Coffee-Table Notes

Innes Reekie didn’t take his camera with him to the first gig he witnessed by The Birthday Party, the self-lacerating Australian band fronted by a young Nick Cave. He did, however, get invited backstage in London’s Moonlight Club after Cave spotted a tattoo of Iggy Pop’s first band The Stooges on the then twenty-one year-old’s arm. In London to watch Scottish bands Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, Josef K and The Bluebells take on the capital, Reekie’s diversion kick-started a pilgrimage of sorts, as he followed Cave and The Birthday Party around the country. It would be a year or so before the band’s chaotic howl of self-destructive trash-blues sooth-saying made it to Fife-born Reekie’s adopted home-town of Edinburgh when they played The Nite Club, one of the city’s main small venues, situated within the confines of The Playhouse. Having bonded with Cave and guitarist Rowland S Howard, this time Reekie made sure he had his camera.   More than three decades on, some of the phot

Keni Davidson – performance and theatre maker, artist Born September 3 1965; died November 23 2018 Keni Davidson, who has died aged 53, was arguably the most avant-garde theatre artist to have come out of Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century. Fiercely uncompromising, free-spirited, mercurial and at times wilfully self-destructive of his own talents, Davidson couldn’t or wouldn’t fit into a mainstream system bound by box-ticking exercises designed to stifle or shut out anything beyond its bubble. Despite this, in his early years working as an artist at least, he managed to navigate the vagaries of arts bureaucracy to some extent, and left behind a unique if barely seen body of work which became the stuff of legend, even as it was all too fleetingly being shown. Today, recognition for that work is slowly but surely trickling its way outwards into a collective consciousness that will eventually and inevitably recognise Davidson as a major artistic force ahead