Coffee-Table Notes

Perth Theatre Four stars Pity poor Billy Casper, the council estate urchin destined for the scrap-heap in Barry Hines’ inspirational 1960s novel about his remarkable empathy with a kestrel that symbolises his own potential to fly high before his wings are clipped. Robert Alan Evans’ two-actor stage version was originally commissioned by the Catherine Wheels company, and Lu Kemp’s new production doesn’t pull any punches in getting to the gritty heart of Billy’s life in a day in a depressed Yorkshire mining town. The bird he names Kes is the only salvation from a bullying brother, a fly-by-night mother and a series of sadistic school-teachers. All these and more are played by Matthew Barker, who both interacts with and watches over Danny Hughes’ Billy with the faraway melancholy of a northern soul’s future self, looking back at all the what-might-have-beens. It’s a heartbreakingly realised study of crushed dreams and low expectations brought vividly to life on Kenneth MacL

It was Friday the 13 th when Jazzateers supported The Motorcycle Boy at Glasgow’s long lost Fury Murray’s venue. It was also the night the band originally founded by guitarist Ian Burgoyne and bass player Keith Band who had been one of the lynchpins of Alan Horne’s West Princes Street-based Postcard Records of Scotland split up. It had been a long haul for the group, originally fronted by vocalist Alison Gourlay, but replaced in turn by Deirdre and Louise Rutkowski, future Hipsway vocalist Graeme Skinner and Paul Quinn, who would see the band morph into Bourgie Bourgie. By the time of the Fury Murray’s gig, however, while Burgoyne and Band remained, Matt Willcock had moved in front of the microphone, with extra guitar provided by Mick Slaven, later of The Leopards, and Douglas MacIntyre from Article 58.   “Everything fell apart after the first song,” MacIntyre recalls. “Keith’s mantra was taken from Herbie Flowers, who said you should never change your bass guitar strings, bu

Katie Paterson’s universe is expanding. This is evident from Future Library: a century unfolds (2019) the Glasgow-born cosmic explorer’s new twenty-six-minute film commissioned by the National Galleries of Scotland. The film provides the spiritual heart of the final edition of NOW, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s sextet of group-based exhibitions designed to show off the best of living artists working in Scotland’s creative diaspora. Paterson’s film documents the six-years-so-far of Future Library, the artistic and cosmic explorer’s epic century-long undertaking to bring together a new text a year by a hundred different writers that will be kept unread in Oslo, where a forest was planted in 2014 which will provide the paper for all one hundred volumes to be published in 2114. The first writer to be commissioned was novelist Margaret Atwood, who appears in the film alongside Paterson and the other five authors. “We wanted to make the film for this show to bring Os