Coffee-Table Notes

Baby Bushka are much more than a Kate Bush tribute band. Anyone who witnessed this all singing, all dancing American ensemble’s first visit to Scotland in 2018 will know this already. With little chance of the real Ms Bush returning to the live arena after briefly coming up for air in 2014, the eight multi-tasking women who make up Baby Bushka have picked up the slack by making the likes of Wuthering Heights, Running Up That Hill, and of course Babooshka, their own.    Brought together in San Diego, California, by Natasha Kozally, aka Boss Bush, Baby Bushka combine baroque musical arrangements, flamboyant costumes and Lindsay Kemp inspired choreography to reimagine Bush’s routines for the twenty-first century. The end result is a fabulist pop art cabaret honouring its inspiration with a collective display of devotion that captures the magic of its source while reinvigorating the songs with each member’s own considerable personality.   A self-titled album released in 2020 showcased the

If clothes maketh the man – and woman - chances are they also maketh the artist that springs forth from such wilfully individual sartorial felicities. This was certainly the case with Steven Campbell, whose death in 2007 aged fifty-four left behind a body of work embodied by tweedy romantics occupying extravagant dreamscapes that all but burst through the frame in their desire to make a world of one’s own.   The importance of clothes to Campbell is unwrapped in this online promenade through the fabric of his life and work, curated by fashion historian Mairi MacKenzie and fashion designer Beca Lipscombe. Their hi-tech rendering is produced by Glasgow based curatorial organisation, Panel, and developed in partnership with digital media designers ISODESIGN and artist Rob Kennedy in a presentation by Tramway, Glasgow.    With Campbell’s wife Carol talking us through the couple’s life together, as they sashay through early days at Glasgow School of Art, through to success in New York, befor

In 2018, The Common Guild closed down its exhibition space in the Glasgow townhouse owned by artist Douglas Gordon it had called home for a decade. Beyond the move from Woodlands Terrace, ongoing off-site projects continued what had been a key component of the contemporary art organisation’s programme since being founded by Katrina Brown in 2006.    Even when forced to shut down physical events in 2020 due to Covid induced lockdown, an online strand included films by Phil Collins, Akram Zaatari and Sharon Hayes, as well as In the Open(2020-2021), two series’ of environmental sound-based commissions. Beyond lockdown, during COP26, The Common Guild presented  Mobbile  (1970/2021), a re-presentation of German artist Gustav Metzger’s modified car that collects and stores its own carbon emissions. All this pointed to an even more expansive future for the organisation.   “We were always only ever meant to be in that building on a temporary basis,” Brown explains. “What started out as a two o

The Lost Plot   As The Nightingales limber up for their biggest tour in the band’s forty-year existence, it’s nice to see them becoming hottish property. This has arguably come partly on the back of the success of King Rocker, Michael Cumming and Stewart Lee’s film based around the life and work of Nightingales frontman, Robert Lloyd. It’s especially heartening to see The Nightingales 2022 UK trek being overseen by a proper professional promoter, rather than some of the ad hoc DIY fly-by-nights that have put them on over the last decade.    As one of those happy amateurs over seven Nightingales shows, I’m obviously delighted that Lloyd and co are receiving the attention they deserve. While for now at least, the band are no longer dependent on the kindness of strangers, I’m going to miss the annual round of adrenalin-charged stresses putting on a Nightingales show brought with it. Anyone who has ever put on a gig anywhere despite not having a clue how to do it will be fully aware of the

Choose Life Earlier this week, the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party tried to get down with the kids by co-opting the much imitated Choose Life mantra from Trainspotting. With the Scottish council elections pending in May, this was turned into an anti SNP rant. While the result suspiciously resembled an April Fool that got lost in the post, more likely it was the last gasp antics of a worn out comms team bereft of ideas. Their semantic wheeze was the press release equivalent of dad-dancing, that painful, try-too-hard shuffle by those who long lost sight of the zeitgeist, but who are still desperate to be hip.   The deliberate Trainspotting reference might arguably have also been a potential breach of copyright.  The original words are the intellectual property of Irvine Welsh, author of the era defining Edinburgh-set 1993 novel where they first appeared. Writer of the equally audacious 1996 film adaptation, John Hodge, director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald could als