Coffee-Table Notes

Richard Walker’s early schooldays have clearly left their mark in this small but expansive exhibition of paintings by the Cumbernauld born artist. This is most evident in the two black and white photographs of the now demolished modernist new town primary school Walker attended, and which are placed like bookends at the top of the show’s large scale title piece that hangs across the entirety of the living room size gallery’s main wall.   In one image, three children play beside a totemic concrete water tower. In the other, a deserted school refectory awaits the bell to fill it with rowdy life as light pours through its voguish spaceship styled windows.  Each of these small pictures is framed in an oval shaped cut out that resembles something that might sit on an elderly relative’s mantelpiece. Inbetween, at the painting’s centre, another egg shaped image suggests something darker beyond its frame.Beneath it, an array of tentacles and roots jostle for space in what may or may n...

Four stars   Rock’s rich tapestry is mythologised one more time in  Prime’s new mini series adapted from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best-selling novel. Following the rise and fall of the fictitious 1970s stadium-sized band that gives the show its title, the ten episodes are driven by the fractious relationship between bandleader Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) and his vocal foil and reluctant songwriting partner, Daisy Jones (Riley Keough).    The substance fuelled soap opera that follows charts all the  incestuous inter-band chemistry, intimate excesses and self-destructive largesse that have become as familiar in music biz fiction as in the real life crash and burn Greek tragedies it imitates. This is framed as a twentieth anniversary documentary that allows the straight-to-camera narration to emulate the book’s oral history style.    With a largely female writing team on board, Reese Witherspoon an executive producer, and real life girl in a band Kim Gordon a ...

Three stars   Like The Bible, The Sex Pistols story has many versions. Director Danny Boyle and writer Craig Pearce’s six-part drama for FX Productions looks to the gospel according to guitarist Steve Jones as the basis for this latest piece of myth-making, drawn from Jones’ 2017 memoir,  Lonely Boy .    John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, has condemned Pistol as a “middle class fantasy”. If he watches without prejudice, he’ll see an over-excited if eminently watchable yarn that marries reimaginings of well-worn Pistols legends to social history and nods to pre-punk 1970s Brit-flicks, with dropped-in archive footage aplenty.    Every line of Pearce’s script sounds like a Situationist manifesto, and is delivered with an accompanying performative archness. As Johnny, Anson Boon is more Rik from The Young Ones than Rotten; Talulah Riley and Thomas Brodie-Sangster ham it up wildly as shop-front svengalis Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren; while Maisie Williams m...