Coffee-Table Notes

I Read the News Today. Oh, Boy!   When The Clash released London Calling at the end of 1979, the politically charged title track of the first generation punk band’s third album sounded like one more much needed call to arms. Coming at the end of a year in which Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party was elected to government for what turned out to be eighteen years of misrule, the lyrics to Joe Strummer and Mick Jones’ composition were a lot to take in.    Police brutality, the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island earlier that year, and the potentially apocalyptic consequences of the River Thames flooding were all in the mix. The song’s line ‘Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust’ also pointed up what was probably a first hand observation of the impotence of a rock band to be able to change things in the face of those who put faith in them.    Coming less than a decade after Liverpool’s 1960s pop saviours split up, the line was in keeping with punk’s willingness

Going Underground   The Arches began and ended with civic failure. Neither was the fault of those in charge of the Glasgow city centre arts lab that existed between 1991 and 2015 in a cavernous interior beside Central Station that was both physically and metaphorically underground. The first failure was down to what had gone immediately before, and which accidentally birthed The Arches on a wing-and-a-prayer idea founded on punk-hippy idealism. The final act of civic vandalism that forced what by now had become one of the most important creative spaces in the world to close its doors was down to even worse external forces. Some might call it capitalism.   In the quarter of a century in-between, The Arches captured hearts, minds, souls and imaginations. It changed lives, perceptions and, in at least one theatre show, clothes. Its messy mash-up of ‘lets-put-on-the-show-right-here’ recklessness and hedonistic excess was the most exploratory of adventures for both artists and audiences, wh