Coffee-Table Notes

Old Kirk, Forgue Five stars   “Not since John Knox called the organ a box of whistles has anybody played like this.” So says Anthony Richardson from the Friends of Forgue Kirk introducing the opening concert of the Aberdeen based soundFestival 2024 twentieth anniversary programme of contemporary music.    As Richardson indicates, Claire M Singer’s approach to the organ is unique, as the Aberdeenshire born composer has proved on her records for the Touch imprint. Drawing from Singer’s walks in the Aberdeenshire landscape, and with many works named after the Cairngorm hills that inspired them, this  makes for a quietly panoramic display.    Singer’s most recent album, Saor, which translates from Scottish Gaelic as ‘Free’, was partly recorded in tonight’s venue, a striking hillside village church built in 1819. With Singer having discovered that some of her ancestors are buried here, this made tonight’s concert a very special homecoming on several levels....

Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars   When Martyn Bennett started performing his radical fusion of Scottish traditional music and contemporary beats and samples around underground Edinburgh clubs in the mid 1990s, little did he know where it would end up. Almost two decades since Bennett’s untimely passing, and just shy of ten years since Greg Lawson pulled together an orchestral rendition of Bennett’s final album, GRIT, and the more than eighty strong Lawson led orchestra is still going strong as Bennett’s legacy burls on.    This makes for an epic way to end the 2024 Edinburgh International Festival in a set that builds on Bennett’s already expansive originals to become a musical expression of a global village.   Vocal lead comes from Fiona Hunter and Karen Matheson, with Hunter setting a rousing tone on the opening take on Ewan MacColl’s ‘Move’. This continues with the theatrical fun of ‘Aye?’, jazz saxophone on ‘Wedding’/’Swallowtail’, and a choir and strings as big a...

Queen’s Hall Four stars   “I feel emotional,” says Natasha Khan after reading If You Be the Universe, a poem dedicated to her daughter, towards the end of her Edinburgh International Festival show in her terminally spectral guise as Bat for Lashes. Khan may resemble a Victorian sprite in her ornate white dress, but it is motherhood that fired The Dream of Delphi, the first Bat for Lashes album since 2019, just as it becomes the primal drive behind much of Khan’s performance.    Flanked by Laura Groves on keyboards and Charlotte Hatherley on guitar, Khan opens with an elaborate mime during the instrumental introduction to At Your Feet. The title track from the new album sees all three women offer up some kind of choreographed offering to some sacred deity on high.   Khan rewinds to 2019’s vampire girl gang opus, Lost Girls, for the nocturnal wanderings of The Hunger, perching on the edge of the stage for the big time sensuality of the piano led Mountains. She wie...

Usher Hall, Edinburgh - Five stars When a dressing gown clad Chilly Gonzales declares Kanye West to be the new Wagner, given that the timpani led ditty the lyric comes from is called ‘Fuck Wagner’, it’s probably not meant as a compliment. It has, however, prompted Gonzales to start a campaign in his adopted home of Cologne to change the name of  Richard-Wagner-Straß e to Tina-Turner- Straße . Such are the pop/classical tensions of the artist formerly known as Jason Charles Beck’s world.    After a restless run of instrumental albums, collaborations, a Christmas record and a French language opus, Gonzales and his three-piece band open with the bongo-led title number from forthcoming song-based album, GONZO, on which forthright musings on art, artistry and audiences are to the fore.    Beyond the new material, Gonzales vamps his way through Satieesque sketches and poundingly propulsive epics. There are showbiz yarns about his collaborations with Drake and Daft Pun...

Burns&Beyond Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Four stars   There can’t be many serious contemporary classical composers who end their live shows with a classic pop sing-along anthem, This is exactly what Anna Meredith and band did, however, for their Burns&Beyond festival show of maximalist machine age euphoria delivered with enough Tiggerish ebullience to sound like a Radio 3 rave.   With Meredith currently working on a new album, this one-off show was clearly a treat for both her and tuba player Hanna Mbuya, cellist Maddie Cutter, Sam Wilson on drums and Jack Ross on guitar. Sporting matching jumpsuits that make them look like they’ve stepped out of a 1970s TV ad for minty sweet, Pacers, the quintet launch themselves into an opening rally of the first three tracks of Meredith’s second album, Fibs, released in 2019. Over the next hour, the relentless zing never lets up for a second.   Sawbones is bashed out with Meredith pounding drums like her life depended on it; Inha...

Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Four stars   ‘Be warned’, goes the disclaimer for one of the Burns&Beyond festival’s flagship shows this year. ‘This will not be your normal Burns Night or gig!’ Callum Easter’s post modern variety show that follows pretty much sums up the ‘Beyond’ bit of the festival name.    With Easter clad in white and carrying what turns out to be a joke book, he sets himself up as mine host and top turn of a night that culminates in a killer set of accordion driven Caledonian blues, electronic No Wave primitivism and off kilter David Lynch themes in waiting. With the action beamed out on a screen behind him, Easter opens with a solo number before his band The Roulettes join him on twin drums to conjure up something resembling Suicide playing a ceilidh.    The haggis is piped in by Fraser Fifield accompanied by a whip wielding Mistress Inka, aka Hettie Noir, vocalist with Edinburgh supergroup, Scorpio Leisure. There are no cheesy showbiz duets ...

O2 Edinburgh Thursday 21st September   Four stars   “’Ello!” hams John Lydon, returning to the stage after he and the rest of Public Image Ltd have ploughed through a glorious rewind as far back as 1979’s Metal Box record alongside songs from their recently released End of World album. By Lydon’s account, the gap since their last one has been “eight years of fucking misery for all of us.”   Sporting a long coat and ornate vintage tie, Lydon looks and sounds every inch the music hall Dadaist provocateur. With lyrics perched on a music stand, he unleashes his guttural declamations over bassist Scott Firth and drummer Bruce Smith’s pounding rhythms and guitarist Lu Edmonds’ torrent of jaggy metal shards.     Having set the scene with album opener, Penge, a backhanded guide to the South East London suburb of the song’s title, the dub echo bass and drums of Albatross, from Metal Box, is a spacey and still startling sounding creation. Similarly, the kneejerk snarl of ...

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   Swatting flies probably wasn’t on John Cale’s agenda prior to his Edinburgh International Festival appearance, but such an irritating insect circles Cale over several songs in. The elder statesman of avant pop classicism finally appears to repel the assault from behind his keyboard, necessitating a roadie to come on and reposition his microphone.   This gives an extra edge to an already mighty Guts, from 1975 album Slow Dazzle, one of several sojourns through Cale’s 1970s post Velvet Underground purple patch. This sees Cale’s superb three-piece band led by long term guitarist Dustin Boyer breathe fresh life into the title tracks of Cale’s Paris 1919 and Helen of Troy albums, from 1973 and 1975 respectively, as well as Barracuda, from 1974’s Fear record.     Fleshed out by understated electronic textures that go beyond rock and roll to something more progressively propulsive, there is even a magnificently demonic take on 1980 s...

Playhouse Four stars Alison Goldfrapp’s eyes are staring out at the audience in giant size close up beamed from the full length of the stage’s entire back wall. In the flesh, Goldfrapp, keyboardist Evelyn May and drummer Seb Sternberg are battering out Strict Machine, Goldfrapp’s now classic piece of glamtastic electronic squelch as the climax to the disco diva’s Edinburgh International Festival extravaganza.  For the last hour, Goldfrapp has been vamping her way through The Love Invention, her first full-blown solo shebang after decades in partnership with sonic sculptor Will Gregory. Sired during lockdown, The Love Invention saw Goldfrapp co-opt pop mavericks Richard X, James Greenwood, songwriter Hannah Robinson, Norwegian duo Röyksopp and German house double act Claptone for the record’s machine age dancefloor friendly opus. The experience thus far has been a slow burning epic, opening with Hotel 23 and the record’s title track, with Goldfrapp slinking her sparkly way...

Leith Depot, Edinburgh Four stars   “Does anyone know what they’re doing?”   This is a question posed by Callum Easter as the first headline act to play the all-new Leith Depot. Given that Edinburgh venues don’t exactly open every day, Easter’s question works on several levels, as Leith Depot moves its live music operations into an adjacent ground floor unit next to its popular community centred bar.    Having survived a proposed demolition that would have seen the end of both the bar and its former upstairs space that had become one of Edinburgh’s most significant grassroots venues, and then forced to navigate assorted Covid induced lockdowns, Thursday’s official opening night resurrection was a considerable show of strength.    First up was Romanian Radio 3 favourite, Lizabett Russo, whose mix of traditional folk stylings played on a vintage acoustic guitar and wedded to vocal loops made for an ethereal and charming form of chamber pop.   Wielding an...

SWG3, Glasgow Four stars “Welcome to the future?” jokes Robert Hodgens, aka Bobby Bluebell, as he and the rest of arguably Glasgow’s most unsung indie-pop troubadours are serenaded onstage by Ronald Binge’s evergreen Shipping Forecast theme, Sailing By. What follows in the first of two Sunday sessions presented by the Last Night From Glasgow record label is probably the first ever live matinee gig since the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic closed down venues six months ago.    LNFG has already released what is destined to become a totem of lockdown artistry in their Isolation Sessions compilation, and here show equal determination to make things happen, no matter what. With the grassroots live music industry on the verge of collapse due to an unviable sticking plaster approach to financial support, the only ones getting creative, it seems, are the actual creatives.   With an open-sided gazebo constructed in SWG3’s Galviniser’s yard housing a socially distanced audience sat at wo...

St Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh St Cecilia was the patron saint of church music whose executioner took three attempts to chop off her head. Often, this two day event seemed to similarly lack an edge. With all performances unamplified, Three Blows aimed to explore the acoustics of the oldest purpose built concert hall in Scotland, oval shaped interior, domed ceiling and all, but this was only really achieved by the most experienced artists on show, Keith Rowe and Red Krayola mainstay Mayo Thompson, who headlined a night apiece.  Elsewhere, most of what followed was appealing enough, but given that the bulk of the acts come from a radical visual arts scene based around Glasgow’s Modern Institute, it was surprising how readily most clung to conventional performance set-ups. Saturday’s For The Voice session opened with Tattie Toes, a junkshop Brechtian quartet framed around Basque singer Nerea Bello, whose undulating wail was upstaged slightly by the incorporation of a spinning top i...

Tolbooth / Various venues, Stirling The longest running leftfield music festival in Scotland now styles itself as ‘Stirling’s No Limits Music Festival’. This year it spread its wings not only throughout the Tolbooth’s multi-tiered interior, but offsite to spaces ancient and modern, from the Church of the Holy Rude next door to a concrete underpass on the edge of town. The biggest presence over the course of the three days was Bill Wells, whose prolific output as pianist, bassist and composer has made him a quietly powerful force, both as a sideman and in his own right. Wells introduced the weekend with a teatime set by his self-styled National Jazz Trio of Scotland, their classically elegant originals setting a wistful tone for a Friday night of understated pop.  Swedish trio Tape led the quiet charge, their mix of harmonium, guitar patterns and electronics a prettified and gentle display that sounded like Roy Budd scoring for State River Widening. Taken by Trees, led by fo...

The Arches / Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow When Gustav Metzger talks about the doomed 1937 flight of the Hindenburg in the same terms as the jet planes which crashed into the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, it puts his ideas of auto-destructive art into an explicitly political context which advocates creativity beyond catastrophe. Metzger’s quietly gnomic presence at the Self-Cancellation strand of 2008’s Instal festival gave things a sense of historical countercultural kudos not seen in Glasgow since he was invited to take part in a 30th anniversary discussion of the Destruction In Art Symposium in 1996.  Also present at both events was novelist/agitator Stewart Home, whose early 90s Art Strike took inspiration from Metzger’s 1970s model. Home pointed to how the nihilism of punk was born from a brief time in the mid-1970s when, with industrial unrest crippling Britain’s industries, there was the possibility of a real revolutionary situation. Metzger himself observed at Sa...

The Arches, Glasgow The fertile noise scene on Instal’s own doorstep has made this offshoot festival a welcome addition. 11 acts are on show in two late night slots following the main Instal festival, and added a speakeasy frisson to proceedings. Positioning them in The Arches public bar, awash with pop-eyed clubbers, makes for an at times uneasily tense mix. The abysmal sound on the first night doesn’t help matters, though neither does opening with the scratchy phutterings of Edinburgh duo Usurper, whose barely audible exercise with ‘disabled’ instruments are pretty much lost to the babble.  There’s no danger of that with Jazzfinger’s martial slabs of sound, and any subtleties inherent in the primitive analogue wail of female duo Hockyfrilla (it’s Swedish for mullet) are stampeded over by their collaboration with Muscletusk’s relentlessly pounding sludge. Squeezed into 20 minute slots, there’s an ad hoc urgency to such collaborations, and pairing Wounded Knee’s vocal loops w...

Mitchell Library, Glasgow, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art The idea of Patti Smith performing in a library is perfect. At this intimate solo show to launch an exhibition of drawings, paintings and photographs originally seen as part of Strange Messenger, her 2002 Andy Warhol Museum retrospective, here appended with new work, this most bookish of artists (rock star, poet, whatever) is herself a walking fan-girl encyclopaedia of absorbed literacy. The glasses Smith sports while reading from her poetry collection, Auguries Of Innocence, add to the overall air of bohemian cool. Tonight, having forgotten to bring her own copy of her book and with a seriously out of tune guitar, Smith comes on like a dotty but hip favourite aunt to Glasgow’s art crowd sitting cross-legged on the floor. Yet, for all her good-natured humility, death pervades Smith’s set. From the bird flu and “hoof and mouth” disease she dedicates poems to, to her own coming to terms with grief on My Blakeia...

Tolbooth, Stirling Almost midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Stirling is the ideal east meets west no man’s land for a festival like Le Weekend. Imbued with a loose-knit vibe, unlike the twin metropolises it satellites, it has no chips on its shoulder or sniffy airs and graces, simply because it’s neither here nor there. For seven years, such wonderful geographical incongruity has allowed Le Weekend space enough to breathe, and this year it stretched itself to four days. This wasn’t enough, however, for Oval’s Markus Popp. Scheduled to perform with vocalist Eriko Toyoda as So at a fringe exhibition in the neighbouring Changing Room gallery, with flights booked, Popp got to the departure lounge but turned around at the 11th hour and duly went home. Such pique doesn’t discourage Thursday’s opening act, The Hamid Drake Trio, a spit ’n’ sawdust free collaboration between the Chicago percussionist, veteran saxophonist Paul Dunmall and bassist Paul Rogers. Drake may have been bill...