Coffee-Table Notes

Ask Paul Haig and Malcolm Ross what they remember about the gig they played in Brussels almost 40 years ago as vocalist and guitarist with Edinburgh’s premier post-punk moodists, Josef K, and both give the same answer. “The only thing I really remember is the snare drum breaking,” says Haig. Ross recalls how “It broke on the first song. Ronnie Torrance the drummer had left all his spare skins in the studio in Brussels, so we had to carry on without a snare and improvise for about four songs. Fortunately for us, Lene Lovich’s road crew were there, and they lent us their snare drum. Listening to it again, Ronnie copes with it amazingly well. When it broke, it made things seem kind of hard. It was quite a prestigious gig, I remember. We were only playing a short set, but it wasn’t a nightclub. It was a theatre set-up, and was quite formal and quite staid.” The unintended snare drum incident nevertheless gives the recording of Josef K’s April 1981 performance an extra edge th

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow until March 15, 2020 Five stars The last time Oscar Marzarolli’s iconic black and white images of Glasgow were seen in a major exhibition was in the 1980s, when the dear green place was en route to reinventing itself as culture city. Marzarolli’s iconic depictions of back-street inner-city urchins at play were heroised on the covers of records by Deacon Blue, who sang of the dignity of labour in a city all but razed into rubble. Thirty-odd years on, and with Marzarolli’s archive of more than 50,000 images just donated to Glasgow Caledonian University, the 80-odd photographs on show here are given a new layer of poignancy by the distance of time. Most of the images were taken within a short walk from the gallery, but the places and people depicted are pretty much no more. The high rises that loom over a lone Gorbals tenement in The Old and the New sets the tone for an array of images depicting half-demolished gable ends, half-built tower b

Tramway, Glasgow Four stars Life is more than a packet of chocolate cherries in Robert Alan Evans’ subtly political version of Carlo Collodi’s Italian folk tale, brought to life in Dominic Hill’s seasonal off-site Citizens Theatre production. This is a lesson the wooden boy carved out of a magic log by ageing puppet-maker Geppetto learns the hard way. With a retracting radio aerial for a nose and a cavalier notion of truth, the more obvious the lie, the more it backfires on Pinocchio. Gary Lilburn’s Geppetto is a grassroots local businessman, whose hand-crafted puppets have been side-lined by glitzier fare care of Irene Allan’s showbiz huckster Florenzina, a cut-throat wheeler dealer happy to cash in on any novelty going. And when a baseball-capped Pinocchio cuts loose on Rachael Canning’s scarlet-draped set, a star is born. Or would be if, among the careless talk of walls keeping people out and a magic money tree in the forest designed to con innocents like Pinocchio, was a