Coffee-Table Notes

J ohn Miles –  Singer, songwriter, musician Born April 23, 1949; died December 5, 2021    John Miles, who has died aged 72, was a singer and songwriter, whose composition, Music, became a piece of classic rock, which travelled far beyond its 1970s roots. Written and recorded for Miles’ debut album, Rebel (1976), Music is a first person ode to the redemptive power of its subject.    Music’s lyrics consist of just two four-line stanzas sung two and a half times throughout the song’s just shy of six minutes duration. Miles’s words punctuate extended instrumental passages that shift gears and tempos several times in a sketchbook history of modern pop that moves from piano-led balladeering to progressive soft rock and disco.    Accompanied by long-term bassist and co-writer Bob Marshall and drummer Barry Black, this is fleshed out by arranger Andrew Powell’s orchestral flourishes, as the song comes full circle to confirm music’s transcendent force.    Miles said he wrote Music in half an ho

Peter Bogdanovich – Film director, actor, writer   Born July 30, 1939; died January 6, 2022   Peter Bogdanovich, who has died aged 82 from complications of Parkinson’s Disease, was a film director who was at the centre of the rise of new American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s. His best-known films were steeped in his devotion to old Hollywood, with early successes The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Paper Moon (1973) on one level lovingly realised pieces of fantasy wish fulfilment.   The Last Picture Show, adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, was a dead-end town rites of passage that won Oscars for Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman. What’s Up, Doc? was a riotous update of screwball comedies. One of its stars, Ryan O’Neal, also appeared in  Paper Moon (1973) as a depression era conman who hits the road with a ten-year-old girl that may or may not be his daughter.    The child was played by O’Neal’s own daughter, Tatum O’Neal, who became the youngest actor to win

Life’s a riot in  The Fearful  Part Of It Was The Absence,  Joey Simons’s new presentation, which forms the latest edition of Collective’s Satellites Programme of work by upcoming artists, provocateurs and other practitioners. Simons draws his title from the journals of Henry Cockburn, the Edinburgh born nineteenth Solicitor General for Scotland, author, conservationist and Edinburgh Royal High School graduate.    Cockburn wrote in his journals of a ‘terrible silence’ and ‘fearful absence of riot’ at demonstrations in Scotland in support of parliamentary reform. These protests nevertheless helped lead to the introduction of The Representation of the People Act 1832. More than a century and a half later, as riots swept across England in 2011 after Mark Duggan was shot and killed in London by police, Scotland again seemingly remained passive.    Drawing from his observations of such apparent cross-border differences, Simons was informed in part too by artist Jimmy Cauty’s The Aftermath D

Alvin Lucier – Composer Born May 14, 1931; died December 1, 2021   Alvin Lucier, who has died aged 90, was a pioneering composer, whose boundless curiosity set down a template for generations of sound artists and sonic architects who followed in his wake. His explorations of the physical properties of sound were quietly radical and endlessly inquisitive in his extrapolation of sound from non-traditional sources. These included brain sensors, pencils and teapots.   Key works include I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), in which Lucier recorded himself talking as he explained what he was about to do. Lucier then played back the speech and re-recorded it, repeating the process until his words blur into the void, and only resonant frequencies remain. The influence of a room’s architecture and acoustic properties were key to Lucier’s work, and it was the unpredictability of the end result that intrigued him. In this sense, Lucier’s experimental approach was rooted in science as much as sound.   T

Bob Baker – Television writer Born July 26, 1939; died November 3, 2021    Bob Baker, who has died aged 82, was a television writer, who helped bring to life two of the small screen’s most iconic creations. Along with his writing partner Dave Martin, who died in 2007, Baker co-penned thirty-eight episodes of Doctor Who (1971-1979) during the children’s SF show’s 1970s golden age. Known as the Bristol Boys, the duo’s work began with The Claws of Axos (1971), and, over eight stories, straddled the regeneration of Jon Pertwee’s third Doctor into Tom Baker’s fourth incarnation of the eccentric Time Lord.    This included the programme’s tenth anniversary story, The Three Doctors (1972-1973), which saw the first and second Doctors, played respectively by William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, join forces with Pertwee in a battle to save Time. Baker and Martin’s tenure on Doctor Who also saw them create K9, the pompous dog-based mobile computer that went on to have a series of its own. Bake

David McKail – Actor, writer,   Born March 13,1938; died December 6, 2021   David McKail, who has died aged 83, was an actor best known for his long running role as police surgeon Dr McKenzie in TV drama, A Touch of Frost (1992-2008). Beyond that, he was a long standing stalwart of theatre in Scotland and beyond. In the guise of Frederic Mohr, he was also an accomplished playwright. This nom de plume was drawn from his German grandfather’s name out of a desire for his writing to stand on its own terms. All this made McKail a proudly Scottish renaissance man, possessed with a vast intelligence and a mischievous wit.    David Fredrick Mohr McKail   was born  in Glasgow, the youngest of three children to David and Janetta McKail (nee Mohr). He grew up in Bridgeton, and, as a war child, spent three years in Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae. He attended John Street Elementary School, then John Street Senior Secondary School for a term before moving to Allan Glen's School.    While his fa

Robbie Shakespeare – bass guitarist, record producer Born September 27, 1953; died December 8, 2021    Robbie Shakespeare, who has died aged 68, was one of the greatest bass guitarists of the last half-century. His muscular but laidback style saw him form a long-term creative partnership with drummer Sly Dunbar that led to them becoming one of the most in-demand rhythm sections in the world.    The duo released six albums under their own name, and played crucial roles as the rhythmic spine of records by numerous other artists. These ranged from key reggae classics by the likes of Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, Black Uhuru and Burning Spear, to playing with Grace Jones during her early 1980s peak.    As part of Island Records’ Nassau based studio band, the Compass Point All Stars, Sly and Robbie worked on a trilogy of albums by Jones. Led by the vocalist’s ice-cool delivery, Warm Leatherette (1980), Nightclubbing (1981) and Living My Life (1982) fused reggae, funk and electronics, Shakespeare’