Coffee-Table Notes

King’s Theatre, Glasgow Four stars Things have changed in the world in the six years since Cora Bissett and David Greig’s heroic musical first appeared. In terms of institutional attitudes towards immigration, to say this hasn’t always been for the better is an understatement. Telling the real life story of what happened when a group of teenage asylum seekers and their mates who dubbed themselves the Glasgow Girls took on the system and won, the show itself feels like it has grown stronger in the face of encroaching adversity since it was originally seen at the Citizens Theatre in co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland. Revived for a timely tour by an alliance between increasingly significant production house Raw Material and gig promoters Regular Music, Bissett’s production now feels more intimate somehow. As it charts how Roza, Ewelina, Amal, Agnesa, Jennifer and Emma find common ground in a Drumchapel secondary school after one of their number is incarcerated foll

Pete Irvine is full of surprises. This has long been the case, ever since his early days putting on gigs with Regular Music, the promotion company he co-founded with Barry Wright to capitalise on a new wave of musical activity in Edinburgh and elsewhere during the late 1970s. It was the same when, as head of Unique Events, he and the company began Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, transforming the capital’s end of the year celebrations into an international spectacle. Irvine may be flying solo these days since he departed Unique, now led by director Alan Thomson, but he’s no less interested in events which capture the creative essence of Edinburgh. So it goes with his contributions to Culture Trail, the one-night only city centre wide compendium of artistic activity that forms Unique’s newly constituted Burns&Beyond festival. As the name suggests, Burns&Beyond is a celebration of Scotland’s national bard Robert Burns, which takes place over six days and nights, and which aims to s

Innes Reekie didn’t take his camera with him to the first gig he witnessed by The Birthday Party, the self-lacerating Australian band fronted by a young Nick Cave. He did, however, get invited backstage in London’s Moonlight Club after Cave spotted a tattoo of Iggy Pop’s first band The Stooges on the then twenty-one year-old’s arm. In London to watch Scottish bands Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, Josef K and The Bluebells take on the capital, Reekie’s diversion kick-started a pilgrimage of sorts, as he followed Cave and The Birthday Party around the country. It would be a year or so before the band’s chaotic howl of self-destructive trash-blues sooth-saying made it to Fife-born Reekie’s adopted home-town of Edinburgh when they played The Nite Club, one of the city’s main small venues, situated within the confines of The Playhouse. Having bonded with Cave and guitarist Rowland S Howard, this time Reekie made sure he had his camera.   More than three decades on, some of the phot