Scotland
theartsdesk
The Blue Nile: A Walk Across The Rooftops, HatsGraeme ThomsonThe Blue Nile occupy a unique spot in the musical landscape. Formed in 1980 by Glasgow University graduates Paul Buchanan, Paul Joseph Moore and Robert Bell, four albums in 30 years suggests a certain neurotic creative sensibility which resulted in a pretty slim legacy but served the music well.From their first single – 1981’s “I Love This Life”, included on these expanded reissues – to their last album High, in 2004, a dedicated and deliberate artistic ethos has driven the music. Aesthetically, there is something immensely pleasing Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It has never been easier to get sucked into a warm, simplistic sensibility which portrays every rich capitalist businessman as corrupt and amoral, but you spend 90 minutes watching Donald Trump in action and you start to wonder. If Trump didn't exist you suspect Martin Amis would invent him. He would probably call his caricature of a dastardly US business tycoon Donald Shit.Anthony Baxter’s powerful, unashamedly partisan film pitches a number of principled Davids against this gammon-faced, lizard-eyed, overcombed Goliath. The story begins in 2006, when Trump first set his sights on the Menie Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Confinement is a thread running through English Touring Opera’s autumn season. In Albert Herring it is in the priggish village; in The Emperor of Atlantis it is in the circumstances of its creation within the Terezín concentration camp; in The Lighthouse, it is one room with curved walls and the interminable wait for the relief ship.This 1979 chamber opera by Peter Maxwell Davies, who also wrote the libretto, is based on real events: in 1900 a supply ship stopping at the lighthouse on a tiny Outer Hebridean island found it in good shape but deserted, with no sign of its three keepers. The Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Animated 11th-century Scotland is a great place to live for a girl with a bow and arrow, until your mum decides to marry you off to any young numpty who wins a clan tournament. No wonder the female audience comes predisposed to love Merida, the star of Disney Pixar’s Brave. She’s a snappy, arrow-shooting, red-haired Scottish princess who’ll do anything not to end up like her mum. Who wouldn’t love a feature-length 3D animated film shining with the vocal talents of Kelly Macdonald, Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson, Billy Connolly and half-Glaswegian Emma Thompson and five propriety software Read more ...
mark.kidel
James Yorkston, the very able singer-songwriter from Fife, is now on his fifth album for Domino. This comes hot on the heels of the reissue of his first and excellent release, Moving Up Country, which established him as one of the most talented artists in the crowded field of nu-folkies, musicians who have drawn inspiration from British folk traditions but worked the forms up in an imaginative and risk-taking way. James Yorkston’s well-crafted songs, swathed in atmospheric strings, and tinged with melancholy and mystery, are never far from “this strange country, with its strange old gods Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The best music has the power to lift the listener out of whatever else she may be doing, to transport her somewhere else. I listened to Traces, fifth album from doyenne of Scottish folk Karine Polwart, in a cafe in Edinburgh in what for that city is the busiest month of the year. Outside it was raining and the pavements were crowded, but as the record expanded to fill my headphones there was space in my reality for very little else.That being said, Traces is an album that is firmly grounded in reality - whether it's the burning political issues of contemporary Scotland or the singer's own Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There are worse assignments than making a film about Nicola Benedetti, and the glamorous 25-year-old violinist had clearly entranced Lord Bragg. Mind you, you'd struggle to find much to dislike about her. She's funny and articulate and has a billion-watt smile, while being an utterly dedicated musician whose playing mixes technical command with potent emotional expressivess.It would also seem that she's driven by a mission to educate and inspire young(er) musicians so both they and classical music itself may have some prospect of future survival. She made the pointed comment that classical Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For perhaps the most widely cheered orchestra on the planet, it doesn’t look like much of a concert venue. Fenced in with wire, flanked by a road which leads away to low-rise housing, a scrappy patch of scrubland stretches over a few nondescript acres. Indeed the only hint of anything to caress the eye is the looming silhouette of Stirling Castle on an adjacent promontory.It’s here nonetheless, in Raploch on Thursday 21 June, that The Big Concert will take place and, with three other events nationwide, officially open the London 2012 Festival. On a stage as sizeable as the one they rig up at Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“Before I met James Yorkston, I used to write songs that had choruses in them - and here’s one of them.” Irish folk-inspired singer-songwriter Seamus Fogarty may be one of the newer additions to the legendary Fence Records label from which Yorkston sprang, but at the end of a clutch of dates on which the more established artist performed his 2002 debut Moving Up Country in its entirety he certainly isn’t over-awed.And nor he should be. Yorkston’s emergence from the crowd to provide some harmonies for one of his protege’s earlier songs - one of the ones with a chorus, and a smart and foul- Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The last time that actor Brad Pitt and New Zealand director Andrew Dominik teamed up it was for the epic and elegiac western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Their new one, in competition in Cannes, couldn’t be more different.Killing Them Softly is a short, sharp, entertaining crime thriller, with a built-in commentary on America in the shadow of the economic crisis – a situation, of course, created by crooks by another name. Brad Pitt plays a freelance enforcer, Jackie Cogan, called to Louisiana to discover who robbed an illegal card game, a deed that has resulted Read more ...