Coffee-Table Notes

Joseph Summers wasn’t born when Derek Jarman’s film, The Last of England, was premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1987. Once the Berlin-based artist, musician and instrument builder saw Jarman’s impressionistic guerrilla-style portrait of Margaret Thatcher’s broken Britain, however, he was struck by how pertinent it seemed to today. Jarman’s backdrop of burning buildings, masked men with guns and young men seeking respite in the rubble gave way to one of the film’s most memorable scenes, in which regular Jarman collaborator Tilda Swinton claws at the wedding dress she’s wearing while rubbish burns beside her. All of this inspired Summers to compose a new live soundtrack for Jarman’s film following a commission from the Bristol-based Palace International Film Festival of queer cinema. Performed by Summers with his brother Thomas and fellow composer/musician Rosa Irwin-Clark, this aural reimagining of The Last of England can be heard accompanying a screening in Gla...

Pete Greenway never intended playing with The Fall for any more than a couple of festival gigs. As it turned out, he ended up as guitarist with the late Mark E Smith’s ever changing garage-band incendiarists for almost twelve years. During that time, Greenway put up with Smith’s trademark disruptions, from disappearing offstage mid-set, to messing up the sound levels or passing the microphone out to the audience. The effect of this was sometimes shambolic, sometimes thrilling. With Smith remaining imperious even when in obvious poor health, however, it was never ever dull. This was the case when The Fall played what turned out to be the group’s final live show at the Queen Margaret Union in Glasgow, when Smith appeared in a wheelchair two months prior to his death in January 2018 aged 60. Almost two years on, Greenway and his fellow survivors of The Fall’s final line-up, bassist Dave Spurr and drummer Keiron Melling, plus vocalist Sam Curran, have reinvented themselves as Imperial...

Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh Four stars “I’d like to welcome to the stage, Mike Heron and Samuel Beckett,” says Alex Neilson following a lull after the ever restless drummer introduced the now seventy-something former Incredible String Band icon as his special guest for the final song of a generation and genre spanning night. Named with a nod to Greek tragedy, Neilson’s latest incarnation casts himself as king, sporting a skeleton t-shirt while sat behind his drum-kit throne to declaim what he styles as ‘songs of love, loss and loathing’. By this time, a stripped-down Storm the Palace has opened the night with a magnificent fusion of Sophie Dodds’ flying-V guitar and Reuben Taylor’s accordion, with Dodds’ vocal at times resembling Dagmar Krause at her Brechtian best. This is followed by surprise guest, Aidan O’Rourke, from Lau, who gives what is quite possibly the first ever solo fiddle rendition of traditional folk tunes to grace the Sneaky Pete’s stage. O’Rourke calls upon Nei...