Coffee-Table Notes

‘I was a bit of a force of nature when I was younger. Nobody was going to challenge me, and nobody did.’   This is Pauline Black talking about her early life in Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story, Jane Mingay’s documentary inspired by Black by Design, the autobiography of the dynamic Selecter vocalist published in 2011. Mingay’s Scottish Screen co-produced film rather handily arrives as The Selecter set out on a tour with the sort of itinerary that would make younger bands feel exhausted.   “ I still enjoy performing with The Selector,’ Black beams over Zoom like a very friendly force of nature, “and we’ll do it while we still can. I don't have any real plans for any kind of retirement, and this tour is an opportunity to celebrate our 45th anniversary of releasing Too Much Pressure. We’ve never really left those songs, even though we’ve always been recording and pushing on.’   The Selecter burst out of the original 2-Tone scene that came straight outta Coventry in 1979 with a ...

The ghosts of musics past can easily send seekers down online rabbit holes in search of enlightenment. For many, this often begins with The Fall. Oh! Brother is the tellingly named show hosted by siblings Paul and Steve Hanley, who both served lengthy stints in the ultimate outsider group and lived to tell the tale.   Since 2021, Oh! Brother has seen the Hanleys engage an array of former band members, celebrity fans and other fellow travellers for discursive chats about life in and out of Mark E Smith’s ever changing ensemble. Highlights include chats with the band’s former keyboardist Marcia Schofield, ex footballer Pat Nevin, Ian Rankin and John Niven. If at times it sounds like a bunch of old blokes in a pub gathered like a post punk reincarnation of Last of the Summer Wine, that’s because sometimes it is.   Working in similar territory is Electronically Yours with Martyn Ware, with former Human League and current Heaven 17 stalwart Ware opening up his even more extensive a...

David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device (2017), erupted into view like a counter cultural dam bursting. The book’s wild depiction of small town Scottish post punk pop life was based around the short lived crash and burn of a group called Memorial Device.   Keenan’s epic immortalisation of the ultimate legends in their own living room seemed to come from the inside, as Keenan conjured up an entire parallel universe. When the stage adaptation of the book was first performed at Edinburgh College of Art’s Wee Red Bar, a poster for a Memorial Device show remains there to this day.   After five more novels in as many years, such devotion to detail can be seen and heard in Volcanic Tongue – A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20 th Century Underground Music. Keenan’s bumper-sized compendium of music writing culled from his years as the Wire magazine’s evangelist in chief is accompanied by a compilation album of the same name. This features the sort of no-fi auteu...

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 ...

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.  ...

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...

Beth Gibbons has always sung the blues. This remains evident on the Portishead vocalist’s tellingly titled new solo album, ‘Lives Outgrown’. Recorded over the last decade with former Talk Talk drummer Lee Harris and Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford, thirty years after Gibbons’ emotive voice was first laid bare on Portishead’s era defining ‘Dummy’ album, ‘Lives Outgrown’ sees Gibbons taking stock of motherhood, menopause and mortality.   ‘People started dying,’ Gibbons is quoted as saying in the album’s press release. ‘When you’re young, you never know the endings, you don’t know how it’s going to pan out. You think: we’re going to get beyond this. It’s going to get better. Some endings are hard to digest.’   Since Gibbons and Portishead co-conspirator Geoff Barrow took the leap from dole queue Enterprise Allowance scheme to winning the Mercury Music Prize, two other Portishead studio albums have seen the light of day. The most recent, ‘Third’, appeared in 2008.   Gibbon...

When Claire M Singer was told about an organ in Forgue Kirk, close to the Aberdeenshire village where she was brought up, it opened up a world of possibilities for the composer who also works as music director of the organ at Union Chapel in London. Drawing inspiration from her walks in the Cairngorms, the result is Saor, the first of a planned triptych of albums released on the experimentally inclined Touch label.    Having begun her musical life as a cellist and composition student, Singer fell for the organ after experimenting with stops and pedals in a way that saw her manipulating air rather than play the instrument in a conventional fashion. Rather than producing something wilfully arid or austere, there is an emotional warmth to Singer’s work on both Saor and her previous Touch releases that began in 2016 with Solas. This reflects her response to the source of her inspiration.     “ The most natural thing for me to do when I get home is to get in the...

One imagines taking a walk with Claire M Singer to be a magical experience. You can hear hints of such magic on   Saor , the Aberdeenshire born composer’s forthcoming album of pipe organ based works released on the Touch   1 label, home to such environmentally inclined experimentalists as Chris Watson   2 and the late Philip Jeck   3 .     Pronounced ‘Sieur’, as in ‘monsieur’,   Sao r is inspired by wide-open space, with tracks such as ‘Càrn’, ‘Forrig’, and 'Braeriach' all named after Munros Singer has climbed during her wanderings in the Cairngorms. The album’s closing title track, meanwhile, sums up Singer’s worldview in an epic twenty-four and a half minute piece that translates from Scottish Gaelic as ‘Free’.     This feeling is confirmed at the end of the track, recorded in one take using five different organs in Orgelpark   4 , the Amsterdam based concert hall for organists containing numerous organs that span the centuries. With ...