Coffee-Table Notes

David Gedge doesn't reckon much to New Year's Eve. As the voice, lyricist and driving force behind Leeds-born indie-rock Luddites The Wedding Present for more than a quarter of a century, such a seemingly curmudgeonly sentiment shouldn't come as a surprise. Despite this, the now California domiciled frontman of what are arguably the ultimate John Peel band has took it upon himself to come back to rainy, chilly and possibly snowy Britain for the seasonally named Seeing Out 2011 With The Wedding Present three-date mini-tour. The first of these shows will take place tonight at The Garage in Glasgow before moving on for a homecoming show in Leeds tomorrow, then finishing up in an undoubtedly lively London on New Year's Eve itself. All of which seems a somewhat contrary cause for celebration. “I've always been a bit disappointed by New Year,” Gedge mourns. “Even as a kid I never liked it. It's over-produced, it's expensive, and there's too many people aro...

When Matthew Zajac was cast in a new play set to tour Sweden, Finland and beyond, he had to learn a brand new language. Because the recent tour of Hohaj, adapted from Swedish writer Elisabeth Rynell's novel by Ellenor Lindgren, was not only set in an imaginary town in the far north of Sweden. As produced by the Vasterbottensteatern repertory theatre based in the town of Skelleftea, Hohaj might have seen Zajac play an incoming drifter, but the play was nevertheless written and subsequently needed to be performed in Swedish. “They can understand what I'm saying,” Zajac jokes. “It was an interesting challenge, having to learn a new language so quickly, but fortunately they have seven or eight week rehearsal periods, which I would say is too long compared to the two to three weeks we have here, which is two short. But I actually needed those seven or eight weeks. It's funny, because I don't really think the language itself is that difficult. There are other l...

When the University of Strathclyde made swingeing budget cuts earlier this year, as is too often the case, it was the arts that suffered. While the university faculty set its sights on becoming a technology and innovation centre on a par with some American institutions, both the Collins Gallery and the Ramshorn Theatre have been forced to close their doors once the plug was unceremoniously pulled. This despite the fact that both venues arguably had the biggest public profile of any centres within the university. As home to Strathclyde Theatre Group for the last twenty years, The Ramshorn in particular connected with a world way beyond academe. Yet, while a separate operation to the Ramshorn under the long term care of artistic director and head of the drama department Susan S Triesman and equally hands-on administrator Sylvia Jamieson, STG looked to have reached its own end following the Ramshorn's closure. With Jamieson and Triesman now retired, rather than shut u...

Many theatre companies are currently in an extended limbo until chief funders Creative Scotland finally decide their fate after what must seem like an eternal wait. As 2011 has proven again and again, however, great art – a word not used much these days – will out despite such an on-going silence. In a year which has seen a merry-go-round of artistic directorships at Perth, the Citizens and Traverse theatres, cross-company collaboration has seemingly been one solution to being able to put on big work in cash-strapped times. If one show illustrated all of the above, it was Age of Arousal, Stellar Quines’s magical-realist whirlwind co-produced by the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh right at the start of the year. Muriel Romanes’ reimagining of Quebecois writer Linda Griffiths’ play was a wildly skew-whiff Victorian costume romp that was by turns sexy, radical, witty and wise in a magnificent fusion of word and deed that seemed to posit a brand new theatrical language. Adventurou...

Street Level, Glasgow, December 17th 2011- February 2th 2012 5 stars Harry Papadopoulos is the great unsung documenter of post-punk, who, between 1978 and 1984, captured a crucial era in pop history in all its geeky glory. Having started out taking snaps for Bobby Bluebell’s fanzine, The Ten Commandments, and orbiting around Postcard Records’ extended family of jangular mavericks who would go on to define themselves as The Sound of Young Scotland, Papadopoulos became a staff photographer on music paper Sounds. Where contemporaries on NME such as Anton Corbijn and Kevin Cummins have been rightly lionised for their work, Papadopoulos’ canon has been all but airbrushed from history. The significance of this major excavation of a huge body of work, then, cannot be understated. With more than three hundred images on show, the fertile Scot-pop scene inevitably dominates. A gangly and giggly Orange Juice era Edwyn Collins skates on thin ice. Josef K vocalist Paul Haig poses li...

Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh November 12th 2011-January 22nd 2012 3 stars Absence makes the heart grow fonder in Andrew Kerr’s first major solo show in Scotland. Almost seventy new paintings discreetly dominate both floors, only interrupted by the odd smattering of drawings or sculptural intervention. Most of the mainly sketchbook-sized works are urgent Zen abstractions awash with counterpointing colours that swoosh into vivid life as if racing to catch a moment before it disappears. Some look like splodged-in blueprints for flags of imaginary countries. Others are rich with implied veldts and blurred deltas, a jungle drum soundtrack the only thing missing along with the blank corners where the works were pinned down while being made. Occasionally more tangible shapes squint through the heat-haze; an alligator here; a motor in motion there. The nails embedded in a small arc of wood give it a sad-eyed cartoonish feel. The bone-like structure dividi...

When the third edition of the Retreat! Festival was awarded a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel award in 2010, it was vindication for a network of independent music promoters who had grown out of what we now must call a post-Fence Collective climate. Chief of these was Tracer Trails, a solo operation run by one Emily Roff, who for the last half-decade has effectively changed the live musical landscape in Edinburgh, and, with like-minded partners in tow, looks set to do something similar in Glasgow. This year alone, Tracer Trails has put on twenty-one shows featuring a total of seventy artists playing in a variety of carefully chosen venues that have included church halls, working mens clubs and community centres. Tracer Trails also ran two festivals, the fourth Retreat! In Edinburgh, and the new Music Is The Music Language weekend in Glasgow. As if this wasn't enough, Roff initiated the Archive Trails project, in which Alasdair Roberts, Aileen Campbell and Drew Wright, ...