Coffee-Table Notes

Pete Fulwell – Music manager Born December 30, 1944; died February 20, 2020    Pete Fulwell, who has died aged 75, was a major force for music in Liverpool for almost half a century. Fulwell was at the centre of his adopted home’s underground scenes from the 1970s, joining Roger Eagle and Ken Testi as managing director of legendary club Eric’s, which became a playground for the city’s punk and post-punk waifs and strays in search of a place to call their own. Fulwell later helped set up the Inevitable record label, before moving into management and steering artists including Pete Wylie, Pete Burns, Holly Johnson, It’s Immaterial, Black and The Christians to mainstream success.    Pete Fulwell was born in Shrewsbury, and moved to Liverpool in 1967 to study psychology. After finishing his degree, he began a PhD based on research into mapping cognitive architecture for automated teaching systems. Frustrated by primitive technology, he dropped out. With ambitions to star...

Barry St John (Eliza Thomson) – Singer   Born 1943: died July 24, 2020   Barry St. John, who has died aged 76, was a singer whose early singles and a sole album, According to St. John (1968), are now regarded by 1960s pop and Northern Soul aficionados as classics. Yet, despite being possessed with a soulful voice honed on the Glasgow spit and sawdust circuit and Hamburg cellar bars, St. John never quite hit the big time in her own right.    She nevertheless became one of the go-to backing singers for rock cognoscenti throughout the 1970s, appearing on records by John Lennon, Pink Floyd, Mott the Hoople and Elton John. St John’s voice can be heard on Lennon’s Power to the People on his Imagine album, four songs on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Brian Ferry’s take on Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and three songs on John’s Madman Across the Water album, including Tiny Dancer.    Eliza Janet Thomson was born in the Gallowgate area of Glasgow to Jenny and Arthur ...

‘In 1964, in Edinburgh, on the last day of the Festival Drama Conference, a nude lady was wheeled  across a balcony in a trolley.’ So observed poet, painter and occasional pop star Adrian Henri in his book, Environments and Happenings, published a decade later. ‘Ever since then,’ Henri concluded, ‘the Great British Public has associated happenings with naked ladies.’ While this possibly says as much about Henri’s preoccupations as anything else, he wasn’t wrong. Apart, that is, from the date of the incident, which actually occurred a year earlier, during the first week of September 1963. One of the event’s co-conspirators, theatre director Charles Marowitz, dates it in his memoir, Burnt Bridges, as having taken place in 1962.  Both men’s recollections suggests that the old cliché about how if you can remember the ‘60s you weren’t really there might well be more true than anything said by either chronicler of their age. Nevertheless, Henri’s highlighting of one of the popular (...

Paul Lucas – Theatre producer, writer Born October 15, 1961; died August 11, 2020     Paul Lucas, who has died peacefully at home in New Jersey aged 58 following a short battle with cancer, was a theatre producer whose work was fired with passion and energy. Whether presenting solo pieces or ensemble works, Lucas was unwavering in his integrity and his dedication to saying what needed to be said onstage. Lucas facilitated this with a charm and an inherent sense of fun that embraced anyone who became part of his orbit. If you were a friend of Paul Lucas, you were a friend for life.   This openhearted ebullience never undermined the seriousness of Lucas’s work. That was the case with both the Herald Angel winning The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac and Simon Levy’s dramatic adaptation of Eliot Weinberger’s prose poem, What I Heard About Iraq, both of which Lucas brought to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006. It was there even more in Trans Scripts, Part 1: The Women, which reveale...

Dunfermline Carnegie Library and Galleries until May 10th; Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries, May 16 th -July 25 th .   The pen-pal style intimations of the title of this independently curated exhibition for Fife-based arts umbrella Fife Contemporary is a very gentle double-edged sword for the broad exploration of drawing it covers. The old-school stencil font of each label for the twenty-three cross-generation artists puts stylistic and symbolic faith in its craft, particularly in relation to the natural world.    Things start simply enough, with Elizabeth Blackadder’s quick-fire capture of Edinburgh in View of North Bridge (1972) and three drawings by Carol Rhodes, Factory Roof and Countryside (2001-02), Reservoir (1999) and Wharf (1999), all so much more than studies for paintings. Blackadder returns later, with reciprocal portraits by and of her and John Houston, that capture the relaxation of marital bliss at its best.    The exhibition’s brief expands by wa...