Coffee-Table Notes

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh Four stars The Day of the Dead might have passed along with Hallowe’en, but that hasn’t paled Natasha Khan’s penchant for gothic drama in terms of this stripped down mini tour to showcase this year’s independently released Lost Girls record. A concept album of sorts forged in the heat of Khan’s Death Valley wanderings and involving vampire girl gangs, Lost Girls began as a film script idea. Dressed majestically in a vivid scarlet frock on a stage of old school synthesisers and a music stand illuminated by a circle of vintage lamps, she certainly looks the part. With only a keyboardist for company in a cabaret table set-up, this is Khan as chanteuse, freed from the machine-age trappings of a full band set-up and left vulnerable and exposed in the solitary spotlight of such an intimate and safety-net free arrangement. Preceded by a mood-setting play-list of 1980s synth soundtracks full of foreboding, Khan opens with a salvo of the new album’s openin

Joseph Summers wasn’t born when Derek Jarman’s film, The Last of England, was premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1987. Once the Berlin-based artist, musician and instrument builder saw Jarman’s impressionistic guerrilla-style portrait of Margaret Thatcher’s broken Britain, however, he was struck by how pertinent it seemed to today. Jarman’s backdrop of burning buildings, masked men with guns and young men seeking respite in the rubble gave way to one of the film’s most memorable scenes, in which regular Jarman collaborator Tilda Swinton claws at the wedding dress she’s wearing while rubbish burns beside her. All of this inspired Summers to compose a new live soundtrack for Jarman’s film following a commission from the Bristol-based Palace International Film Festival of queer cinema. Performed by Summers with his brother Thomas and fellow composer/musician Rosa Irwin-Clark, this aural reimagining of The Last of England can be heard accompanying a screening in Gla

Pete Greenway never intended playing with The Fall for any more than a couple of festival gigs. As it turned out, he ended up as guitarist with the late Mark E Smith’s ever changing garage-band incendiarists for almost twelve years. During that time, Greenway put up with Smith’s trademark disruptions, from disappearing offstage mid-set, to messing up the sound levels or passing the microphone out to the audience. The effect of this was sometimes shambolic, sometimes thrilling. With Smith remaining imperious even when in obvious poor health, however, it was never ever dull. This was the case when The Fall played what turned out to be the group’s final live show at the Queen Margaret Union in Glasgow, when Smith appeared in a wheelchair two months prior to his death in January 2018 aged 60. Almost two years on, Greenway and his fellow survivors of The Fall’s final line-up, bassist Dave Spurr and drummer Keiron Melling, plus vocalist Sam Curran, have reinvented themselves as Imperial