Coffee-Table Notes

Four stars          Jamie Collinson’s study of those forced out of the bands they sometimes founded makes for a refreshingly insightful, entertaining and at times poignant read. Boldly subtitled An Alternative History Of Popular Music, Collinson’s book mixes research, interviews, personal interludes, and a series of wonderful footnotes that join the dots between more than thirty subjects. At one point he writes a gonzo style first person short story charting Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten’s final days before and after being sacked by Neil Young.     Ousted Beatles drummer Pete Best, doomed Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and dumped-on Velvet Underground auteur John Cale are all in the mix, as are ‘All the Musicians Kicked Out of Fleetwood Mac’ but Collinson focuses on what are perhaps lesser-known stories that are by turns tragic, absurd, and occasionally redemptive.   While the book moves beyond boys with guitars and bad habits by way of original Supreme Florence Ballard, tw

Tron Theatre, Glasgow Five stars Home and garden are sanctuary and safe house for the four women of certain ages who line up in Caryl Churchill’s quietly devastating play. As it digs deep into what lies beneath the small talk and shared experiences of friends on a sunny afternoon, a series of everyday revelations give way to something more globally seismic. It begins with Blythe Duff’s Mrs Jarrett stumbling on Lena, Vi and Sally catching some rays as they indulge in chit chat, gossip and tittle tattle as any group of long standing friends and neighbours might do. As everyday mundanities hint at more complex lives, each scene is punctuated with a monologue that reveal worlds of personal and global devastation. Churchill’s play may date from 2016, but Joanna Bowman’s post Covid pandemic revival now looks in part a prophecy of things to come. Ushered in by sound designer Susan Bear’s foreboding drones, Anne Kidd as Lena, Joanna Tope as Sally, Irene Macdougall as Vi and Duff as cuckoo in t

Richard Walker’s early schooldays have clearly left their mark in this small but expansive exhibition of paintings by the Cumbernauld born artist. This is most evident in the two black and white photographs of the now demolished modernist new town primary school Walker attended, and which are placed like bookends at the top of the show’s large scale title piece that hangs across the entirety of the living room size gallery’s main wall.   In one image, three children play beside a totemic concrete water tower. In the other, a deserted school refectory awaits the bell to fill it with rowdy life as light pours through its voguish spaceship styled windows.  Each of these small pictures is framed in an oval shaped cut out that resembles something that might sit on an elderly relative’s mantelpiece. Inbetween, at the painting’s centre, another egg shaped image suggests something darker beyond its frame.Beneath it, an array of tentacles and roots jostle for space in what may or may not be a l

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   They don’t make summers like they used to in David Greig’s new play, which plops its title characters in the Fife caravan park where they holidayed as teenagers. Amy is on the run from a volatile home life that sees her channelling all her lost dreams of becoming a rock singer into serial adultery. Emma is a lawyer in retreat, with notions of writing a novel. Not one where anything happens, mind. Just a story where people feel. A bit like Two Sisters, in fact.   As Amy and Emma take a cheap holiday to explore their own misery in designer Lisbeth Burian’s rusting hulk of a caravan, this prodigals’ return sees the siblings attempt to recapture how it feels to be sixteen again beyond their black and white grown up lives. When a blast from the past shows up in the shape of maintenance man and DJ Lance, the desire to unleash the terminal adolescent within causes both women to behave as if at some kind of end of term school disco snog-fest.   As d

Saturday lunchtime in January, and on a plinth on the City Art Centre’s third floor, two incense sticks sit side by side. As a small crowd circle close, the first stick is lit. The scent it emits is drawn from ‘the first forest’, 385 million years ago at the dawn of civilisation, in what would become Cairo in New York State.  Once this first stick is burnt out, a second is lit, releasing a more recent odour that  comes from ‘the last forest’, deep in the Amazon Rainforest.  As the scents of Paterson’s work intermingle in the air, they create a sensory cocktail that draws across the centuries to infuse the air that we breathe today. This little ritual is To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), Katie Paterson’s contribution to the City Art Centre’s group show that gets back to nature to explore the human relationship with the natural environment. With the show’s mix of photography, painting, sculpture and installation nestling side by side, such cross fertilisation of approach itself creates a wor

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars   “How many of you have seen Sex and the City?” Judging from the response that bounces back at her opening gambit, Candace Bushnell knows her audience. This was the case too with Bushnell’s New York Times column and book that inspired Darren Star’s era defining TV adaptation that over the last quarter of a century set the template for every wannabe girl about town to try and step into her shoes.   Shoes are everywhere in Bushnell’s one-woman show. The stage is lined with a row of them, each pair in a spotlight to call their own and lined up like pretty maids in a row as if awaiting their mistress to give them a twirl.Prior to Bushnell’s entrance, a big screen mash up of Bushnell’s chat show introductions is somewhat surprisingly soundtracked by Leeds anarchist combo Chumbawamba’s 90s crossover smash hit, Tubthumping. This sets the scene for Bushnell’s entrance, a vision in scarlet who sashays her way through a living room set pinker than Barbie’s

The Playhouse, Edinburgh Four stars   Like messiahs, some shows simply refuse to lie down. Take Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s half century old rock opera charting the last days of the ultimate people’s pin-up. The show’s most recent resurrection came in 2017 care of Timothy Sheader’s Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre production. Sheader’s reimagining breathed new life into a show that had started to coast on its musical numbers alone, but which was now infused with renewed dynamism and depth.   Eight years on, with a fistful of awards and international tours under its belt, Sheader’s production remains a thrilling second coming, as Rice and Lloyd Webber’s glorious treatise on celebrity, rebellion and how the establishment can create martyrs out of radical chic steps into the post X Factor age.   A network of giant crucifixes become catwalk, dinner table and gallows in Tom Scutt’s set, which Ian McIntosh’s Jesus walks among as a baseball capped and hoodied up hipster with an acoustic