4 stars It’s de rigeur for Turner Prize winners to play in bands these days, and anyone familiar with Martin Creed’s oeuvre from his 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival show at the Fruitmarket Gallery and accompanying live song-and-dance routine at the Traverse will know what to expect from this most calculated of borderline autistic, OCD auteurs. To whit, in this pre-Olympic run-up to orchestrating all the bells in the country to ring out for three minutes, Creed thrashes out eighteen miniatures of love and hate that fuse the desperate yearning of playwright Sarah Kane and the No Wave minimalism of Glenn Branca with the DIY messthetics of Swell Maps and the brattish cartoon petulance of Jilted John. Bookended by ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’, which sound-tracked the Fruitmarket lift’s rise and fall, Love To You is a bumpy thirty-seven minute and nine second ride through the confessional ups and downs of fatal attraction, obsession, rejection, frustration and apparent acceptance. If ‘1234’ and ‘Fuck Off’ strip the concept of a love song to its bare bones and machine-gun it into Billy Childish-style garage-band submission, ‘I Can’t Move’ and the title track are prom-night paeans to Creed’s object of desire, girly harmonies and all on an insistently honest heart-to heart in which opposites attract in not-so-perfect symmetry. The List, June 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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