Coffee-Table Notes

Pitlochry Festival Theatre Four stars It’s the quiet ones you have to watch in Jim Cartwright’s scabrous treatise on grief and finding salvation through song, revived here by Gemma Fairlie as the second show of Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s summer season. At the start, at least, LV, the painfully shy young woman that gives the play its title, is all but ignored amidst the clamour caused by her drunken mother and the big-talking men she brings back to a house with dangerously shonky wiring. While LV stays silent, she loses herself in the records once owned by her now dead dad. Shirley Bassey, Judy Garland and Edith Piaf were his favourites, camp icons all, and when LV sings, it’s as if she’s channelling the spirit of both them and him. It’s local lothario Ray Say and sleazy club compere Mr Boo who have stars in their eyes, however, as LV runs terrified from the spotlight. Written and set in a pre-internet and pre-reality TV talent show age, Cartwright’s play is a potty-mo

There was something about Cindy Wilson when she played at the Liquid Rooms in Edinburgh in February this year as part of a short tour. It wasn’t the way the long-time B-52s chanteuse and co-founder of the ultimate party band played the whole of her recently released solo album, Change, bolstered by a young band drafted in from Wilson’s home town of Athens, Georgia. Nor was it the way a short-haired and gamine-looking Wilson preceded her set of breathy electronic lullabies with an extended theremin solo, or the way each song segued into the next without a word to the audience. This rendered the occasion more akin to a live art performance piece tailored for a late night gallery happening than anything resembling rock and roll. Neither was it the fact that Wilson and band didn’t play one crowd-pleasing song from the B-52s joyous back-catalogue of wacky, wiggy and freaky-deaky parallel universe pop classics, on many of which she sang rip-roaring lead vocal. Nor was there a hint that th

It must have been about sixish on that cool, dewy Mayday morning in 1988 when I was approached by the man I now know as Angus Farquhar atop Calton Hill in Edinburgh. At the time, I only recognised the kilted and bunnetted figure who offered me a bannock and a blessing for luck as a member of Test Dept. The NME-championed industrial agit-prop ‘metal-bashers’ had earlier lined up with massed drums and pipes between the pillars of the Scottish National Monument’s half-built folly in front of several thousand revellers to see in the day as part of a ritual for Beltane. This reconstituted pagan ceremony had come at the end of a procession spear-headed by dancers covered in blue or red body-paint, and led by a flailing May Queen. This white-robed powerhouse positioned herself at the centre of the folly flanked by Test Dept’s black-clad quartet pounding their sturm-und-drang way towards dawn. Now here she was standing beside this unerringly polite if possibly pissed member of the group i