Coffee-Table Notes

1 When a seventy year old Hamish Henderson sang Freedom Come All Ye at the end of an event billed as something called Self-Determination and Power that took place at the Pearce Institute in Govan, Glasgow in January 1990, it was the ultimate folk-song cabaret. Here, after all, was the man whose co-founding of the School of Scottish Studies in 1951 had kick-started the Scottish folk revival, and here he was singing the song he'd penned that many believe to be Scotland's real national anthem (with a small n, for Henderson was nothing if not internationalist in outlook). Henderson sang it in his own slightly cracked tones not as part of some officially sanctioned flagship event for Glasgow's status as European City of Culture that year, but for a low-level grassroots initiative that brought together art and activism in an event that would prove to be of huge trickle-down significance. The Self-Determination and Power event was organised by a loose alliance of the Free Univ...

What would you do if you met Hitler as a toddler, forewarned Dr Who-like of the mass genocide the future Nazi leader would inflict on the twentieth century? Would you do the world a favour and kill him quickly and without fuss? Or would you embrace the seemingly innocent mite to one's bosom, vowing to protect him from whichever ills would otherwise corrupt his infant sensibilities with such disastrous consequences? Such a dilemma is the hypothetical sort of stuff usually played out by liberal intellectuals on The Moral Maze. It's also the starting point for The Wheel, a major new play by Zinnie Harris for the National Theatre of Scotland, which plays as part of the Traverse Theatre's Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme in a production by NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone. As with many things about the play, though, looks can be deceptive. The play may open in a nineteenth century Spanish village on the eve of both a wedding and a war, and initially c...

When the Made In Scotland showcase was founded three years ago to support home-grown theatre and dance companies who wished to perform on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe before a host of international promoters, no-one really knew what to expect. Since then, not only has the strike rate been high in terms of work picked up, but it is work which only a few years ago for it to be produced within a Scottish context would have been nigh-on unthinkable. Shows like Cora Bissett's site-specific sex-trafficking drama, Roadkill, and David Leddy's labyrinthine back-stage tour, Sub-Rosa, speak volumes about how much theatre-making in Scotland has raised the level of its game in terms of scope and imagination. Funded by the Scottish Government's Expo fund, Made in Scotland has developed it's remit this year as well to include a new Scottish Performing Arts Symposium and Promoter Plus, a means of pairing international promoters with at the very least a guaranteed five ...

Theatre Royal, Glasgow 4 stars Art, life and revolution, as anyone who heard Sex Pistols cover artist Jamie Reid speak in the National Galleries of Scotland last Thursday night will understand, categorically aren't the preserve of a bourgeois establishment who buy such notions into submission. Lee Hall recognises this too in his loving impressionistic portrait of The Ashington Group, the alliance of Tyneside miners who came together in 1934 at a Workers Educational Association art appreciation night-class under future head of Edinburgh College of Art Robert Lyon, only to end up an artistic cause celebre in their own right. First seen at Live Theatre Newcastle in 2007 before transferring to London and Broadway, Max Roberts' co-production with the National Theatre is a gloriously feel-good take on social history, which nevertheless talks about aspiration and the transformative power of art in an intelligently expansive manner. With the men's work projected on...

Wilton's Music Hall is the perfect place to meet Marc Almond. Tucked down a lane in London's east end, one would never guess that such a dramatic landmark exists so discreetly off the beaten track. As the former vocalist with 1980s electro-pop duo Soft Cell Almond steps into the high-ceilinged expanse of the UK's oldest working music hall, the same could be said about this most singular of torch balladeers. Almond may be about to make his first foray into musical theatre in Ten Plagues at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, yet his shades, black jeans and v-neck with the wings of a blue-bird tattoo peeking over the top seeks to repel rather than invite attention. Once inside the building, however, the shades are removed, and, as Almond settles into a chair with a cup of herbal tea, what emerges is an erudite and open figure, who's as willing to talk about his troubled childhood and the 2004 motorbike accident that put him in a coma as he is about his creativ...

Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh until July 23rd 2011 4 stars The acid house smiley face on the sunny yellow ball of Peter Liversidge's shelf-load of single-hued detritus speaks volumes about this colour-focussed group show of eight artists that takes its title from Thomas Pynchon's baroque noir. It begins with a joke by Yves Klein, who in 1954 published a booklet of coloured paper rectangles that purported to be the creations of some hip young kid on the block, but which were actually found off-cuts. The fact that Liversidge too has painstakingly remade his own rubbish out of clay and placed it next to the original adds to the gag. Kay Rosen's wall paintings ape Pynchon and Klein by using colours on the basis of their aspirationally inclined names, ending up with mint choc chip style blocks as demonstrated by 'Mud Hut between Willow Tree and Apple Tree beside Rocky Road separated by Hedgerow from Copper Canyon'. This is painting and decorating as art, as...

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh until October 11th 4 stars German handball star Pascal Hens gazes out from a black and white poster, his torso naked, gaze serious, his pose one of self-deification. This is enhanced further by a tattoo on his stomach of two disembodied hands clasped together as if in prayer. It's an image made familiar by its own iconic status which, in the context of the poster, borders on a state of heroic kitsch. Further down the corridor in a glass case sits a green-moulded plastic hare taken from an installation that filled a Nuremburg square with seven thousand of the little critters. Again, it's familiar twenty-first century apparel points to both parody and homage. Both works, in fact, are two of the most recent examples that take from sixteenth century German maestro of woodcuts and engravings, Albrecht Durer. Hens' buff-bellied tattoo is taken from Durer's 'Study of Praying Hands', while the electric green hare l...

Botanic Gardens, Glasgow 3 stars Leaving aside the questions over the actual authorship of what may or may not be the bard's most scattershot work – half Shakespeare, half a couple of his not quite so clever contemporaries, the scholars say – cut through the morass and its not a bad yarn. Bard in the Botanics director Gordon Barr's ninety-five minute version for four actors situated in the Kibble Palace goes some way to prove this in what becomes a near Dickensian mythological romp. The fact that the whole affair is kicked off by Pericles' ability to decode King Antiochus's incestuous confession disguised as a riddle speaks volumes about the play's taboo-busting intent. Barr opens proceedings with all four actors itinerising chest-loads of booty as if they've just discovered buried treasure only to find themselves in the same story-book they relate each act's prologue from. As Pericles does a runner, he finds himself courting even more troub...

Charlie Chaplin, Michael Jackson, A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess and rap star Snoop Dog may be artists rarely mentioned in the same breath. When it comes to comedy, however, this fantasy dinner-party quartet have all at different times outed themselves as fan-boys of one of Britain's great lost comic icons. Not that Benny Hill, who died in 1992, three years after his long-running prime-time TV sketch show was cancelled, is celebrated much in his own country. While France hails Hill as a farceur on a par with Jacques Tati and America airs endless re-runs of his shows, in Britain there are no retrospectives shown or statues put up in his home town as with other funny-men of his generation. Yet Hill emerged from a similar music hall background as his peers, and, during his hey-day, was arguably bigger than them all. So what happened? This is something actor and writer Grant Smeaton puts under the spotlight in Whatever Happened To Benny Hill?, Smeaton's la...

4 stars Long before REM lost their edge, Bristol's Blue Aeroplanes were their English counterparts, ploughing an urgent furrow of spikily jangular folk-rock with multiple guitars zinging about every which way to backdrop lead auteur Gerard Langley's tumbles of opaque, semi spoken-word murmurs. Thirty years and forty-two members on, several generations of Aeroplanes combine for this fresh-as-a-daisy sprawl through more of the same. From the opening firework bursts that precede the forboding swirls of 'Sulphur' to the elegiac 'Cancer Song' that closes things, this is a dense epic chiming with wisdom and experience, art-rock's rich tapestry personified anew. The List, July 2011 ends

4 stars Katy Lironi's pedigree as a chanteuse dates back to C-86 swoonsters Fizzbombs followed by a stint fronting bubblegum stompers The Secret Goldfish. This latest vehicle for Ms L's sublime cooing is an infinitely more laid-back affair. Think Saint Etienne-style ballads sans London-centric reference points but with a melancholy worthy of bedsit-era Tracy Thorn. This solitary, gal in exile feel is fleshed out on a still lugubrious 'If You Made It Easy For Me by a mellowed out band arrangement, while electronic skitters underscore the equally plaintive 'If I Could Only Cry' on a late-night affair that sounds in need of a cuddle. The List, July 2011 ends

Tron Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars The timeless allure of the ultimate big-screen romance was plain to see when Morag Fullarton's contracted stage version appeared as part of Oran Mor's lunchtime Classic Cuts season in 2010. This speedy revival may have upgraded things for the night-time set with nary a pie in sight, but Fullarton's supreme grasp of populist theatre sensibilities remain undimmed in a glorious three-actor affair which in lesser hands might have merely ended up as one great big daft industry in-joke. There are elements of this, of course, particularly in the newly added B-movie homage to westerns, an extended fifteen-minute sketch that somehow manages to shoehorn the Marx Brothers into the rootin', tootin', sharpshootin' fun. It's the main feature, however, that fully delights, as we're whisked off to Rick's bar, where worlds collide and old flames linger in a cut-price no-man's land of scarlet drapes, silver-sashed door...

Blondie mainstay Chris Stein is spending the day on the beach with his kids. It feels as far away from the 1970s Downtown scene that sired the band Stein founded with vivacious front-woman Debbie Harry as it does from Balado, where a reignited Blondie will perform tracks from their new album, Panic of Girls, at T in the Park this Sunday. Panic of Girls is the band's first album since 2003's The Curse of Blondie, and is released, not on a major record label, but by the band themselves as part of a special 'Collector's Pack'. Given that tracks were first laid down as far back as 2009 before assorted record company wrangles made a long silence even more protracted, one could be forgiven for thinking that the title of the last Blondie album had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The truth, however, for Stein, at least, is much more mundane. “I took time out to be with my family,” says Stein. “I had two kids who are now six and seven, so I sort of stumbled ...