Coffee-Table Notes

Gabi Delgado – Singer, DJ Born April 18, 1958; died March 22, 2020 Gabi Delgado, who has died aged 61, was the mercurial frontman of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (German American Friendship), the band he formed in Dusseldorf with Robert Gorl in 1978. Initially a quintet before stripping things back to a core duo of Delgado and Gorl, DAF produced a muscular and at times menacing form of rhythm-led electronica, over which Delgado declaimed, howled and provoked. The result was an intense, sensual and at times relentless brutalist assault of pumped-up primitivist punk-disco that pre-dated hardcore techno. Gabriel Delgado-Lopez was born in Cordoba, Spain, before his family moved to Germany. Delgado and Gorl met at a punk club, and after forming DAF, briefly left the band prior to its debut album, Ein Produkt der Deutsch Amerikanischen Freundschaft (A Product of German American Friendship), a set of improvised instrumentals. The band moved to London in 1980, by which t

Guildhall Arts Centre, Gloucester For a decade, Ochre Records has existed in a backwoods wilderness of its own design. Even at this, the Cheltenham based label’s tenth anniversary all-dayer, which took place in the civic confines of Gloucester’s Guildhall — its spiritual home, having hosted the label’s fifth and seventh birthdays — it all seemed unfussily homespun and low key. A sure sign of confidence from any cottage industry. Nowhere was this better personified than in opening act The Serpents, Ochre’s very own ‘supergroup’‚ whose ranks have previously been swollen by members of Super Furry Animals, writer Jon Savage and even reality TV model Catalina. This time out there were eight people up there, mostly culled from Ochre acts scheduled to play later on. Their one minute’s noise for the late John Peel whipped up a glorious storm of rustic Prog clatter, augmented by bass clarinet and singing bowl. The extended piece that followed magnificently cascaded through a landscape of

Dundee Rep                           

 Love - pardon my French - comes in spurts. The hard part is keeping a tight grip on what you've got. Too tight though, and you're left with nowt but a notch on the bedpost and a bittersweet memory of what might've been. But, hey, that's the sort of romantic guff - however true - that makes playwrights like Terence McNally so darned popular. His plays ditch plot like a cheap date in favour of everybody's favourite piece of tittle tattle - Relationships And How To Do 'Em. Or not, as the case may be. McNally champions the little guy on the ropes, gets him together with the small-town girl, and lets 'em at it. This is the basic premise of his 1987 hit romantic comedy, which thrusts together this pair of downbeat lovers - already a legend, if in name only - and hopes for the best. Dundee Rep associate director Michael Duke's production begins in the dark, with the pair abandoned to the last lengthy gasp of th

Terrence McNally – Playwright, librettist, screenwriter Born November 3, 1938; died March 24, 2020   Terrence McNally, who has died aged 81 from complications of Covid-19, was a Tony award winning playwright, whose slow burn of a career moved through controversy to commercial success. In the former, his early play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1965), put gay relationships at its centre at a time when such matters were taboo enough to provoke critical venom. Much later, McNally’s depiction of Jesus and his apostles as gay in Corpus Christi (1998) provoked protests, death threats, condemnation by the Catholic League and attempted cancellation of its scheduled premiere at the Manhattan Theatre. In terms of commercial success, his 1987 play, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, saw McNally adapt his two-hander about a one-night stand between a short order chef and a waitress into a film starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. His book for Kiss of the Spiderwoman