much-needed break from the pressure to keep up.
It’s also a generational thing. Millennials and older Gen Zs – now a dominant force in nightlife and music consumption – are hitting the age where looking back becomes part of how we move forward. We’re curating our memories as much as our playlists. The songs we once screamed at school discos or burned onto mix CDs now offer emotional grounding – a reminder of who we were, and who we still are.
Plus, let’s face it: the past just slaps. Bangers were bangers, no algorithm required. And now, with streaming putting every era at our fingertips, it’s never been easier to dive back in.
So, whether you’re throwing shapes at a 00s club night, screaming every word at a reunion show, or falling for fresh faces with retro flair, nostalgia is the soundtrack of the moment, and we’re all dancing to it.
Photo: Roosa Paivansalo
Joesef @ La Belle Angele, Edinburgh, 24 Oct
Hydro, Glasgow, 7 Jun 2025
Photo: Serena Milesi
Living History
The day before Glasgow’s Greatest Hits lands in bookshops across the country, we catch up with one of its authors Fiona Shepherd to talk all things Glasgow music
Isit down to chat to Fiona Shepherd on hallowed ground. We meet in Mono, the cafe and bar home to Monorail, the legendary record shop where lucky punters might be able to buy a Pastels album from the actual Stephen Pastel. Shepherd, one third of the team behind Glasgow’s Greatest Hits, is perhaps better known as the rock and pop critic at The Scotsman – no pressure then. On the way down I read her glowing review of I y Pop’s gig earlier in the week at the Academy. I wonder if she’d also caught Morrissey, who played a sold out show the following night? “Oh no,” laughs Shepherd, “I went to see Lionel Richie!”
“That’s the beauty of Glasgow. It’s not that difficult to be in the right place at the right time”
Fiona Shepherd
It’s a perfect example of the breadth of musical life which Glasgow has to offer, but also of the approach that Shepherd, alongside co-authors Alison Stroak and Jonathan Trew, have taken to the book. It’s a celebration of every aspect of Glasgow musical life. One minute it’s a look at Gerry Cinnamon and The Jesus and Mary Chain, while the next page brings a deep dive into the Sub Club and Sydney Devine. With so much material to cover, how tough were the arguments about who made the cut and who missed out?
“Oh, that was easy,” jokes Shepherd, “we just had a wrestling bout any time we disagreed, and the winner got their way. I think we were quite united, and of course, we had to be selective, and we had to be opinionated. It’s impossible to cover every single aspect of Glasgow music in 144 pages. So, it’s about people, places, gigs. There were the big names that we knew we had to cover, but we wanted to make space for some of the quirkier characters as well.”
Words: Andrew Williams
So, what are Glasgow’s greatest hits? I ask Shepherd the question every pundit dreads. Push comes to shove, what are the bands, the albums, the gigs, that define Glasgow? Shepherd is keen to stress that the Glasgow music scene defies easy archetypes, and it’s a question we start to answer by thinking about albums which don’t fit the bill. I su est to Shepherd that Screamadelica, for example, isn’t really a record that makes the Glasgow list?
“Oh no, that’s a Brighton album. That could never have been made unless Primal Scream had been to the Zap Club. But I think for me the album that really reflects the spirit of Glasgow is Tigermilk by Belle & Sebastian. An absolute classic, from a band that didn’t quite fit in to any scene. They were almost a reaction to all the grungy stuff happening in the early 90s. The band had that outsider approach – more about authenticity than success – that made them seem as much a cult as a pop group.”
And when it comes to the band that defines Glasgow, Shepherd is unequivocal. “It has to be Simple Minds. Their transition through the years from this arty, aspirational band, looking to Europe as much as London,
through to the absolute anthem of Waterfront – that sums up Glasgow to me. When they play, there’s just something special between the fans in Glasgow and the band. And I’d choose my all-time Glasgow gig for the same reason: Blur at King Tut’s in July 1990. Seeing this band, three months before the release of their first single, treat the 40-odd attendees as if they were playing to 40,000 people was an incredible moment. And that’s the beauty of Glasgow. It’s not that difficult to be in the right place at the right time, watching an unknown band who go on to be the next big thing.”
The new book has grown out of the Glasgow City Music Tours which Shepherd, Stroak, and Trew have been running for ten years. Are there regular questions that visitors to Glasgow pose? “We’re lucky to get a mix of visitors and locals on the tour. For many people, it’s all about the Apollo. And we’re giving people permission to access their memories, seeing incredible bands over the years. It’s about seeing music as part of the fabric of social history. It’s about more than gigs or records, it’s living history.”
And what of the future? Will we see further editions of the book as the next generation of acts break through? Shepherd seems hopeful but sceptical. “I think my message to 21st century bands would be – you need to up your game. Where are the stories about the next wave of legendary Glasgow acts? It seems to be more difficult to find stories from recent years, even though there are incredible subcultures – just look at corto.alto and the underground jazz scene in the city.”
Glasgow remains a musical melting pot, with venues, new bands, and record shops everywhere. This new book offers a perfect taster for the casual fan, and a deep dive for the avid gig-goer.
In celebration of Lorde’s fourth album Virgin, Anahit Behrooz takes a deep dive into her back catalogue exploring its relatability through a constant negotiation of pleasure and limitation, freedom and responsibility
Pull up Lorde’s discography on any platform, and a near perfect spectrum of blue spills across the screen. The saturated near-black of Pure Heroine melts into the cobalt of Melodrama, into the powder blue of Solar Power, into the translucent cerulean of Virgin. On Melodrama, David Hockney-esque sharp edges of colour flood from above, across the crags of the duvet and onto her cheeks, cast in an electric glow. On her latest, the shifting tones pick out a zipper, an IUD, and the hard texture of bone illuminated on an X-ray. “The blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it,” writes Ma ie Nelson in Bluets, her lyrical ode to the colour blue. “In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.”
Ecstatic accident is, coincidentally, a perfect tagline for these albums and their thematic obsessions, which largely revolve around desire, heartache, and enduring the chaos of being a person. It is also a perfect tagline for desire itself, and the lightning bolt upheaval it can wreak across your life. Melodrama in particular, an album I fell in love with only in recent years and which seemed to sum up their sudden euphorias and dissolutions, is all about moments of simultaneous generation and rupture – that is to say, void and fire – in which a single house party allows for both heady self-discovery and sober reckoning.
This constant negotiation of pleasure and limitation, freedom and responsibility, is the essence of the coming-of-age narrative, but it also stretches long past adolescence, punctuating the various growing pains that structure our lives. It’s a tension that winds throughout Lorde’s music, through the teen longing of Pure Heroine, the first heartbreak of Melodrama, the determined introspection of Solar Power, and the regeneration of Virgin, an album that knows full well that comingof-age is a lifelong, unending project. Across her albums, Lorde marks herself as the patron saint of chasing the high, the irresistible doubled dose of
drugs and falling in love; and of attending to its inevitable comedown, the unglamorous work of disentangling yourself from fantasy.
I am five years older than Lorde, but I still can’t imagine what it would be like to experience desire and love not as fantasy, but as some kind of solid ground. My life feels very distinctly bifurcated by their absence and presence, to the extent that I often stru le to experience it as a single coherent and ongoing thread, rather than a series of small deaths and rebirths. The extremities of emotion that come with this, of existing either in a perennial state of longing or in the sudden intoxi-
‘So much of Lorde’s music is about this sense of freedom [...] where you can tip into a different, new version of yourself’
cation of its fulfilment, has made it very difficult not to chase the high at any cost. “Do not however make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning,” writes Nelson in Bluets. But to me it is, and I think it is in Lorde’s music too. Maybe that’s the problem. If you think the only way to want something is to have it be just out of reach, either unlikely or ill-advised, there is very little safety net when it falls into your hands.
There’s that meme that does the rounds every few years, which goes something like, “As an adult you can just buy a birthday cake anytime and eat it yourself. Nobody stops you.” It’s true. You can buy a birthday cake anytime. You can do anything. Anything – its checklist of possible ecstasies and disasters – spills across Lorde’s
music, a siren call of unrealised potential that marks the beginning of adolescent agency and never quite goes away. ‘MDMA in the back garden, blow our pupils up / We kissed for hours straight, well, baby, what was that?’, she sings on What Was That; ‘King and queen of the weekend / Ain’t a pill that could touch our rush’, she sings on Sober. Looking at my own life, I am not sure capitulating to my capacity for pleasure – flooding my brain with serotonin and falling in love with people I wanted badly who did not want me the same – has done that much to improve it, but it is true that no one did stop me. And it is the tipping point of such agency that preoccupies Lorde’s music, and is perhaps why it preoccupies me in turn. How do we acknowledge the actualising power of our most destructive impulses? How do we reconcile our desires with the harm they might do us? Is it really harm, if it is what we wanted?
If I try to imagine the platonic ideal of a teen film, Lorde plays in the background. There’s a scene: maybe it’s summer, maybe someone is careening towards the horizon on rollerskates, maybe the day is shifting into a deep orange glow. So much of her music is about this sense of freedom, about the threshold times and spaces where you can tip into a different, new version of yourself: unseen late hours, anonymous streets of a nondescript town, brain chemicals askew. ‘And I’ll never go home again / Place the call, feel it start’, she sings on Buzzcut Season, about the holographic new landscape of love. But listening to it all without the rose-coloured optimism of adolescence, I’m struck how much of it is really about running – either from or towards something, but really always away. Sometimes it’s a town. Sometimes it’s a person. Sometimes it’s heartbreak. Most of the time, it’s yourself.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel, in some way, trapped in my body, a physical manifestation of a much broader lack of control that I am constantly trying to escape, with whatever moments
of pleasure I can piece together. I am aware of the fact of myself all the time, a level of consciousness that has sat like a distorting smear over my life and has made my relationships with various embodied experiences – food, sex, exercise, almost anything – extremely complicated. Half-hearted fingers down the back of the throat at interim points, the body horror sensation of stretching after eating, skin burning to the touch after sleeping with someone, a source of suffocation when alone. Many days it takes me an hour to decide what to wear, quiet panic setting in. “Don’t you think it’s terrible to have a body,” I asked a friend once. “No, I think it’s wonderful,” she said. I looked at her like she was crazy.
It’s an idea that preoccupies Lorde too, most famously on her verse of Charli xcx’s Girl, So Confusing (‘I’ve been at war with my body / I tried to starve myself thinner / And then I gained all the weight back / I was trapped in the hatred’, she sings; “Fucking hell,” Charli replies on the text conversation she leaked when the song dropped), but also again and again on Virgin, an album that, briefly, stops running away to face the mess of it all head on.
If Melodrama was about being caught in the spiralling downfall of your own agency, Virgin rethinks agency not as a blank cheque of possibility but as the ability to sit within the grey areas. The body not as something to fight, but to reimagine. Heartbreak not as something to escape, but to examine with tender bewilderment. The desire to be loved not as something to recklessly pursue, but to look for inwards. ‘When I’m in the blue light, I can make it alright’, she sings on What Was That. It’s a shift away from the Gatsby-like pull towards fantasy that began Melodrama eight years before. There’s a kind of clarity – first devastating, then healing – that gets cast in this new light.
Void and fire. That ecstatic accident of staring into the abyss and distracting yourself from it again and again – pulling something across the veil to not entirely face what is there. It can produce something beautiful, I think. It produces the colour blue, apparently, that sits smudged across Lorde’s album art; it produced four of her records; and it produces all of our lives, alternately unbearable and euphoric, a kaleidoscope of everything we have ever wanted and gotten and lost. ‘I don’t belong to anyone’, Lorde sings on the final track of Virgin, before adding, ‘Am I ever gonna love again?’ And there is nothing to resolve the contradiction this time, no high and no escape. We are just left with the questions, their ecstatic, unending possibilities.
Virgin is out now via EMI; Lorde plays the OVO Hydro, Glasgow, 19 Nov
lorde.co.nz
‘Across her albums, Lorde marks herself as the patron saint of chasing the high’
Photo: Thistle Brown
The Good Place
On her fabulously ambitious fourth solo record, Welsh experimentalist Gwenno revisits her past, and reinvents her present
With each record she makes, Gwenno Saunders continues to find her voice – musically, thematically and, in the most literal sense, linguistically. Her first three albums – including her most recent, the Mercurynominated Tresor – were sung in either Cornish or Welsh, the languages she inherited from her father and mother, respectively. Those were records that reflected on her childhood and her formative years spent in Cardiff, and she used a blend of pastoral folk and electronic soundscapes to delve deep into her roots, both in Wales and Cornwall. “I wrote Tresor in St. Ives,” she says on a Zoom call, “and I knew I couldn’t write that again. But I needed to write something. Physically, I needed to.”
Accordingly, she set about changing everything. For the first time, she sat down at the piano to write songs, and as she did so, she began to think less about where she was, and more about where she’d been. “That’s how the journey started, and eventually I got to Utopia.” Saunders’ fourth album takes its name from a Las Vegas nightclub, where she’d spend chaotic weekends after moving to the city at the age of 17; a gifted Irish dancer, she’d landed a lead role in a Michael Flatley show. “Thinking back, I realised that was really the start
of my adult life; the first time I was in employment, the first time I was away from my parents. For some reason, it’s taken me 20 years to really reflect on that time.”
Utopia represents a thrilling, endlessly creative tour through Saunders’ own psychogeography, starting with the hedonism of her late teens in Vegas and taking us through to Brighton, where she joined indie-pop upstarts The Pipettes in the mid-noughties; and London, a place she’s always had a complicated relationship with. “I was originally going to call the album Were We Ever Really Here?, because there’s a lot of thinking about how little impact we individually have on cities we live in.” Remarkably, for a musician synonymous with electronics, she’s reinvented her sonic palette to include breezy guitars (Dancing on Volcanoes; The Devil), swooning, piano-driven reflections (Utopia; Ghost of You) and, on closer Hireth, gorgeously atmospheric experimental pop, written on the harp.
“There were a few reasons for changing it up,” she explains. “I was naturally losing interest in electronic music, and I was curious; I’ve spent a decade using the same tools – synths, drum machines. I wondered whether I could make songs
Words: Joe Go ins
“At this point in time, it’s really, really important to reconnect with older instruments”
Gwenno Saunders
that stand up at the piano. I played some piano shows, and it was so nice to be in a room and connect with people without the need for machines. And I think, in part, it’s a reaction to my fear that technology is ending up in the wrong hands; that’s why we’ve got this threat of AI producing music. I think at this point in time, it’s really, really important to reconnect with older instruments. I’m not being a luddite about it; I just think it’s crucial to think about what music is really about, which is human beings, in a room, making something together. That’s where the nourishment is.”
Perhaps the most crucial aspect of her progression on Utopia, though, is that she’s finally taken to writing in the English language. “It felt high-risk, knowing everybody listening would understand me!” she laughs. “When I write in Welsh, I’m generally pretty political because that language, for me, embodies the idea of surviving, of community, and enduring hardship; that’s naturally where I go in Welsh. And then Cornish is very mystical to me, because there’s only about 500 fluent speakers, and not all of them listen to my music; I can kind of say whatever I want. So it was daunting to move into English, but it’s the language I had those experiences in; in Vegas, and in The Pipettes, who were a very English band. I think I’ve just been exploring English and putting down my own foundations in it – thinking about who I strive to write like. On the song War, I’ve reworked a poem by Edrica Huws, and she writes with a calmness, a concision and a poignancy that I aspire to.”
In the early stages of working on Utopia, Saunders thought it might have been an album about youthful rebellion; of rejecting the culture of her Cornish poet father and Welsh musician mother to head to Vegas and London. In the end, though, she found it was in her nature as a songwriter to offer a utopian vision of her past, focusing on the good, not dwelling on the bad. “Music is celebration, for me,” she says. “When I think of the past, I always think, what was the value of that experience? What was the lesson – what was the thing that’s worth sharing? It’s a form of therapy for me – it sounds clichéd, but it’s true.”
Utopia is released on 11 Jul via Heavenly Recordings; Gwenno plays Nice N Sleazy, Glasgow, 4 Nov
gwenno.info
Photo: Claire Marie Bailey
Gwenno
Memory Cafe
With a day job in dementia care and education, one writer shares the life-altering effects of music on dementia patients
Words: Noah Barker
Illustration: Magda Michalak
That day, I sat cross-le ed for two hours next to a man I couldn’t speak to at the time. He had late-stage cardiovascular dementia, and, to my credit, it was my first day on the job. It was a memory cafe, where people living with dementia, their care-partners, and volunteers get together to do brain engagement activities. I was paired with him for its entirety, trying and failing to meaningfully engage with what limited dementia skills I had at the time; I fumbled through group activities and rarely caught the corner of his eye.
At the end of the session, the group gathered for a final piece centred around music, presenting me with the arduous task of supporting him across the room to the piano. We moved, hand under hand, exhaustively and in lockstep. Finally sitting, his head was low enough to supplant his shoulders. As the crowd readied for the singalong, I half-heartedly lowered the large-font printout of Hey Jude to his eye level, hopeful but not expectant. The performance began, and his head rose purposefully. He sang every word. And so did a crowd of people also experiencing dementia, all conversing via ‘na-na-nas.’ After the song finished, he spoke to me in detail, in bursts of remembrance, about his seafaring days travelling Europe. He was suddenly there in front of me. For the first time in my life, I didn’t need to romanticise or philosophise the importance of music. It was right fucking there.
In that moment, song ceased to be some metaphorical standard of narrative, or a subjective sense of critique for those pretentious keyboardclickers I find myself within; it was a neural pathway to his youth. It was a method of activation that seemed to ease the processes of the brain, a ritual chant to bring back an old friend. Without truly understanding it, I would follow along to this motus every week when seeing him. A golden country hit, or Beatles campfire singalong, he never minded Orbison either. It was only the week after where I played (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction on an out-of-tune antique acoustic that I sealed my fate as the new songleader for the group. Now, it was my turn to strum a chord, and stifle my tears in wonder to see his eyes reach me. As a function of that new job, I eventually learned about the parts and functions of the brain, and how they created those conditions for my radical change.
their temporal lobes. The left temporal lobe, which often deteriorates first, is where specific words, speech, and comprehension live in the brain. Word-finding becomes challenging, and the act of speaking with it. However, the right temporal lobe frequently lasts far into someone’s journey, and it is the centre of automatic language. Prayer, poetry, counting, spelling, rhythm, and song live here; in trying to engage with brains that are losing function, focusing on the right temporal lobe and its ties to music is a transformative practice. Combine this fact with the ages of taste crystallising in the brain (4-8 y/o, 12-24 y/o, 32-40 y/o), and revelatory conditions arise.
‘For the first time in my life, I didn’t need to romanticise or philosophise the importance of music. It was right fucking there’
In the over 100 types of dementia, one of the few throughlines is the general path the degeneration follows; while not definite, most experience a nearly nostalgic phenomenon in
How best do we reach people in this state? Their past favourite songs, nostalgia, even. Dust off a record of solid number ones from the years 1950-1975, and see what happens. It’s nearly a teleportation to the times in their lives when those songs first made an impact; they are deeply made trenches in the brain during its formative years, and we’re working with what we got. Imagine a song from your youth appearing as a graspable light in the dark. For short windows, that light can activate sections of the brain, with the potential to momentarily increase memory recall and speech output. Most importantly, it brings a quality of life they deserve. What a trick to find in those invisible air waves.
It’s not one that will last forever, as dementia is ultimately a progressive, fatal disease. At first, he could recall my name with the right support, and eventually, the smile when he saw me was all I needed. No song could mend. He was my friend for nine months and passed last November. His memorial programme hangs above my desk and his widow gifted me a suit jacket of his, or two. Life goes on. I miss him. Given that this has all happened within my span of memory crystallisation, he’ll surely come back to me in some fruitful and unimagined place 50 years from now. I’ll hear pianos ringing out, and a refrain of ‘na-na-nas,’ and I’ll get to see my friend again.
WTF is a Hud Mo?
From remixing Starlight Express to scoring Wimbledon, Hudson Mohawke has made a career out of swerves. Back in Glasgow for a packed-out Numbers showcase, the LA-based artist reflects on chaotic homecoming, future work, and the art of keeping it weird
It’s hard to pin down a man who’s remixed Andrew Lloyd Webber, written the Wimbledon theme and landed a cameo in Twin Peaks. So when Hudson Mohawke – part musician, part chaos merchant – takes to the stage, the scene at The Art School feels as bizarre and brilliant as something out of the late David Lynch series.
It’s equally tricky to beat the bar queue, but after almost a decade, seeing the 39-year-old Grammy-nominated producer – real name Ross Birchard – return to the building that once served as home to Glasgow’s fightback against techno dominance feels more than worth the wait.
“I have a lot of memories from that venue... it was maybe the first venue I went out in as an under-18 in Glasgow with a chaperone,” he recalls. While Birchard wasn’t a student there, The Art School became a formative weekly fixture for him, as well as for many others who sought something different in Scotland. It sat at a unique intersection where student-night perks met some of the most forward-thinking line-ups in the country.
“Half the crowd were there for the music, and half were students there because it was a pound a pint. For my whole teens and early twenties, it was one of the most popular and prestigious venues in the city.” Although, after two fires in the space of four years and prolonged financial problems, the chance to play – let alone dance – there “frankly wasn’t looking like it would be possible ever again,” admits the LA-based DJ and producer.
The venue helped launch artists like Hud Mo, Rustie, and the late SOPHIE to global acclaim, powered by the Numbers parties and label via the Glasgow-to-America pipeline that popped out of nowhere. “We were in the eye of the storm at that point and we didn’t even realise it,” he laughs. As the city exploded onto the map around 2008, ‘aquacrunk’ was floated around to make sense of it all. Still, Birchard credits something simpler: a generation raised on Archaos happy hardcore, East Coast hip-hop, and dissatisfaction with “everything being fucking techno.”
While he acknowledges, ironically, that we’ve come full circle since – with techno arguably more popular than ever – he
raises the broader cultural shift outside of music where “people are calling Glasgow the new Berlin... the notion of someone even from England moving to Glasgow for culture wasn’t really thought of back then.” But for many downstairs in The Vic, neither was the Memphis-Scotland proudly screamed by DJ Spanish Fly mic in hand.
The Hud Mo homecoming Numbers showcase is packed to the rafters across two floors with Sega Bodega, Spencer, and Nabihah Iqbal in what feels like a highly-anticipated throwback. Birchard, however, is quick to resist the idea of reflecting too fondly. “I don’t really subscribe to this idea of ‘back to the 90s or 00s’,” he says. “I’ve always been of the opinion that you’re setting out to make timeless work...our little scene back then was focused on this idea of out-newing each other.”
“A lot of what Rustie, SOPHIE and myself were doing at the time was our take on American mainstream rap music... then a bunch of US artists (including Danny Brown, Rihanna and Kanye West) came to us for production.” Like the strippedback noughties sound of the Neptunes or Timbaland, Birchard – who was behind Talk Talk on Charli xcx’s Brat – explains: “If you were to listen to them as instrumental tracks without the vocal, you’d hear it was an experimental producer behind it, but with familiar pop sensibilities there’s accessibility to it.” That familiarity is the tool that helps new audiences “experience things we would
Words: Cammy Gallagher
“It’s not laugh-outloud funny, but more confusing, or making people a wee bit uncomfortable… it’s that Scottish mindset of bamming people up”
Hudson Mohawke
have taken for granted.” But with Birchard – whether it’s scoring Watch Dogs 2 or nearly soundtracking the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, nothing is ever quite a given.
“I like to keep people on their toes, guessing, and wondering ‘Why the fuck is he doing that?’” he smiles. “I remember getting an email for the Starlight Express remix and being like ‘Whit? That’s such a strange combination I have to do it.’” After six months of sitting with the stems, the longawaited remix of The Race was finally released –much to the delight of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Now splitting his time between the Tron soundtrack with Nine Inch Nails, albums for VTSS and Bb trickz, and a collaborative project with Dave Sitek, Birchard remains both masterful in his craft and mischievous in delivery. “It’s never meant to be comedic – I take what I do incredibly seriously,” he says. “But there’s an aspect of fucking with people that is very key to the whole thing. It’s not laugh-out-loud funny, but more confusing, or making people a wee bit uncomfortable… it’s that Scottish mindset of bamming people up.”
Photos: Ruth Mitchell
Photo: Alan Morgan
Symphonic Youth
The National Youth Orchestra of Scotland are preparing to debut Galvanic Dances, a piece which asks big questions about life and death, and whether or not frogs can do the can-can
Words by: Laurie Presswood
Anational youth orchestra is kind of like a collective expression of will by a subsection of a nation’s youth – these bodies are the product not just of the talent of their members, but also of focus, of commitment that’s ( perhaps unfairly) surprising in such young minds.
The National Youth Orchestra of Scotland (NYOS) has existed for nigh on 50 years and serves as a pathway into the music profession, cultivating and nurturing some of the most dedicated young musicians from across Scotland. It operates on the basis that there’s something important about playing together, about learning from one another – maybe more important even than practising alone in your room for hours on end.
The dedication NYOS’ members bring to the ensemble is rewarded in kind with a serious reception to their work – they are reviewed (often favourably), their e orts weighed up critically and expectations of their capabilities are set high. They have new works commissioned for them by successful and popular composers (who, crucially, are alive to work with the players, provide interpretation and demand their work be represented to a high standard)
Touring internationally for the rst time in a decade, next month NYOS will debut Galvanic Dances, a new work by Jay Capperauld inspired by the experiments of Italian physicist Luigi Galvani (from whom we got the inspiration for Dr Frankenstein, and also the word galvanise). In his programme notes, Capperauld explains:
“Galvani’s experiments focused on the re-animation of dead frogs’ legs, which moved and twitched when applied with an electrical current. This discovery raised signi cant questions
about the source of life itself and whether death could, in reality, be prevented…
“This concerto for accordion and orchestra is written in one continuous movement that re-imagines and re-tells the Frankenstein story in a set of infernal dances through the nightmarish image of a chorus-line of dancing dead frogs’ legs, as though Galvani’s morbid experiments have created a kind of musical Frankenstein’s monster.”
Capperauld’s compositions are often works of intuitive storytelling – he is drawn to the challenge of creative narrative without words. He also has an evident interest in the historical macabre, particularly moments of dark humour. In Galvanic Dances we can expect him to play with the audience, using our notions of accordion music against us. The timbre of the accordion is surrounded by associations with mystery and intrigue across di erent musical cultures, but for Scottish audiences there is an additional level of baggage as it inevitably conjures the image of Jimmy Shand; of being forced, aged 12, to ask a boy in your P.E. class to dance with you.
These hints at Scottish folk stories and of folk music’s universal intertwining with dance are woven into the fabric of the writing, “with references to various musical dance forms, such as the tango, waltz, jig and tarantella.” Capperauld couldn’t have chosen a more apt collaborator for this cross-genre journey – soloist Ryan Corbett has built his career to date by pushing on the boundaries of traditional repertoire. He is the rst accordionist ever to win a place on BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Artists Scheme, and takes a special interest in playing music written before the accordion was invented.
In commissioning one of Scotland’s most in-demand composers to write for their young players, the orchestra is adding to the body of work that is the Scottish national repertoire, and showing young instrumentalists that they have a role to play in that. For Capperauld, it “continues the development of orchestral repertoire in a meaningful way by exciting and encouraging young musicians to explore new music with a living composer.” It’s not a coincidence then, that support for the commission has come from the Vaughan Williams Foundation, whose remit is supporting composers and keeping composition a living, breathing pursuit, and the Richard Chester Creativity Fund, so named in memory of the former Director of NYOS, whose achievement was nothing short of the explosion of professionalstandard youth music in this country.
NYOS’ summer concerts mark the orchestra’s rst tour outside of the UK in ten years – they begin in Perth on 1 August and continue onward to Liverpool, and Sa ron Walden, before performing at the prestigious Young Euro Classic festival in Berlin. The Perth premiere of Galvanic Dances will be the only chance to see them on their native turf. Taking the young players outside of Scotland is signi cant for many reasons: personal growth, exposure to other approaches to music, other types of audiences. But at NYOS it’s about showing those audiences, and most importantly the players, that Scottish talent is deserving of a worldwide audience.
NYOS Summer Tour: Perth Concert Hall, 1 Aug, 7.30pm; Royal Liverpool Phiharmonic Hall, 2 Aug, 7.30pm; Sa ron Hall, Sa ron Walden, 3 Aug, 3.30pm; Konzerthaus, Young Euro Classic, Berlin, 6 Aug, 7pm
Photo: Sally Jubb
Photo: Sally Jubb
Section from Ephemeral 50x50 cm, mix media on voile, 2025 by Amanda Saeibæk
Growing Pains
In her poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name, American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney navigates the tragedy and comedy of both past and present
Sasha Debevec-McKenney holds up two copies of her debut collection, Joy Is My Middle Name, on our Zoom call. Fitzcarraldo Editions’ blank white cover, the title held by a royal blue frame; and W. W. Norton’s blue flames that eat into a hot pink, patterned by outlines of American presidents and barbed-wire hearts. “We’ve got both ends of the spectrum,” she says, laughing. The duality is fitting for this collection, which embraces life’s extremes and celebrates the absurdity of our past and present. From reflections on ex-lovers and consumerism, to observations on womanhood and race, Joy Is My Middle Name is a sprawling collection, swinging and spinning itself into each corner of the poet’s life.
Debevec-McKenney is a fan of project books – Ma ie Millner’s Couplets is a particular favourite – but her debut collection strays far from such defined parameters. Fitzcarraldo’s inaugural Poetry Editor, Rachael Allen, first found DebevecMcKenney in the Granta slush pile; ever since, Allen has fiercely championed her work. Once commissioned, Debevec-McKenney sent Allen two documents: her MFA thesis and every poem she had written since then (titled 32, in the style of Adele albums). From there, Allen curated Joy Is My Middle Name
Originally titled POEMS, Debevec-McKenney and Allen were certain no other title would suit the off-handed, all-consuming nature of the collection. Upon surveying her friends, she eventually settled on Joy Is My Middle Name, a title shared by one of her poems. “There’s levity to it, but it also kind of comes off as…” she pauses, “like, that phrase is so sarcastic. Do you know what I mean?” Debevec-McKenney doesn’t sacrifice sincerity for irony; rather, she welcomes both at once.
“I grew up in a small town in Connecticut that was founded in 1633. Everything is history,” says Debevec-McKenney. An excess of commemorative plaques and well-preserved mansions maps the town and Debevec-McKenney’s poetic sensibility. The American presidents locate themselves in many of her works; the collection delights in unpicking and exposing the false glory of their image. The aptly named Sestina Where Every End Word is Lyndon Johnson is one such marvel. “When you grow up as someone who is being pushed to push harder on the version of American history that your school teaches you, the presidents are a very easy nut to crack.”
Indeed, much of her adolescence and its preoccupations weave themselves throughout the collection. Debevec-McKenney spent her teenage years watching and re-watching stand-up comedy DVDs at home; now, it’s one of her bi est influences. The realisation first came when watching a video of stand-up comedian, Katt Williams. “We’re doing voltas. We’re doing turns. We’re doing
Words: Eilidh Akilade
“I grew up in a small town in Connecticut that was founded in 1633. Everything is history”
Sasha Debevec-McKenney
linguistic surprises,” she says. To embrace the poetics of comedy – and, the comedy of poetics – is to embrace the intimate wonders of human connection.
Pop culture at large enjoys itself in DebevecMcKenney’s poetry. “I love reality television,” she says. “I love going to the movies. It’s just what I love. So I’m going to use it as an image. It seems like the same thing as the presidents... These are my images. Like, these are my metaphors.” BET Uncut, Fast & Furious, Britney Spears’ Curious, a community theatre production of Seussical – the poems subvert themselves. “I think it’s always fun to take a low brow thing and push it into a poem,” she explains. Debevec-McKenney likes to be entertained, to enjoy herself; but DebevecMcKenney also likes to entertain and to encourage others to enjoy themselves.
“Form is a prompt, you know,” says DebevecMcKenney. “It’s something that helps me write the poem.” In returning to the collection, she has noticed that her found poems are primarily concerned with addiction and sobriety; in this, the form itself is bound to her own attempts to navigate such matters. For Debevec-McKenney, the poem often chooses its own form – tight and contained or reclining in its free-verse lengths.
“It’s a place where I can try and figure out how I feel about stuff and try to be understood. Like, try and make it legible because there’s so [many] times in my life where it’s illegible,” she says. “And then there’s the beauty of a poem, which is that my legible could still be illegible.” The collection orientates, then all too suddenly, disorientates its reader – such is its thrill.
This ambiguity is shared by both reader and writer. “I teach too, and something I always tell my students is that poetry is a place for your most confusing feelings, the things you don’t have answers to. And no human emotion is simple, you know. It’s not just straight grief – there’s humour too,” she says. Albeit holding a number of accolades, Debevec-McKenney is figuring things out – and, while she does, she’d like you to enjoy it with her.
Regional Retail Therapy
Weekend hours spent under the fluorescent lighting of suburban consumerism – count us in. One writer hails the brilliance of ageing Scottish shopping centres as a social hub, local treasure and provider of good old-fashioned tat
The globalised retail and leisure experience is a numbing one. With transplanted American design, most Scottish shopping centres have been modernised and maximised to become arenas of multinational homogeny. In the name of qualitative upgrade we have developed a teleological taste for the uncanny. I believe we have been impoverished by a false idea of newand-improved expansion, with the glossy renovations, at least for me, inspiring only grim resignation and spiritual vacuity. We forget the value and charm of the more basic: the few older Scottish shopping centres that have managed to evade the complete conglomerate makeover.
A day or afternoon of leisure is now a predetermined trip, in replicate, in every corner of the country: the St James Quarter in Edinburgh is The Bullring in Birmingham is the St. David’s Dewi Sant in Cardiff is Victoria Square in Belfast is Westfield in London (and every smaller, suburban retail park is working up to this up-market uniform too). Everything is Wagamamas. Everything is Zara. Everything is Five Guys. Everything is the tinny sound bath of chart radio. Jesus – and Michael Moore – wept. How did the world go from Grecian agoras to this franchised debasement? You try to enter with a Bourdainian open-mindedness but inevitably leave with a Baudrillardian dismay. Overstuffed and desensitised by the superfluity, these ballrooms of excess stomp out any regional specificity and novelty – a Shake Shack should not supplant a Blue Lagoon. Remember your roots! Consider The Forge Shopping Centre at
Parkhead (various internal organs of which endure a seesawing threat of foreclosure), Springburn Shopping Centre, and the Paisley Shopping Centre, where humble outlets like The Works and Peacocks are still king. Sure, they are still sizable, boxy impositions – compromised square feet that could have remained a bucolic field – but they aren’t the size of a small kingdom. I lobby for their soft serve capitalism – they retain a sense of proportion and integrity; they are a controlled beast. They still comprise some high street titans like JD and Primark (but just as Luca Guadagnino saw Applebee’s as a site of romance in Challengers (2024) - “I love the practicality of America, I think it’s fantastic” – there is some beauty and excitement to be distilled from a chain here and there). Crucially these spaces do not welcome a wholesale domination of chains and high tariff-goods; they’re more bargain bin than Breitling, Bodycare before Aesop. Notably, it is only in these spaces that those nebulous, small independent shops whose unique selling point is simply cheap miscellanea still get a chance at life – you know the ones where it’s all plastic curios and tartan paraphernalia. Oh, the prelapsarian shopping experience.
I’d argue that the 70s-and-80s-built structures and interiors of these Scottish shopping centres now appearing as superannuated and influencer-resistant compounds appeal. Take The Savoy Centre: ghostly in a way that would inspire a great neo-gothic novel; liminal in a way that would exacerbate an already troubling hallucination. That’s real ambience, baby. That’s engaging your senses. It’s honestly cinematic: with low-ceilings, morgue lighting, and some vacant ‘To Let’ spaces, it’s like set dressing for 28 Days Later (2002). Revel in its Brutalist carapace and its random, handy units; whether it’s a McGhee’s roll, a random piece of fabric, a wig, or a high vis vest you need,
Words: Lucy Fitzgerald
Illustration: Magda Michalak
“When I walk through these spaces, I see bright lights and state failure. These glam galleries ostensibly service every utility and desire, but are no social good”
they’ve got it. And the character of Buchanan Galleries, though more modern, was validated when it attracted the attention of Jonathan Glazer, for Under The Skin (2013). (Note: it has so far dodged demolition and redevelopment plans.)
There is, undeniably, a deep sense of moral rot to the proliferation of these maxi-malls. When I walk through these spaces, I see bright lights and state failure. These glam galleries ostensibly service every utility and desire, but are no social good. Rather, they are sites of culture culling and damaging social impact. Sociologists have long lamented the diminishment of third places; which The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors define as “a publicly accessible location where social interaction can happen... Locations where people can spend time without spending money.” There being few casual gathering spots outside of work, school, and home harms every demographic, but young people most significantly. As a young adult who feels disillusioned by the recreational options in front of me (see the pub crisis, as reported by The Guardian), I feel the frustrating weight of ennui, but for teens and tweens to be stunted at such a formative time of life is far more concerning. It should surprise no one that the result of dwindling youth centres is a generation of kids who are recreationally homeless. The sprawling modern mall has thus become a third place by force, but, hardly an inexpensive haven, they undermine the functional definition of the tertiary outlet. They are only nominally accessible, with scarcely two benches available in the interstitial corridors between storefronts that aren’t connected to an eatery. I applaud the smaller shopping centres for being considerably more hospitable to kids, even if that means simply trailing parents as they run errands – at least that’s character development.
So I say resist the monster malls. Repent. Find the quaint in the consecrated ground of the antiquated. Find love in a hopeless place.
Just Transition
We meet with Climate Camp Scotland to discuss reclaiming green spaces, taking on the far right, and building a climate justice movement that welcomes everyone
This summer, Climate Camp Scotland invites all of us to build a fossil fuel-free world –one action at a time. The group are bringing new life to Scotland’s long tradition of protest camps dating back to the 1970s nuclear disarmament movement.
Each year, for seven days, members live collectively: they run and participate in workshops, cook and eat together and share training for protests and direct actions. Hosted in different locations, anywhere between the Highlands and the Scottish borders, each year their fight for climate justice has a local and global focus; for Climate Camp Scotland, intersectionality is not simply about bringing siloed movements together, but creating a place for different types of people and their needs. “Everyone is crew,” says Duncan Harbison, an organiser in one of the many working groups that have run the camp for the past four years, tells me. From the camper chopping vegetables to the camper running the kids’ play group, building the world we want to live in demands a celebration of difference. “There’s a role for everybody – activism looks different for different people.”
This year’s camp is focused on ‘the climate crisis and the far right’ in a political climate of multiple crises. In England, the Reform Party is seeing a growing vote share in local elections and is benefiting from the increase in airtime from traditional media. It’s a trend that Climate Camp Scotland is watching closely. “Reform gets a lot of funding from oil and gas companies with bases in Scotland, especially Aberdeen. They won the local
council elections in Lincolnshire and then scrapped the funding for flood prevention. One of the ways the climate crisis manifests itself in the UK is through flooding and increased rainfall,” says Harbinson.
The camp isn’t just about coming together for one week of the year: organisers are embedded in their community, fighting local actions to raise awareness of global companies eroding the natural biodiversity of Scottish towns. “Companies like Sea Peak, based in Glasgow, benefit financially from Russia’s war in Ukraine. Several Israeli delegates own Scottish manufacturing companies that fund human rights violations in occupied Palestine.” Climate Camp Scotland understands that working across borders and upholding our diverse skills, interests, and backgrounds is equally important in achieving climate justice.
The financial interests of the far right stretch around the world, but also change the very landscape of Scotland. In the last year, Climate Camp Scotland has organised protests and direct action to save Sclattie Park in Aberdeen. “It’s the last publicly accessible green space in that community... The area has had industrial waste after industrial waste dumped on it. They’ve had a massive incinerator built fairly recently. It spews toxic fumes, a few hundred metres from a primary school,” says Harbinson. Discussing the intersections of global and local stru les brings terms like land justice to the front of public consciousness, therefore, encouraging us to question who owns the land, who looks after it, and who can thrive on it. The camp challenges land use for industrial
Words: Jj Fadaka
“We’re pushing for a transition fair to workers and communities. One that centres their voices”
Duncan Harbison, Climate Camp Scotland
profit and works to protect communities’ rights to breathable green spaces. “There’s so much privately owned land in Scotland, it’s used to benefit shareholders rather than local people and their ecosystems.”
Scotland’s economy and job market rely heavily on the fossil fuel industry. As a workingclass movement, Climate Camp Scotland knows the people must reclaim the narrative of a ‘just transition’. Justice for workers ensures climate justice policies are concerned with “transitioning away from systems, not people.” As Harbinson notes, “We’re pushing for a transition fair to workers and communities. One that centres their voices.” The group’s campaign in Grangemouth, Falkirk, fights for workers, hundreds of whom have been made redundant after the town’s refinery was turned into an oil import facility – yet another example of the oil and gas industry prioritising shareholder profit at the cost of local economies. “It’s a community suffering from acute poverty, with food bank usage above the national average. All the oil money flows out of that area, away from the hands of the people who live there. It’s going to Jim Ratcliffe, a billionaire who buys football clubs as a hobby.” As reported by the Sunday Times Rich List, Ratcliffe has an estimated net worth of £17 billion and, according to the Guardian, changed his tax residence from Hampshire to Monaco in 2020.
This year, the camp wants to take their coalition-building to towns across Scotland, and keep the pressure on the oil and gas industry year-round. “We’ve been starting campaigns in places like Aberdeen and following up with the group monthly. You can’t show up somewhere for a week and then just leave.” This year, more than ever, they are focused on building long-term community groups to support each other with intersecting stru les. If the far right is building a long-reaching coalition, surely, the resistance should do the same. And, of course, everyone is welcome: as Harbinson says, “Even if you’ve never been involved in the climate movement before, come. You can fit into a movement here.”
Climate Camp Scotland runs 22-29 Jul, location to be announced.
Photo: Climate Camp Scotland
Climate Camp Scotland protest
Definitely a Laughing Matter
Pioneering comedy showcase Abnormally Funny People celebrates 20 years of putting disabled comedians in the spotlight
Abnormally Funny People, created by Simon Minty and Steve Best to showcase disabled comedians, is returning to the Fringe this year with a celebratory show to mark their 20th anniversary. This year’s ensemble boasts members from the original 2005 line-up, along with some newer recruits. The Skinny chats to Steve Best along with four of the group: Tanyalee Davis, Juliette Burton, Don Biswas and Steve Day.
“We all know what it’s like to have that experience of stigma – whatever condition we have, we’re all united”
Juliette
Burton
There’s no mistaking the affection within the group, which works as a loose collective for one-off workshops and gigs. Steve Day, a deaf comedian who was one of the founding members, “loved the communal feel” of the 2005 Abnormally Funny show; their performer flat his work “first time sharing with other disabled people.” An added benefit: “If you’re sharing with dwarves, the food lasts longer when you put it in the overhead cupboards.” Don Biswas, a comedian with autism and dyspraxia, reports a similar roasting from the irreverent Day: “He takes the piss out of me for having ‘a fake disability,’” he laughs. Tanyalee Davis, a short stature Canadian-American comedian, also loved the 2005 experience. Living with Chris McCausland and Day, she recalls: “Blind guy keeps tripping over me, deaf guy can’t hear me scream.” The show itself, with the ensemble all on stage together, “evolved throughout the weeks,” getting better and better as the shared references developed. The improv game – which will return this time – was clearly a highlight for her: “Lost Voice Guy can’t speak, Steve Day can’t hear, Jess Thom with Tourettes.” It was “an absolute shit show and a lot of fun,” she says with evident relish.
Juliette Burton, meanwhile, a comedian with a history of mental health conditions, has performed with many groups, but says it’s different with Abnormally Funny People. “When we all know what it’s like to have that experience of stigma –whatever condition we have, we’re all united –there’s a whole barrier down.” More than anything, it’s a chance to “muck about with mates on stage.”
Words: Emma Sullivan
Photo: Steve Ullathorne
Juliette Burton
High profile comedians like Chris McCausland and Rosie Jones (and indeed Simon Minty himself as a regular on Go lebox) have done wonders for raising awareness and dispelling lingering preconceptions, so there’s a general sense amongst the group that mainstream literacy about disability is improving. Day wonders if the increased public awareness of neurodiversity might also have played a part, and Burton, herself diagnosed with neurodivergent conditions, suggests sensitivities towards hidden disabilities has allowed for “the building of bridges” – to other conditions and other experiences of marginality.
It’s not all straightforward, though, and ableist misunderstanding (and even hostility) persists –Biswas describes casual abuse shouted from van windows, and notes how a friend, Benny Shakes, a comedian with cerebral palsy has to wear the Hidden Disabilities sunflower lanyard, “otherwise people have a go because they think he’s drunk.” For Davis, the issues are the perennial ones of access – the limitations of public transport in particular. And Burton is clear that it’s society at large that ensures her conditions become ‘disabilities’.
Comedy, however, is “a beautiful oasis”, Burton says, where marginality becomes a strength – and where being at the “sharp end of the wedge of human experience” can fuel insight and stand-up is the ideal place to explore those specificities. Indeed, marginality is actively helpful in comic terms: if comedy relies upon building tension in order to break it with a punchline, then given “a lot of my life experiences cause tension –mental health, sectioned under the mental health act, hallucinations – it’s up to me to harness that tension, like riding an untamed horse.” Burton is adamant that those at the ‘sharp end’ can help effect change to benefit everyone: she cites the example of electric car windows – an innovation which came out of disabled users’ needs but now helps everyone. And one of the solo shows she’s currently working on develops a parallel analogy: “I’m a marginalised person – a canary in the mine – and I can report that society as it is currently designed doesn’t work for us – and more than that, it doesn’t work for any of us.”
Biswas is similarly passionate about standup’s capacity to bring about political and social
change: “It’s all about persuasion,” he says, particularly on the club circuit, where he’s “often the only brown person there.”
“While making people laugh is the most important thing, I also hope to change minds and inform people about race and disability.” He describes honesty and authenticity as central to his stand-up.
Burton and Biswas are looking for structural as well as individual change – but for Davis the greatest issue is an all-pervasive “victim mentality”, and it’s her project – her vocation, even – to change that. “We need positive role models more than ever,” she says, and as someone “living my best life” –traveling the world, horse riding, parasailing – “I can help people who aren’t disabled but who are mired in a ‘I can’t’ mindset. I feel like it is my purpose to prove that it’s mind over matter.” With 3.2 million followers on Tik Tok, it’s a message that’s getting a lot of traction. Not everyone’s buying it, though, and she’s had some pushback from disabled people accusing her of ‘toxic positivity’. She hoots – astonished that “this is actually a thing.” Characteristically unfazed, she’s pocketed the phrase as the title of her next show.
Davis is interested to see audiences’ responses this year – like Best, she’s aware of a degree of “hyper-sensitivity.” Best su ests “current audiences are sometimes not willing to extend much tolerance – they hear one tri er word...” and then pass judgement. Davis may be worried that “people are going to be overly demonstrative of their allyship,” but she also hopes that audiences “are finally starting to lighten up a bit.” In fact, she says “Scottish people are the best audiences in the world,” precisely because they “don’t get so hung up on disability issues” - part of her reasoning for touring in Scotland after the Fringe.
Davis can’t wait for the Fringe – alongside the pleasures of performing, it’s also “so exhilarating, meeting performers from all over the world – and getting to see group and double acts, and character acts” which aren’t common on the US comedy scene. For Biswas it’s quite simple: “I wouldn’t be able to go to Edinburgh without Abnormally Funny People,” and as a nine-time veteran of the Fringe, Day reiterates this: “It’s too expensive now to be in Edinburgh on my own, I don’t think I’ll do another solo show unless it changes.” There’s a chance this Abnormally Funny show might be a last hurrah – if so, says Day, ‘it’ll be a fantastic way to go out’.
Abnormally Funny People, 30 Jul-25 Aug (not 14), Pleasance Courtyard (Beside), 4.50pm, £10-15 / @abnormallyfunnypeople on Instagram
Juliette Burton: Best of Burton, 30 Jul-8 Aug, Gilded Balloon @ Appleton Tower (Ruby), 7pm, £9-12.50 / Juliette Burton: Rogue Nights (WIP), 5 & 12 Aug, Laughing Horse @ West Nic Records (Main Cellar), 8.15pm, free/ PWYW / Juliette Burton: Going Rogue, 18-24 Aug, Laughing Horse @ Counting House (The Lounge), 1.15pm, Free/PWYW
Tanyalee Davis tours various venues across Scotland, 25 Aug-2 Sep, for full details visit tanyaleedavis.com
And if you’re keen to support some other disabled-led comedy shows this Fringe, here’s a handful we’d recommend:
Alice-India puts the spectrum of good and evil into context, in their ultra-confessional debut hour including getting arrested 10 days before a diagnosis of two hidden disabilities. (Alice-India: See You In Hell, 30 Jul - 25 Aug (not 11), Underbelly Bristo Square (Daisy), 7.15pm, £8-12)
Skinny fave Stuart Laws has something a little different in store for us this year – a comedytheatre whodunnit set on an island full of puffins AND an hour of excellent quality, joke-rich standup following on from his most recent shows exploring his late autism diagnosis. (Stuart Laws Is Stuck, 28 Jul - 24 Aug (Sun-Thurs, not 13), Monkey Barrel Comedy @ The Tron, 3pm, £7-10 / Stuart Laws Does Stand-Up Comedy for an Hour, 1-23 Aug (Fri-Sat), Monkey Barrel Comedy @ The Tron, 3pm, £12)
Visually impaired comic Jake Donaldson is a mainstay of the North East England comedy circuit and was a finalist in the BBC New Comedy Award 2024. His latest show is rammed with early 2000s nostalgia. (Jake Donaldson is the Fifth Weezer, 31 Jul-24 Aug (not 14), Laughing Horse @ City Cafe (Nineties), 11:55am, free/PWYW)
And finally, Ria Lina brings her first full run to the Fringe in nine years, with Riabellion seeing the comedian look at rules and rebellion through her unique autistic lens, whilst using her access requests to help others. (Ria Lina: Riabellion, 28 Jul-24 Aug (not 14, 21), Monkey Barrel Comedy @ Cabaret Voltaire (CabVol1), 2.25pm, £6-12)
Kelburn
Don Biswas
Ria Lina
Stuart Laws
Photo: Steve Best Photography
Photo: Steve Ullathorne
Photo: Ed Moore
Filling the Silences
In her debut novel The First Jasmines, Saima Begum gives voice to a long-silenced period of Bangladeshi history, exploring how history and literature construct gaps in the record
When Saima Begum was studying for her Masters, she took a class titled South Asian Literature. She immediately noticed gaps on the reading list, with no Bangledeshi texts included. “There was absolutely no text or significant piece of fiction from Bangladesh or on Bangladeshi history,” she explains, “so that led me to want to look into Bangledeshi history.” The history here is a complex one; once a whole country and then callously partitioned into three respective nation-states, the violent entanglement between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have long been characterised by silence and shame across all kinds of institutions. This is particularly true for the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, in which East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) fought for independence against West Pakistan. Begum’s own parents and grandparents lived through the war, but “they never brought it up,” she says. “I felt like I didn’t know about a part of myself and I definitely did not see that reflected in the literature.” It was this silence that compelled Begum to write her debut novel, The First Jasmines
The book is set against the backdrop of the last weeks of the war, and centres on Lucky and Jamila, two sisters who are captured and imprisoned by the Pakistani military in a detention camp. “I saw massive statistics, like hundreds of thousands of women had been raped, but I’m not reading about the experiences of these women,” Begum explains. Conservative estimates in the years following su est that over 200,000 women were captured and raped by Pakistani military during the war, but these crimes have subsequently rarely been broached. “What happened to these women afterwards?” Begum asks. “Why was their history brushed away?”
The First Jasmines tells the story of the war through the experiences of Lucky and Jamila, alongside their fellow captives. The Pakistani soldiers pass through the novel like strangers, identifiable only by physical descriptors such as ‘Slightly Cross-Eyed’ or ‘Major Moustache’. “That’s typically how women were seen,” Begum says. “They were seen as bodies, but to them, the soldiers were also just bodies inflicting terrible pain onto them.” The majority of the book is set in a single room, yet in the brief intervals between this claustrophobic terror, the captured women transform their prison into a space for collective processing, not only reflecting on their oppressive present circumstances but also the constructs which shape their lives outside of the prison: marriage, motherhood, sexual dynamics, bodily autonomy and beauty standards.
“I think it was really important to have these discussions, because women do not receive the help, assistance, therapy, or any of the things that are necessary to be able to heal from a situation like that,” Begum explains. ‘‘I really wanted to explore the kinds of conversations that women in the room might have. Especially those who have been in the room for many months and those who had been in for a couple of days, and the different emotional, psychological and physical impacts that creates.”
Language is important in the novel: conversing in Bangla constructs a defensive wall for the women against their Urdu speaking
Words: Laila Ghaffar
“It is still not enough for the government to say that we have dealt with the situation and we can now look beyond it. Decades have passed, but we still need this conversation”
Saima Begum
captors. It becomes the primary method of resistance used by the women to cling on to their identity under siege. “The language issue was one of the bi est issues which led to the Independence War,” Begum explains. “We were forced to speak one language to construct the idea of a cohesive nation.” One of the captured women, Suhana, speaks Urdu fluently and thus is afforded special privileges by Major Moustache. Upon Bangladesh’s victory, Suhana moves to Pakistan with him. Although this betrayal may seem like a stark exception, it was an important sub-plot for Begum as “there were a significant number of women who really did do this. The title of traitor was so great at this time that even being seen to cook for these soldiers was seen as an act of betrayal. They preferred anonymity in that land over there, rather than staying [in Bangladesh] and having people know what happened to them.”
The true tragedy of the novel lies in what happens after the war, as women are expected to resume their lives in silence. “Women are seen as a single collective unit, as one person. So the thinking was that you could deploy one strategy against them and get the same outcome,” Begum explains. Yet Lucky and Jamila, the characters at the centre of the novel are forever impacted, and their once co-joined paths now diverge. Whilst The First Jasmines adds colour to a bleached page of history, the need to continue the conversation remains urgent work for Begum.
“These were 200,000 individuals with lives, with families, with their own unique characters and personalities,” she says. “It is still not enough for the government to say that we have dealt with the situation and we can now look beyond it. Decades have passed, but we still need this conversation.”
The First Jasmines is out on 31 Jul with Hajar Press
Image: courtesy of Jahar Pres
Saima Begum
Reclaim the Gallery
Alia Syed’s solo exhibition, The Ring in the Fish, explores what role imagination plays in migration. The curator reflects on nurturing Alia’s creative vision within an institutional framework that is, at present, stifling community expression
The Ring in the Fish marks Alia Syed’s first major solo exhibition in Glasgow. Straddling 16mm film, photography and sound, the exhibition is a collaborative body of work that draws inspiration from the tale of St. Mungo – patron saint and founder of Glasgow – and the story of the fish and the ring. The title becomes a conduit for the transformative nature of both individual and collective narratives inviting an exploration of what role imagination holds in migration, and how these images are carried across multiple generations of migrants to enable new ways of being.
Born in Swansea to an Indian father and a Welsh mother, Alia grew up between India, Pakistan, and the UK, spending a significant part of her formative years in Glasgow, a city that continues to hold personal meaning. This exhibition, therefore, becomes a kind of homecoming and is dedicated to her late father, Mr. Syed Ali Ahmed. Besides a pensive photograph of a young man on a ship with his hair blowing in the wind, his stories are not directly part of the exhibition but emerge instead in Alia’s anecdotes. You hear about his love for gardening, despite his failed attempts at growing strawberries; his life as a respected physicist, his Muslim faith and his political journey shaped by the Trade Union
movement; his founding of the West of Scotland Friends of Palestine and Scottish Friends of Bosnia. She tells you how he would drive Yasser Arafat around Glasgow on his visit, and of a young Humza Yousaf running to offer him an umbrella as he sat in the rain in a CND demonstration against the Trident Missile base in Faslane – that he grumpily denied.
Her father’s presence becomes symbolic of the many families who migrated to Britain and Glasgow between the 1950s-70s in the wake of Independence and the Partition, seeking a better life in a post-war economy. Over the past five years, Alia has uncovered an archive of stories and personal histories of individuals through anonymous archival records and photographs, community networks and women’s friendship circles. The exhibition presents only a small part of this research: a collection of oral narratives with each story shaped by inevitable gaps in memory. Alia reimagines these memories through film while also employing the gallery’s architecture both visually and sonically, to guide viewers in their engagement with these stories.
One of the central works in the exhibition is a film in the first gallery that features the sport of Kabaddi, an ancient game of tag-and-tackle from the Indian subcontinent. The game relies on marked lines dividing teams and territory, requiring a player to continuously chant ‘kabaddi’ while on the opponent’s side; but if they pause to take a breath and/or are tackled, they lose a point. Alia uses this game as well as the ritual of breathing, as a metaphor for survival: for migrant bodies navigating ways to endure within unfamiliar environments; for resisting oppressive systems that seek to classify and control lives; and for the lingering legacies of colonialism that have divided territories across South Asia and continues to fragment land and communities on a global scale.
Beyond this metaphor, the film prompts us to reflect on the architecture of the CCA as an institution – one that Alia recalls having occupied as a teenager when it was still The Third Eye Centre; one that I first stepped into five years ago. Over the decades, it has held countless histories of its communities and offered a shelter to so many lives. Alia and I now occupy this very architecture with this exhibition, yet we unexpectedly find ourselves adrift – struggling to sustain this exhibition within an institutional framework that is suddenly drawing boundaries and fragmenting the very communities it was meant to support.
As I write this, Police Scotland surrounds the CCA and artists and cultural
Words: Shalmali Shetty
‘We now find ourselves struggling to sustain this exhibition within an institutional framework that is suddenly drawing boundaries and fragmenting the very communities it was meant to support’
workers face a ression. The CCA Board’s recent indecisive statement around endorsing the PACBI has left the public in a state of chaos and frustration. For us, this came in two weeks after the opening of the exhibition, following an already exhausting period of uncertainty beginning with Creative Scotland’s defunding and later reinstatement, accompanied by the CCA’s temporary closure last year, both of which resulted in delayed timelines. Further, since issuing its statement, the Board has not only remained silent, but in a recent and deeply troubling turn of events, responded to its own community with violence – by engaging the police, restricting access to the space, and carrying out yet another temporary closure. These decisions, made without any prior consultation or communication with the current exhibiting artists, have left us grappling with the situation by ourselves. Until last week, Alia and I had chosen to continue with the exhibition as our own form of reclaiming the space – an act of resistance from within the institution by women from the global majority, bringing to light the very histories that are often tokenised or erased. But in the light of this week’s events and ongoing institutional silence, we are left trying to determine what it even means to continue.
Our solidarity lies with all those who are working to reconstruct accessible art spaces while also fighting for Palestinian liberation – which is our collective step towards a larger ongoing fight to free the world from the throes of colonial and capitalist structures. We hope that our combined voices add to the growing pressure on the institution to take an accountable stance and speak.
The Ring in The Fish is on view until 26 Jul at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow cca-glasgow.com
Image: courtesy of CCA
Syed Ali Ahmed, Alia Syed's father, early 1960s
Degree Shows
Three art writers share what caught their attention and challenged them at the 2025 Degree Shows in Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design
Dundee’s DJCAD once again opened its doors for its annual undergraduate Degree Show, featuring the work of over 450 students.
Tucked at the top of the Cooper Gallery stairwell, a tranquil scene of horses unfolds, projected large across one wall. This is a short film, developed colaboratively by Claire Marion Black, responding to the artist’s sculptural work, also on display. Contextualised by research surrounding Ashvamedha and other traditional Vedic rituals, the work explores notions of time, habitat, and the language of ‘inner-nature’.
Approaching nature from a different angle, Malachy McCrimmon has taken over one end of the Cooper Gallery with an installation of 2D works that somehow jump out from the wall with a sculptural, or rather animated, quality. Filled with polarising imagery, the work behaves like a cacophony of post-internet noise and pixelated birdsong.
A twisted pastel dreamscape comprises the work of Millie Stewart. A constructed room of softened spikes and shining surfaces, Stewart has built an immersive site of the sickly sweet, but with an undeniable edge.
The viewer is asked to rely on other senses in the work of Leah Macmillan, who has responded to familial experiences of blindness with a body of work intended to be felt rather than seen. Below a sign reading ‘Please Touch the Art !!’ are pairs of blackout glasses, and beside them, braille panels offering tangible translation. As one moves along the walls, scraping, sliding, and stroking displays
of bulbous cotton, twisting fibres, and other less discernible materials, a thought-provoking approach to creating work accessible to blind and visually impaired audiences begins to unfold.
Also stepping away from traditional boundaries between artwork and audience, Mia Vidman invites viewers to sit beside skeins of crimson yarn, used to form an installation of crocheted letters suspended between two speakers playing violin music from both Balkan and Scottish cultures. The music, played by Vidman and their mother, explores ideas around genetic inheritance, neurodiversity, and cultural overlap.
James Ryan Ross has forged a site seemingly suited for pilgrimage, drawn from an interest in ancient sites and standing stones, but instead featuring football paraphernalia. Surrounded by an energy where one might expect Pictish symbols and ancient engravings, we are instead met with discarded football strips and Tennent’s cans, strewn across an astroturf floor that supports a su ested stone archway. This makeshift prehistoric site, composed of contemporary reference, frames a monitor playing The Battle of Dun Nechtain, a film documenting a performance piece reenacting the 685 AD battle between the Picts and the Northumbrians.
Overall, this year’s graduates present a promising group of artists, each uniquely concerned with situating their work within contexts that increasingly shape our understanding of the world and our relationship with a shifting artistic landscape where notions of technology, nature, and collectivity exist in flux. [Celeste MacLeod-Brown]
Words: Celeste MacLeod-Brown, Toby Üpson, and and Gabrielle Tse
The Glasgow School of Art
Artists have a unique ability to see beyond the surface of things, able to translate that seeing into newly perceivable forms. The GSA’s class of 2025 is full of such artistic souls.
Douglas Rogerson and Jennifer Aldred, who are graduating from the Master of Fine Art programme, each incorporate overlooked and discarded materials in their respective artworks. Rogerson’s multi-layered prints recall sheets of dilapidated steel, subtly weathered and ghostly. Using monotype and relief printing processes, the surfaces of these large works not only reproduce the tactility of his subject matter – fragments of wood found on the streets of Glasgow – but expose the misted history that can be read in their patina and grain. In this way, Rogerson’s artworks invite us to reflect upon the dynamism of city life, how things change, but more so, what is lost or forgotten in that process.
Similarly, Aldred finds the abstract in materials from the urban world. Positioned in a narrow corridor space, her presentation includes a number of metal push and kick plates – the flat rectangles of metal usually fixed to doors to protect them from damage. Aldred’s plates are far from pristine, each bearing the traces of human activity: greasy finger smears, scratches and remnants of sticky tape. Displayed in pairs, to me, these odd couples allude to the most fleeting of everyday interactions and how mundane devices hold bodies apart.
Graduating from the School of Fine Arts’ Painting & Printmaking BA (Hons) programme, Mia Coutts’s meticulous pastel paintings echo something of Rogerson and Aldred’s sensitivities. Utterly impressionistic, her wide canvases seem to depict mundane aspects of city life glimpsed through a fo y bus window – as hatched lines jazz, I see blocky tenement flats blur into foliage.
Working across photography and moving image, Jules Dunn’s work is delicate. Minute in scale and printed in soft tones of white-silver, a series of well-framed Super 8 stills depict moments from everyday life: a body battling with a white sheet, a horse’s ass, far off figures engulfed in a landscape. Walking between these intimate stills, I wonder if they form part of a larger narrative: not a concrete film per se but a memory, or indeed, a series of disparate memories lo ed in the back of one’s mind.
Memories haunt Marie Autratová’s practice, too. Her minimal installation includes an aged wooden ladder adorned with chintzy pearl buttons, a stool with a fat-frilled pin cushion placed upon it,
Go Touch Some Grass, Malachy McCrimmon
Image: courtesy of artist Icarus Affection, Solomon Pawlyn
Image: courtesy of artist
and a book of poetry penned in both English and Czech (as Google Translate tells me). These works are quietly inviting; the first page in Autratová’s poetic collection makes this intention clear: “The words I cannot speak out loud, / I invite you to read on my behalf.”
Solomon Pawlyn pastiches the crafting of a digital existence; specifically, an existence forged on Grindr. Featuring a slack plywood changing booth, video, photography, laser pointers, and a range of bedazzled masks, his multimedia installation, titled Icarus Affection, is rather OTT. Together, this confused meeting of stuff not only relays aspects of Pawlyn’s collaborative research undertaken on Grindr, but also materially alludes to the app’s dissociative effect. Toned hot blood red, the looped video resting at the centre of the installation conveys what I mean: here we see a view of a packed night club from above, topless men helplessly gyrating. If the myth of Icarus tells of a young man who, given new resources, flew too close to the sun only to fall towards his death, this film positions the community of Grindr as something risky, two-faced and hedonistic.
Alongside these six artists, GSA’s class of 2025 represent true artistic sensibility. Across the degree show’s two sites, the art school’s Stow Building and the Glue Factory, this year’s graduates make their personal perspectives aesthetically engaging. [Toby Üpson]
Edinburgh College of Art
Set against the striking backdrop of a window looking onto Edinburgh Castle, a large dragon’s head, rendered in all its bloody-mouthed glory according to the visual language of Medieval tapestries, lays with an arrow pierced through its mouth. This grisly sculpture belongs to An Aftermath, A Crime Scene, a multi-part installation by Libby Entwistle based on the life of Saint Margaret. According to legend, the saint killed a dragon that was sent to torture her by a spurned Roman general. Glazed clay slabs around the room, featuring disembodied hands and red, frightened faces, serve as mute witnesses. Themes of folklore and femininity are echoed in the dreamy works of Abigail Miskin, whose intricate etchings of sprites and fairies are inspired by her childhood in Yorkshire and her research into the post-WWI fairy fever phenomenon. Alluding to themes of domesticity, several of Miskin’s pieces are framed delicately in crochet, adding to their sense of storybook tenderness.
After examining Scottish fungi under a microscope, Jewellery and Silversmithing graduate Isabel Honey Coles recreated their complex patterns on Britannia 958 silver using ancient granulation techniques. Suspended on moss-green threads, the pendants are luminous and richly textured, like small, elegant moons.
Meanwhile, Carmen Rachel Alexander’s Friday Street tells a playful story of memory and landscape. The artist presents a box of trinkets including film, vintage postcards, old matchboxes (one proudly advertising, in Gothic font, ‘The Bahamas Most Distinguished Tavern!’) and more, many of which were sourced from weekly visits to a Suffolk car boot sale. The curios are presented alongside metallic cylinders, the same size as film canisters, on which the artist has delicately etched the impression of trees.
With icy precision, Marni Saunders’ eerie, orderly sculptures scalpel open the trappings of domestic life. Plain kitchen sponges and cutlery sit half-submerged in transparent glass panels mounted on the wall, a cross between laboratory kitchen sinks and petri dishes. On one coffee mug, a kiss mark su ests human presence – perhaps a stolen hint of something unruly – but the objects are suspended from time, as gelid as the motionless soap suds on their glass containers.
Another artist who plays with polarities is Lucie Benninghaus, whose sculptures combine
steel mesh with colourful yarn that grows mosslike from the metal structures. One piece is a steel cube composed in neat, expanding lines. Orange yarn twines on one side, wobbly as a child’s drawing. Another sculpture features two worn-out metal tubes, their yellow paint fading; between them is a near-circle created by a narrow, curving metal pipe. Together they resemble a crude scalemodel of some abandoned industrial plant – but a net of purple yarn blooms right in the middle, unexpected and tender.
In the Fashion graduate showcase, we find the colourful works of Olivia Musson. Inspired by the hanging gardens of Babylon, Musson’s gowns are composed of exuberant, sun-ripened florals. The designer’s extravagant use of colours, textures, and silhouettes reveals a Rococo fondness for flair and excess, but at their core, these designs are distinctly contemporary, countering the pastel-pastoral with vibrant colours and glossy bows, everything oversized and over-glamorous.
The overall mood of the show is playful and introspective, with many pieces drawing visual or thematic inspiration from mythology, natural landscapes, and daily life. It seems that a collective sense of world-making runs throughout the show. Both in terms of reenvisioning the past and creating better futures, the works speak of optimism, of brighter seasons ahead.
[Gabrielle Tse]
An Aftermath, A Crime Scene, Libby Entwistle
Credit Crunch
Chronicling the Royal Bank of Scotland’s pivotal role in the financial crash of 2008, James Graham’s new play Make it Happen traces the origins of our current crises – we talk to director Andrew Panton
The ghosts of the financial crisis stay with us. Nearly 20 years on, the decline in economic activity heralded by the Great Recession (2007-9) has seen lasting impacts. The crisis is widely regarded as the most catastrophic monument for deregulation, and thus one of the most significant events in modern times. We can attribute this reputation to the success of recent dramas like Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy or Adam McKay’s popular film The Big Short, which digest the abstract economic argot and complex causes behind the crisis into entertainment. Yet, the bursting catalogue of crisis-related media has, so far, never foregrounded the roles which the Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) and its CEO Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin played in orchestrating one of the bi est losses in UK corporate history, which also saw Edinburgh centre stage in global events. Andrew Panton, director of the upcoming play Make It Happen, calls it “one of the bi est stories to happen in Scotland” in his lifetime.
Shortly after Panton assumed his post as Artistic Director of Dundee Rep Theatre, V&A Dundee opened. At the opening, he ran into veteran actor Brian Cox, who agreed on a return to the Rep, where he began his acting career 64 years ago. Panton had also been in contact with James Graham, Olivier Award-winning playwright of Dear England and Quiz, about a possible collaboration. The pandemic happened in between, but here we are in 2025, and a collaboration bringing Cox, Graham, the Rep, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) and Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) is now happening with Make It Happen set to preview at the Rep (18-26 Jul), before transferring to the Festival Theatre (30 Jul-9 Aug).
Make It Happen is the latest in a flurry of plays by Graham which dredge into view themes of political vitality, dissecting systems and tracing origin stories of the crises we experience today. In Fred Goodwin, Graham finds a character whose commitment to privacy in life allows for interpretation and fictionalisation: importantly, as Panton
Words: Aidan Monks
tells me, this play integrates history and fictionality. We can expect informed and biting satire in Make It Happen, a laugh-out-loud funny and entertaining study of one man’s stringent commitment to his ideals – no matter their flaws or contradictions – as his world splinters around him. Alongside Sandy Grierson as Goodwin, Cox stars as Adam Smith, the Scottish liberal economist and author of The Wealth of Nations, whose ideas are typically mischaracterised to validate neoliberal views: Panton says Smith in the play is not necessarily a ghost but a “ghostly” figure of Goodwin’s imagination, for whom Smith is effectively a “poster boy.” It is between these two characters – Goodwin and the embodiment of his beliefs in Adam Smith – that Panton says most of the play’s comedic elements are threaded. While Make It Happen may sound like a cerebral exchange of ideas, facts and figures, Panton stresses that as a director he could not be less interested in making “people in [his] audience feel silly or ignorant,” or plays which require a basis of knowledge to understand. Complex data and terminology (“toxic assets,” “shadow banking” etc) will be dealt with in entertaining ways that keep an audience hooked and never distract from the story. We can expect a technical multimedia approach to storytelling, including videography and contemporary music from the 2000s from artists like Keane, Alicia Keys, The Killers and Franz Ferdinand, which all instinctively signify the new. Movement and choreography with a large ensemble that resembles an ancient Greek chorus (nicknamed throughout the rehearsal process “the Furies”) will saturate the scene as bankers, shareholders, and economists, which conversely implicates Make It Happen in traditions as old as theatre itself. Make It Happen is bound to be as rooted in contemporary contexts and storytelling as it is epic and classically tragic. The tracery and dimensions of tragedy within this play – especially with the hindsight of Goodwin’s inevitable downfall – qualify it as a “contemporary version of tragedy,” according to Panton.
Panton hopes audiences will gain a better understanding of why the financial crisis occurred (“why there wasn’t cash in the ATMs that day”), why Edinburgh ended up as a catalyst for global crisis, why RBS was effectively nationalised with billions of pounds of taxpayer money spent on bailouts, and why we are still suffering the aftermath in 2025. But for Panton, the story is everything. Make It Happen is bound to offer a high-octane, hilarious, and nuanced account of the events surrounding RBS in 2008, and the CEO in his temple of finance as its walls came tumbling down.
Make It Happen, Dundee Rep, 18-26 Jul; Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 30 Jul-9 Aug
Photo: David Vintiner
Brian Cox and Sandy Grierson in Make It Happen
Sounds Good
July
16th
17th
18th
19th
Edinbu gh Jazz & Blues Festival: Julian Lage T io featu ing Jo ge Roede and Joey Ba on + suppo t
Edinbu gh Jazz & Blues Festival: Cu tis Stige s
Edinbu gh Jazz & Blues Festival: Colin Steele: STRAMASH
Edinbu gh Jazz & Blues Festival: co to.alto + suppo t
20th
Edinbu gh Jazz & Blues Festival: A Ve y Special Evening with Kenny Wayne Shephe d and the Legenda y Bobby Rush
24th
Dexys’ Kevin Rowland - A Life Sto y In Conve sation with special guest host Stewa t Lee
August
9th13th Ka ine Polwa t: Windblown 16th Lindisfa ne
17th18th
Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumou s’ with the T ansatlantic Ensemble
21st Withe ed Hand and F iends
22nd PP A nold - ‘Soul Su vivo ’
31st Edinbu gh Psych Fest 2025
Septembe
6th Susie Dent - Wo d Pe fect 13th Au i
15th
AMPLIFI: Bell LungsKevin Leomo - Lucian Fletche
16th James Yo kston & Nina Pe sson
18th
Malin Lewis P esents: Kim Ca nie T io, Malin Lewis T io, Heal & Ha ow
19th Eddie Izza d - Hamlet
20th Ch is McCausland: Yonks!
24th Wa d Thomas
25th Dunedin Conso t: Bach’s Italy
27th FARA: 10th Annive sa y Tou
Released 18 July by Planet Mu rrrrr
Album of the Month Slikback — Attrition
Slikback continues his ever-evolving exploration of sound in Attrition, released by powerhouse Planet Mu. He is venturing further afield and coming home, delving into a scored experience of dance: history, present and future. Attrition is an immaculate vision that locates you on a dancefloor where other things happen: interruptions, brief flings, temporary rhythms all forming a ghastly, but immensely danceable mix.
There’s inspiration from DJ Lag, Gqom more broadly, almost nasty Tech-step, which suddenly evolves into sections not dissimilar to Tim Hecker, with percussive breaks like our contemporary ZULI. The depth on display is distinct and unchallenged – there’s a richness to it all in its range of styles and sounds. You might not know how to feel. Then suddenly there’s a cinematic narrative developing like Galcher Lustwerk, with occasional plasticity like Gábor Lázár. All of this is reminiscent of others, but propelled forward into now by the immaculate production of the tracks throughout.
Attrition follows a relentless stream of releases from the Kenyan, not only an eponymous full length this time last year, containing a wide selection of tracks from 2021-2023, but the FORZA
Find reviews for the below albums online at theskinny.co.uk/music
EP; the five-track belter released last August now serves as a prototype for his evolving battleground of genres. Slikback’s output has been immaculate and frequent, and having followed the brevity of styles, dancefloors, and spaces his music could occupy, this album celebrates it all in one place, side by side, around the next corner.
The movement into working with Planet Mu seems to have created an ultimate opportunity to combine, reflect and build on the mega stream of his self-released work. Rather than trying this, trying that, we are listening to the final versions of intentional, deliberate and fully developed ideas. They’re fleshed out to their finest ends, where they exemplify his experimental spirit and ability to explore new creative freedoms.
A striking feat of this full-length is the return of dubstep-inflected LFOs fragmented into future memories. It feels at once ‘magpie’, ‘collage’ or ‘mashup’, but the precision in the combining of its modes, styles, and just ‘parts’ is seamless, easy and fluid. In Taped we’re treated to a complete curveball of LFOs in a 160bpm nightmare, as if trapped in a club in 2006 somewhere in Britain. It’s all over quickly. This is a magical release with far too much on display to communicate; it’s worth trying though. [Tommy Pearson]
Listen to: Sekli, Duality, Semblance of Composure
Lorde Virgin Out now via EMI
Rival Consoles Landscape From Memory Out 4 Jul via Erased Tapes
Allo’ Darlin Bright Nights Out 11 Jul via Fika Recordings
Alex G Headlights Out 18 Jul via RCA / Columbia
Indigo De Souza Precipice Out 25 Jul via Loma Vista Recordings
Panic Shack
Panic Shack
Brace Yourself, 18 Jul rrrrr
Listen to: Gok Wan, Unhinged, Pockets
This absolute riot of a full-length debut by Cardiff upstarts Panic Shack is precisely what it sounds like – the unvarnished soul of five mates having a laugh. Both the lyrics – infusing everyday observations with caustic wit – and the sound of the album will invite comparisons with Kathleen Hanna’s oeuvre, with the band as much at home with stomping pop-rock as they are inflecting their sound with some squelchy electronics.
The freewheeling spirit of everybody from Ramones to Ex Hex is a sonic constant on Panic Shack, allowing them to tackle myriad topics with droll lyrics that are frequently laugh out loud, from Unhinged – comprised entirely of actual lines from Hinge profiles – to Pockets, a brilliant lament of fashion choices making bags a necessity. They tackle weightier subject matter too, skewering size-zero culture on Gok Wan and railing against sexual harassment on SMELLARAT, but insist that their raison d’être is primarily having a good time. And if Panic Shack has a constant theme running through it, it’s an appreciation of the power of female friendship, as crystallised on the disarmingly earnest closer Thelma & Louise. This is one of the debuts of the year. [Joe Go ins]
Amy Macdonald Is This What You’ve Been Waiting For?
Infectious Records, 11 Jul rrrrr
Listen to: Trapped, I'm Done (Games That You Play, Can You Hear Me?
Amy Macdonald’s sixth studio album finds her reflecting on survival, identity, and standing your ground, with an energy that feels both personal and arena-ready. Fuelled by the euphoria of her 2021 TRNSMT set, Can You Hear Me? is a disco-tinged anthem of solidarity, channelling collective resilience. ‘We are fearless / We are leaders’, she belts over a hypnotic thrum of guitar and drums. Trapped showcases Macdonald’s empathy and lyrical strength, telling the story of a friend going through divorce, its galloping rhythm and questioning chorus, ‘Can you break me out? / Help me break these chains around my feet?’, cutting to the heart of social pressure and personal liberation.
In contrast, I’m Done (Games That You Play) delivers a jubilant goodbye to draining relationships, while national pride pulses through The Hope and We Survive, reflecting on Scotland’s underdog spirit and the joyful escape found in weekend revelry, all delivered with sharp wit and heartfelt warmth. Balancing pop-rock polish with lyrical bite, the album builds its case with every track. The title poses a question – and with grit, heart, and clarity, Macdonald delivers a confident answer: this is exactly what we’ve been waiting for. [Jenna Cockburn]
Wet Leg moisturizer Domino, 11 Jul rrrrr
Listen to: liquidize, mangetout
It’s been four years since Wet Leg began their path to indie superstardom with the bizarre yet utterly infectious Chaise Longue. Just how far they’ve come since (two Grammys, two Brit Awards, half a billion streams) is rather remarkable for the self-proclaimed “oddball” five-piece. Now, with their hotly anticipated second album moisturizer, they’re more fiendishly fun than ever. liqiuidize is effortlessly cool with its Strokes-esque staccato guitar rhythms. mangetout and don’t speak flow similarly with grungy and shoegazey hooks respectively, while davina mccall (yes, you read correctly), takes things down a notch with woozy vocal melodies and swooning lyrics. Indeed, the entire album is a collection of love songs – some gooey-eyed (pond song), some gratuitously horny (pillow talk), others more manic (catch these fists). The band’s relentless touring schedule over the last few years reaps rewards here too, with their cohesiveness shining among every track’s neat arrangements. And while there may not be as many immediate ‘bangers’ compared to their debut, they more than make up for this in their richer musicality. There’s no sniff of second album syndrome here. moisturizer oozes confidence and Wet Leg continue to play to their strengths in style. [Jamie Wilde]
Utopia
Heavenly Recordings, 11 Jul rrrrr
Listen to: London 1757, Utopia, Y Gath
Following on from previous releases sung in Welsh and Cornish, Gwenno Saunders’ fourth solo album is her first primarily in English. With lyrics recalling her adolescence spent in London, Las Vegas, Brighton and Cardiff, Utopia is an altogether more urban album, recounting experiences of nightclubs and bus rides and thrumming streets. Another first for Saunders is that the record was largely composed on the piano, while her previous works took shape electronically. With rich strings, choppy, staccato basslines, and spindly guitar, there’s an earthiness to Utopia that contrasts with the gleaming mysticism of the Mercuryshortlisted Tresor
London 1757 is a perfect opener, bristling with energy and motion; light percussion and plucked guitar create a restless, itchy groove, while cool, pearly keyboards and haunting vocals lend an air of mystery. Lead single Dancing on Volcanoes follows, a lively burst of catchy guitar pop. Cate Le Bon and H. Hawkline join Gwenno for the spiky, feline Y Gath, sliced between the celestial ballad Utopia and the windswept desolation of War. Finally, on airy closer Hireth, the album seems to take off out of the city streets and into an otherworldly reverie, delicately strung together with harp and flute. [Zoë White]
Gwenno
Billie Marten Dog Eared Fiction Records, 18 Jul rrrrr
Listen to: Goodnight Moon, Crown, Planets
Dog Eared is a raw and reflective return to Billie Marten’s famed jazz-infused indie-folk. Journeying between stories and emotions, Marten’s songwriting is personal but universal. Feeling opens with a sunny ode to innocence, nature and memory as we’re plunged into a new era: ‘Sweep the leaves and cut the air’. The forest folk atmosphere is momentarily paused in Crown, where whirring drums meet gentle synths. An ordinary memory of her cat in the garden is translated into ethereal sunlit melodies.
In No Sudden Changes, she reminds a lover of her presence: ‘I am the dust in the breeze / I am the tu ing at your sleeves’. The initially gentle Goodnight Moon blurs memories of a relationship like a film reel. Jazz infusions and windchimes are scattered specks of magic. Mellow synths in The Glass give way to whirring distortion and sparkly windchimes as Marten’s voice commands, despite its feather-light frequency. Swing signals a final celebration of nostalgia. Despite initially overwhelming industrial chimes and heavy bass, the swooping fiddles mirror whimsical playground joy. Like its name, Billie Marten’s fifth album is one to be dog-eared – revisited, rediscovered, and cherished. [Juliette Pepin]
Katie Gregson-Macleod
Love Me Too Well, I’ll Retire Early Last Recordings On Earth, 4 Jul rrrrr
Listen to: I just think of it all the time, Mosh Pit
In 2022 Katie Gregson-Macleod released the introspective piano ballad complex, which quickly caught fire through TikTok. Columbia Records noticed her potential and offered her a deal. But a single EP of intimate, brooding piano-led songs was all that followed before the two parted ways, Gregson-Macleod citing a difference of opinion on where to take her sound.
Now on Matt Maltese’s label, Love Me Too Well, I’ll Retire Early is a product of the creatively unfulfilling time she spent at Columbia. It would be surprising if it wasn’t an attempt to show that she knew which direction she should take. Her piano is unused in this small collection of songs, but Gregson-Macleod’s eye for intimate moments, which she recounts earnestly over soft hatches of acoustic guitar, means the EP is as warm and personal as the rest of her work. The drums and strings threaded into these songs hint that this EP is a bridge towards a full-band sound akin to previous single Teenage Love, one with shades of Ratboys and Julien Baker. Though recent history shows us we shouldn’t second guess what Gregson-Macleod will do next, a full-length album could be something great. [Adam Clarke]
Barry Can’t Swim Loner Ninja Tune, 11 Jul rrrrr
Listen to: The Person You’d Like To Be, Still Riding
On Loner, Barry Can’t Swim builds on the foundations of When Will We Land? to create something more personal, expansive, and emotionally layered. Drawing from jazz, ambient, house, broken beat, and spoken word, he delivers a record that’s danceable yet introspective, mirroring his varied approach to production.
Opener The Person You’d Like To Be sets the tone and solidifies itself as a highlight of the album: eerie horns and sparse piano drift around a disembodied voice repeating, ‘Change, there is nothing permanent except change’. It’s an immersive, meditative beginning that feels emotively rich and invites inward thinking. Another standout, Still Riding showcases his lighter touch, a deceptively simple, rhythmically tight track that leans into restraint rather than the obvious drop.
What elevates Loner is Barry’s willingness to shift gears. Tracks like About To Begin burst with intense momentum, while Cars Pass By Like Childhood Sweethearts swerves into wistful jazz textures. These contrasts feel purposeful, painting a picture of dislocation and identity in flux. With Loner, Barry Can’t Swim cements himself as a boundary-pushing voice in electronic music, one fluent in mood, movement, and meaningful reflection. [Lucy Ward]
MC Yallah & Debmaster Gaudencia
Hakuna Kulala, 25 Jul rrrrr
Listen to: Yalladana, Higher, Kekasera
Gaudencia, the second LP (second and a half if you include half the tracks on 2023’s Yallah Beibe) uniting Kenya-born Uganda-raised MC Yallah and French producer Debmaster, feels like a consolidation of their chemistry, but it never quite manages to build beyond that.
The record’s at it’s best when it lets Yallah stand front and centre. Her voice is akin to Chuck D in its focused power but with a snarl that makes it so much lighter on its feet, and allows her to tear through tracks like Higher and Kekasera. Debmaster for his part knows exactly how to play to her strengths, the skeletal structures he guides her voice with are perfect, and his sledgehammer bass is the perfect mirror for Yallah’s sonorous tone.
However, where the smattering of other collaborators on Yallah Beibe gave a broader sense of what she can do over a variety of beats, things are a little more one note here, and when the beats do try for something new, they’re hit and miss. As much as the glitched stutter of Yalladana is lightning fun, the likes of Deception and Tunyedde never quite match the magnetism of her voice.
[Joe Creely]
Music Now
In July’s new Scottish music column, we look forward to released from Hannah Laing, Carsick Charlie, Annie Booth, Lomond Campbell x Dot Allison and more
Words: Tallah Brash
In amongst the rammy of June, we missed singles from Town Centre (Red Flags), Health & Beauty (Footprint), Oyakhire (Tied Up), corto.alto (Don’t Listen), Rudy Zygalo (EURASIA) and Megan Black (Clementine). On 20 June, party starters KuleeAngee released their debut EP Is It Awryt, pulling together their first four singles, plus one extra – All In – a 90-second heady blur of beats and bass. On the same day, we also missed Poundstore Diabolism, from How to Swim, the second in the Glasgow art-rockers ambitious six-album project for 2025.
From being able to swim, to not, in July Edinburgh producer Barry Can’t Swim releases his second album, Loner. Turn back a page to read the full review, where you’ll also find words on the latest from Amy Macdonald and Katie GregsonMacleod. For a much-needed shot of adrenaline, on 4 July seek out Hannah Laing’s latest EP, Into the Bounce. Part one in a trilogy of genre-focused releases that will later in the year serve fans of hard house and trance, Into the Bounce’s gut-punching techno triumvirate is bookended by collabs with Charlie Sparks and Shlømo, with Laing’s solo offering Pedicure Princess its synthetic, gurgling centre-piece.
At the opposite end of the musical spectrum, on 10 July you’ll find C2: Metamism; made for deep listening, this new concept EP from Glasgow artist Carsick Charlie explores the Roswell conspiracy. A gorgeous journey through different soundscapes, everything here feels purposeful, from the static that tingles over a muffled driving bassline on Light Trap, to the gentle snores that open and close the song; the mysterious hum of Be hangs heavy like clouds that could break at any minute, and the tinkling of piano keys and birdsong dance around hushed yet commanding vocals on Metamism. It’s the most experimental side we’ve seen so far of Carsick Charlie, and one worth leaning into.
On 18 July, Annie Booth returns with The Brace EP, her first new music since 2021’s SAY Award-nominated Lazybody. Recorded and mixed at Leith’s Knockwood Studios, on The Brace, Booth confesses, ‘I’ve forgotten who I am’ on opener Who I Am, before ‘Having some words with my ego’ on Ivar Imagined. On Spring, a season synonymous with renewal and rebirth, she devastatingly admits ‘There’s nothing left to say’, before some clarity comes on closer Notice to Leave: ‘The birds don’t look backwards / The night is upon us / And there’s not gonna be / A sky like this again’. It’s an EP that feels deeply personal, Booth’s voice at its finest when overflowing with emotion.
Following on from their debut collaborative record in 2022, Music for the Moon and Trees, childhood friends Tommy
Perman and Morgan Szymanski, from Scotland and Mexico respectively, return for round two. Trees are once again a focal point as the pair release Songs for the Mist Forest via Blackford Hill (18 Jul), a collection of 11 songs born out of the pair’s soundtrack work on the documentary film El Dragón de los Bosques de Niebla (The Dragon of the Mist Forest). Once again there’s a romantic feel to their music, although this time with an underlying sadness, the record serving as a stark reminder that the forests of Valle de Bravo, Mexico, where Szymanski lives, are under threat – Szymanski’s classical guitar playing and Perman’s electronics are tenderly matched with field recordings from the Valle de Bravo forests in a beautiful call to action.
Later in the month, Perman’s ex-bandmate Lomond Campbell (the pair used to be in FOUND together) reworks Dot Allison’s Consciousology to create Subconsciousology. Due on 25 July via Sonic Cathedral, Campbell breathes new life into Allison’s work. On opener Shyness of Crowns, bright strings still exist in tow with Allison’s inquisitive, breathy vocal, but synth blips and squelches add a new depth, like Dot Allison, but after she’s necked a ginger shot. The mournful strings and delicate hope found in the vocals of the original version of Bleached by the Sun remain, however there’s a darkness found in the rumbling depths of Campbell’s rework that’s intoxicating; there’s an elasticity, fizz and otherworldly aura now to Moon Flowers, and the gurgling and pounding techno of Weeping Roses is akin to the rejuvenating shock of jumping into an ice-cold plunge pool after a ripping hot sauna. On Subconsciousology, while the essence of Allison’s original works remains, Campbell has clearly had a lot of fun colouring inside the lines, albeit with permanent markers and neon highlighters.
Also this month, Glasgow alt-metallers Sixth Wonder release their full throttle debut EP, Prologue (2 Jul), Edinburghbased singer-songwriter Michael Steele releases Mosaic (25 Jul), and Glasgow artist Anna Secret Poet releases I Saw This and Thought of You (28 Jul). On 11 July, The Beta Band’s Three E.P.’s gets the reissue treatment, while on the same day Numbers invite you to shake it up and make it fizz with the 10th anniversary reissue of SOPHIE’s immaculate Product on vinyl, featuring two previously unreleased tracks, OOH and GET HIGHER. There are also a bunch of new singles to look out for this month from the likes of Wave of the Flood, JusHarry and pedalo
Scan the QR code to follow and like our Music Now: New Scottish Music playlist on Spotify, updated on Fridays
Photo: Robbie Crawford x Lomond Campbell
Photo: Sullman
Hannah Laing
Dot Allison and Lomond Campbell
Film of the Month — The Shrouds
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Diane Kruger, Vincent Cassel, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
RRRR R
Released 4 July by Vertigo
Certificate 15 theskinny.co.uk/film
The Shrouds will make you reevaluate all the bad first dates you’ve had. As far as terrible encounters go, it doesn’t get worse than meeting a man who invites you to watch a livestream of his wife’s corpse right after dessert. This is how David Cronenberg’s latest introduces protagonist Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a tech entrepreneur whose grief over the death of Becca (Diane Kruger) finds a compassionate, if a tad creepy, outlet.
Karsh is the head of GraveTech, a high-tech burial site that allows you to keep track of your loved ones’ decomposing bodies. The deceased is wrapped in a state-of-the-art shroud, sending signals to a tombstone screen which broadcasts a 3D, live image of the remains. It’s the ultimate romantic gesture that cheats the ‘till death do us part’ formula, but its voyeuristic pleasure risks keeping one’s pain too close for comfort.
When Karsh’s controversial graveyard is mysteriously vandalised and its network hacked, he seeks the help of Maury (Guy Pearce), who coded the project and was married to Becca’s identical twin, Terry. Karsh maintains a friendship with Terry, a pet groomer with an eye for conspiracy theories, though their relationship is complicated by his recurring horny dreams of Becca’s body mutilated by cancer.
Following up on 2022’s Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg furthers his exploration of decaying flesh and desire. With The Shrouds, he crafts a paranoid, eroticised nightmare about the ethical and environmental implications of technology in both life and death. Originally pitched as an ambitious international
series for Netflix, The Shrouds is a morbid, pulsating testament to Cronenberg’s vision. The streamer pulled out after financing the writing of the first two episodes, but their squeamishness has resulted in them missing out on a profoundly personal work. Cronenberg came up with the central concept shortly after his wife and longtime collaborator, cinematographer and producer Carolyn Zeifman, passed away in 2017. Karsh is clearly an extension of the filmmaker, with Cassel disappearing brilliantly in a grey-haired, angular Cronenberg likeness. Like his protagonist, the auteur has talked in interviews about an impulse to join his wife in her coffin as it was lowered six feet under, and had to find a way around that urge.
The 82-year-old body horror maestro hasn’t lost an ounce of his singular, skin-crawling genius, turning every frame into a gift we ought to cherish. But a flawless movie, The Shrouds is not.
Occasionally stuffed with ideas that would’ve had more room to breathe in an eight-episode arc, it doesn’t care too much about tying up its loose ends. Mirroring the protagonist’s wave of grief, The Shrouds ebbs and flows – but when it does flow, it devastates.
The movie also features Kruger’s finest performance(s) to date. The German actor takes on a trio of roles: as Becca, Terry and Karsh’s AI assistant Hunny, modelled after his late wife. Cassel’s Karsh may be the brain, but Kruger is the body, hardware and software, and that tangible cocoon of flesh and bone is what holds together this Cronenberg classic of the future.
[Stefania Sarrubba]
Scotland on Screen: Athina Rachel Tsangari on Harvest
Athina Rachel Tsangari swaps the ‘Greek Weird Wave’ for the Scottish Highlands with her elegiac period drama Harvest. Tsangari talks to us about the film’s Marmite reactions, its doom-laden atmosphere and her fondness for ambiguous characters
Words: Josh Slater-Williams
Filmography: Harvest (2024), Chevalier (2015), Attenberg (2010), The Slow Business of Going (2000)
The location of an in-person interview can inform both the mood and the questions raised. Back at the Glasgow Film Festival in March this year, I’m set to speak to Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg; Chevalier) about her newest feature, Harvest, an adaptation of Jim Crace’s Booker Prize-nominated novel, which transports the book’s English village setting to Scotland during the Middle Ages. In preparing my questions, I have a look at some things Tsangari said about the film around the time of its world premiere in Venice a few months earlier. Speaking to Savina Petkova at Cineuropa, Tsangari, discussing the range of idioms and accents in her Scotland-shot film, said with a laugh, “I think we’re going to be crucified by the Scots and the Brits.”
No better place to follow up on that topic than in Glasgow, where we meet on the day of the film’s Scottish premiere. I begin, as the very first question, with that elephant in the room: since she thought she’d “be crucified”, now that Harvest has screened at the London Film Festival and in Glasgow, how has she found the UK responses to the film? Her answer to this opener: “I mean, we got one star from The Guardian, from Peter Bradshaw. So, I call this crucifying. Ouch.” Cue the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme playing in my head.
Harvest has proven divisive on the festival circuit, and Peter Bradshaw’s pan was apparently the very first review the film’s team read after their world premiere. But Tsangari seems relaxed and appreciative about her latest movie’s Marmite qualities. “The screening at the London Film Festival in the Royal Festival Hall felt amazing,” she tells me. “The audience was very welcoming. But you know, this is not an orthodox period film.”
As mentioned, Harvest takes place sometime in the Middle Ages, but part of the allegorical film’s eerie intrigue stems from the fact that the era in which it’s set is undefined by design. Over the course of seven hallucinatory days, the residents of an unnamed Scottish village see their traditional way of life disrupted by economic turmoil and the arrival of outside forces. The ostensible leads are Walter (Caleb Landry Jones), a soulful farmer, and Master Kent (Harry Melling), the befuddled lord of the manor. The former is often found wandering lost through the movie’s strange, folk horror-tinged events, trying to make sense of the madness taking over this place; madness for which people are seeking a scapegoat. Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, Neil Leiper and Frank Dillane round out the main ensemble.
“Jim Crace’s [novel] is a radical, punk book that doesn’t follow any prescriptive recipes about the period it’s taking place in,” Tsangari tells me of the atmosphere. “It’s quite fluid with space and time. So whether [Harvest] is about the enclosure act, the [Highland] clearances or whether it’s set
today… it was not the point to be precise historically. I wasn’t really giving a damn about that. It was the opposite, actually, because I felt that doing something where you couldn’t quite place yourself made [things] stronger for the story’s relevance. It basically has never stopped happening around us.” The “it” being social upheaval through rampant capitalism.
Throughout Harvest, there’s little in the way of black-andwhite characterisation, with even the more outwardly antagonistic players – such as Dillane’s Master Jordan, who arrives at roughly the halfway point – having pretty understandable logic behind their actions. “This is what attracted me to the original novel,” Tsangari says. “And in general, that’s how I usually approach my characters, with a lack of judgement. I resist, with all my might, making ethical pronouncements or moral judgements. I leave this to the audience, who are extremely smart, don’t need their hands held and can definitely read between the lines.
“For example, Master Jordan, in a more traditional western, he would be the villain, right? But he’s actually an idealist. He’s a romantic in his own way. He’s a young, educated guy, an economist, who wants a better future for himself and for the land. The village was fucked anyway. The yield was not good enough. The moral dilemma that Jim [Crace] put forward is that something was [always] going to break. The question is how? And how do we approach the invasion of a new force? How do we resist? Do we adapt? Do we flee?”
Speaking of westerns, Bosch, Rembrandt and “anti-westerns of the 70s” were apparently among the visual references for the 16mm cinematography by “master of natural light” Sean Price Williams. “Whether it was Czech cinema, [Akira] Kurosawa or [Robert] Altman,” Tsangari says, “it was this gritty, chaotic language of nihilist westerns. Hallucinatory nihilism.” The result is one of the most visually striking films shot in Scotland in recent memory.
Newly remastered in 4K, the 2006 breakthrough film of Mamoru Hosoda (Belle, Mirai) wasn’t quite the anime titan’s first feature credit as a director – franchise films for Digimon and One Piece precede it. And it also isn’t the first film to have some variation on the catchy title The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Hosoda’s movie is in fact a fully standalone sequel to Yasutaka Tsutsui’s source novel, which has been adapted before and since 2006, but most notably in 1983 by one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers, Nobuhiko Obayashi (House, Labyrinth of Cinema), whose expressionistic films often blurred the lines between live-action and animation in thrilling ways. A tough act to follow, then, but think of Obayashi and Hosoda’s films
Director: Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Starring: Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps, Vincent Perez, Patsy Ferran, Yann Gael, Vangelis Mourikis rrrrr
The overbearing mother and the sullen, stoic daughter relationship is ripe territory for cinema, from Terms of Endearment to Mermaids to Joanna Ho ’s more recent example of the subgenre, The Eternal Daughter. But in acclaimed playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz‘s hands, Deborah Levy’s eponymous novel is less of a sun-struck examination of power dynamics between women and more of a so y sizzle, a limp beach towel of a film.
Sophie (Emma Mackey, who is all silently steel surface with no substance) is in Spain with her ailing mother (Fiona Shaw, who is excellent at playing frazzled and demanding) to find a cure for her litany of health problems. Like the best summer
as like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and its excellent first remake in 1978: Hosoda reaps rewards by doing very different, inspired things with the malleable premise.
If that Body Snatchers comparison makes either Girl Who Leapt film sound like sci-fi tinged with horror, that’s certainly not the case. But Hosoda’s thoroughly charming, beautifully bittersweet coming-of-age time-travel tale does masterfully tap into fears that plague most of us well beyond the age of its teenage protagonist, Makoto, who discovers she can journey back to her recent past at will after a near-death experience. Among those fears: how our attempts to steer other people’s lives, even with good intentions, can have devastating consequences. And if that sounds a little too heavy, rest assured that Makoto also uses her abilities to engineer ten-hour karaoke sessions. [Josh Slater-Williams]
memories of lust and love, there are clothes drenched with sweat, longing and wet from swimming in the windswept sea, and meet-cutes over cigarettes under the bleached sun.
German Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) arrives like a mirage, a beautiful, exotically older mädchen not in uniform but throwing her boots into the sea and rolling her own fags. Sophie is spellbound, but Ingrid is just another one of those tired romantic movie tropes: the manic pixie dream girl, who replies with lines like “Red shoes. A bicycle. A cat” when asked about her childhood.
Sometimes the best holiday memories don’t age well, but curdle like spoiled milk – the same goes for book-to-screen adaptations.
Encroaching modernity, class conflict and capitalism are the main threats in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s historical mystery. It’s promising material – especially as it’s anchored by the ever-compelling Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling – but Harvest never settles confidently into its tonal or thematic groove. Smatterings of the earthy, the occult, the hallucinatory and the neo-realist never coalesce into a pacy narrative, despite an explosive, barnburning opening and the fascinating historical tragedy of the Highlands Clearances against which Harvest unfolds. This is folk horror without enough of either to satisfy.
Jones plays Walter Thirsk, a villager with a chequered past and penchant for silence – playing to the actor’s strength, and the film finds its best moments when it matches
The Other Way Around Director: Jonás Trueba Starring: Itsaso Arana, Vito Sanz, Fernando Trueba rrrrr
Jonás Trueba’s un-romantic comedy
The Other Way Around has a pretty simple premise: Ale (Itsaso Arana) and Alex (Vito Sanz) are breaking up. They spend most of the movie trying to explain to their baffled friends and family that nothing has happened and no one is angry but, after 14 years together, they’ve amicably decided to go their separate ways. In fact, they’re even going to throw a big party to send their marriage off in style.
Walter’s pacing (Sean Price Williams’ cinematography marvellously captures the haunted, the outcast, and the otherwise ill at ease). Melling is Charles Kent, the well-meaning and somewhat dim lord of the manor, whose childhood friendship with Walter blinds him to the latter’s shortcomings, Charles’ own privileges, and the unnatural forces encroaching on their seemingly isolated existence. As strong as these performances are, it’s a shame no Scottish actors were trusted in any of the primary roles.
Tsangari has a clear personal affinity to this story, dedicating the film to her Greek grandparents whose farm has been turned into highways, but she conveys this better through heightened, stylistic vignettes rather than a coherent, cohesive narrative. Brilliantly atmospheric yet hampered by a disjointed plot, Harvest is a missed opportunity despite some strong individual elements. [Carmen Paddock]
Released 18 Jul by MUBI; certificate 18
clever ways to blur the line between reality and fiction – suddenly rewinding a sequence that had appeared to be taking place in the “real” world or allowing music to spill over between the two realities.
Released 4 Jul by MUBI; certificate 15
Throughout, the pair break the news to many different people, usually reciting the exact same lines as they do so. And their story soon begins to blend with scenes from a film that Ale is making so that we often see the same moment recreated, with Trueba finding plenty of
But The Other Way Around’s script is too clever for its own good. Its intentional repetitions are eventually explained as a Kierkegaardinspired idea about how the key to life and love might be learning to live the same moments over and over again. In one extremely meta scene, Ale even defends this idea explicitly after a test screening of her own film. But even once you’ve understood the point of it all, watching the same thing repeatedly recurring simply isn’t that interesting – no matter what Kierkegaard said.
[Ross McIndoe]
Released 11 Jul by AX1 Films; certificate PG
Hot Milk
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
The Other Way Around Harvest
Released 6 Jul by Anime Limited; certificate 12A
Hot Milk
PALESTINE MUSEUM SCOTLAND
A permanent space for Palestinian art and stories on Dundas Street, Edinburgh, explores themes of resistance and perseverance in the face of brutality
Europe’s first museum of contemporary Palestinian art recently opened in Edinburgh. The Palestine Museum Scotland stands on Dundas Street, famous for high-value Scottish contemporary art. Even before you enter, the building intervenes on the quiet, white box gallery street, with colourful and richly textured paintings of Palestinian women living and working in community screened on large windows. It’s a new perspective on display in our capital, a remix of traditional mediums like acrylic, oils and linen to try and distil what it means to create and be shown as people living under siege.
Just before I enter, I encounter a group who had travelled from Amsterdam to see the creative defiance of genocidal violence that we have been watching on our phone screens. Immediately, I find myself grounded in historic Palestine. That is, a map printed to fill half the floor, etching the borders of Palestine pre-Nakba. Over the map, coloured icons show the impact of violence on the landscape. Refugee camps, sites of massacres, depopulated villages and shifting armistice lines are marked out as if they are a warning to us, while we traverse the land. The only historical constant is the mountains, segregated as demilitarised zones, as the dense history, sediments and memory they possess make them inhospitable to colonisation.
There is so much to learn from the way the landscape is portrayed in the museum. Swathes of farms and water, exalted in acrylic, invoke what lies at the heart of Palestinian culture, the stewardship of land. Nabil Anani’s In Pursuit of Utopia gives a colourful, dreamlike depiction of nature undisturbed and left to flourish. Trees age from garden green to autumnal red. With a wall all to itself, you could find yourself lost in the peace of the picture, and take the question, ‘what does the Earth have to teach us, if we were to just watch’ with you for the rest of the exhibition. What we hold and can afford to let go of is a theme carried on to the left side of the first room. Sana Farah Bishara’s bronze sculpture, Woman In All Her Moods, removes the woman’s abdomen leaving only her head, shoulders, arms and long
Words: JJ Fadaka
pointed legs. It’s as if the emotion she has been made to carry has dispersed across the room and becomes part of the air we breathe in and the space we take up. In observing her, standing in historic Palestine and entering this museum, we have each committed to becoming a witness and carrying these experiences, in any small form.
Above me, I see parcels wrapped in keffiyehs, suspended from the ceiling with barbed wire. Ibrahim Alazza’s installation All That Remains quietly hovers above the work, a reminder of the resistance and need from which this building has been launched. He gives a stark reminder that these works show life amongst scarce aid and solidarity passed over borders worldwide. The wire causes me to question: where is the solidarity landing, and how can art-making circumvent the violence of occupation?
Under occupation, creativity perseveres. Maisara Baroud quietly protests I Am Still Alive with his black and white paintings, one made for
‘How can art-making circumvent the violence of occupation?’
every day he survives in Gaza. Meanwhile, Leena Nammari exposes the hypocrisy of biblical scripture used to justify occupation. With her family members, she created Biblical Jenga, olive wood and brass pieces from Bethlehem, laser engraved with curses inspired by ‘the land of the Biblical angry god.’ The artist invites learners to do what they will with this new vocabulary and ‘learn your curses well.’ There are prints of selected works for sale in the final part of the exhibition, ranging from £35-50. An offering to take a small part of the space home with you fits well with the pared-back ending of the exhibition. This room features smaller works, with a wider range of artists, most of whom have modestly presented their work on paper. The quick flashes of Palestinian life, culture, and belonging are reminiscent of contemporary practice and
resistance efforts still in motion. Just before leaving, I sat with Nameer Qassim’s Enough, a large acrylic painting on canvas. Qassim mosaics the face of a woman from multiple squares of colour. She wears a patterned headband and reaches her arms above her head, crossed at the wrists. The textures of the acrylic are palpable, inviting you closer and closer into the sediment of the image. The history and movements that have informed our recognition of her resistance are as innumerable as the squares in front of you. We’ve played a small, residual part in naming and seeking answers to the contemporary moment. In this exhibition, we trace the steps leading up to and after suppression.
Palestine Museum Edinburgh, 13A Dundas St palestinemuseum.us
Spring Mourning, Haya Ka'abneh
Image: Courtesy Palestine Museum
KING OF FEASTS @ THE HANGING BAT, EDINBURGH
We check out the latest residency from King of Feasts, currently occupying Edinburgh’s The Hanging Bat
133 Lothian Rd, Edinburgh, EH3 9AB; bar open Sun-Thu, noon12am, Fri-Sat noon-1am thehangingbat.com
Oh, memories. Our visit to King of Feasts’ residency at the Polwarth Tavern was our first piece of food writing post-lockdown. In case you missed it four years ago, here are the notes: it was punishingly hot outside; lots of extremely a ressive but absolutely delicious sauces; a delightfully gooey scotch e Suffice it to say things are different in 2025, but we are once again out and about amid a spectacular mini-heatwave for dinner at King of Feasts. This time, though, things are a lot bi er. It’s a much larger menu than in those Polwarth days, and a much bi er space, with the King taking up residence at The Hanging Bat.
We’ll get to the food in a minute, but first a word for The Hanging Bat. The venerable craft beer bar has been one of the focal points of Edinburgh’s beer scene for the last decade or so; after a bit of recent uncertainty, the Leeds-based Northern Monk brewery have taken the reins. On a first visit, not a huge amount appears to have changed – although the tap list definitely features more of the Monk’s beers than last time – but there’s something reassuring about that continuity. The Hanging Bat does craft beer, the new owners do craft beer, let’s all have a delicious craft beer.
And what goes better with a tasty beer than a bunch of exciting fried things? That’s always been a
key point in the King of Feasts plan, and the good news is that’s mostly carried over to the new space. There is real skill in getting a basket of tater tots or onion rings (£4/5) just right; soft and near-caramelised inside, carapace like a crab’s shell on the outside. The chicken tenders (£8) don’t quite hit the same heights, but the popcorn ha is melts (£8) are a classic bit of savoury nonsense that we could eat all day long. A mix of ha is and cheese in a crunchy falafel-esque outer, sat on a bed of brilliantly fiery and deliciously creamy peppercorn sauce; these are genuinely fantastic, and an example of this sort of elevated maximalism working perfectly.
It’s when we step away from the ‘crunchy chunk with wild accompaniment’ dynamic that things go off the rails. A chicken caesar salad (£14) should be a zingy, decadent excuse to eat a bunch of cheese, fat and meat and still call it healthy, but our salad feels very underpowered. It’s barely dressed at all, so everything feels disconnected. What dressing makes it through is tasty, but King of Feasts has never exactly traded on subtlety (entirely complimentary) so it can’t really stand toe-to-toe with the likes of those ha is-cheesepeppercorn fellas from before. There just isn’t the textural or flavour contrast to make this work; the chicken lacks a bit of oomph, the croutons are nice but we’re paying £14 for a salad and one of the kindest things we can say about it is ‘the croutons are nice’. The caesar salad profile – lemon, mustard, anchovy, big umami flavours – should be well within the KoF ballpark, but this one was a swing and a miss. Things pick up when it comes to the old stalwart of King of Feasts – sandwiches. The One True Monk (£10) brings a big hunk of crunchy fried chicken, an inscrutable but delicious fast food-inspired sauce and the unmistakable twang of American sliced cheese. The Butter Aubergine (£10) is an enormous flatbread stuffed with fried
aubergine, lime pickle, a butter curry sauce, lime pickle, a poppadom to give it a bit of recurring crunch, and tell you what there’s definitely some lime pickle in there. It’s tangy, it’s sloppy, it’s very very limey and it’s pretty damn tasty. Plus, it’s always nice to see the vegetarians get an option that’s just as unhinged as the meat-eaters.
This move to The Hanging Bat does look set to benefit everyone involved – on opening weekend, the pub was packed despite it being the hottest day of the year so far; clearly word of the King has spread far and wide. A bi er space and bi er menu will bring growing pains, but the good news is there are still a few knockouts on this menu. If the ‘more is more’ mentality that’s made King of Feasts so effective can be applied right across the board, this king’s reign could continue for a while yet.
Words: Peter Simpson
Image: courtesy of King Of Feasts
Image: courtesy of King Of Feasts
Death and the Gardener
By Georgi Gospodinov rrrrr
Georgi Gospodinov returns to shelves with his latest book, Death and the Gardener – a gentle exploration into his relationship with his dying father. Gospodinov picks through the weeds of time to explore the symbiotic relationship his father kept with the plants he tended, and the metaphor of the body as a garden, paralleled with the covert and destructive nature of cancer.
Gospodinov recalls the pride and purpose gardening gave his father throughout his cancer treatment, but also the exertion that the labour claimed from a man already battling his own body. With the act of gardening, Gospodinov examines a dignity afforded to his father, the desperate desire to feel useful through doing in the face of illness and a connection with nature. He illuminates his father’s love for gardening, his repotting of dark-blue tulips from Holland with every house move and the powerlessness of watching a parent dwindle before one’s eyes; the childish yet acute fear of abandonment.
Gospodinov handles parental death with deft sensitivity, his memories brief and rounded. He returns to his introduction to death as a child, remembering the understanding that loss is not limited to the young, as sobs of a neighbour echo along a street after the death of his granddaughter. With his words, Gospodinov handles the subject with immense care – repotting difficult and delicate memories of his father onto the page. [Josephine Jay]
Moderation
By Elaine Castillo rrrrr
Moderation is Elaine Castillo’s much-anticipated sophomore novel, and follows Girlie Delmundo, a content moderator for a social media company fla ing and removing the most heinous content on the internet. Girlie is excellent at her job, partly because of her learned behaviour of compartmentalising and emotionally dissociating. When she’s offered a new position with a shiny paycheck and her own office, Girlie accepts the company’s offer to moderate their new virtual-reality theme park of historical civilisations. Girlie begins to unravel something rotten in the code of the company while battling with her growing attraction to William Cheung, her new boss and the co-founder of the company.
Girlie is a fascinating protagonist: a Filipina living in the US, she’s distant and composed on the surface but the reader is treated to her snarky inner monologue. Castillo is skilled at writing flawed and layered characters which the reader can’t help but root for, and the slow fall of Girlie and William’s defences is a necessary core of earnest vulnerability in this world of cold cynical tech. Castillo deftly explores the friction between innovation and ethics, interrogating Meta’s dogma of ‘move fast break things.’ Moderation is a compelling blend of speculative and literary fiction, with a touching slow-burn romance woven throughout, which underscores the human need for connection. [Katalina Watt]
By Daniela Catrileo, trans. Jacob Edelstein rrrrr
The Chilco of Chilean writer Daniela Catrileo’s debut novel Chilco is an island, and mainlander Marina, better known as Mari, has moved there with her partner Pascale who was born and raised on the island before being forced to leave. Mari declares that there is a smell, or more specifically a ‘scent,’ in her house but it is one which it appears only she can detect, much to the annoyance and suspicion of those locals who visit. Their reaction leads Mari to believe that this scent may be coming from inside her and no amount of cleaning can fix that. In this apparently simple premise lies the heart of Chilco and its themes of difference, belonging, identity, and the Other.
Chilco is a place of richness and ripeness that could only come from the natural world and Mari’s former life in Capital City had none of that, increasingly a place of decay and destruction. Mari and Pascale leave when life in the city becomes unbearable, with buildings literally falling down around their ears. The commentary on the failures of capitalism is clear, but there is something more essential being explored, questions of human nature. In a manner which will resonate with most, Chilco manages to capture how place helps define those from there, often in ways which are imperceptible. [Alistair Braidwood]
Songs of No Provenance
By Lydi Conklin rrrrr
Joan Vole is an almost-famous folk singer, living off of small venues and self-produced albums. After an on-stage moment of sexually explicit madness, she flees the city, takes a teaching gig and tries to figure out what to do with the pieces of her newly exploded life.
Lydi Conklin’s writing mirrors the punky folk style of her protagonist. The language of Songs of No Provenance is largely straightforward but there’s something ja ed and discordant about it too. Every so often you snag upon a sentence that won’t quite smooth itself out, even if you go back over it two or three time. But its greatest strength is the way it pushes us into Joan’s perspective, complete with all of her blind spots. They’re never explicitly pointed out, but we can see all the places where Joan’s vision of herself, the world and her place within it doesn’t quite jive with reality.
As Joan turns the events of that fateful night over in her mind, Songs of No Provenance explores and re-explores ideas about artistic ethics, boundaries, gender lines and sexual borders in a way that’s often insightful and always empathetic. Unfortunately, it continues to revolve around these ideas after it has run out of fresh revelations, leading to a final third where introspection gives way to something more like navelgazing, albeit with the gaze fixed a few inches further south.
[Ross McIndoe]
Orion, 10 Jul
Atlantic Books, 3 Jul
Charco Press, 15 Jul
& Windus, 10 Jul
Chilco
Chatto
Behind
Katie Palmer, head honcho at Brass Tacks Comedy, tells us how the production company came about and her big summer plans
Words: Polly Glynn
Tell me about Brass Tacks Comedy
Brass Tacks Comedy is a female-founded, Scottish, comedy production company. We reduce barriers to comedy and provide meaningful, affordable support to artists who’ve historically been left out of the industry. It’s also about celebrating standup as an artform, where comedy nerds can feel part of something and casual comedy goers can feel less overwhelmed with what to see.
How did it come about?
I launched it at the beginning of 2024, out of a love of stand-up comedy and frustration at people who say they ‘don’t enjoy comedy’ – I genuinely believe anyone who says that just hasn’t seen the comedy for them yet – and the lack of attention Scottish acts get across the UK comedy industry.
I’d been working in comedy for years and would drag friends to shows, make them watch the specials I loved, and tell them about new acts I’d seen, whether they liked it or not. A comedian pal said I should be “stand-up comedy’s agent” and so Brass Tacks was born – initially as an Instagram page to promote great comedy happening in Scotland. It quickly developed into Fringe production, touring, workshops, mentorship, mini festivals and more.
What was the first Brass Tacks project?
Producing and directing Grace Mulvey’s Edinburgh Fringe run in 2024. I’d heard about stand-up directors and it sounded like the best job, so I asked on Instagram if any comic pals would let me give it a bash, and found Grace. That escalated into producing and working with Amy Annette too. I could not have asked for two better Fringe runs. Amy sold out hers (including two extra shows), and Grace’s show was named by Rolling Stone as one of the 12 stand-out shows of the Fringe.
How did your two funded Fringe debuts come about?
I was desperate to do something to support Scottish comics who felt consistently overlooked and priced out of the Fringe. I put together a sponsorship pack, sent it to over 100 businesses, and Red Bull UK bought into the idea. They’ve been brilliant ever since and really engaged with supporting local talent. Ayo Adenekan is debuting this year without the financial burden. And from the 50 applications we got, I just adored Jack Traynor too and knew he needed support, so Blackfriars in Glasgow stepped up and said “How can we help?” So now they’re supporting Jack’s debut too. It’s fantastic to see tangible support go to artists who need it, and it really could set them up for life.
Who would be your dream act to work with and why?
This is so cheesy but at the beginning of this year I wrote down a list of acts I wanted for the Fringe 2025, and Ayo and Jack were on that list. I’m obsessed with both of them, and to support two incredibly talented young comics from Scotland, who felt the Fringe was too expensive, and are so different to each other, is a total dream come true.
What’s been your best bit of advice from running Brass Tacks?
It’s always been ‘if you don’t ask you don’t get.’ My whole life I’ve stumbled into dream jobs because I emailed someone and said “any chance I can do this?” And that mentality is exactly how the two funded Fringes came about.
Who should we look out for on the comedy scene?
This is so hard! Jack and Ayo, obviously. Ifrah Qureshi, Maddie Fernando and Rowan Hackett are all fairly new and you’d never know from watching them. Plus a hidden gem gig is the Roast Battle at Monkey Barrel each month, run by Ryan Cullen who’s one of my favourites. People think it’ll be dark and edgy and mean, and it is a wee bit, but it’s so fun and silly too.
Who’s the funniest comedian you’ve seen and why?
Absolutely Rosco McClelland. He’s someone I would confidently recommend to anyone regardless of their comedy preferences. So silly, so chaotic in all the best ways. He can do material on fatal heart conditions or drying himself with a towel and it’s never not hilarious.
What’s next for Brass Tacks?
We’re bringing six incredible shows to the Fringe: Amy Annette, Ayo Adenekan, Grace Mulvey, Jack Traynor, Jodie Sloan and Tamsyn Kelly. Plus, from 4 to 6 July we’ve partnered with Blackfriars for a ‘Fringe for a Fiver’ weekend – three days packed with some of the bi est and best comedians in Scotland, including Kim Blythe and Larry Dean, all previewing their Fringe shows, for only £5 each.
Fringe for a Fiver runs at Blackfriars, Glasgow, 4-6 Jul; Full lineup and tickets available at brasstackscomedy.com/fringe-for-a-fiver
Tickets for Brass Tacks Comedy’s Fringe roster available at edfringe.com
Keep up to date with Brass Tacks Comedy on instagram @brasstackscomedy or sign up to their mailing list via subscribepage.io/brasstackscomedy
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
Mon 30 Jun
IRON MAIDEN
THE OVO HYDRO Heavy metal from the UK.
JAPANESE BREAKFAST
BARROWLANDS Indie pop from Philadelphia.
Tue 1 Jul
REMY BOND
KING TUT'S Pop from the US.
LUCY DACUS
BARROWLANDS Indie from the US.
DESTINY BOND (BIG LAUGH) THE HUG AND PINT Rock from Denver. THE BACKSEAT LOVERS
SWG3 Indie rock from the US.
CALL ME MALCOLM (THE KITTYHAWKS)
NICE 'N' SLEAZY Ska-punk from Kent.
Wed 2 Jul
NICK SHOULDERS
MONO Country from the US.
SOPHIE B HAWKINS
KING TUT'S Pop rock from New York.
MOLDER (KONTUSION) THE HUG AND PINT Death metal from the US.
MIND CHARITY GIG (KIAN + GASP + TOMMO + RAH.)
NICE 'N' SLEAZY Alternative from Glasgow.
Thu 3 Jul
SAWYER HILL
KING TUT'S Rock from Arkansas.
ESKRÖTA (NORTH OF RUINS + STOP THE SUNS FROM SETTING) THE HUG AND PINT Hardcore from Brazil.
THE UPPER STRATA (LEANOVER + MALLET SPACE)
THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Indie from the US. MATTHEW NOLAN SWG3 Singer-songwriter from Ireland.
ROCK & MAYHEM (THE PATIENT + RECKAGE) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Rock from Glasgow. THE ALLERGIES STEREO Producer from Bristol.
Fri 4 Jul
GIRLS.SPEAK.FRENCH KING TUT'S Alt indie from Glasgow.
JOSH ROUSE THE HUG AND PINT Indie folk from Nebraska. WAYLON WYATT ST LUKE'S Country from Arkansas. DIVING HORSE STEREO Post-punk from Glasgow.
Sat 5 Jul
ALANIS MORISSETTE THE OVO HYDRO Pop from Canada. LOW LIGHT LISTENING LOUNGE (FLOWER MARKET + HEAVYSKINT) THE HUG AND PINT Indie rock from Glasgow.
ROBERT DALLAS GRAY + M. JOHN HENRY THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Indie rock.
SAVE FACE (ESTHER'S WIFE + LEWIS BRENNAN) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Folk and alt rock from Glasgow. THE HEAVY NORTH STEREO Rock from Liverpool.
Sun 6 Jul
COLONEL MUSTARD & THE DIJON 5 ORAN MOR Alt rock from Scotland.
HOTTER THAN JULY: THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT THE RUM SHACK Funk and soul.
Mon 7 Jul
BILLIE EILISH THE OVO HYDRO Pop from the US. BILL CALLAHAN ORAN MOR Alt indie from the US. SPARTA THE HUG AND PINT Rock from Texas. THE DARTS THE RUM SHACK Rock from Scotland.
Tue 8 Jul
BILLIE EILISH THE OVO HYDRO Pop from the US. KNEECAP
O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Rap from Belfast. Wed 9 Jul
MIWA NAGATOAPTHORP (MARA SIMPSON + GRACE HONEYWELL) THE HUG AND PINT Folk from Hawick.
PUMICE (RICHARD YOUNGS + CHRISTOPHER THOMAS FAILURE) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Folk from New Zealand. LEENALCHI STEREO Pop from South Korea. Thu 10 Jul
NANO THE GARAGE GLASGOW J-pop from the US. KAONASHI (DORMANT + GOUT + SILKSPINE) THE HUG AND PINT Metalcore from Philadelphia.
MADDY RINGO + IONA FYFE THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Folk lineup.
LONELY DAZE NICE 'N' SLEAZY Alt rock from Glasgow.
Fri 11 Jul
CALLUM STEWART
THE GARAGE GLASGOW Singer-songwriter. THE DOOBIE BROTHERS THE OVO HYDRO Rock from California. GOODBYE MR MACKENZIE
ORAN MOR Rock from Scotland. KING OF BIRDS THE RUM SHACK Country rock. MIC RIGHTEOUS SWG3 Rap from the UK. THE BODIES (OLD SALTY + MOJO CAKE) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Alt rock from Glasgow. ENERGY DOME THE FLYING DUCK Hardcore from Glasgow.
Sat 12 Jul
DIE TWICE (BAD KNEES + DELAP) THE HUG AND PINT Indie rock from the UK. CLEAVERS THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Punk from Scotland. COUNTRY CLUB SWG3 Country.
AUGER
NICE 'N' SLEAZY Pop rock from the UK. SLUG ALL DAYER THE FLYING DUCK Eclectic lineup.
Sun 13 Jul
HAIL THE SUN THE GARAGE GLASGOW Post-hardcore from California. APPARATUS (SENTIMENT + SUGAR DARLING)
NICE 'N' SLEAZY Rock.
Mon 14 Jul
ALLIE X ORAN MOR Pop from Canada. JESSICA PRATT ST LUKE'S Alt indie from LA.
LYRIC SWG3 Singer-songwriter from Australia.
Tue 15 Jul
CHEEKFACE + MARTHA (FRESH) ST LUKE'S Indie.
Wed 16 Jul
LEFT LANE CRUISER NICE 'N' SLEAZY Blues rock from Indiana.
Thu 17 Jul
ANTHONY GOMES ORAN MOR Blues rock.
ALCATRAZ KING TUT'S Alt rock from Glasgow. CAMERON STEWART
GRANT (ERIFF + MYSTERY GIFT) THE HUG AND PINT Singer-songwriter from Scotland.
DOSS X CROP ROT THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Indie punk.
GLOOM COOKIE (FIRING AT STATUES + VENUS IN THE LAKE)
NICE 'N' SLEAZY Emo from Paisley.
Fri 18 Jul
NIAMH MORRIS KING TUT'S Singer-songwriter from Glasgow.
JAMES KING AND THE LONEWOLVES (SCORPIO LEISURE)
CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART Rock from Glasgow. COWBOY HUNTERS + DINOSAUR 94 THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Eclectic lineup.
MILLAR SWG3 Hip-hop lineup from Scotland.
HAZY SUNDAYS (SEX ON TV + LOCAL AUTHORITY ) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Indie rock from Glasgow.
Sat 19 Jul
PETER CAT RECORDING CO. THE GARAGE GLASGOW Alt rock from India. SOLASTA KING TUT'S Folk from London. SLUTS OF TRUST (HOLOGRAPH + ESCAPE GOATS) THE HUG AND PINT Rock from Glasgow. WILL STRATTON (TRIPPERS & ASKERS) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Indie.
THE REYTONS SWG3 Rock from South Yorkshire. DES DEMONAS THE FLYING DUCK Punk from Washington DC. Sun 20 Jul THE VIOLETS (FLAME + FATALE + SNAILS FROM JUPITER) KING TUT'S Neo-psych from Glasgow. YOUTH FOUNTAIN (DYING GIANT) THE HUG AND PINT Pop punk from Canada. PERSISTENT AND NASTY + AND FRIENDS THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Eclectic lineup. Mon 21 Jul
THE CRIBS SWG3 Garage rock from the UK. SPIDERBAIT STEREO Alt rock from Australia.
Tue 22 Jul
LEON BRIDGES BARROWLANDS Neo-soul from Atlanta. THE GREAT PLEASURE STEREO Jazz from Scotland. Wed 23 Jul
LIL TECCA BARROWLANDS Rap from the US.
NAKED ACTRESS (VIGILANTI) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Hard rock.
WEATHERDAY STEREO Emo noise from Sweden.
Thu 24 Jul
LAMAYA
KING TUT'S Soul from East Kilbride.
GURRY WURRY (CLONEASAURUS + JULIA'S BUREAU) THE HUG AND PINT Alt pop from Edinburgh. SLUG (STANLEY WELCH + BOAB + SULKA) STEREO Rock from Glasgow. TERRIFIER UK: BITEWOUND & TERRORIST PVHC (SWARMS + FRAIL + SCREWDRIVER LOBOTOMY + SLEPT ON) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Beatdown from the UK and Italy. Fri 25 Jul
NEONWAVES THE GARAGE GLASGOW Indie rock from Glasgow. IN VERTIGO (ROGER BACON + THE HERITAGE + DELIRIUM) KING TUT'S Hard rock from Canada.
W.A.S.P.
O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Heavy metal from the US. LAURA SILVERSTONE (RAFF + DEVON CASSON) THE HUG AND PINT Singer-songwriter from Scotland. THE WAR AND TREATY ST LUKE'S Country from the US.
RIDERS OF ROHAN + FLICKERS FROM THE FEN + MOUNTAINFOG THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Metal.
KING NOBODY THE FLYING DUCK Rock from Glasgow. RAIDAX (WHISSKER + PIRAH) STEREO Metal from Scotland.
Sat 26 Jul
HOSPITAL CORNER (ARRAN HOPKINS + CASPERS RIDGE + HAVER) KING TUT'S Rock from Edinburgh. ARCHI (GEORGE ERITH) THE HUG AND PINT Indie from the UK. CAMP TRANS PRESENTS A NIGHT OF CABARET STEREO Burlesque. Sun 27 Jul
PORTLAND KING TUT'S Dream pop from Belgium. AMY PAPIRANSKY THE HUG AND PINT Trad from Scotland. FANNY LUMSDEN NICE 'N' SLEAZY Singer-songwriter from Australia.
HELEN ISLAND THE FLYING DUCK Electro pop from Paris.
Tue 29 Jul
YNGWIE MALMSTEEN THE GARAGE GLASGOW Rock from Sweden.
Edinburgh Music
Mon 30 Jun
LUCY DACUS USHER HALL Indie from the US. Tue 1 Jul
PSYCLON NINE (ANTANIA + PRETTY ADDICTED) BANNERMANS Metal from San Francisco.
Regular Glasgow club nights
The Rum Shack
SATURDAYS (LAST OF EVERY OTHER MONTH)
VOCAL OR VERSION, 21:00
Vintage Jamaican music on original vinyl by resident DJs and guests.
Sub Club
FRIDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) RETURN TO MONO SLAM’s monthly Subbie residency sees them joined by some of the biggest names in international techno.
Regular Edinburgh club nights
Cabaret
Voltaire
FRIDAYS
FLY CLUB, 23:00
Edinburgh and Glasgowstraddling night, with a powerhouse of local residents joined by a selection of guest talent.
SATURDAYS
PLEASURE, 23:00
Regular Saturday night at Cab Vol, with residents and occasional special guests.
The Bongo Club
TUESDAYS
MIDNIGHT BASS, 23:00
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, 23 00
Sound system and crew, part of a music and art collective specialising in BASS music.
FRIDAYS (MONTHLY, WEEK CHANGES)
SOUND SYSTEM LEGACIES, 23 00
Exploring the legacy of dub, reggae and roots music and sound system culture in the contemporary club landscape.
FRIDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH)
DISCO MAKOSSA, 23 00
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, 23 00
A safe space to appreciate all things rave, jungle, breakbeat and techno.
SARAH BLASKO (SLOW LEAVES) THE CAVES Indie rock from Australia. THE TESKEY BROTHERS
USHER HALL Soul from Australia.
Wed 2 Jul
LUKE DE-SCISCIO + RAPT
SNEAKY PETE'S Folk from Bath
Thu 3 Jul
NEW YORK PIG
FUNKERS THE VOODOO ROOMS Punk funk from Edinburgh.
SISTER MADDS
SNEAKY PETE'S Pop-rock from Glasgow.
Fri 4 Jul
MISTY BLUES
BAND (THE JAMES EMMANUEL BAND) THE VOODOO ROOMS Blues from the US.
SATURDAYS SUBCULTURE, 23:00
Long-running house night with residents Harri & Domenic, oft’ joined by a carousel of super fresh guests.
SATURDAYS (FIRST OR SECOND OF THE MONTH)
MESSENGER, 23 00
Roots reggae rocking since 1987 – foundation tune, fresh dubs, vibes alive, rockers, steppers, rub-a-dub.
SATURDAYS (MONTHLY )
CHROMATIC, 23 00
Championing all things UKG, grime, dubstep, bass and more, with disco, funk and soul from Mumbo Jumbo upstairs.
SATURDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH)
PULSE, 23 00
Techno night started in 2009 hosting regular special guests from the international scene.
SATURDAYS (MONTHLY )
HOBBES MUSIC X CLUB NACHT, 23:00
A collaboration between longrunning club night and Edinburgh record label ft. house, techno, electro, UKG and bass.
Sneaky Pete’s
MONDAYS RIDE N BOUNCE, 23:00 R‘n’B, pop, rap and hip-hop bangers every Monday.
TUESDAYS
RARE, 23:00
House, UKG and occasional techno from special guest DJs and rising locals.
THURSDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)
VOLENS CHORUS, 23:00
Resident DJs with an eclectic, global outlook.
FRIDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) HOT MESS, 23:00
A night for queer people and their friends.
SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)
SOUL JAM, 23:00
Monthly no-holds-barred, down-and-dirty disco.
DIGGETH BANNERMANS Metal.
MIKE MCKENZIE SNEAKY PETE'S Indie-pop form Edinburgh.
Sat 5 Jul THE ALLERGIES THE VOODOO ROOMS Indie from Bristol. DAWN LANDES THE VOODOO ROOMS Singer-songwriter from North Carolina. SO BORING SNEAKY PETE'S Shoegaze from Edinburgh. CLASS OF ‘79 LA BELLE ANGELE Punk and New Wave.
Sun 6 Jul THE PASTELS THE VOODOO ROOMS Indie rock from Scotland. THE HEAVY NORTH THE CAVES Rock from Liverpool.
SUNDAYS POSTAL, 23:00
Bass, breaks, grime and more from a selection of Cowgate all stars.
The Liquid Room
SATURDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)
REWIND, 22:30
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 POPTASTIC, 22:00
Pop, requests and throwbacks to get your week off to an energetic start.
TUESDAYS
TRASH TUESDAY, 22:00
Alternative Tuesday anthems cherry picked from genres of rock, indie, punk, retro and more.
WEDNESDAYS
COOKIE WEDNESDAY, 22:00
90s and 00s cheesy pop and modern chart anthems.
THURSDAYS HI-SOCIETY THURSDAY, 22:00 Student anthems and bangerz.
FRIDAYS
FLIP FRIDAY, 22:00
Yer all-new Friday at Hive. Cheap entry, inevitably danceable, and noveltystuffed. Perrrfect.
SATURDAYS BUBBLEGUM, 22:00
Saturday mix of chart and dance, with retro 80s classics thrown in for good measure.
SUNDAYS
SECRET SUNDAY, 22:00
Two rooms of all the chart, cheese and indie-pop you can think of/handle on a Sunday.
Subway
Cowgate
MONDAYS
TRACKS, 21:00
Blow the cobwebs off the week with a weekly Monday night party with some of Scotland’s biggest and best drag queens.
TUESDAYS
TAMAGOTCHI, 22:00
Throwback Tuesdays with non-stop 80s, 90s, 00s tunes.
WEDNESDAYS
TWISTA, 22:00
Banger after banger all night long.
THURSDAYS
FLIRTY, 22:00
Pop, cheese and chart.
FRIDAYS
FIT FRIDAYS, 22:00
Chart-topping tunes perfect for an irresistible sing and dance-along.
SATURDAYS
SLICE SATURDAY, 22:00
The drinks are easy and the pop is heavy.
SUNDAYS
SUNDAY SERVICE, 22:00
Atone for the week before and the week ahead with non-stop dancing. The Mash House
TUESDAYS MOVEMENT, 20:00
House, techno, drum ‘n’ bass and garage.
SATURDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)
SAMEDIA SHEBEEN, 23:00
Joyous global club sounds: think Afrobeat, Latin and Arabic dancehall on repeat.
SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)
PULSE, 23:00
The best techno DJs sit alongside The Mash House resident Darrell Pulse.
AMANN & THE WAYWARD SONS BANNERMANS Blues rock from Spain.
EDINBURGH JAZZ & BLUES FESTIVAL: JULIAN LAGE TRIO
THE QUEEN'S HALL Jazz and blues from the US.
Thu 17 Jul
THE BATHERS THE VOODOO ROOMS Chamber pop from Scotland.
SURFACE SESSIONS
SNEAKY PETE'S Multi-genre from Edinburgh.
EDINBURGH JAZZ & BLUES FESTIVAL: CURTIS STIGERS
THE QUEEN'S HALL Jazz and blues from the US.
Fri 18 Jul
SPARKS THE EDINBURGH PLAYHOUSE Pop rock from the US.
TYLA'S DOGS D'AMOUR (SATELLITE KIDS) BANNERMANS Hard rock from London.
DOSS & CROP ROT
SNEAKY PETE'S Electronic punk from Glasgow.
EDINBURGH JAZZ & BLUES FESTIVAL: COLIN STEELE: STRAMASH
THE QUEEN'S HALL Jazz and blues from Scotland.
Sat 19 Jul
YOUTH FOUNTAIN
SNEAKY PETE'S Emo from Vancouver.
EDINBURGH JAZZ & BLUES FESTIVAL: CORTO.ALTO THE QUEEN'S HALL Jazz and blues from Scotland.
TEN
LA BELLE ANGELE Rock. DEAD ENDZ THE MASH HOUSE Hip-hop.
Sun 20 Jul
EDINBURGH JAZZ & BLUES FESTIVAL: KENNY WAYNE
SHEPHERD + BOBBY RUSH THE QUEEN'S HALL Jazz and blues from the US.
Tue 22 Jul
BLACK FOXXES
SNEAKY PETE'S Indie rock from Exeter. Wed 23 Jul
ALICE COOPER THE EDINBURGH PLAYHOUSE Rock from the US. THE IDIOTIX BANNERMANS Rock from the Highlands.
KASABIAN
NASH AT THE MASH THE MASH HOUSE Country.
Fri 11 Jul
MIRANDA SEX GARDEN THE VOODOO ROOMS Goth rock from London. IRON VOID (CARDINALS FOLLY ) BANNERMANS Metal from Yorkshire.
HARRY MILESWATSON + NED ASHCROFT
SNEAKY PETE'S Post-punk from Edinburgh. Sat 12 Jul
CIAN DUCROT USHER HALL Singer-songwriter from Ireland. FRAGILE ANIMALS THE MASH HOUSE Indie pop.
Dundee Music
Sat 5 Jul
EMERALD SUNDAY
CHURCH Indie rock from Scotland. Fri 11 Jul
HOMETRUTHS BEAT GENERATOR LIVE! Pop punk.
Glasgow Clubs
Fri 4 Jul
SPIRIT: SNPLO + BAKE SUB CLUB Techno. I LOVE ACID PRESENTS: PAURRO & JON DASILVA THE BERKELEY SUITE House and acid. DISCLAIMER PRES GAU7 T LA CHEETAH CLUB House and garage. RECOVER TO BOUNCE SWG3 Trance. ELANDA NICE 'N' SLEAZY Electronica and dubstep. NECTAR GLADE (SEVARYA + ENTHER. ENTHER + LUCKYBABE + RENEÉ) STEREO Techno and bass.
Sat 5 Jul
THE BERKELEY SUITE PRESENTS EROL ALKAN THE BERKELEY SUITE Techno. CHARLIE BONES THE RUM SHACK Club. FORTIFIED: HORSEPOWER PRODUCTIONS THE FLYING DUCK Garage and dubstep. MANU FACTURER NICE 'N' SLEAZY Techno. ACT NATURAL NICE 'N' SLEAZY House and Italo disco. BREAK AWAY (CALZO FM + JO -HANN + FINNFM + ORLA HALLIGAN) STEREO Breakbeat.
Fri 11 Jul
Fri 18 Jul
BREATHE: PANGAEA
SUB CLUB House and techno. POLKA DOT DISCO CLUB THE BERKELEY SUITE Disco and house.
313 CONNECTION: A NIGHT OF DETROIT MUSIC IN GLASGOW WITH KAIROGEN & UNDERCURRENT LA CHEETAH CLUB Electro and deep house. HOLLY CALDER & FRIENDS
NICE 'N' SLEAZY Psych, garage and rock. DISCOUNT DISCO
NICE 'N' SLEAZY House and disco.
PEDESTRIANISM #3: AUDIO ARSONISTS GARAGE AND JUNGLE. Glasgow.
Sat 19 Jul
QUEER HISTORY OF DANCE MUSIC/BUM NOTES PRESENT... PRIDE @ MONO SUB CLUB House and disco.
SHOOT YOUR SHOT
PRIDE: ANGEL D'LITE THE BERKELEY SUITE House and techno.
DANSE MACABRE THE FLYING DUCK Italo disco.
Sun 20 Jul
SHOOT YOUR SHOT PRIDE: ROMY THE BERKELEY SUITE House.
Fri 25 Jul
CÉLESTE W/ ****** THE BERKELEY SUITE Techno.
LUNACY X SUNNY SIDE UP THE FLYING DUCK House and techno.
JOHN BAILLIE JNR NICE 'N' SLEAZY House, Italo disco and electro.
LUÜMA NICE 'N' SLEAZY Dancehall and dub. JOHNNY JOHNNY RECORDS (MAGDA + MODAT + SHARKEYS MACHINE) STEREO Minimal techno.
Sat 26 Jul
Fri 4 Jul
LA DOLCE VITA & QUALITY EVENTS OPEN DECKS CABARET VOLTAIRE House.
SUMMERTIME SADNESS LA BELLE ANGELE Pop. QUALITY EVENTS THE MASH HOUSE Garage. CONTRAST CAGE PRESENTS D.N.P THE MASH HOUSE Techno.
Sat 5 Jul
LUCKY DIP SNEAKY PETE'S Leftfield bass. BACK TO THE 80S LA BELLE ANGELE 80s pop. RELIVE (DAY RAVE) THE MASH HOUSE House and trance. ALIEN DISKO THE MASH HOUSE Drum 'n' bass and jungle. Wed 9 Jul
KATALYSIS SNEAKY PETE'S Hard dance.
Thu 10 Jul
CANDYFLIP: PIRAPUS THE BONGO CLUB
Sun 13 Jul
MORGAN SZYMANSKI + TOMMY PERMAN
THE VOODOO ROOMS Instrumental from Scotland.
HEAVY PETTIN BANNERMANS Metal from Glasgow.
MICHAEL MORROW & THE CULPRITS (TWENTY GAUGE) BANNERMANS Rock from the US.
Mon 14 Jul ON THE CINDER (THE ANTI- QUEENS) BANNERMANS Punk rock from New York.
HANNAH JUANITA
SNEAKY PETE'S Country from Tennessee.
Wed 16 Jul
THE BATHERS THE VOODOO ROOMS Chamber pop from Scotland.
EDINBURGH CORN EXCHANGE Rock from Leicester. COPPER LUNGS
SNEAKY PETE'S Rock from Dundee.
Thu 24 Jul
JOANOVARC (NOT NOW NORMAN) BANNERMANS Rock from the UK.
Fri 25 Jul
DESERT STORM (FAMYNE + SOLAR SONS) BANNERMANS Metal from Oxford. Sat 26 Jul
BURNT OUT WRECK BANNERMANS Hard rock from the UK. Sun 27 Jul
RAMAGE INC BANNERMANS Prog metal from Edinburgh.
HANG TOUGH THE BERKELEY SUITE Techno and bass. A.D.S.R INVITES MUTO MAJOR THE FLYING DUCK Techno. DUBSMITH NICE 'N' SLEAZY House, techno, funk and disco. ADÉRÁYO & STEREO PRESENT: SYNAESTHESIA STEREO Hip-hop and R'n'B.
Sat 12 Jul
LOOSE JOINTS: SHACKLETON (LIVE) + SLYN + MAVEEN + NURSE THE BERKELEY SUITE Dubstep. APEX X WARFARE PRESENTS: CEEJAY ROOM 2 Techno and gabber. NOISE COMPLAINT 001 THE FLYING DUCK Trance and techno. T.D. SLIDER
NICE 'N' SLEAZY House, electro and disco. NIGHTSHIFT: BAAD
AFTERPARTY (ALI WATTS + JOHNNY GREIG + BRANE) STEREO House and techno.
A NIGHT OF ITALO DISCO THE BERKELEY SUITE Italo disco. WSHWSH X INTIBINT THE RUM SHACK Club.
THROUGH THE ROOF BASEMENT SERIES: JAMBACK ROOM 2 Tech house. HOT DUB TIME MACHINE SWG3 Pop.
LUNA ROJA THE FLYING DUCK Techno.
JACUZZI BABY NICE 'N' SLEAZY Electro, house, disco and club classics.
CL!CK PRIDE (XNBTNI + SOFSOF + MISS CABBAGE + DJ GARLIC BREATH) STEREO Techno and club. Sun 26 Jul
HEALTHY NICE 'N' SLEAZY Bass, club and house.
Edinburgh
Clubs
Wed 2 Jul
HAPTIC: ELL MURPHY SNEAKY PETE'S UKG.
Fri 11 Jul HEADSET: LEONCE SNEAKY PETE'S Club. BOOGIE WONDERLAND LA BELLE ANGELE Disco. PARDEE BASS THE MASH HOUSE Bass.
Sat 12 Jul
EPIKA: MAEMM THE BONGO CLUB Techno and electro. DEPTFORD NORTHERN SOUL CLUB SNEAKY PETE'S Northern Soul. ELDER EMO LA BELLE ANGELE Pop-punk. PULSE LA BELLE ANGELE Techno. CLUB NACHT W/ MACKA + LOWREE THE MASH HOUSE House and disco.
Thu 17 Jul
IMPORT SNEAKY PETE'S Hard dance.
Fri 18 Jul
PALIDRONE: MA SHA SNEAKY PETE'S Leftfield bass. DUST AND DESIRE LA BELLE ANGELE House and techno. INKOHERENT THE MASH HOUSE Techno.
Sat 19 Jul
1-800 GIRLS ALL NIGHT LONG
SNEAKY PETE'S House. DECADE LA BELLE ANGELE Pop-punk. LUNAR THE MASH HOUSE Techno and house.
Wed 23 Jul
CLUB SPIT
SNEAKY PETE'S Hard dance.
Thu 24 Jul
POTPOURRI
PETE'S
Fri 25 Jul LUCKYME SNEAKY PETE'S Club. EDM RAVE LA BELLE ANGELE Club.
Sat 26 Jul
DBT X CAB VOL
CABARET VOLTAIRE House and minimal techno. ROLL IN PEACE LA BELLE ANGELE Hip-hop.
Dundee Clubs
Sat 12th July
THE IMPROV JAM MON 7 JUL
Sharpen your skills at The Improv Jam.
MC HAMMERSMITH'S FREESTYLE BREAKDOWN (WIP) WED 9 JUL
MC Hammersmith is an award-winning freestyle rap comedian. Straight from the ghetto of middle class west London, he performs improvised hip hop comedy based entirely on audience suggestions.
TAMSYN KELLY: WORK IN PROGRESS FRI 11 JUL
Tamsyn moves to Glasgow to live with a guy she’s known for four months.
Struggling to makes friends and fit in, she visits a psychic for reassurance that it will all work out, but gets the opposite.
SAM LAKE: WORK IN PROGRESS
SAT 12 JUL
A new stand-up hour about the highs and lows of pursuing your lifelong passion and loving a laugh.
SIKISA: WORK IN PROGRESS
SAT 12 JUL
Glasgow
Comedy
The Old Hairdressers
HAROLD NIGHT
TUE 8 JUL
Two Glasgow Improv Theatre house teams performing The Harold. Featuring F.L.U.S.H. and Raintown. IMPROV FUCKTOWN
TUE 8 JUL
Glasgow Improv Theatre Presents: Welcome to Improv Fucktown, population: YOU.
GOOD MOURNING
TUE 15 JUL
A group of improvisers will help a member of the audience celebrate the memory of their dearly departed.
ALAN STARZINSKI (UCB) - SLUTBOY
TUE 15 JUL
Being a slut isn’t a bad thing! At least Alan doesn’t think so. Come see him explore his slutty world. The King's Theatre
TAYLOR TOMLINSON: THE SAVE ME TOUR
TUE 8 JUL
American stand up brings her new show to Glasgow.
Edinburgh
Comedy
Monkey Barrel Comedy Club
AYO ADENEKAN: BLACK MEDIOCRITY
(WIP)
SAT 5 JUL
Ayo Adenekan prepares for his highly anticipated Fringe debut with a hilarious and heartfelt show about growing up in Scotland.
DEAN T. BEIRNE: FATED TO PRETEND (WIP)
SAT 5 JUL
Dean T. Beirne, the BBC New Comedy Awards 2023 finalist and star of Rosie Jones’ Comedy Disability Extravaganza, presents his debut solo show.
CAMPFIRE IMPROV MON 7 JUL
Scotland's top improvisers create hilarious scenes based on stories from a guest monologist. Every show is unique, unscripted, and totally unpredictable.
MAN’S BEST FRIEND THU 19 JUN - SAT 12 JUL
Hilarious, heart-warming antics ensue in this tale of companionship and struggle.
Edinburgh Theatre
Festival Theatre
KISMET
THU 3 JUL - SAT 5 JUL
A double bill of cutting edge choreography by leading dance company Rambert.
FOOTLOOSE
FRI 18 JUL - SAT 19
JUL
A rebellious teen brings joy and dance to a repressed small town in this adaptation of the beloved 80s film.
The Edinburgh
Playhouse
DEAR EVAN HANSEN
TUE 1 JUL - SAT 5 JUL
Relive the worst of your high school years with this Broadway sensation.
Traverse
Theatre
Sikisa brings her new work in progress show with brand new jokes about living your best life.
CHRISTOPHER MACARTHUR-BOYD: WORK IN PROGRESS
SUN 13 JUL
An hour of work-in-progress not-quite-there-yet stand-up comedy from Christopher MacarthurBoyd.
CHRIS TURNER: WORK IN PROGRESS FRI 18 JUL
An hour and a half of jokes, songs, and freestyle rap from the first comedian to ever perform a Las Vegas residency with Cirque Du Soleil.
IAN SMITH: WORK IN PROGRESS
SAT 19 JUL
Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee 2023 and co-host of the Northern News podcast returns with a work in progress of a new show.
AMANDA HURSY: CARTED (WIP) SAT 26 JUL
They threw her in cuffs. Wrote her off. She wrote herself back in. A hilarious show that navigates the funny side of failure.
Glasgow Theatre
The King's Theatre
CALAMITY JANE
TUE 1 JUL - SAT 5 JUL
It's a whipcrackin' good time in this adaptation of the Doris Day musical.
THE TOMMY BURNS
STORY
FRI 11 JUL - SAT 12
JUL
A play about Glasgow Celtic footballer.
Theatre Royal BALLET NIGHTS
GLASGOW FRI 4 JUL
Ballet Nights makes its Scottish Debut with an unmissable programme in the ballet calendar.
Theatre Royal
THE WIZARD OF OZ : YOUTH EDITION
FRI 25 JUL - SAT 26 JUL
A colourful youth production of the colourful musical.
South Block
THE WONDER WALL: PRINTMAKING SANS
FRONTIERS
FRI 27 JUN - SAT 16
AUG
Over 50 linocut prints exploring the egalitarian possibilities of printmaking.
The Briggait
MICHELLE CAMPBELL: EDEN
SAT 28 JUN - MON 11
AUG
A vibrant sensory map of neurodivergent perception exploring the blurred lines between feeling and form.
The Modern
Institute
SPENCER SWEENEY: LARRY RASBERRY AND THE HIGH STEPPERS
FRI 6 JUN - WED 27 AUG
Eclectic exhibition by New York multimedia artist.
JIM LAMBIE: HOT
FOAM
FRI 6 JUN - WED 27 AUG
SHE'S BEHIND YOU FRI 25 JUL - SUN 24
AUG
Scottish pantomime legend Johnny McKnight presents a reflective, personal show about playing the dame.
Traverse
Theatre
STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF GIANTS
FRI 25 JUL - SUN 24
AUG
An autobiographical show about being a rockstar(‘s sister).
LOST LEAR
SUN 27 JUL - SUN 24
AUG
Shakespeare's classic tale of betrayal is given new life in this experimental adaptation, told from the point of view of a person with dementia living in an old memory of rehearsing the play.
Dundee
Theatre
Dundee Rep MAKE IT HAPPEN
FRI 18 JUL - SAT 26
JUL
Legendary actor Brian Cox takes to the stage as the ghost of Adam Smith in this biting satire on greed and unchecked growth.
Glasgow
Art
CCA:
Centre for Contemporary Art
ALIA SYED: THE RING IN THE FISH
SAT 17 MAY - SAT 26
JUL
A multi-part exhibition featuring a new experimental 16mm film work presented as a series of moving image vignettes, exploring what role the imagination holds in migration.
Glasgow School of Art
VICTORIA MORTON: SWITCH TRACK
FRI 27 JUN - SAT 9 AUG
A survey of works by GSAtrained artist exploring ideas of iconography and abstraction.
Regular Glasgow comedy nights
The Stand Glasgow
FIRST MONDAY OF THE MONTH
MONDAY NIGHT IMPROV, 20:30
Host Billy Kirkwood & guests act entirely on your suggestions.
TUESDAYS RED RAW, 20:30
Legendary new material night with up to 8 acts.
Regular
A newly developed installation of sculptures and paintings reconfiguring everyday objects in conversation with the gallery space.
SIMON PERITON: NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC
FRI 6 JUN - WED 27 AUG
British artist whose work encompasses painting, sculpture and installation.
Tramway SOLANGE PESSOA
SAT 10 MAY - MON 22 SEP
One of Brazil's most preeminent living sculptors brings together large-scale constellations of organic materials referencing landscapes, archaeology and historical narratives from both Brazil and Scotland.
SARAH ROSE: TORPOR
SAT 14 JUN - SUN 7 SEP
Working with waste materials, by-products or found objects, this exhibition interrogates what new, radical energy systems might look like.
Edinburgh
Art &Gallery
FRAGMENTS
SAT 5 JUL - WED 30 JUL
A series of small scale collages by the gallery's artists.
KAREN STAMPER: SALVAGE
SAT 5 JUL - WED 30 JUL
Work made from discarded materials drawing on the visual language of forgotten industrial spaces.
City Art Centre
OUT OF CHAOS: POSTWAR SCOTTISH ART
1945-2000
SAT 17 MAY - SUN 12 OCT
A survey of work looking at the diversity and ambition of work that came out of the tumult of the Second World War.
JOHN BELLANY: A LIFE IN SELF-PORTRAITURE
SAT 31 MAY - SUN 28 SEP
Over 80 autopbiographical sketches and paintings documenting the work of one of the most eminent modern Scottish painters.
FRIDAYS THE FRIDAY SHOW, 20:30
The big weekend show with four comedians.
SATURDAYS THE SATURDAY SHOW, 20:30
The big weekend show with four comedians.
Edinburgh
The Stand
Edinburgh
MONDAYS RED RAW, 20:30
Legendary new material night with up to 8 acts.
TUESDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)
STU & GARRY’S IMPROV SHOW, 20:30
The Stand’s very own Stu & Garry’s make comedy cold from suggestions.
THURSDAYS THE BEST OF SCOTTISH COMEDY, 20:30
Simply the best comics on the contemporary Scottish circuit.
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.
Collective Gallery
MERCEDES
AZPILICUETA: FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN, LIGHT ON THE HILL
FRI 20 JUN - SUN 7 SEP
Large-scale tapestries and installations by Argentinian artist explore lesser known gendered stories from history.
Dovecot Studios
DOUG COCKER: THREADS
SAT 24 MAY - SAT 19 JUL
One of Scotland's leading sculptors unveils a new series of work drawing inspiration from the landscape surrounding his Angus studio.
IKEA: MAGICAL PATTERNS
FRI 18 JUL - SAT 17
JAN
An innovative exhibition exploring six decades of textile design by IKEA and the development of interior design.
VICTORIA CROWE: SHIFTING SURFACES
MON 28 JUL - SAT 11
OCT
Presented in partnership with The Scottish Gallery, this exhibition looks at the little known textile work of one of Scotland's most eminent contemporary artists.
Fruitmarket
MIKE NELSON: HUMPTY DUMPTY
FRI 27 JUN - SUN 5 OCT
Known for his immersive exhibitions, Mike Nelson transforms Fruitmarket into a new installation capturing the shifting nature of cityscapes.
Glee Club
FRIDAYS FRIDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00
The perfect way to end the working week, with four superb stand-up comedians.
SATURDAYS SATURDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00
An evening of awardwinning comedy, with four superb stand-up comedians that will keep you laughing until Monday.
comedy nights
SATURDAYS THE SATURDAY SHOW, 20:30
The big weekend show with four comedians.
Monkey Barrel
Comedy Club
SECOND AND THIRD TUESDAY OF EVERY MONTH
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.
Ingleby Gallery
AUBREY LEVINTHAL: MIRROR MATTER
SAT 28 JUN - SAT 13
SEP
Passing quotidian moments of a cast of characters living urban lives.
Jupiter Artland
JONATHAN BALDOCK: WYRD
SAT 10 MAY - SUN 28
SEP
A zoo of hybrid animals formed from textile and clay exploring ideas of myth-making, queerness and hybridity.
Open Eye
Gallery
CATHARINE DAVISON: PATHS TAKEN
FRI 27 JUN - SAT 19
JUL
Transforming the plein air landscape tradition into a more contemporary practice.
JAYNE STOKES: SHOWCASE
FRI 27 JUN - SAT 19 JUL
Paintings of landscapes captured on matchboxes.
Out of the Blueprint
ODYSSEYS THROUGH THE STORM
TUE 8 JUL - SAT 12 JUL
Showcasing the work of Art Psychotherapy graduates from Queen Margaret University, the exhibition explores the profound personal and collective journeys of the training navigated through creativity and self-expression.
Talbot Rice
Gallery
WAEL SHAWKY
SAT 28 JUN - SUN 28
SEP
A new exhibition by Egyptian artist incorporating previous work for the Venice Biennale, exploring ideas of historicity and postcolonial identity.
The National Gallery of Modern Art
RESISTANCE: HOW PROTEST SHAPED BRITAIN AND PHOTOGRAPHY
SHAPED PROTEST
SAT 21 JUN - SUN 4 JAN
FRIDAYS
MONKEY BARREL COMEDY’S BIG FRIDAY SHOW, 19:00/21:00 Monkey Barrel’s flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.
FRIDAYS
DATING CRAPP, 22:00
Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, Farmers Only...Come and laugh as some of Scotland’s best improvisers join forces to perform based off two audience members dating profiles.
SATURDAYS MONKEY BARREL COMEDY’S BIG SATURDAY SHOW, 17:00/19:00/21:00
Monkey Barrel’s flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.
SUNDAYS
MONKEY BARREL COMEDY’S BIG SUNDAY SHOW, 19:00/21:00 Monkey Barrel’s flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.
Royal Scottish Academy
PAUL FURNEAUX: TABIJI
SAT 21 JUN - SUN 20 JUL
Printmaking drawing on the textures and techniques of Scottish and Japanese landscape printing.
ANDY GOLDSWORTHY: FIFTY YEARS SAT 26 JUL - SUN 2 NOV
A major exhibition showcasing a body of work by seminal Scottish artist, including several specially commissioned new works.
Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art
YOUR ART WORLD
SAT 10 MAY - SUN 2 NOV
Artworks by young people across Scotland created specifically for this exhibition, supported by a team of freelance artists.
Sett Studios
BEA DESSENT + GEORGE BALDRY: LINGERING FEELING
FRI 4 JUL - MON 7 JUL
A group exhibition exploring themes of memory, traces and contamination. Expect hauntingly beautiful textures, otherworldly sounds and liminal vibes.
THEODORA CLEARY + NAT
OPHELIA WALPOLE: THRESHING/HOLDING
FRI 11 JUL - WED 16
JUL
A two-woman show of work exploring trans femininity and womanhood under the watchful eye of a trans and androgyne reimagining of Janus, the Roman god of thresholds and transitions.
An unmissable exhibition conceived by acclaimed artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen.
Dundee Art
V&A Dundee
GARDEN FUTURES: DESIGNING WITH NATURE
SAT 17 MAY - SAT 25
JAN
Bringing together artists and thinkers such as Derek Jarman and Jamaica Kincaid, this exhibition looks at the politics and aesthetics of the modern garden.
NINEWELLS HOSPITAL: CARE, COMMUNITY AND INNOVATION
SUN 1 JUN - SUN 14 SEP
Exploring over 50 years of medical and design innovation at Ninewells Hospital.
THREAD MEMORY: EMBROIDERY FROM PALESTINE THU 26 JUN - MON 1
SEP
Spotlighting the intricate art of tatreez and the ways in which folkcraft can capture moments of social and political change.
The Skinny On... C Duncan
As his debut album Architect gears up to celebrate its tenth anniversary, SAY Award- and Mercury Prize-nominated composer and musician C Duncan takes on this month’s Q&A
What’s your favourite place to visit?
I’d probably say Paris. It’s a ridiculously romantic and sprawling city... I’ve been many times and each time I go I feel like I’m discovering it for the first time all over again.
What’s your favourite food?
PASTA! I fri in love pasta... My favourite to make and eat is pappardelle and favourite sauce is probably white ragu (with pork, fennel and white wine).
What’s your favourite colour?
I’ve always loved the colour blue. More pretentiously, Yves Klein blue and Majorelle blue. They both have slight hints of purple – so maybe purple is actually my favourite colour?
Who was your hero growing up?
Because I’m always prattling on about Björk I’ll go with Thom Yorke and Radiohead. I was obsessed with Radiohead as most alternative teens were, and their music and ability to adapt and change their style has had a profound effect on my music.
Whose work inspires you now?
Musically, Maurice Ravel and Cocteau Twins – I have just read Simon Raymonde’s autobiography, In One Ear, and that has reignited my love of Cocteau Twins. Artistically, I’m really enjoying the works of Jonas Wood and Nicolas Party.
What three people would you invite to your dinner party and what are you cooking?
I’d invite Gina Riley, Jane Turner and Magda Szubanski from Kath & Kim I’d do chicken feet for main and a statue of baby cheeses for dessert.
What’s your all time favourite album?
This is actually too hard a question as it changes from day to day. Today my favourite album of all time is Hats by The Blue Nile. It’s an exquisite and incredibly sophisticated record that I never tire of.
What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen?
One that stands out from fairly recently is Wine Country. On paper it should be up my street and has a fun cast, but oh boy is it a rubbish film. Everything is forced – the comedy, the emotions – it’s truly trite.
What book would you take to a desert island?
I would either take a Rick Stein seafood cookbook... why let your
culinary standards drop just because you’re alone on an island. Or I would take The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson, because you’d need a laugh, wouldn’t you?
Who’s the worst?
All of them. The whole lot.
When did you last cry?
I must admit I had a jolly good cry when West Side Story was on TV between Christmas and New Year. It completely caught me off guard... I’ve listened to the music lots before, but put it together with the movement on the screen and I was a complete mess.
What are you most scared of?
My younger, more pretentious self would have said mediocrity, but now I would say heights... over the past decade or so I’ve had lots of recurring dreams where I’m precariously at the top of very high structures, so it’s kind of a learned fear.
When did you last vomit?
I almost did a couple of years ago when we bought some Minger cheese from a local farm shop. Their fridge obviously wasn’t working and when we opened it I almost threw up.
Tell us a secret?
I don’t like Fleetwood Mac... What can I say? I just don’t think they’re very good.
Which celebrity could you take in a fight? I’m not really one for fighting, but I’d happily set my dogs on Chris Martin for becoming rubbish. Although my dogs would probably just lick him and demand treats, which is a bit annoying after a while. So I guess I’d like to cause Chris Martin mild nuisance.
If you could be reincarnated as an animal, which animal would it be?
I’m sure most people say a bird so they can fly etc… But I would probably come back as a dog... You can now get passports for your pets so dogs can also fly.
What’s your favourite historical time period? Late Victorian Arts and Crafts... Buildings from this time I especially like are Wightwick Manor, Hospitalfield House and of course Hill House in my hometown of Helensburgh.
What song makes you feel nostalgic? Emily by Joanna Newsom. I had just left school when her album Ys came out and my friends and I decided to put on a play at the Edinburgh Fringe (for which I wrote the music). We stayed at a friend’s flat in the New Town for the full month and this album soundtracked our time there. Listening to Emily always brings back fond memories of my time there (but not such fond memories of the terrible, cryptic, pseudo intellectual garbage play we put on).
You’re celebrating ten years of Architect next month – what has that album meant to you and do you have any special events planned to help celebrate such a milestone? Architect means everything to me. It was my first release and it’s the reason I’m still doing what I love. Although I have developed musically a lot since, I have very fond memories of recording the album and all the excitement around releasing my first album and all the touring that went along with it, and still happens. We’re celebrating Architect’s 10th anniversary by putting on a special show at The Tolbooth in Stirling on the 19 July. We will be a five-piece band performing lots of songs from the album as well as some newer songs.
Architect was released on 17 Jul 2015 via FatCat Records; C Duncan celebrates its 10th anniversary at The Tolbooth, Stirling, 19 Jul cspaceduncan.com
