Coffee-Table Notes

Sam Knee was thinking about his two young daughters when he decided to put together the book that became Untypical Girls. Subtitled Styles and Sounds of the Transatlantic Indie Revolution, Knee’s compendium of images combines coffee-table gloss and a DIY sensibility to create a vital document charting the irresistible rise of female-centred bands from punk to riot grrrl. Inbetween, umpteen shades of post-punk, indie, no wave, hardcore, shoegaze and grunge show off an emancipated underground of women seizing the means of production. As they do so, they remain charity-shop groovy enough to set a street-smart example for future generations.   “My daughters are too young yet to be into music,” says Knee. “One’s nine, and the other’s still a toddler, but I wanted something for them to have when they’re a little bit older that says they don’t have to be synthetic, but that they can dress like this if they want to. They’re not ready for that yet, but I thought it would be nice to have a

Stephen Adly Guirgis was in a bar when one of the seeds for his play, The Motherfucker with the Hat, first started to take hold. The New York born playwright, director, actor and screen-writer was out with a group of male friends, and they got talking, as men do, about women who weren’t their wives or partners, but who they’d been intimate with, or as intimate as you can get without touching. “I was noticing people being unfaithful in their relationships pretty often,” Guirgis says about the roots of his 2011 Broadway hit on the eve of its revival at the Tron Theatre in co-production with the Cardiff-based Sherman Theatre. “One guy said that he had all these things going on with other women, but that it was okay, because they didn’t have sex or touch, they just got naked and masturbated. And everyone was going, yeah, yeah, not touching, like it was fine. I said, wait a minute, if your girlfriend went home with a guy, took her clothes off, and didn’t have sex, but they both mastur

Eddie Amoo Singer, song-writer with The Real Thing Born May 4 1944; died February 23 2018 By rights, Eddie Amoo, who has died suddenly in Australia aged 73, should have had as high a profile as a singer and song-writer of socially conscious soul as his heroes Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes and Marvin Gaye. If Amoo had come from frontline Harlem or Watts, both crucibles of the 1960s civil rights movement, it might have happened. Coming from the rough-house streets of Liverpool 8, or Toxteth as the city’s multi-racial inner-city neighbourhood built on the back of slavery became better known following the summer riots of 1981, things worked out differently. This was despite Amoo and The Real Thing, the band formed by Amoo’s younger brother Chris, writing Children of the Ghetto, the centre-piece of the twelve-minute Liverpool 8 Medley. This three-part suite formed the climax of the band’s 1977 album, 4 from 8, and attempted to give voice to some of the conflicting tensions that

When Ross Sinclair designed the cover for the first album by his band The Soup Dragons, he was accidentally setting a marker down for the relationship between his artistic practice and his role as the band’s drummer. ‘this is our ART’ went the legend set on a painted five-pointed star that seemed to shimmer like a wild west sheriff’s badge. ‘USELESS, BORING, IMPOTENT, ELITIST AND VERY VERY BEAUTIFUL’.  As revolutionary slogans go, it was tailor-made for t-shirts some of us still wear. The album was released in 1988, a few years after Sinclair had taken time out from his studies at Glasgow School of Art to join in with a nascent underground scene that saw the then Buzzcocks-inspired Soup Dragons play their first gig supporting a still jangly Primal Scream. That was at Splash 1, the Sunday night Glasgow Happening that recast Andy Warhol’s Factory in a sticky-floored 1980s neon-lit nightclub set to a punk/psych soundtrack played on cassettes. Thirty-odd years on, Sinclair contin

It felt like things had come full circle when Stephen Mallinder found himself working with his students in Brighton making 16mm film loops. More than forty years earlier, he and his collaborators in Sheffield-sired electronic trio Cabaret Voltaire had done something similar. Taking their name from a Dadaist nightclub and inspired by William Burroughs, Mallinder, Richard H Kirk and Chris Watson cut and pasted a set of rhythmically pulsed soundtracks to a scary dystopian future set to back-drops of found footage collages. Now here was Mallinder in a digital future which seemed to have caught up on itself. “Technology has changed everything,” he says, “but it’s great that a new generation want to work that way.” A similar sense of experimentation with sound and film should be in evidence when Mallinder’s current band, Wrangler, appear at Glasgow Film Festival this week as one half of an event called The Unfilmables. Scheduled as part of GFF’s Sound and Vision strand following a

Candy Opera was the first band I ever met. For a young shaver attempting to make his way in Liverpool during the early 1980s, this probably sounds a bit weird. Maybe not as weird as hearing them again for the first time in more than 30 years, but still. That strange sensation comes courtesy of 45 Revolutions Per Minute, a collection of never-released demos recorded between 1983 and 1993 by several incarnations of a band who should have caught fire alongside contemporaries such as The Pale Fountains, Prefab Sprout and Friends Again. Fates decreed, alas, that Candy Opera’s elegant brand of what some are now calling sophisti-pop somehow fell off the radar, only to be discovered online by Uwe Weigmann, co-owner of the Berlin-based Firestation label, ace purveyors of indie obscurities par excellence. What those coming with fresh ears to the album when it is released this weekend on limited edition CD and vinyl is anybody’s guess. For me, even though the bulk of the album was recorded