Coffee-Table Notes

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Four stars The high chair that sits to the side of the Tron’s up close and personal Changing House stage is the first clue about live artist Katy Dye’s ferocious solo dissection of the infantilisation of women. With a plastic sheet on the ground, when Dye enters what is effectively an emotional playpen, her introduction comes with a piercing white noise soundtrack. Through this, she lays bare the ever reductive reactions from a man’s world that isn’t shy about pointing out just how much the grown woman she actually is resembles what they used to be able to get away with calling jailbait. This opens up a fearless critique of the sort of fetishisation of pre-pubescent imagery which has been normalised through everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Britney Spears, both referenced here. Such stereotypical cover girl styling has previously been subverted by the riot grrrl wave of bands, and here Dye picks up the baton over a breathless fifty minutes, in which she shout

When 8,000 music fans turned up at Craigmillar Park in Edinburgh in August 1978 for Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League’s Edinburgh Carnival, many were expecting to see The Clash. The name of Joe Strummer and Mick Jones’ iconic first wave punk band had been added to posters and flyers for the show, saying they had been ‘invited’ to play, despite possibly never having been approached. There is the story as well about the young Scottish activists who travelled from Aberdeen to the London Carnival in Victoria Park the same year, and were charged to guard the stage overnight lest their opponents attempt sabotage after dark. This wasn’t a fanciful notion, as the activists duly had to see off a bunch of National Front supporting skinheads intent on burning it down. While neither of these stories make it into David Renton’s new book on the era, they nevertheless go some way to illustrate both the enterprisingly maverick spirit of the anti-racist movement of the time and its

It took a trip to a graveyard for the members of Biff Smith’s band A New International to realise that the theatre show they’d signed up to do was for real. As it turned out, A Dark Carnival was the latest opus from Vanishing Point, the internationally renowned company that provides a vehicle for the dark visions of its artistic director Matthew Lenton. With Smith and A New International at its musical core, the seriousness of the project came as something of a surprise to the band.    “It’s probably fair to say the band are all sceptics,” says Smith. “It took them six months to believe this was actually happening. I remember we decided to for for a walk in the Necropolis, and afterwards going for a drink, and the penny finally dropping when one of them said, ‘You didn’t tell me it was a real theatre company’. The music industry and the arts world in general does tend to attract blowhards and people who promise you the things that never materialise, so I dare say that informed the