Coffee-Table Notes

Steven Berkoff wouldn’t recognise the Gorbals these days. As the iconoclastic actor, writer, director and auteur returns to Glasgow this weekend for the first time in what he reckons is at least twenty years, Berkoff certainly wouldn’t recognise the Citizens Theatre, currently undergoing a major period of architectural re-development. It was here he cut some of his early acting teeth in the mid-1960s at the Citz’s now long-destroyed studio space, The Close. It was here too where he took the never before seen photographs that make up Gorbals: 1966, which opens this weekend at Street Level Photoworks. The images on show may be just across the Clyde, but as the Gorbals itself undergoes its latest period of regeneration along with the Citz, they reveal a long lost world that Berkoff captured just before it was razed to the ground. “The Gorbals was kind of a no-man’s land,” says Berkoff. “It was in the process of being pulled down, and I spent days going round this bizarre and slig

Roy Carr, music journalist Born 1945, died July 1 2018 Roy Carr, who has died aged 73, was much more than a music journalist. While he applied his encyclopaediac knowledge of all genres across almost half a century of writing for the major publications of each era, Carr opened the doors of perception to generations of curiously-eared listeners through compilations of the sounds themselves. This was done during his long-term tenure at NME during Britain’s premiere music weekly’s post-punk peak, when it could shift more than 200,000 copies. The series of what would be more than thirty NME cassettes began with C81, which was produced in association with the Rough Trade label, and aimed to capture a market who listened to music on their new portable Walkman cassette players. The tape featured a roster that included Scritti Politti, The Raincoats and the Red Crayola, as well as tracks by Orange Juice, Josef K and Aztec Camera, all luminaries of the Glasgow-based Postcard Record

Time was when anyone walking through the Clyde Tunnel was a potentially dangerous journey. Anyone who ever used the Glasgow walk-way as a means of getting between the north and south sides of the city or vice versa late at night in the 1980s and lived to tell the tale will shudder at the memory of such fool-hardy and possibly alcohol-fuelled behaviour. These days, however, things are different in what is now a brighter, cleaner and infinitely less scary promenade along the 762 metre concrete underpass which opened alongside the more widely used road tunnel in 1963. This should be made apparent when Glasgow-based international arts producers Cryptic unveil Portal, an audio-visual walk through the tunnel that forms one of a trio of events as part of the company’s latest events under the Sonica banner. Normally a bi-annual festival of audio-visual art, Portal and its accompanying spectacles of sound and vision across the city effectively amounts to a Sonica summer special. This has l