Coffee-Table Notes

It was 40 years ago not quite today when I first saw Edwyn Collins on a stage. That was with Orange Juice, the band who spearheaded Postcard Records of Scotland’s fleeting marriage between Velveteen cool and Glasgow cheek in some mythical pop paradise that arguably invented indie-pop as we know it. It was August 19 th  1981, and Orange Juice was headlining a short lived irregular Wednesday night Liverpool club called Plato’s Ballroom.Plato’s had set out its store in January of that year with its first event at the faded chicken-in-a-basket cabaret dive usually called Mr. Pickwick’s. With New Order playing their seventh or eighth gig ever as headliners, the arty-looking poster for the night also promised ‘film’, ‘performance’ and something called a ‘videoteque’.   This amounted to David Lynch’s film, Eraserhead, and assorted flicks by Kenneth Anger beamed onto the back wall of the stage while a soundtrack of The Pop Group’s She is Beyond Good and Evil, The Adventures of Grandma...

Welcome to the Bar…   If the past is another country, listening to The Nectarine No.9’s 9.9.99 album is like stepping, not just into last century, but into another world. Released on 2.2.22 on The Creeping Bent Organisation’s Patreon site, 9.9.99’s unearthed live recording captures Edinburgh’s  premiere voodoo beat seditionists (copyright whoever came up with that phrase) in full flight, but also in flux. Recorded at Edinburgh’s Bongo Club on the sort of date that might prompt all manner of numerologically inspired conspiracies, they weren’t alone.   As history tells it, the generation of tech heads and geeks who inherited the earth regarded 9.9.99 – September 9 th , 1999 - as a precursor to Y2K. This,  they prophesised, would be the day the machine stopped and the world went into collective meltdown. As it turned out, two years into New Labour and the Cool Britannia con trick, and the Scottish Parliament a mere four months old, the tech heads were wrong on all count...

Monica Vitti – Actress   Born November 3, 1931; died February 2, 2022   Monica Vitti, who has died aged 90 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, was an actress who transcended her early arthouse image to become an equally charismatic comic turn. Her enigmatic presence in the former came primarily through her lead roles in four films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. L’Avventura (The Adventure) (1960), La Notte (The Night) (1961), L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) (1962) and Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) (1964) became known collectively in Italy as ‘the quartet of non-communication,’ and made Vitti an international star.    Once she moved into comedy, however, she gave vent to a more expressive theatricality. Where a glance from Vitti could express ice-cool existential ennui and emotional terror in an urban wasteland for Antonioni, many of her films that followed saw her embrace a lighter tone. Vitti spoke of how such seemingly contrary characteristics confused a fi...

Ronnie Spector – Singer Born August 10, 1943; died January 12, 2022    Ronnie Spector, who has died of cancer aged 78, was a singer whose early records fronting The Ronettes defined the sound of 1960s girl groups with something more provocative than some of their saccharine-laden peers. Spector’s euphoric vocals were key to the success behind The Ronettes’s run of hit singles; Be My Baby (1963); Baby, I Love You (1963); (The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up (1964); Walking in the Rain (1964) and more. In a pre British invasion era, these bite-sized melodramas became the soundtrack to teenage yearning.    There wasn’t anything submissive or demure in Spector’s vocal style. She delivered every desire-filled line with pure joy. This was complemented by The Ronettes’ kohl-eyed beehived look and a more assured attitude than some other groups. “We weren’t afraid to look hot,” Spector wrote in her 1989 memoir, Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness. “That was ...

J ohn Miles –  Singer, songwriter, musician Born April 23, 1949; died December 5, 2021    John Miles, who has died aged 72, was a singer and songwriter, whose composition, Music, became a piece of classic rock, which travelled far beyond its 1970s roots. Written and recorded for Miles’ debut album, Rebel (1976), Music is a first person ode to the redemptive power of its subject.    Music’s lyrics consist of just two four-line stanzas sung two and a half times throughout the song’s just shy of six minutes duration. Miles’s words punctuate extended instrumental passages that shift gears and tempos several times in a sketchbook history of modern pop that moves from piano-led balladeering to progressive soft rock and disco.    Accompanied by long-term bassist and co-writer Bob Marshall and drummer Barry Black, this is fleshed out by arranger Andrew Powell’s orchestral flourishes, as the song comes full circle to confirm music’s transcendent force.  ...

Peter Bogdanovich – Film director, actor, writer   Born July 30, 1939; died January 6, 2022   Peter Bogdanovich, who has died aged 82 from complications of Parkinson’s Disease, was a film director who was at the centre of the rise of new American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s. His best-known films were steeped in his devotion to old Hollywood, with early successes The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973) on one level lovingly realised pieces of fantasy wish fulfilment.   The Last Picture Show, adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, was a dead-end town rites of passage that won Oscars for Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman. What’s Up, Doc? was a riotous update of screwball comedies. One of its stars, Ryan O’Neal, also appeared in  Paper Moon (1973) as a depression era conman who hits the road with a ten-year-old girl that may or may not be his daughter.    The child was played by O’Neal’s own daughter, Tatum O’Neal, who beca...

Life’s a riot in  The Fearful  Part Of It Was The Absence,  Joey Simons’s new presentation, which forms the latest edition of Collective’s Satellites Programme of work by upcoming artists, provocateurs and other practitioners. Simons draws his title from the journals of Henry Cockburn, the Edinburgh born nineteenth Solicitor General for Scotland, author, conservationist and Edinburgh Royal High School graduate.    Cockburn wrote in his journals of a ‘terrible silence’ and ‘fearful absence of riot’ at demonstrations in Scotland in support of parliamentary reform. These protests nevertheless helped lead to the introduction of The Representation of the People Act 1832. More than a century and a half later, as riots swept across England in 2011 after Mark Duggan was shot and killed in London by police, Scotland again seemingly remained passive.    Drawing from his observations of such apparent cross-border differences, Simons was informed in part too ...