Coffee-Table Notes

The last time Franz Ferdinand were supposed to play Edinburgh’s Hogmanay’s Concert in the Gardens, the Glasgow-based band had recently caused a stir with their first single, Darts of Pleasure., Its follow-up, Take Me Out, was set to be released in twelve days’ time, while their eponymously named album was two months away from being unleashed into the world. The then four-piece version of Franz Ferdinand featuring vocalist Alex Kapranos, guitarist Nick McCarthy, bass player Bob Hardy and drummer Paul Thomson were sired in Glasgow’s fecund DIY art and music melting pot, and were the cool kids’ new favourites. It was already clear to regulars on the scene at Optimo and Glasgow School of Art’s Vic Café that Franz’s new wave of post-punk disco cut from the stylistic cloth of indie obscurities by the likes of Josef K and The Monochrome Set was about to storm the mainstream.   Opening a Hogmanay bill headlined by Erasure and The Coral was a big deal, both for the band and event o...

When French street theatre fabulists Transe Express go wandering along Princes Street as part of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay this year, it’s unlikely they will be missed by the thousands of revellers who will make up their accidental audience at the night’s main street party. Using giant structures, aerial interventions and a mixture of captivating visuals and operatic arias, the company will bring more than thirty years’ experience of making a spectacle of themselves to see out the old year in style. This will form part of the event’s We Love You strand, designed to celebrate the importance of Europe’s cultural connections. “It should be very beautiful,” says Transe Express’s international production manager Nicole Dittmar Ragaigne of the company’s programme for Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, produced by the London-based Underbelly company. “We know there will be a lot going on in Princes Street, and the only thing we can’t be sure of is how people will respond. We hope they will stop for a ...

Cooper Gallery, Dundee Four stars There’s a crash and a clang in the front foyer of the Cooper Gallery, where a deceptively stately-looking contraption of percussion instruments and junkyard detritus greets those attending this first retrospective of the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, the east-London sired trio of performance artist Anne Bean, sound auteur Paul Burwell and sculptor Richard Wilson, who throughout the 1980s, built instruments from rubbish found in skips, used them to make primal symphonies and performed them as post-industrial multi-media spectacles that lit up the landscape. The pan-global reverberations continue upstairs, where, in the main room, sheets of metal occasionally clatter into mechanical life to shake up the formalities  Last sighted (and sited) in Scotland at the Third Eye Centre and in 1986, making an epic intervention in St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, the Bow Gamelan Ensemble’s surviving members Bean and Wilson have reunited to show...