Scotland
graham.rickson
That a film has a cult following doesn’t mean it’s a masterpiece, and 1985’s Restless Natives is sweet but ephemeral, a Scottish crime caper that can’t hold a candle to Bill Forsyth’s sparky debut, That Sinking Feeling. Both are set in a period when Scotland’s industrial base was being dismantled, and you could place both films in the same part of the cultural Venn diagram which contains the TV programmes Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Boys From the Blackstuff, the latter’s Bernard Hill having a role here as one protagonist’s father.Directed by Michael Hoffman using a script which had won first Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Shortly after Arab Strap split up in 2006, Malcolm Middleton was quoted saying “I don’t think we should ever get back together”. That’s the sort of fighting talk that’s just begging to be cast up by tired old hack music writers tasked with reviewing the inevitable comeback – but the trick, in this case, was that the comeback was never inevitable. The Falkirk duo built a reputation on electro-acoustic songs about drink, drugs and shagging. Who wouldn’t want to hear how that all turned out?The album opens with a challenge to the nostalgia-hungry listener, Aidan Moffat disclaiming past Read more ...
joe.muggs
It’s odd that there’s still no name for the wave of genre-agnostic British bands of the '00s. Not manic enough to be nu rave, way too interesting for the retro-guitar nu rock revolution / landfill indie tsunami, the likes of Hot Chip, Metronomy, Friendly Fires, Simian and the super-louche Wild Beasts between them mapped out a new area of psychedelic pop. And into this in 2009 came the Scottish / Northern Irish / English band Django Django, a perfect fit into this unnamed movement with their winsome melodies and ability to fold everything from psyche-folk to acid house to rockabilly into their Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Although this streamed concert from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra featured the music of Schubert and Tchaikovsky, the ghost at the feast was Mozart, the acknowledged inspiration behind the two main pieces. In particular these works sought to capture the charm and ease of Mozart but cast in the later composers’ idioms.As with the SCO concert I reviewed a fortnight ago this was broadcast on YouTube, the presentation simple and unobtrusive – no son et lumiere to get in the way of the music. And the repertoire was chosen to show the advantages of a small orchestra: lithe textures, fast tempos Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
As our friends across the pond celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, a mix of music from America kicked off the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s concert, opening with Massachusetts-born composer Carl Ruggles’s Angels for muted brass. Ruggles originally penned the work in 1920 as the second movement of a three-part piece entitled Men and Angels. It was scored for six muted trumpets, but the 1938 revision which was performed on Thursday features four trumpets and muted trombones; it's also transposed down a minor third. Tenderly played by the brass of the BBC SSO, it had a touching, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After a brief interlude of concerts with a live audience, we are back to streamed events from empty halls (though many venues in London will be opening up again from next Thursday, concerts in Scotland have never opened up to the public). Some ensembles have opted to sell tickets, others – including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – to broadcast the music free but solicit donations. The economics of both models seem fraught with problems but at the same time the show must go on. But if that means in future I can sit in London and enjoy a concert from the Perth Hall that I would Read more ...
Graham Fuller
If Shakespeare had lived in post-war Britain, he surely would have dramatised the careers of the three towering contemporaneous Scottish football managers whose visions of how football should be played and its importance to ordinary people left a greater impact on the nation’s selfhood than any 20th century political leader, excepting Churchill.Comprised of archival footage newly galvanised in the cutting room, Jonny Owens’ stirring documentary The Three Kings judiciously balances its accounts of the triumphant reigns of Matt Busby at Manchester United (1945–1969), Bill Shankly at Liverpool ( Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 45 years since the West End success of John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert put a young Scottish folkie named Barbara Dickson on the map, launching a career that brought richly-deserved success on stage and screen, as well as in music. She’s since recorded 25 studio albums and enjoyed major singles success. The latter paid the rent but the primped hair and dry ice of 1980s Top of The Pops never was her style and in recent years Dickson’s returned happily to her roots with a series of folk-accented albums that demonstrate the effortless beauty of her voice.The latest is Time is Going Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An endearing cast does what it can to keep Get Duked! aloft until writer-director Ninian Doff's movie sinks under the weight of too many wearisome shifts in tone. A coming-of-age film that is alternately silly and sentimental while wanting at times to be scary as well, the result leaves no doubt as to the talents of its gifted young cast. Rather more debatable is music video alum Doff's control over material that lurches all over the map, buoying up the audience on the back of some fresh-faced leads before devolving into absurdity by the final reel. The setting suggests an odd amalgam of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In normal times, Edinburgh Festival audiences would now be packing into the city’s invaluable Traverse Theatre, home to some of the most vibrant new writing in the country. Instead, the Traverse has created a new online venue, Traverse 3, that exists to extend its festival programme throughout the year and can point to an immediate success in a new 30-minute online film, Declan, adapted from a recent stage hit at this same address.The source material for the actor Lorn Macdonald’s directorial debut is Mouthpiece, the 90-minute play by Kieran Hurley in which Macdonald Read more ...
mark.kidel
Together for over 20 years and with a string of incredibly successful albums, the Scottish trio return with a ninth release that offers more of the relatively sophisticated bombast they've consistently delivered, not least in perfectly-paced audience-pleasing festival performances.Biffy Clyro are a metal band with heart, with little of the doom and gloom or Gothic menace associated with so much of the genre. They're creatures of the golden sunlight rather than the dark underworld. And yet also macho guitar heroes, fuelled by fiery energy that borders on anger but never gives way to excess. Read more ...
Antonia Bain
The Narcissistic Fish is a brand new opera specifically created to be filmed. Set in Leith and written in Scots, it tells the story of restaurant owner and chef, Angus, and his brother Kai who are arguing over the death of their father, while the talented Belle struggles to carry on underpaid and under-appreciated.I was an opera novice when I started working at Scottish Opera as their first digital content producer in 2015. I had no idea what to expect when I saw my first opera but was completely hooked on the art form especially after seeing the company’s production of Rusalka directed by Read more ...