Coffee-Table Notes

When Sonica Surge takes over Tramway and The Hidden Garden in Glasgow for forty-eight hours this month, the intense feast of sound and vision this mini festival presents will be an all too fitting way to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of Cryptic, the company behind it. Since it was founded by artistic director Cathie Boyd while still a student in Glasgow, Cryptic has become an ever-evolving artistic shape shifter that has moved from its roots as a leftfield music theatre company into the delirious melange of sonic art it has become today.   The company’s early focus was on staging literary classics, including Francoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1994) and Molly Bloom’s rapturous soliloquy from James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, in Parallel Lines (1996), and Virginia Woolf’s gender bending novel, Orlando (2010). From the start, Cryptic’s mission has been to ‘ravish the senses’, with internationalism at its heart. This has seen Cryptic present more than 2,000 artists to over 1.2 million peo

The eternal renaissance of Michael Head has been a wonderful thing to witness. Over a wayward forty-odd year anti career, the Liverpool born song-writer has moved from the under achieving felicities of The Pale Fountains to the urban fantasias of Shack, alighting a decade ago in his current tenure helming the ever changing Red Elastic Band. Judging by 2022 album, Dear Scott, and its predecessor, Adios Senor Pussycat, released in 2017, Head seems to have finally found his time. The Red Elastic Band’s line-up currently features a superb ensemble bringing Head’s scallydelic kitchen-sink narratives to life with guitar led grit laced with baroque flourishes. This should translate in Head and co’s forthcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe outing into a virtuoso showcase of more recent material interspersed with a pick and mix of favourites from Head’s colourful back pages.     Recently, this has seen Head rewind all the way back to some of the Pale Fountains and Shack’s finest moments, which sit

Richard Strange is a pop cultural renaissance man, who has moved from fronting pre-punk band Doctors of Madness and hosting 1980s multi-media salon, Cabaret Futura, to acting in Hollywood films, curating the National Review of Live Art and much more. Much of Strange’s back catalogue is documented in his 2005 memoir, Punks and Drunks and Flicks and Kicks. Strange returns to Scotland for the first time since 2011 to perform An Accent Waiting to Happen, an evening of songs, stories and scurrilous gossip.      Hi Richard, how’s the tour going?   It’s such a joy to be out on the road again after the last three brutal years of uncertainty, fear and restrictions. I am a performer first and foremost, and without an audience a performer is a man looking into a void, a black hole.   What’s prompted An Accent Waiting to Happen?    I have never really toured the show before. I have done a few isolated gigs but never got it into a shape where it works every night. I did a couple of shows in London

Baby Bushka are much more than a Kate Bush tribute band. Anyone who witnessed this all singing, all dancing American ensemble’s first visit to Scotland in 2018 will know this already. With little chance of the real Ms Bush returning to the live arena after briefly coming up for air in 2014, the eight multi-tasking women who make up Baby Bushka have picked up the slack by making the likes of Wuthering Heights, Running Up That Hill, and of course Babooshka, their own.    Brought together in San Diego, California, by Natasha Kozally, aka Boss Bush, Baby Bushka combine baroque musical arrangements, flamboyant costumes and Lindsay Kemp inspired choreography to reimagine Bush’s routines for the twenty-first century. The end result is a fabulist pop art cabaret honouring its inspiration with a collective display of devotion that captures the magic of its source while reinvigorating the songs with each member’s own considerable personality.   A self-titled album released in 2020 showcased the

When legendary radio DJ John Peel sadly passed away in 2004, one of his many legacies was the welter of more than 4,000 radio sessions recorded exclusively for his late night radio show. Many more were recorded for Peel’s fellow BBC Radio 1 DJs, including Janice Long. While some of the artists behind the sessions went on to mainstream success, often the most interesting ones showcased were those who never crossed over, but whose work makes up what are arguably far more valuable artistic statements of their time.   One of the conduits for that was Alan McGee’s Creation label, about to be immortalised in Creation Stories, the McGee-based biopic that premiered at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival. As with Peel, Creation similarly left behind a significant catalogue that went way beyond the hits.    While Creation wasn’t based in Scotland, many of its acts were from here, with Glasgow born McGee arguably copping his moves from Postcard, Fast Product and other indie labels that seized the m

It may be a quarter of a century since Ryuichi Sakamoto scored the soundtrack to Nagisa Oshima’s Japanese prisoner of war flick, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, but it remains the Tokyo-born electronic music pioneer’s best known work. This is partly, one suspects, to do with the film’s pop cultural iconography. David Bowie, about to embark on his commercial Let’s Dance phase, starred, while Sakamoto’s title theme was released in a vocal version with Japan’s David Sylvian.   By that time Sakamoto had already produced six solo albums in tandem with his tenure in Yellow Magic Orchestra, the synth-pop trio whose oriental-influenced state-of-art production values went pan-global. A multitude of soundtracks followed, including an Oscar winning collaboration with Talking Head David Byrne on Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, while Sakamoto’s stand-alone work spans almost forty albums. All this is a far cry from the 57 year-old composer’s solo date at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall to coincide with t

Things have moved on since Stina Tweeddale started her online music sessions on the Honeyblood Facebook page. Originally broadcast live from the Glasgow-based singer and song-writer’s Iceblink Luck studio, Tweeddale’s half-hour nightly solo sets augmented by occasional guests were some of the earliest events to rethink how artists can get their work out there during the Covid-19 pandemic. With all live dates curtailed till further notice, the driving force behind Honeyblood across three albums since forming the band eight years ago began the shows as a practical way of filling the gap, as well as supporting herself and fellow musicians. Tweeddale set up a GoFundMe page, inviting those tuning in to donate, with all proceeds split between those who took part in the shows and Help Musicians Scotland, the independent charity set up to support those on the frontline of such an insecure profession. In the current climate, especially, with the everyday physical and mental well-being unde