Coffee-Table Notes

Peter Broderick had never heard of Arthur Russell before people started coming up to him after shows and saying how much his voice reminded them of the American wunderkind, who passed away in 1992. While the comparison made the Oregon-raised singer, composer and former touring member of Danish band Efterklang curious, he only ended up hearing Russell by accident. “I never chased him up,” says Broderick down the line from Galway, Ireland, which he now calls home with folk musician Brigid Mae Power since the pair married in 2016. “But I was at a friend’s house, and they put this record on which turned out to be by Arthur Russell, and I loved it, and ended up going down this rabbit hole discovering all this amazing work.” This weekend sees Broderick team up with an ensemble of Scotland-based musicians who join him for what promises to be be a very special Celtic Connections show of of Russell’s songs. It is the latest outing for a set that was the round-the-houses result of an in

The bar of Oran Mor is quiet on the cold Tuesday morning April Chamberlain and Morag Fullarton sit down to talk about A Play, A Pie and A Pint’s forthcoming spring and summer season of lunchtime theatre. As the co-artistic directors of arguably the biggest theatrical phenomena of the last fifteen years tuck themselves away in the corner of the bar that has become of the liveliest cornerstones of west end social life in Glasgow, however, this might be regarded as the calm before the storm. Chamberlain is auditioning later on, and she has twenty plays to cast. The first of those, a bite-size version of Liz Lochhead’s rambunctious Scots version of Moliere’s comedy, Tartuffe, opens in early February. Then there is the small matter of the autumn season, which will feature another twenty plays. Both seasons are landmarks in A Play, A Pie and A Pint’s history, founded in 2004 by the late David MacLennan, who had already been at the forefront of popular theatre as co-founder of the or

Stefan Kassel remembers the very first time pop music had an effect on him that was physical as much as emotional. “My mother had a copy of Dione Warwick’s album, I Know I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” says the co-founder of the Hamburg-based Marina Records of Warwick’s 1970 collection. “I heard it as a kid and got goosebumps. That never went away.” Given that the record Warwick’s spine-tingling interpretations of songs by the likes of Jimmy Webb and composer of its title track, Burt Bacharach, Kassel’s response sealed his love of classic pop song-writing forever after. It was the same when a decade or so later he first heard the bands whose records were being released on Alan Horne’s Glasgow-based Postcard record label. “My gateway into Scottish music was listening to John Peel on British Forces Radio,” says Kassel. “The first time he played Blueboy by Orange Juice and Pillar to Post by Aztec Camera, that was goosebumps too.” This is presumably one of the reasons why