Coffee-Table Notes

O2 ABC, Glasgow Saturday November 5th 2011 4 stars “I don’t know,” says Howard Devoto, wearily wiping his palest of faces. “Have we done enough songs about the wrong kind of sex?” The band behind him launch into the icy menace of 1979 album Secondhand Daylight’s closing epic Permafrost for good measure, anyway. Devoto has a point. As the archest man in pop entered wielding a Brechtian style placard bearing the legend, ‘Let’s Fly Away To The World’, the band he reformed after thirty years away strike up an opening rally of Definitive Gaze, Give Me Everything and Motorcade. Heard in rapid-fire succession, the songs show off the light and shade of a canon that lays bare Devoto’s soul via an array of psycho-sexual baroque brutalist bon mots. With new album No Thyself and bass player Jon ‘Stan’White added to the fold to replace Barry Adamson since they first toured in 2009, Magazine sound more urgent than ever, with Devoto’s self-absorbed confessionals offset by a dirty whit

Jordanhill Parish Church, Glasgow 3 stars Breaking the rules is instinctive when you’re of an age whereby you’re not entirely sure what they are yet. This was evident from the primary school age audience watching this new show created by John Retallack for his Company of Angels operation in a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland. Throughout sixteen unrelated scenes that tackle a variety of cross-generational conflicts, these not easily impressed charges giggled at the swear words and whispered throughout. It’s not that they weren’t getting the seriousness of what was going on. It’s just that, as with the characters onstage, they too were seeing how far they could take things. From the boy squaring up to a shopping mall security guard and the mum whose teenage daughter is more grown up than she’ll ever be, to more immediately recognisable forms of parental abuse and avoidance, Retallack pulls no punches. Based on interviews with families from Glasgow-bas

HMV Picture House, Edinburgh Thurday November 3rd 2011 The moustached man from the local tattoo parlour onstage is giving it loads. His whine-perfect karaoke impression of Mark E Smith has the advantage of having the most crack-shot surf-garage band around backing him, who, for the previous half-hour, have been proving just how good they are with a series work-outs made necessary by the prolonged absence of their vocalist, conductor, arranger, director, gaffer and guru. It all started so well, with Smith practically bounding on stage on the dot of 9pm and within a minute of the band striking up the hundred-mile an hour chug of the forebodingly titled Nate Will Not Return, a highlight from the new Ersatz G.B. album. Guitarist Tim Presley from the 2006 American Fall line-up has rejoined the fold while his replacement Pete Greenway takes time out on 'maternity leave', and Presley's twitch-hipped boyish demeanour adds extra urgency to an already relentless fu

“Suicide has always been quite an important idea to me,” says Howard Devoto, vocalist, lyricist and mouthpiece in chief of post-punk fabulists, Magazine. Devoto is talking about Hello Mr Curtis (with apologies), the band's recent single which trailed No Thyself, the first album of new Magazine material for thirty years. The Mr Curtis in question is one Ian Curtis, the former singer with Magazine's Manchester scene contemporaries Joy Division, who hanged himself on the eve of what should have been the band's first American tour in 1980. Devoto's song also references a certain Mr Cobain, as in the late Kurt, of 1990s grunge icons Nirvana, and another rock and roll suicide. By the end of an appositely jaunty number in which both of his forbears are put on the couch and encouraged to explain what caused them pain enough to take their own lives, Devoto is declaring his own intentions to die like a king. Such a lofty pronouncement is up-ended somewhat when th

Kings Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars Scarlet drapes tumble about the stage in the living junk-shop that forms the back-drop to Simon Callow’s double bill of Charles Dickens short stories originally performed by the great man himself a century and a half ago. Mr Callow is the ultimate patter merchant, whether relating a yarn about a vertically challenged sideshow turn who hits the jackpot, or else becoming the hawker whose life is turned upside down when he adopts a speech and hearing impaired young girl. Mr Chops is up first, with Callow acquiring the cockney rasp of henchman Toby in a barrel-organ sound-tracked lament for his partner, who on winning the lottery is patronised and abused by the grasping grotesques of high-class society. In the second half, the widowed Dr Marigold tugs the heart-strings all the way to Christmas Day. As Chops grows in moral stature prior to his demise even as Marigold finds salvation, it’s easy to see where sit-com scribes Galton and Simpson

“Anyone who has ever played a piano,” Tom Waits declared in a recent interview, “would really like to hear how it sounds when dropped from a twelfth-floor window.” Waits probably hasn’t heard of Raydale Dower, but if the gravel-voiced troubadour can bring his wonkily-inclined junkyard orchestra over to Tramway this week for the Glasgow-based artist and musician’s new three-dimensional audio-visual installation, he might just be able to find out. As its title suggests, Piano Drop is a Sensurround record of what happened when Dower let loose a winched-up keyboard from the venue’s ceiling, filming it as it smashed into a million match-stick size pieces. The result, slowed down by up to forty times and relayed through a film loop and an ambisonic speaker arrangement, aims to enhance the hidden musicality of such a seemingly destructive action. “It was a simple piece of musical curiosity,” Dower explains of Piano Drop’s roots, “just to explore the straightforward absurd an

Simon Callow can’t get away from Charles Dickens. When he arrives onstage at Edinburgh’s Kings Theatre tonight to perform Dr Marigold and Mr Chops, it will be a continuation of Callow’s lifelong fascination with one of the figureheads of world literature. These two stories, adapted here by Patrick Garland, were staples of Dickens’ repertoire as he toured theatres to give energetic renditions which one suspects were on a par with Callow’s own all-encompassing presentations. First presented at Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms in 2008, Dr Marigold and Mr Chops finds Callow transforming himself first into a travelling salesman who adopts a deaf and dumb girl; then into a freak-show turn who wins the lottery and makes his way through a well-heeled society he becomes increasingly repulsed by. “I really feel quite like actors of yester-year,” Callow admits, clearly revelling in his bravura performance. “These stories were last seen onstage a hundred and forty years ago, with Dickens