Coffee-Table Notes

  Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom!   That's pretty much how rock'n'roll started - not with a bang, but with a guttural shriek of libidinous intent. As the opening line of the song, Tutti Frutti, as inimitably delivered by Little Richard, the phrase lent itself perfectly to John Byrne's TV drama series about a first-generation r'n'r band's late flowering revival beyond the chickenin-a-basket cabaret circuit.   Byrne's Tutti Frutti was about the fallout of that initial musical explosion, in which emigre art student Danny McGlone returns to Glasgow from a decade in New York for the funeral of his brother and lead vocalist of beat boom veterans, The Majestics, Big Jazza McGlone.   It wasn't quite 20 years ago today that Tutti Frutti hit our screens, but, with a mere four terrestrial channels to play with then, it feels like it comes from a more innocent age. Originally shown in a graveyard slot on BBC1 opposite ageing-biker drama, Boon, its mix of pathos, int...

  Milky coffee is dripping off John Byrne's moustache. Given his facial hair's already droopy protrusion, the effect is somewhere between wild west and cartoon comic. We're sitting in the Tuesday morning heart of Nairn's cafe society, ostensibly to discuss the Traverse Theatre's 25th anniversary production of Byrne's play, The Slab Boys, which opened this weekend.For those not already aware, The Slab Boys moseys through a day in the life of Spanky and Phil, a couple of likely lads who work as factory fodder in a 1950s carpet factory in Paisley. Both have ideas beyond their station, and fully intend wise-assing their way out of town and to the top.   It sounds a simple enough yarn now, but, coming as it did at the fag end of the 1970s, it set the theatre world alight, reaching the west end, and later Broadway. With its follow-up plays, Cuttin' A Rug and Still Life, it formed what we now know as The Slab Boys Trilogy, which will be performed in full in the new...

  John Byrne looks like an artist. Well, he is an artist. And a playwright, film director, and set designer. But, in the studied cool of his dungarees, waistcoat, and carefully groomed moustache ensemble, he looks like an artist, full of beatnik bohemian cool as he takes a fag break from rehearsals of his latest play. And, in art as in life, image and self-mythology is everything. Byrne understands this, as do too the wave of self-conscious self-promoting art stars of the Emin and Hirst variety. And, way way back, before we were famous for 15 minutes and counting downwards, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde understood it, too.Who?     Okay, the two Roberts, both graduates of Byrne's own alma mater, Glasgow School of Art, 25 years before him, may have been all but airbrushed out of art history, but in the forties and fifties, before their Scotsman abroad act became a parody of itself, they created a considerable splash in the prissy London gallery scene and were recogni...

When Arthur Melville died in 1904, the Forfarshire born artist left behind a life as rich in incident and colour as that in his paintings, several of which are held as part of the Fleming-Wyfold collection. The Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh highlighted Melville’s importance as an artist in 2015 and 2016 with the tellingly named exhibition, Arthur Melville: Adventures in Colour.   In death too, it seems, Melville’s legacy continues, as a plan to restore his desecrated grave in rural Surrey in South East England runs on apace. This follows the discovery of a broken headstone for Melville’s grave by Jon Leech of the Brookwood Cemetery Society, the voluntary body who, with full support from the surviving members of Melville’s family, are seeking support from collectors of his work to help them restore the grave to its former glory.    Melville’s grave isn’t in Brookwood Cemetery itself, but, as explained by BCS founding member John M. Clarke in his book, London’s Nec...

Alberta Whittle took a while to get to the Venice Biennale with her film, Lagareh - The Last Born. Originally commissioned before the world closed down due to the pandemic, Lagareh finally made the trip as part of the Barbados born, Glasgow based artist’s deep  dive (pause)   uncoiling memory  exhibition that formed the Scotland + Venice 2022 programme. Focusing on Scotland’s connections to the Transatlantic slave trade as well as more contemporary losses of Black lives to racist violence, Lagareh has now come home, as Whittle’s labour of love tours cinemas for a series of screenings that began in September.    “ This is the film I've wanted to make for a long time,’ says Whittle of Lagareh. “I arrived in the UK the year Stephen Lawrence was murdered, and that always stayed with me. I remember when Sheku Bayoh lost his life, how that shook me even further, and for a long time, I wanted to find some way to really speak of these groundbreaking moments that shake y...

Carolee Schneemann embodied an era of late twentieth century live art that was all about pushing boundaries. Works such as Meat Joy (1964) indulged in orgiastic celebrations of bodies in motion in collective acts of play. Meat Joy itself saw near naked participants roll around in bucket loads of paint while assorted foodstuffs rained down on them like an action painting come to full liberating life.   While Barbican’s overview of Schneemann puts photographic documentation of such works at the centre of her half-century of iconoclastic wildness prior to her death in 2019 aged 79, this epic homage goes a lot further. This is clear from the insistent thwack of a mechanically controlled mop beating the top of the television set it is attached to that permeates the air as you move through the exhibition. It is clear too from Schneemann’s declaration quoted at its start.   ‘I’m a painter,’ Schneemann said. ‘I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have develop...

Dan McCafferty – Singer, songwriter   Born October 14, 1946; died November 8, 2022     Dan McCafferty, who has died aged 76, was for more than forty years the lead singer of Dunfermline sired rock group, Nazareth. McCafferty’s rasp-laden voice defined a sound that came of age in the first half of the 1970s, with the likes of Led Zeppelin’s Robert  Plant and Free’s Paul Rodgers clear vocal peers. Weaned on first generation rock and roll, Nazareth took backwoods blues into spit and sawdust inner city barroom territory.    This was evidenced on a spate of cover versions that included rock reinventions of Joni Mitchell’s This Flight Tonight (1973), from Mitchell’s 1971 album, Blue, and especially on their U.S. hit, Love Hurts (1975). The latter appeared on the American edition of Hair of the Dog (1975), the sixth Nazareth album, which saw the band cross over into the big league. Originally intended as a B-side, the Boudleaux Bryant penned ballad had previously ...

If travel broadens the mind, how to capture an unexpected moment that changed everything beyond mere postcards home? This is something Mark Cousins’ new four-screen film installation attempts to tune in to, as he channels a once-in-a-lifetime epiphany experienced by St Andrews born artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004). This occurred in May 1949, when Barns-Graham climbed the Grindelewald glacier in Switzerland. Whatever intoxicated her up there on what was meant to be a mere away day excursion left its mark on her mind’s eye with such force that she never quite came down.   This is evident from the cycle of paintings drawn from that afternoon, which at points beam out from each screen like transmissions from Barns-Graham’s brain that Cousins immerses the viewer inside alongside his own retelling of the event. This comes by way of a subtitled dialogue between the older and younger Barns-Graham indicated by photographs taken of her fifty years apart. The cross-generational disc...

Flashback Some time in the mid to late 1980s, I attended a short season of films by  Shūji Terayama , a Japanese radical best known for his features, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1968), and Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971). The screenings took place at Filmhouse in Edinburgh, which I visited on a semi regular basis to see the sort of subtitled arthouse films I’d previously only been able to watch on small screen BBC2 or Channel 4. Tickets were cheap, especially if you were on the dole, as I was, and spending afternoons watching Godard and Fassbinder, or more current works by Derek Jarman or Peter Greenaway, was a steal for 50p. The  Shūji Terayama season, however, was something else again, and seemed to relate more to performance or visual art as much as film. One short film, Laura (1974), had a group of women address the camera directly, with Terayama’s assistant, Henrikku Morisaki, walking from the audience and through the slatted screen to become part of t...