Coffee-Table Notes

George Costigan can’t ever see himself playing the king. Lear, that is. The man who became a familiar face playing a council estate lothario in Alan Clark’s big-screen version of Andrea Dunbar’s stage play, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, doesn’t really fancy it, to be honest. He doesn’t have the authority, he reckons. Which is why this bluffest of adopted northerners also reckons he’s right to play Ray, a very different kind of man on the ropes in Blackbird, David Harrower’s provocative psycho-sexual study first seen at the 2005 Edinburgh International Festival. In a new co-production for Pilot Theatre Company and York Theatre Royal, which tours to Glasgow’s Tron Theatre next week, Costigan plays Ray, a fifty-five year old man who had a sexual relationship with Una fifteen years earlier, when she was twelve. When Una turns up at his workplace unannounced, old emotional scars are opened up and the new lives each has built for themselves collapse into each other. “It’s not an ea

4 stars Forget the much misused F(olk)-word. Rob St John is miles better than such lazy reference points, and putting a full electric band behind his whey-faced Lancastrian intonations has put muscle and guts on his musings. Yet for all the low-key chorales, musical saws and string-laden back-woods baroque pulsing his full-length debut’s eight songs, it's St John’s increasingly forceful mix of melancholy and other-worldly rapture that counts. At the record’s core is the slow burning eruption of Sargasso Sea and the slash and burn revelation of Domino. If the late Nick Drake and another old Nick’s Bad Seeds ever hitch up at some rural English crossroads, this is what such an unlikely clash of souls might sound like. ends

Henry’s Cellar Bar, Edinburgh Saturday November 5th 2011 “Penis!” Former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine may only be checking her sound levels, but her one word opening gambit sets out her store for the artistic splurge that’s to follow. Within seconds Albertine is relating how she thinks about sex all the time but doesn’t believe in love; about how her seventeen-year long marriage broke down after she picked up her Telecaster guitar for the first time in years; about how her first band, The Flowers of Romance, formed with Slits drummer Palm Olive and future Sex Pistol Sid Vicious (on saxophone, no less!) used to rehearse in Joe Strummer’s squat. Pedigree? Without Albertine and fellow Slit Ari Up, who passed away in 2010, sisters doing it for themselves from Riot Grrrl to Muscles of Joy would never have happened. Slotting in this late-night ‘secret’ show on the back of her mini Scottish tour and accompanied only by the aforementioned Tele and a floor-load of FX boxes

O2 ABC, Glasgow Saturday November 5th 2011 4 stars “I don’t know,” says Howard Devoto, wearily wiping his palest of faces. “Have we done enough songs about the wrong kind of sex?” The band behind him launch into the icy menace of 1979 album Secondhand Daylight’s closing epic Permafrost for good measure, anyway. Devoto has a point. As the archest man in pop entered wielding a Brechtian style placard bearing the legend, ‘Let’s Fly Away To The World’, the band he reformed after thirty years away strike up an opening rally of Definitive Gaze, Give Me Everything and Motorcade. Heard in rapid-fire succession, the songs show off the light and shade of a canon that lays bare Devoto’s soul via an array of psycho-sexual baroque brutalist bon mots. With new album No Thyself and bass player Jon ‘Stan’White added to the fold to replace Barry Adamson since they first toured in 2009, Magazine sound more urgent than ever, with Devoto’s self-absorbed confessionals offset by a dirty whit

Jordanhill Parish Church, Glasgow 3 stars Breaking the rules is instinctive when you’re of an age whereby you’re not entirely sure what they are yet. This was evident from the primary school age audience watching this new show created by John Retallack for his Company of Angels operation in a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland. Throughout sixteen unrelated scenes that tackle a variety of cross-generational conflicts, these not easily impressed charges giggled at the swear words and whispered throughout. It’s not that they weren’t getting the seriousness of what was going on. It’s just that, as with the characters onstage, they too were seeing how far they could take things. From the boy squaring up to a shopping mall security guard and the mum whose teenage daughter is more grown up than she’ll ever be, to more immediately recognisable forms of parental abuse and avoidance, Retallack pulls no punches. Based on interviews with families from Glasgow-bas

HMV Picture House, Edinburgh Thurday November 3rd 2011 The moustached man from the local tattoo parlour onstage is giving it loads. His whine-perfect karaoke impression of Mark E Smith has the advantage of having the most crack-shot surf-garage band around backing him, who, for the previous half-hour, have been proving just how good they are with a series work-outs made necessary by the prolonged absence of their vocalist, conductor, arranger, director, gaffer and guru. It all started so well, with Smith practically bounding on stage on the dot of 9pm and within a minute of the band striking up the hundred-mile an hour chug of the forebodingly titled Nate Will Not Return, a highlight from the new Ersatz G.B. album. Guitarist Tim Presley from the 2006 American Fall line-up has rejoined the fold while his replacement Pete Greenway takes time out on 'maternity leave', and Presley's twitch-hipped boyish demeanour adds extra urgency to an already relentless fu

“Suicide has always been quite an important idea to me,” says Howard Devoto, vocalist, lyricist and mouthpiece in chief of post-punk fabulists, Magazine. Devoto is talking about Hello Mr Curtis (with apologies), the band's recent single which trailed No Thyself, the first album of new Magazine material for thirty years. The Mr Curtis in question is one Ian Curtis, the former singer with Magazine's Manchester scene contemporaries Joy Division, who hanged himself on the eve of what should have been the band's first American tour in 1980. Devoto's song also references a certain Mr Cobain, as in the late Kurt, of 1990s grunge icons Nirvana, and another rock and roll suicide. By the end of an appositely jaunty number in which both of his forbears are put on the couch and encouraged to explain what caused them pain enough to take their own lives, Devoto is declaring his own intentions to die like a king. Such a lofty pronouncement is up-ended somewhat when th