Coffee-Table Notes

When the Tom Robinson Band stormed the barricades of the pop charts in 1978 with their hit single, 2, 4, 6, 8 Motorway, British society seemed on the verge of breakdown. As TRB became figureheads of Rock Against Racism, the organisation founded after Eric Clapton’s racist outburst during a 1976 Concert, rabble-rousing anthems such as Up Against the Wall and Glad to be Gay captured the uneasy spirit of the age. The title track of TRB’s debut album, Power in the Darkness, a call to arms punctuated by a monologue in the hysterical voice of a rabid right-winger, showed what punky youth were up against. Almost half a century on, and with the UK in a similar state of collapse, TRB’s songs might just have found their time again.   ‘ The two TRB albums came out of a time of uncertainty,’ says Robinson, who brings a new TRB line up to Scotland for three dates. ‘There was mass unemployment among the youth for the first time, and nobody really knew where the country was going. We didn't know ...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   When Greenpeace activists occupied the Shell UK owned decommissioned Brent Spar oil store off the coast of Shetland in 1995 to prevent it being sunk in the North Sea, little did anyone know that thirty years later it would inspire a new musical. This is exactly what the  Sleeping Warrior company have done, however, transforming the Brent Spar story into a rousing radio friendly pop drama that chimes with the times while remaining easy on the ear.    Writer/directors Andy McGregor and Isla Cowan set out their store on Brent Spar itself, brought to life by designer Claire Halleran as an iron and steel arena the Greenpeace activists make their own. The group are a motley mix of idealism and experience as epitomised by Matthew McKenna’s de facto leader Karl and Katie Weir’s hard liner Engel, with enthusiastic new recruits Colin, played by Nathan French, and Kara Swinney’s young mum Rachel also in tow. As personal and political...

  Five stars As the historicisation of Scotland’s pop back pages runs on apace, Blair Young and Carla J. Easton’s study of the women too often written out of that history is a vital and necessary labour of love. From the 1960s pop adventures of Edinburgh sisters The McKinleys, Since Yesterday talks to post punk sheroes across the decades before pointing the way to the future in a mix of history lesson, personal essay and manifesto.   Drawing from her own experience as driving force of Teen Canteen, Easton’s narration unearths a hidden history of sisters doing it for themselves in a misogynistic music industry. Post punk auteurs such as The Ettes, Sophisticated Boom Boom, Sunset Gun and The Twinsets tell their stories, paving the way for 1990s home grown mould-breakers such as Hello Skinny, Lung Leg, Pink Kross and Sally Skull, with the likes of The Hedrons picking up the baton. And lets not forget Strawberry Switchblade’s bona fide pop stardom, as the only Scottish girl b...

Arts at Loaningdale, Biggar  Four stars   Hollywood is a long way from rural 1920s Clydesdale in Martin Travers’ new play for the Braw Clan company, set up in 2023 to produce plays in Scots. In a cramped cottage, teenage Nancy’s fantasies of becoming a star of the big screen like her silent movie idols beamed into the local picturehouse are all she has to escape the everyday drudgery she looks set to be stuck with forever.    With her mother Annie out at church and her bedbound granny wheezing her way to oblivion in the other room, Nancy is free to sing, dance, put on lipstick and cut her hair, with only the mirror on the wall for an audience. Only a mountain of dirty laundry is holding her back from making the big time. Five years on, and a prodigal’s return in the wake of the talkies sees Nancy’s sister Wee Moon harbour her own dreams of fame as history looks set to repeat itself.    There is something Tennessee Williams-like about Travers’ heroines in Ro...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   As the artists formerly known as The Smiths bicker over who holds custody of their name, what of the children? What became of the effete youths who found solace and salvation in the band’s miserablist anthems as they came of age?    Theatre director Ben Harrison was one such soldier, as the Smiths appropriated title of his autobiographical mash up of stories and songs from his formative years make clear. As the archetypal small town teenager in search of a cause and a love affair to call his own, Harrison’s fictionalised self portraits recall an awkward young dreamer with stars in his eyes and a habit of falling for older women of twenty-one. Such defining moments are laid bare inbetween breaking into his school to hang communist flags and painting his bedroom red and black.   Set against lighting designer Simon Wilkinson’s wall of wine bar neon in Scott Johnston’s deftly woven together production, Harrison’s Proustian patchwork is ...

Dundee Rep Four stars   Ghosts are very much in the house in Alan Ayckbourn’s 2002 play. The garden too for that matter. And the tennis court. Not to mention what might be lurking at the bottom of the well. This is something the two middle-aged sisters at the play’s centre must square up to when they are reunited in their childhood home following their father’s death.    High flying Abigail is making a prodigal’s return after years of collapsed businesses and broken relationships while living abroad. This left her sister Miriam to tend to their now dearly departed dad while putting her own life on hold. Or so it seems. Only the old boy’s nurse Alice knows the full story, and she wants a cool hundred grand to keep it to herself.    What follows is a series of double bluffs, things that go bump in the night and daddy issues galore as what looks suspiciously like a case of accidental murder unfolds alongside a series of increasingly troubling true confessions....

Pleasance Courtyard, Pleasance Two Three Stars   Randy Thatcher is a bedroom bound songwriter who thinks he just penned the greatest musical the world has ever seen. Playing to his invisible audience (not an impossibility at this time of year), 21-year-old Randy wears his heart on his sleeve in his science fiction based showtunes, in which our alien hero, the tellingly named Gazandy, finds true love in a way Randy can only yearn for. Like a musical theatre Daniel Johnston with a penchant for sock puppets, Randy is every showbiz wannabe who eventually has to face the music.   Real life New York songwriter Matt Haughey’s solo show shines an incisive spotlight on the perils of trying to get a foot in the door of an industry where everything is a talent contest these days. Accompanying himself on piano in Travis Greisler’s production, Haughey ramps up Randy’s high anxiety in what might well be regarded as a twenty-first century take on a backstage musical, with the talent hawking ...

Roundabout @ Summerhall Four stars   When a man steps on stage and starts talking to us, he conjures up a picture of an entire world in every day turmoil. What follows in Sam Ward’s latest excursion into the imagination under his YesYesNoNo banner is a devastating dissection of how the world can be turned upside down in an instant.    It begins with a dead body, on a normal street in a normal town populated by a cast of seemingly ordinary people. As Ward rewinds on the events leading up to this, he casts the audience as the townsfolk, whose lives are changed when a stranger arrives at a party.    While the inadvertently prescient allegories aren’t hard to spot, Ward is never obvious in his telling, commanding the stage with a quiet authority as he lures his audience into his conspiracy. A slow burning air of alluring ambiguity drives Ward’s play about community, disruption and fear of change, as the tragic consequences that follow all but destroys that community...

Assembly George Square Four stars   Pro Wrestling, from World of Sport to WWE, has always had a form of mythology at its heart. It’s not that big a choreographed leap, then, to present the Norse myths as a series of bodyslams and forearm smashes in a battle royal to end them all.    Seconds out, then, for this epic spectacle brought to the squared circle by writer, director and real life grappler Ed Gamester and his well toned ensemble of fellow grunt and groan merchants. As they apply their larger than life mix of gymnastics and pantomime showmanship, the scenario looks not unlike Game of Thrones re-enacted in a local sports hall.    Gamester is Odin, as the likes of Thor, Loki and others ham it up as opposing warriors in a series of solo assaults and mixed tag matches to illustrate classical narratives honed into theatrical rhetoric. This set up is akin to when Marvel comics introduced the same set of gods into the mix, making them more accessible for school a...

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars   Everything is up in the air for Jay and Jamie, the two strangers living parallel lives in Visible Fictions’ ingenious meditation on love, luck and the crash landings of everyday life. Jay is one of life’s natural high flyers, seemingly breezing through life unscarred. Jamie, on the other hand, has stumbled her way through her days with a glass is half empty attitude and an aptitude for disaster. As the pair find themselves sat next to each other on a doomed international flight, their lives flash before the audience’s eyes as their very different fortunes are revealed.    While all this would be interesting enough by itself in a more conventional production, director Douglas Irvine and company lift things into the stratosphere. This is done by having actors Zoe Hunter and Martin McCormick not just give voice to Jamie and Jay, but by bringing the entire scenario to life from behind a table using model planes, Barbie dolls and toy animals....

Garry Robson – Actor, writer, director   Born March 3rd 1952; died July 26th 2024     Garry Robson, who has died aged 72, was a force of nature. This was the case whether as actor, playwright or director, all of which he excelled in with an energy, humour and heart that drove everything he did. While his disability was at the heart of Robson’s art, he transcended any notions of being patronised or ghettoised so his mercurial talent could shine through on its own terms. He did this in his own plays, which included The Irish Giant (2003), for Birds of Paradise; and the Ian Dury inspired Raspberry (2008), initially at Oran Mor in Glasgow, then at the Tron Theatre and on tour.Like Robson, Dury had contracted polio, and became a hero to Robson.    As an actor, Robson worked with key disabled theatre companies such as Graeae, with whom he appeared in Ian Dury based musical, Reasons to be Cheerful (2012), and was in The Who’s Tommy for Ramps on the Moon. Robson also wo...

Anya Gallaccio may not have any memory of Paisley, where she was born, but the Turner Prize nominated artist’s new installation currently gracing the Renfrewshire mecca’s High Street is a homecoming of sorts in other ways. Stroke, after all, is the latest iteration of a work first seen in Scotland in 2014 at Jupiter Artland, the sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where Gallaccio has a permanent work, The light pours out of me (2012), in situ. As before with Stroke, Gallaccio has painted the walls of a room in chocolate, leaving an ever-changing sensory feast in its wake.   In Paisley, this has seen Gallaccio take over a disused shop, transforming it into an elegant looking chocolaty paradise designed to entice passers by into its sweetly scented interior. Sitting between a branch of WH Smith and Tech Doctor, and with signs for a long closed clothing alterations emporium still in the windows above, Stroke’s ornately painted exterior and flower adorned window is a classy l...

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars   Working the midnight shift at the Samaritans is quite an eye opener for Karen, the eighteen-year-old volunteer and would be literary superstar in Harry Mould’s debut play. It’s sometime in the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher is on the radio, the office is a riot of Formica and multi coloured carpet tiles, and dungarees are de rigueur in Natalie Fern’s period design work. The Samaritans, meanwhile, are equally on trend with the so-called permissive society. The Brenda Line of the play’s title is a code for callers who want to talk dirty rather than offload their troubles in a more conventional manner.    Tonight’s Brenda is Anne, who takes all this in her stride as Karen takes the moral high ground, accusing Anne of all sorts of betrayals to the feminist cause she espouses, with little experience of life on the frontline of adulthood. Anne and Karen may be ages apart, but beyond the ethical ambiguities regarding the Samaritans instigat...

As one of Edinburgh’s original punk inspired bands, Fire Engines may not have been around for long, but the band’s urgent angular howl left its mark. Over the band’s breathless eighteen-month lifespan between 1980 and 1981, the mercurial teenage quartet of Davy Henderson (vocals/guitar), Murray Slade (guitar), Graham Main (bass) and Russell Burn (drums) released a mere three singles and a mini album before imploding.   These can be heard on ‘chrome dawns’, a double vinyl and/or 2CD compilation that brings together all of Fire Engines studio releases. This opens with the band’s frenetic debut single, ‘Get Up and Use Me’ / ‘Everything’s Roses’, released on manager Angus Groovy’s Codex Communications label.  This is followed by high concept mini opus, ‘Lubricate Your Living Room’, and subsequent singles, ‘Candyskin’ / ‘Meat Whiplash’, and the band’s swansong, Big Gold Dream. All of these appeared on Bob Last and Hilary Morrison’s post Fast Product imprint, Pop; Aural.  ...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Three stars As Ian Rankin’s ever expanding Inspector Rebus universe runs on apace, after twenty-four novels, with a twenty-fifth due any day now, and with the latest TV adaptation by Gregory Burke still fresh, the toughest case to crack for Rankin and his unreconstructed hero so far has been theatre.   Following Rona Munro’s adaptation of a new Rebus story in 2018 with Long Shadows, this latest effort sees Rankin collaborate with playwright Simon Reade on an inspired wheeze that has a whole lot of fun with classic murder mystery fare. In Loveday Ingram’s production originally seen at Cambridge Arts Theatre, Rebus moves upmarket to an Edinburgh New Town dinner party where money talks the loudest, however it was acquired.   Gray O’Brien’s louche Rebus is the unexpected plus one of Abigail Thaw’s lawyer Stephanie Jeffries at a murder mystery night hosted by Teresa Banham’s Harriet and her second husband Paul, played with pukka largesse by Neil McKinven...

Fire Engines were one of Edinburgh’s most influential post punk bands. As a definitive compilation, chrome dawns, is released, the Herald presents an exclusive extract from Neil Cooper’s accompanying essay, in which the group’s Davy Henderson talks about the band’s early days.     “ Good evening. We’re from the 20 th  century…”   The life of Fire Engines as a band might have been over before it had barely begun, but the all too brief existence of Edinburgh’s punk sired provocateurs blazed with incident and colour. ‘Boredom or Fire Engines – You Cannot Have Both’ went the legend. The small and imperfectly formed back catalogue they left in their wake sounded like they had crawled out of a cellar and come blinking into the inner city light in a parallel universe somewhere between Leith Walk and C.B.G.B. Boredom wasn’t an option.   Fire Engines were in the thick of Edinburgh’s fertile post punk scene. Formed by the teenage quartet of vocalist and guitarist Dav...

As its name implies, Sonica is about rocking worlds. Over eleven days in September, the Glasgow based Cryptic company’s eighth edition of its festival ‘for curious minds and restless spirits’ mixes up a smorgasbord of international audio-visual artworks from Egypt, Ukraine, Quebec and more. These are seen and heard alongside a plethora of homegrown fare from the likes of the Scottish Ensemble, the RSNO, composer Michael Begg and more, infiltrating the city across multiple venues great and small. Sonica sets out its store from the start with Nati Infiniti, the Scottish premiere of a new work at Tramway by Allesandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails. Other highlights include Songs for a Passerby, Celine Daeman’s Venice Film Festival Award-winning VR opera for a sole headset wearer; a cyborg pop concert of the future from Danish ensemble, NEKO3 and German multimedia composer Alexander Schubert.   Scottish and Scotland based artists in the programme include the world premiere of Ela Orleans’...

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me was the final single to be released by The Smiths, the mercurial Manchester band who for a certain breed of sensitive young men helped define life in the 1980s. One of these was Ben Harrison, who went on to become the co artistic director of the Edinburgh based Grid Iron Theatre Company. Growing up in a small English town, for Harrison, the Smiths, and Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me in particular, became a soundtrack to his life.   Harrison was a hopelessly romantic middle class teen who undertook a very quiet rebellion against his background by way of the trappings of Cold War communism and radical chic. He also fell for the Smiths just as he fell for girls at bus stops and older women at the local am-dram group who offered some kind of salvation in a humdrum town.   It should come as no surprise, then, that Harrison has co-opted the title of the Smiths swan song for his autobiographical look back at the decade in which h...