Coffee-Table Notes

SWG3, Glasgow Four stars “Welcome to the future?” jokes Robert Hodgens, aka Bobby Bluebell, as he and the rest of arguably Glasgow’s most unsung indie-pop troubadours are serenaded onstage by Ronald Binge’s evergreen Shipping Forecast theme, Sailing By. What follows in the first of two Sunday sessions presented by the Last Night From Glasgow record label is probably the first ever live matinee gig since the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic closed down venues six months ago.    LNFG has already released what is destined to become a totem of lockdown artistry in their Isolation Sessions compilation, and here show equal determination to make things happen, no matter what. With the grassroots live music industry on the verge of collapse due to an unviable sticking plaster approach to financial support, the only ones getting creative, it seems, are the actual creatives.   With an open-sided gazebo constructed in SWG3’s Galviniser’s yard housing a socially distanced audience sat at wo...

Juliette Gréco – actress, singer   Born February 7, 1927; died September 23, 2020     Juliette Gréco, who has died of a stroke aged 93 at her home near St Tropez, was an icon of post World War Two French bohemianism. Before she became the last of the great French chanteuse’, Gréco’s presence became a vital part of Left Bank café culture where intellectuals held court. Here, she became friends with the era’s literary set, including Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Prévert. She learnt, she said, by listening to them. The creative energy was reciprocated, and she captivated them all.     “Gréco has a million poems in her voice,” said Sartre, who based a character on her in his The Roads to Freedom trilogy, and wrote the songs for her that first made her take the leap onto the stage. “In her mouth,” Sartre went on to say, “my words become precious stones.” In such heady times, not for nothing was Gréco nicknamed la Muse de l’existe...

  The Common Guild until December 2020 “Whit yi’ up to, mate?” asks a befuddled voice 18 and a half minutes into  A walk through a  different  city ,  Luke Fowler ’s aural excursion through the centre of locked down Glasgow. “Whit yi’ doin’? You doin’ somethin’?”   Fowler’s sonic derive forms the seventh and final contribution to In the open, the Common Guild’s off-site response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. This has seen six artists move out of the Glasgow townhouse based gallery and into the wild to create new audio works designed to be listened to outdoors on headphones during government-sanctioned daily walks.   Collated from 500 hours of recordings, Fowler’s 35-minute edit that makes up A walk through a  different  city ambles its way through a winding route, that begins on Sauchiehall Street and ends beneath the Kingston Bridge beside the River Clyde. Inbetween, Fowler leads the listener through assorted back alleys onto Buchanan St...

Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2020 until October 11 th , 2020 Luke Fowler is no stranger to remixing the lives of crucial counter-cultural figures on film. Experimental and electronic music too has long fired Fowler’s oeuvre, from nights at Glasgow club, Optimo, to his own adventures in disco with the band, AMOR. Fowler’s new 21-minute study of Hi-NRG disco pioneer Patrick Cowley combines both strands, and follows Fowler’s 2017 study of American electronic composer Martin Bartlett, Electro-Pythagorus.   Premiering as part of the 2020 Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, which this year has moved its 53-film programme online, Fowler’s film continues follows his 2018 BFAMAF commission, Enceindre. That film was made with sound recordist Chris Watson, who opened this year’s festival with Dark Cinema, a sonic companion piece recorded in and around Berwick, and available in podcast form as part of the programme.   While seemingly worlds apart from Enceindre’s parallel images...

Pete Fulwell – Music manager Born December 30, 1944; died February 20, 2020    Pete Fulwell, who has died aged 75, was a major force for music in Liverpool for almost half a century. Fulwell was at the centre of his adopted home’s underground scenes from the 1970s, joining Roger Eagle and Ken Testi as managing director of legendary club Eric’s, which became a playground for the city’s punk and post-punk waifs and strays in search of a place to call their own. Fulwell later helped set up the Inevitable record label, before moving into management and steering artists including Pete Wylie, Pete Burns, Holly Johnson, It’s Immaterial, Black and The Christians to mainstream success.    Pete Fulwell was born in Shrewsbury, and moved to Liverpool in 1967 to study psychology. After finishing his degree, he began a PhD based on research into mapping cognitive architecture for automated teaching systems. Frustrated by primitive technology, he dropped out. With ambitions to star...

Barry St John (Eliza Thomson) – Singer   Born 1943: died July 24, 2020   Barry St. John, who has died aged 76, was a singer whose early singles and a sole album, According to St. John (1968), are now regarded by 1960s pop and Northern Soul aficionados as classics. Yet, despite being possessed with a soulful voice honed on the Glasgow spit and sawdust circuit and Hamburg cellar bars, St. John never quite hit the big time in her own right.    She nevertheless became one of the go-to backing singers for rock cognoscenti throughout the 1970s, appearing on records by John Lennon, Pink Floyd, Mott the Hoople and Elton John. St John’s voice can be heard on Lennon’s Power to the People on his Imagine album, four songs on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Brian Ferry’s take on Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and three songs on John’s Madman Across the Water album, including Tiny Dancer.    Eliza Janet Thomson was born in the Gallowgate area of Glasgow to Jenny and Arthur ...

‘In 1964, in Edinburgh, on the last day of the Festival Drama Conference, a nude lady was wheeled  across a balcony in a trolley.’ So observed poet, painter and occasional pop star Adrian Henri in his book, Environments and Happenings, published a decade later. ‘Ever since then,’ Henri concluded, ‘the Great British Public has associated happenings with naked ladies.’ While this possibly says as much about Henri’s preoccupations as anything else, he wasn’t wrong. Apart, that is, from the date of the incident, which actually occurred a year earlier, during the first week of September 1963. One of the event’s co-conspirators, theatre director Charles Marowitz, dates it in his memoir, Burnt Bridges, as having taken place in 1962.  Both men’s recollections suggests that the old cliché about how if you can remember the ‘60s you weren’t really there might well be more true than anything said by either chronicler of their age. Nevertheless, Henri’s highlighting of one of the popular (...