Coffee-Table Notes

Four stars   Life, the universe and everything are gathered together in Katie Peterson’s monumental new work, which draws together materials across the ages to create an epoch-spanning time capsule marking out the world’s ongoing destruction.   In the title work, 364 small glass jars are lined up side by side. Each jar contains the ground down remains of a fleeting moment, beginning with meteorite dust from before the Sun existed, with the world’s story so far ending with blood samples from a Polynesian snail reborn from extinction. The short descriptions of all 364 samples contained in the accompanying publication by Palaeobiology professor Jan Zalasiewicz capture the full mind-expanding breadth of Paterson’s endeavour.   With accompanying time-based works upstairs, during the exhibition’s run, the contents of each jar are poured into a large glass urn at the centre of the room. From first to last, this funereal rite creates a dried up cocktail of life on earth, as what once was is tu

The Studio, Capital Theatres, Edinburgh Three stars A cuddly toy perched on the seat beside you is a welcome companion for audience members watching Skye Loneragan’s new solo work drawn from the chaotic playpen of her mind. The furry friends in question become the equivalent of a comfort blanket to cling to during Loneragan’s 65-minute free-associative meditation on sanity, madness and the family. These domestic meanderings seem to have been sired by a post-natal fever dream that reflects Loneragan’s own sleep-deprived voyage into motherhood, as assorted hand-me-down neuroses bring up sense memories of madnesses past.    In what could have been the frustrated dramatic equivalent of throwing her toys out of the pram, Loneragan marks her low attention span leaps into the void with Shakespeare references aplenty. Each moment is broken up by way of a series of projected post-it notes designed by Roddy Simpson, with Mairi Campbell’s nursery rhyme style folk soundtrack bubbling into the mix

Three stars   Like The Bible, The Sex Pistols story has many versions. Director Danny Boyle and writer Craig Pearce’s six-part drama for FX Productions looks to the gospel according to guitarist Steve Jones as the basis for this latest piece of myth-making, drawn from Jones’ 2017 memoir,  Lonely Boy .    John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, has condemned Pistol as a “middle class fantasy”. If he watches without prejudice, he’ll see an over-excited if eminently watchable yarn that marries reimaginings of well-worn Pistols legends to social history and nods to pre-punk 1970s Brit-flicks, with dropped-in archive footage aplenty.    Every line of Pearce’s script sounds like a Situationist manifesto, and is delivered with an accompanying performative archness. As Johnny, Anson Boon is more Rik from The Young Ones than Rotten; Talulah Riley and Thomas Brodie-Sangster ham it up wildly as shop-front svengalis Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren; while Maisie Williams makes quite the entrance as th

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