Coffee-Table Notes

Internationalism and collaboration on scales both great and small were  very much on the agenda for a year in Scotland's theatre scene that rode the recessionary wave with some consistently ambitious programming that wasn't afraid to mix up classical and popular forms. The tone was set right at the start of the year when Vox Motus presented their biggest show to date, The Infamous Brothers Davenport. As scripted by Peter Arnott and conceived by Candice Edmunds and Jamie Harrison, the play dissected the alleged supernatural powers of a pair of vaudevillian siblings with a box of tricks all of their own. Vox Motus' look at artifice and belief was oddly book-ended at the end of the year with a set of similar themes from Peepolykus' The Arthur Conan Doyle Appreciation Society at the Traverse. Both were bested, however, by Rob Drummond's Bullet Catch, a close-up solo dissection of the same terrain that created real magic out of similarly styled hokum. Also...

Time was when the main event for Hogmanay in Edinburgh saw revellers gather en masse outside the Tron Kirk on the corner of the High Street where the bells would be seen in with inebriated abandon. This pilgrimage to the seventeenth century landmark built at the behest of Charles 1 continued long after the Tron closed as a church in 1952, and only since the rise of large-scale Hogmanay events in the last twenty years did the tradition go into decline as the focus moved to Princes Street. This year sees an attempt to revive the spirit of old Tron Kirk gatherings in the form of something styled as A Festival of the Extraordinary. Initiated and backed by the Drambuie drinks company, this three day event runs from the night before to the morning after Hogmanay, and aims to bridge elements of the new year's tradition both old and new. This is done with a mixture of film screenings and performances in the daytime under the banner of The Drambuie Surreal Sessions, while the evening...

As with the season they're generally cashing in on, Christmas albums somewhat mercifully only come round once a year. While much festive fare is as depressingly jolly as it is unbearably ubiquitous – see Top of the Pops 2's annual Xmas special, plus department stores' endless looping of the Now That's What I Call Christmas compilation – there have been some genuinely inventive reimaginings of the season of goodwill in pop form. Both Motown and Phil Spector released superb Christmas compilations, while The Beach Boys and James Brown filled a whole album apiece to their very singular takes on festive fare. On a more leftfield front, both ZE Records and Factory-connected Belgian label Les Disques du Crepescule released Christmas albums. While the former gifted the world The Waitresses joyous Christmas Wrapping on ZE's dryly named A Christmas Album in 1981, the latter's Ghosts of Christmas Past collection found the likes of The Durutti Column, Cabaret Voltai...

At first glance, this year's Edinburgh's Hogmanay festival which kicks off this weekend is as civic-mindedly populist as it comes. Or at least that's the case as presented in its brochure with a big number '13' emblazoned on the cover in neon-styled lettering with the words 'BE LUCKY' beneath. The annual torchlight procession is in there, as is the candle-lit concert at St Giles and the Concert in the Gardens this year headlined by the stadium pomp of Simple Minds. The Loony Dook is a must, and even the sled dog races have made a return this year. Look beyond all this, however, and there is a very subtle subversion in the programme that takes the avant-garde out of the art-house and unleashes it on the streets and in some of Edinburgh's most august institutions. Most of this is to be found in Your Lucky Day, a New Year's Day construction which invites revellers to throw a dice which, depending on how they land, will take them to one of twelve unk...

4 stars So-called 'regional' album compilations were crucial statements of independence during the post-punk fall-out that briefly shook up the bone-idle London-centric record company hegemony. Snapshot documents of blink-and-you'll-miss-em scenes in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Brighton and other cities proliferated on shoestring DIY labels, which, politically, were as much about self-determination as music. By collecting and selecting new material from eight Glasgow-based acts, this new collaboration between three of the city's micro-labels (including the debut release by venue Stereo) does something similar in capturing the here-and-nowness of a fecund and forever-changing independent musical landscape. Tut Vu Vu, Palms, Organs of Love, Gummy Stumps, Sacred Paws, The Rosy Crucifixion, Muscles of Joy, Jacob Yates and the Pearly Gate Lock Pickers all present new work in an elaborate box set made up of two 12” vinyl LPs, a CD and a booklet featuring ...

4 stars With art school credentials to spare, Colvin Cruikshank's trio of Edinburgh scene-setters mash up a grab-bag of left-field post-punk conceptualists to make something that seems to channel the ghosts of every act who ever made the Wee Red Bar such a crucial hot-bed of musical and artistic eclectica while still sounding oh so very now. There's even a glam rock styled tribute to the bands alma mater on 'E.C.A'. Musically jaunty and lyrically wry, Snide Rhythms are possessed with an off-kilter quirkiness bordering on brilliance that more than justifies the band's name. On 'Yah Versus Schemie', they even manage to dissect the sociological roots of class war in one minute and fifteen seconds with a wit that withers even as it puts two fingers up to both parties before running away snickering.  The List, December 2012 ends

When Lady Gaga embarked on the early stages of her Monster Ball tour in 2009, it not only marked the provocative pop princess' crossover into the major league with a spectacular show described by some as the first ever pop electro opera. In it's look, Monster Ball also unwittingly formed a bridge between a pub theatre in Shepherd's Bush, art-punk band Wire, the Royal Opera House, lingerie label Agent Provocateur and the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. All of these, including Monster Ball, featured the work of theatre designer Es Devlin. Fans can get a taste of Devlin's work for Monster Ball in Transformation and Revelation: Gormley to Gaga – Designing For Performance, an exhibition of some thirty-three major British designers which opened at Summerhall in Edinburgh this weekend. “It was a very interesting point in her trajectory,” says Devlin. “For Monster Ball we were given an initial budget, then almost every day it went higher. It was design...