Glasgow
Veronica Lee
The line-up for this year's Glasgow International Comedy Festival has been announced. The festival, now in its 11th year, takes place 14-31 March with 411 show at 46 venues in Scotland's second city.There's a strong Scottish contingent led by Susan Calman, Fred Macaulay, Jerry Sadowitz, Janey Godley and Daniel Sloss, and from south of the border are Harry Hill, Jimmy Carr, Phill Jupitus and John Shuttleworth. International flavour is added by Canadians Katherine Ryan and Tom Stade, and there's an evening of American comedy supported by one of the festival's sponsors, United Airlines. St Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
With a hollered “hello Glasgow” and immediate launch into “Magpie”, the emotionally ragged song that opens this year’s Sugaring Season, it was as if Beth Orton had never been away. On this last date of her UK tour, the night before her 42nd birthday, Orton’s notoriously husky singing voice was unsurprisingly even throatier, more tremulous than usual. It had the effect of lending even more intimacy to cuts from a new album that, after a six-year gap and particularly tumultuous personal circumstances, emerged bathed in the quiet glow of domestic bliss. After setting the scene with only an Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Guitar virtuoso RM Hubbert is something of an unlikely champion of quiet music. In fact, if you haven’t yet heard the gorgeous Thirteen Lost and Found, the Chemikal Underground debut on which the guitarist invited friends including Aidan Moffat, Alex Kapranos and Alasdair Roberts to supplement the instrumentals with which he made his name, you might wonder what Hubbert - a heavily-tattooed onetime member of various Glasgow hardcore bands - is doing co-curating a festival with the unlikely label of Shhh!Shhh! was created by London-based promoters The Local who - together with Hubbert and Alun Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Before Glasvegas took off James Allan played professional football in Scotland. He did not quite make the highest echelon in his soccer career and after a blistering start, when his band was championed as the Next Great Guitar Group, things haven't been looking too hopeful in his music career either. Glasvegas was dropped by Columbia Records after their second album, and when I heard they were playing this small club in the run-up to the 2013 release of their third album, Later...When The TV Turns To Static, I wondered if maybe their record label had a point.How wrong I was. This brief " Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Arditti String Quartet, Wigmore Hall, 31 October ****November is always a good month for new music. This year saw the interest begin a day earlier. Whichever wag chose to hand over Halloween at the Wigmore Hall to two of the most uncompromising contemporary string quartets, however, was denied a fitting punchline. The young JACK Quartet were grounded in New York by Sandy, and the venerable Ardittis chose to programme works that weren't half as terrifying as hoped.Mauro Lanza's new octet was to see the upstart quartet perform with the old pros. Without the JACK's, however, we got Wolfgang Rihm Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kevin Bridges, an affable young Glaswegian, has had a meteoric rise in comedy. He started gigging at 17, made his solo Edinburgh Fringe debut in 2009, where he played in a 50-seater and earned an Edinburgh Comedy Awards newcomer nomination, and returned the following year to a sold-out run in a 700-seat theatre.But his real breakthrough was being booked on the BBC's Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow in 2009, which brought him to an audience of millions. His early television success means that much of his material is TV-friendly, but his live shows include more uncompromising material. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Jason Lytle has a “fervent appreciation”, he says, “for bands that don’t exist anymore”. It’s why he’s playing the cover of “Here”, by Pavement, that has become a staple of his band Grandaddy’s live sets on this open-ended reunion tour, although it doesn’t explain why the time is right for a Grandaddy reunion in the first place.Not that any of the caps or plaid shirts under the ABC’s giant disco ball were complaining, of course. While it seems that these days Nineties alternative bands will reunite at the drop of a hat - or a royalty cheque - you would have been hard-pressed to find any Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The Queen made a rare visit to Glasgow yesterday. Now as luck would have it Liz 'n' Philip did too, apparently driving by my office on their way to George Square for afternoon tea and a quick chorus of long-to-reign-over-us (at least until 2014), and in the process lending this opening paragraph a rare note of topicality. However I'd be very surprised if the pair of them received quite so rapturous a welcome, or experienced as many people take an icy command to "bow down to me" so literally, as Shirley Manson on her triumphant return to the Barrowlands.Such is the fickle nature of pop music Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Best Coast has always been the quintessential California band, an identity the duo has embraced so fully that the artwork for their latest album features the bear that is the state’s mascot. It would be clichéd to remark on the unsuitability of the band’s sun-kissed fuzz-pop for the sort of damp, drizzly evening that soaks through three layers, so it was a relief that frontwoman Bethany Cosentino did it for me. “We thought we’d bring you some sunshine,” she said, introducing “Summer Mood” from buzzworthy 2010 debut Crazy For You, “but I guess not. We like it though.”But then, that’s the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
“The angels' share” refers to the two percent of whisky that evaporates each year during its maturation process - which the romantically or religiously inclined would have us believe is siphoned off by cheeky celestial beings. With two Hollywood monoliths (Prometheus and Snow White and the Huntsman) slugging it out at the box office this week it seems unlikely that Ken Loach’s Glasgow-set latest - a tiny wee film by comparison - will be left with much more than the angels' share of business. However, this comedic and compassionate film – the winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In the eight years since the fourth – and very possibly last - Blue Nile album, High, Paul Buchanan has seen his band disintegrate and a close friend die. Little wonder, then, that his solo debut is a reflective record. The most cinematic of bands, the Blue Nile's ravishing sound-pictures generally came in widescreen; Mid Air may be a more intimate, art house affair, but it is no less affecting.Mostly recorded in Buchanan’s Glasgow flat over the course of a couple of years, there's not much to it: 14 songs, as beautiful as they are brief, consisting of soft piano, the occasional daub of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Club culture has always had a tension between democratisation (“come one, come all!”) and exclusivity (the thrill of being in the know about the newest or most underground thing). The best clubs have always been the ones that find ways of short-circuiting this seeming opposition, and a great part of the success of The Boiler Room is the way they have harnessed technology to perform the same trick.Begun barely a year and a half ago, the premise was incredibly simple – to use video streaming to allow viewers online to watch a DJ playing to a group of friends – but the impeccable quality of the Read more ...