Coffee-Table Notes

Jacqueline Dutoit – Actress Born, June 19, 1959; died March 2, 2020 Jacqueline Dutoit, who has died aged 60, was an actress of gravitas and style, whose many performances at Pitlochry Festival Theatre were possessed with the authority of an elder states-woman of the stage. This was the case over fifteen years working at Perthshire’s ‘theatre in the hills’ alongside her life-long partner and PFT’s artistic director, John Durnin. The presence and power Dutoit carried with her onstage was evident from the fact that she twice won the Leon Sinden Award for best supporting actress, voted for by the Pitlochry audience. The awards were for Dutoit’s performances as overbearing snob, Lady Pontefract, in A Woman of No Importance, and as the equally upper crust Duchess of Berwick in Lady Windermere’s Fan, both written by Oscar Wilde. The two roles were telling of Dutoit’s penchant for playing high class eccentrics, which allowed her to indulge her own wicked sense of humour. In le

It may be a quarter of a century since Ryuichi Sakamoto scored the soundtrack to Nagisa Oshima’s Japanese prisoner of war flick, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, but it remains the Tokyo-born electronic music pioneer’s best known work. This is partly, one suspects, to do with the film’s pop cultural iconography. David Bowie, about to embark on his commercial Let’s Dance phase, starred, while Sakamoto’s title theme was released in a vocal version with Japan’s David Sylvian.   By that time Sakamoto had already produced six solo albums in tandem with his tenure in Yellow Magic Orchestra, the synth-pop trio whose oriental-influenced state-of-art production values went pan-global. A multitude of soundtracks followed, including an Oscar winning collaboration with Talking Head David Byrne on Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, while Sakamoto’s stand-alone work spans almost forty albums. All this is a far cry from the 57 year-old composer’s solo date at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall to coincide with t

Alan Merrill – S inger, guitarist, song-writer, actor, model Born February 19, 1951; died March 29, 2020 Alan Merrill, who has died aged 69 of Covid-19, was already a rock veteran by the time he made the pop charts with Arrows in 1974 and 1975. Caught in the limbo between glam and punk, Arrows were marketed as teeny bopper idols, and recorded for producer Mickie Most’s RAK label. It was an image heightened when the trio were given their own teatime TV series in the UK after scoring a couple of hit singles. While the band didn’t release any records during the programme’s two 14-week runs, a performance of the band’s fourth single, co-written by Merrill and guitarist Jake Hooker, would outlive them all. Initially released as the B-side of Broken Down Heart, I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll was upgraded for the re-release that followed. The song caught the ear of Joan Jett, who saw Arrows perform it on TV while she was on tour in the UK with her band, The Runaways. Six years later, Jett