The Skinny Sepmteber 2025

As if having an EH postcode isn’t enough of a reward, yours entitles you to money off food and drink around the city, cheaper days out and exclusive events. All to say thanks for being a local legend.

Whigfield – Saturday Night

Busted – Year 3000

M People – Love Rendevous

Moloko – Fun for Me

Republica – Ready to Go

Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mya & P!nk – Lady Marmalade

White Town – Your Woman

Britney Spears – Everytime

Black Eyed Peas – Meet Me Halfway

Britney Spears – Lucky

Mika – Relax, Take It Easy

Lady Gaga – Speechless

Paramore – Misery Business

Taylor Swift – 22 Listen to this playlist on Spotify — search for 'The Skinny Office Playlist' or scan the below code

Meet the team

Championing creativity in Scotland

We asked: What's the worst meal you prepared when you first started cooking for yourself?

Senior Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief

"This 'recipe' I learned in an NZ hostel sounds like the worst meal but is actually delicious – a cheese, peanut butter and onion toastie. You can also add Vegemite for a real flavour sensation. You're welcome."

Cammy Gallagher Clubs Editor

Peter Simpson Deputy Editor, Food & Drink Editor

"I’m not a man of science, and apparently ‘science’ includes ‘baking’. My loaves of bread looked like they'd been hit by a car at 20 mph *and* 170c."

Anahit Behrooz Events Editor, Books Editor

"Brown people skip this stage x"

Jamie Dunn

Film Editor, Online Journalist

"I was making family dinners from about 12, so I was a decent cook when I went to uni. My dormmate, Davey, however, did make me ‘French onion soup’ once. Ingredients: burnt onions, Bisto gravy granules, water."

Tallah Brash Music Editor

"Mac and cheese from a can on toast. Delicious but nasty af. See also chicken Super Noodles (TM) on Toast. They were cheap and I was poor so "

Eilidh Akilade Intersections Editor

"Toss up between the Linda McC burger x broccoli omelette or a tinned tuna curry."

Business

Laurie Presswood General Manager

"I get my flatmate to cook for me."

Commissioning Editors Sales

George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist

"I mean, all of them."

"It depends who you ask but I'm still a big fan of sweet potato, hummus, and baked beans. "

Production

Dalila D'Amico

Art Director, Production Manager

"Boiling e s in the kettle was basically a weekly ritual. Some people used it for tea, I didn't."

Sandy Park Commercial Director

"My friend in his halls at uni used to be fond of the odd multi-pack of frozen doner kebabs from Iceland, heated up in the microwave. Gourmet. I didn't go to uni so that can't possibly have been me, honest."

Rachel Ashenden Art Editor "Entrée: Jammie Dodgers. Plat Principal: Penne pasta, mayo, ketchup and grated cheese. Dessert: Jammie Dodgers."

Phoebe Willison Designer

"I lived with four girls, and we all ran out of money at the end of one month so we clubbed together to buy lasagne sheets (cheapest pasta available in Morrisons) and ate them with salad cream."

Ema Smekalova Media Sales Executive

"Not necessarily a 'meal' but in first year I made an espresso martini with Tesco Imperial Vodka, instant coffee and granulated sugar. "

Polly Glynn

Comedy Editor

"I used to bulk buy frozen chicken breasts from Farmfoods, cover in paprika and cook until dry. Serve with poorly drained broccoli and a full tin of cold sweetcorn. Repeat x5 nights a week. Bon appetit!"

Ellie Robertson Editorial Assistant

"Can't remember what the meal wound up being, but the yearround red stains on the ceiling make me think the recipe probably involved wine."

Emilie Roberts Media Sales Executive

"Last week I ate supermarket udon noodles with knock off Nando's spicy mayo. I'm 29."

Rho Chung Theatre Editor "There are no bad meals when you have rice and kimchi."

Billie Estrine Editorial Intern

"I've been eating a lot of butter noodles with cheese while in Edinburgh because I'm too lazy to buy the spices I need to make real food. Whoops."

Editorial

Words: Rosamund West

It’s the September issue aka the thank fuck August is over issue aka everyone is broken from all that weekly magazines, hundreds of reviews, award-giving and general living in the middle of the bi est arts festival(s) in the world for a month will do to you. Welcome autumn, and also, as is traditional, welcome students!

In the centre of the magazine you’ll find an extra special Student Guide, offering a mixture of gentle guidance, hard facts and horror stories to help all the new arrivals to Scotland’s cities to get involved in the creative communities around them. This year’s edition has been carefully crafted by Billie, who’s been interning with us over these intense summer months and is going back to the US (almost) immediately after sending. She’s done an outstanding job.

The main magazine theme is small but resonant – as Spotify’s CEO pours hundreds of millions (hundreds of millions, you may remember, extracted from artist pay) directly into military tech development we take an urgent look at our alternatives. We also consider the true impact the streaming algorithm has had on our relationship to music.

Elsewhere, we meet sunny pop outfit The Cords, to hear about their self-titled debut. There’s a whole heap of festivals still to come this year – we have words from some of the organisers on what they’re most looking forward to in their programmes. Film looks forward to an autumn of festivals, talking to the programmers of now-biennial Take One Action, and IberoDocs, who’ve recently moved from spring to autumn, while Sam Riley discusses identifying with his washed-up tennis pro character in Islands.

Art takes a trip up north for Joanne Coates’ exhibition memorialising the Herring Girls. Books talks to Selali Fiamanya about his debut novel Before We Hit the Ground, while Theatre celebrates the return of Gorbals institution the Citizens Theatre. Clubs takes a trip to Govan to learn how a social club is growing its community with a little help from DIY party crews Healthy and Sentinel. We also meet Dansa to hear about working with LuckyMe and life as a Cowgate Rat.

We close with The Skinny on… Iona Zajac, who reminisces about touring with the Pogues and subsisting on mackerel as a student.

Cover Artist

Paul d'Orlando is a French artist who is interested in everything related to illustration and can express his ideas through drawings or threedimensional works. In addition to his work as an illustrator, Paul is also a screen printer and has been involved in setting up a screen printing studio in Nantes, France. This studio allows him to produce his own work freely and also to assist artists who wish to do so in their production.

Paul is curious and always on the lookout for new projects, so don't hesitate to take a look at his work and contact him!

pauldorlando.com

IG: @paul_dorlando

Love Bites: Placing & Replacing

This month’s columnist reflects on loving a place you once couldn’t wait to leave

Words: Conner Milliken

It always feels strange, setting foot on the ground of the estate you grew up on. I don’t live too far away from this place on the outskirts of the city that was home to me for more than half of my life, but I rarely come back. My family don’t live here anymore. The friends I once had here have either gone to start new lives too, or we have drifted apart, with my path taking me out of the estate as their feet stayed. Every time I come back, I try to describe the overwhelming feeling that engulfs me. Sometimes I think it’s love, other times nostalgia, but whatever it is, it’s an entirely different feeling than the one I used to feel walking through these streets.

The estate isn’t exactly a suburb, it’s something different, unique to the UK. An amalgamation of housing, retail parks, countryside and industrial works, with absolutely nothing to do. A collection of things that are necessary for the city to function, but too unsightly to stick on the tourist leaflets.

As a teenager, I felt completely suffocated here. I was queer, I was angry, I liked heavy metal and the late night movies on Film4. I wanted my world to feel so much bi er than this place would allow; I couldn’t wait to get out.

But as my foot hits the pavement for the first time in a year, I get that strange overwhelming feeling again. One that gently tells me that I was too harsh on this place. That it’s as much a part of me now as all those big other things I’ve been lucky enough to experience. It’s complicated, but it’s home.

Heads Up

Noor Abed: A Night We Held Between Common Guild,

Glasgow, 26-27 Sep

A gorgeous act of archival discovery, Noor Abed’s short film centres around Song for The Fighters, a song found in the sonic archive of the Popular Art Centre Palestine. Taking a similarly archival visual approach, the film delves into both the song and ancient sites in Palestine, from caves to valleys, to explore narratives of historic resilience and present-day collective memory.

AMPLIFI

The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 15 Sep, 8pm

The closing gig in AMPLIFI’s 5th season – before they come back with a bang next month – this intimate show features three rising musicians currently working in Scotland, curated by Arusa Qureshi and Halina Rifai. There’s Bella Lungs, the moniker of Scottish-Turkish multi-instrumentalist Ceylan Hay; Kevin Leomo, an experimental music practitioner and researcher; and Lucian Fletcher, an ambient Glasgowbased musician.

Matthew Arthur Williams: In Consideration of Our Times

Stills, Edinburgh, 12 Sep-18 Oct Glasgow-based artist, photographer and DJ Matthew Arthur Williams’ new exhibition excavates the capacity of memory to hold and reveal hidden histories in the face of structural erasure. Through a series of self-portraits and landscapes, as well as a new moving image work, his photography examines states of loss and absence, reclamation and retrieval.

Iberodocs

Various venues, Scotland, 10–28 Sep

After the flurry of festival season, we go super local this month, with homegrown festivals, musicians, artists and club nights to see out the last of the summer.

Compiled by Anahit Behrooz

Exit 2nd Birthday

Exit, Glasgow, 5-6 Sep, 7pm

Beloved Glasgow club turns two and they’re throwing a back-to-back party over two nights, featuring some of their – and our! – favourite musicians, DJs and selectors from Scotland and beyond. Find HUNTRESS playing b2b with Salam Kitty, Alliyah Enyo playing b2b with Lizzie Urquhart, Junglehussi, babyschön and more besides.

Sep, 11am

Present Futures

Various venues, Dundee, 10-11 Sep

A biennial performance festival co-curated by Scottish choreographer Colette Sadler and Feral Arts, this year’s edition of Present Futures is a satellite festival taking place across Dundee Rep Theatre, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), and Dundee & Angus College. The programme looks at intersections between dance and visual art, music, and technology, with performances from SHHE, Samir Kennedy and Suk-Jun Kim.

Brìghde Chaimbeul

Oran Mor, Glasgow, 24 Sep, 7pm

A master of the Scottish smallpipes – the softer, more emotive sibling of the bagpipe – Brìghde Chaimbeul is one of the most exciting names in Scottish folk at the moment, drawing on historic traditions and practices to create innovative, distinctly modern work. Her latest album Sunwise follows the movement of the seasons, using music to tap into ancient, primal rhythms.

Oran Mor, Glasgow, 24 Sep, 7pm

Pippa Blundell

Salam Kitty’s House Party Exit, Glasgow, 26 Sep, 11pm

Collective Gala Collective, Edinburgh, 7

Photo: Adrián Orr

Image: courtesy the artist

Photo: Sally Jubb

Photo: Mathieu Collombon

Photo: Elly Lucas

Photo: Brian Hartley

Photo: Jonny Ashworth

Image: courtesy the artist

Photo: Spit

Image: courtesy the artist

To Our Friends at IberoDocs

Collective Gala

Pippa Blundell

Salam Kitty

Brìghde Chaimbeul

Ceylan Hay at AMPLIFI

Matthew Arthur Williams, Emollition Man I, 2023

The Violet Hour by Colette Sadler

Huntress at Exit 2nd Birthday Noor Abed, A Night We Held Between, 2024. Film still.

Take One Action!

Various venues, Scotland, 17 Sep-8 Nov

Scotland’s film festival dedicated to social justice, Take One Action uses cinema as a platform to open up discussions on how we can claim political agency. This year’s programme is themed around Real Utopias, featuring the likes of Kenyan-American documentary How to Build a Library and community organising documentary Union. They’ll be in Edinburgh and Glasgow this month, before moving to Inverness and Dundee in October and November.

inertia: IN CANVAS

CANVAS, Dundee, 20 Sep, 3pm Dundee’s latest music and arts venue continues its season-long christening with a day party, starting in the afternoon and ending at midnight (OK, Cinderella). There’s an extremely fun lineup: inertia headline, with sets from Edinburgh’s noodle, Is Kill, Iris Pertegaz and Dance No Evil among others playing a fun, bouncy mix of house, techno, acid and dub.

Scottish Ballet: Mary, Queen of Scots Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 17-20 Sep, various venues Having made an incredible amount of noise at Edinburgh International Festival just last month, Scottish Ballet’s newest acclaimed production Mary, Queen of Scots might sound a little stuffy (history class trauma, anyone?) but it is anything but: a queer, sexy, punk retelling of the fraught relationship between Mary and Queen Elizabeth I, brought to stunning life by choreographer-in-residence Sophie Laplane’s striking movement.

Fashion in Film Festival

Various venues, Scotland, 21 Sep-18 Oct

Hand-made with Love: DITA

Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 13 Sep, 11pm

Aqsa Arif: Raindrops of Rani Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, until 2 Nov

A short film and a series of digital and screenprinted textiles influenced by South Asian folklore, Raindrops of Rani takes as its subject a Jonathan Glazer-directed advert from 2006, in which residents of a Glasgow council block –including the artist’s family – were displaced for filming, as a touchstone for exploring ongoing legacies of migration, resilience and welfare.

DAYS Festival

The Pitt Market, Edinburgh, 27 Sep

Make the last of the warm(ish, hopefully) days of the year with the appropriately named outdoor day festival DAYS, a dance music festival created as a collaboration between RARE and Sneaky Pete’s. The full lineup is still pending, but they’ve announced some really exciting names so far, including Erol Alkan, Or:la, Ross from Friends and Leon Vynehall.

The Rum Shack, Glasgow, 23 Sep, 7:30pm French-American, Glasgow-based neo-soul singer Gaïa has been making waves in the Scottish music scene in the past couple of years, nominated for the Scottish Jazz ‘Rising Star’ Award in 2023. Her work is a distinctive blend of nu-jazz, R‘n’B and soul, offering intimate, explorative songwriting alongside smooth, heartfelt vocals.

Huron

Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 23 Sep, 7pm

Walk Porty 2025

Various venues, Edinburgh, 4-14 Sep

Lord

Art

Photo:

Image:

Gaïa

Photo: Andy Ross

Photo: Josef Hall

Photo: Talha Imam

Photo: Rory Barnes

Image: courtesy of Take One Action

The Grand Bizarre

DITA

Lord Huron

Solen Collet, Roll the dice

Gaïa

Roseanna Leney as Mary in Scottish Ballet’s Mary, Queen of Scots

How to Build a Library

Aqsa Arif, Raindrops of Rani

Days Festival

Noodle at inertia

What's On

All details correct at the time of writing

Music

Local artists make up the bulk of our gig recommendations for September. At the top of the month, singer-songwriter Rosie H Sullivan is road testing new songs and new merch at The Glad Cafe, with support from the equally talented Grayling (4 Sep). If louder sounds are more your bag, on the same night catch PAWS at McChuills on the first of their trio of Scottish dates, before they play Edinburgh’s Leith Cricket Club (5 Sep) and Stirling’s Tolbooth (6 Sep). Following the release of singles Copycat and DUMMY, Glasgow rapper Rosé Chrissy returns this month, playing for Savage x Hip Hop Scotland at The Poetry Club (5 Sep). On 11 September, Lead Sister, featuring former Sons & Daughters singer Adele Bethel, celebrate their new EP War of the Words with a show at The Old Hairdresser’s, while the following night sees Dancer launch More or Less at The Flying Duck (12 Sep).

Later in the month, Lizzie Reid releases her brand new EP, Bodega, with a headline show at The Poetry Club (20 Sep), with Russell Stewart and Anna Shields joining her for the occasion. GAÏA brings her intoxicating blend of R’n’B and neo-soul to The Rum Shack for her debut headline show on the 23rd, while singer-songwriter, and 2024 Sound of Young Scotland nominee, Pippa Blundell throws a party for her debut album common thread at Òran Mór (24 Sep), or join QUAD90 for the launch of their eponymous debut album at The Glad Cafe (26 Sep). Of course, if you failed to get tickets for The Beta Band’s anniversary dates at the Barrowlands (25 & 26 Sep), do what you can to snag some.

In Edinburgh, pick between a night curated and headlined by Day Sleeper at Sneaky Pete’s featuring support from Goodnight Louisa and Deep Sea Creature, and a double bill of beauty at Voodoo Rooms from Chrysanths and Djana Gabrielle, both on the 9th. Also at Voodoo Rooms, Alt Milk bring a trio of local talent – Post Coal Prom Queen, Penny Black and Valenstein – to the venue’s Speakeasy. There’s a lot to shout about at The Queen’s Hall this month: AMPLIFI returns for its first autumn outing with Bell Lungs, Kevin Leomo and Lucian Fletcher (15 Sep), James Yorkston and The Cardigans’ Nina Persson celebrate their latest record together (16 Sep), and the latest Malin Lewis-curated night featuring Kim Carnie and Heal & Harrow takes over on the 18th. On the same night, Zoe Graham brings her debut album Tent to Leith Depot, before Amy Louise’s mini UK tour swings by Sneaky Pete’s (19 Sep), with Brìghde Chaimbeul playing Pleasance Theatre on the 25th.

For touring artists this month, in Glasgow seek out Blondshell (QMU, 6 Sep), Turnover (Barrowlands, 9 Sep), Sophie Ellis-Bextor (SWG3, 18 Sep), The Beths (SWG3, 21 Sep), Lisa O’Neill (Cottiers, 22 & 23 Sep) and clipping. (Garage, 24 Sep). In Edinburgh, head for And So I Watch You From Afar (La Belle Angele, 11 Sep), Ditz (The Mash House, 12 Sep), Self Esteem (Usher Hall, 16 Sep) and Meryl Streek (Cabaret Voltaire, 19 Sep), while you can catch Nadia Reid in Stirling (Tolbooth, 16 Sep) and Black Country, New Road in Dundee (Duck Slattery’s, 19 Sep). Or, if you want a bit of everything this month, pick from one of the lovingly-curated all-dayers or weekenders happening in autumn – find our expansive festivals roundup on p73. [Tallah Brash]

Film

As we say goodbye to a bizarrely pleasant Scottish summer, the autumn tsunami of film festivals arrives just on schedule. You’ll find details of some of them, like Take One Action! (17 Sep-9 Nov, touring), IberoDocs (10-28 Sep, touring), Glasgow Youth Film Festival (26-28 Sep) and Sea Change (19-21 Sep) in Tiree on pages 30 to 31. These are great festivals embedded in their

Photo: Olivia Richardson

Photo: Cameron Brisbane

Photo: Jack Reuben

Self Esteem

Zoe Graham

Dancer

communities rather than shipped in from elsewhere. Be sure to give them your support.

Spooky season is still a while off, but that’s not holding back All Night Horror Madness, which returns to Cameo on 27 September with a delirious lineup. It’s got double zombies (The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue and Demons), it’s got killer conjoined twins (Basket Case), it’s got body horror (Videodrome) and it’s got a surprise film. Four of the movies are screening from 35mm and each one is crazier than a bag of frogs; it’s going to be a riot.

Talking of 35mm, there’s a slew of Paul Thomas Anderson 35mm prints playing in Scotland in September to whet audiences’ appetite for PT’s new film One Battle After Another, out 26 September. DCA screens the trio of Magnolia (5-11 Sep), There Will Be Blood (13-16 Sep) and Boogie Nights (19-24 Sep), while GFT screen Boogie Nights (6-10 Sep) and There Will Be Blood (19-25 Sep).

We’re excited to see the new weekly community cinema night Leith Kino begin screenings at Leith Depot this month. The first three films are crackers, and show off the eclectic taste of the collective behind this new endeavour. Funeral Parade of Roses screens 7 Sep, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story screens 14 Sep, and the little-seen, newly-restored crime caper Ping Pong is on 21 Sep.

GFT have a six-film retrospective celebrating the cool and sensual cinema of Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai. The lineup ranges from his early efforts like As Tears Go By (30 Aug & 2 Sep) and Days of Being Wild (6 Sep & 9 Sep) to his high masterpieces Happy Together (29 Sep) and In the Mood for Love (1 Oct). See them all on the big screen if you can.

We’d also like to shout out Filmhouse’s screenings of Edward Yang’s lovely family saga Yi Yi (19-25 Sep), playing from a 4K print; Cameo’s ‘Lynchspiration’ double bill of Lost Highway and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (6 Sep); and the DCA’s bonkers pairing of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin with a score by The Pet Shop Boys (6, 7 & 10 Sep).

And finally, GFT say goodbye to its long-serving head honcho Allison Gardner after three decades of service to the arthouse cinema. The GFT team are seeing her off on 14 September with an on-stage conversation, looking back at key moments from her career, hosted by long-time festival collaborator Allan Hunter, and the chat is followed by a screening of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, one of Gardner’s personal faves. She’ll be dearly missed. [Jamie Dunn]

Clubs

Glasgow’s newest – and weirdest – venue to stand the test of time, EXIT, on Maxwell Street, celebrates its second birthday on Friday 5 and Saturday 6 September, with a two-day freaky blowout featuring leftfield DJs, live acts, and £3 tickets not to be frowned upon. For something a little poppier, check out Scandal.gla Hosted by Playmymixtape at The Art School with Rahul.mp3, or across the motorway, Lena Willikens lands at The Berkeley Suite for Fenix, where you can alternatively expect a solid, but strange selection of wonky downtempo wormholes (7 Sep).

On Friday 12 September, we’re back at EXIT for another birthday, but this time to celebrate Richard from Rubadub’s 50th at HAVE YOU BEEN RUNNING? A Fundraiser for Refuweegee with Sparky (Live), the Conor Thomas Latin freestyle set, Ribeka and much more from 7pm. Over at Renfield Lane inside Stereo, Ink Tank returns with a lineup recruiting SOFSOF, Roy Don, and Jurnalist on the microphone. In the capital, and more specifically in the Cowgate (shock), techno, trance, and gabber will be ground into one at Alien Disko: Miss Cabbage + Mollie Rush – not for the faint-hearted (12 Sep).

On Thursday 18 September, head to the Dance No Evil 1st Birthday Party with Josi Devil, promising a special set from the Hessle Audio sound design virtuoso inside Stereo (18 Sep). The next day at Sneaky Pete’s Palidrone x Volens Chorus join forces to bring high-intensity rhythms of Kenya’s Slikback to Edinburgh – expect bass, footwork, techno and trap (19 Sep). On Saturday 20 September in Glasgow, it’s ERP with Boosterhooch and her brilliantly bonkers programming inside EXIT – the less you know the better. Looking for a midweek dance, Mile High Club has you covered, as yung kidd showcases Lukas Wigflex and his wonderful take on contemporary UK club sounds at Sneaky Pete’s (24 Sep). If you fancy tackling one final festival to close out your month and quite possibly the year, on Saturday 27

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Videodrome

Image: courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Image: courtesy of Mirimax

Photo: Martyna There Will Be Blood

Ross from Friends

Photo: Kyle Crooks, Hair by Ponyboy Glasgow, MUA by MV Brown, Styling by Graham Peacock

Photo: Celine Antal @celineantal

Boosterhooch

Miss Cabbage

September, DAYS returns to The Pitt Market in Edinburgh with Erol Alkan, Leon Vynehall, Or:la, and Ross From Friends. [Cammy Gallagher]

Art

If, like me, you’re on an Edinburgh Art Festival comedown, then don’t fret. September will keep you busy with plenty of new exhibitions, pop-ups and curated events.

There’s time to recover before Art Walk Porty launches in Edinburgh. SHOWGROUND (6-14 Sep) celebrates the Portobello’s seaside variety entertainment era, which involves a series of site-specific performances spanning acrobatics, dance and film, as well as collaborations with Nobles Amusements and Moving Images Cinema Caravan.

Over to Glasgow, Cryptic Nights takes over The Art School. Cryptic Nights are known for their audio-visual experiments which platform emerging, Scotland-based artists. On Thursday 11 September, from 8pm, artist Shankar Saanthakumar presents Sail, a sound sculpture and a kinetic replica of his body which explores ‘mind-body (dis)connection.’

Back to Edinburgh for In Consideration of Our Times, Matthew Arthur Williams’ solo exhibition at Stills: Centre for Photography. The show, which opens on 12 September, features haunting self-portraits and landscapes that Williams describes as being “in a state of constant loss”.

From 13 September, Lindsey Mendick transforms a vacant high street shop in Dundee into an ‘imagined estate agency.’ Known for her provocative and deeply personal clay sculptures that lay it all bare, Mendick last exhibited in Scotland with SH*T FACED at Jupiter Artland. In this new, off-site collaboration with the sculpture park, Growing Pains promises to explore class, social mobility and the teenage experience.

On the Isle of Bute, artist Thomas Abercromby stages Recovery Island. Across Mount Stuart, Abercromby presents a multisensory installation which follows personal stories about recovery from addition, grief, trauma or physical illness. The artist has been working with a local recovery group to develop the exhibition, which he describes as “rooted in abolitionist thought” for its ambition to dismantle old systems of harm. The show runs from 13 September. Heading West again for Glasgow Southside Art Weekend, which celebrates independent art activity in, well, the southside of the city. Happenings include an exhibition in tribute to writer and critic Marina Vishmidt and performances by Single End Collective. Organised by Glasgow Art Map, Glasgow Southside Art takes place from 18 until 21 September.

[Rachel Ashenden]

Theatre

In Glasgow, A Play, A Pie and A Pint kicks off its Autumn season with Wallace, a Hamilton-esque hip-hop musical about the titular William Wallace. Written by Rob Drummond and Scottish rapper and producer Dave Hook, the musical chronicles the life of Wallace and other Scottish figures. Wallace will visit Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre (9-13 Sep) after its run at Òran Mór (1-6 Sep).

Following its grand re-opening, Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre, in association with National Theatre of Scotland, presents Small Acts of Love by Frances Poet and Ricky Ross (9 Sep-4 Oct). Featuring original songs by Ross, Small Acts of Love tells the true story of two communities coming together to cope with the Pan Am 103 bombing of 1988.

This month, Peapod Productions will be touring their new play, Uncle Vincent, around Scotland, including the Scottish Storytelling Centre (27-28 Sep). Written by Rebekah King and performed by Philip Kingscott, the production is a look into how Vincent van Gogh’s surviving family members fought to preserve his genius.

Tron Theatre Company and Traverse Theatre, in association with National Theatre of Scotland, present Black Hole Sign, a dark comedy by working NHS nurse Uma Nada-Rajah. Helmed by Traverse Theatre Artistic Director Gareth Nicholls, the production cuts through the absurdity of our ailing healthcare system. Black Hole Sign will have its world premiere at Tron Theatre before touring to Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in October (19 Sep-4 Oct).

To finish out the month, Dundee Rep Theatre will begin its tour of Tennessee Williams’ beloved classic The Glass Menagerie, directed by Andrew Panton. After opening in Dundee (27 Sep-18 Oct), the production will visit Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre (21-25 Oct) and Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre (4-8 Nov). [Rho Chung]

Photo: Mark Wild Photography

Image: courtesy of artist

Photo: Eoin Carey Citizens Theatre Homecoming

Matthew Arthur Williams, Emollition Man 2023

Oran Mor

Image: courtesy of artist

Thomas Abercromby, Recovery Island

Image: courtesy of artist

Dylan Bell, Fun City

Comedy

With the first month in their new home (416 Great Western Road, where Webster’s Theatre used to be), The Stand Glasgow have some cracking shows to kick off this new chapter. As part of Glasgow 850, the venue’s hosting Big Yin’s Best Of (6 Sep, 4pm, £4.50-£8.50), which celebrates the big man himself with past winners and nominees of the Sir Billy Connolly Spirit of Glasgow Award (expect Rosco McClelland and Susie McCabe) making appearances. Josie Long also brings her gorgeous Fringe show home, sharing Now Is The Time Of Monsters (11 Sep, 8pm, £22) with her adopted city.

Way East, there’s a new regular show from hip-hop-comedy-baller MC Hammersmith. Once a month at Monkey Barrel, he presents MC Hammersmith and Friends (Monkey Barrel, 14 Sep, 7.30pm, £7-£9) with a top-secret lineup. Heavy on the beats and batshit su estions, it’ll be an excellent way to round off your weekend.

As for solo shows this month, we’d su est seeing David Callaghan and Jin Hao Li. Callaghan’s These Lanes I Watch Into The Fog (Gael & Grain Glasgow, 10 Sep, 7.30pm, £10) is a real marvel of comedy, storytelling and tech. Well worth a punt, we can guarantee it’ll be unlike any other comedy show you’ll have seen before. And Best Newcomer Nominee, Jin Hao Li is back in the city with Greatest Hits (Monkey Barrel, 26 Sep, 8pm, £7), a tongue-in-cheek-titled WIP to roadtest some new and on brand off-kilter punchlines.

Finally, get your tickets booked in advance for Sick of this Shift (The Stand, Glasgow, 6 Oct, 8pm, £12-£15), a fundraiser for Unite Hospitality Glasgow branch with an absolutely stacked lineup. Supporting this excellent cause will be Liam Withnail, Krystal Evans, Kim Blythe, Amelia Bayler and headliner Christopher Macarthur-Boyd. With a bill like this, tickets will get snapped up sharpish. [Polly Glynn]

Books

The book festivals might be over but the books keep on a-coming, and there’s so many launches to celebrate them. Over at The Portobello Bookshop, Helen Charman chats with Akshi Singh to mark the release of the paperback of her book Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood (3 Sep). Ocean Vuong is also in town – he’ll be launching his latest novel The Emperor of Gladness with The Portobello Bookshop at Assembly Rooms on 8 September. And for your inner child, Jacqueline Wilson has written an adult sequel to her beloved book The Illustrated Mum, also at Assembly Rooms on 4 September.

Looking for more local writers? Lighthouse Bookshop have you covered – they’re hosting a queer writers debut showcase featuring Selali Fiamanya, Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin and The Skinny’s own Elspeth Wilson on 11 September. Their big prize – The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing – is also getting the spotlight: they’re looking at the shortlist and announcing the winner in an event on 15 September. And as cosying up with your significant other season approaches, author Caroline Young drops by the bookshop to discuss her book Single and Psycho, and how pop culture has created the idea of the unstable single woman (18 Sep).

Over in Glasgow, Mount Florida are hosting a double launch to celebrate new independent London press Ssnake Press: Kate O’Connor and Anna Walsh will be discussing their new publications (11 Sep). There’s also a wee launch at Glasgow Women’s Library, where poets Linda Jackson and Lesley O’Brien present Siren Calling and On the Scent of the Honeyed Hive respectively (13 Sep). And finally, there’s some poetry open mics too: Glasgow Zine Library host theirs on 10 September, and Typewronger Books host theirs on 28 September. [Anahit Behrooz]

Image: courtesy of GZL

Photo: Julie Broadfoot

Photo: Rebecca Need-Menear

Photo: Matt Crockett

Photo: Laurence Winram

Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin

Josie Long

MC Hammersmith

Jin Hao Li

Glasgow Zine Library

Features

22 As calls for a boycott continue to grow, we take a look at some alternatives to Spotify for collecting and listening to music.

26 One writer explores the impact streaming and the algorithm have had on their relationship to music.

29 We catch up with the new sound of sunshine pop in young Scotland, The Cords

30 Time for autumn film festivals, as Take One Action!, IberoDocs and more launch their programmes.

33 The Student Guide 2025 – 32 pages blending useful information, life advice and tales of regret.

67 Sam Riley discusses relating to the character of a washed-up tennis player in new film Islands

68 We take a trip to Timespan in Helmsdale for Joanne Coates’ exhibition amplifying the overlooked story of the Herring Girls.

69 Selali Fiamanya on his debut novel Before We Hit the Ground, a wrenching account of immigrant family dynamics.

70 A guide to Scotland’s many and varied autumn music festivals

72 We take a trip to Govan’s Fairfield Club ahead of a fundraiser with Healthy & Sentinel

73 LuckyMe signee Dansa talks art, production and life as a Cowgate Rat.

74 After seven years of refurb, Gorbals mainstay the Citizens Theatre has reopened – we take a look at what’s in store.

On the website...

More podcasts – another in our Music Now interview series drops mid-month, and The Cineskinny continues fortnightly – plus reviews of some Big Films from our writers at Venice Film Festival, our new music Spotlight every Thursday, and events a-plenty in our Zap! newsletter

Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Paul D'Orlando; Paul D'Orlando; Marc Tedechi; The Boy and the Suit of Lights; Stella Dalgleish; Islands; courtesy of North Carolina Archive; Gary Timmons; Marilena Vlachopoulou; Ruby Pluhar; Celine Antal; Alasdair Watson

Shot of the month

The Linda Lindas @ King Tut's, Glasgow, 26 August by Elliot Hetherton

Across

1. Tertiary learning (6,9)

9. Schemed (7)

10. Clueless (7)

11. Influential – impressionable (9)

12. Painter's tool (5)

13. Reverting – sapling (anag) (7)

15. Narcotic gummies (7)

17. Introversion (7)

19. Begrudges (7)

21. Escapade (5)

23. Lightbulb moment (9)

25. Offence (7)

26. Sincere (7)

27. Undergraduate qualification (9,6)

Down

1. Optimistic (7)

2. Study of Earth (9)

3. Additional (5)

4. Swirling – dyed gin (anag) (7)

5. Small guitar (7)

6. Scholars (9)

7. Apple computers (5)

8. Syringes (7)

14. Intoxicate (9)

16. Listen (sympathetically) (4,2,3)

17. Give into (7)

18. Below freezing (3-4)

19. Bookish types (7)

20. Phantom (7)

22. Genital (5)

24. Mettle – audacity (5)

Compiled by George Sully

Feedback? Email crossword@theskinny.co.uk

Turn to page 7 for the solutions

Poster by Freddie Guthrie (p48-49)

Freddie Guthrie is an artist and designer living in Glasgow who is interested in place and digital obsession and printing things out and all the controversy surrounding angels and manuscripts.

IG: @artbyfreddiexx www.freddieguthrie.com

Illustration: Paul d'Orlando

Techpocalypse

It’s a micro theme this month, to counterbalance with the mega theme of the Student Guide in the middle of the magazine. A pair of features consider the impact of technology on music, our experience of it, and our essential relationship with it. After decades of paying artists fractional royalties it has emerged that the massive individual profits of Spotify’s founder have been poured into AI military tech. As the boycott escalates, we ask: what are the alternatives?

Alongside this, one writer considers how listening to music determined by the algorithm has made the experience an increasingly isolating experience, and how we can change the way we listen, challenge ourselves to extend our attention, and re-engage.

Deepening the Grooves

Following Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek’s venture capital firm investing in the AI military software development company Helsing, artists and outraged subscribers are boycotting the platform – it’s time to rethink our approach to music listening

Amass-exodus from Spotify was launched over the summer. The usual culprit of artists’ renewed call for their community to jump ship from the streaming service is none other than Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. The boycott was sparked by Ek’s venture capital firm Prima Materia leading a round of funding in Helsing, a German defence tech group focusing on AI software development in military technology. Ek dumped a whopping 600 million euros into the war machine fuelling Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Also wrapped up in artists’ and Spotify subscribers’ outrage over Ek’s capital investment is that over the last two decades he has become a billionaire off the backs of artists’ music through his company’s royalty distribution system that has only paid independent artists pennies per stream. Duetti, a company that works with independent artists to manage and market their catalogue to streaming services, published a 2024 Economics Report that found Spotify pays artists a meagre $3 USD per 1,000 Streams.

Even though I spent the whole summer being told helpful tricks to ditch Spotify, I still haven’t. It’s quite hypocritical. Unfortunately the convenience of streaming has made it difficult to decide how to supplement all the time I spend listening to music on Spotify. I do have a sizeable collection of physical media: vinyl, cassette tapes and CDs, which is an obvious alternative to streaming music on Spotify. Outrageously, the ease streaming creates means a lot of my physical media is more untouched than it should be.

Streaming and playlist culture do feel to be an inorganic way to listen to music. To move past the need for Spotify it seems to be time to rethink the way I approach listening to music. Since most of my music-loving life I’ve been a playlist person, it seems remarkably difficult to part with all of my favourite tunes in these folders of convenience. I do feel artistically ready to partly abandon the playlist and revert to the tried and true habit of listening to albums. It was a huge summer of album listening for me. Blondshell’s new record, If You Asked For a Picture, The Bug Club’s Very Human Features, and Adult Mom’s spring release, Natural Causes, have

Words: Billie Estrine

Illustration: Paul D'Orlando

been replayed so much that had I been listening to them on vinyl the grooves would be insanely deep after the past few months.

Instead of only listening to albums this summer though, I’ve also created playlists – like a normal Gen Zer – with a couple songs I enjoy from an album and other singles. But I’ve found over the past few months that this way of listening to music consistently falls flat; I’d listen to the playlist three times and then get sick of the tunes. Then all I had to do to fall back in love with those songs was listen to the record they’re on and the spark was back.

The decisively more important reason to rethink my music listening habits is the political intent behind boycotting Spotify. If I don’t migrate off the platform, Ek will continue to profit from the monthly fee paid to stream songs artists aren’t adequately paid for. Furthermore, when his next weapons manufacturer of choice has their next funding round I’ll be complicit in his ability to fund military technologies. This is a concern local independent artists also have with their music continuing to stream on Spotify after his investment in Helsing this past June.

Without artists’ music streaming on Spotify the corporation’s exploitative business model could completely crumble. With both customers and artists joining the boycott of Spotify, the movement has the possibility to reshape the economic landscape streaming services have profited from for two decades. International and local artists have left Spotify in droves due to the horror of Ek’s investment in military technology. Premium consumers and freebie streamers who haven’t cancelled their subscriptions over the CEO’s investments may be forced to when none of their favourite music is available to stream on Spotify.

‘Without artists’ music streaming on Spotify the corporation’s exploitative business model could completely crumble’

In conversations with independent Scotlandbased artists it’s clear that Ek’s investment in Helsing was a shocking misuse of funds with disastrous political and humanitarian ramifications. They’re also keenly aware that without the collection of music that the platform profits off from independent artists their business model would be obsolete. Neil Pennycook, aka Meursault, told me about how Ek’s venture capital firm’s last round of investments has made it impossible to “support a company that can gleefully and without shame, contribute so substantially to the death and suffering of so many regular, flesh and blood, non-billionaire humans.”

Artists joining the boycott know that leaving is much more complicated than clicking a button. Having alerted the company that distributes their music to streaming services or those managing the business side of their career that they’re considering leaving Spotify, artists are routinely met with a hostile response. “One of the first things a label or a publisher will tell an artist looking to leave Spotify is that it makes up a large percentage of their digital revenue,” says Pennycook. Meursault currently has 8,153 monthly listeners on Spotify. “The total sum isn’t exactly putting anyone’s kids through college,” Pennycook states. Therefore, he feels leaving Spotify is “a fairly ‘low risk’ move.”

Independent artists are also Spotify customers. Along with weighing the decision to pull their discography off the platform they’re also thinking about how to proceed as consumers. Grant Donaldson of Glaswegian bands Moni Jitchell and Civil Elegies is in that boat. He shared that “apart from the pitiful amounts that are paid in revenue to artists per stream – or arguably the worst sound quality out of any of the main streaming sites – the investment of the profits by the CEO to fund the production of AI weaponry would be the main reason for myself wanting to leave Spotify.” The reasons behind artists and customers alike joining the boycott of Spotify seem to ring true for more and more people.

Another independent artist considering removing her music from Spotify is Josephine Sillars. She’s been reckoning with Spotify’s unethical royalty practice for years and now the horror that Sillars would be complicit in Ek’s investments in AI military technologies unless she decides to change her relationship with the platform.

“Regardless of if I pull my current discography, I am currently looking into alternative release models and platforms for future releases,” she explains. “I don’t feel comfortable at the moment putting anything new on Spotify.” Thankfully there’s an alternative artist cooperative brewing called Subvert. The platform could fill the ethical gap independent artists are stuck on when they’re ready to release new music.

Subvert is an online cooperative marketplace set to launch this autumn. The platform’s goal is to be the artist-owned successor to Bandcamp, which started as an independent music e-commerce platform. Since its founding, Bandcamp has been sold twice from one corporation to the next. In contrast to Bandcamp, as of late August Subvert is collectively owned by 5587 artists, 998 labels and 862 supporters. The online marketplace will create a system for artists to own their means of production by releasing music directly to their fans.

“I don’t feel comfortable putting anything new on Spotify”

Before Donald J. Trump’s second inauguration Spotify hosted a brunch as a means to brag about “the power of podcasts in this election” as reported by Bloomberg. Nikki Belfiglio is a member of New York City bands BODEGA and NODEGA and was outraged by this Spotify event. She told me: “In January, watching the tech assholes simp and smile behind [Trump], a blatantly corrupt sexual abuser enraged me to think, what else? With a few simple questions, asking around to friends I was linked to Subvert.” It’s insidious that artists have been exploited by streaming service corporations and their executives for decades. Instead of streaming music on Spotify or other corporate streaming services, Subvert could offer a cooperative alternative for fans to buy records as both MP4 files and different types of physical media directly from their favourite independent artists.

When I started working on this feature, a callout for local artists looking to leave Spotify showed an overwhelming want for change in the way they’re able to make their music available to

Josephine Sillars

fans on the internet. Those who reached out included Yemeni musician Intibint, cross-genre artist Beth Karp, DJ and producer naafi, Stephen McLeod, aka allmyfriendsaresynths, plus singer-songwriters Kohla and Grayling among many others.

Spotify’s decades of exploitation, coupled with the CEO’s unethical investments in Helsing has caused an international tidal wave of artists standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine and other people living under the boot of empire, imperial wars and genocide by boycotting the platform. Over the last few weeks King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof, Hotline TNT and Xiu Xiu have all pulled their music from the platform to join the boycott. As of September I’ll be joining the Spotify boycott too and hope that in turn all the records in my collection will have their grooves deepened from proper use.

Sounds Good

Septembe

6th

11th

Susie Dent - Wo d Pe fect

Tommy Smith & Gwilym Simcock Duo

13th Au i

15th AMPLIFI: Bell Lungs - Kevin 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

26th The Music of Weathe Repo t with the Scottish National Jazz O chest a

27th FARA: 10th Annive sa y Tou

29th Pete Hammill

Full Listings

Octobe

2nd

Beve ly Glenn-Copeland with special guest Elizabeth Copeland

3rd Elis & John - That Feels Significant: Live!

5th The Music of The Lo d of The Rings

9th Edwyn Collins - The Testimonial Tou

10th Jason M az

13th New Town Conce ts: Do ic St ing Qua tet

14th The Blow Monkeys & The Ch istians

15th AMPLIFI: Theon C oss | Azamiah | Gaia

16th Ha ben Kay Qua tet: Album Launch

17th John G ant - SOLD OUT

18th Ziggy Albe ts

19th Ma y Gauthie

22nd Ke y Godliman: Bandwidth

23rd SCO 25/26: Haydn’s D um Roll

24th Jen B iste : Reactive

25th B eabach

26th An Evening with Johns’ Boys Welsh Male Voice Choi

27th Scottish Ensemble: Shifting Patte ns

30th SCO 25/26: Yeol Eum Son plays Moza t

31st Legend - The Music of Bob Ma ley

Wed 15th Oct

Easy Listening

Individual music taste has become a path of least resistance, rather than an act of creative discovery – one writer explores how streaming and AI has altered our relationship with music

Over the past few months, I’ve been striving to become a more mindful musical listener, making an effort to experience music as it was originally intended. A rather logical approach was to listen to albums all the way through, letting the music engulf me from the first track to the last. While incredibly straightforward, only upon adopting this habit did I realise that I’d practically never taken the time to do so. Now, I’ve noticed myself becoming more patient, more curious about music; I care more now about experiencing a song as its own individual piece of art, as well as attempting to understand how it fits into a broader artistic narrative of an album or the artist’s discography.

On a sunny afternoon this past July, I popped in my earbuds and pressed play on The Doors’ 1967 album Strange Days. An apt name, for you could certainly describe The Doors’ psychedelic, moody sound as a bit strange. Especially when one factors in lead singer and principal songwriter Jim Morrison’s sporadic screeches, bordering on primal; it serves as a stark contrast to his haunting, ethereal vocals.

I’ve loved The Doors’ music for years, and yet somehow this marked my first listen, in its entirety, to their second studio album. It features some of their classics, such as Love Me Two Times and People Are Strange, as well as a few tracks that I hadn’t come across before. Some of these I was

quick to groove along to, while others I found less accessible. After about a minute of Horse Latitudes, I checked to see how much was left, willing a transition into a soft ballad, or a funky, organ-backed beat; most sounds would have been a welcome change from the cacophony. It was starting to sound less like a song and more like it would send me into a panic room. After one minute and 35 seconds, it ceased, and I breathed a small sigh of relief.

Words: Sophia Goddard

Illustration: Paul D'Orlando

is inevitably deserving of a skip to the next track. In light of this convention, how many of the most popular, prolific artists would dare make music that may not be short, snappy, or radio-worthy?

‘I’ve noticed myself becoming more patient, more curious about music; I care more now about experiencing a song as its own individual piece of art’

The Doors are unusual in the sense that they’ve got tracks that are over in the blink of an eye – a taster of an idea, explosive and then over – as well as others that are long, winding stories. I’ve listened to When the Music’s Over absently, subconsciously, likely skipping it halfway through; its 11-minute runtime is a far cry from a standard radio tune, but certainly no one would ever claim The Doors to be conventional. And so, there I sat, seeing it through. It’s a fascinating song, instrumentally and lyrically, with an energy that ebbs and flows throughout. Yet, once the five, six, ten minute marks hit, I found myself more than ready for the end; for lack of a better phrase, for the music to be over. It makes sense that I’d feel this way, doesn’t it? This is how we’ve become conditioned by the popular music industry – our ears consistently piqued for the novelty of a new tune; an invisible threshold of time beyond which a song

Behold the process of popular music developing into an increasingly monotonous sound. Sensibly, the most circulated music on radio and streaming is that which is likely to have the broadest appeal to listeners. This so often manifests as an attentiongrabbing tune with a catchy chorus and captivating beat, but within this formula, there can only be so much variety. On one hand, it could be that this trend is caused by consumer demand, and that artists are leaning into this ‘radio sound’ because it has the broadest appeal to listeners. On the other hand, could it instead be that audience preferences are directly reflective of what musical artists have established as a ‘winning formula’ for success (which may also take precedence over artistic liberty)? If listeners have only been exposed to the most accessible music, how could they be expected to have a tendency towards anything else?

I don’t dislike this music; it’s fun, engaging, and usually popular for good reason. However, I do feel that there is danger in the broadening ubiquity and monotony of this ‘radio sound’. First, by adhering to the formula of a catchy radio-worthy track, artists exercise less creativity and in turn, audiences are exposed to less musical diversity. Further, this has conditioned us into perceiving the act of consuming music as something that ought to be easily digestible, thus squandering individuals’ opportunities to challenge themselves to be exploratory and curious as a musical consumer.

Thanks to musical technologies such as streaming services and artificial intelligence (including Spotify daylists), we exercise complete choice over the media we consume. With regards to music, we can leap between artists, genres, decades, even centuries, all without a second thought. It’s an incredible phenomenon, having all this music available to us so freely, not to mention an immense privilege. We can access a vast range of artistic expression and, in turn, curate our own collection of this music based on what resonates

with us. My concern with this, however, is how dramatically it has altered our relationships with musical consumption. We now have the power to skip a song the second we get bored, to decide we abhor an artist the moment we hear a tune that doesn’t appeal on first listen. We have the power to do all of it so effortlessly – perhaps without even realising it – to create our own echo chambers of music, our own insular ecosystems of preference.

remain insulated by the limited scope of our own preference, how can we remain open to understanding a range of creative expression; the broader picture of music as an art form? How would we define ‘good music’ as anything other than our own personal path of least resistance: the music that is the easiest for us to consume?

I was thinking all of this as I made my way through When the Music’s Over. It didn’t initially

The greatest development in modern musical consumption is the freedom of preference, but perhaps the technologies allowing this are also leading to the downfall of audiences’ creative curiosity and of artistic appreciation. We no longer need to turn on the radio and be patient until a song we like finally comes over the speakers. In the past, we had to listen to myriad music in order to access our own preferences, but now, we can expose ourselves to as narrow a range as we choose. We can lean so stubbornly into preference, we can form opinions with such limited perspective. We are allowed to be as close-minded as we feel comfortable. Having the freedom of choice at our fingertips is wonderful, but it makes the process of listening to music, and developing a musical taste, so convenient, practically effortless; a path of least resistance to enjoyment. How could this not change our relationship with music?

How are we supposed to define ‘good music’ if there is no common story, nor common ground for us to stand on? When we have access to such a diverse array of music, how are we to form educated opinions about ‘good music’ when we’re so caught up in our own preferences, when we have such a limited concept of relativity? If we all

appeal to me because it didn’t fit into any mould of what I typically listen to. It was beyond my musical comfort zone, hence it felt uncomfortable. However, as I sat listening, I questioned myself and what good music means to me. Good music doesn’t necessarily mean it is the easiest to listen to. David Bowie said that he always made music that he liked, that resonated with him. The central goal was never to please an audience; it was to experiment, to play, to make music he loved. Perhaps this is the best way to describe good music (of course, some talent is rather key here as well). It’s music that captures the artist, speaks to them and continues to inspire them. Good music makes me curious. It makes me understand an artist a bit more and makes me appreciate the complexities of the artistic process. Just because a song isn’t ‘easy listening’ doesn’t mean that I can’t see its value or its purpose. Good music doesn’t always have to be easy. Maybe it shouldn’t be. In an era where technology seems more prevalent by the day, it’s essential that we refrain from relying on it to dictate our approach to music. We must ensure that music stays creative, stays human, and reliance on AI and other technologies – despite its obvious advantages and convenience

‘Good music doesn’t always have to be easy. Maybe it shouldn’t be’

– will taint this. We have a unique ability as humans to not only create art but appreciate it, and we must ensure that our listening habits reflect our consciousness of this innate privilege. Be that as it may, listen to as many short, snappy chart-toppers as you desire. As will I. Skip a song if you get bored, then skip another. As will I. At the end of the day, music should be fun. Art should be fun. But I believe it should also inspire you, move you and challenge you. So maybe, put on When the Music’s Over for a change, even if it defies your algorithm. Be provoked, get bored. Or, maybe, get inspired.

Welcome to the Jangle

Ahead of releasing their self-titled debut album, we catch up with the new sound of sunshine pop in young Scotland, The Cords

Words: Andrew Williams

“It’s just… I don’t know. Different? Better? It’s not like other stuff you hear constantly. It’s so much more fun!”

Eva Tedeschi from The Cords is trying to explain the appeal of the indie-pop sound which has inspired their self-titled debut album. Eva and her sister Grace have breathed new life into a well-worn genre, picking up some high-profile support along the way. Their strum-along, sunshine pop perfectly captures the energy of youth, enough to melt the hearts of even the most cynical old timers.

And yes, it feels impossible to write about The Cords without mentioning their ages, their combined years taking them to only a fraction of most of their indie heroes. Yet they seem unfazed by horror stories of the music industry and retain an upbeat outlook on life, focusing on what seems to matter to them most: making music which hits

home and tugs at the heartstrings. So where did it all begin?

“Well, you started drumming when you were six, didn’t you?” Grace sets the scene, though the sisters enthusiastically tag-team throughout the interview. “Yeah, I got a tiny toy drum kit for Christmas one year. Then moved on to lessons, and then Eva started playing guitar. She was four when she started! I’d stop for ages and then go back to it. I was hearing a lot of bands and just thought, I really want to do this. We really loved the Shop Assistants’ drumming, it’s so simple, and yet it all sounds so good. And not samey, it’s never boring, it just fits perfectly with the songs.”

The Cords are signed to two legendary indie labels, Skep Wax in the UK and Slumberland in the States. The former is run in part by the Fairy Godmother of twee pop, Amelia Fletcher, of Talulah Gosh and Heavenly fame. Slumberland, in turn, have been a powerhouse of US indie for decades, home to Stereolab, Lightheaded, and Rocketship amongst many others.

It might feel like a case of right place, right time, but that would ignore the sheer number of gigs that The Cords have played, in support slots and headlining, to crowds large and small. Was that a deliberate tactic, to get out and play as much as possible? And do they enjoy it? “We just keep getting asked! And we’re supporting such amazing bands, we feel so lucky. We look forward to playing live, of course the run-up to any show is scary, but once we’re up there and we start playing it’s completely fine.”

I wonder if this feels especially true when they play “hometown” shows in Glasgow? “Oh, absolutely. Glasgow is so special because of the iconic bands it has produced. But beyond that, everyone has just been so supportive. Like, last year we seemed to be playing at Mono every month! It’s our favourite place ever, we just love Glasgow so much.”

Quizzed on their favourite gig of the past couple of years, the sisters eventually settle on the Postcards from Scotland shows, which were hosted to tie in with the Grant McPhee book of the same name. To hear The Cords waxing lyrical about great lost

“Last year we seemed to be playing at Mono every month! It’s our favourite place ever, we just love Glasgow so much”

Eva and Grace Tedeschi, aka The Cords

Scottish indie bands of the past such as Jesse Garon and the Desperadoes and The Fizzbombs is almost enough to bring a tear to the eye. And what comes next? World domination? Arena tours? Perhaps – whisper it – a bass player? This su estion provokes peals of laughter from Eva and Grace. “That’s the question everyone always asks us! We both play bass on the album, but we love it being just the two of us. We can discuss things and write songs together. We know what kind of sound we want. And it would be cool if we were a stadium band, but we also love the little cult following we have at the moment. And that already feels like a crazy amount of people. So, in some ways, we don’t want that to change. But also, being signed to Slumberland, we would absolutely love to play in the States… hopefully that might happen soon.”

The Cords have an easy, knockabout manner, that would charm anyone who met them. Next up is a trio of pop fests across the UK and Europe, and some album launch shows, including one at Rough Trade. Grace and Eva ponder what their favourite songs on the album might be, and When You Said Goodbye, Yes It’s True, and Fabulist all get honourable mentions. For a band who have already supported indie icons such as Belle & Sebastian and Camera Obscura, and who have worked incredibly hard to get to where they are now, it’s difficult not to feel optimistic for the future of Scottish pop after an hour in the company of The Cords.

The Cords is released on 26 Sep via Skep Wax / Slumberland Records

The Cords play The Mash House, Edinburgh, 4 Oct; Mono, Glasgow, 5 Oct

instagram.com/the.cords_band

Photo: Marc Tedeschi

Community Interests

Here are four film festivals with community at their heart. The directors of Take One Action and IberoDocs introduce new eras for their much-loved events, and we celebrate the inventive programming at Sea Change and Glasgow Youth Film Festival

Take One Action

Take One Action (TOA), Scotland’s film festival for social change, has had a reinvention. The upcoming edition will be its 17th, but the first of a new biennial structure that’s been introduced to create deeper ties with the various communities the festival serves and build a model that prioritises the well-being of the festival’s small, dedicated team. Rather than a week-long event, the new-look TOA will take the form of weekenders in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness and Dundee, spread over three months, with local co-programmers from each city putting on additional events that reflect their priorities and interests.

Overseeing TOA’s transformation is Rachel Hamada, who joined the festival last year as director. Hamada’s background is in investigative journalism – she helped found crowd-funded investigative journalism collective The Ferret, and currently works as a community organiser for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism – and tells me she finds plenty of overlap between uncovering news and her new role at TOA. “The ultimate goal of TOA is quite similar to investigative journalism; it’s just a slightly different method of getting there.” They’re both about communicating information to people, and she reckons the film festival might have the edge in this goal. “There’s quite a lot of evidence that facts alone don’t necessarily change people’s minds. You need to get to people’s emotions as well; you need to resonate with them to really change stuff. That’s probably the main reason I moved over into the arts.”

The theme for this year’s TOA is Real Utopias. “The idea for the theme came from the fact that we’re in quite a bleak place politically for lots of different reasons,” explains Hamada. “And many people feel hopeless and unable to take action. So we wanted to have a theme that could galvanise people, make them feel that action was possible, and bring them together so it’s easier to take action.” She says, though, that there’s a big emphasis on the ‘real’ part. “We wanted our ideas [of a Real Utopia] to be a bit pragmatic and show seeds of things that are already happening, rather than stuff that is too perfect or pie in the sky. So it’s a bit messy, but it’s also real.”

One film that fits neatly into this theme is Power Station, a vivid portrait of community following the filmmakers Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn as they try and convince their neighbours to turn their street in Walthamstow into an energy-generating powerhouse via the power of the sun. “I think it fits Real Utopias really nicely,” says Hamada. “The artist/activists that the film is centred around admit they don’t know everything; they get frustrated, make mistakes. So I think there’s something quite nice about the way it portrays how it’s OK to not necessarily know what you’re doing all the time, and to hit dead ends and then have to rethink rather than having a really clean narrative.”

Another highlight looks to be Union, Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s documentary focused on a group of workers at an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey as they band together to form a labour union – the first in that online store’s history. Hamada calls it a classic TOA film. “It’s just such a powerful account of how workplace and

Words: Jamie Dunn

community organising can change things,” she says. The screening will include a discussion with representatives from an Amazon fulfilment centre in Coventry who were recently unsuccessful in their attempts to unionise. “It’ll be really interesting relating this US example in New Jersey to the Coventry example and asking why it wasn’t able to happen here in the UK.”

Other highlights look to be NIÑXS, which takes us to a small Mexican town where we follow teenager Karla over several years as she works through the complexities, joys and uncertainties of coming-of-age as a transgender person, and the classic 1984 documentary Red Skirts on Clydeside, which uncovers the untold story of the women activists who were central to the 1915 Glasgow Rent Strikes. As well as entertain and inform, Hamada hopes the programme will help shift people’s mindsets and maybe even activate them into taking actions they might not have taken before. “The dream is to galvanise people through possibility and hope, rather than despair.”

17-21 Sep, Filmhouse and Grassmarket Community Project, Edinburgh; 25-28 Sep, GMAC, Glasgow; 10-12 Oct, Eden Court, Inverness; 7-9 Nov, DAC, Dundee Libraries’ and Steps Theatre

Full programme at takeoneaction.org.uk

IberoDocs

IberoDocs is about to deliver its 11th and bi est edition. While the raison d’être of the festival might seem quite obvious – as its title su ests, it celebrates the culture and history of IberoAmerican countries through documentary film – its aims go much deeper than simply a showcase. “We want to bring these stories to Scotland in a way that helps people better understand themes like migration, identity, and belonging,” explains IberoDocs’ director, Mar Felices, “while also building bridges between local communities and Ibero-American residents here.” And those communities are growing, with the festival expanding to Dundee this edition on top of its traditional venues in Edinburgh and Glasgow. That’s not the only significant change. IberoDocs traditionally took place in the spring, but this year it’s slotting into autumn’s lively film festival season. “September felt like the right moment,” says Felices, “especially to connect with students and younger audiences, as it aligns with the academic calendar. It’s also an exciting fresh start – bringing the festival into a new season and opening up opportunities for growth.”

Fanny and Elvis

NIÑXS Power Station

Felices and her team have curated a diverse programme this year and will be bringing 15 Ibero-American artists to Scotland. The lineup includes 11 features, a shorts programme, networking events, live music, a masterclass and an art exhibition. The overarching theme, meanwhile, is Searching and the Sea. Felices explains more: “The films this year all touch on the theme of searching, whether that’s searching for identity, family, memory or belonging. The sea itself also becomes a metaphor – fluid, transformative, connecting cultures and histories across borders.” This theme is also evoked in the festival’s new environmental strand, The Sea, which features four short films by female filmmakers that reflect on our relationship with the ocean.

Opening film Home Is Somewhere Else could hardly feel more timely and urgent. It’s an animated documentary exploring a trio of deportation and displacement stories in the US, told from the perspective of several young immigrants. “It felt essential to open the festival with [Home Is Somewhere Else],” says Felices. She’s not just talking about the content of the film, but also its form. “It connects beautifully with this year’s theme of transformation and fluidity through its use of animation, with each character’s story told in a different visual style. That fits perfectly with our focus on creativity and diverse forms of storytelling.”

When I ask for another tip from the lineup, Felices su ests Inma de Reyes’ The Boys and the Suit of Lights, about a compassionate young Spanish lad who feels pressured by his family into becoming a bullfighter. “Inma is a Spanish filmmaker based in Edinburgh, and we’ve supported all her films over the years. This screening will be extra special because Noelia Blanca, who performs the film’s soundtrack, will be singing live at IberoDocs.”

What does Felices hope audience members will take away from this year’s IberoDocs as a

whole? “More than anything, I hope people leave feeling connected – whether that’s to the films, to the Ibero-American community, or to each other. Our goal is to create spaces where cultural exchange feels natural and welcoming. Ultimately, I want audiences to discover stories they wouldn’t otherwise see, and to feel part of something bi er than just a film screening.”

10-28 Sep, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee; full programme at iberodocs.org

Sea Change

Sea Change has been a breath of fresh air to the Scottish festival calendar. Taking place on the Hebridean island of Tiree, it’s an innovative and intimate celebration of female filmmaking. As well as showcasing a programme of films made by women, the community-minded festival also breaks out the cinema space with wholesome beach walks, group yoga and wild swimming.

Maybe New Zealand actor Kerry Fox will join audiences for an Atlantic dip? She’s helping close the festival with a rare screening of her underrated 90s rom-com Fanny and Elvis, followed by a conversation with GFT’s Allison Gardner. Fox will also lead a workshop on working with actors and present a screening of Jane Campion’s wonderful An Angel At My Table

Author Amy Liptrot will also be on Tiree to discuss the adaptation of her celebrated memoir The Outrun, and to introduce a screening of the film. And the festival opens with 1934 classic The Ru ed Isle: A Shetland Lyric, a poetic ‘story documentary’ about crofting life by pioneering Scottish filmmaker Jenny Gilbertson, with a live score by Inge Thomson and Catriona Macdonald.

19-21 Sep, various venues, Tiree; full programme at screenargyll.co.uk/sea-change-film-fest

Glasgow Youth Film Festival

Every summer, the GFT mentors a group of 15 to 18-year-old Glasgow students in the ways of film curation and festival coordination. And then, at the end of the summer, those young programmers are let loose and come up with the Glasgow Youth Film Festival. This year’s programme is one of their richest and most daring yet.

The festival kicks off with Plainclothes, a 90s-set queer police thriller that sounds like a less problematic Cruising. Other highlights include a pair of new documentaries: Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, about Richard O’Brien’s creation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show; and Runa Simi, in which a Peruvian father and son work to dub The Lion King into Quechua in an effort to preserve their endangered indigenous language.

The teen programmers also take over GFT’s regular Queer Cinema Sundays slot to screen Jamie Babbit’s cult lesbian rom-com But I’m a Cheerleader, and close the festival with the joyous Irish musical Sing Street. It’s a lineup that’s fierce, fun and a little subversive. Turns out the kids are alright.

26-28 Sep, GFT; full programme at glasgowfilm.org

But I'm A Cheerleader

The Boy and the Suit of Lights

Dream Big

Francis Ford Coppola’s wildly inventive, batshit crazy epic Megalopolis is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. This is a film that has to be seen to be believed

Words: Jamie Dunn

Movies don’t get more spectacular, more hallucinatory or more wildly bonkers than Megalopolis, the hugely ambitious and uninhibited new lm from Hollywood titan Francis Ford Coppola. This is what cinema looks like when a great director gets the chance to make the lm they’ve been trying to get produced for more than four decades. By working outside the studio system and nancing the lm independently, Coppola has created a work that’s bursting at the seams with bold ideas, huge performances and visual invention.

Coppola’s chaotic process during the production of Megalopolis is soon to be laid bare in the y-on-the-wall documentary Megadoc, directed by Mike Figgis. It’s described as “a record of a production on the brink; a personal memoir unfolding in real time”, and has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. One thing it might explore is how Megalopolis acts very much like a culmination of Coppola’s long, topsy-turvy career, given that it blends the epic scale of the masterpieces he became famous for in the 70s (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) with the playfulness of the more idiosyncratic lms he made later in his career, like Rumble Fish, Peg Sue Got Married and Tetro Megalopolis also shares some of the jaw-dropping visual excess Coppola demonstrated with his two most beautiful lms: One From the Heart and Bram Stoker’s Dracula Megalopolis tells the story of Cesar Catilina ( played by Adam Driver), an enigmatic genius who dreams of a better world. He’s an inhabitant of New Rome, a sprawling metropolis that looks very much like today’s New York spliced with the Eternal City. It’s a cesspit of greed and corruption, but Cesar, who’s a master architect, has a dream to turn it into an urban utopia through his forward-thinking designs and the incredible new building material he’s invented. But plenty of forces, including a small-minded mayor (Giancarlo Esposito), a sleazy banker ( Jon Voight), and Cesar’s hoodlum cousin, Clodio ( Shia

LaBeouf ), are trying to stand in his way. Amid all this betrayal and backstabbing, Cesar also nds time to fall in love with Catilina (Nathalie Emmanuel), the whip-smart party girl who’s the mayor’s daughter. Throw into the mix a scenestealing Aubrey Plaza as Wow Platinum, a TV news reporter with her own scurrilous ambitions, and you’ve a pretty heady brew with one of the craziest movie casts in recent memory.

While watching Megalopolis, there’s a feeling that Coppola, who was 85 when he made it, has let his creativity fully run loose. The Oscar-winner is clearly having lots of fun playing in the toolbox of cinema, blending old-school lmmaking techniques with the latest possibilities of digital technology. At times, Megalopolis resembles a stagebound Hollywood epic like DW Gri th’s Intolerance or Fritz Lang’s similarlynamed Metropolis, while at others it calls to mind the digital vistas of late Tim Burton or the Wachowskis at their most maximalist. The result is a bold and often messy display of unadulterated ambition.

Many critics have pointed out that Megalopolis’s plot is a nifty metaphor for its own tortured making. Much like his protagonist Cesar, Coppola is someone who often lays everything on the line for his art. While making the feverish war epic Apocalypse Now, the director seemed to brie y go insane in the Filipino jungle, as detailed in the documentary Hearts of Darkness. A few years later, Coppola then put his whole studio in jeopardy to make his glorious musical One From the Heart, which was wonderfully excessive but went way over budget and proved nancially ruinous.

In this tale of a maverick architect pushing the limits of his art form, it’s hard not to see parallels with Coppola himself. When no Hollywood studio was willing to back this daring sciepic, reports are that the director sold o a huge chunk of his successful winery business to raise the $120 million needed for the budget. Working with his own money, Coppola didn’t play it safe and created a lm that’s a total one-o ; it breaks all the rules of cinema, plays to its own strange rhythms and at times is completely batshit crazy. Whatever speculation and controversy you’ve heard about Megalopolis, there’s no doubt it’s the work of a true visionary, and it simply has to be seen to be believed. With Megalopolis arriving on streaming, now’s your chance to nally try this one-of-a-kind experience.

Megalopolis is streaming exclusively on MUBI from 5 Sep

To get 30 days of MUBI free, head to mubi.com/theskinny

Megapolis

Student Guide

Welcome

Welcome to The Skinny Student Guide 2025! It was put together by the team at The Skinny, Scotland’s largest independent culture magazine. You can pick up a free copy in venues across Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Perth and Stirling every month. We cover all things cultural – music, film, art, comedy, food and drink, clubs, theatre, books and much more besides. The magazine is completely free and comes out on the first Monday of each month. Find your nearest stockist at theskinny.co.uk/new-issue

We also have a weekly newsletter which goes out every Thursday morning, The Zap. In it we share a hand-picked selection of the most interesting events across Scotland, as well as highlights from the magazine and exclusive long reads. You can sign up to receive it – again, for free!

– using the QR code, where you can also get details of our website, podcasts, socials and Other Stuff We’re Up To…

38 Heads Up - A guide to the year’s events

41 Ask Anahit - She’s here to solve all your personal issues

45 Meet the programmers and artists from AMPLIFI, the night celebrating the Scottish music scene

46 The power of shared meals in building community 48

Poster by Freddie Guthrie

52 How Wet Leg inspired one writer to make her social life less about sex

A guide to getting involved in student activism

How to break into the Scottish art scene

A day in the life of an art student 58 We meet some DIY music programmers putting on nights across Scotland 61 Creative community in the design scene

62 Fresh(ers) Horror - Dark tales from The Skinny team’s pasts

Stella Dalgleish is a Glasgow-based illustrator and filmmaker. Often playful and tactile visually, she makes use of found imagery and personal archives of video and photos to weave narratives and storylines within her work.

IG: stedalgleish

Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) ReCompose; Rory Barnes; Stella Dalgleish; Iris Luz; Dalila D'Amico; Ot Pascoe; WSHWSH; Phoebe Willison; Stephen Hughes

Student Heads Up

FLY Open Air Festival

Princes St Gardens, Edinburgh, 13-14 Sep

Start as you mean to go on with this big outdoor party from Scottish clubbing mainstays FLY. The lineup includes &ME, Joy Orbison, KILIMANJARO and Effy; the setting is iconic; there’s loads of afterparties if you want to keep things rolling.

Tenement Trail

Various venues, Glasgow, 11 Oct

We get it, you want to keep your calendar clear for ‘work’ and ‘studying’ and ‘the sesh’, but there is a lot going on around here. Consider these the tentpoles around which to build your year…

What better way to get to know the East End than swinging between its various gig venues?

The Barrowlands, Saint Luke’s and BAaD host this year’s Tenement Trail, with a lineup packed with great new Scottish bands (look out for Soapbox, Cowboy Hunters and Theo Bleak), and headlined by Pale Waves.

The SAY Award

Caird Hall, Dundee, 6 Nov

The annual celebration of Scotland’s best new music is in Dundee this year, with an awards ceremony at the Caird Hall on 6 Nov. Even if you don’t make it along, the SAY Award is a great excuse to listen back to some of the great albums released by Scottish artists in the past year – the 20-strong longlist is released on 25 Sep.

Scottish Queer International Film Festival

Glasgow, 27 Oct - 1 Nov

Compiled by Peter Simpson

Celtic Connections

Venues across Glasgow, 15 Jan - 1 Feb

Get back from Christmas break and right back at it with Celtic Connections, Glasgow’s annual festival of folk and roots music from around the world. Expect a mix of folk sessions, big gigs and unique collaborations – it’ll definitely help shake off the cobwebs.

Glasgow Comedy Festival

Various venues, 11-29 Mar

Glasgow Comedy Festival has a bit of everything: previews, touring shows and works-in-progress from big names, and showcases of Scottish comic talent. Early highlights include the new show from Taskmaster’s Bridget Christie, and a chance to see Christopher Macarthur-Boyd’s excellent Fringe show Howling At The Moon in the palatial surroundings of the King’s Theatre.

Scotland Loves Anime GFT, Glasgow, 31 Oct - 2 Nov; Cameo, Edinburgh, 10-16 Nov

Lighthouse Radical Book Fair

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, 6-9 Nov

RSA New Contemporaries

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 28 Mar - 22 Apr

The cream of the crop from 2025’s art school degree shows come together under the enormous columns of the RSA for the annual New Contemporaries exhibition. Dozens of artists from across the country in one big exhibition, with some late-night parties thrown in for good measure.

Christmas Art Markets

Out of the Blue Drill Hall and Fruitmarket, Edinburgh; Kelvingrove and Alchemy Experiment, Glasgow

Photo:

Photo:

Photo: curse these eyes

Photo: Tiu Makkonen

Photo: Julie Howden

Photo: Alan Richardson and The SAY Award

Photo: Brendan Waters

Photo: Ryan Johnston

Fruitmarket Christmas Market

Lighthouse Radical Book Fair

A still from The Concierge, 2023, Tsuchika Nishimura Shogakukan SQIFF

Christopher Macarthur-Boyd for Glasgow Comedy Festival

Cowboy Hunters for Tenement Trail

RSA New Contemporaries 2024

Caird Hall Dundee for SAY Award

Celtic Connections

Fly Open Air

Record Store Day

Various venues across Scotland, 18 Apr

Over the years, RSD has become an unofficial public holiday for music-lovers. We’re talking big queues for Record Store Day exclusives, pop-up gigs, afterparties, and a genuinely buzzy and lovely atmosphere all day long (helped by the fact that the weather is often suspiciously good for the time of year).

Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival

Hawick, Scottish Borders, 30 Apr - 3 May

Film students – it’s time for a road trip! Alchemy is one of the UK’s very best festivals of experimental film and artists’ moving image, with a warm welcome for anyone who makes the trip south, and a huge programme of screenings and events waiting for you on your arrival.

Degree Shows

Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, May-Jun

Graduating art students: it’s your time to shine, and share your work on an undoubtedly big platform. Studying art students: an ideal chance to be nosy and see what your peers are up to. Everyone else: here are some massive, exciting exhibitions to check out and some afters to try and blag your way into. Everyone wins.

Manipulate Arts

Venues across Edinburgh, Feb

Glasgow International 2026

Venues across Glasgow, 5-21 Jun

The biennial festival of contemporary art will take over the city next June with a mix of big exhibitions, artist-led productions, unique collaborations and one-off events. Keep an eye on GI’s socials for more info.

Kelburn Garden Party

Kelburn Castle, near Largs, 2-6 Jul

Our favourite Scottish music festival, Kelburn offers a real community feel, an absolutely beautiful setting on the west coast, a huge art programme and a selection of great bands, musicians and DJs from across Scotland and beyond. Get your crew together (for your sake, grab at least one person with access to a car) and have a great weekend.

The Edinburgh Festivals August

You may have heard of them. The International, Book, Film, Art and Fringe Festivals will all be back next August, offering thousands of shows at venues across the city all month long – and countless opportunities to get a bit of bar or front-of-house work then spend all the money immediately on ‘having fun’.

Glasgow Short Film Festival

Sonica

Glasgow,

Photo: Ingrid

Photo:

Lachie Douglas and Sonica

Image: courtesy Glasgow International and the artist Photo: Sam Dick

Photo: Sanne Gault

Photo:

ReCompose

Image: courtesy of Edinburgh University Students Association

Image: courtesy GSA and the artist

TRIPTYCH Robin Fox

Glasgow Short Film Festival 2024

Glasgow Film Festival

Acrodance, Gabbi Cook

Glasgow International - Wah Yen 2024, Wei Zhang

GSA Degree Show - Stills from Super 8, Jules Dunn

Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival

Pleasance Courtyard

Kelburn Garden Party

Good Vibes for Record Store Day

In this advice column special, our resident agony aunt answers all your burning questions about how to be a student

I feel less creative at university and I’m doing a creative degree. Is this a sign I should drop out, or should I stick with it?

I don’t think this in itself is a sign you should drop out, but I think it is a sign that you need to completely disentangle the idea of higher education in this country from creativity, praxis, or – indeed – education, and if that doesn’t feel possible then yes, maybe it isn’t for you.

You might think I sound jaded and you would possibly be right. It could be because we went on strike while I was teaching at university with a regularity that was alarming but also somewhat comforting, like the reliability of the rising sun; it could be because the vice-chancellor of the University of Edinburgh was given tens of thousands of pounds to move himself and his pets over from Hong Kong while all these strikes over working conditions were happening, and has since been given almost ONE MILLION BRITISH POUNDS STERLING of expenses to jet around the world while presumably (allegedly! allegedly!!) quashing any student dissidence he stumbles upon. Who can say. Some mysteries are destined to remain mysteries. But any institution so bound up with the capitalist machine is simply not a place where you will feel at your most creative.

I have done three degrees (this is not a brag, it is a confession), so I can tell you with certainty: fostering creativity is no longer the university-as-institution’s intended function, no matter how arty your degree or how interestingly your coursemates dress. It is, however, a space to test out being an adult for the first time, to be with your friends, and to buy yourself enough time to discover the things that really make you feel creative. Find your nearest artist co-op and get stuck in, join the community radio station with the kookiest show idea you can think of, go bother your local zine library. Creativity doesn’t happen behind closed doors, and it can’t be taught. It’s a practice that bleeds into every aspect of your life and the broader community. Go to class, get your piece of paper at the end, and find what truly makes you happy.

I really like my course, but I can’t stand some of my coursemates. We’re going to be working in groups a lot this year, how do I get through the term without shouting at them?

You know when you’re scouring through job websites in the desperate hope that maybe there will be a single job you don’t hate and you wonder why exactly you signed up for an English degree when you still can’t really define Realism even after seven separate well-meaning but boring tutorials, and shouldn’t it just be about what’s real anyway, it’s when novels show something in a real (???) way, but no apparently it’s “more complicated than that” which, if we’re being honest, is probably just something they say to maintain the ongoing Dickens Industrial Complex, and you keep scrolling and actually it seems you can do most of the jobs on here (even though you really don’t want to) because it turns out the only valuable thing yours and any other degree teaches anyone anyway is ‘transferable skills’ and not in fact how and why Ezra Pound was kind of a cunt. Anyway, one of those transferable skills is tolerating annoying people.

I have full sympathy that these people on your course are probably annoying. I also have full sympathy that most group work should be deployed only as a form of illegal torture, ideally suited to the US military when they invade the next country where they are planning to establish peace or good will or whatever. But unfortunately, adult life is full of annoying people and annoying tasks, and part of learning how not to get called up by HR for throwing a stapler at someone in your future job that you didn't want is microdosing that early on.

I’m sorry that I don’t have any better advice than to grit your teeth and get through it. It’s also very hypocritical of me because I am flagrantly rude to anyone I find irritating. I think su esting and maintaining a structure to these meetings to make them as efficient and short-lived as possible is a good idea; so is giving yourself a treat when you’re done. Maybe collect all your coursemates’ worst habits and turn them into an eviscerating short story. But really, and I’m so sorry to say, this is probably a valuable learning experience for you.

I’m going back to uni this September and also staying on at my current job. I’m a bit worried about maintaining a healthy work / study / life balance, especially after dropping out of my last attempt at a full time Masters. Do you have any advice on how to approach this stage of my life without losing my mind or burning out?

Firstly, and I don’t know if this is helpful, my Masters was the easiest out of all three of my degrees (I said this sentence out loud in the office and everyone booed which – reading it back – was the least I deserved), so I think it might be less full on than you think! The one good thing about university, and especially graduate courses, is that they are so flexible and (forgive me) so easy, because they are largely used as a way to extort money from international students to, oh I don’t know, pay the vice-chancellor to go on holiday, that that balance is definitely possible to strike.

What it requires is a baseline level of organisation, and for you to be realistic about what you can achieve. How does your course manage assessments, and how sta ered are they throughout the term? Go through the plan and put those deadlines in your calendar now, and then work backwards and block out the week or two you’ll need to read for and write them. Figure out with your work what your easy weeks and what your hard weeks will be, and try and adjust your work schedule accordingly. Be OK with saying no to your friends if you don’t feel like doing something! There will always be other times to hang out and the pressure you feel is only coming from yourself. And finally, be prepared for all of this to go out of the window. It is part of the charm of higher education, that so much is done by the seat of your pants, that you ignore that assignment that is due tomorrow, no like really tomorrow, like you have to write it tonight, to hang out with your friends. It’s one of the last times in your life that you can make and are actively encouraged to make bad choices, and I really do think the entire purpose of postgraduate courses are to give yourself one to four more years of this, as a treat. The easiest way to avoid burnout, in my opinion, is to not take any of it seriously. Try and get back into that 18-year-old mindset, where nothing matters at all.

I’ve just finished my bachelors degree and cannot image not being flatmates and living in the same city as my pals from uni. How do I stay in touch with people across a ten hour time difference? Is there any other way you can think to stay in touch with my pals back home in New York than a lovely phone call to chat and catch-up?

This is really sweet! How nice for you! I’m so sorry to say that this is probably not feasible, but what a lovely impulse! That period of your life, where you all lived together and shared the intimacy you can only share by going through the same thing and living in the same place, is unfortunately over, and it will never come back in this exact form. I don’t mean this in a defeatist, nihilistic way: more that you need to be able to recognise that change in order to keep the friendships, and to let them change shape and occupy a new space in your life. Maybe you will become even closer, maybe you will drift apart, maybe you will not speak for a while and suddenly end up living together again and it’ll be magical like it was before. You simply don’t know, and while the thought of not knowing and instead trusting that relationships will change and that loss and growth are part of life makes me want to throw up, it’s only by letting go that we, incongruently, get to keep hold of things at all.

I cannot stress enough that while I know this, I simply cannot enact it in my own life, and react to all change with a particularly volatile mix of panic and hysteria that makes everything implode anyway. And that is one solution! But if you can be more normal, and I truly do believe in you, you’ll find that life can be surprising and beautiful, instead of surprising and devastating. Send each other voicenotes, send each other packages, watch all their Instagram stories so you feel tapped into their life. But also try and accept that it will be different, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily worse, or over. I think. Maybe. Who fucking knows to be honest. I’m not sure I really believe any of this anyway.

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

Amped Up

We hear from the creators and stars of the fourth season of AMPLIFI about the breadth of the Scottish music scene, taking over The Queen’s Hall main stage and the night’s importance

Back in early 2022 word reached Skinny HQ that friend of the mag Arusa Qureshi was working on something new, a series of three gigs at The Queen’s Hall. We knew nothing about it other than that it would be exciting – after all, Qureshi was (and still is) an esteemed music journalist whose taste we all trusted. These three gigs, going by the name AMPLIFI, were a partnership between her and Halina Rifai, a prolific Glasgow-based podcast producer and music writer, and all-round good e . The aim was to showcase the depth and breadth of music by Scottish musicians of colour, with no restrictions placed on genre and experimentation encouraged.

The result was something quite special – both intimate and casual, a gathering of interested and supportive music heads in the long, narrow bar down the side of The Queen’s Hall main room. Those three gigs have grown to three years’ worth of semi-regular programming, and the acts themselves have grown in stature too: since their initial performances in that intimate Queen’s Hall space Bemz has gone on to sell out rooms at SWG3 and Brownbear has led a hugely successful and mostly sold-out tour, while Miwa Nagato-Apthorp recently appeared on a lineup with Vi o Mortensen at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Now, following a show back in The Queen’s Hall’s bar this month, a bi er series of AMPLIFI, running across four nights from October to March, will take over the venue’s main auditorium, featuring for the first time headline acts from outside of Scotland, each supported by one AMPLIFI veteran who has previously performed with them in the bar space.

Qureshi tells me this has been an ambition of theirs all along, “partly to be able to give up-andcoming artists the opportunity to play on the immense Queen’s Hall stage, but also to emphasise that they very much belong there. In addition to this, we want to be able to promote these artists beyond Scotland and a great way to do that is by inviting artists on tour to play AMPLIFI, so that we can offer previous AMPLIFI artists the chance to play some really exciting support slots.”

For this reason, the nights have been arranged thematically by genre – the first in the series, for example, is a jazz special, with Tuba extraordinaire Theon Cross (formerly of Sons of Kemet) headlining, supported by two exciting acts from the Glasgow nu-jazz scene, Azamiah and GAÏA.

Rifai points to the symbolic nature of these lineups: “We’re showing Scotland that we are united globally, demonstrating what people can learn from each other – the talent, the influences, the possibilities. We’ve matched these touring artists with local artists based on sonic synergies and shared values around pushing boundaries. It’s about cultural exchange – showing that Scotland’s

“For Black artists in particular we often face barriers, we often don’t see ourselves in major venues like The Queens Hall or on festival lineups”

Brownbear

Words: Laurie Presswood

music scene exists in conversation with the world, not in isolation.”

GAÏA first graced the AMPLIFI stage in March of this year – she speaks to the excitement of getting to play in spaces specifically reserved for lifting up the voices of artists of colour. “It gave me a very similar feeling to what it was like when I played M4 Festival last year, of how important it is and how refreshing it is to be on an all Black lineup and to be around people that are there to hear your music and that want to encourage growth in that space.”

But of course she also points out how much variety can exist within those lineups: “I think the most exciting thing about music and music culture in general, is cross-pollination, and the fact that it isn’t static, and it isn’t just this one thing, and Scotland has the opportunity to nurture all of these different genres and all of this talent.”

This idea of rich musical diversity is key to AMPLIFI’s vision and success, so it’s no surprise that each of the acts playing in the upcoming series taps into this theme when asked about the night’s importance, and the nature of modern Scottish music. Brownbear, who headlined that very first AMPLIFI, points to it as a showcase for excellence: “For Black artists in particular we often face barriers, we often don’t see ourselves in major venues like The Queens Hall or on festival lineups, we have an expectation around sound, genre and look. AMPLIFI is a blank page for us to perform at the highest standard and be who we are as individuals, whether we are rock artists, indie artists, soul artists, hip-hop, it doesn’t matter. It is very much a case of get up there and show them why they have been wrong in overlooking us.”

LAMAYA, who came to the AMPLIFI stage at just 19 years old, already equipped with megawatt star power (and who will be bringing that star power back to the main stage later this year), sums up perfectly what it is that AMPLIFI captures: “The sound of modern Scotland is… diversity. Sounds from all over the globe. Squeezed into one city. Basslines that feel otherworldly but are born here in places like East Kilbride. It’s accents clashing and cultures blending. It’s a country remixing itself in real time.”

The next installment of AMPLIFI runs in the bar at The Queen’s Hall on 15 Sep featuring Bell Lungs, Lucian Fletcher and Kevin Leomo on the lineup

The main venue series kicks off with Theon Cross, Azamiah and GAÏA on 15 Oct with future dates on 3 Dec, 4 Feb and 27 Mar

Keep up-to-date at thequeenshall.net and weareherescotland.com/amplifi-newstage

Photo: Rory Barnes

Photo: Kim Simpson

GAÏA

LAMAYA

Home Cooking

Between lectures, parties, coursework and work-work, you’ve got a lot going on. We look at how cooking together with your flatmates can help build community and fuel your fun

It took me a while to get into communal cooking with my flatmates. While attending the City College of New York, a public university in Harlem, I lived in the campus dorms for two years. I roomed with some insane folks and needless to say we did not cook together. When I moved into a Brooklyn flat with a bunch of pals for my last two years of uni, it somehow took us a full year to christen ‘Taco Thursday’ as a weekly family dinner. It was inspired by a friend re-enrolling in my flatmate’s art institute; we all wanted to establish a routine of getting together in the flat and intentionally spend time together as a friend group.

Cooking with flatmates is a sweet routine to create. Whether you start out as uni friends, know each other from school, or are complete strangers, it can establish a moment of connection that lasts longer than a chat in the living room. Sure, if you

In order to establish some proof behind this promise, I had a chat with Ema Smekalová: graduate of The University of Edinburgh, former resident of the Edinburgh Student Housing Co-op, and (as you may have already noticed) fellow member of Team Skinny. Ema’s connections to the ESHC and our shared history of communal flatmate cooking made this chat too good to pass up. Upon moving into the Co-op, it was decided that everyone in Ema’s flat would cook each other a meal one night a week, as we did in Brooklyn, but it didn’t end there. “The nicest part of it was that we shared all the food as well,” they say. “People would do a shop and then there’d be stuff in the fridge and cupboards. It was free to use and there was this policy of trust that we had all spent similar amounts.”

Back in Brooklyn, we had a similar food

Words: Billie Estrine Illustration: Stella Dalgleish

owed each other from buying groceries and paying bills. Here in Edinburgh, it seems like Ema and co were definitely on the right track.

Along with communal meals in the flat, someone at the Edinburgh Student Housing Co-op would organise weekend breakfasts for the whole building. “There’s a basement, which is the communal space,” Ema says, “and people would just cook loads. Someone would organise it and do a huge batch and then everyone else would bring little bits, go downstairs and we’d all eat together in the basement.” The Co-op does a great job of creating a sense of community for university students who are so overwhelmed by their course (and broke) that they aren’t known for cooking lavishly, if at all. “ Beyond the breakfasts, there was Hearty Squirrel, who ESHC would collab with on a community meal.”

Hearty Squirrel Food Cooperative and ESHC still run this collaboration each month uni is in session. Juliet is a member of Hearty Squirrel and tells me more about the collab. Even before the community meals began, the organisations’ relationship goes back around seven years, with monthly community meals beginning in 2023. Juliet says the group make a meal “for around 70 people, destined for anyone and everyone on a pay-as-you-can basis. We try to highlight the importance of food seasonality, sustainability and sovereignty and talk about different perspectives and actions to take part in.” The meals serve as a way to fundraise for different causes. “Charities we’ve raised money for include Mothers of Sumud in the South Hebron Hills of Palestine, Grassmarket Community Project and Calais Food Collective,” Juliet tells me. It’s a wonderful example of how communal cooking can leave uni accommodation and enter the wider community. Shared time around food is so important and an opportunity to interact with new people – and who wouldn’t want to go to a pay-what-you-can meal as a broke uni student?

Taco Thursdays are among my fondest memories of that Brooklyn flat. It was a tried and true way for five friends to get together for a hang and it even promised all us very busy people a hearty meal once a week. Communal cooking with your flatmates can be a once a week routine, or in Ema’s case, a nightly occurrence. Communal cooking can be organised, or fall apart as people get busy with the semester. But you live together – it’s a habit that can be picked right back up when the (dinner)time is right.

Hearty Squirrel Food Cooperative’s first monthly meal is at Edinburgh Student Housing Co-op Basement, 25 Sep, 8.30pm, pay-what-you-can

@heartysquirreledinburgh on Instagram

heartysquirreledinburgh.weebly.com

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Man Down, Level Up

It’s all too easy to get stuck in the male gaze and let it drive your nights out: one writer tells how their uni experiences – and some Wet Leg lyrics – helped them change perspective

The

first night I lived in university housing is burned into my mind. Hurricane Ida was hitting New York City with heavy winds and intense rainfall, and we freshers were pissed. Unable to get from Harlem to the bars downtown, we had a plan: get pizza, make that one friend go to the liquor store to get vodka, and make our own party in the dorm. I was one of a handful of girls hitting on this scrawny yet attractive dude, who thankfully ended up becoming my pal two years later. I don’t remember being too bummed that nothing happened between me and the guy; instead I was giddy to have become friends with a bunch of people that I thought were really cool.

A lesson I could have learned ‘all those’ (four) years ago is: I would always have fun on a night out with pals, and flirting with strangers on the dancefloor should only be a fun little plus to a night out. Unfortunately this is not a lesson I had the privilege of learning until after graduating from university. Instead, when I connected the dots of platonic joy fulfilling me more than a person of any gender coming onto me in a dark room ever could, it was thanks to an artist complaining about just what I thought I wanted.

Wet Leg have made me have a long think or two about why my sex life – especially interactions I have with men – has been such a priority in my social life. Especially since I’m bisexual and that’s not even the only romance I’m interested in; I knew that something had to give. On Catch These Fists, off Wet Leg’s second album Moisturizer, frontperson Rhian Teasdale sings: ‘He don’t get puss, he get the boot… / This always happens late at night / Some guy comes up, says I’m his type.’ What Teasdale says next are the lyrics that hit me like a truck: ‘Yeah, don’t approach me / I just wanna dance with my friends’.

The song has helped me realise that beyond a general amount of horniness, that feels extreme at times due to the taboo nature of the subject, I also might be trapped inside the male gaze. Beyond the phrase’s roots in feminist film analysis conceptualising how women are portrayed as objects of desire in media, the male gaze also suffocates women by way of socialisation. Why else have male interactions taken up so much of my brain space?

Gen Z are a very obsessive generation; I’m sure it has to do with the internet hot-wiring our brains through overstimulation and consumption. So when I rethink how to engage with my social life, I find the broader cultural obsession with Gen Z’s collective sex life to be a hilarious misunderstanding. Since the end of the COVID-19 lockdowns, an endless stream of mainstream media articles, by writers at least a decade older than any of us, have attempted to coin us as the ‘under-sexed generation’.

In June, The Guardian ran an article titled, A generation of ‘virgins’ is leading America’s next

Words: Billie Estrine

'My mission since arriving was to beat the trap of the male gaze. How could I get over this feeling and instead make going out a time where I just want to dance with my friends?'

sexual revolution. The article is an extract from Carter Sherman’s new book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future Sherman conducted hundreds of interviews with a diverse group of Gen Zers, creating a succinct argument that young adults are not only still horny, we’ve revolutionised our sex lives in an increasingly conservative climate. To quote Sherman: “Many Gen Zers have been spurred to extraordinary activism in support of sexual progressivism.”

Sherman goes beyond the basics of Gen Z simply having more sex than you might have heard, and brings to light the politicisation Gen Z has created around their sex lives. Personally, the way this politicalisation has affected me is recognising the male gaze’s self-imposed self-objectification, and the loss of reproductive justice rights in the United States and trans folks’ right to gender-affirming healthcare in the UK and USA.

I’ve been in Edinburgh for two months and trying to approach my social life from this

new enlightened perspective. My mission since arriving was to beat the trap of the male gaze. How could I get over this feeling and instead make going out a time where I just want to dance with my friends? Since I’m new in town and can’t exactly go out and dance with my NYC friends, instead I’ve been making very purposeful decisions on a night out to dance with a group of girls, paying no mind to the romantic fancies reeling around in my head.

Habits are famously hard to break. Don’t get me wrong: my mental space and social life since reprioritising my focus on a night out are still irrationally occupied by romance. However, when I was single in my last year at uni I spent so much time obsessing over the possibility of meeting a stranger, when I should have focused on having the time of my life with my best pals. Now when I go on a night out, I feel so much less obsessive about how I am being perceived in a club or at a gig and it’s fucking liberating.

Image: courtesy of Domino Records

Wet Leg's Moisturizer album artwork

Solidarity Steps

Keen to get involved in activism? Your student years are the perfect time to start. Here’s a rundown of our top tips, as well as a handful of organisations to keep on your radar

Start small

It is undeniably overwhelming to consider the sheer scale of ongoing injustice – both at home and away. But small actions contribute to big movements and it’s okay to ease yourself in. Attend a protest, write to your MSP, commit to a boycott. Look to others with more experience to help you with these first steps. Afterall, building confidence takes time.

Team up

Taking those first steps can be daunting – especially on your own. Bringing a friend along to that first meeting or protest can be helpful but, if that’s not an option, don’t worry: organisers are well-accustomed to welcoming newbies and making that first introduction. Standing in solidarity with others is also a great way to connect with likeminded people. Your university will likely have groups dedicated to specific movements – from abortion rights to climate justice – but it’s also great to look outwith the university bubble. For instance, each week, international mutual aid project Food Not Bombs (with branches in Edinburgh’s Leith and Glasgow’s Govanhill, amongst others) prepares and shares free food in the local community. Enjoy a hearty meal, get involved, and make a friend or two, while you’re at it.

Follow your interests

While all stru les are interconnected, focusing on a particular movement or campaign can be helpful. As Lucy Grieves, Co-Founder of student-led campaign group Back Off Scotland, tells us: “Sometimes at university, it can be hard to see how you may apply what you learn to the ‘real world’ but this is a great time to find out what interests you and let that lead what you do next.” Your studies can live beyond the library. Likewise, activism is also an opportunity to pursue your passions which don’t fit too neatly into your degree. Guerilla gardening, anyone?

Get creative

Remember: art is political and activism isn’t limited to petitions and placards. Attending activist-led arts events can broaden your world view and nurture your day-to-day activism. Check out Art Workers for Palestine Scotland. As well as lobbying Scotland-based arts organisations, they also regularly host workshops – reading, writing, embroidery – which centre around Palestinian solidarity. Meanwhile, this autumn also sees the return of Take One Action, a film festival which celebrates the power of film to unite communities and create real change. You’ll be hard pressed to leave such events without a renewed sense of hope.

Words: Eilidh Akilade

Think local

Activism is closer to home than you think and showing up for your community often means showing up with your community. Take Living Rent – Scotland’s tenant and community union. Rooted in working class stru le, Living Rent believes that power belongs with the people. If you’re personally navigating the ever-nightmarish state of landlordism, this is the union to turn to. Monthly meetings are a great way to ease yourself in, with branches in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee. Strike up a conversation with your neighbour while you’re there, in case you ever find yourself needing a cup of sugar.

Spend wisely

Don’t forget the weight of your own spending power. Keep up to date with the BDS Movement and consider joining the weekly global economic strike, led by the Humanti Project. If it’s possible in your current financial situation, donating to mutual aid crowdfunders is likewise a great way to directly support communities.

Know your rights

With increased police powers and legal scrutiny, protest can bring its risks – especially for marginalised communities. It’s worth familiarising yourself with the good folk over at Scottish Community & Activist Legal Project (SCALP), a collective which offers legal support and challenges police abuse. In addition to a number of in-depth online resources, SCALP runs workshops and training sessions; in particular, their Know Your Rights training is a brilliant place to start. You’ll also catch them at protests, providing on-hand support in case of arrest. Knowing who to turn to is crucial in looking out for those around you.

Take care

It’s a tough time to be a person in the world – and it’s easy to feel disheartened. Thankfully, you’re not alone. Connect with Glasgow-based Exhale Group, which creates safe spaces for QTIPOC+. Or, find solace in the stacked shelves of Lighthouse, Edinburgh’s radical bookshop. Perhaps, simply, spend time with your loved ones. Take care of yourself and others – and let them take care of you too.

Breaking into Scotland’s Art Scene

Gatekeepers stand aside. Making your mark in Scotland’s visual art scene can feel like a daunting task, but we’re here to show you the ropes

Breaking into Scotland’s visual art scene can feel like a daunting task, especially if you have no direct contacts to show you the ropes. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to get your foot in the door and find your arts-loving community across the country.

Make an exhibition of yourself

If you’re motivated to develop an exhibition practice alongside your studies, established curatorial collectives might just inspire you to find your niche. Take Glasgow-based 16 Collective, for example. 16 Collective have established themselves as a curatorial powerhouse with a feminist edge – they’re focused on spreading the love for experimental contemporary art and redistributing power, with particular attention to female-identifying, LGBTQ+ and working-class artists. Curatorial platform FEMME has also caught our eye for its queer, feminist and DIY approach to exhibition making.

Scotland is a haven for grassroots, artist-led exhibition spaces. Among them are Generator Projects in Dundee: a non-profit, collaborative and membership-based space dedicated to fostering creativity. While their funded programme is not available to full-time students, their Takeover projects allow members to run events or exhibitions in the Generator galleries or Community Space. Best of all, it’s free to become a member and to run a Takeover project – though if you’re in the financial position to do so, you can donate to support their programming.

In Edinburgh, Sett Studios and Embassy come to mind for grassroots exhibition opportunities. Sett Studios provide a financially accessible and safe space for artists to make, prioritising those from financially and socially disadvantaged backgrounds, while Embassy supports early-career artists through an exhibition programme and commissioning opportunities in a non-hierarchical setting.

Write like no one’s watching

Here at The Skinny, we receive several lovely emails a day from students on the hunt for their first journalism gig. Nothing shows initiative more than someone who writes keenly for their student newspaper, or runs their own Substack devoted to art observations. We’re looking for evidence that you can translate that niche academic interest into a timely and original piece of arts journalism.

Creative Scotland’s Opportunities tool is about to become your best friend. Keep an eye out for emerging writer schemes, residency or mentorship opportunities which will support you to hone your craft. Shameless plug: for the last four years, in collaboration with Edinburgh Art Festival,

Words: Rachel Ashenden

The Skinny has run an Emerging Writer scheme. The scheme supports Scotland-based, early career writers from backgrounds underrepresented in journalism through a mentored, paid opportunity to be published in our magazine – both print and online.

In the words of Chloe Caldwell, author of lesbian cult-classic Women: “Writing publicly is so embarrassing. But someone’s gotta do it.” It can feel incredibly vulnerable to get your name and your words out there, which is why building a community of fellow writers can help stave off the fear. The Skinny runs monthly meet-ups for art writers across Scotland, where we explore an exhibition together before chatting about the art on the walls, and art journalism in general, over the ultimate writing fuel (coffee). Gallery Ba ing also run regular ‘[synonym]’ sessions that facilitate writing within exhibition spaces. Through thoughtful writing prompts, facilitators A-J Reynolds and Eliza Coulson create a dialogue about the exhibition at hand – no previous art writing experience is required.

Showing up

While an invitation to an exhibition opening at a big ol’ institution might seem hard to come by,

refreshingly, there are many galleries with an open-door policy out there. Glasgow Art Map has made it easier for us to find them. Use this independent guide to exhibitions happening across the city as a tool to establish connections with galleries, artists and curators. Wherever you’re based, keeping up to date with exhibition openings through newsletter subscriptions and social media can go a long way.

Beyond exhibition openings, there’s artist in-conversations. These dialogical events are a way for artists to explore their creative process, context and intentions, and often leave room for you to present your questions. During August, Edinburgh Art Festival organise several thoughtprovoking conversations, while Edinburgh International Book Festival often have an art focus in their programme.

Of all the art forms, visual art has a reputation for being the wankiest. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me “I enjoy going to exhibitions and writing, but I can’t write about art.” Our ethos at The Skinny is: “Why the hell not?” Hopefully, this snapshot of opportunities reassures you that there are folk out there hellbent on demystifying the art scene.

Photo: Ot Pascoe

SETT Studios

ANYWHERE A free membership for 15 to 25-year-olds.

£6.40 tickets to any standard GFT show. Discounted standard Glasgow Film Festival tickets. One free youth screening a month. Earn loyalty points for every pound you spend.

A day in the life

One art student takes us with him on an average day via a meditation on class and access to creative learning

Words: Michael Smith

It was half past four on a Wednesday and I was in the lingerie section of Primark on Sauchiehall Street, crouching to the bottom rail to weigh in on the dilemma my friend was having. My friend had recently impulsively purchased an inflatable man – the kind that flail about in the wind outside car garages. In order to find a feminist slant that had yet to be fully figured out, she wanted to dress the inflatable tube man in bra and pants, and having blown most of the budget already, the rest of the project made shoestring look indulgent.

We had to communicate that this whole thing was a joke, so we opted for a pink lacy number after agreeing that ‘red is too overtly sexy’. We fell out in to the baking sun and set our sights on our next task – a pint.

If you’ve ever tried to drink outdoors at The Vic Bar on Scott Street, then you’ll know that it’s a bastard of a hill and your glass may well start sliding down the trestle table like an alcoholic log flume at M&D’s. But it’s a nice day, and we look out on to the plastic coated scaffolding structure we’re reliably informed was once the Mackintosh Building.

After two fires nearly ten years ago, it still lies silent like a haunted shrine – teasing us with glimpses of its beauty; stunning iron work, charred bricks and intact street signs can be spotted in amongst a maze of scaffolding and cladding. We hear about it in awed tones, like ghost stories – about the light and the space and the elephants that were brought in from a local circus in the early 20th century for the students to draw. Unethical, sure – but how class would it be to draw an elephant?

The thing I love most about art school is the way we talk about ideas, craft, techniques and how to move things forward. Design is, at its core, a commitment to making things better. I have never been more creatively determined and every day I am around students and tutors that are endlessly talented, interesting and curious. This is a microcosm of what our culture is driven by, and what it has always been – a love of ideas and following curiosity. This environment is amazing and inspiring. But there’s a problem – who gets to access it.

I am a proud product of a Glasgow state school and my parents do not work in the creative industries, but I am fully aware that any success I’ve had in freelance work or

education has been rooted in the support of my family and the luxury of being able to fail without financial consequence.

I fear that Scottish people, working class people and those from underrepresented groups are unable to pursue the arts and the creative industries as a plausible career path. I firmly believe that if we are to push the needle forward for Scottish culture, it is essential that our creative institutions and industries fight off the classism that is inherent here.

The Glasgow School of Art’s demographic breakdown sits with 25% International Students, 20% from the rest of the UK and a minority of 20% from the most deprived areas of Scotland. At the same time, our cultural economy is being eroded, with Creative Scotland’s Open Fund being cancelled then re-instated, with its future constantly being called into question.

'The thing I love most about art school is the way we talk about ideas, craft, techniques and how to move things forward'

Education more generally is no safer. Perstudent funding for domestic students has fallen 19% in real terms since 2013, and the 2024/25 budget includes a further 6% cut to teaching grants. As a result, universities are pushed to rely heavily on international fees, creating a system where well-resourced international students gain access, while many working-class Scots are shut out. Even for those who make it through a creative degree, post-graduation things can often get even tougher. Freelance work, internships and projects for low or no fee can be amazing stepping stones to other things, but only if you have the financial support to survive them. Not everyone does. And when people have to prioritise financial stability over creative opportunity, the industry becomes less diverse, dynamic and representative of the society we live in.

It doesn’t need to be like this. Look at sports – we pump billions into sports because it is largely understood that it benefits our culture, communities, economy and tourism as well as people’s mental and physical health.

It may seem quaint to discuss arts funding in the current omnicrisis clusterfuck that is the modern news agenda. But it matters; diversity in the arts is paramount to social mobility. It’s about who gets to create, have their voice heard and shape our culture and society, and overlooking it now only deepens inequity later. I will always feel a depth of gratitude that I get to wander the halls of the Art School, and feel the sense of possibility and opportunity to move our culture forward. I just want those doors to be opened for those we don’t know we need yet.

Photo: Phoebe Willison

The Caseroom at GSA

Get With The Programme

Your local music scene is powered by great grassroots promoters – we chat to three of them to get some insight into how a great gig comes together

Whether you’ve been going to gigs for years or are trying to get acquainted with a new city, there are many ways to navigate Scotland’s plethora of underground music scenes. The best way to go about it is to follow the folk already putting on some of the hottest events, in the sweatiest (complimentary) venues that their city has to offer. From there, you can form your own collective and programme an event to fill a gap that you feel is open. Two years ago WSHWSH did just that.

As WSHWSH organisers Salam Kitty, Shem, Luna and Fatma explain: “We were all having individual conversations about feeling a gap in the club scene in terms of Arab and SWANA [South West Asia and North Africa] representation and wanted to do something about it.” The collective’s driving ethos is to create space for people from the SWANA regions to come together “regardless of religion and sexuality to celebrate our cultures, listen to our music, and just have fun.”

Finding your first venue can be daunting; the home base for the collective’s first event in 2023 was the since-shuttered queer co-op bar Bonjour. “Luckily when we started, Bonjour was still open,” WSHWSH say, “and they were very open and welcoming of supporting new nights. Salam had a link to them from [queer BPOC club night]

Mojxmma, so that was our natural choice.” The collective’s first club night was a sold-out success, and was met with resounding celebration from their community. They tell us: “Since starting WSHWSH so many people have told us that they haven’t felt like there’s a space for SWANA people in Glasgow to meet and connect in spaces that celebrate our culture, especially for women and queer people. Especially with the issues that our communities are facing at the moment in the UK, and in our homelands, it’s important for us to have a space like this to be together, and find some joy and connection.”

Another Glaswegian collective that’s been rock ‘n’ rolling their way around the underground is Weird & Wired. James Carvalho and Cammy Young-Lee started organising gigs as Weird & Wired in 2022. They’ve since moved to London and continue to put on gigs under the Weird & Wired name there but they’ve passed the Glasgow-based W&W torch to Jules Che Thurlow, Millie Hanlon Cole, Louis Muller Stuart, Moana Watson, Aedan (Willy) Wilson, and Kira Wolfe Murray.

Some of the group began putting on gigs while in university, which was no small feat (“a lot of work to manage a dissertation alongside this – but fun!”) and now the gang volunteer their time organising gigs that combine live electronic and punk music into one night of headbanging and moshing galore. The collective tell us that those two styles have “a real vein of shared mentalities between them and a lot of the same energy (self expression, embracing noise, thinking outside of the box).”

The punk methodology behind Weird & Wired extends to how they handle the business side of event programming. The group explain: “We evenly split the take between us and bands after booking costs. Any money we have left after our own costs is donated to charity, so we are never taking a profit. That being said, we are all volunteers and fortunate enough to be able to dedicate time to this for nothing, things are trickier when people need to make a livelihood from organising gigs.” The collective’s punk ethos runs deep, and fundraising raffles – especially for the people of Palestine in Gaza, facing the atrocities of Israel’s genocide – are programmed between bands’ sets at most Weird & Wired gigs.

Words: Billie Estrine

“Put on gigs because you’ve discovered a band and NEED to tell the world about them”

David Weaver

Leaving Glasgow, David Weaver is the booker at Stirling venues Tolbooth and Albert Halls. His gig programming goes back to high school in Alness in the northeast. He tells us: “We were 16 or 17 and putting on gigs in pubs that we weren’t legally allowed in, or putting on all-dayers in village halls.” At uni, Weaver continued: “When I went to Stirling University, it was kind of similar. I was part of the team running Air3, the student radio station. We managed to get a whole bunch of bands to come in and do sessions for us, and then we were able to start putting on gigs.”

For Weaver, booking gigs has always been about the need for people to know about the bands he puts on the bill. He tells us: “Put on gigs because you’ve discovered a band and NEED to tell the world about them. Put on a show in a venue that you’ve found that you think everyone should come to. Put together a bill that excites you.” Now that Weaver books the two main venues in Stirling he finds the community created in those spaces to be the most fulfilling aspects of his job. He says: “What I love is that we have people in bands headlining the main venue, and a musician will say ‘oh I actually learnt guitar at the Tolbooth, and then I played my first gig there five years later as a 15-year-old, and now I’m back 10 years later headlining.’” Whether you want to put on a gig or throw a party in the student union, there’s a plethora of ways to create a good time for yourself and those in your community; get out there, you’re in good company.

Debut new night from Salam Kitty featuring T.NO and Kinluiz, EXIT Glasgow, 26 Sep

Weird and Wired present The Bleeders, Comfort Girl and Self Love, The Old Hairdresser’s, Glasgow, 26 Sep

Interesting Things, Tolbooth, Stirling, 4 Oct, under 25s and Students £30

@wshwsh_____ / @weirdandwired_ / @tolboothstirling

Creative Commons

We speak to some of Scotland’s creatives about the importance of finding community, and how to get yourself involved

Moving to a new city – or perhaps a new country – might feel lonely at times, but luckily for Scotland’s students, we’re known for being welcoming. This friendly demeanour extends to our thriving creative community, where you’ll find an active annual calendar of events. Open the doors to your new home by searching on socials and asking around – you’ll find talks from international design superstars, drop-in co-working sessions for freelancers and side-hustlers, DIY club nights and open decks, and grassroots organisations putting on talks and workshops. We’ve pulled together some of our favourites to get you started.

“Go for any opportunity, even if it feels a bit out of your usual”

Ines

Chapelo, Edinburgh College of Art Student

Born in 2014 from a student project at Edinburgh College of Art, INTL Festival is an unmissable two weeks of creative events in Glasgow, which runs this year from 6-21 November. The programme includes a star-studded conference with talks from Pentagram, OK-RM and Annie Atkins, and a selection of workshops led by those at the top of their game in areas such as sculpture, creative coding, and branding. Mook Attanath, project manager of INTL and an ECA grad herself, su ests students might want to sign up for a Live Project: “It’s an opportunity to tackle a brief that challenges your design thinking, while collaborating with a local design studio that pushes you to develop the best version of your idea.” What’s more, winners from each mentor group receive studio placement offers to get them kick-started with real design agency experience. “It’s the kind of environment that encourages you to expand your creative playground,” explains Attanath. For more regular programming, there’s an ever growing list of events run by Glasgow’s grassroots organisations. Colour Theory celebrates and amplifies the voices of BPOC artists in Scotland, while Glasgow Glyph Gang runs talks and workshops for those who are typographically obsessed. Unknown Errors, founded by Ophelia Davis and Yexa Rivero, explores failure (and what comes after) through candid talks. With speakers ranging from top of their game C-suite agency execs to emerging talents, the nights are a refreshingly honest insight into the ups and downs of creative life. Davis tells us about the special environment these events create: “You have creative directors talking shit alongside first year students, and that dynamic can be great

– especially for those starting out – to pick people’s brains, share resources, and make genuine connections.” She also highlights the importance of finding community to get through the trickier times. “There’s many challenges facing people breaking into the design industry – while our night sadly can’t solve those issues, it can at least offer a platform to help process some of them.”

If your creative interests lean towards music and dance, and you find yourself lured by the irresistible pull of becoming a self-taught DJ (don’t worry, it happens to the best of us) Glasgow has plenty of open decks to get involved in. They’re a great way to hone your skills and practise in front of a crowd, as well as meeting like-minded people. Adrian’s Bar, a queer pub on Glasgow’s Victoria Road, hosts Tuesday sessions at 6.30pm (sign up via their Instagram). For femme and non-binary aspiring spinners, FemmeDM regularly organises open decks nights – keep an eye on their social media for details of the next one. And if Friday night is calling, pop into The Marlborough’s grand BSIDE room from 8pm til late (_alluneeed on Instagram has the details).

Bouncing back over the central belt, we speak to ECA student Ines Chapelo about her experience in Edinburgh. “I really love how designers in the Scottish community actively want to help and encourage each other, it feels like we all want to see everyone succeed rather than it being focused on being competitive.” She su ests thinking outside the box to expand your creative network. “Volunteering for any charity within or outside your university has taught me such interesting skills and allowed me to work with such talented creatives in different areas. Truly go for any opportunity, even if it feels a bit out of your usual!”

And if you’re already one step ahead and have a side-hustle on the go, join Habits for their regular drop-in coworking sessions in Edinburgh. Usually hosted in a stylish coffee shop or chic hotel, you’ll be able to rub shoulders with freelancers and founders while getting a full day’s work done. Habits also runs talks and networking events (see their Instagram for updates), with previous speakers including Gabby Secomb Fle , photographer and founder of the quirky Main Character Club.

Once you start looking, you’ll discover endless pockets of creative community in Scotland. As Attanath reflects, “Looking back to my time as a design student, I would have loved to discover just how broad and diverse the design and creative disciplines really are.” So get stuck in, this is your opportunity to try everything.

INTL Festival @intl.international; Colour Theory @colourtheory.scot; Glasgow Glyph Gang @glasgowglyphgang; Unknown Errors @unknown_errors__; Adrian’s Bar @adriansbarglasgow; Femme DM @femmedm.uk; Alluneed @_alluneeed; Habits @thisishabits

Words: Phoebe Willison

Photos: Stephen Hughes

Fresh(ers) Hell

The Skinny team have dug around in their memories to find and share some freshers and flatmate/halls horror stories from their uni days. Some memories are traumatising, some funny (in retrospect), all vivid and enduring

Being a fresher is just a million feelings, experiences, and moments of hell baked into nine speedy months. It’s usually the first time people are living away from home, outside of the watchful eye of their folks, which inevitably leads to the most unhinged behaviour humans can drunkenly manage. Even when freshers are sober it seems the decisions are not quite decisioning too hard. That’s no shot at you pal. That’s just how it felt for me at eighteen living out that hellscape of a year. Turns out a lot of The Skinny’s team felt the same way.

“When I was in halls, someone in my flat got a pet tarantula lol, which was bad enough, but he also got loads of live crickets to feed it. One night he came back drunk and knocked over the cricket tub. We all woke up in the night with crickets in our beds, and we couldn’t get rid of them for weeks. Also the tarantula died.” [Phoebe Willison]

“Came back to our halls from the Freshers Ball. Turns out that our flatmate’s few friends who were over for pre-drinks ended up throwing all our saucepans out the window, which meant we found them dented and covered in slugs by the time we returned. They also drew a penis on our fire blanket. I had to just fold it back in place.” [Ema Smekalová]

“When I studied in Glasgow, I lived with a resourceful New Yorker who picked limpets from the River Clyde for his dinner. I guess he had a pretty robust immune system?”

[Rachel Ashenden]

“The night before classes started in my first year of uni in NYC, I was awoken in the middle of the night by a completely naked man who had gotten drunk, taken a shower, and then lost his way going back to his dorm room, so he was going door to door looking for it, naked and drenched.” [Rho Chung]

“I made the mistake of kissing my flatmate’s brother at a Halloween party and then he honestly hung around like a bad smell for weeks, like he was just always there. I kept having to excuse myself when he appeared and at one point I made the bold decision to just leave the flat, but still he didn’t get the hint. When he realised I’d left, he actually chased me down the street yelling, ‘Do you even like meeeee’. I thought it was pretty clear that no, I did not. So yeah, the whole thing was incredibly awkward, so please heed my advice and don’t get involved in any way whatsoever with a flatmate’s sibling. Just don’t do it!!” [Tallah Brash]

“When I was out at my favourite Brooklyn venue, the Knitting Factory – how am I only twenty-one and I have a favourite venue that’s had to shut their doors – my insane pal was very drunk and jumped into a large pile of trash bags. We were all also very drunk and thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

“Also when I was a fresher I lived with the most insane girls in the halls and one of them threatened to stab me with a knife on Valentine’s Day. It had nothing to do with it being Valentine’s Day, but I remember when it was because of that.” [Billie Estrine]

“Looked round a flat to rent with four pals (our first one after living in halls), one bedroom downstairs, the rest upstairs. The guy in the downstairs room was being really weird when we viewed the flat, said his lightbulb in his room was broken so no light but didn’t think anything of it. This was back in *2012* so we had all taken loads of pics of the flat to remind us what it looked like with our very trendy Nikons. The day after the viewing had a weird email saying PLEASE DELETE ALL PHOTOS YOU HAVE TAKEN OF THE FLAT. Right, I mean, sure? Turns out, we loved the flat despite all that. Moved in. In the first weekend my flatmate in the downstairs room found a phonebook obliterated by bb gun shots with all the cartridges still embedded. We changed the locks.” [Polly Glynn]

Words: Billie Estrine

“People in my halls thought it was really funny to drop things out the window at 4am, four floors up on the Cowgate – they were of course drunk, it was the 00s. The police were called when they threw e s at the flat opposite, smashing on the windows and waking up the residents.

“There was an American guy in the flat who always got his mum to send over big blocks of Velveeta, a sort of super processed cheese that we all regarded with deep fascination. Someone drunkenly sculpted it into a shockingly realistic penis at one point.

“We never took out the bins, just left the bags in the hallway and once our friend, again he was drunk, fell on one and the bag burst open, covering the entire landing in ma ots. I didn’t realise until I found myself in the hall, barefoot, locked out, surrounded by writhing grubs, some of which were halfway through turning into flies.”

[Rosamund West]

“In my first year, I lived in a dorm with 11 other guys. It was fun, the lads were nice, but they did have some eccentricities. For example, the guy whose room was next to mine, who incidentally was an aeronautics engineer and was also in the Air Cadets, had a strange quirk that he had sex exclusively to the soundtrack to Top Gun. I still can’t hear the opening thrum of Kenny Lo ins’ Danger Zone without cringing and heading for the exit.” [Jamie Dunn]

“During my month-long stint inside Murano at Glasgow Uni, the peak of chat never seemed to surpass a mutual fondness for omelettes. So when, on rare occasions, outsiders wandered in for an after-party, I upstaged the e -talk deadlock and gave the green light to hotbox our ten-man kitchen – a move that was swiftly and unanimously condemned by the entire flat. Not long after a fourth-year warden – a violinist, no less –threatened to confiscate my speakers, and I dropped out. To this day, I’m not sure who the real menace was. [Cammy Gallagher]

Crowning Glory

Time to suit up. We speak to Scotland’s leading drag kings about exploring masculinity, looking out for one another, and creating a name for themselves in today’s drag scene

Words: Carlin Braun

Drag performer Dom Perignon is doing his makeup. Luscious blonde hair flows down his back as he meticulously draws on thick eyebrows and a beard. His grip is steady, precise and practised. He’s leaning over a sink in the bathroom of Leith bar, the Arches.

Tonight’s punters aren’t the regulars, but instead attendees of bi-monthly drag king night the Bro Code. Started two years ago it is one of very few drag king nights in Scotland. The layman’s understanding of drag is where an individual ‘switches’ from one gender to another with the purpose of entertaining an audience. However, speak to anyone involved in the scene and a more complex definition emerges. To Perignon, who identifies as gender queer in his day to day life, it is a way of broadening his gender exploration.

“Whenever I query my gender, it feels like something very stressful where I need to have answers or I need to decide on pronouns,” Perignon says. “This is the opposite of that: it’s fun, it’s playful.”

queen, you have a dance queen, you have a comedy queen, and then you have a king.”

While not at Bro Code tonight, one name repeatedly comes up: Dorian T. Fisk. The English-born king – who spent several years in Shanghai’s glitzy drag scene – is behind a drag king course called Shut Up and King. Teaching wannabe kings how to bind, stuff and perform, it is the ‘kingcubator’ for the fledgling scene in Scotland. Shut Up and King is Fisk’s passion project, aiming to foster more opportunities for those starting out.

According to Fisk, patriarchy and misogyny are often to blame for the lack of opportunity in the scene. Although dressed as men, drag kings still come face to face with misogyny. Fisk says that a large number of showrunners are “cis white gay men” or people who only view drag as being that which features on mainstream platforms like RuPaul’s Drag Race: kings do not factor into this.

“We’re very much bros in life as well as in business”

Under the flicker of fluorescent lights Perignon’s delicate features transform into those of an 80s rockstar sex god. Not yet on stage, he fluctuates between persona and person. In his lilting soft voice, he elaborates: “[Perignon] is just this like sexy, gay-leaning pansexual who wants to sleaze up the scene.”

Dom Perignon

A balcony overlooks the stage where a makeshift greenroom has been devised. It’s hot, sticky and humid. The other half of the Bro Code, Jack the Strapper, is tall, dark and ‘strapping’. “It’s a way of exploring masculinity,” Strapper says. “Outside of drag the only time you’ll get a compliment will be like the one day a year you’re wearing a dress and lipstick, whereas in drag, you actually get socially valued for being masculine.”

Nearby, king Phil Herrin wears a polo shirt mini dress. A Leith local, he’s been in the scene for 11 years. He recalls seeing drag queens burst into the mainstream with the airing of RuPaul’s Drag Race: “I just thought, why is no one doing that the other way? So I googled: ‘What is the opposite of a drag queen?’”

According to Herrin, a slew of American drag kings appeared; they were “too glamorous”. He wanted to encapsulate the kind of men he knew. “I used to sit in beer gardens in Leith and watch people go by,” Herrin says. “I’d study their walks and like their mannerisms and just started observing what masculinity was in my, like, local area.”

Unlike their queen counterparts who regularly book out gay bars and bingo halls, king-specific events and opportunities are few and far between in Scotland. “ It tends to be a one king per show sort of situation,” Perignon says. “You have a sexy

Many performers at the Bro Code tonight have taken part in Shut Up and King. Perignon and Strapper met through the course; the Bro Code grew from a desire to create a platform for all the talent that wasn’t getting booked. “The workshops kept producing new kings and then those kings were stru ling to get booked ‘cause all the shows at the time were run by Queens,” says Strapper. “We figured it would probably be easier to just create a show than to get booked like five times.”

At the Bro Code it is clear that kings don’t stru le to fill a room. There’s an anticipation that bubbles and spills over as the hosts take to the stage. The show begins with a list of ‘Bromandments’. Number one: “consent is mandatory”. Baguettes, carrots and graters form part of props for a show that is lively and full of heart, wit and humour.

“You know, we’re very much bros in life as well as in business,” says Perignon. “ We didn’t know each other before the Bro Code, but it’s now been two years of hanging out planning and writing scripts; Jack’s now one of my closest friends.” The two even went cycling in France over the summer. This sense of camaraderie is commonplace in the scene, says Perignon.

“I love watching the variety of acts kings come up with. From traditional male impersonation to experimental drag clowns; from hand sewn costumes to live vocals,” says Strapper. “It’s a space for protest as much as for creative expression. As an art form, drag is as weird, wonderful and varied as the performers who make it.”

The Bro Code, Leith Arches, 10 Sep, 7pm - find out more via Instagram @brocode.drag

Drawn to Map

One writer reflects on a love of maps – both physical and digital – and considers how local intimacies can transform the places we know and love

Acouple of years ago, shortly after moving to London, I began working in an independent bookshop in Tower Hamlets. Between shelves lined with titles on the radical Jewish East End and the Bangladeshi communities of Brick Lane, I came across a collection of old Ordnance Survey Maps of East London. They showed me places I’d only vaguely heard of – Limehouse, Rotherhithe, Wapping – and mapped, frozen in time, as they looked in 1805 or 1923. I was instantly hooked. I didn’t know what these places looked like in 2023, but I felt a compulsion to buy all the maps, make my way there and compare then to now.

There’s a particular thrill of spotting a street you walk on, or even have lived on, on an old map. It feels a bit like seeing your local pub in a sitcom or hearing your town name in a pop song. Suddenly, your everyday pavement has been elevated to something worth writing about, something worth mapping.

The emotional quality of looking at old maps is evident in their historical ornateness. They’re often beautifully inefficient, more decorative than directional. They can be filled with flourishes, sea monsters and wobbly lines preoccupied with expression rather than precision. They reveal that these weren’t simply made to guide, but also to record how the places both looked and felt.

These old OS maps I spent far too much money on aren’t beautifully ornate – they’re simple maps showing me Bethnal Green in 1918 or Glasgow West End in 1894, but they evoke such a

lot. A recent study for the University of Cambridge, by Dr Elisabeta Militaru, explores what types of places evoke nostalgia; blue spaces, green spaces are dominant however specific urban spaces frequently come up. The study unpacks how nostalgia brings places into focus and ‘in doing so connects our past self to our present and future self’. When I stare at a map of 19th-century Edinburgh and find the street of my old university flat, I feel nostalgic but also valuable; the past versions of dwellers on that street have been recorded and we’re assured we will be too.

Today’s mapping culture, however, largely resides in our phones, which has a distinctive duality between the comfort of access and an underlying eeriness of surveillance. My personal algorithm is filled with urban geography accounts, documenting everything from manhole covers, ghost signs and lost pubs. I find myself continuously checking @caffes_not_ cafes or @londonpubmap to know where to go and what to do next. These accounts celebrate the value of locality. I’ll often find myself standing on a street corner I’ve never visited, with an intense feeling of déjà vu running through me. But is that just because the Pret and the Costa are positioned very similarly on a different street? Local historical features – such as an out of use railway line – can shake us out of this recurrent mental state, rooting us in a specificity which fosters pride in our sense of place.

The utilisation of online maps in this niche, obsessive and sometimes algorithmic way can feel

Words: Trisha Mendiratta

Illustration: Amy Lauren

‘They’re often beautifully inefficient, more decorative than directional [...] They reveal that these weren’t simply made to guide, but also to record how the places both looked and felt’

really pleasurable and very intimate. Via shared Google Maps, my friends and I often pin our recommendations of our known areas and send across the fruitful lists. I recently received an ‘ultimate glasgow reccs’ list annotated with notes: “good for a quiet pint” and “lovely garden in the back for a sunny day”. And suddenly, I was in my friend Lucy’s Glasgow, creating an emotional bond through blue dotted directions.

Online maps undeniably warp the world; we’re often most familiar with the bird’s eye view of locations sequestered in the four corners of our phones. Spotting something in satellite view and then stumbling across it in real life, weathered, cracked or still standing, can feel distorting but also quite magical. We become flaneurs – not in an aged Parisian arcade, but on some random A road, the satellites sharpening the places around us. But, of course, this comes with a chilling home truth. These emotional ties can make us feel as though big tech companies work for us, purely a tool providing a service. But, in reality, we share a handful of dinner recommendations and soon after we’re advertised nearby hotspots with their unbeatable Monday pizza deal. A shared recommendation between friends is flattened into something far more sinister.

Find my Friends and other tracking apps blur that line. I use such apps to check if my flatmate is home safe or to know who to call to check whether I need to pick up milk on the way home. But there is always a (very rational) low hum of surveillance dressed up as care and access. Often I forget when spotting others on the map, that I can be spotted too.

Despite this disquiet, maps – whether digital or physical – tell us stories about where we’ve been and who we are. But I don’t buy old maps from Ebay or charity shops with this grand idea of ancestral storytelling in mind – often I just want to show the people in my life something funny or interesting I found. Sometimes it just feels really good to hold something in your hand that has no immediate utility. They can be not just tools but traces.

Anyone for Tennis?

Sam Riley gives one of his finest performances in Islands as a washed-up tennis player who gets embroiled in a mystery. Riley tells us why he related to the character and what, to him, makes for great acting

“Iwas so spoiled with my first film,” says actor Sam Riley, looking back on Anton Corbijn’s Control (2007), which saw him playing Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. “I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was Samantha Morton – my first on-screen wife – and Alexandra [Maria Lara, now Riley’s real-life spouse], two incredibly experienced actors, who really taught me how to act. Because they made everything feel real, you know? It’s like in tennis: if you play against someone good, you play better.”

Having moved to Berlin shortly thereafter, Riley’s last time in Edinburgh was almost 18 years ago for that film’s press run. Now he’s back to talk about Islands, a sun-drenched Highsmithian drama in which he plays Tom, an English tennis coach living on the island of Fuerteventura. In his mid-40s, Tom’s days mostly consist of waking up wherever he passed out the night before, and then half-heartedly feeding balls to casual players staying at the hotel until he can get drunk at the local club, go home with a stranger, and do it all again the next day.

Tom’s monotonous routine is interrupted, however, by the arrival of a holidaying English family. After spending the evening with Anne (Stacey Martin) and Dave (Jack Farthing), who insist their son, Anton (Dylan Torrell), receive tennis lessons, Tom suddenly finds himself embroiled in a missing persons case. Helping to piece the evening back together, he takes on a level of responsibility he hasn’t faced for years.

The seeds of the character were sown when the film’s writer-director Jan-Øle Gerster was himself on holiday in Fuerteventura, relates Riley. “From his room, he saw this tennis coach playing every day. He saw a guy with this dream life; he was free, no responsibilities, no children, no wife. But the longer the week went on, he realised this guy just did the same thing; he could hear the same hitting of a thousand balls a day. He was

trapped and somehow lost, and life was just going by.” Riley, who was just 26 when Control came out and now finds himself closer to Tom’s age, could relate. While happily married and a father, careerwise, he had faced a few quiet periods, which had occasionally stirred up similar feelings of stagnation. “There is that [question] in your mid-40s: have you really done everything? Missed opportunities, paths not taken. I think we can all relate to that,” he says.

Despite really wanting the role, upon first meeting with Gerster, Riley played it cool. Avoiding talking about the film, they chatted coyly about the news of the day: Will Smith had just slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars (where he won for playing, weirdly, a tennis coach). On the second, he made his interest clear, and on the third, they played tennis.

Gerster needed to know Riley could convincingly deliver the film’s emotional climax. The scene sees Tom make a drunken bet with a stranger and be pulled into a tennis match where his unreturnable serve gives us a window into his faded glory and unrealised potential. Having never played, Riley – working with a tennis coach – piled pressure on himself to nail it. The resulting scene is a reminder of what a powerhouse physical performer Riley is. Islands rests on the actor’s ability to sell that Tom was once an “ace” player, just as Control had rested on Riley’s ghostly embodiment of the wildly idiosyncratic Ian Curtis.

As Tom pummels tennis balls into the ground, there are echoes of Tom Ripley bludgeoning Dicky Greenleaf to death at sea in The Talented Mr Ripley, his release of pent-up anguish giving way to a sort of rebirth. But the bloodless scene encapsulates how, though ostensibly a crime film borrowing and playing with Noir conventions, Islands’ violence is internal. While the suspense is born out of the initial disappearance, it is mostly sustained by Riley and Martin’s forlorn

Words: Louis Cammell

“There is that [question] in your mid-40s: have you really done everything? Missed opportunities, paths not taken. I think we can all relate to that”

Sam Riley

faces as we watch their characters work through the realisations that the event has catalysed. In that respect, Islands resists the melodrama that can often befall the mystery genre. “It’s a risk to have [such] anticlimaxes,” says Riley, “but there’s so much ambiguity in life. As an actor and cinemagoer, I’ve always been drawn to films that [reflect that]. That’s the beauty of cinema: faces, and the unsaid. When you’re on set, you realise you can say stuff without saying it.”

Silent close-ups, of which Islands has many, are great for actors to play because – like tennis – they demand that you inhabit the character; they require the sort of dedication that envelopes you, makes you forget about what’s come before or what’s coming next. Aptly channeling the sporting adage that his wayward coach comes to apply to life, Riley observes, “the person you’re really playing against is yourself. You’ve always got to be thinking about the point you’re playing in the moment, not the one before. To fully achieve that is impossible, I think. Which is why it’s addictive.”

Red Herring

At Timespan in Helmsdale, artist Joanne Coates amplifies the overlooked story of the Herring Girls through photography and sculpture

Joanne Coates’ solo exhibition Red Herring centres the lesser-known and excluded histories of the Herring Girls, also known as the Gutting Girls or Herring Lasses. The exhibition revisits the role of an all-female workforce, who were instrumental in the Scottish fishing industry between the 18th and 20th centuries.

Culminating from a six-month residency at Timespan and shaped by Coates’ Northern English working-class background and feminist practices of care, listening, community and solidarity, the exhibition draws on research, creative collaboration and active participation from local organisations, women and schoolchildren. Through photographs, archival images and ceramic sculptures, it addresses the omissions in these histories, reclaiming them with a focus on themes of class, gender and racial inequities.

The Helmsdale Harbour was built in 1815 to support the expanding global herring fish trade prevalent in the North Sea, and relied heavily on women employed as herring gutters. Primarily Scottish and some as young as fourteen, these women came from as far as Shetland and the Outer Hebrides, seasonally migrating with the fish along the east coast between July and November, journeying as far south as Great Yarmouth. As they gutted and packaged herring for consumption, they not only sustained local economies, but also played a role in the larger global trade network.

Coates notes that statues commemorating the Herring Girls across these fishing towns often present them in a romanticised way, rarely acknowledging the harsh realities of their work. Although the women did gain independence by working away from home, they laboured in precarious conditions, both physically demanding

and economically exploitative. Further, their seasonal migration to the South, carrying their local cultures, religious practices and their Gaelic tongue, often subjected them to marginalisation. Despite this, their agency through collective organising is demonstrated, for instance, with the Great Yarmouth Strike of 1936.

‘She honours their memories through photographic performance and retelling, using her own body as a site of remembrance’

The herring trade was closely tied to the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial legacies of the early 1900s, before decline after the First World War due to disrupted trade routes alongside the dwindling stocks caused due to overfishing, forcing the industry to shift elsewhere. In tracing these histories, Coates uncovers a broader network extending to America’s Southern states, where Black women continued to undertake similar work, while facing restricted freedom, exploitative wages, and systemic racial discrimination, even after the abolition of slavery. Coates also discovers a direct link with Ghana, then part of the colonial empire, where herring was exported as a cheap food source.

Words: Shalmali Shetty

The colour red encompasses the space, reflected off the red vinyl curtains framing an installation that displays archival images along with the artist’s photographs. It symbolises the bloody labour of gutting fish, while also referencing the herring’s change in colour during the process of salting and smoking, preserving it for export. The curtains further allude to modern fish factories, often carried out by migrant labour under harsh conditions, indicating similar work in the industry today. The title also plays on the idiom, meaning distraction from the truth, which Coates uses to critique the misleading narratives perpetuated by capitalist structures.

The archival images of the Herring Girls sourced from Timespan, the Shetland and Highland museum and archive collections, and the Perry-Belch Company and Cannons Fisheries in North Carolina, depict groups of women in their work attire, often posed in studio settings or staged as tableaux vivants, presenting a stark contrast to the harsh realities of their labour. Coates reflects on the male-authored photographs, and how gendered working-class narratives have historically been documented to align with prevailing social norms. Today, many local families maintain strong ties to the fishing industry, tracing their ancestry back to these Herring Girls who once formed a central part of the community.

Coates invited the women from the community to share stories of their mothers and grandmothers, many of which reveal what Coates describes as “injuries of the system.” One recounted a grandmother with dementia who continued to insist on warming her feet in a bucket of boiling water – a practice from her time as a Herring Girl enduring the freezing conditions. Through her own series of black-and-white photographs, Coates reimagines their lives while engaging with literary critic Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, exploring how trauma and memory are transmitted across generations. Instead of photographing the women directly, she honours their memories through photographic performance and retelling, using her own body as a site of remembrance. Printed on smooth pearl paper, the evocative photographs capture ghostly traces of the numerous women who have traversed the expansive landscapes with their wooden trunks, while closeups of bandaged hands and feet soaking in pails of warm water after long, arduous days are paired with visuals of tools like hooks and gutting knives. Coates thus positions the exhibition as a model for engaging both the local community and a wider audience, revealing how class and gender hierarchies, along with the complexities surrounding inherited histories, continue to shape our present.

Red Herring, Timespan, open daily until 30 Sep, 10am-5pm timespan.org.uk

Women gutting and heading herring at either the Perry-Belch or Cannons Ferry fishery, ca. 1937-41.

Photo: Charles A. Farrell. Courtesy North Carolina Archive

Family Tree

We chat with Glasgow-based debut author Selali Fiamanya, whose debut novel Before We Hit the Ground is a tender and wrenching account of immigrant family dynamics

“The goal with this type of literature is that spark of recognition,” Selali Fiamanya says. He’s speaking about his debut novel Before We Hit the Ground: a literary burst of fireworks depicting a GhanaianScottish family, whose heartwarming yet tense family dynamics mirror something that is scarily close to home for so many first-generation Ghanaian immigrants. In this family, the parents, Abena and Kodzo, migrate from Ghana to Scotland in the late 80s. Their children Elom and Dzifa are born and raised in Glasgow, with Abena becoming a pastry chef and Kodzo a nurse to keep the family afloat. As the lives of this family are unravelled by grief, sacrifice and sexual repression, the precarity of home becomes the book’s central question, speaking in a language that so many Ghanaian immigrants – including both first and second-generation, and beyond – can understand.

This idea of home is a difficult topic across both immigrant and queer communities. In Before

We Hit the Ground, each character can claim more than one place that serves as a profound site of belonging and relating to the world. Venturing across Glasgow, Accra and London, these cities are nevertheless never big enough to permit every single member of the family escape from both external and self-expectations.

For Fiamanya, this diasporic vision of home that the characters navigate found expression in the “urban/rural question,” he explains. “I love the countryside but I feel that it’s more difficult to access because of this sense that in order to allow yourself to enjoy that land, you [usually] have to have a blood tie to that land. I am interested in interrogating how immigrants can lay claim to or access rural spaces, because the earth should belong to us all.” We see this in the character of Elom, the son whose death in the first chapter totalises the search for home, who is most at peace when he wild swims in quiet towns across Scotland where he will not be recognised. With his younger self haunted by a lack of freedom, and his older self frozen in uncertainty, he turns to the land – foreign as it is – for a sense of belonging. In different ways, all the various members of this family are forced to face and fend for themselves, as the sacrificial acts of love that have long bonded them come to unearth buried resentments.

Love, as Fiamanya puts it, is impossible without this kind of sacrifice. “I think love can be liberating and self-actualising but if you aren’t sacrificing as part of it then I don’t know if that is love,” he explains. “Maybe that’s a cynical view from me but if you love someone, you’re going to have to give a bit of yourself up to do that. That’s the reality of what love is, [but] it can be taken to extremes.” Before We Hit the Ground touches on the strain between parents and children who cannot see eye to eye, including on sexuality. Fiamanya hopes that readers might use this conversation to also offer grace to our parents. “I think it’s important to acknowledge

Words: Jan A.

[that our parents are trying]. It’s not a one-way thing – parents want their kids to be proud of them.”

“Maybe that’s a cynical view from me but if you love someone, you’re going to have to give a bit of yourself up to do that”

Selali Fiamanya

Throughout the book, fundamental relationships – including ones to God – are daringly undone and remade. Long a devout Christian, Kodzo breaks away from his faith in pursuit of general spirituality. Meanwhile Abena, whose convictions pale to Kodzo’s, stands firm in her quiet rejection of the faith that has never seemed to be in her corner. “I wanted to see how you can grant someone more freedom and curiosity within this religious confine,” Fiamanya says. Kodzo’s Christian values, though certainly well-intentioned, contain a patriarchal contract that blows through the whole family: it silences his wife Abena’s aspirations and leaves a cold gap in his relationship with his children. “I was interested in this character who relies on religion, and his religion has been good for him in lots of ways,” Fiamanya says. “I would class him as a good Christian man. But that type of religion is so rigid and so constricting. I was interested in exploring how that can be oppressive and I wanted to come into that margin, that line between freedom and control.”

It is this change that brings Abena and Kodzo closer together once their children move out. Yet some notions of change seem out of limits for both of them. Despite both having spent a similar amount of time in Ghana, they cannot agree on where to call home after retirement and now that Elom is gone. Abena seeks to return to Ghana permanently, while Kodzo never wants to return. “That memory of home lives within them,” Fiamanya says. “What happens when you’re confronted with the reality of what it is now?” It is a question, Before We Hit the Ground understands, without resolution; rather, it is in the questioning that such lives are experienced.

Before We Hit the Ground is out now with The Borough Press. Fiamanya will be at Lighthouse Bookshop on 11 Sep as part of Queer Debut Showcase

Photo: Garry Timmons

Autumn Festivals Calendar

Just when you thought festival season was over, Scotland’s music scene has other plans. Some of the folks behind festivals taking place across the country this month, from Glasgow to Islay, tell us what they’re most excited about and why you should go

Outwith Festival

Dunfermline, 3-7 Sep

Lineup: The Twilight Sad, Haiver, The Twistettes

Outwith isn’t just about music, it’s a multidisciplinary celebration of live music, theatre, film, literature, visual arts, family-friendly activities and wellness events.

The festival was founded to promote local artists and spaces, and it continues to spotlight emerging talent from Fife and beyond. Events like the West Wind Youth Music Showcase and spoken word open mic nights give new voices a platform. It’s a festival with heart and purpose... designed to be inclusive. [George Murray, Trustee and Chairperson on the Outwith Festival board and festival volunteer]

Lammermuir Festival

Haddington, 4-15 Sep

Lineup: Hebrides Ensemble, Van Baerle Trio

The stars have aligned to bring together a particularly brilliant programme this year. We love everything in there, but particular standouts would be the outstanding French pianist Jean EfflamBavouzet, the brilliant young British viola player Tim Ridout and in particular Rinaldo Alessandrini who brings his sensational ensemble, Concerto Italiano. Expect artists of top international quality playing wonderful music in stunning venues in a truly beautiful part of Scotland. [James Waters, CEO and Joint Artistic Director]

No a Mean City III (in aid of Refuweegee) Glasgow, 6 Sep

Lineup: Psweatpants, Salt, Dara Dubh Salt and Psweatpants are examples of artists who have moved to Glasgow from other countries and been embraced by the local music community so I’m particularly excited to have them on the bill. No a Mean City rejects the greed and amorality which is so often associated with modern concert experiences. People should come to celebrate the diversity of Glasgow and contribute to supporting refugees at a time where they are being dehumanised and vilified more than ever. You’ll also have a great night! [Mackenzie Burns, founder]

Core. – a Celebration of Noise. Glasgow, 12-14 Sep Lineup: And So I Watch You From Afar, Ditz, Gout We’re absolutely buzzing to have Cave In performing one of the greatest heavy albums of all time, Jupiter. We’ve also pulled off something we’re incredibly proud of: a reformation set from sludge icons Torche! But, the magic of Core. lives in the depths of the lineup. You can stumble across your new favourite band at any set.

At its heart, Core. is about community. Our audience is one of the most open, welcoming, and passionate groups you’ll ever meet at a heavy music event. It’s a space where people connect, discover, and feel seen and accepted! We also put

Words: Tallah Brash

a huge amount of care into platforming diverse and marginalised voices in heavy music... we’re committed to shifting that balance. At the end of the day, Core. is more than just a festival, it’s a movement. See you in the pit? [Daniel Mutch, co-founder and booker]

Caol Ila Islay Jazz Festival

Islay, 19-21 Sep

Lineup: Fergus McCreadie, Colin Steele Quartet, GAÏA,

I am always attracted to this festival’s propensity for creating such amazing collaborations so I think my top one is Late & Live in Bruichladdich: A World Premiere Islay Quintet. I am very excited to hear GAÏA, Ali Affleck and Colin Steele Quartet, not to mention Fergus McCreadie Trio and Stephen Henderson’s Modern Vikings. Caol Ila Islay Jazz Festival is so different from all the other Jazz Festivals I’ve been at – the sense of community and togetherness, and the friendship you can feel between the audience, the musicians, it is just so great. Jazz, single malts, beautiful scenery, tranquility, community, you can’t help but fall in love with this festival. [AnaMaria Bogdan (Gheorghe), Festivals and Programmes Coordinator for Jazz Scotland]

Freakender

Glasgow, 19-21 Sep

Lineup: Lylo, Sacred Paws, Former Champ I’m excited for all of it. On Friday we’ve got a debut from Spacial Awareness (feat a few familiar faces) and the return of V-Twin who hadn’t played in 20 years until last month. Saturday always gets a bit wild and this year the lineup is stacked, we’ve got one of my fave locals Doss along with this amazing garage rock’n’roll band from Cornwall called Heavenly Bodes. On Sunday we’ve got the return of one of Freakender favourites L.A. Witch plus heaps more.

The lineup is usually very good and fun, 20+ acts over three days taking over both levels of The Old Hairdresser’s and Stereo this year. This is our 7th (or maybe 8th) year and might be our best yet, you decide! [Ross Keppie, promoter]

Mean City Fest

Glasgow, 19-21 Sep

Lineup: Meryl Streek, Peroxide, Pizza Tramp We’re very excited about the entire lineup, but we’re really proud to be hosting Anarcho legends Zounds as they play their last ever gig in Scotland. We’re also incredibly stoked to have

Photo: Marilena Vlachopoulou

Meryl Streek on the bill – he’s been such a vocal critic of Dublin’s housing crisis, his performance at Mean City Fest is a powerful statement of solidarity with Glasgow’s homeless community.

Mean City Fest is an entirely DIY undertaking with all profits going to our nominated charity: the Homeless Project Scotland. Our gigs are always a lot of fun and this will be no exception. As we always say, good times for good causes. [Dan and Laura, promoters at Beyond the Gap]

Days

The Pitt, Edinburgh, 27 Sep

Lineup: Erol Alkan, George Riley, Or:la Putting Days together we had a rough idea that it was a festival for Sneaky Pete’s kinda people with great DJs playing. But when the first edition came round, actually being there it dawned on me; this was one of the best crowds ever. We’d somehow managed to attract only sincerely lovely people who knew how to party right. And then the same thing happened at the second Days event – it wasn’t a fluke! I guess really good music plus Sneaky Pete’s, The Pitt, and RARE together makes this really special thing happen. [Nick Stewart, owner Sneaky Pete’s & co-booker of Days alongside RARE]

Interesting Things

Tolbooth, Stirling, 4 Oct

Lineup: Proc Fiskal, Alliyah Enyo, Luga Europ

It’s a festival for the curious – so you might come for the mind-bending techno of Mun Sing, but then fall in love with the unhinged dadaist doom poetry of L, the industrial noise of Mrs Frighthouse, or the improv jazz of Ubu Warp Cheer. The thing that unites all the artists, and

hopefully the festival itself, is that it’s about breaking down boundaries and working beyond any barriers. [David Weaver, programmer for Tolbooth, Stirling]

Edinburgh Indiepop All-dayer

The Mash House, Edinburgh, 4 Oct Lineup: The Cords, F.O. Machete, The Just Joans

The magic of indiepop events is always the warmth and enthusiasm of the people who come together for them. The idea for this festival really grew out of a conversation with a band after a gig in England. We asked, “Why haven’t you played Edinburgh in so long?” and their answer was simple: “No one asks us.” We wanted to change that and bring more brilliant bands to the city. As a not-for-profit collective, our focus is always on creating great shows and paying bands fairly – something we feel is really important. [Craig McCormack and Andy Watson, members of the Edinburgh Indiepop Collective]

Tenement Trail

Glasgow, 11 Oct

Lineup: Pale Waves, Adult DVD, Cowboy Hunters

This year’s lineup feels REALLY special with Pale Waves headlining – I cannot wait to see them in the Barras! I am a HUGE fan of Gallus and Soapbox who never disappoint live! The magic lives in the artists you’ve maybe never seen before, so I have to shout-out the likes of Sister Madds, Dirty Faces and Matt White & The Emulsions who are all on my MUST SEE list.

Tenement Trail was created by a few young pals and was proper DIY! Now it’s en epic production which has grown and grown – it’s a special place where music is the answer!! I cannot wait to see everyone do 30,000 steps in Doc Martens and see 30+ bands in one day... It’s iconic! [Nadine Walker, part of the festival organiser team]

125 Live!

Perth, 6-7 Sep

Lineup: Walt Disco, Parliamo, Valtos

Walt Disco’s performance perfectly embodies our vision of showcasing local talent ‘front and centre’ and illustrates how Perth’s artists have

achieved significant success on the global stage. Unlike traditional festivals, the evening show is a singular, spectacular performance that unfolds sequentially across four stages along Mill Street, extending from the Perth Concert Hall Plaza to the courtyard of Perth Theatre. It will be presented in an ambitious immersive format, partly designed by Cryptic’s Cathie Boyd, and will include dramatic projections by Catalonian visual artist Alba Corral, as well as a stunning laser and light show by award-winning designer Will Potts. Working with Scottish DJ Jack David, they will transform the site of the headliner stage into an audiovisual amphitheatre at the end of the night. [Christopher Glasgow, Director of Perth Theatre and Concert Hall, and Producer of 125 Live!]

Trax

Dumfries & Galloway, 11 Oct

Lineup: Stealing Sheep, Paix, Pearling

We’re so excited to be bringing Liverpool’s Stealing Sheep to the stage this year! The band have spanned so many eras, from indie-folk to rave-pop, and I think how they present this on stage will be really interesting, and knowing them, very fun. Trax celebrates DIY and combats the standard commercial model of festivals. The bill is also extremely varied, celebrating the best of the best in emerging local music. FOMO guaranteed!

[Chloe Lancaster, Marketing Officer]

Pop Mutations x Tiny Changes

Glasgow, 18 Oct

Lineup: Altered Images

We have such a cool lineup coming together – some of it is still hush hush! But, I am super excited to have the amazing Altered Images headlining one of the stages – you’ve heard it here first! We wanted to create something really special, bringing people together and helping us to reach as many people as possible. We’ll have well established artists playing at Mono, Stereo, The Old Hairdresser’s, The Flying Duck, The Glad Cafe and The 78 at the same time. Hen Hoose and Monorail are helping curate the lineups at two of the venues, so you know they’re going to be good!

[Nic Beedie, event organiser]

Days Festival

Es at Freakender

ML Buch at Interesting Things

Photo: Gregor Boyd

Photo: Connor McGhie

Photo: Josef Hall

Shipyards & Sound Systems

From lunchtime pints for shipbuilders to parties splashed in Vogue, Govan’s Fairfield Club is transforming into Glasgow’s unlikely nightlife spot. Ahead of a fundraiser with Healthy & Sentinel, we hear from those fighting to keep the big club evolving.

It’s called the big club for a reason. On a Tuesday afternoon, I soon find Govan’s Fairfield Club can do many things at once: tea dancing in the front, a funeral in the back, and a solitary snooker fixture upstairs. There’s a hole in the wall, but I’ve a cake in hand and tea on the table that separates all parties involved in a meeting that feels similar to a Ken Loach scene.

On one side sit the club’s committee members and volunteers, and on the other, Glasgow’s renowned DIY party crews, Healthy and Sentinel. But after all, it’s a tried and tested collaboration between old and new that, with the help of OH141, has produced some of the city’s most sought-after annual ceilidhs, which recently featured in British Vogue.

“We call them The Happy People because everyone’s fucking angry over this side,” laughs Jim, the club president, explaining the first encounter between each of their worlds in 2022. “I came into the club on a Sunday around 7pm and I’ve never seen anything like it in my life... Before I walked up the car park, there must have been 300 bikes all strapped to the fence; it was a bike thief’s paradise.”

Phil, co-founder of Healthy, smiles, picking up the story, “It was like two crowds, right? The regulars were showing us all how to do the bingo... it took me until halfway through to realise all the ones are in the same column,” he says, looking

towards Davie, the club’s social organiser. “I’ve been here for 30 years... It’s like water off a duck’s back, it’s easy for me,” he says, explaining the six-pint wage that comes with being a bingo caller.

“So, from then on, it’s been about building on how these crowds can overlap even more,” says Phil. “We like taking people places they wouldn’t normally go and doing things in venues that are totally different to the norm.” But at one time, on any given day – or evening – in towns across the country, ‘the norm’ revolved around clubs like this.

Established in 1895, twelve men in the Fairfield polling ward formed Govan’s Working Man’s Club. Thomas, the club secretary, is quick to dispel early affiliations with the shipyard, which didn’t develop till later, along with their lunchtime drinking habits and the addition of a concert hall in 1975. “The community was a lot different then, there were loads of folk living here and loads of jobs for them,” he says, describing a peak before the decline in local industry, drinking habits, and ultimately club memberships.

“You can tell when something’s done for money and when it’s done for love”

Phil, Healthy

This left members with two options: start selling off the space to property developers or set about repurposing it. Siding with the latter, lockdown saw the boys transform the back room into a large multi-purpose function lounge. “I remember we brought one of the long timer’s coffins in before they went to the crematorium,” laughs Jim. “One of the boys went ‘fuck sake, that’s the first time my dad’s been carried into the club’... But seriously, without that room we would have closed like every other club.”

Continuing to keep the club alive, however, means thinking beyond the back lounge, explains Cal, the promoter behind punk outlet Sentinel. “We had a meeting to identify what needed fundraising to keep the space sustainable and landed on a PA,” he says. “It’s about installing something they own and can use long term to reduce the costs of facilitating existing events like the cabaret for old members, whilst integrating new ones from the DIY community.”

Although installing the PA, which is set to be custom-built by We Enjoy Sound – the engineers behind the systems at St Luke’s and The Berkeley

Words: Cammy Gallagher

Suite – the challenge isn’t just technical; it’s about making the space welcoming to new crowds while preserving the character of a working-class community hub. “If you handhold people into a community space and explain the ethics… once they are in, they get it,” Cal explains. “I think people are up for it, you know, people are sick of being ripped off and being skint all the time.”

“You can tell when something’s done for money and when it’s done for love,” says Phil, pointing to the club’s £11 three-course meals and £3.20 Tennent’s as proof. “The bar prices alone show it’s not about profit. It’s difficult, but it’s run the way things should be run. I know it is cool and trendy and there is an element of ‘aw look at that’ when you first come, but once you feel part of the community, it just becomes a nice alternative to a nightclub,” he smiles, showing his membership card around the room.

“What we say is, today’s visitors are tomorrow’s members, and we need young people in here all the time to keep things moving,” says Thomas. “Society will change, but this club should always be here for the people around this area and elsewhere.”

Healthy Fairfield Fundraiser all dayer, Fairfield

Working Men’s Club & Institute Society ltd, Sat 13 Sep, midday-midnight

Photo: Alicia Bickerstaff

Photo: Ruby Pluhar Ceilidh Tea Dancing

Carving Chaos

From sculpture student to LuckyMe signee, Dansa is carving a club-first sound rooted in chaos via Edinburgh’s Cowgate. Blending what-the-fuck with dancefloor function, the Sneaky Pete’s booker and Palidrone boss spills the sauce behind his new project

What happens when you strong-arm strange sounds into danceable sequences designed to get your booty shaking? That’s just one of the questions Flustra – the latest EP from electronic artist Dansa – faces head on. Formerly Daniel Howe, in his day job programming for Sneaky Pete’s, the 28-year-old DJ and producer emerges on a busy Cowgate before taking shelter from a barrage of Fringe flyers inside Stramash. You’d be forgiven for thinking the East Anglian might be Scottish, half-spilling an afternoon pint as the stirrings of a ceilidh hum behind him. After unsuccessfully attempting to drag us onto the dancefloor, the band begins to soundtrack a short conversation around his work as Edinburgh’s latest LuckyMe signee, Palidrone boss, and self-styled ‘Cowgate Rat’.

The Skinny: Do you ever escape the Cowgate?

Dansa: I’ve literally never been to George Street for a night out. I’ve only been to The Mash House –where I also worked – Sneaky Pete’s, and Bongo Club in Edinburgh. I moved here from a place called Thetford in Norfolk to go to The Art College in 2016, brought my decks with me to Kincaid’s Court, skipped Freshers to see Marcel Dettmann, and just became a bit of a Cowgate Rat.

What did you study?

Sculpture... I got a bit disillusioned with it all by the end because it wasn’t a world I cared about going into. I think with making art the goal is to affect people in some sort of way – you’re always trying to chase that – but when I started putting parties on, I got it so much stronger. It was like this instant feedback of people buzzing compared to making work for six months that people could nod to at a gallery exhibition.

How did you get into production?

I always had Ableton when I was working on sound installations during my degree, but I didn’t really see it as a club thing. I started a bit later than I should have, considering I’ve been DJing for over ten years. It never occurred to me to take it seriously before COVID, whereas now I’d say that this artistic pursuit of bringing something new to the table lies in producing more than playing gigs.

“I think with making art the goal is to affect people in some sort of way – you’re always trying to chase that – but when I started putting parties on, I got it so much stronger”

Dansa

Words: Cammy Gallagher

What are you bringing to the table on the EP? I don’t know if it’s particularly new, but I’m always looking for that sort of ‘what the fuck’ thing in a track. But, it’s not home listening, so I don’t want it to be deconstructed to the point where it’s inaccessible to DJs – I try to stretch sound design as far as I can, while still rooting it in a club context. The drum structure is designed to make people move on a dancefloor, but in a way that feels slightly alien. I don’t know where my music sits in terms of scenes. I don’t really feel like a UK bass producer or anything else, and LuckyMe adds that ambiguity a bit... I don’t think I could put those tunes out on any other label right now.

When did the link-up with LuckyMe come about? I met Martin from LuckyMe while working near each other in Summerhall. After I released my first EP on Palidrone, he asked if I wanted to do the Lunice remix, which was a weird full-circle moment because I used to tan him, Hud Mo, and Cashmere Cat on the bus to school.

Did it ever feel intimidating?

I still feel like I don’t really know how to make tunes in a way that would be considered proficient, so the idea of putting them out on an esteemed label was a bit scary because it can feel

like there are so many people better than you. But slowly over time, I got over that. It’s still true, I just don’t care about it anymore. I feel like it’s time wasted if people don’t hear it eventually. It’s nice to do it for yourself, but if you spend a lot of time on something, putting it out there releases you from it so that other people can enjoy it in a way that you can’t.

How has your job at the club over the years informed your workflow?

I have a lot of time to see who’s hot and which sounds are coming through working at Sneaky’s – I try not to let it have a direct effect on me and what music I’m making, but working a forty-hour week means I have about an hour a day in the mornings where I can make tunes, so I have to work quickly without overthinking. It’s a nice restriction because you might finish feeling like you don’t want to, and it keeps you coming back. I think also, like, obviously I’m English, but I’ve lived in Scotland nearly nine years now, and what feels unique about here is that it’s a real positive and supportive environment for anyone doing stuff. So yeah, I do claim it. When I go on holiday, I say I’m from Scotland because I feel like I am.

Flustra is out now via LuckyMe

Photo:

Celine

Antal

Dansa

Welcome Back, the Citz

After seven long years Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre has finally reopened its doors. We take a look at what’s been happening, and what’s coming up

Words: Rho Chung

After recently kicking off its opening week, the Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre has returned home to its newly refurbished building. With a focus on making the venue more accessible, the refurbishment includes new facilities and studios, as well as restored architectural elements like the building’s six iconic statues. Following the COVID-19 pandemic and escalating costs, the building has finally reopened its doors to the public seven years after it was first closed for renovation.

The building, which dates back to 1878, has housed the Citizens Theatre since 1945. When the building first closed in 2018, the renovation was expected to take three years and cost £20 million. Arts Professional reports that, six months back, the Scottish Government contributed an additional £8 million to finish the project, bringing the total cost to nearly double the original budget. It’s a steep price tag at a time when arts funding is constantly being pulled out from under us, and all eyes are on the Citizens Theatre to see how the company makes use of its dearly bought facility.

In the past, Artistic Director Dominic Hill has expressed that the Citizens Theatre can function as a space for co-productions, which are a financial necessity at the moment. Over the next few years, we will see the Citizens Theatre work with numerous big, Scottish theatres to maximise their reach. Unstable funding in the arts means that it’s difficult for organisations to plan for the future – by re-opening this building, the Citizens Theatre is working to create one.

With principal funding from Creative Scotland and Glasgow City Council, the Citizens Theatre represents a material investment on behalf of the Gorbals and its artistic community. The theatre offers £5 tickets for locals, as well as other programmes to make the theatre more accessible for its neighbours, continuing in its mission to engage with the historically deprived community around it. Some coverage of the building bears shades of a gentrifying tone, with The Guardian calling the area ‘once notorious Gorbals’, praising the ‘regeneration’ the area has undergone over the past few years.

After re-opening last month with a local parade and series of events, the theatre seems committed to showing the community a return on their engagement. Until 5 September, the Citizens Theatre will be hosting their Homecoming Festival, featuring tours, workshops and activities for children, amongst other things. The tours are sold out for now – further proof of high demand – but the website promises that a full programme of tours will launch later this year.

The Citizens Theatre’s first production back will be Small Acts of Love, based on the true story of the Pan Am 103 bombing in 1988. With a script by playwright Frances Poet and original songs by Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue, the story chronicles the acts of kindness that passed between those affected by the disaster. The show itself is enormous – there are fourteen cast members and a live band. The rest of the theatre’s first season sports other crowd pleasers. Saint Joan, running in February 2026, is a multi-media adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s classic play about Joan of Arc. The Citizens Theatre will also stage Beckett’s Waiting for Godot next year. This lineup – speckled by phrases about the power of community and friendship and the difficulty of not being a man – is safe but dependable.

Local families can look forward to the return of the Citz Christmas show, which this year will be Beauty and the Beast. There’s little known about the production at present, but it is set to be written by Lewis Hetherington and directed by Hill. The smaller Studio Theatre will host more intimate, experimental projects, like Wonder Fools’ Fringe First-winning Òran and Vox Motus’ Flight. Looking through the upcoming programme, these shows strike me as the kinds of things you stage if you want – and need – to get people to visit again and again. I am eager to see how the Citizens Theatre joins ongoing movements in Scotland to make the theatre industry more accessible. In regaining a theatre of this size, the Scottish theatre scene regrows by that much.

Photo: Alasdair Watson

SCOTTISH NATIONAL JAZZ ORCHESTRA

FRI 26 SEP

SAT 27 SEP

SUN 28 SEP STEVENSON HALL, RCS GLASGOW

Album of the Month

Baxter Dury — Allbarone

It’s not often you’ll hear of an artist making the best work of their career by their eighth album. However, with Baxter Dury, this couldn’t be truer.

Allbarone’s dancier feel excels due to producer Paul Epworth’s (Adele; Florence + the Machine) touches in the studio. A fortuitous meeting at Glastonbury last year brought the pair together, and their partnership here results in Dury pushing himself to go against the sonic familiarity of his more typically minimal approaches. His Fred again.. collaboration (Baxter (these are my friends)) back in 2021 offered the first signal of where Dury’s sound could travel with some dance-ready tunes thrown into the mix. Now, he has fully embraced them and penned a nine-track tour de force laden with biting observations and curious characters.

The album’s title track sums up this revelatory sound best. Brilliantly punchy and brimming with catchy hooks provided by vocalist JGrrey, its beats are both visceral and textured. Dury sticks to his signature formula of melding funny, relatable scenes with typically cryptic stories – in this case, his misfortune on a date at a well-known wine bar which the track takes its namesake: ‘That night in Allbarone / Sat in the rain / Thought about all those promises made’.

Return of the Sharp Heads flows similarly, painting a picture of late-night scenes through hypnotic reverbs and longing lyrics, while Schadenfreude (a German term for pleasure derived by someone else’s misfortune) owes much to Epworth’s fast pace in the studio, forcing Dury to write quicker and trust his initial instincts.

Alpha Dog, Mr W4 and Kubla Khan all showcase Dury’s penchant for being the unbridled central character in the majority of his songs, often to hilarious effect and made all the better with his off-kilter karate moves often seen on the live stage. The anthemic Mockingjay takes romantic inspiration from The Hunger Games, of all places. But while versatile with influences, there’s no doubting the album’s cohesive feel. Epworth’s instrumental arrangements may be seamless throughout, offering plenty of depth and variety, but there’s still plenty of room for Dury’s direct vocals to cut through the mix, assuring he’s still the star of the show.

You get the sense that Allbarone is an album that Dury has always had in his locker. Now it’s come to fruition, Aylesbury’s own Serge Gainsbourg shines more singular, enigmatic and full of life than ever. [Jamie Wilde]

Listen to: Allbarone, Schadenfreude

Big Thief Double Infinity

David Byrne Who Is the Sky? Out

Sep via Matador

BABY!

Children Sister

Bleeds

Olivia Dean The Art of Loving

Lucrecia Dalt

A Danger to Ourselves

RVNG Intl., 5 Sep rrrrr

Listen to: divina, no death no danger, the common reader

From El Boraro, the vampiric demon on 2018’s Anticlines, to Petra, the alien observer of 2022’s ¡Ay!, Lucrecia Dalt often uses fictional personas to explore complex themes and emotions in her work. However, with A Danger to Ourselves, she sheds the chrysalis of these alteregos to emerge with her most personal record yet. The title, borrowed from David Sylvian’s lyrics on opener cosa rara, hints at the album’s preoccupations; emotional volatility, self-sabotage, and the uneasy pull between intimacy and annihilation. It’s Dalt at her most exposed, and somehow, her most inscrutable.

On divina, you sense this newfound vulnerability as she sings about improbable love against a backdrop of staccato piano and the sharp, syncopated sound of snapping fingers. Elsewhere, tracks like mala sangre, the common reader and no death no danger quiver with malicious intent, sounding like a cross between a spaghetti western and a psychological horror, shot through with shards of bolero, salsa and mambo. Dalt has recently scored several horror films, and A Danger to Ourselves feels influenced by this mode; a cinematic exploration of the self that reveals the human psyche as a strange and uncanny landscape. [Patrick Gamble]

Hand of God, 19 Sep rrrrr

Listen to: kawasaki, crooked little line, more than you give

There’s a Proustian rush to this hook-drenched debut album from Glasgow’s Former Champ. With echoes of Camera Obscura, Allo Darlin’ and Alvvays running through the songs, it hits home as a summertime smash of power-pop. Look closer, however, and there’s more going on. Behind the choruses there’s a melodic edge to the tracks that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Teenage Fanclub album. The lyrics cover a range of ground from lost love to the mysteries of the parallels that life sweeps us down; there’s a mournful aspect that somehow also manages to sound uplifting and positive. Perhaps more than anything it’s an album that sounds as Irish as it does Scottish. Claire McKay, aka Martha Ffion, who leads on vocal duties, seems to have made a natural progression from her solo roots to a band environment. Her delivery retains a quality su esting a voice that’s endured Guinness and heartbreak as much as Buckfast and young love. This album never feels like a solo project, however. The guitars intertwine the vocals on every track, delivering a set of songs that feel fully developed, ready to explode from your car stereo as you drive down to the coast. [Andrew Williams]

NewDad Altar Atlantic, 19 Sep rrrrr

Listen to: Roobosh, Mr Cold Embrace, Something’s Broken

Since the release of MADRA in 2024, things have shifted for NewDad. A couple of changes on bass have left the shoegazey Galway outfit operating as a trio. The slimmed-down lineup pushes the band towards a more guitar-driven sound on their second album, Altar. What remains from their early work is their command of atmosphere. What’s new is a real prestige in the instrumentation, felt in the soaring interlude on Mr Cold Embrace, the restrained build of Something’s Broken and in the scuzzy layered guitars on the thrillingly furious Roobosh.

Roobosh is also a great showcase for Julie Dawson’s evolution as a frontwoman; her vocals are sharper, her presence more commanding and confident. She explores this directly on the wry and confessional Entertainer: ‘No, I won’t stop if I’m falling apart / Keep on running around for you’. The band’s recent move to London means that homesickness and distance shape a lot of the songs here. None more so than Pretty, a straightforward love letter to Galway: ‘I love you in every picture… / Haven’t found a better place’. The image of Dawson ‘rattling like a toy’ by the wild ru ed coast captures the enormity of the landscape beautifully. [Tara Hepburn]

Biffy Clyro Futique

Warner, 26 Sep rrrrr

Listen to: Hunting Season, Woe Is Me, Wow Is You, A Thousand and One

With the release of a tenth album, a band must create a record that not only lives up to their past successes but also honours the weight of such a milestone. This is something Kilmarnock-born heroes Biffy Clyro could do with their eyes closed, which is proved in Futique The album’s title plays on the contrast of “future” and “antique” – focusing on themes such as memories and nostalgia, coping with change and relationships in a digital age.

Opening with the vibrant A Little Love, Biffy delve into what they do best: heavy riffs, crashing drums and relentless energy. This momentum stays through the first few tracks, before arriving at Goodbye, a much slower track that discusses the breakdown of a relationship. Much of the album explores personal growth and how it can change certain relationships, exposing the band in a more revealing light. Friendshipping further emphasises this narrative, while Two People In Love shares the same intimacy before bringing the album to a crashing close. Consistently flowing from heartfelt numbers to classic electrifying rock, Futique is one of Biffy’s most personal albums to date, cementing their status as one of the country’s most iconic bands. [Emma Cooper-Raeburn]

Former Champ I saw you in paradise

Joanne Robertson Blurrr

AD93, 19 Sep rrrrr

Listen to: Gown, Exit Vendor, Why Me

Being best known as the ghostly melodic heart of Dean Blunt’s tales of wounded masculinity has often overshadowed Joanne Robertson’s brilliant, similarly idiosyncratic solo work. On Blurrr, her strongest and most focused work to date, she continues to build a gorgeous world of solitary melancholia. Sonically largely sparse and haunted, simply recorded acoustic songs seem gently smudged, all elements drifting into something that aches through the fog. There’s something of early Cat Power about how unadorned and downcast it all is, but, perhaps owing to the simplicity of its recording, its atmosphere feels more domestic, less constructed, as if it’s something private overheard from the flat upstairs.

Bolstering her sound this time are contributions from experimental cellist Oliver Coates, whose treacly textures become a perfect accompanying haze for Robertson’s voice. The atmospheres of the solo songs are so church-like in their solitude that, on paper, orchestral flourishes feel like they could puncture the atmosphere rather than contribute to them. It’s no surprise though to people familiar with Coates’ work that his input is sublime, expertly judged, particularly on Gown where he churns down into desperation and reaches for salvation simultaneously. [Joe Creely]

Kojey Radical Don’t Look Down Atlantic, 19 Sep rrrrr

Listen to: Conversation, On Call, Breathe

With his second studio album, Don’t Look Down, East London rapper Kojey Radical has clearly used the intervening years well since his 2022 debut – Don’t Look Down is a bumper 16-track offering, every song created with care. Combining jazz, rap and R’n’B, his sound lands somewhere between Tyler, The Creator and Kendrick Lamar – but hailing from Hoxton, not Hollywood. Check out Breathe, Rotation and Everyday for the best examples of this unique sound; there’s also a strong gospel flavour to the album, which soars on head-bopping single Conversation.

An eclectic mix of artists from the burgeoning UK R’n’B scene join Radical on the album, with each given time to make their mark – don’t miss James Vickery’s contribution to On Call, a stand-out track. Most impressive, though, is Radical’s strong cadence, wordplay and progressive bars, which draw comparisons to East London legend Kano. While Don’t Look Down might lack the knockout punches that would bring Kojey Radical to the top table of UK rap, it’s another step in his rise as a star of the alternative scene as he continues to carve out his own sound. [Calum Skuodas]

Dancer

More or Less Meritorio Records, 12 Sep rrrrr

Listen to: Legend, Always Running, Baby Blue

Dancer teased their fantastic new album with three singles that make heavy use of a greenscreen. On Just Say Yes, they play blowup instruments in fancy dress on a speedboat, on Happy Halloween they’re perpetually spinning into a fiery vortex, while on Baby Blue, singer Gemma Fleet is a floating head in space, wearing a party hat. The videos feel like the Glasgow-based band are underlining a manifesto commitment to use small budgets to make something fun, attention grabbing and really quite charming. More or Less arrives just 18 months after their debut and it’s full of the same bursts of sparkling, jangly pop. Dancer don’t try to reinvent the wheel, instead they draw from a long lineage of Northern indie bands. Songs like Baby Blue and Just Say Yes contain the bouncy spiky riffs synonymous with Sacred Paws, their buoyant bass grooves call to mind Field Music and the resounding choruses of Always Running and Deadline evoke erstwhile outfit Frankie & The Heartstrings. With slicker production, cleaner tones and plenty of their own unique charm thrown in, Dancer may not make big-budget blockbusters, but they may make your favourite cult-indie classic. [Adam Clarke]

SPRINTS

All That Is Over City Slang, 26 Sep rrrrr

Listen to: Need, Pieces, Better

Aesthetically, SPRINTS’ sophomore record feels definitively like autumn. From the cover art’s palette of muted purple and orange tones to the yellow typeface resembling fall leaves as they change in October, the record feels like crisp temperatures and the sounds of horror. It’s either serendipity or incredibly intentional that the record is out four days after the start of fall is marked by the autumnal equinox. Sonically, All That Is Over creates a spooky and diverse soundscape, while embodying themes of atrocity that backlight its conceptualisation, two of these atrocities being Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the climate crisis – both utter catastrophes.

Throughout the record SPRINTS vocalist and guitarist Karla Chubb’s lyrics reverberate the political and personal turmoil she’s been working out on the road. Opening track Abandon begins with Jack Callan creating a spine-tingling crash on the drums, Callan and bassist Sam McCann setting the record’s eerie mood, while Chubb’s lyrics are so sharp they could pierce the skin like a sword. Embodying the ethos of punk, All That Is Over mirrors the horrific state of humanity that the world has found itself in.

[Billie Estrine]

Music Now

Music lovers of all types can find tunes on the Scottish scene this September, but we’re most excited for concept albums, satirical songwriting and strong emotional narratives from artists like Goodnight Louisa, Emma Pollock and Rudi Zygadlo

Words: Ellie Robertson

Between last month’s festival frenzy and sold-out stadium gigs, we’ve got a lot to catch up on. In late July, we heard from feminist songwriting collective Hen Hoose (Wipe Out) and psych four-piece Floating Heads (Drug Tent), while in August we missed tracks by Possibly Jamie (FTDJ), Rianne Downey (Angel), Quiet Man (Good Enough), Pictish Trail (Hold It), AiiTee (Eli), Slime City (You Do the Math(s)) and a collaboration between EYVE and LuckyBabe (Miniskirt B).

Now that it’s September and the dust has settled, the wait is finally over for a new album from Goodnight Louisa; the synth artist hinted at a new record in our Spotlight On... New Scottish Music in 2025 feature back in January, so we couldn’t be more excited for Marathon’s release on the 26th. Louise McCraw’s sophomore record has been preceded by a slew of singles, including Grace Jones and Jennifer Aniston – the latter of which is accompanied by an ultra-indulgent music video that brings to mind The Substance more than it does Friends. Dark and dreamy synth notes pair well with McCraw’s siren song about the eternal youth of the eponymous icon: ‘Life is just a pattern of good liars and good manners and it doesn’t really matter / Cause soon I’ll look like Jennifer Aniston’.

The LP also mentions Saint Bernadette on immaculate dance track Playboy, and don’t miss the devastating, orchestral ode to Drew Barrymore. Beats are complex and crystalline across the album, and there’s a vast palette of bittersweet and ephemeral emotions covered – Sunday School interchanges bassy and brassy effects to create a high-tempo hit, and Polaroids From Malta pairs hard rock sounds with lyrical themes of melancholy and nostalgia. Marathon is an aesthetic, cinematic synth album that captures the glamour of the icons and idols that inspire McCraw, while still communicating the darker reality of life when all eyes are on you.

On the same day, founding member of Scottish record label Chemikal Underground, Emma Pollock releases Be ing the Night to Take Hold (26 Sep), her first full-length solo record in nine years. In the wake of the pandemic, amidst the loss of relatives and a stru le for self-discovery after an autism diagnosis, Pollock penned this series of baroque rock ballads pairing piano, synth and strings. Symphonies like Rapid Rush of Red belie the pain of quarrelling with a loved one, and Marchtown is a moving memoriam for Mary Queen of Scots; despite the displacement in time, Pollock brings as personal a performance to each, and her journey towards healing is deftly written across all ten tracks.

If that’s too long to wait, AUTO FICTION, the newest narrative record by Scottish artist Rudi Zygadlo, is out on 12 September. The anti-AI artist has scored the story of an insecure man who turns to a virtual girlfriend, making use of glam rock instrumentation, looping and layering self-loathing soliloquies, and mixing in an eclectic set of literary references, from Trainspotting in Finasteride to Erysichthon of Thessaly in Autophag. Enter AUTO FICTION for a listening experience that’s satirical, smooth and wonderfully sleazy.

From a seasoned storyteller to a first-time concept album, on the same day Edinburgh’s Jack Hinks releases Kintsugi, a suite of previously released singles now arranged into a model of the stages of grief. Indie label Last Night From Glasgow have

two debuts on the 26th – a self-titled release by neo-disco outfit QUAD90, and Rapture Party, the first outing by synth-pop Highlanders The Joshua Hotel. Over on page 29 we speak to indie sibling duo The Cords about their eponymous debut, and if you turn back a page you’ll find full reviews of Biffy Clyro’s Futique, Former Champ’s i saw you in paradise, Dancer’s More or Less and Joanne Robertson’s Blurrr

Folk arrives in force this autumn. On 5 September, decorated virtuoso Karen Marshalsay releases Eadarainn a’ Chruit : Between Us the Harp, a collection of 16 compositions, both original and traditional, that showcase the range and impact of one of trad music’s most intricate instruments. Ballad Lines, a coming-of-age queer musical that modernises traditional Scottish and Appalachian sounds, launches their original cast recording on 12 September, followed by a one-off performance at Cottier’s on the 15th. And back in July, Mairi Sutherland’s homemade animated music video for I’d Be Bored revealed the folk guitarist as a capable visual artist, so expect more marginalia when her debut EP Uncanny Comparisons drops (19 Sep).

Elsewhere, post-rock maestro Hamish Hawk releases Covers II (5 Sep), showcasing his irresistible multi-instrumentalism through the songwriting of Madonna, Pet Shop Boys and others, while on the same day Glasgow jazz pianist Paul Harrison releases Encontros, interpreting the music of Brazilian legend Egberto Gismonti. Later in the month, pop heads should chase down Charly Miller’s debut EP, I NEED THERAPY (19 Sep). To wrap up with some singles, Grow Up give us Beach (4 Sep), Eleanor Hickey releases Pesky Rain (12 Sep) and Vanderlye’s Blackout Sky arrives on the 19th.

Scan the QR code to follow and like our Music Now: New Scottish Music playlist on Spotify, updated on Fridays

Photo: Rudi Zygaldo

Photo: Laura Meek

Goodnight Louisa Rudi Zygaldo

Film of the Month — Deaf

Director: Eva Libertad

Starring: Miriam Garlo, Álvaro Cervantes

RRRR R

Released 12 September by Curzon

Certificate 12A

Deaf had its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival

theskinny.co.uk/film

Eva Libertad’s Deaf is an intimate domestic drama of disjunctures and interiors. She engages us with a difficult conceit: a mother who can’t hear her baby cry.

Miriam Garlo plays Angela, a deaf woman pregnant with her first child. She is succoured by Hector, her attentive and proactive husband, sensitively acted by Álvaro Cervantes. He is a hearing person who’s fluent in sign language and a supportive advocate for her autonomy (in both medical consultations and social gatherings, he tries to mediate with tactful gestures to involve her) and together, they are a loving, mellow pair. With great care and intention, they get provisions in order; they rally the proverbial village. However, come the birth of their baby girl, Ona, the film finds its charged vein as the reverberations of Angela’s dysphoria invade their life, and their simpatico union gradually fragments (“But it is harder with Ona now.” “Of course, everything’s harder now.”).

We watch a bifurcated world turn with indifference; there are hearing people and there are deaf people. The film lucidly demonstrates the hostility of such a societal make-up, and most perceptively, how it inexorably infects even devoted homes. You feel complicit in Angela’s distress, the essential exclusion she has to contend with; the abasement of taking up space. Whether interacting at her kids’ nursery or with fellow nightclub patrons, constant, distorted reflections of her personhood orbit her. People’s pre-disposition to ogle, impose, or patronise with

inept interpretation is her dehumanising everyday. But the world’s unsparing reception finds its most painful note in the disconnect with her child. Garlo is stunning in her character’s soul-baring state, reacting with numbness when reality catches up to her dread, fulfilling her foreboding. The stultified bond with her baby has put her very constitution on trial, and it feels as if nature’s rendered judgment is, ruthlessly, that of incompatibility.

The emotional beats of Deaf strike with cudgel force, as Angela moves from participant to spectator in her child’s early development. This feels reminiscent of language-as-a-relationship-barrier in Past Lives (2023) – “You dream in a language that I can’t understand. It’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.” Hector’s more realised, direct line of communication with Ona strains Angela and the attendant sense of isolation drives her to defensive conspiracy, projecting distrust – “I’m outside of everything.” As her hopelessness and calcified resentment threaten to consume her, there are shades of Ma ie Gyllenhaal’s implosive The Lost Daughter (2021), compellingly complicating what we consider to be a mother’s onus.

The pathos of a fractured relation and the disorienting odyssey of maternity will always make for intense, vital filmmaking. Deaf is at once gentle and fraught; exacting but not defeatist. It penetrates as it confronts ableism’s mocking spectre and a mother’s compounded plight. [Lucy Fitzgerald]

Christy

Director: Brendan Canty

Starring: Danny Power, Diarmuid Noyes, Emma Willis, Helen Behan, Chris Walley rrrrr

We first meet Christy (Danny Power) as his foster family is kicking him out. The bruises on his knuckles give us some idea why. So he goes to live with his brother, Shane (Diarmuid Noyes), and Shane’s partner, Stacy (Emma Willis), in a council housing estate in Knocknaheeny.

Brendan Canty’s film could easily be another bleak kitchen-sink drama about the grim realities of working-class life. The world it brings us is grey, run-down and uninspiring, an easy place for a person to stagnate. But it’s also full of vibrant personalities, and people who dearly love being wrapped up in each other’s lives. A real community, albeit an imperfect one.

They’re a funny lot too. Knocknaheeny is rife with wisecrackers,

right down to the ten-year-old kids who banter like middle-aged men. As if the lines were passed down to them in their mother’s milk, or maybe in those endless cups of tea.

Power plays Christy beautifully and believably. He wears a permanently glazed-over expression at first, but it’s clear that this affectation, and his quick temper, are just overactive defence mechanisms. It’s a joy to watch them slip away, revealing the person underneath.

There are a few stray moments where Christy is a touch heavy-handed – like the Vaseline-lensed flashbacks of Christy’s mother. But, in a way, this just highlights how successful the rest of the film is – it doesn’t need these crutches because the performances and the story stand up so strongly on their own.

[Ross McIndoe]

Christy had its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival; released in the UK on 5 Sep by Altitude; certificate 15

Happyend

Director: Neo Sora

Starring: Yukito Hidaka, Hayato Kurihara, Yuta Hayashi, Shina Peng, Arazi, Kirara Inori, Shirō Sano rrrrr

When the offspring of a famous director with a distinctive style scratches a directing itch themselves, it’s easy to speculate what that debut film might be like based on the parent’s work, even if the final product wildly differs from predictions – e.g. the Cronenbergs, multiple generations of Coppolas. It’s a lot trickier to guess the early style of a director whose influential father left an indelible mark on cinema through a different field. Having helmed the acclaimed Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, which documented his father’s final concert a few months before his death, Neo Sora now brings us Happyend as an impressive fictionfeature calling card, free of any overt ties to his dad’s legacy.

In a near-future Japanese city, everyone’s bracing for a devastating

earthquake that’s set to reshape life as they know it, while the government stokes far-right rhetoric against swathes of the population, such as Zainichi Koreans. Meanwhile, a diverse group of teens, on the cusp of graduation, navigate personal stru les and rising tension after a prank they play on their principal leads to the installation of intrusive surveillance tech at school.

Where you can see a connection between pioneering composer Sakamoto and his son’s film is in Happyend’s unpredictable rhythms. Sora takes the conventions of comingof-age stories, especially Japanese school dramas, and infuses them with an air of dread that nonetheless doesn’t sour the regular moments of joy, comedy and escapism. It’s a clever, compelling way to explore creeping techno-fascism, made all the more resonant by how barely futuristic it all looks. [Josh Slater-Williams]

The Golden Spurtle Director: Constantine Costi Starring: Charlie Miller, Ian Bishop, Lisa Williams rrrrr

Who would have thought a documentary about porridge, the beigest of foodstuffs, would be so colourful? I’m not just talking about Dimitri Zaunders’ attractive, 4:3 ratio cinematography capturing the lush woodland around Carrbridge, the darling Highland town that hosts the annual World Porridge Making Championship. Colourful too are the various characters who compete in the annual event, and the eccentric collection of locals who make it happen each year.

What makes Constantine Costi’s film so winning is that he clearly loves all of them – from Toby, the deadpan Aussie taco chef, flying from Sydney to Scotland to compete in the competition for the second time, to Ian, the grizzled veteran who looks and sounds a bit like Sean Connery gone feral. He even has time

Paul & Paulette Take a Bath Director: Jethro Massey

Starring: Marie Benati, Jérémie Galiana rrrrr

Jethro Massey’s debut is a polarising battle of the quirkiest between the titular heroes, a French flâneuse (Marie Benati) drawn to all things ancient and dead, and an American photographer (Jérémie Galiana) who tags along for the ride. Inspired by Lee Miller’s stunning shot in Adolf Hitler’s Munich bathtub, Paul & Paulette Take a Bath explores the pair’s fascination with terrible historical events. Their city tours encourage a reflection on how to consciously inhabit places with a past (and present) of violence and marginalisation, and where to draw the line between curiosity and voyeurism.

The only movie boasting an imaginary guillotine meet-cute, this Paris-set anti-romcom conjures up dreamy, magnetic visuals, yet fails to capture the characters’ truths. Both protagonists are underwritten, their

for Neil, the tryhard Englishman who you suspect would sell out his grandma to get his hands on the titular trophy. Our chief hero, though, is Charlie Miller, the competition’s chieftain who’ll be retiring at the end of the event, giving The Golden Spurtle an emotional kicker.

This is an incredibly funny film, with most of the comedy emanating from the disconnect between the competitors’ passion for creating the perfect bowl of porridge and the inherent futility of such an endeavour, given that every bowl passed in front of the camera looks identical. James Alcock’s deadpan editing also elicits plenty of laughs. Costi’s direction, which was so precise on the lead-up, becomes a bit looser during the chaos of competition day, but that’s the only grumble in this otherwise pitch-perfect endeavour. [Jamie Dunn]

The Golden Spurtle had its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival; released 12 Sep by Dogwoof; certificate U

inner worlds relayed in voiceover, clichéd exchanges, and Tumblr-worthy tableaux from decades past. The film rarely goes beyond a surface-level back-and-forth between the leads. Paulette’s characterisation is particularly frustrating, despite Benati’s riveting performance. Although Paulette begs Paul not to idealise her, it’s his fantasy of her we see, much like the movie’s Paris is Massey’s own version of the French capital, one that sweeps its modern idiosyncrasies under a rug of carefully woven, decadent beauty.

Borrowing from Nouvelle Vague and 1990s analogue romances like Before Sunset, Paul & Paulette Take a Bath lacks those staples’ sharp dialogue to sustain its uneventfulness. A hybrid romance of collective responsibility, it ultimately buries a compelling discourse on evil permeating our spaces within empty layers of a relationship that should’ve ended at ‘hello’. [Stefania Sarrubba]

Happyend

Christy

Paul & Paulette Take a Bath

The Golden Spurtle

Scotland on Screen:

EIFF 2025

This year’s Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence unearthed a mixed bag of work, much of it disappointing, but there were a few glimmers of talent and invention to be found

There’s a lot riding on Edinburgh International Film Festival’s Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence, and I’m not just talking about its ample £50,000 winner’s fund. In many respects, it’s the centrepiece of the ‘revitalised’ festival. “Ever since day one, one of the principles behind our selection has been this idea of securing highquality world premieres,” EIFF’s director Paul Ridd told me a few days before his second edition in charge.

Having now seen eight of those ten world premieres in competition, it seems to me Ridd is still a ways off from achieving that dream. But perhaps this is to be expected. Major festivals can often stru le to secure strong competition titles, so it’s no surprise that Edinburgh, a festival that’s in the middle of rehabilitating its industry credentials, might not be attracting the most exciting new works of international cinema, especially with an insistence on only considering world premieres for entry – even the competitions at the Berlinale and Cannes have more relaxed attitudes to exclusivity.

Several films began with much promise but failed to stick the landing. Jesse Noah Klein’s Best Boy, for example, opens confidently on a family in mourning. Their exacting patriarch has died, but not before leaving word that his three adult offspring have to recreate the bizarre and abusive family competition they were made to play as children to crown the ‘best boy’ and win their $100,000 inheritance. Taking place over a single day in and around the family’s woodland cabin, the competition mixes physical endurance with psychological torture, and after each round, a winner is crowned and the other two have to strip naked and recite a humiliating chant proclaiming themselves losers. When structured around this surreal tournament, Klein’s film is blackly comic and pleasingly bizarre, but its intensity dissipates when it becomes clear there’s little meat on the story’s bones beyond the high-concept setup. As Best Boy drags to its close after exhausting its best ideas, Klein unleashes a series of clichés (a fire, a cathartic kiss, a character plunging into a cleansing lake) in lieu of a satisfying resolution.

The most visually striking work in competition was Ondine Viñao’s Two Neighbours. Inspired by Aesop’s fable of greed and envy, Avaricious and Envious, it’s a wild satire that takes place across a chaotic party at a lavish country house and concerns the rivalry between Stacy (Chloe Cherry), a vapid socialite whose father is throwing the party, and Becky (Anya Chalotra), a stru ling writer with a chip on her shoulder. It’s a film of excess, with bold production design, finely-detailed costuming and enough supporting characters, including a real-life genie (an underused Ralph Ineson), to fuel a mini-series. The maximalism is clearly the point, but Viñao’s film is so cluttered with side-plots that she neglects the fable’s central premise for most of the runtime.

Campbell X’s second feature, Low Rider, was one of EIFF’s most anticipated titles, but it was a crushing disappointment in comparison to his sparky 2012 debut, Stud Life. Very little works in this sha y road movie following Quinn (Emma McDonald), a young woman from London travelling across South Africa in search of her estranged father. Ploddingly paced, clunkily written and cloyingly sentimental, the film takes Quinn, a deeply unlikeable and boring protagonist, on a series of life lessons exploring big issues like racism, identity, and self-love, but these trite eddies rarely rise above the superficial.

It wasn’t all bad, though. The bi est buzz was generated on the ground by Blue Film, the debut from LA-based filmmaker Elliot Tuttle. It’s easy to see why it got audiences talking. Shot on a shoestring and taking place over one long night of the soul, it takes the form of a series of charged conversations between two characters. One is Aaron (Kieron Moore), a macho camboy who specialises in humiliating his fans with homophobic slurs; the other is the middle-aged Hank (Reed Birney), who’s spending $50,000 for a night of Aaron’s company. It’s quickly revealed, though, that Hank is Aaron’s former teacher who was convicted of sexually assaulting one of his pupils. Unflinching in its exploration of both men’s sexuality, the film is uncomfortable viewing, but intentionally so, refusing to look away from troubling taboos. Both actors give committed performances, and Tuttle does just enough with framing and blocking to keep this talky film dynamic. Not perfect by any means, but Blue Film marks Tuttle out as a daring new voice in queer cinema.

The most accomplished film I saw in the competition was Mortician from veteran Iranian filmmaker Abdolreza Kahani. With no funding or crew, Kahani wrote, directed, edited and shot the film himself on his iPhone with a handful of actors in a production style he describes as “one-person cinema.” The filmmaking may be impoverished, but it’s rich with visual invention. It centres on a lugubrious mortician, who specialises in the Islamic tradition of washing corpses before burial, and the friendship he forms with a dissident Iranian pop star who’s in hiding in the snowy outskirts of Montreal. Superficially, Mortician is an odd-couple comedy, but it has some devastating left turns that remind us of the real-world dangers for people under the eye of the Iranian regime. It clearly stood out to EIFF’s audience too, and walked off with the £50,000 prize – it’s exciting to think what this resourceful filmmaker will make next with his bounty.

EIFF ran 14-20 Aug

Words: Jamie Dunn

Two Neighbours

SEAR’S PIZZA, EDINBURGH

A tale of two pizza shops, as we visit new by-the-slice spaces at both ends of the M8

Sear’s Pizza, 27A Marchmont Rd, Edinburgh, EH9 1HY

Wed-Sun, midday-9pm

Pizza by the slice – it’s having a bit of a moment. Call it a trend, call it a recession indicator, but it does seem like slice shops are popping up all over the place. Maybe we’ve just been very busy in the last few months and more in the market for food you can eat while sprinting – who’s to say?

Anyway, Sear’s have been on the slice scene in Glasgow’s West End for a few years, and now they’re in equally leafy surroundings in Edinburgh’s Marchmont. Their new spot is a dainty, dinky little shop that seems to have very neatly parallelparked rather than crash-landed, with ‘well-worn’ signwriting on the external wall and a chunky neon in the window.

Inside, it’s a charming facsimile of what we imagine a New York pizza shop might look like: we’re talking cool signwriting, more neons, brickeffect panelling, and a whole bunch of framed portraits. Once we stop focusing on the walls, there’s a lovely wooden booth in the window and a big counter at the back filled with pizzas. It’s sweet, almost quaint, which might be down to the fact that it’s all Victorian tenements and massive hedges outside, rather than skyscrapers and fellas who are walkin’ here, buddy.

As connoisseurs of the form, we’d say that Sear’s have something of a medium crust – there’s a bit of rise and puff but with a good crunch on the bottom, so there’s a nice light and shade thing going on. The Margarita (£3) is an extremely solid slice of pizza – plenty of cheese, and a tangy, almost jammy tomato sauce that is worryingly moreish.

consistent, it pairs very well with a window seat and liberal sprinklings from the oregano dispenser. Sear’s, then, is a great pitstop; a place to spend ten minutes having an on-the-run lunch and living out your NYC fantasy within walking distance of the park. We reckon you’ll really like it. If not, the good news is that other by-the-slice pizza is available.

Anxious Pete’s, 25 Kent St, Glasgow, G40 2SR Thu 4-9pm, Fri-Sun midday-9pm

As for the Pepperoni (£3.50), it’s absolutely loaded with lots of little slices of the stuff. We’re talking 100% coverage, no bite left behind; it looks almost exactly like the iPhone emoji for ‘pizza’ came to life then headed straight to Marchmont. And it tastes great – not too spicy, and a good balance between the meat, cheese and sauce. It’s delicious, it’s

Words: Peter Simpson fast while leaning against the lamppost outside? Of course we do. Anxious Pete’s is serving up some incredible pizza and focusing almost solely on that. Grab a slice, find a perch, scarf it down, then head back for another. We think it’s brilliant, and reckon you will too. If not, well, other by-the-slice pizza is available.

Words: Peter Simpson

Anxious Pete’s are rocking thin, blistery crusts with big puffy edges and middles that need to be folded or they will get away from you. The white slice (£3.50) is a bit like the fanciest piece of cheese on toast you’ve ever had. Plenty of mozzarella, a sprinkle of parmesan, a whole load of garlic and some fresh rosemary; it’s a tangy, stringy treat. As for the Pepperoni (£4), it’s an outrageous bit of business. For starters, it’s the size of a small tea towel. It’s topped with fresh basil and loaded up with parmesan, and while the pepperoni isn’t all over the slice, it makes its extremely savoury presence felt throughout. Smoky, spicy, gooey and crispy, this is a genuinely brilliant slice of pizza. Do we burn our mouth trying to eat it too

Inside, it’s an extremely ‘real’ look at what a New York pizza shop might be like. There’s a front section with a bench and a checkerboard floor, a counter loaded with pizzas, and a steady flow of punters. Behind that counter, it’s a factory-esque void with a prep station, a two-deck pizza oven, and chefs getting through a power of work in a fog of what we assume is heat, smoke and flour. The staff are fanning themselves with paper plates, the Barras is in full swing outside, and it smells amazing in here.

Anxious Pete’s is the new spot from the folk behind the excellent Barras pizza place The Pizza Cult, and it’s right in the heart of the market action. It is also, as a glass-fronted unit that’s only just opened, completely chamelonic. It blends right in (we walked past it twice and only stopped when we saw someone pass with a pizza box).

Pizzerias get more bang for their buck and the chance to run a slightly shorter menu, punters get an extremely quick and fresh bite to eat that hits the sweet spot of ‘tasty treat that won’t leave you bankrupt’.

bit of a moment, and in These Trying Times, it makes sense.

izza by the slice – it’s having a

PA tale of two pizza shops, as we visit new by-the-slice spaces at both ends of the M8

GLASGOW

Sear's

Anxious Pete's

Image: courtesy of Sear's

Photo: Denis Fisher

who will be remembered here @ EAF Pavilion

An EAF25 X The Skinny Emerging Writer responds to a tender film that connects queer stories with Historic Environmental Scotland sites

Halfway up Leith Street, I am sucked into a revolving door on the ground floor of a tall glassy building. After half a rotation, it spits me out into a reception that has become a Pavilion. This block of offices is currently occupied by artists, the usual city centre development in reverse; white-collar work displaced by temporary studios. I enter through the gift shop, past a pile of books embossed with a provocation: ‘who will be remembered here’. In a darkened room just beyond this question, a film created by artist CJ Mahony and playwright Lewis Hetherington becomes a portal to a multitude of answers. We are transported to a gasworks in Bi ar. Robert Softley Gale crawls across the small grey stones that make up the path to the building, the cobbles and gravel inhospitable to his wheelchair. The physical inaccessibility of this place is visible from the outset. Abandoned cylinder turned relic, another

behemoth of the Scottish post-industrial landscape. Gasworks, factories, shipyards. Places that forged not only metal and industry, but ideas of what it might mean to be a man. Gale ruminates on purpose, how these kind of places never doubted their value, wondering how he might he come to understand his. “A useful queer? Isn’t that a contradiction?” he jibes, reflecting on the prejudiced assumption that gay men are unproductive while considering how society might force certain bodies to justify their existence with a use. But he faces the darkness with joy, finding happy usefulness in the daily routine of fatherhood. Caring, feeding, playing. An eternal purpose that will outlive any piece of industrial architecture. Robbie MacLeòid is speaking Gaelic in Fort George, already a defiance. This is a place with oppression bricked into its walls. Originally built to suppress Jacobite rebellion and enforce a certain way of talking and dressing, it now continues as a

British military base. A place where acts of love and ways of living might be illegal, but death and violence are always encouraged. He doesn’t appear to us inside the fort, but su ests that if he were to, it would be locked in its prison, the Black Hole. His fingertips trace the stone in complete darkness, searching for the indents of initials scratched in long before him. Another boy forced into the dark. He ends instead on the beach, looking outward, and reminds us that the land has been here long before any of its people and their empires, and will continue on after. A tree is growing in Fort George, the ocean closes in.

Harry Josephine Giles stands in the centre of a circular structure made of stone, another similar but more dilapidated building keeps watch nearby. These two brochs are situated unusually close to each other, su esting friends rather than enemies built them. The rhythm of her speech is pure music, finding melody

in the rolled-out R’s of a Scots language made to be spoken. Her voice gives each word an ominous texture that seems to transcend barriers of language and time. As I simultaneously listen and read the subtitles, I register moments of disconnect between my eyes and my ears, where the written word seems to fail the spoken. To anglicise a tattery coast or ragin God into a ra ed, angry, loss. But translation is always a departure, a compromise, and in this case my ear is biased. I wonder what each poet might make of their onscreen translation, of how each Helvetica sentence grasped at their language, pulling it into the dominant, written English. However, to translate is also to open up, and this work is about letting people in. Even in our best attempts to understand each other, there is always a loss, but the potential of what might be gained in trying is so much greater.

The next site, another circle. Standing stones erected four thousand years ago. Bea Webster remembers visiting as a child but couldn’t find their story here. Instead, they draw on the power of these ancient stones and imagine what that history might be, knowing they must write their own since it was violently taken from them. What was it like being queer and deaf, Scottish and Thai, thousands of years ago? What would sign language have been like back then? Could it exist at all? To find the answers, we must peel back the layers of time and tune in to the psychic imprint left by those before us. Site is a container for stories. Webster gestures towards a new future, where an oppressive past is replaced with all the possibilities of who they might become, and the hope that those who come after might now know their history too.

The screen darkens to the soft glow of the credits and I am returned to an elongated bench in the back room of the Pavilion. While each site is beautifully filmed, the most poignant aspect of this work lies in the layering of stories and place through the performance of language. Writing through site, a queer archive for the future.

Edinburgh Art Festival, 7-24 Aug, EAF Pavilion

edinburghartfestival.com

Words: Megan Rudden

Harry Josephine Giles for who will be remembered here

Photo: Tiu Makkonen

Robert Powell: Hall of Hours @ Edinburgh Printmakers

Robert Powell’s solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers is a hypnotic and whimsical exploration of the passing of time

Since 2020, Robert Powell has been on an art-philosophical mission to understand and interpret how we exist in time, prompted in part by his child’s su estion to “make stuff about clocks.” Powell’s work spans printmaking, video, sculpture and text, characterised by a surreal kind of world-building that fizzes with dark humour, satire and innuendo. Unsurprisingly then, his ‘stuff about clocks’ is a delightfully intricate and eccentric response to the abstract mystery of time. His latest exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, Hall of Hours is a fantastical effort to heed his toddler’s call in the most ambitious and complete way yet.

The ground floor exhibition space at Edinburgh Printmakers is a near-perfect cube of white walls and concrete floors. A space almost atemporal in its hyper-negativity, it is appropriately suited to Powell’s experiments in horology. Here, clock-time is replaced by story time – a unit of measurement not connected to any symbolic set of numbers, but to the various cycles of human experience and the existential stories we tell ourselves to explain them. Governing Powell’s story-time is his “big clock”, as his toddler puts it, which stands against the back wall like a 4.5-metre-high automatic pop-up card with the architectural design of a Moorish palace.

Storyboard scenes replace numbers on the etched copper face of this big clock. Circling the face are twelve discs, each made up of a further twelve motifs. Each disc evokes the rich imagery of religion, myth, fable and folklore. Powell’s references are geographically and historically expansive, pulling together icons and symbols from ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian and AngloSaxon storytelling. They mingle with Powell’s own idiosyncratic figures that seem like wobbly-lined amalgamations of them all: chubby cupids, breasted sphinxes, centaurs in breaches and a barefoot ghost.

To play with surrealism in such minute detail takes a unique combination of intelligence and imagination that fellow Scottish artist Alasdair Gray similarly embodied. Perhaps it is the dedication to storytelling that evokes the comparison with Gray, though the two artists

Words: Evie Glen

“The threat, or reality, of climate collapse looms large over his work in fireballs, freak storms and a feudal hierarchy that points to those responsible.”

also take a similarly satirical view of human life and its eccentricities, as informed by their eclectic mental archives. Powell’s etchings bear resemblance to Gray’s illustrations made to accompany his 1981 epic novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Like Gray, Powell has a skill for crafting intricate pictures that communicate dense, referential narratives while remaining bewilderingly hypnotic.

In Hall of Hours, visitors are drawn into Powell’s hyperreality through optical illusions and a continuous sound installation of tick-tocking voices. The installation is recorded by members of Powell’s family, spanning four generations

from his five-year-old child to his ninety-five-year-old grandmother. At 12pm daily, five copper bells by the entrance are rung, breaking visitors out of their trance with a brief return to clock-time. The bells are, like the rest of the exhibition, credited as much to Powell’s family as to himself. Etched by Powell but forged by his father, they hang as an ode to generational craftsmanship and, perhaps, a subtle critique of mass production processes.

In his investigations in time, Powell takes a postmodern approach that is acutely aware of its ending. The threat, or reality, of climate collapse looms large over his work in fireballs, freak storms and a feudal

hierarchy that points to those responsible. His watercolour etchings depict vaguely apocalyptic scenes barely concealed in pastel hues that distract if your attention-span is short enough. With his doomsday clock ticking in the background, Powell asks us to listen more intently, look a bit closer and think a bit harder. Hall of Hours imagines the time to do that.

Robert Powell: Hall of Hours, Edinburgh Printmakers, until 2 Nov, 10am-6pm edinburghprintmakers.co.uk

Robert Powell, Hall of Hours

Photo: Alan Dimmick

Will There Ever Be Another You

By Patricia Lockwood rrrrr

With an arresting opening sentence, Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You begins with a woman arriving in Scotland from Chicago with her family, discombobulated by the long flight, and open to the otherworldly and alternative possibilities, whatever their source. What follows is a sparkling, strange, entertaining, yet affecting novel which has a darkness at its heart. There’s pain which, although wellhidden, permeates throughout. It could be read as a collection of short stories, with every chapter individually named and themed. The first, Fairy Pools, is exemplary of the form, and sets the bar high. Then comes The Changeling which raises it. Together they are Part One of three, and they set the rest of the novel beautifully, looking at ill-health, grief and art, through a glass, darkly.

This is a novel where high and low culture meet and get on famously, with references to (among so many others) TV detective Adrian Monk, Iris Murdoch, original Irn-Bru, William Carlos Williams, and Weezer. What unites them is the strength of the narrator’s infatuations and obsessions, and what lies beneath. The novel could be read as a stream of consciousness, with these scattergun, if carefully considered, musings on art in particular an attempt to avoid confronting other, all too real, concerns. A key example is the exquisite chapter which deconstructs Anna Karenina, Mr Tolstoy, You’re Driving Me Mad (a mushroom diary). Literary, artful, funny, and unexpectedly emotional, Will There Ever Be Another You may make you feel it was written just for you. [Alistair Braidwood]

By Asta Olivia Nordenhof rrrrr

In the follow-up to her awardwinning novel Money To Burn, Asta Olivia Nordenhof effectively conjures the strange other world of the COVID pandemic. Quarantined in a flat in London with a man she barely knows, a young woman deals with the same sense of quiet unreality that settled over everyone in that time. That, and the fact that she may be carrying the child of her possiblydemonic ex-lover.

The Devil Book’s protagonist tells her tale in an understated, almost matter-of-fact way. It feels like being told a story by a stranger in a bar, one that gets more outlandish by the sentence and yet, for some reason, you can’t help but believe every word.

The main story of The Devil Book is followed by a series of poems, written Bukowski-style in tumbling columns of lower-case text.

Much like his own, these verses contain a lot of rage – at patriarchy, capitalism and the other toxic forces poisoning our world. But they’re also full of love, for that same world and how beautiful it should be and could be and still sometimes is. The love burns much brighter than the rage.

In some ways, Nordenhof’s book is a victim of its own success.

The narrative portion is so beguiling that you might find yourself longing for more of it, rather than those lovely, thorny poems. But the book as a whole is still an undeniable success: funny and angry, tender and timely. [Ross McIndoe]

By Mariana Enriquez rrrrr

Blending memoir, travelogue and peculiar little histories, Somebody is Walking on Your Grave is a series of essays paying homage to Mariana Enriquez’ love of cemeteries. From Aboriginal graves in Australia to Parisian catacombs beneath Montparnasse, the author takes readers on a whistle-stop necro-tour of famous graveyards. In her first work of non-fiction, the journalist and novelist visits burial sites of figures both famous (take Karl Marx’s London grave, where the author’s favourite band inspires her to pose in a leopard skin coat) and unknown to interrogate our complex and changing relationship with our local dead. As we follow Enriquez through young love and a lifetime affinity for punk rock, the author weaves her own life into the deaths of others, interrogating the complex role cemeteries play in our sociopolitical lives through violent residues of colonialism and dictatorships. Enriquez unabashedly courts the Gothic; this is a quietly introspective and odd book full of dark romanticism, teasing the reader in a kind of danse macabre. Somebody is Walking on Your Grave is a reminder of the omnipresence and inevitability of death, and while it can at times verge uncomfortably close to the death-fetishistic, it is a fascinating and provocative rendering of the stories of the dead and those who tend to them. This book will make you pay a renewed attention to any taken-for-granted graveyards on your local commute. [Parisa Hashempour]

Cursed Daughters

By Oyinkan Braithwaite rrrrr

Cursed Daughters, the muchanticipated second novel from Oyinkan Braithwaite, follows the story of the Falodun women across generations as they find themselves doomed to heartbreak by an old curse. The youngest of these women, Eniiyi, feels the weight of her ancestors’ grief even more strongly: she is suspected to be the reincarnation of her aunt Monife, whose life was taken by the curse just days before Eniiyi’s birth.

Engaging and well paced, Cursed Daughters is a quick and effortless read. It balances the melodrama of romantic pursuit and complex family dynamics with a sense of humour that, although often cheesy, adds lightness and texture to the novel. The plot might be rather predictable, but Braithwaite manages to sprinkle in a few mysteries, tying together the individual stories of the members of the Falodun family while keeping readers immersed until the end of the book. The gothic, whimsical tone throughout adds breadth to the narrative, and the persuasive portrayal of Nigerian society provides depth to an otherwise very straightforward novel about women whose main priority is to find husbands who won’t leave them.

Granta, 25 Sep

Jonathan Cape, 4 Sep

Granta, 25 Sep

Here lies the chief weakness of Cursed Daughters; for a book about women and their experiences, where the multiple protagonists are all female, neither the story at large nor the characters in it ultimately succeed at decentring men. The thematic arc leads nowhere in particular, and readers are left wondering if the androcentric curse will ever be broken. [Venezia Paloma] Atlantic

Somebody Is Walking On Your Grave

The Devil Book

Listings

Looking for something to do? Well you’re in the right place! Find listings below for the month ahead across Music, Clubs, Theatre, Comedy and Art in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. To find out how to submit listings, head to theskinny.co.uk/listings

Glasgow Music

Tue 2 Sep

DUTCH INTERIOR

THE HUG AND PINT Indie from LA.

Wed 3 Sep

RICHY MITCH & THE COAL MINERS

ORAN MOR Folk rock from Seattle.

FOOD HOUSE (POSSIBLY JAMIE)

KING TUT'S Indie from Massachusetts.

CINDER WELL THE HUG AND PINT Experimental from California.

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE (RICHARD YOUNGS) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Folk from the US. LOWKEY SWG3 Hip-hop from the UK.

THE BURNING HELL (JOHN MCKIEL) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Indie folk from Peterborough.

Thu 4 Sep

HAYDEN PEDIGO MONO Avant-garde from the US.

CHASE PETRA (SOOT SPRITE) THE HUG AND PINT Pop from California. THE COUNTESS OF FIFE THE RUM SHACK Alt country from Scotland.

SCENE QUEEN

SWG3 Metalcore from the US.

CHRISTOPHER OWENS

NICE 'N' SLEAZY Indie rock from Miami.

Fri 5 Sep

GENITORTURERS

CATHOUSE Industrial metal from the US.

TEENAGE DADS

KING TUT'S Indie rock from Australia.

PENNY BLACK (LEA G) THE HUG AND PINT Indie from Scotland.

WOLFGANG FLÜR (PETE DUGGAL) SWG3 Electronica from Germany. HIP HOP SCOTLAND X SAVAGE PNP SWG3 Hip-hop lineup.

THE SCANERS NICE 'N' SLEAZY Synth-punk from Lyon.

SABINE MCCALLA (AARON MIRRALLES + GRACE MORTON) NICE 'N' SLEAZY R'n'B from New Orleans.

GLARE STEREO Shoegaze from Texas. Sat 6 Sep

MIDLAND (CAMMY BARNES) O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Country from Texas.

GREG FREEMAN THE HUG AND PINT Indie rock from Vermont. MELISSA CARPER THE HUG AND PINT Country from Nashville.

VORTEX SUTRA THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Prog rock from Glasgow.

BLONDSHELL QMU Indie rock from the US. TYLER BALLGAME SWG3 Indie from the US. THIS FAMILIAR SMILE (PALEJOY + LANDSCAPES & LANDSLIDES) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Emo indie rock from Glasgow.

NO A MEAN CITY III FEAT NOUGHTY MEAN CITY ALL STAR BAND + THE DUNTS, TANZANA, MAJESTY PALM, THE NOISE CLUB, PSWEATPANTS, SALT STEREO Fundraiser for Refuweegee.

Sun 7 Sep KING TUT’S PRESENTS: HIPPY+ SALT RIVER SHAKEDOWN KING TUT'S Eclectic lineup.

HOMEWORK + I

WANNA BE A TRUCK DRIVER + THE BURGERS

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Indie lineup.

ANGELICA MODE (PAPERCUT PEACH + WHISSKER) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Indie rock from Scotland.

Mon 8 Sep

LIAM CROMBY THE HUG AND PINT Rock from the UK. CAMERON WHITCOMB SWG3 Country from Canada.

IAN NOE STEREO Singer-songwriter from Kentucky.

Tue 9 Sep

DINOSAUR PILE-UP THE GARAGE Rock from Leeds. TURNOVER BARROWLANDS Rock from Virginia.

Wed 10 Sep

KING TUT’S PRESENTS: IN TWO MINDS KING TUT'S Indie from Scotland. SLOW COOKED + THREDD + S3LKIE THE HUG AND PINT Eclectic lineup. DAÐI FREYR THE OLD FRUITMARKET Synth pop from Iceland. CARAVAN POP (MET AFTER DARK + KATIE LINDSAY ) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Alternative pop from Scotland.

DADDY LONG LEGS STEREO Rock'n'roll from New York. Thu 11 Sep DEAD DADS CLUB THE GARAGE Rock from Malvern. SAINT ETIENNE MONO Pop from London. POISON THE WELL THE GARAGE Metalcore from Miami. TOM GRENNAN (TOM WALKER) THE OVO HYDRO Pop from Bedford. MEREBA ORAN MOR Rap from Alabama. KING TUT'S PRESENTS: TWO HANDS WILL REACH OUT (BELGRADES + STARDAWG) KING TUT'S Indie from Scotland. LEAD SISTER THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Indie rock from Glasgow. UNOMA OKUDO STEREO Singer-songwriter from Nigeria.

Fri 12 Sep TEN56

CATHOUSE Deathcore from France. VENDETTA LOVE THE GARAGE Hard rock from Ireland.

THE CASTROS (STAGBOY + THE SANKARAS)

KING TUT'S Indie rock from Fife. LUKE MORLEY ST LUKE'S Hard rock from London. HALLOWS (PINK POUND)

THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Electronica from LA. BLUSHER SWG3 Indie pop from Australia. FRANKS HOUSE (JUTEBOX + AIDAN CONNELL) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Hip-hop from Glasgow. THE MILLTOWN BROTHERS STEREO Indie rock from Lancashire. Sat 13 Sep

KNOX THE GARAGE Pop from the US. A BOX OF TRASH (PANHEAD SHARPS + MONZA EXPRESS + EMERGENCY BREAK) THE GARAGE Psych rock from Ayrshire.

LEWIS CAPALDI THE OVO HYDRO Pop from Scotland. OUT WITH THE BUCKLEYS KING TUT'S Indie from the UK. REND COLLECTIVE (BENJAMIN WILLIAM HASTINGS)

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Folk rock from Bangor. THE WHISTLIN DONKEYS BARROWLANDS Folk from County Tyrone. THAT JOE PAYNE CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS Experimental from Northampton. OSCURA (TELEKINEPHEWS) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Nu-metal from Ayr. PENDULUM

SWG3 Drum 'n' bass from Australia.

FRASER MCLEAN

SWG3 Pop from West Lothian.

CAREO (DIVE CASINO)

NICE 'N' SLEAZY Alt rock from Port Glasgow.

Sun 14 Sep KING 810

CATHOUSE Nu metal from Michigan.

SIOBHAN WINIFRED

THE GARAGE Alt pop from the UK.

LEWIS CAPALDI THE OVO HYDRO Pop from Scotland.

KING TUT'S PRESENTS:

LEAH EVELYN + MAR

CHARAV + KIERAN

CROSBIE

KING TUT'S Eclectic lineup.

JESSIE REYEZ

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Pop from Canada.

Mon 15 Sep

FLORENCE BLACK THE GARAGE Rock from Wales.

OLIVER ANTHONY

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Country from Virginia.

SIDESTEP THE HUG AND PINT Hardcore from Gothenburg.

Tue 16 Sep

BRAD KELLA

ORAN MOR Experimental.

RILEY GREEN (HANNAH

MCFARLAND)

O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Country from Nashville. THE WILD THINGS (AIM FOR TWO + INGE

LAMBOO)

NICE 'N' SLEAZY Rock from the UK.

Wed 17 Sep

ACOPIA THE HUG AND PINT Indie from Naarm/Melbourne.

FLYTE

ST LUKE'S Indie from London.

TOKYO TEA ROOM (DALLAS LOVE FIELD) THE RUM SHACK Dream pop from Margate. GRENTPEREZ

SWG3 Pop from Australia.

BASEMENT

SWG3 Rock from the UK.

JEHST

NICE 'N' SLEAZY Hip-hop from the UK. M(H)AOL

NICE 'N' SLEAZY Post-punk from Dublin.

Thu 18 Sep

REPUBLICA

ORAN MOR Rock from the UK.

BLACK COUNTRY NEW ROAD

BARROWLANDS Rock from Cambridge.

INDIA ELECTRIC CO. THE HUG AND PINT Folk from the UK. ARTHUR COATES + KERRAN COTTERELL (FRANÇOIS-FÉLIX ROY ) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Folk. AMY LOUISE SWG3 Pop from Glasgow.

SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR SWG3 Pop from the UK. ORAL HABIT (STRAID + VOITURES) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Garage-punk from Brighton. REINHARDT BUHR STEREO Improv from Cape Town.

Fri 19 Sep EARTHTONE9 CATHOUSE Alt metal from Nottingham. SIXTH WONDER THE GARAGE Metalcore from Glasgow. BLUE NICOTINE KING TUT'S Rock from Scotland. HALF MAN HALF BISCUIT O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Rock from Birkenhead. ZOE GRAHAM (SCOTT C. PARK) THE HUG AND PINT Folk pop from Scotland. EMILIE LESLIE SWG3 Pop from Scotland. KYLE FALCONER SWG3 Rock from Scotland. CRAZY HEART STEREO Country.

Sat 20 Sep RIDING THE LOW CATHOUSE Rock from the UK.

JASPER HODGES THE GARAGE Indie from Kent. ASLAN KING TUT'S Rock from Dublin. LORD HURON O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Indie rock from LA. SELF ESTEEM BARROWLANDS Pop from the UK.

SORROW HILL (LIL SOLACE + DESCEND) THE HUG AND PINT Eclectic lineup. LIZZIE REID SWG3 Indie from Scotland.

FRANK & WALTERS STEREO Pop from Cork.

Sun 21 Sep

CHLOE MORIONDO

KING TUT'S Indie pop from the US. SELF ESTEEM BARROWLANDS Pop from the UK. UNIVERSITY THE HUG AND PINT Emo punk from Crewe. THE BETHS SWG3 Indie from New Zealand.

FREAKENDER: L.A. WITCH + THE BUTTERTONES STEREO Psych garage from Los Angeles.

Mon 22 Sep

NEKROGOBLIKON THE GARAGE Death metal from LA. EIVØR SWG3 Pop from Norway.

Tue 23 Sep

ONEREPUBLIC (ELLA HENDERSON) THE OVO HYDRO Pop from Colorado. RUBII KING TUT'S Alt R'n'B from Birmingham. LASTELLE THE HUG AND PINT Post-hardcore from Oxfordshire.

GAÏA THE RUM SHACK Nu-jazz from Glasgow.

FRANK TURNER & THE SLEEPING SOULS SWG3 Punk folk from the UK. BOOTER BEE SWG3 Drill from the UK.

Wed 24 Sep

CLIPPING. THE GARAGE Rap from the US. BRÌGHDE CHAIMBEUL ORAN MOR Trad from Scotland. PIPPA BLUNDELL ORAN MOR Indie from Glasgow. LA VOIX O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Pop from Durham. ALAN FLETCHER CCA: CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS Country from Melbourne. NIKO B SWG3 Rap from the UK.

Thu 25 Sep

THEATRE OF HATE THE GARAGE Post-punk from London. SNAYX KING TUT'S Alt indie from the UK. THE BETA BAND BARROWLANDS Folk rock from Scotland. ROWENA WISE THE HUG AND PINT Indie from Melbourne/ Naarm. RED RUM CLUB SWG3 Rock from Liverpool. THE PILL (TOUGH COOKIE) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Alternative from the Isle of Wight. JOHN MCKAY'S REACTOR STEREO Guitarist from Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Fri 26 Sep

FORTITUDE VALLEY + FLINCH. + COME OUTSIDE MONO Indie lineup. CALLINSICK THE GARAGE Punk rock from Portsmouth.

PIERCE THE VEIL (CAVETOWN + HOT MULLIGAN + CRAWLERS) THE OVO HYDRO Rock from San Diego. CALUM MCPHAIL ORAN MOR Folk from Scotland. KING TUT’S PRESENTS: UPRIZING + LINT BIN + KLOANS + SKELP KING TUT'S Eclectic lineup. THE BETA BAND BARROWLANDS Folk rock from Scotland. OMEGA NEBULA THE HUG AND PINT Electro dub. WEIRD AND WIRED: THE BLEEDERS (COMFORT GIRL + SELF LOVE) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Punk. NO WINDOWS THE RUM SHACK Indie pop from Edinburgh. WESTON LONEY SWG3 Indie rock from Armagh. AVENUE STREET STEREO Indie rock from Glasgow.

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.

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.

Sat 27 Sep

RUBY CHERRY

(LAUREN KATE + THE STRIKES + MADISON MCKEAN) THE GARAGE Pop from Glasgow.

SKIPINNISH (FISHERMAN'S FRIENDS + LEVI HERON)

THE OVO HYDRO Trad from Scotland.

KING TUT'S PRESENTS: WHITNEY

KING KING TUT'S Indie.

THE CRANE WIVES O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW Indie from Michigan.

CHARLIE & THE BHOYS

BARROWLANDS Folk from Scotland.

PORKPIE

ST LUKE'S Ska from Scotland.

WISHBONE ASH QMU Rock from the US.

THE BAND LOULA SWG3 Indie from Georgia.

PINS (CHROMA)

NICE 'N' SLEAZY Alt rock from Manchester.

THE LET'S GO'S STEREO

Noise pop from Tokyo.

Sun 28 Sep

SIMPLY RED (RUMER)

THE OVO HYDRO

Pop from Manchester.

PERMANENT (JOY )

KING TUT'S Indie.

SATURDAYS

SUBCULTURE, 23:00

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

Sat 13 Sep

THE DROWNS (BILLY LIAR + BUZZBOMB) BANNERMANS Rock from Seattle.

PIGEON PIT (THE WALTER MITTY ORCHESTRA) THE WEE RED BAR Indie rock.

AURI

THE QUEEN'S HALL Folk and roots from Finland.

THE MILK

THE MASH HOUSE Funk and soul.

SILVER DOLLAR ROOM

DRIVEN BY HARNESS (FAWKES + LAURENCE LEAN) THE WEE RED BAR Indie rock.

Sat 20 Sep

RUFUS WAINWRIGHT USHER HALL Alt rock from the US.

CRAIG EDDIE SNEAKY PETE'S Singer-songwriter from Falkirk.

SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)

SOUL JAM, 23:00 Monthly no-holds-barred, down-and-dirty disco.

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.

REFUWEEGEE PRESENTS: FLIGHT OF THE WILD GEESE ST LUKE'S Folk.

MICHAEL CERA PALIN ROOM 2 Indie punk from Atlanta. SONNYJIM (GRIM SICKERS) SWG3 Rap from Birmingham. Mon 29 Sep FOR THOSE I LOVE ROOM 2 Synth pop from Dublin.

Edinburgh

Music

Tue 2 Sep

THE BURNING HELL SNEAKY PETE'S Folk rock from Canada.

Wed 3 Sep

CHASE PETRA (SOOT SPRITE) VOODOO ROOMS Indie pop from California. WARRIOR SOUL (SPREAD EAGLE + NEW GENERATION SUPERSTARS) BANNERMANS Rock from the US. LION ON TIGER SNEAKY PETE'S Alt rock from Edinburgh.

Thu 4 Sep

PRETTY BOY FLOYD (JETBOY ) BANNERMANS Glam metal from California.

Fri 5 Sep MOLLY KARLOFF BANNERMANS Rock from the UK.

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.

Sat 6 Sep

FM THE LIQUID ROOM Rock from the UK. JACK BOTTS

SNEAKY PETE'S Surf folk from Brisbane. WOLFGANG FLÜR LA BELLE ANGELE Electronica from Germany.

Sun 7 Sep

SECTION 25

VOODOO ROOMS Post-punk from Blackpool. FURY

BANNERMANS Heavy metal from the UK.

JAKE FUSSELL THE CAVES Blues folk from the US.

Mon 8 Sep

LEAH EVELYN (THE HEADSHRINKERS + JESSICA GIBBS) BANNERMANS Singer-songwriter from Edinburgh.

Tue 9 Sep

CHRYSANTHS (DJANA GABRIELLE)

VOODOO ROOMS Indie pop from the UK. BELINDA CARLISLE

USHER HALL Pop from the US. DAY SLEEPER

SNEAKY PETE'S Alternative from Edinburgh.

Wed 10 Sep

JOLIE HOLLAND

VOODOO ROOMS Folk from the US. BABYLON A.D.

BANNERMANS Hard rock from San Francisco.

REALLY BIG REALLY CLEVER

SNEAKY PETE'S Emo from Brighton.

Thu 11 Sep

CHRIS THOMSON (THE BATHERS), PAUL MCGEECHAN (STARLESS) AND FRIENDS

VOODOO ROOMS Rock.

TOMMY ARCH VOODOO ROOMS Rock from the UK.

SHAYFER JAMES BANNERMANS Singer-songwriter from the US. THE MEFFS

SNEAKY PETE'S Punk from Essex.

TOMMY SMITH & GWILYM SIMCOCK DUO THE QUEEN'S HALL Jazz from Scotland. AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR LA BELLE ANGELE Punk rock.

Fri 12 Sep

ROB HERON & THE TEA PAD ORCHESTRA

VOODOO ROOMS Rockabilly from Newcastle. EBB (BIG HOGG) BANNERMANS Prog from the UK.

RURA THE LIQUID ROOM Folk from Scotland.

DITZ THE MASH HOUSE Noise from Brighton.

VALTOS LA BELLE ANGELE Electronic trad.

THE MASH HOUSE Prog rock.

VALTOS

LA BELLE ANGELE Electronic trad.

Sun 14 Sep

RICKY WARWICK & THE FIGHTING HEARTS

THE LIQUID ROOM Rock from Scotland.

BILLY REEKIE

SNEAKY PETE'S Singer-songwriter from Fife.

Mon 15 Sep

JO QUAIL (MRS FRIGHTHOUSE) VOODOO ROOMS Composer from London.

DURGESH THAPA THE LIQUID ROOM Pop from Nepal.

AMPLIFI: BELL LUNGS + KEVIN LEOMO + LUCIAN FLETCHER

THE QUEEN'S HALL Rock from Scotland.

Tue 16 Sep

ACOPIA

VOODOO ROOMS Electro pop from Melbourne.

SELF ESTEEM

USHER HALL Pop from the UK.

SINÉAD TAIT

SNEAKY PETE'S Singer-songwriter from Glasgow.

JAMES YORKSTON & NINA PERSSON

THE QUEEN'S HALL Folk and roots from the UK.

ARMOR FOR SLEEP

LA BELLE ANGELE Dream rock.

Wed 17 Sep

THERA

BANNERMANS Metal from Alaska.

YAELOKRE THE CAVES Folk from Iceland.

JONATHAN OGDEN & TAYLOR ARMSTRONG

SNEAKY PETE'S Acoustic from Manchester.

Thu 18 Sep

THE BARKING MAGPIES

VOODOO ROOMS Blues from the UK.

CRIMSON SPIRE (PERCEPTION + DAVID LEAN) BANNERMANS Metal from Scotland.

TOM MEIGHAN

THE LIQUID ROOM Rock from the UK.

M(H)AOL

SNEAKY PETE'S Post-punk from Dublin.

OEDIPUS & THE MAMA'S BOYS (SAVE FACE + MUZZLE) THE WEE RED BAR Post-punk.

MALIN LEWIS PRESENTS: KIM CARNIE TRIO, MALIN LEWIS TRIO, HEAL & HARROW THE QUEEN'S HALL Folk from Scotland.

Fri 19 Sep

REINHARDT BUHR VOODOO ROOMS Multi-instrumentalist. AMY LOUISE SNEAKY PETE'S Singer-songwriter from Glasgow.

DENARA (SECOND WORLD WAR + OVERALLS + SCREAMING KICK) THE WEE RED BAR Indie and garage rock.

Sun 21 Sep

BANG BANG FIRECRACKER BANNERMANS Hard rock. LEVEL 42 (ROACHFORD) USHER HALL Jazz funk from the Isle of Wight.

Mon 22 Sep THE WHISKEY BROTHERS SNEAKY PETE'S Folk rock from Derbyshire.

Tue 23 Sep

LORD HURON USHER HALL Indie rock from LA. QUADE SNEAKY PETE'S Post-rock from Bristol.

Wed 24 Sep

CONNOR SELBY VOODOO ROOMS Roots. WARD THOMAS THE QUEEN'S HALL Rock from the UK.

MARCO MENDOZA (WHITESNAKE/THIN LIZZY/JOURNEY ) + SILENT THIEVES BANNERMANS Rock.

JOSEPHINE ILLINGWORTH, NÉOMI, LA LOYE SNEAKY PETE'S Indie folk from London/ Netherlands.

Thu 25 Sep

PYE CORNER AUDIO SNEAKY PETE'S Electronica from UK.

Fri 26 Sep

PAMA INT'L PERFORM THE TROJAN SONGBOOK PT.2 VOODOO ROOMS Reggae.

PRETTY ADDICTED (PLAYDEAD) BANNERMANS Metal. PINS SNEAKY PETE'S Post-punk from Manchester. AKI REMALLY THE WEE RED BAR Jazz funk.

Sat 27 Sep

FARA THE QUEEN'S HALL Folk from Scotland OMEGA NEBULA (BOTANICA SOUND) VOODOO ROOMS Electro dub.

THE STUMBLE (PAUL GEMMELL & THE BLACK MAGIC BLUES BAND) VOODOO ROOMS Blues from the US. BRIELLE SNEAKY PETE'S Alt rock from Glasgow. FINAL THIRTEEN THE MASH HOUSE Rock.

RANDOM HAND LA BELLE ANGELE Ska punk.

Sun 28 Sep

PROFESSOR ELEMENTAL (LAURIE BLACK) VOODOO ROOMS Rap from the UK. THE MUSIC OF WEATHER REPORT WITH THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL JAZZ ORCHESTRA THE QUEEN'S HALL Jazz from Scotland.

Mon 29 Sep

PETER HAMMILL THE QUEEN'S HALL Rock from the UK.

Dundee

Music

Fri 5 Sep

THE COUNTESS OF FIFE BEAT GENERATOR LIVE! Alt country from Scotland.

Sat 6 Sep

TOM MCGUIRE AND THE BRASSHOLES BEAT GENERATOR LIVE! Funk soul from Scotland.

Fri 12 Sep

THE DROWNS BEAT GENERATOR LIVE! Rock from Seattle.

Mon 15 Sep

A BURIAL AT SEA BEAT GENERATOR LIVE! Post-rock from Ireland.

Fri 19 Sep

BLACK COUNTRY NEW ROAD FAT SAM'S Rock from Cambridge.

Sat 20 Sep

TOM MEIGHAN FAT SAM'S Rock from the UK.

Glasgow Clubs

Thu 4 Sep

MUTUAL PRESENTS: PARSA NANI, BLAIR MUIR, LAMD4 NICE 'N' SLEAZY House, trance and techno.

Fri 5 Sep

10 YEARS OF SOUND METAPHORS SUB CLUB Techno. MISSING PERSONS CLUB THE BERKELEY SUITE Techno. EXIT 2ND BIRTHDAY EXIT House and disco. STEREO OPEN DECKS: SHITEPOP STEREO Pop and club. STEREO UPSTAIRS BAR: RADIO BUENA VIDA X HIBA X MEG10 OPEN DECKS STEREO R'n'B.

Sat 6 Sep FENIX + LENA WILLIKENS THE BERKELEY SUITE Experimental. WORLD OF TWIST: GLOBAL GROOVES WITH BUTHOTHEWARRIOR + JAMO KIDD + HOW BIZARRE THE RUM SHACK Disco and Afrobeat. GROOVE HUT SWG3 Techno. EXIT 2ND BIRTHDAY EXIT House and disco. ACT NATURAL NICE 'N' SLEAZY Funk and disco. PERSISDANCE STEREO House and electro.

Thu 11 Sep

UPRANGE NIGHT: INTO THE AFTERGLOW NICE 'N' SLEAZY Underground.

Fri 12 Sep

RENDEZVOUS PRESENTS: JASPER JAMES LA CHEETAH CLUB House and disco. HAVE YOU BEEN RUNNING? EXIT House and techno. CORE AFTERPARTY: KUTE X CUTTYS GYM X COFFIN MULCH NICE 'N' SLEAZY Dance. INK TANK (SOFSOF FEAT. JURNALIST) STEREO Bass.

Sat 13 Sep

LOOSE JOINTS X KINDRED: BEATRICE M. THE BERKELEY SUITE Techno and bass. STILL EXISTS WITH PROSUMER & BYS VYKEN SWG3 Club. PLANTAINCHIPPS CURATES EXIT House. CORE AFTERPARTY: FANTASTIC MAN VS GLASGOW NICE 'N' SLEAZY Hip-hop and techno. GULLYGULLY: TAPS LAUNCH WITH REPTILE B & EVISSIMAX STEREO Bass and club.

Sun 14 Sep

COLOURS 30 PRESENTS: DANNY TENAGLIA SUB CLUB Prog house.

Mon 15 Sep

BREATHE: TRENT VOYAGE + ELENA MORODER SUB CLUB House. THUDLINE THE BERKELEY SUITE House and electro. Wed 17 Sep CANDLE THE BERKELEY SUITE Acid.

Thu 18 Sep RARE CLUB: CHLOÉ CAILLET SUB CLUB Tech house. SAY SO - NEW FACES THE BERKELEY SUITE Trance and garage. DANCE NO EVIL 1ST BIRTHDAY PARTY WITH JOSI DEVIL STEREO Garage and breaks.

Fri 19 Sep

SPIRIT: DJ FART IN THE CLUB + KIA + LIBRA ESTERLINA + BAKE SUB CLUB House. POLKA DOT DISCO CLUB INVITES MICHELLE MANETTI THE BERKELEY SUITE Trance and house. Y U QT SWG3 Garage. DON'T FORGET TO EXIT EXIT Techno and experimental. MISS SUZIE MAC NICE 'N' SLEAZY House and techno.

BARE MAX X STEREO FRESHERS FRIDAY WITH DENHAM AUDIO & BUCKLEY STEREO Garage and jungle.

Wed

Sun 7 Sep

POSTAL

SNEAKY PETE'S Bass.

Mon 8 Sep

SATSUMA SOUNDS LA BELLE ANGELE House.

Wed 10 Sep

KATALYSIS

SNEAKY PETE'S Techno.

Thu 11 Sep

MANGO LOUNGE: MPH

SNEAKY PETE'S UK garage.

Fri 12 Sep

HEADSET

SNEAKY PETE'S Bass.

THE FUNCTION

THE WEE RED BAR Hip-hop and house.

UNTITLED THE MASH HOUSE Techno.

Sat 13 Sep

FLY AFTERPARTY CABARET VOLTAIRE Techno.

FLY AFTERPARTY THE LIQUID ROOM Techno.

ASCENSION THE LIQUID ROOM Techno and house.

HAND -MADE WITH LOVE

SNEAKY PETE'S Disco.

ASCENSION THE WEE RED BAR Industrial and EBM goth.

PURETEK PRESENTS: RAMBO AND THOMAS EVANS + SUPPORT THE MASH HOUSE Rave.

BARK AT THE MOONA NIGHT FOR OZZY

LA BELLE ANGELE Metal.

Sun 14 Sep

FLY AFTERPARTY CABARET VOLTAIRE Techno.

Tue 16 Sep

ANDROMEDA SOUNDS RETURN CABARET VOLTAIRE House and disco.

Wed 17 Sep

YBZ: CHEETAH SNEAKY PETE'S Jungle.

Thu 18 Sep

TREASURE, TREASURE: MICHELLE MANETTI SNEAKY PETE'S House.

Fri 19 Sep

PALIDRONE X VOLENS

CHORUS: SLIKBACK SNEAKY PETE'S Bass. OVERGROUND THE MASH HOUSE Rave.

MONSTER'S BALL LA BELLE ANGELE Pop.

Sat 20 Sep

DBT. 6TH BIRTHDAY CABARET VOLTAIRE Techno and house.

SPECTRUM PRESENTS

Tue 23 Sep

TSHA PRESENTS

JACKFRUIT WITH ECLAIR FIFI

SNEAKY PETE'S House.

Wed 24 Sep

MILE HIGH CLUB: LUKAS WIGFLEX

SNEAKY PETE'S House.

Thu 25 Sep

SATSUMA SOUNDS

CABARET VOLTAIRE Techno.

EDINBURGH ARROWS THE LIQUID ROOM House.

IMPORT SNEAKY PETE'S Bass.

Fri 26 Sep

TELFORT'S GOOD PLACE: PRIVET SNEAKY PETE'S House.

DIFFUSION HARD THE MASH HOUSE Tech house.

REGGAETON PARTY LA BELLE ANGELE Latin and reggae.

Sat 27 Sep

EASTBOUND: TOMMY PHILLIPS CABARET VOLTAIRE Tech house.

COMPRESSION: OLD SKOOL REALITY THE WEE RED BAR Day rave. PULSE THE MASH HOUSE Techno. SPIT THE MASH HOUSE House and techno. SO FETCH - 2000S PARTY

LA BELLE ANGELE Pop.

Dundee Clubs

Sat 6 Sep

INTIMO: VAN DAMN NOLA BAR House.

Fri 12 Sep

PROSPEKT PRESENTS: THE WUB OUT

AFROBEATS Drum 'n' bass and grime.

Sat 20 Sep

INERTIA: IN CANVAS CANVAS House.

Glasgow

Comedy

King's Theatre

Glasgow

JOANNE MCNALLY: PINOTPHILE FRI 5 SEP

Hilarious stories about the woes of dating from the Taskmaster star.

The Glee Club

RAHUL DUA: ALLOW

ME

WED 3 SEP

One of India’s topmost stand-comedians, performed in Hindi.

GAURAV GUPTA: LIVE IN GLASGOW

TUE 23 SEP

Gaurav Gupta is coming up with his show in your city Glasgow.

The Old Hairdressers

HAROLD NIGHT

TUE 2 SEP

Two Glasgow Improv Theatre house teams performing The Harold. HAMISH NIGHT

TUE 2 SEP

Two Glasgow Improv Theatre house teams performing The Harold. SPREAD: UNDER THE COVERS

TUE 9 SEP

Improvised comedy inspired by print media.

BOUNCE HOUSE: SOLVES EVERYTHING

TUE 9 SEP

Solving all of the petty squabbles they come across with improv comedy.

PERFECT IMPROV: KATHLEEN HUGHES

TUE 16 SEP

A flagship improv show with a special guest monologist and an all-star improv cast.

IMPROV FUCKTOWN

TUE 23 SEP

Welcome to Improv Fucktown, population: YOU! Different teams, trying different things.

COUCH SURFS THE WEB

TUE 30 SEP

A night of improv comedy where Couch looks up bad reviews of places the audience have been to.

GIT IMPROV CAGE

MATCH

TUE 30 SEP

Two improv teams battle to be crowned champions of the Glasgow Improv Theatre this month. Audience decide who wins.

Theatre Royal

STEWART LEE VS THE MAN-WULF

FRI 26 SEP

A brand new show in which the veteran comedian shares the stage with a werewolf comedian pulled from his subconscious.

CHRIS MCCAUSLAND: YONKS!

TUE 23 SEP

A masterclass in comedic storytelling.

Edinburgh Comedy

Monkey Barrel Comedy Club

MATT STEWART: BAD BOY + WHO KNEW IT?

THU 4 SEP

Join comedian Matt Stewart for his solo show, Bad Boy, plus a LIVE 'Who Knew It?' - the comedy quiz where guests write the wrong answers.

AURIE STYLA: NOW WE'RE COOKING!

THU 11 SEP

NEEMA NAZ: MY ESTUPID LIFE

SAT 20 SEP

Canadian-Iranian comedian known for his original characters, impersonations, and content featuring his beloved mom.

JIN HAO LI: GREATEST

HITS (AUG-SEPT 2025)

FRI 26 SEP

A work in progress show from last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards Best Newcomer Nominee.

LOU CONRAN: GOOCH

SAT 27 SEP

Lou Conran presents her new show.

The Edinburgh Playhouse

JOANNE MCNALLY: PINOTPHILE

SAT 6 SEP

Hilarious stories about the woes of dating from the Taskmaster star.

STEWART LEE VS THE MAN-WULF

SAT 27 SEP

A brand new show in which the veteran comedian shares the stage with a werewolf comedian pulled from his subconscious.

The Queen's Hall

SUSIE DENT: WORD

PERFECT

SAT 6 SEP

Comedy from the UK.

CHRIS MCCAUSLAND: YONKS!

SAT 20 SEP

Comedy from the UK.

Glasgow Theatre

Citizens

Theatre

SMALL ACTS OF LOVE

TUE 9 SEP-SAT 4 OCT

Acts of solidarity and humanity take place between two distanced communities following the Lockerbie bombing.

King's Theatre

Glasgow

HERE & NOW: THE STEPS MUSICAL

TUE 16 SEP-SAT 20 SEP

New jukebox musical based on the joyous songs of Steps.

TINA: THE TINA

TURNER MUSICAL

TUE 23 SEP-SAT 4 OCT

Tina Turner's blistering life story is told through the songs that made her who she is.

Royal Conservatoire of Scaotland

ORLANDO

WED 3 SEP-SAT 6 SEP

A playful, innovative staging of Virginia Woolf's epic, genderfluid novel.

FEELGOOD

WED 3 SEP-SAT 6 SEP

Tramway

PENNY CHIVAS: WHERE WE CHOOSE

TO STAND

FRI 19 SEP-SAT 20 SEP

A powerful new dance theatre show inspired by climate activism and political change.

Tron Theatre

BLACK HOLE SIGN

FRI 19 SEP-SAT 4 OCT

When a hole appears in the roof of an A&E department, staff and patients scramble to manage in this absurd take on the crumbling welfare system.

Edinburgh Theatre

Festival

Theatre

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

TUE 9 SEP-SAT 13 SEP

This critically acclaimed adaptation of the classic musical, much like its characters, treads the line between the old world and the new with aplomb. THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY

TUE 16 SEP-SAT 20 SEP

Patricia Highsmith's electrifying thriller is brought to life in this sundrenched tale of glamour and deception. THE LIGHTNING THIEF: THE PERCY JACKSON MUSICAL

TUE 23 SEP-SAT 27 SEP

Teenage Percy Jackson discovers he is the son of a Greek god in this musical adaptation of the beloved YA series.

Royal Lyceum

Theatre

BLACK IS THE COLOR OF MY VOICE

TUE 2 SEP-THU 4 SEP

Apphia Campbell's renowned play follows the life of Nina Simone as told through her songs.

BUFFY REVAMPED

WED 17 SEP-THU 18 SEP

A whistlestop tour of all 144 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer told through Spike's eyes.

Sett Studios

WYLD & GREEN: BOG CABARET

FRI 19 SEP-SAT 20 SEP

A cabaret-style storytelling event exploring the folklore of bogs through puppetry, drag, ritual, folk song & story.

Studio Theatre

HOPEFUL MONSTERS

FRI 5 SEP-SAT 6 SEP

Tabletop puppetry telling the story of evolution entirely through hands.

Traverse

Theatre

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: WALLACE

TUE 9 SEP-SAT 13 SEP

Historical figures get brought to life in this hip-hop reconstruction of William Wallace's life.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: OUR BROTHER TUE 16 SEP-SAT 20 SEP

Inspired by a true story, a Scottish professor meets with Khmer Rouge at the height of his dictatorship.

A PLAY, A PIE AND A PINT: FEIS TUE 23 SEP-SAT 27 SEP

A dark comedy about the dark side of Irish dancing.

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.

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.

MAN'S

A poignant comic screwball tale of the bonds formed under pressure.

Dundee

Theatre

Dundee Rep BETH MALCOLM: FOLKMOSIS

THU 4 SEP

A blend of film, spoken word, and music by acclaimed Scottish folk and trad singer.

MAN'S BEST FRIEND FRI 12 SEP-SAT 13 SEP

A poignant comic screwball tale of the bonds formed under pressure.

RAY FRI 26 SEP-SAT 27 SEP

Scottish Dance Theatre's latest creation by Brusselsbased choreographer Meytal Blanaru explores ideas of emergence and the quest for a deep, collective physical experience.

THE GLASS MENAGERIE

SAT 27 SEP-SAT 18 OCT Tennessee Williams’ iconic investigation of post-war class dynamics is brought to blistering life.

TO BE KEPT BY THE EARTH THU 11 SEP

A live performance and installation drawing on Scottish folk traditions to explore ideas of ritual and care.

THE VIOLET HOUR + CONVERSATIONS WITH EVE THU 11 SEP

An experimental double bill of performance, drawing on the intersections of dance and technology.

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.

Regular Edinburgh comedy nights

The Stand

Edinburgh

MONDAYS RED RAW, 20:30

Legendary new material night with up to 8 acts.

SATURDAYS THE SATURDAY SHOW, 20:30

The big weekend show with four comedians.

Sat 6 Sep

LUCKY DIP: SHAUN D, TEXYO (LIVE), STRAWB.BBY, CLO SNEAKY PETE'S Bubbling. TRUE SOUL THE WEE RED BAR Soul and deep funk.

SEB FONTAINE THE GILDED SALOON House. THE MIRROR DANCE SNEAKY PETE'S Disco.

JUST LIKE HONEY THE WEE RED BAR Post-punk and indie.

DILF THE MASH HOUSE House.

DECADE

LA BELLE ANGELE Emo.

Mon 22 Sep

REDEMPTION THE MASH HOUSE Tech house.

TOM STADE: NAUGHTY BY NATURE

THU 4 SEP

Direct from the Edinburgh festival, the legendary Canadian stand-up star is back on the road with a brand-new show. AN AUDIENCE WITH GAVIN MITCHELL

THU 18 SEP

Acclaimed actor and comedian presents an exclusive up close and personal show.

Aurie Styla is back in Edinburgh after his soldout 100+ date international tour, and is cooking up a new show in the way he knows best… crowd work, freestylin', and having fun with his audience.

MC HAMMERSMITH AND FRIENDS

SUN 14 SEP

MC Hammersmith is multiaward winning freestyle rap comedian. He presents an evening of improvised comedy raps based on audience suggestions.

Alistair Beaton's satiric critique of New Labour is set in a world of spin doctors and journalists.

MR. BURNS, A POSTELECTRIC PLAY

THU 4 SEP-SAT 6 SEP

In this dark comedy, a frame-by-frame retelling of a Simpsons episode becomes mythologised in a post-apocalyptic world.

Theatre Royal

SCOTTISH BALLET: MARY, QUEEN OF

SCOTS

WED 17 SEP-SAT 20 SEP

A punk reimagining of the feud between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I.

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.

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.

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.

Glasgow Art

Glasgow Print Studio

CLAIRE BARCLAY: KINSKINS

FRI 8 AUG-SAT 4 OCT

Large-scale printed works that challenge how we perceive and experience printmaking, pushing the bounds of sensory experiences of art.

Glasgow Women's Library

MADHUBANI PAINTINGS EXHIBITION

THU 17 JUL-SAT 20 SEP

In celebration of South Asian Heritage Month, this exhibition brings together traditional folk art Madhubani paintings from the collection.

Patricia

Fleming

TESSA LYNCH: ARENA

SAT 13 SEP-SAT 18 OCT

Graphic, materially experimental objects and installations that explore the uncanniness of contemporary urban life.

Street Level

Photoworks THE SCENE FROM WITHIN

SAT 19 JUL-SUN 5 OCT

The work of four historic photographers who captured the inner-East End of Glasgow.

CRANHILL ARTS: GLASWEGIANS

SAT 19 JUL-SUN 5 OCT

Portraits from Cranhill Arts' Glaswegians project taken between 1989 to 1993 offer a vital record of Glasgow.

SWG3

BENEATH THE NOISE

THU 4 SEP-FRI 17 OCT

Work that explores the post-industrial textures of Glasgow.

The Briggait

MORAG SMITH: AND IN THEIR WAKE HAPPINESS

FRI 26 SEP-FRI 24 OCT Bright, playful sculptures and installations inspired by sailing journeys across the Highlands and Islands.

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

DAVID MANKIN: INTERLUDES

SAT 6 SEP-WED 1 OCT

A new body of work that captures moments of stillness and reflection within the ever-changing Cornish landscape.

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.

UNMASKED: EXPLORING SCOTTISH PORTRAITURE

SAT 13 SEP-SUN 31 MAY

Drawing from over 400 years within the gallery's archive, this exhibition examines the fluid generic history of Scottish portraits.

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

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.

Edinburgh

Printmakers

AQSA ARIF: RAINDROPS OF RANI

FRI 1 AUG-SUN 2 NOV

Drawing on Pakistani folklore and imagery from an advert filmed in the artist's childhood council flat, this multimedia exhibition explores themes of fractured identity, displacement, and cultural synthesis.

ROBERT POWELL: HALL OF HOURS

FRI 1 AUG-SUN 2 NOV

Inspired by medieval Books of Hours, this intersection of printmaking and animation explores the how we conceptualise temporalities.

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.

AUBREY LEVINTHAL: MIRROR MATTER

SAT 28 JUN-SAT 13 SEP

Passing quotidian moments of a cast of characters living urban lives.

Ingleby Gallery

CHARLES AVERY: THE EIDOLORAMA

SAT 27 SEP-SAT 20 DEC

Abstract, world-building paintings in which simple pictorial forms which combine to form more complex and charismatic structures.

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.

GUY OLIVER: MILLENNIAL PRAYER

THU 7 AUG-SUN 28 SEP

Video, text and collage blend to satirically explore masculinity, politics and pop culture.

Royal Botanic Gardens

Edinburgh

LINDER STERLING

DANGER CAME

SMILING

FRI 23 MAY-

The first retrospective of Linder Sterling's photo montages remixing imagery from popular culture.

FUNGI SESSIONS

SAT 2 AUG-SUN

The premiere of Edinburghborn composer Hannah Read’s albums The Fungi Sessions Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 as an audiovisual installation.

Royal Scottish Academy

ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

FIFTY YEARS

SAT 26 JUL-

A major exhibition show casing a body of work by seminal Scottish artist, including several specially commissioned new works.

RSA: Royal Scottish Academy

SO MANY SUMMERS

SAT 2 AUG-SUN

An exhibition exploring the many moods of a Scottish summer.

GEORGE MACPHERSON

NA TIR-DHÀIMH

MUSIC OF THE HOME

SAT 13 SEPSelected works by ac claimed Royal Academi cian.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

YOUR ART WORLD

SAT 10 MAYArtworks by young people across Scotland created specifically for this exhibi tion, supported by a team of freelance artists.

Sett Studios

FROST WOOD CLAY

SAT 13 SEPExhibition of works from members of Studio Frost wood, from earthly reflec tions to silly sculptures.

Stills Gallery

MATTHEW ARTHUR

WILLIAMS: IN CONSIDERATION OF OUR TIMES

FRI 12 SEPBlack-and-white selfportraits and landscapes explore ideas of loss and absence.

Summerhall

ANNUAL GROUP

EXHIBITION

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

SAT 26 JULSummerhall Arts' inaugural group show featuring visual artists working across all mediums.

The Skinny On... Iona Zajac

Touring member of The Pogues and recording artist in her own right, Iona Zajac has released three exquisite, soul-baring singles this year with more to follow. She takes on this month’s Q&A

What’s your favourite place to visit?

I wouldn’t say I have a favourite place. But if I’m on tour and feeling homesick I’ll seek out a department store like John Lewis and buy something boring and practical like socks or pants. A grounding familiar place in an unknown city. I love Ridley Road Market too, I was born at home round the corner and lived there till I was four before moving to Scotland. It’s a wild place full of life and characters that feels quite similar to 25 years ago despite surrounding Dalston changing so much.

What’s your favourite food?

Pastaaaaa. Comfort simple filling chewy goodness.

What’s your favourite colour?

I think it would have to be red – for me it’s blood and power and rage and love and it’s the colour of my first record.

Who was your hero growing up?

My grandad. He still is. He’s 90 and I sometimes live with him in London. He was a producer at the BBC and can relay the plot and characters of every book he’s read in his life. We end days with a stiff G&T and practice our yodelling to the So y Bottom Boys. I’ve never met a more resilient man with such joie-de-vivre and interest in others. We get on the tube and by the time we’ve got off he knows all about the life of the person he sat next to.

Whose work inspires you now?

Women artists that do something brave and bold. I’ve found such inspiration in the making of my first record from writers like Emily Dickinson and Audre Lord. From musicians like Patti Smith, PJ Harvey and Eastern European female choirs – I like women who yell. Visually, I recently discovered Judy Chicago’s Women and Smoke. Look it up, but for now picture a strong naked woman painted entirely red walking through a desert holding two flares. And Frida Kahlo always.

What three people would you invite to your dinner party and what are you cooking?

Billy Connolly, President Michael D. Hi ins and Imogen Poots. I’m cooking Mediterranean fish stew with big chunks of chewy bread.

What’s the worst meal you prepared when you first started cooking for yourself?

My go-to lunch in first year of uni was a 20p white

roll and a tin of mackerel. How to lose friends in the library.

What’s your all-time favourite album?

I couldn’t choose one album. Gaelic Folk Songs by The Sound of Mull, Third by Portishead, The Livelong Day by Lankum, I Get into Trouble by Maple Glider, Colour Green by Sybille Baier. All unlocked bits of my brain at different stages.

What’s a song you love from the first physical release you bought?

Pump It from Black Eyed Peas’ Monkey Business –happy car journeys blasting this and still a go-to karaoke band when I’m with my sis.

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

Most recently I can think of The Salt Path, it was a big case of nothing.

What book would you take to a desert island?

Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems. It’s the poetry collection I always return to and find something new. You feel every move of the people she’s writing about. Or Claire Keegan’s short stories Antarctica, she is the GOAT.

Who’s the worst?

The governments who are complicit in war and killing innocent people.

Tell us a secret?

I once had a sex dream about Elton John, we were running away from danger and he had lost his glasses.

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

I’d be a hare for a day because Zajac means hare in Polish and Ukrainian, so I think I’d make a good one, and I have no idea what they get up to.

You’ve had a busy year so far as a touring member of The Pogues – what’s that experience been like for you?

An absolute treat and at times very bonkers. I’m used to playing mostly on my own to crowds who don’t know me, so walking out on stage with original Pogues members to crowds practically climbing on stage with excitement and roaring the words you’re singing back at you is pretty surreal. It’s the best craic ever, I feel very lucky to be doing it.

You’ve also been touring as an artist in your own right, with three gorgeous tracks – Summer, Bang and Anton – released since February. What does the rest of the year have in store for you? Anything you can let us in on?

Thank you, it’s felt very exciting and special and also revealing and scary to release these tracks. They are part of a bi er world, and I will say the rest of it is coming quite soon...

Iona Zajac joins Lisa O’Neill for two nights at Cottiers, Glasgow, 22 & 23 Sep

Follow Iona Zajac on Instagram @ionazajac for announcements coming soon

ionazajac.com

Photo: Carys Huws

SOUND IS A LIVING SPACE

RVNG Intl. & Freedom To Spend 2025 Releases

COLIN SELF — res p ite ∞ levit y for the nameless g host in crisis aka r∞L4nGc • LUCRECIA DALT — cosa rara EP

DISCOVERY ZONE — Quantum Web EXP • SATOMIMAGAE — Taba • THE VERNON SPRING — Under a Familiar Sun REPETITION REPETITION — Fit for Conse q uences: Ori g inal Recordin gs, 1984–1987 • KATE NV — Room for the Moon Live

LUCRECIA DALT — A Dan g er to Ourselves • AMY SHEFFER — I Am Shee , Ori g inal Recordin g s: 1979–1987 M. SAGE — Tender/Wading • EMILY A. SPRAGUE — Cloud Time

Coming late 2025

HORSE LORDS & ARNOLD DREYBLATT — FRKWYS Vol. 18: Extended Field • SISTER IRENE O’CONNOR — Fire of God’s Love

DIALECT — Full Ser p ent EP