Scotland
Kieron Tyler
John Charles Gunn’s Orkney: The Magnetic North was published in 1932 as a guide to the islands and their history. Now, along with a dream, it’s inspired The Magnetic North’s album Orkney: Symphony Of The Magnetic North. With former Verve member Simon Tong, his collaborator in Erland & the Carnival, and solo artist and orchestrator Hannah Peel, the Orcadian singer-songwriter Erland Cooper has created a tribute to his roots.Cooper says he was visited in a dream by Orcadian Betty Corrigal, who hanged herself in the 1770s after discovering she was pregnant by a visiting sailor. Cast out, she Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its near-simultaneous cinema and DVD release ringing alarm bells to rival Big Ben, The Decoy Bride takes talent and stuffs it into a GM turkey of a film. This insincere romantic comedy from director Sheree Folkson is replete with wobbly accents, head-slapping clichés, cardboard characters, preposterous plot developments, all flanked by a distractingly dire TV movie score. That it’s such a shambles will be a particular disappointment to (the innumerable) fans of David Tennant, for whom this represents his first filmic foray as romantic lead.Writers Sally Phillips and Neil Jaworski give us Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Baker Street” and “Stuck in the Middle With You” will live forever. Once heard, each is never forgotten. Both are perfect. Both were written and sung by Gerry Rafferty, the subject of Right Down the Line, an affectionate David Tennant-narrated tribute to this stubborn Scotsman, who died in January last year. The story was told with warmth and his songwriting celebrated, but evidence for Rafferty’s troubled nature was never far.“Baker Street” flew into the charts in early 1978 as punk was supposed to be wiping the singer-songwriter off the face of the earth. Gerry Rafferty’s beard, the single Read more ...
Amy Liptrot
In the same way that some chase the thrills of extreme sport, extreme art fans can now take the challenge of visiting this small art festival, which is uncompromising in terms of location, climate and content. Orkney as a whole has natural beauty, a rich history and a thriving cultural life, with a disproportionate number of artists compared to the size of the population. The prestigious and high-brow St Magnus Festival of arts, held each midsummer, is patronised by composer and isles resident Peter Maxwell Davies.However the Orkney "mainland", the largest island of the group and home to most Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Such is the nature of the music industry these days that artists are anointed even before they’ve released a record. So it has been with Emeli Sandé, a medical student from the north-east of Scotland who has not only bagged this year's BRITs Critics' Choice Award (former winners: Adele, Florence Welch, Ellie Goulding) but is, apparently, Simon Cowell’s favourite songwriter. Stop! Come back...Sandé has written for everyone from Leona Lewis and Tinie Tempah to Susan Boyle and Cher Lloyd, but it’s her voice that you’ll recognise from Professor Green’s recent number one “Read all About It” (which Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Popular operatic love stories by Puccini, Wagner and Mozart dominate the regional scene in 2012, but key talents like producer Tim Albery in Leeds, Lothar Koenigs in Cardiff and David McVicar in Glasgow all promise significant stage experiences. Opera NorthHandel’s Giulio Cesare (NEW PRODUCTION), Leeds Grand Theatre 14 Jan-16 Feb 2012; Nottingham Theatre Royal 23 Feb; Salford Quays The Lowry 1 Mar; Newcastle Theatre Royal 9 Mar; Dublin Grand Canal Theatre 14 Mar. The epic love affair between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, dazzlingly composed for two outstanding female singers. Pamela Helen Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has been transformed with a £7.6 million facelift. As a first-timer I confess I don’t have a clue what it looked like before, but I am assured it was dark and gloomy and had the air of a building cast aside in favour of Edinburgh’s better attractions. Built in 1889 by Robert Rowand Anderson as the world’s first dedicated portrait gallery – paid for by the proprietor of The Scotsman, John Ritchie Findlay, and inspired in part by the Doge’s Palace in Venice – the SNPG had, in fact, shared over half the building with the Scottish Society of Antiquaries.The Read more ...
David Nice
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Glasgow concert tonight has had to be cancelled because of what my Scots godson, in far less extreme conditions down in the Borders, once described as "horrifying wind and rain". The programme? The Suite from Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden, about a northern people in the grip of extended bad winter weather until the icy heroine should be melted by the rays of love, and the second act of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, where admittedly it's in the first that ballerina snowflakes eventually get tossed around in a storm and the heroine heads off with her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scotland’s Bill Wells is hard to pin down. Although ostensibly a jazz pianist, boundaries don’t concern him. He’s played with Aidan Moffat and Isobel Campbell. In 2009 he made the GOK album with Japan’s Tori Kudo (who records as Maher Shalal Hash Baz). Lemondale was made in Japan with a raft of collaborators that include Jim O’Rourke, Kudo and members of Tenniscoats.It’s a lovely album. Coherent, too. Especially considering that it was recorded in one day. Overall, Lemondale is filmic, edging towards Michel Legrand’s jazzier moments and even Francis Lai soundtracks. Equally, it’d be at home Read more ...
fisun.guner
George Shaw might have been the popular favourite, but it was Martin Boyce who carried the vote to win this year’s Turner Prize. The 44-year-old artist from Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, follows fast on the heels of two fellow Scots: Susan Philipsz won the prize in 2010 and Richard Wright in 2009. But neither seemed as much of a clear-cut choice as Boyce, for although the public vote wasn’t his, the critics were pretty much united in backing him.Boyce’s installation (main picture), which takes as its starting reference a series of sculptures by French Modernists Joel and Jan Martel, is Read more ...
graeme.thomson
The passing of Jackie Leven, who died last night from cancer, comes with a sense of real sadness. One of our most distinctive and original singer-songwriters, the Fifer maintained a doggedly low commercial profile throughout almost four decades spent weaving his rich, rather brave musical tapestry. With the abrasive, unclassifiable pre-punk band Doll By Doll and later as a solo artist, Leven often specialised in difficult subjects. A song on one of his recent solo records was called “The War Crimes of Ariel Sharon”, and his music was typically peopled by Serbian prostitutes, Earls Court Read more ...