Coffee-Table Notes

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially most infiltrational moment

SWG3, Glasgow Four stars “Welcome to the future?” jokes Robert Hodgens, aka Bobby Bluebell, as he and the rest of arguably Glasgow’s most unsung indie-pop troubadours are serenaded onstage by Ronald Binge’s evergreen Shipping Forecast theme, Sailing By. What follows in the first of two Sunday sessions presented by the Last Night From Glasgow record label is probably the first ever live matinee gig since the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic closed down venues six months ago.    LNFG has already released what is destined to become a totem of lockdown artistry in their Isolation Sessions compilation, and here show equal determination to make things happen, no matter what. With the grassroots live music industry on the verge of collapse due to an unviable sticking plaster approach to financial support, the only ones getting creative, it seems, are the actual creatives.   With an open-sided gazebo constructed in SWG3’s Galviniser’s yard housing a socially distanced audience sat at wooden tables, a

Juliette Gréco – actress, singer   Born February 7, 1927; died September 23, 2020     Juliette Gréco, who has died of a stroke aged 93 at her home near St Tropez, was an icon of post World War Two French bohemianism. Before she became the last of the great French chanteuse’, Gréco’s presence became a vital part of Left Bank café culture where intellectuals held court. Here, she became friends with the era’s literary set, including Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Prévert. She learnt, she said, by listening to them. The creative energy was reciprocated, and she captivated them all.     “Gréco has a million poems in her voice,” said Sartre, who based a character on her in his The Roads to Freedom trilogy, and wrote the songs for her that first made her take the leap onto the stage. “In her mouth,” Sartre went on to say, “my words become precious stones.” In such heady times, not for nothing was Gréco nicknamed la Muse de l’existentialisme. She was all that,

  The Common Guild until December 2020 “Whit yi’ up to, mate?” asks a befuddled voice 18 and a half minutes into  A walk through a  different  city ,  Luke Fowler ’s aural excursion through the centre of locked down Glasgow. “Whit yi’ doin’? You doin’ somethin’?”   Fowler’s sonic derive forms the seventh and final contribution to In the open, the Common Guild’s off-site response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. This has seen six artists move out of the Glasgow townhouse based gallery and into the wild to create new audio works designed to be listened to outdoors on headphones during government-sanctioned daily walks.   Collated from 500 hours of recordings, Fowler’s 35-minute edit that makes up A walk through a  different  city ambles its way through a winding route, that begins on Sauchiehall Street and ends beneath the Kingston Bridge beside the River Clyde. Inbetween, Fowler leads the listener through assorted back alleys onto Buchanan Street, then into an almost deserted Central S