Coffee-Table Notes

Edinburgh International Festival Five stars Dark times require enlightened responses. So it is with Edinburgh International Festival’s reaction to the enforced cancellation of the annual arts extravaganza due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. With no live events possible, as with so many endeavours over the last few months, EIF has turned to digital evocations of its assorted splendours to make up its My Light Shines On programme.   Hope Dickson Leach’s thirty-minute film for the National Theatre of Scotland takes its cue from the theatrical tradition of leaving a solitary light on in theatre buildings when they’re closed. Conceived with NTS artistic director Jackie Wylie and dramaturg/director Philip Howard, the result is a slow-burning cinematic love letter to those that breathe life into them when you’re not looking.    On the one hand, as the camera leads us on a back-stage tour of Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre, we get a bite-size collage of NTS greatest hits past, ...

I love Viz. The potty-mouthed Newcastle-sired adult comic is one of my very favourite things in the world. As a barometer of the state we’re in beyond a media/parliamentary bubble, Viz’s satires of unreconstructed British kids’ comics of the 1970s and latter-day social stereotypes are up there with the lyrics of Birkenhead absurdist commentators, Half Man Half Biscuit.   On an entertainingly puerile level, the likes of Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres and Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles have been provoking guffaws among terminal adolescents since Viz was first founded by Chris Donald and his mates in 1979. Back then, it was a DIY zine flogged around record shops and pubs. Look beyond such naughty fun, and strips like Drunken Bakers, by writer Barney Farmer and artist Lee Healey, are up there with Samuel Beckett. The Male Online, also by Farmer and Healey, is a withering thumbnail portrait of little Britainites. Then there is Sid the Sexist, the jingoistic a...

Online and around the city HELLO. It’s a simple enough greeting to usher you into Edinburgh Art Festival’s response to the cancellation of this year’s physical event due to the fall-out from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but it works. Especially when the word is laid out in understated black letters on a series of white flags draped from various sites around an infinitely quieter city than usual as Peter Liversidge’s contribution to the programme. These aren’t flags flying with triumphalist symbolism, but are a peaceful greeting of welcome, inclusion and surrender of the most romantic kind. Like the other nine works on show, Flags for Edinburgh (2020) revisits work first shown at a previous EAF. This isn’t so much a greatest hits selection as a reimagining of each work and the resonances they might have in this brave new world since Covid-19 changed things forever. In Liversidge’s case, this was in 2013. The welcome the flags implied then was just as warm, but, unlike now, as t...

When Manchester pop-punk subversives Buzzcocks infiltrated the charts with their 1978 single, Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve), the song’s infectious true confession was a perfectly cynical display of unrequited love-lust. But the 2 minutes 40 second litany of gender-neutral spleen-venting was more than just a dirty secret laid bare. Penned by late Buzzcocks frontman Pete Shelley in a parked van outside Edinburgh’s main post office on Waterloo Place, the song’s resonance has trickled down the decades in a way that goes significantly beyond its original hormonally-charged intent. Shelley’s breathlessly yearning lyrics set to an amphetamine-driven buzz-saw melody not only showed how artforms inter-connect and inspire one another during periods of social distancing and enforced isolation. The background to the evolution of Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) itself chimes with some very current concerns. These include the importance of grassroots music...

When it was announced that this year’s Turner Prize would not be taking place in its usual form, it marked the latest evolution of one of the UK’s most well-known art awards. The change was done out of necessity, with the award’s usual accompanying exhibition of the four short-listees cancelled due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Rather than drop out of view completely, this prompted the decision by this year’s Turner jury to give ten bursaries of £10,000 to ten long-listed artists rather than £25,000 to an outright winner and £5,000 apiece to three runners-up. However necessary, such a lateral leap nevertheless makes quite a statement, both about collective action over the cult of individualism, as well as the Turner’s own chameleon-like tendencies and willingness to move with the times. This follows on from the 2019 award, when the four short-listees requested that they share the award between them rather than sanction a sole winner. This show of unity between the disp...