Coffee-Table Notes

It was during the height of mid-1990s Britpop fever when Liverpool-born singer/songwriter and brains behind pop perfectionists The Lightning Seeds Ian Broudie suddenly found himself at No1 in the singles charts with a football anthem performed with a pair of comedians.

Almost a decade and a half on from the original release of Three Lions, the song, recorded with Frank Skinner and David Baddiel as the England football team’s official song for the Euro 96 competition, remains Broudie’s best-known work. As he sets out on a series of rescheduled low-key solo dates following the cancellation of an Edinburgh Festival Fringe show in August, however, you get the impression that the short-lived triumphalism and euphoria of Britpop are the last things on his mind.

“It’s an odd thing,” he reflects, “because in terms of my career, Three Lions had a negative effect. I’d already done three albums as The Lightning Seeds, and had started playing live with a band in the run up to the third one…

When Pete Irvine talks about Scot:Lands, the multiple-venue New Year's Day extravaganza that will see some 8,000 morning after revellers move around Edinburgh's Old Town, it as if he is navigating his way around an imaginary landscape of his own design. One minute he's singing the praises of the St Magnus Festival on Orkney, the next he's flitting from the Wigtown Book Festival to the Highlands, taking in all manner of mini festivals and home grown folk art en route.

The audiences who have signed up online for the already fully subscribed free event will be able to do something similar after downloading their boarding pass that allows them access to nine as yet un-named indoor venues that hosts this celebration of localism in what amounts to a global village. Beyond geographical borders, they will also be able to explore neglected poets of the past brought to life by a new generation of young radicals, as well as checking out an even newer diaspora of Scots borne of a…

CULTURAL revolutions take time. Just ask the recently-reformed Gang Of Four. In the first flush of punk, they took their name from a quartet of deposed Chinese Communist Party leaders, and now, almost 30 years on, find the spiky urgency of their punk-funk pioneering co-opted into the mainstream by everyone from Franz Ferdinand to Bloc Party.

Gang of Four's appearance this weekend at the newly-constituted Indian Summer festival, in Glasgow's Victoria Park, should go some way towards reclaiming the limelight from such musical whippersnappers, as well as making up for the cancellation of a proposed Glasgow show in 2005 when vocalist Jon King injured himself.

"Jon keeps time by hitting something with a metal bar, " says guitarist Andy Gill. "Quite often we use a microwave, and, one night, we were doing the song, He'd Send In The Army, and he missed and the bar went into his knee."
As punk-rock moments go, it's a far cry from 30 years ago,…

WHEN Joanne Catherall played her debut gig with The Human League in a Doncaster nightclub in 1980, the idea of playing to 16,000 people in the unfeasibly glamourous amphitheatre that is the Hollywood Bowl was, like so many things in the depressed north of England at the time, an impossible dream. Up until the Doncaster show, dark-haired schoolgirl Catherall and her blonde best friend Susanne Sulley had escaped the grey, post-industrial depression of their Sheffield home on the dancefloor of their local palace of neon naughtiness, the Crazy Daisy. Within a year, they'd be Top Of The Pops regulars, performing hits from the mega-selling album Dare - including the ultimate kitchen-sink Christmas number-one duet, Don't You Want Me?

More than a quarter of a century on, Catherall, Sulley and frontman Phil Oakey are still the core of a thoroughly grown-up, re-made and re-modelled Human League. They are currently on a greatest-hits tour for audiences of not-quite-so-new roman…

Onstage in a dimly lit club that sits at the end of a row of terraced houses, poet Kevin Williamson is performing a poem about Edinburgh, the city where he lives. A homage in part to Salford bard John Cooper Clarke, the co-founder of spoken-word art cabaret mash-up Neu! Reekie!'s opus is a humorous and potty-mouthed paean to all that is good, bad and ugly about the place he calls home.

Over the course of an hour or so, there are performances and presentations by members of Scottish Album of the Year winners Young Fathers, artist and provocateur Bill Drummond, poet and Neu! Reekie! regular Hollie McNish, film-maker Mark Cousins and members of Edinburgh hip hop troupe Stanley Odd. Also in attendance are radio DJ Vic Galloway and Davie Miller of pioneering electronic band FiniTribe.

With Williamson and fellow Neu! Reekie! co-pilot Michael Pedersen hosting the show, the night climaxes with a dynamic performance by Law Holt, followed by sets from a crew of fledgling rappers, which se…

It's all the tube strike's fault. The double-deckers are crammed, and a black cab is impossible. In the autumn sunshine, bodies ebb and flow outwards from King's Cross's dilapidated, ever so slightly edgy exterior. Dickensian waifs flake out on red brick and sawdust street corners. An emaciated girl slaps felt-tipped ''business'' cards on telephone box walls. London may be a blur of constant motion, progress personified, but these images, along with a good old-fashioned British strike, only serve to heighten the fact that, however swanky its minimalist facade, London life is still as charmingly grotty as ever.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the gangly figure lolloping down Marylebone High Street. He may be the epitome of dressed down cool in his pinstripe plum-coloured strides and short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to tropical proportions, but the fact that he played in one of the most influential bands to ever pogo out of Ladbroke Gr…

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars

The painful litany of shop-soiled Christmas songs that usher in Matthew Bulgo's not entirely festive monologue speak volumes about what follows. Into the void steps Tom, a man on the verge of thirty wearing a hang-dog expression and a permanently misanthropic air. Over the next sixty minutes, Tom rewinds from hungover awkwardness with his newly pregnant girlfriend Nat, to the sheer awfulness of the office party the night before. But, as he leaves Nat alone to travel home for Christmas, Tom goes further, to the loser mates he left behind, to his widowed mum, and most of all to his dead dad who he's slowly but surely starting to resemble.
As played by Sion Pritchard in Kate Wasserberg's seasonal revival for the Cardiff-based Dirty Protest company, Tom is an initially dislikeable young pretender, a commitment-phobic man-child scared to face up to his responsibilities, yet who also feels hard done by. Out of such a gently tragi-comic sc…

Here's a wheeze and a half: Guinness are/were a wonky pop duo with tentacles in various Edinburgh College of Art-sired bands, including Commie Cars and Edinburgh Leisure. Armed with John Shuttleworth-style toybox keyboards and wilfully rudimentary bass and de(con) structive guitar, throughout 2016 they produced deadpan absurdist vignettes, some of which were possessed with a tragicomic intent worthy of Tony Hancock.

After seven months they decided to split up, figuring that was quite long enough for them to have done their bit, thank you very much. Their last gift to the world is this twelve-track album, released solely on YouTube, although there's a download link if you want one, and it really is pure genius.

The opening instrumental title track somewhat appositely bumps and grinds its way across the dancefloor like very early Cabaret Voltaire, its primitive drum machine, motorik funk bass and wailing banshee guitar giving few clues to what follows. I'm A Zookeeper (Not A…