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April 2020 Issue 175
January 2020
Books
THE SKINNY
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THE SKINNY
Art January 2020
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THE SKINNY
The Skinny’s isolation playlist...
The White Stripes — I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself Macy Rodman — Lazy Girl Pavement — Cut Your Hair Tame Impala — Solitude Is Bliss Living in a Box — Living in a Box The Communards — Don't Leave Me This Way American Football — Stay Home LCD Soundsystem — emotional haircut George Michael — Killer / Papa Was a Rolling Stone Akon — Lonely Grover Washington Jr — Just the Two of Us Akon — Locked Up Robyn — Dancing On My Own Therapy? — Isolation
Taylor Swift — We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together Marika Hackman — hand solo
Listen to this playlist on Spotify – search for 'The Skinny Office Playlist' or scan the below code
Issue 175, April 2020 © Radge Media Ltd.
April 2020
Get in touch: E: [email protected] T: 0131 467 4630 P: The Skinny, 1.9 1st Floor Tower, Techcube, Summerhall, 1 Summerhall Pl, Edinburgh, EH9 1PL The Skinny is Scotland's largest independent entertainment & listings magazine, and offers a wide range of advertising packages and affordable ways to promote your business. Get in touch to find out more. E: [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the explicit permission of the publisher. The views and opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the printer or the publisher. Printed by DC Thomson & Co. Ltd, Dundee ABC verified Jan – Dec 2019: 28,197
printed on 100% recycled paper
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Championing creativity in Scotland
Meet the team We asked – what are your top store cupboard recipes? Editorial
Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief "I received this useful advice from a PR: Pair a vanilla milk rice pudding with a sun-drenched and similarly sweet Sicillian Grillo for a nostalgic treat."
Peter Simpson Digital Editor, Food & Drink Editor "Ran out of spuds weeks ago? Simmer butter beans, thyme, rosemary and lots of garlic in a saucepan. Add a bit of stock, blitz or mash, pretend it's potato."
Anahit Behrooz Events Editor "Dominos."
Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist "Chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle + boiled egg (optional) + spring onion (optional) + slice of processed turkey (optional) = Ramen."
Tallah Brash Music Editor "There's an incredible recipe on BBC Good Food for Burnt Aubergine Chilli – slow-cooked for a few hours it is nothing short of exceptional, and very versatile."
Adam Benmakhlouf Art Editor "Recipes all out the window, just keeping in mind Samin Nosrat's advice to balance Salt Fat Acid Heat, and also not overdo it with the dried spices."
Production
Nadia Younes Clubs Editor "Cheese beano, aka cheese and beans on toast, aka the most comforting meal OF ALL TIME."
Polly Glynn Comedy Editor "One tin of Heinz Vegetable Soup. One tin of Heinz Oxtail Soup. Mix. Bon appetit! A recipe of my Grandad's creation. He taught me how to bet on horses."
Katie Goh Intersections Editor, Acting Books Editor "Instant ramen + any leftovers + an egg + chili sauce = best lunch ever."
Tom McCarthy Creative Projects Manager "Curried porridge yo!"
George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist "Tin of tuna + fork."
Eliza Gearty Theatre Editor "Chickpeas. Now is the time to do something bizarre, like make hummus from scratch."
Sales & Business
Sandy Park Commercial Director "Cheese of any kind. In any form."
Laurie Presswood General Manager "Easy-to-make sauce: combine one carton of tomato passata with pepper, celery, Tabasco, Lea & Perrins, lemon, ice, vodka."
Rachael Hood Art Director, Production Manager "Season your food with those back-of-the-shelf crumbs. Who knows what you could excite your taste buds with!"
Fiona Hunter Designer "Make your own milk from a big ol' bag of oats."
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Editorial Words: Rosamund West
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audiences in the coming months. We meet one member of sketch super group Tarot to hear about rehearsing over WhatsApp and comedy in the time of COVID-19. One resident of Milan offers a first hand account of what life has been like in their lockdown – you’ll find more like this on the site in the coming weeks. Glasgow Zine Fest may be cancelled, but you can still appreciate the work of local zine makers online or order your own copies (support local creatives). We speak to a few in our centre pages. As restaurants and bars are forced to close their public premises, many are pivoting into delivery services. We meet the people behind new grocery box delivery service Romaine Calm to find out more about where they’re coming from. Concluding our isolation special, Intersections looks at why voice notes are definitely the communication tool of this particular crisis. In slightly more normal release-driven content, we meet Purity Ring, here to talk about their third album WOMB. Locals Walt Disco talk 80s influences and maintaining their breakout year in spite of their live dates being cancelled, while Elisabeth Elektra shares a little of her creative process. South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus discusses Moffie, an extraordinary drama about a teen conscripted to fight in the Angolan war in Apartheid-era South Africa while Lucio Castro discusses moving romance End of the Century. In Books, Wendy Liu discusses the future of technology without capitalism, being a woman in a male-dominated industry and the pitfalls of corporate diversity. That’s us for now. We’ll be back hopefully in a couple of months, ready to inform, engage and enrage you in equal measure just as we have for the last near-15 years. In the meantime, let’s all just stay inside and read theskinny.co.uk.
April 2020 — Chat
he world has changed so rapidly in the last fortnight it feels impossible to predict what it will look like when this issue hits the streets (or, now, the supermarket shelves) in five days time. We’re been working remotely for the last week and a half, trying to put together a magazine using all new processes and compiling all new distribution routes to make sure we’re able to get the finished product into readers’ hands. Fingers crossed that has worked. As a magazine which mainly covers events, is primarily distributed in social and cultural venues, and relies entirely on advertising revenue to sustain itself, it may not come as a shock to learn that we have been profoundly affected by the current lockdown. As a result, we have taken the difficult decision to press pause on our print publication until such a time as events are coming back on, and the cities opening up. This April issue will be our last for a while, although we will be continuing on the web for the foreseeable future. Head to theskinny.co.uk or our various social channels for your daily dose of accessible culture online. For this last-for-a-while issue, we took the opportunity offered by... eh... everything being cancelled to look at things largely untethered from time and (geographical) space. We also have been preoccupied, like much of the population, with wondering how to best maintain social connection while remaining within our homes. Our theme is life during social distancing – so, our Film editor has carefully curated a multistranded film festival you can watch at home, in your pants. Surely everyone’s dream? We look at how the local music community has responded to the restrictions on venues by switching to live streaming performances on digital platforms, and hear from National Theatre of Scotland about their plans to bring Scenes for Survival, a series of short digital works, to
Cover Artist Rachael Hood Rachael Hood is an Edinburgh-based illustrator and art director, whose art practice ebbs and flows between disciplines. She uses storytelling, filmmaking and printmaking to bring to life observations of human behaviour, identity and interaction. www.rachael-hood.com Find her on Instagram at @rachaelhoodprints
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THE SKINNY
Love Bites
Love Bites: Music Will Always Be There This month’s columnist reflects on the emotional staying power of music Words: Jex Wang
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April 2020 — Chat
burst into tears on the bus because my friend sent me a song I had been avoiding for over nine years. She had no idea I was meant to send that song to my high school sweetheart who unfortunately passed away before I could get it to him. The mere track title reduced me to a mess thinking about one of the most devastating heartbreaks of my life. As I sat there silently weeping to the song on the bus, I began to realise that it had been a long time since I really thought about that relationship. I kept playing it on repeat until eventually my tears dried and I started to smile thinking about how pure and wholesome it was to be in love for the first time. The song took me back to a time when I had no fear when it came to love because I didn’t know how bad it could be. As bitter as I am about not being able to be in that mindset again, I am still eternally grateful that I got to experience it. By the time I got home, I had added the song to one of my playlists and was humming the lyrics in my head. In my life, I’ve experienced a multitude of heartbreaks but also numerous cherished moments with family, lovers and friends that I will remember forever. Certain pieces of music end up becoming the soundtrack to these moments. I appreciate how they have the power to bring back some cherished memories that I pushed away due to heartbreak.
Crossword Solutions Across 1. RIVERS CUOMO 9. AL FRESCO 10. TEAM 11. TERRENCE MALICK 12. WHO 14. FBI 15. RSVP 17. EAT 18. SOS 19. YEET 20. ODE 21. SUN 22. CHECKED BAGGAGE 24. YUAN 25. ARANCINI 26. THE TERMINAL Down 2. INFERNO 3. RESIN 4. CLOVERFIELD LANE 5. OSTRACISE 6. OUTLIERS 7. SLACK 8. CASTAWAY 13. STOCKPILE 16. PANDEMIC 17. ETHERNET 21. STAMINA 22. COUCH 23. ALARM
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THE SKINNY
Heads Up
With all of us hopefully now confined to our houses (if you are still outside – why? Go inside), we bring you a special, quarantine edition of our April Heads Up calendar. Stream incredible live music, read a book or seven, and turn to Netflix with renewed, invigorated purpose
Compiled by Anahit Behrooz
Heads Up
Lighthouse Books, various dates Edinburgh’s radical bookshop is keeping up its community spirit with a new series of author-based digital events to keep us all afloat in these strange tides. Made up of interviews, book chats, and recommendations released on their socials over the next few weeks, the list of authors includes Lola Olufemi, Golnoosh Nour and Jemma Neville.
Photo: Gavin Day
Photo: Lighthouse Books
Lighthouse Life raft
Films by Filmhouse + MUBI Edinburgh’s beloved indie cinema Filmhouse may have closed its physical doors for now, but it is opening other, metaphorical ones to the wonderful world of cinema. Head to their website and you can get three months of indie film streaming service MUBI for free. Upcoming releases in April include the incandescent Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire Photo: Matthew Arthur Williams
Notes from an Apocalypse Photo: Joanna Mahaneela Susskind
All The Young Nudes - Online Drawing Club (LIVE) Mondays, 7pm
April 2020 — Chat
Scotland’s hottest new variety night takes place in your very living room (or bedroom, or bathtub…we won’t judge). Streaming live on Instagram every Saturday (@quarantinecabaret) at 7:30pm, Quarantine Cabaret have lined up an impressive collection of musicians, writers and performers for April: look out for the likes of Harry Harris, Kirsty Law and Ricky Monahan Brown. Photo: Lilies Films
Credit: Penguin
14 Apr Could there be a more apropos book? No. A personal yet rigorous investigation of our current world and its uncanny resemblance to the End Times (listen, we were all thinking it), this is a must-read for all you socially isolating bibliophiles out there. Remember to order from your local independent bookshop!
Saturdays, 7:30pm
Harry Harris
Lighthouse Books
Notes from an Apocalypse, Mark O’Connell
Quarantine Cabaret
If the only thing holding you back from being a world-famous artist was time, good news. Edinburgh and Glasgow life drawing darlings All the Young Nudes are holding weekly live streamed life drawing sessions: head to their Eventbrite to buy tickets and get a link to their next session.
All the Young Nudes
Glasgow Zine Festival
Photo: Netflix
Credit: Netflix
Little Women Digital release, 1 Apr
Come Zine With Me 9 Apr, 3pm There are some organisations that have responded to the lockdown with heroic aplomb, and the Glasgow Zine Library is one of them. With their April festival cancelled, they’ve instead programmed a series of incredible remote events. If you’re feeling crafty, hang out at their live-streamed zine making session and collage away your feelings.
Money Heist Season 4 Netflix, 3 Apr Photo: Netflix
Photo: Columbia Pictures
Howl's Moving Castle
Time to Hunt
Studio Ghibli
Time to Hunt
Netflix, 1 Apr
Netflix, 10 Apr Little Women
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Money Heist
THE SKINNY
Tuesdays and Fridays, 2pm Luminate, Scotland’s creative ageing organisation, is releasing two videos a week teaching new activities and skills that can be done at home. Learn how to make paper crafts, memorise a new dance routine, or improve your creative writing. The videos will be posted on their socials and website every Tuesday and Friday.
Credit: Elena Boils
Photo: Eoin Carey
Luminate@Home
Photo: Trackie McLeod
Femspectives Film Club Wednesdays, 7pm and Thursdays, 8pm Still smarting from the Oscars’ complete denial of womxn directors? Femspectives are here to ease the pain. Following on from their incredible festival earlier this year, Femspectives are rolling out an at-home feminist film club. Films will be voted on by participants, and you can tweet along every Wednesday evening, with an extended Zoom discussion on Thursdays.
Varda by Agnès Photo: Rumpus Room
SHREK 666
Every day, 7pm Keep your mind sharp and your general knowledge skills obnoxious with Scottish favourites Goose’s Quizzes. Using their Twitch livestream (yes, Twitch. How do you do, fellow kids?), assemble your teammates (remotely goddamnit!) and put your answers into their special online answer sheet. Goose’s Quizzes are running every night at 7pm so you can quiz away to your heart’s content.
Music for the Isolated Generation Various dates Another newly sprung-up live performance night for the quarantined and housebound, this Glasgow-based initiative are programming incredible acts throughout April for live streaming. Confirmed so far are hypnotic drag DJ SHREK 666, performance artist Liv Fontaine, and dance band Design a Wave – head to Music for the Isolated Generation’s Facebook for dates, further events and streaming links. Photo: Joel Nilsson
Rumpus Room, sculpture petting zoo with Sally Hackett
Rumpus Room Thursdays, 2pm
Yoga
Photo: Netflix
Photo: Netflix
Invisible Life Amazon Prime, 3 Apr
Yoga for the Apocalypse Various dates The number of exercise apps I have downloaded in the last month is deeply disproportional to the amount of exercise I normally do. If you too are on this optimistic (delusional?) kick, check out your local yoga spots offering digital classes. Edinburgh’s Meadowlark run daily online sessions while Laura Yoga + Fitness in Glasgow has moved her classes to Zoom.
Tigertail Netflix, 10 Apr Photo: Netflix
Photo: Amazon Studios Circus of Books
Community
Community Seasons 1-6
Circus of Books
Netflix, 1 Apr
Netflix, 22 Apr Invisible Life
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Tigertail
April 2020 — Chat
An artist-led collaborative studio space for children and young people, Rumpus Room are – like everyone else – turning to the internet to keep the arts trucking along. Tune in to their Instagram or Facebook stories on Thursday afternoons for live studio craft sessions and workshops, perfect for home-schooling or just keeping the boredom away.
Heads Up
Goose's Quizzes
Luminate
Goose’s Quizzes
April 2020
THE SKINNY
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THE SKINNY
6 Editorial — 7 Love Bites — 8 Heads Up — 12 Games — 35 Albums 40 Film & TV — 44 Books — 45 Comedy — 46 The Skinny On… Kieran Hurley
Features 15 Welcome to life in the time of corona! With the UK on lockdown, we’ve curated for you a film festival you can enjoy from your home 18 We speak to those affected by COVID-19 in Scotland's music industry
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21 Want a picture of the UK’s near-future? We look at life in lockdown in Italy
Contents
20 National Theatre of Scotland introduces its coronavirus crisis project Scenes for Survival
22 One-fifth of sketch supergroup Tarot let us in on their comedy process 23 Two stalwarts of the Scottish food scene have a plan to feed us through lockdown 24 The power of zine culture and local arts is explored
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26 One writer reflects on the tensions of growing up LGBTQIA+ and religious
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27 Why voice notes might be the perfect form of communication during coronavirus lockdown 28 Indie-electro duo Purity Ring reflect on the current pop landscape 30 Tech industry critic Wendy Liu is all set to abolish Silicon Valley
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34 Time, space and memory are all in flux in Lucio Castro’s queer romance End of the Century On the website... The Skinny’s intern, Caroline Ring, recounts her nervy flight back to the USA before the borders closed as COVID-19 panic set in; Holy Fuck's Graham Walsh on their estimable new record 28
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Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Rachael Hood; Roosa Päivänsalo; Niall Walker; Harry Woodgate; Drew Forsyth; Romaine Calm; Rose Sergent; Katie Smith; Monika Stachowiak; Carson Davis Brown; Jackie Luo; Moffie; End of the Century
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April 2020 — Chat
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33 Oliver Hermanus returns with a drama about a gay teen conscripted to fight in the Angolan war in Apartheid-era South Africa
THE SKINNY
Shot of the month Jon Hopkins, Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 4 Mar by Martin Ross
by Jock Mooney
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April 2020 — Chat
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Compiled by George Sully
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1. Member of the band Weezer who once released a solo album called Alone: The Home Recordings of... (6, 5) 9. Term (pinched from Italian) meaning "outside", especially when eating (2, 6) 10. People on the same side (4) 11. R eclusive director of films such as The Tree of Life and The Thin Red Line (8, 6) 12. UN agency dedicated to public wellbeing (initials) (3) 14. U S agency dedicated to domestic security (initials) (3) 15. Initialism (pinched from French) to confirm an invitation, back when we could go to things (4) 17. To put food in one's face (3) 18. Morse code distress signal, also an ABBA banger (3) 19. Exclamation (pinched from... the internet) especially when throwing something (4) 20. Fancy poem celebrating someone or something (3) 21. Big hot sky ball (3) 22. The suitcases that go in the hold rather than the cabin (7, 7) 24. Chinese currency (4) 25. Deep-fried rice balls, from the Italian for "little orange" (8) 26. Tom Hanks trapped in an airport (3, 8)
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Down 2. Dante's hot place (7) 3. Amber is an example of this plant-secreted substance (5) 4. Stuck in a bunker with John Goodman, address: 10 ____ ____ (11, 4) 5. Exclude or banish (9) 6. Things that are separate to or distant from the main thing (8) 7. Instant messaging platform, "where work happens" (5) 8. Tom Hanks trapped on an island (8) 13. Hoard (9) 16. That innocuous board game about virulent diseases taking over the world (8) 17. Internet cable (8) 21. Ability to endure (7) 22. Sofa (5) 23. A warning sound, especially for getting up in the morning (5) Turn to page 7 for the solutions
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April 2020
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April 2020
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THE SKINNY
Virtual Reality Illustration: Rachael Hood
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his month we find ourselves mainly indoors, so we’ve put together a special issue to help you stay connected and entertained while doing your most important job of staying home. The outside world may be largely out of bounds (beyond our one daily government-mandated outdoor exercise session*) but that doesn’t mean you can’t engage with your local cultural community. The early days of social distancing have seen a wealth of inspired solutions popping up for creatives to share their work with an audience through virtual means. Self-isolation can seem daunting, but here are a few ideas – from a streaming film festival to Instagram Live gigs to local home deliveries – that we hope will help you navigate this remarkable time. *Terms of lockdown correct at time of writing
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THE SKINNY
Quarantine Culture It's just like a normal film festival, but you don't have to wear trousers – bunker down with our curated list of films to stream at home Compiled by Jamie Dunn
Film
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elcome to quarantine culture! And get used to it. Our cinemas are closed, our festivals are postponed and our monthly film clubs have now been outlawed in an attempt to quash the spread of COVID-19. With your movie palaces on lockdown, you film fans out there have probably turned to streaming to get your movie fix, but with huge catalogues filled mostly with bad Adam Sandler movies (and the occasional good ones, i.e. Uncut Gems), you’ll probably spend most
of your time in quarantine trying to decide what to watch. What you really need in this moment of endless choice is a bit of curation and some order applied to the bounty of cinema at your fingertips. Something a bit like a film festival. And that’s exactly what we’ve attempted to come up with here: a programme of film and television available to stream that’s been put into a manageable order and categorised by themes.
April 2020 — Feature
Love in a Time of Corona Separated from your bae through this time of crisis? These tales of love – both bitter and sweet – should keep you going until you’re reunited.
Atlantics (2019) Watch on Netflix
Call Me by Your Name (2017) Watch on Netflix
The Green Fog (2017) Watch on Vimeo
I Lost My Body (2019) Watch on Netflix
I’m Not Okay with This (2020) Watch on Netflix
Appropriate Behaviour (2014) Watch on Amazon Prime or BFI Player
Schitt’s Creek (2015) Watch on Netflix
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015) Watch on Netflix
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) Watch on Netflix
Spy (2015) Watch on Netflix
Downsizing (2017) Watch on Netflix
Hot Rod (2007) Watch on Netflix
Sometimes You Just Have to Laugh Another way to approach the COVID-19 crisis, of course, is to sit back and laugh. These comedies are the perfect balm to the hellscape that is your Twitter timeline.
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THE SKINNY
Works like My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service saw Miyazaki’s acclaim grow in the West, while masterpieces like eco-epic Princess Mononoke and the elegantly batshit Spirited Away confirmed him a master of animation with mainstream audiences. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) Castle in the Sky (1986) My Neighbor Totoro (1988) Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) Princess Mononoke (1997) Spirited Away (2001) All of the above are available on Netflix
Film
My Neighbor Totoro
COVID-19 retrospective: Hayao Miyazaki If you’re looking to escape reality for a short while, we recommend diving into the world of Hayao Miyazaki, who’s been taking us into strange new worlds and on phantasmagoric adventures for decades. Luckily, a bunch of Miyazaki’s Studio Ghilbi films have just arrived on Netflix and are waiting for you to dive in. As much as we love Miyazaki’s later films like Ponyo and Howl’s Moving Castle, we suggest you get stuck into the lesser-seen early works like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky, both action-packed adventures full of the imagination and style that would make the Studio Ghilbi animation house the most creative and critically acclaimed in the world.
How to Survive this Plague If movies and TV shows have taught us anything, it’s how to overcome adversity, whether that’s being trapped in a confined space or fighting huge celestial beings.
Room (2015) Watch on Amazon Prime
The Kings of Summer (2013) Watch on Amazon Prime
Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) Watch on Netflix
Paris, Texas (1984) Watch on BFI Player
Bacurau (2019) Watch on MUBI
The Wild Goose Lake (2019) Watch on MUBI
Spring in a Small Town (1948) Watch on BFI Player
Kaili Blues (2015) Watch on Amazon Prime
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) Rent on Amazon Prime or BFI Player
The Breadwinner (2017) Watch on Netflix
Under the Shadow (2016) Watch on Netflix
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April 2020 — Feature
Chinese and Iranian films: a Cinema of Solidarity We’ve seen racism rear its ugly head during this crisis. Better though would be to show empathy to the countries who have been most affected by the coronavirus outbreak. With China and Iran among the most devastated by COVID-19, we dive in to some great films from these great filmmaking nations.
Daybreak (2019) Watch on Netflix
THE SKINNY
We Can’t Stop As Scotland’s music industry scrambles to survive an uncertain future in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, we speak to those affected by the ‘new normal’
Photo: Nick Stewart
Music
Interview: Becca Inglis
Sneaky Pete's
“We felt hung out to dry” April 2020 — Feature
Nick Stewart, Sneaky Pete’s
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feeling a lot like Doomsday fell about the country on Thursday 12 March. Up until then it had felt like business as usual, but while Boris Johnson told the public that schools would stay open and sporting events could go ahead, Nicola Sturgeon seemed to confirm that afternoon what Scottish promoters had feared for weeks – that large gatherings of more than 500 people would be banned in Scotland, starting from the following Monday. Events that were scheduled that weekend could still go ahead, and at Edinburgh’s Wee Dub Festival the room was full. That’s not to say that signs of the coronavirus pandemic didn’t linger – events colleagues opted for the more hygienic elbow bump over hugs, and MC Natty Campbell shared on the mic how nervewracking passing through Edinburgh Airport had been. “It’s scary out there,” he said, “but tonight is about the music.” ‘The show must go on’ seemed to be the operating mantra amongst promoters, though with each passing day that became an even more daunting task. In Edinburgh, the lack of large venues initially felt like a benefit. Smaller clubs, like the 100-capacity Sneaky Pete’s, could technically still keep their doors open, while nights like Church Edinburgh said that they’d cap numbers for their night at The Liquid Room (now postponed
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to 5 Nov) to stay under the 500 limit. But come Monday 16 March, it materialised that Sturgeon’s message was not an outright ban, just strongly worded advice. In his first daily briefing to the public, Johnson avoided calling a ban himself in favour of discouraging people from communing in clubs, pubs and restaurants, and said that emergency services would no longer be in attendance at large gatherings. It was left to the musicians, promoters, and venues, then, to decide whether to press forward with their events. Whether these individuals ethically felt they could keep bringing people together was one thing. But many who have staked their careers on live music had little choice. This line of work is already famously hand-to-mouth, and with a rapidly emptying calendar many found themselves cut off. “A lot of people operate on a financial knife edge and closing venues, even for a few weeks, could be a disaster,” said one promoter, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his clients amidst all the uncertainty. “Freelancer friends, be they musicians, tour managers, or general creatives, are already feeling the pinch due to cancelled tours or shows and venue closures. With no sick pay for most, zero hours contracts and uncertainty surrounding support, it’ll fuel anxiety and stress.” “We felt hung out to dry,” Sneaky Pete’s owner Nick Stewart said of Johnson’s 16 March briefing. “Music and hospitality were initially singled out in a way that was going to make trading extremely difficult.” Johnson’s address forced venues into a catch-22 – stay open and watch customers and income trickle away, or close with no way to claim business interruption insurance. Even though COVID-19 is recognised as a notifiable disease in Scotland, meaning it is covered by some insurers, Stewart’s interpretation of his own policy was that the virus would have to be present on the premises for him to make a claim. It would take an impressive amount of foresight, and extra insurance specific to pandemics, for businesses to be covered. In a bid to be proactive, venues like Sneaky Pete’s in Edinburgh and Stereo and The Hug & Pint in Glasgow turned to crowdfunders to help keep their staff paid while business was down, and to make sure they can continue as normal once again in the future. Coming back after the pandemic is a real concern for many, even with the £350 billion worth of business loans and grants made available by Westminster on Tuesday 17 March. At the time, Stewart said: “There’s still some questions around how well it will protect us.” But
THE SKINNY
“If someone feels that ease by tuning into these sessions that I’m holding in my studio, then I think it’s worthwhile” Stina Tweeddale, Honeyblood At the moment some of Scotland’s festivals like Kelburn Garden Party, Doune the Rabbit Hole and Eden at least have time on their side and say they intend to go on as planned, so long as government advice permits them to. There are still a couple of months for rhetoric around gatherings to change, and if the nation were forced into quarantine now for a month, even two, we might be out in time for festival season to commence, just.
But what about the musicians themselves? “People can’t plan to reschedule their tours,” says Honeyblood’s Stina Tweeddale. “If you’re an independent artist who’s not selling millions of records, touring is the best way for you to make money. It’s cut such a massive amount of revenue to use to pay for making records. Without it, that infrastructure just crumbles.” To help ease some of that pressure, on 16 March Tweeddale and her business partner Robert Kilpatrick launched a series of virtual gigs that streamed live from their ICEBLINK LUCK studio with sets from Emme Woods, Martha Ffion and Carla J. Easton as well as Tweeddale herself taking place during the first week. With an increased focus on social distancing, however, Tweeddale plans to continue performing herself every evening for as long as she can. In lieu of a gig ticket, viewers can donate money via a GoFundMe page, with half of all funds raised going to Help Musicians Scotland. “A lot of people socialise in venues, and to be isolated from that community can be quite scary and upsetting,” says Tweeddale. “Maybe it’s a way for us to use technology to combat that. If someone feels that ease by tuning into these sessions that I’m holding in my studio, then I think it’s worthwhile.” She’s not the only one. Artists everywhere have been looking for digital solutions. In Edinburgh, the Quarantine Stream Sessions launched on 19 March, with Quarantine Cabaret launching two days later on the 21st, with musicians Craig Lithgow, Heir of the Cursed and Ben Seal, and poets Iona Lee and Kevin P Gilday broadcasting from their homes to Instagram Live. On the same night, the Glasgow-based Music for
the isolated generation also streamed its first gig via the platform Twitch, featuring Lady Neptune and The Modern Institute. Further afield, entire festivals have materialised online, be it Australia’s Isol-Aid – described as the ‘socially (media) distanced music festival’ that took place on Instagram between 21-22 March – or the Social Distancing Festival in Canada, which acts as a central hub for live streams by embedding content on its website. Its organisers will continue refreshing a calendar of live streams for as long as people continue to submit them. “I’m seeing quite a lot of that [online streaming] just now. People are trying to look at opportunity amongst a mass amount of chaos,” says Kilpatrick, who also works with the Scottish Music Industry Association (SMIA), who have recently issued an Impact Survey poll in order to find out exactly how people in Scotland’s music industry are struggling and what support they need to survive financially. “I think as an industry we need to come together and ensure that at the end of this there still is going to be an industry,” he says. “The good thing is the connection between people in music is so strong, and in times of crisis music is really important. As people turn to their screens instead of going to live events, hopefully there’s an opportunity to inspire and support through music.” If there’s anything that people working in live music know well, it’s risk, and that has been heightened considerably now things are changing at such a fast pace. It will take more creative solutions, partnerships, and goodwill than ever to ride this thing out, but with any luck at the end this plucky industry will pull each other through.
Music
since then, in an unprecedented u-turn, Friday 20 March brought us a glimmer of hope as the UK government took command, demanding the closure of restaurants, bars, gig venues and clubs, announcing they would pay 80% of furloughed employees’ wages. “Given today’s news of extraordinary government commitments to businesses and workers, including those in the hard-hit entertainment and hospitality sectors, we are reviewing the best use of your donations,” Stewart updated on the Sneaky Pete’s crowdfunder page that evening, continuing: “We can again confirm that we will be using the money you have given to both help our staff get through this tough time, and to ensure that the venue is in a good state to rise up again.”
Photo: Roosa Päivänsalo
If you work in music and the arts and have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic head to theskinny.co.uk for some helpful advice
April 2020 — Feature
Honeyblood
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THE SKINNY
The Show Must Go Online Theatre
Jackie Wylie, Artistic Director for the National Theatre of Scotland, tells us about Scenes for Survival, the NTS crisis project responding to the COVID-19 pandemic Interview: Eliza Gearty
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heatres have closed their doors for the foreseeable future, and theatre-makers and lovers are anticipating hard times ahead. The National Theatre of Scotland, however, is offering a not-so-small glimmer of hope. Not only is the company honouring its contracts – paying full wages to those who were expecting to be paid from projects that have been postponed or cancelled – it is also launching a new season of short digital works called Scenes for Survival. The programme will allow audiences in isolation to enjoy theatre throughout the pandemic, and, crucially, provide theatre-makers with continued opportunities for employment.
“When this is over, we want people to still want to go to the theatre” “The first thing we had to do was make sure we were very clear [about] still paying everybody who would’ve been paid had this crisis not happened,” says Artistic Director Jackie Wylie. “We did that first.” The company then began thinking about how to use their platform to “articulate how we’re feeling on a national, cultural level”, with big names involved including Cora Bissett, Mark Bonnar, Tam Dean Burn and Ian Rankin. “We’re putting together mini-teams – a writer, an actor and a director,” explains Wylie. Teams will create short pieces of digital theatre remotely – they could be new pieces of writing or extracts from contemporary Scottish plays. The short works will appear across a series of online platforms and channels over the next few months, delivered in association with BBC Scotland and the BBC Arts Culture in Quarantine project. With no clear guidance from the government regarding freelancers and the self-employed at the time of writing, it’s not surprising that many people in the theatre industry are anxious about the financial implications of COVID-19. It’s something that Wylie says the NTS was very aware of when sketching out plans for Scenes for Survival. “[The programme] will have a fundraising campaign attached to it – [proceeds] will go to those who are facing the largest amount of hardship in the theatre sector,” she explains. Every artist involved in the project will be paid; big names can choose to ‘pay forward’ their fee if they wish, contributing towards supporting lesser-known artists. The NTS approached some of the more high-profile artists directly, but writers of all levels are encouraged to respond to a call-out to have their work commissioned for the project. Wylie’s hope for Scenes for Survival seems to be that it will keep the theatre community
Find out more about Scenes for Survival at nationaltheatrescotland.com
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Photo: Niall Walker
April 2020 — Feature
Jackie Wylie
alive and connected; that audiences can tune in and feel less alone, but also that theatre artists can continue to work and feel valued. Having said this, she’s keen to stress that artists shouldn’t feel under any pressure to create. “Not all artists should be expected to have a response to what’s going on,” she emphasises. “Some people will need to pause and be reflective, and they might not want to be making work. For others, the act of making art and creating is a way of … [maintaining] hope and purpose. Both of these positions are totally fine.” Theatre is, in Wylie’s own words, a “shared, communal live experience”. In this new temporary world, how will digital, online theatre distinguish itself from TV and film and preserve what makes it unique? “One thing I’ve noticed is how much the theatre community is able to react fast, share experiences and act with a unified, collaborative voice,” Wylie responds. “Theatre is a rapid-response art form – we’re aiming to have our first Scenes for Survival pieces out within a fortnight. “The reason we are trying to continue to work – even in isolation, which is kind of the antithesis of the theatrical experience – is because we want to keep audiences together,” she adds. “When this is over, we want people to still want to go to the theatre, because it’s continued to be a part of their lives.” Supporting new stories, she says, has never been so important. “In the last fortnight, the level of humanity that we’re all sharing is completely different to what it was a few weeks ago. We’re suddenly understanding our neighbours and our communities and the NHS workers and the people who work in shops.” Theatre has a role to play, even if it’s offstage: “We can find storytellers who can navigate that into a future where we can sustain that feeling.”
THE SKINNY
Life in Lockdown One Scottish citizen currently living in Milan tells us what life is like living in lockdown and urges you to do your bit and stay at home Words: Raymond Gordon Illustration: Harry Woodgate
Travel
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finalised the details! We saw crowds of people rushing to the train stations to leave the region and move south before they got trapped in the new expanded ‘red-zone’. The changes happened very quickly the next day, with everything closing down with the exception of supermarkets and pharmacies. We were instructed to only leave home to visit one of these two places, for unavoidable work, or in the case we had pets or children that needed to take a short walk outside. Any visit outdoors, we now have to fill in a document to carry with us explaining the reason for going out, incase of a spot check by the police. A visit to the supermarket involves queuing one metre apart outside waiting to get in – my local one allowing only three-to-four people to enter at one time. Once inside, the shelves are full, and there’s nothing I’ve struggled to find. So now I leave home two or three times a week, with the rest of the time spent working from home. The weather outside is amazing – clear blue skies every day – but we all have to resist the temptation to go out. Anyone caught outside without a valid reason risks fine, or even imprisonment. It’s amazing to see how the whole country is responding to being stuck indoors. People seem surprisingly positive, singing, dancing and coming together to support each other. Gyms and trainers — 21 —
have made a shift to home-workout videos, famous singers live-streaming. In place of #milanonosiferma, we have #andràtuttobene (everything will be ok) and #restaacasa (stay at home). Checking the coronavirus stats/updates is a daily ritual, and it can be scary to see the numbers here increasing so much each day. Being in full lockdown does give a sense of hope that we will eventually reach the other side of the peak and see a return to normality, whatever that will look like. The biggest impact of the whole situation for me comes from seeing the difference in how Italy and the UK are dealing with the situation. Italians were resistant initially, but jumped in line very quickly as soon as there were clear guidelines that they couldn’t make a choice to ignore. Here feels very organised, with the whole country united. Looking from the outside, the UK feels a little chaotic, and lacking direction. My family can’t find basics like toilet roll, pasta, milk, but here I’ve had no issues. It’s definitely a different way of life right now, but staying at home isn’t the most difficult thing to be asked to do, and something more people in the world should be doing where they can. I’m really looking forward to all this being over to get back to Scotland again though! Ciao!
April 2020 — Feature
lmost two weeks into lockdown, life in Italy is very surreal right now. In a country where there have now been more deaths attributed to coronavirus than China, staying at home is the new normal. I remember hearing about the first cases reaching the Lombardy region, in the areas surrounding Milan. Those areas were classed as ‘red-zone’ and were in 100% lockdown with no-one allowed to enter or leave. It still felt very distant, and everyone in the city continued about their daily lives, myself included. In Milan, the first measures to be implemented were already more drastic than the social-distancing measures the UK is starting to see – gyms closed, cinemas closed, bars and restaurants couldn’t open after 6pm etc. Other than some frustration at not being able to go to these places, nothing else seemed to change. People seemed resistant, and we started to see things like #milanononsiferma (Milan is not closed) trending on social media, with what felt like every Italian posting images/videos about how everything should continue as normal, and that this virus was nothing to be concerned about. Bars and shops were still packed. Supermarket shelves were decimated. The first I heard about this region going into full lockdown was on the news. It was announced on a Sunday, before the politicians had even
THE SKINNY
Comedy
Play Your Cards Right Ben Rowse, one-fifth of sketch super group Tarot, drops us a line about the group’s comedy process. Oh, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, ofc Interview: Louis Cammell Photo: Drew Forsyth
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April 2020 — Feature
onducting an interview with Tarot is a lot like attending one of their shows: disorienting, confusing, hilarious and, if you’re lucky, perhaps there’s a hint of truth buried in there somewhere. The tricky part is identifying it. The troupe operates on a brilliantly unique premise: pre-prepared sketches assigned to Tarot cards, the combination and order of which is then dictated live by the audience. What results is a descent into a rabbit hole, the ghastliness of which, for all the laughs it produces, would no doubt have Alice wondering if her psychedelic adventures were really worth the trouble. In the midst of a global pandemic, Ben Rowse, also of sketch group Goose, suggests that if any sketch group is ready for isolation, it’s them. “We rehearse over WhatsApp,” he says. “That’s why every expression in the show is an emoji.” The statement’s effect is like being told you’re adopted even though you’re the spitting image of your parents. You know it’s not true, but to not give it a moment of serious consideration would be irresponsible. While the troupe do possess the kind of papier-mâché faces that make it all too easy to drink up the lie, logic soon sets in and it’s obvious that to rely on WhatsApp to plan more than a pub get-together would be a fool’s errand.
“We rehearse over WhatsApp. That’s why every expression in the show is an emoji” Ben Rowse Speaking on how a space can affect a performance, Rowse has no one to blame for those many preview shows when the group walked into the venue and simultaneously thought “this just won’t work”. “It’s hard to blame the architects for that [feeling],” says Rowse. Ambience clearly plays a huge role in the success or failure of their shows, since the sketches often take a backseat to allow for the main attraction: the intense rivalry between performers. Yet Rowse has only the wisdom of a small-time crook to offer when it comes to the question of how day shows differ to evening shows: it’s easier to make a getaway in the dark. Fittingly for someone who deals in Satan jokes, Rowse seems to have adopted Coronavirus
as his new comic muse, and makes it clear that it’s what he’d rather be talking about. He inserts it into anecdotes to cause havoc like that cheat code in Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 that would allow you to play as Shrek. He spins a yarn about fellow Tarot member Ed Easton having his palm read in the midst of the outbreak and thus having to do it hands-free. “She read his elbow instead,” he says. “He was told he’d be a tennis player.” As funny as Rowse is, there’s a subtext in his preoccupation with COVID-19 which compels one to wonder how the fortunes of a sketch comedy group will be affected. Although, since Rowse basically defines doing this for a living as a bad financial move (admittedly on the part of fellow Tarot-member Adam Drake, rather than his own), the impression he gives off is that where money is concerned comedy is a relatively barren land, virus or no virus. Even so, he’s a dab hand at keeping things light, which may have something to do with how audiences leave Tarot’s shows smiling rather than rocking back-and-forth for days on end. Whatever their medium, artists and performers are constantly at risk of appearing to pontificate about their work. — 22 —
Not Rowse. He shows no interest in discussing what it was about the Tarot deck that led to its use for the show. “Kath was really pushing Yu-Gi-Oh! for a while. But then it turned out that David Walliams was developing something similar. UNO only really works as an opera, so we ruled that out. We ended up settling on Tarot because there was no faff with copyright infringement. Far fewer emails in the occult, basically.” Nothing seems any clearer about Tarot and its members. Lucky for them, mystique is their stock-in-trade and they’re not about to give it up. Perhaps another member of the group would have answered the above questions totally differently, but what’s more probable is that in any member’s hands the answers would be equally as impenetrable. Watching Tarot is like watching a Monty Python sketch devised entirely by a cursed Magic 8-Ball, and like that it shall stay. Check @Tarotcomedy on Twitter for future gigs. You can also listen to the group’s very own Kiri Pritchard-McLean on BBC R4’s Newsjack, @killnofillpod and @amusicalshow podcast. Her first show Hysterical Woman is also available to watch at watch.nextupcomedy.com
THE SKINNY
Leaf It On The Doorstep The Scottish food and drink scene has been battered by the coronavirus, but two of its stalwarts are aiming to get the best of Scottish produce direct to your door Interview: Peter Simpson
together, take a pic and we will shift his produce. “We really do want people to stay inside,” Downton says, “we’ve been to the shops and we’ve all seen the pics online. The UK supermarket supply chain is based on just-in-time, we saw this when we had a couple of snow days last year. Supermarkets order based on historic sales figures and try to hold as little stock as possible on site as retail space is precious. “The supermarkets cannot cope with huge peaks in demand – and even if they could, we do not want people to go to shops. This thing [COVID-19] is bigger than all of us and we all have our part to play in solving it. The longer this goes on the worse things will become and the harder it will become to return to ‘normality’.” The speed of change throughout this pandemic has been blistering. Cafes and bars that were left to the wolves on a Monday were being offered the bulk of their staff’s salaries as government grants by Friday. And that pace has been reflected at Romaine Calm, where the duo’s idea – launched in under 48 hours from that initial phone call – has been growing “exponentially”. “The response has been insane,” says — 23 —
romainecalm.co.uk instagram: romaine_calm_ed
April 2020 — Feature
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t’s been… an interesting few weeks. The wholescale shutdown of the food and drink scene – all bars and restaurants, and basically everything that isn’t a supermarket or pharmacy – have made things unimaginably difficult for people involved in every aspect of the food world. But even when they’re locked inside for their own protection and unable to visit the places they love, people still need to eat. Romaine Calm is here to help with both sides of that problem. It’s the brainchild of Jeremy Downton – the man behind the Chick + Pea and Kebabbar food trucks – and farmer and wine merchant James Henderson. The goal, Downton tells us over email, is to “connect local producers with a local customer base” at a time when everything seems to be shutting down. Downton says: “Hendo phoned me with his own ‘how to survive the apocalypse idea’ and said, ‘I have a van, let’s sell veg’. The idea went from there. I rang my veg guy who I usually use to supply the trucks and he said things were miserable, he had a ton of veg that was going to spoil and told me that orders were dropping from all of the usual hospitality businesses. I asked him to put a box
Downton. “We’ve had messages from people in self-isolation who have returned from abroad who haven’t been able to go to the shops to get supplies, we’ve had children concerned about older parents that are self-isolating and for obvious reasons cannot be seen by younger family members, and we’ve had younger people who are self-isolating to just play their part. We’ve had quite a few emails of gratitude so far as well, which we love to see as it reaffirms that the service is solid and actually helping.” That service has already expanded beyond fruit and veg into coffee from Edinburgh micro roastery Machina Espresso, and sourdough bread from Company Bakery, with plans to broaden their offering to include vegan recipe ideas and locallysourced meat. “When we spoke with Machina and Company they both said the same thing [about] demand. Sales had dropped off a cliff in the wake of people being encouraged to stay inside. We want to keep these businesses operating and for them to prosper as a result of this. We’ve also partnered with Jarvis Pickle pies as they are amazing.” Scotland’s food and drink scene is great – lots of fantastic bars, brilliant cafes, great restaurants, brilliant produce – but it relies on people being able to get its wares in their mouths and choosing to do so. “I think this is a good time for us to all have a long hard look at ourselves,” says Downton. “The supermarkets are great and convenient, but they offer a product that you will probably find along the road, for a similar price and to be generally of a lower quality than what you will find in an independent shop. A similar story is happening with flour. We have contacts who use heritage flours across Scotland and they have all said a similar thing. Demand for flour has gone through the roof. Who knew we all loved baking so much? “When all of this blows over,” Downton says, “we hope that people will change their buying habits and give an extra thought when choosing where to spend their hard-earned money.”
Food & Drink
Romaine Calm
THE SKINNY
DIY Art Art
As COVID-19 places so many arts organisations and artists in jeopardy, we chat with three artists programmed for the now-cancelled Glasgow Zine Festival to discover what it is about zine culture and local arts and institutions that is so powerful Interview: Anahit Behrooz
Rose Sergent Rose Sergent is a Manchester-based freelance artist and facilitator, and the founder of the Drawn Poorly project, a series of zines that examine life with chronic and mental illness and disability. “My work focuses on using arts as a force for change which is central to the Drawn Poorly project,” Sergent explains. Beginning as a single zine in 2017, the project has since expanded to include five separate issues, each focusing on a different core theme surrounding illness: identity, relationships, diagnosis, barriers and FOMO. “All the zines are collaboratively created,” Sergent stresses. “A huge number of creatives contribute their work,
April 2020 — Feature
Credit: Rose Sergent
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he cultural casualties of the coronavirus are almost too numerous to count. Glastonbury Festival has been cancelled, Glasgow International has been postponed, and Eurovision is currently ‘exploring alternative programming’, to the relief of thousands of music fans (and the consternation of just as many others). As devastating as these big-name cancellations are, some of the greatest losses to the arts and culture sector will be the smaller festivals, festivals whose funds are limited but whose programmes are generous. Glasgow Zine Festival, organised by the Glasgow Zine Library, perfectly epitomises the community-led focus and grassroots action that such smaller-scale events bring to the table. Its 2020 programme, sadly indefinitely postponed, offered a space for attendees to harness their creativity as a form of both personal and public expression, with talks on creating inclusive spaces, zine workshops on self-care and mental health, and creative explorations of Black feminism. These kinds of events, and the organisations such as Glasgow Zine Library who are prepared to curate them, are fundamental to our cultural lives because they understand our culture to be diverse, plural, and ongoing in a way that larger festivals often cannot, or do not, reflect. Inspired by Glasgow Zine Library’s dedication to supporting the arts, we caught up with three of the artists featured in their programme, to find out more about their creative practice, their relationship to the festival, and why the local arts matter. In the meantime, until they can reschedule these events post-pandemic, the zine library are running an incredible roster of free, online events and workshops – check out their Twitter (@GlasgowZineLib) for up to date listings.
Drawn Poorly series
which allows the project to be as multidimensional as living with conditions is.” Sergent is explicit about zines being the perfect medium for thinking through issues and frustrations surrounding disability and health. Their unregulated nature, free of the constrictions of traditional publishing and distribution, allow for narratives that are otherwise often silenced or ignored. “What we have to say can be moulded into a particular way – to provoke sympathy. Through zines, creatives can speak openly about their experiences and reach others who feel the same.” As much as the Drawn Poorly project depends on the creatives who collaborate to make it happen, it also draws on local festivals and events to reach as broad an audience as possible, and to give everyone living with physical or mental disability a chance to creatively articulate their lives. In 2019, for example, the project was featured in the Edinburgh Fringe programme, with a series of Let’s Make Sick Art workshops. “The idea was to engage brilliant creatives and explore how — 24 —
the arts can be more widely accessible to people with health conditions,” Sergent explains. When the subject turns to Glasgow Zine Library, Sergent is deeply appreciative. “They are forerunners for running accessible, inclusive events. They ensure pronouns are asked, they provide a quiet hour at the beginning of the day, and make sure each stall holder has everything they need. These spaces are incredibly important.” Jules Scheele “Reading zines produced by other queer people was a very important part of my figuring my personal stuff out,” Jules Scheele muses. Working as a freelance illustrator, comics artist, and facilitator, Scheele’s work focuses primarily on mental health, queerness, activism and community, through their own personal stories. “I use autobiographical comics to take my personal experiences with these subjects and try to untangle and make sense of them – hoping that this will also resonate with other people and maybe make
THE SKINNY
Credit: Jules Scheele
Credit: Jules Scheele
Art
Mixtape Zine: Songs to Cry to on the Nightbus
Sunday Market
give us a chance to broaden our horizons and make connections, which can result in amazing new stuff.” Natasha Ruwona Natasha Ruwona is an artist, writer, critic, and facilitator, whose work examines how post-colonial, de-colonial and anti-colonial methods can both produce and dismantle structures of power. Although not strictly a zine artist, Ruwona is intrigued by the ways in which zine-making can intersect with other de-colonial and anti-colonial work in the arts. “Decolonisation has definitely become a buzzword,” Ruwona explains, “which is why I have begun using it less and less. Anti-colonial feels Credit: Natasha Ruwona
more useful because all structures – and white people! – are inherently colonial. Decolonising isn’t enough, we must commit to creating new structures that are anti-colonial in their methods.” As far as Ruwona is concerned, this goes for zine-making too, particularly as zine culture’s roots were originally rooted in eschewing dominant structures. “I think it’s important to make zines, and the arts generally, as accessible (which is a mode of anti-colonialism) as possible,” she underlines firmly. “The cost of zines is often a barrier to my accessing them, especially when they are so effective and can be very simple to make. It takes away from the radical, DIY nature of this form of art-making, which I find super disappointing.” Places like Glasgow Zine Library, which promote creative accessibility, are so important for this very reason. “Having moved to Glasgow from Edinburgh not so long ago, the thing that really excites me here is the DIY culture,” Ruwona enthuses. “There are constantly festivals happening, which is super cool. It’s so important to have a rich and exciting community for and by creatives.” Moreover, institutions such as Glasgow Zine Library are needed because problems of colonialism and exclusion within the arts are, by their nature, institutional and structural. “We need more people within arts organisations, from higher up, to commit to anti-colonial methods within their organisations,” Ruwona says. “People expect change to be made from the ground up, which doesn’t make sense.” Find these artists on Instagram: @drawnpoorlyzine @julesscheeleillustration @badgalnt
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April 2020 — Feature
them feel less alone, like reading other artists’ autobiographical work often does for me.” The accessibility of zines makes them ideally suited to this kind of marginalised representation, Scheele claims. “Highly produced art zines are gorgeous, and there’s definitely a space for them, but at their heart zines are about having an idea, grabbing a pen and some paper, and then going down to the shop to get them photocopied,” they emphasise. “Zines don’t have to be perfect, and they don’t have to appeal or be marketed to a mainstream audience.” This materiality of zine-making is exactly why the zine festival is such a necessary event. “Spaces like Glasgow Zine Festival are super important – being able to communicate in person, discover new stuff, and get your work into people’s hands is invaluable,” Scheele explains. And it’s not just limited to the zine festival. “I think Scotland is pretty good for this: apart from Glasgow Zine Festival you also have the zine fair in Dundee, and various little comics fairs, but you also have brick and mortars like the Glasgow Zine Library and queer, indie bookstore Category Is Books, who also sell tons of zines by local artists and beyond. These events bring together the community and
THE SKINNY
Reclaiming Our Histories Religion and LGBTQIA+ inclusivity tend to go together like oil and water. One writer reflects on her own Catholic school upbringing and how it shaped her sexual identity
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’m 15 years old when I’m in my first same-sex relationship, attending a Catholic school outside of Glasgow and scared of what the future holds. Almost a decade on from that relationship and I’m only now beginning to find my feet as a queer woman. Ten years may have passed but my mind is still heavy with the shame and guilt of my personal history. During my years at secondary school I faced homophobia in many forms, from my peers refusing to share the same changing facilities during P.E., to general exclusion and name-calling, to being threatened with expulsion from staff members if I didn’t stop encouraging such “sinful behaviour”. It’s true that discrimination of any kind is prevalent in all areas of life, yet with the rigid and cold traditions of Catholicism often comes complete disregard of anything other than the status quo of heterosexuality. Homophobic, biphobic and transphobic rhetoric is rife and only with the move towards inclusion and diversity will this be eradicated completely. I’ve always felt detached from my Catholic upbringing and fought relentlessly to withhold these painful memories of my time as a teenager. I’m not alone though. There are many who have shared experiences like mine, like Maura* from Coatbridge who identifies as queer. During her time attending a Catholic school, her struggles came in the form of the years it took for her to
build up the courage to come out and accept her sexuality. Although she was never directly targeted, she says: “the reason I was afraid [to come out] in the first place was because of how I saw my LGBTQIA+ peers treated and spoken about. Slurs and ridicule were definitely common, with words like ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘f*ggot’ and ‘d*ke’ often used as insults”. Like so many who faced discrimination at the hands of teachers and peers, Maura indirectly witnessing and experiencing homophobia led to a disconnect with her own sexuality, a story that is all too common for LGBTQIA+ students. With Catholicism failing to accept progression and diversity, we are often the ones left to suffer. Similarly, Janet* who attended an all-girls Catholic school in Hertfordshire and identifies as bisexual, faced a discriminatory experience with a school counsellor while disclosing her sexuality. “A huge thing for me was not just the homophobic taunting from my classmates, but the experience with a staff member who was supposed to help me,” she explains. “Being told that I shouldn’t explore my sexuality and my LGBTQIA+ identity because of this homophobic idea that we are ‘promiscuous’ had a hugely negative effect and definitely did more harm than good”. Despite this leading Janet to distrust counselling services and refuse to seek help for her mental health issues over the years, she says she recently had therapy with an understanding therapist, which has helped her to process her
April 2020 — Feature
Intersections
Interview: Hannah Boyle Illustration: Katie Smith past. Her story is but one example of the lack of resources available to potentially vulnerable LGBTQIA+ students. Janet’s experience has also made her doubt her faith, causing her to “seriously reevaluate whether or not to believe in God and follow the church teachings”. This same doubt more often than not sees us turn our back on our own religious journeys. It seems ironic that Catholicism expects steadfast adherence to be seen fit in the eyes of God yet these attitudes only seem to push us further away.
“The reason I was afraid to come out was because of how I saw my LGBTQIA+ peers treated” Maura Meanwhile, Martin* from North Lanarkshire identifies as gay and recognises the integral role that those in education have to play in facilitating a safe space for LGBTQIA+ students, with his experiences leading him to carve out his own path towards inclusive education. “My experiences have made me want to stamp out any use of gay as a pejorative and to encourage kids to be who they are and own their identity and not be bound by gender stereotypes”. When asked how this impacted his own sexuality as an adult, Martin adds: “[I had] a complete lack of education around sexual health and identity. Thankfully now as a teacher I can see there is a lot more work being done to validate LGBTQIA+ pupils and raise awareness of issues pertinent to those pupils”. And he’s right: the need for LGBTQIA+ inclusive sex education has finally been recognised in Scotland, with a new curriculum to be introduced in Scottish secondary schools in 2021 – a huge step forward. Like Maura, Janet, Martin and countless others, I, too, am learning to reclaim my sexuality, discount discrimination in favour of activism and most importantly, pave the way for younger generations to feel safe and protected. These stories are significant in our fight towards turning our personal histories into something positive for future generations of LGBTQIA+ students. Only through sharing these experiences may we move forward, towards reclaiming our identities, our stories and ourselves. I hope that one day all schools will take a similar approach. *Names have been changed to protect anonymity For more information and support on this topic, visit youngstonewall.org.uk
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THE SKINNY
Hold, Speak, Release While self-isolating, voice notes became a social lifeline for this writer. Here’s why they could well be the perfect form of lockdown communication Words: Katie Goh Illustration: Monika Stachowiak have sent her, send her response and then listen to replies in the evening. What she likes most is the element of surprise – unlike a text popping up, you don’t know what’s in a voice note until you start listening. Both Riyoko and I tend to use voice notes for longer messages and anecdotes, stories or
One increasingly popular form of millennial communication is the voice note. While globally sending voice memos or notes on WhatsApp or Facebook is old news, the UK is still lagging behind getting on the voice note train. Allowing for the intimacy and individuality of a phone call, yet done at one’s own leisure like a text, the voice note has the best of both and is also a callback to the romantic neediness of a voicemail (remember those). I got into voice notes after my friend, Riyoko, persisted in sending them to me. She herself got into them while living in Spain and international classmates casually used them all the time. Now voice notes are an established part of her routine: while eating breakfast she’ll listen to what friends
thoughts that we might not normally send in text form. Mine typically last between one to four minutes, while Riyoko thinks 20 minutes is the longest she’s gone, recorded on a walk to university. Voice notes are definitely not for everyone and while Riyoko is an afficionado of the form, I
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April 2020 — Feature
“We’re all longdistance for the foreseeable future and voice notes have become a social lifeline”
send them regularly to only four or five people. Pre-coronavirus, I mostly used voice notes for communicating with long distance friends but seeing as we’re all long-distance for the foreseeable future, they’ve become a social lifeline for me staying in touch with people. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been using voice notes more than ever to check in with friends, share my thoughts during a Twilight marathon and attempt to entertain similarly selfisolating mates. Hearing other people’s voices is far more intimate than a cold text thread and speaking rather than typing frustrations feels far healthier. I’m not the only person who seems to be using voice notes more since self-isolation began. I’ve noticed more friends doing it, and one, Jamie, posted on Instagram offering to send them to people while he took a step back from social media. I asked him to send me a voice note explaining why he liked them and his reasons were similar to mine: he likes to hear friends’ voices but in a different context to an in-person conversation and you can listen to them at your leisure. He also points out they have great romantic potential as an intimate yet disposable sort of letter. There’s something also wonderfully self-indulgent to voice notes: you give yourself space, time and an audience to monologue about anything, something that obviously doesn’t work in any other form of communication other than perhaps, as Jamie pointed out, a letter or, god forbid, a voicemail. It’s unsurprising that millennials – the generation that adores the other popular monologue communicatory form, podcasts – seem to enjoy voice noting more than Boomers or Gen Z. Look, I understand the criticisms of voice notes – they take longer to listen to than glancing at a text, are the bane of group chats and please don’t ever use them to send actually useful information – but right now we have nothing but time on our hands. Receiving a voice note from a friend who is deliberating between making a self-isolation Pot Noodle or a self-isolation tray of oven chips for dinner is sometimes the highlight of my day. At a time when anxiety levels are through the roof and we’re all feeling the effects of not having been to the pub in weeks, we need some joy in our lives that isn’t on Netflix. May I recommend the humble voice note.
Intersections
A
ccording to those over the age of 40, millennials are responsible for a bloody murder spree. We’ve somehow killed both marriage and divorce, annihilated mayonnaise (fair enough), massacred napkins (save the planet!), stabbed dinner dates in the back and even snuffed out good old fashioned exorcisms (RIP). But there’s one accusation of millennial murder that I can get behind: the death of the phone call. More than three quarters of UK adults own a smartphone but 25% aren’t using them to make calls and that percentage is only increasing. Unsurprisingly, millennials are being blamed for the death of the phone call but can you really blame us? This is 2020 and there’s a new etiquette to calling: you only do it as a last resort for essential information or if it’s your mum. Sure there are loads of reasons flung at millennials for not liking phone calls – apparently, we’re anxious, lazy and/or bad at confrontation (not wrong) – but when messaging, FaceTime and social media are how most 20 to 30-somethings stay in touch now, calling a friend without a heads up just feels like bad manners.
THE SKINNY
Music
Power Struggles Purity Ring were once heralded as the future of pop. But a decade since they burst onto the scene, pop music has completely changed. With their third record, WOMB, they are coming to terms with their place in that landscape Interview: Tony Inglis
April 2020 — Feature
P
urity Ring are an endangered species. The indie-electro duo of Megan James and Corin Roddick made music once termed ‘future pop’. They can certainly no longer claim to be the sound of pop music on the horizon. The future they once heralded the beginning of hasn’t come to fruition. Pop music is now borderless and colour-blind, not beholden to definitions or traditional structure. It’s K-pop and urbano; it’s TikTok and Soundcloud rap. The landscape is totally unrecognisable to the one James and Roddick sprouted in after the release of their debut Shrines, a record of sickly sweet melodies, oblique lyrics and titanic beats, which inspired as much as it was influenced. There was a time when music’s behemoth stars wanted a piece of that sound – not quite mainstream, not quite indie. Five years ago, they released their buffed-up sophomore album Another Eternity, perhaps a stab at actually being the norm rather than simply shaping it, but since then pop music has all but left them behind. With their new record WOMB, James – who writes and sings the words that ground these frequently soaring songs, still immaculately produced by Roddick – is somewhat aware of this. Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, she rings in from LA, a week before the entirety of California is told to “shelter-in-place”. (Coronavirus seems to be infecting more than just people – everything seems to have some connection. For most it’s a stretch, but with James’ infamous preoccupation for limbs, distensions, and bodily movements and functions in her lyrics, listening back can seem particularly gory when all that’s in the news is illness and death.) — 28 —
THE SKINNY
“The more people you get into a room on a song, the less it’s yours [...] It’s a lot harder to argue for your part. And you’re usually arguing with men” Megan James
Photo: Carson Davis Brown
“You can’t just write a pop song and it gets on the radio. It just doesn’t work that way” Megan James “It’s cool to be influential, even in a minor way, but it doesn’t always turn into money,” she says matter-offactly. “My relationship with pop music has definitely changed a lot, especially since moving to LA. After Shrines, Corin started getting into session music. I never really wanted to, but that was the thing people wanted. It’s like, if you want a song to sound a certain way, you call in that producer or whatever. We gave them that. But we’ve decided that’s not something that we want anymore. We’d rather spend our time writing our own songs because that’s why we’re doing this and it’s the most satisfying way to keep making music. I feel like we shouldn’t take that for granted. The more people you get into a room on a song, the less it’s yours. It sounds simple but I felt that immediately. It’s a lot harder to argue for your part. And you’re usually arguing with men.” At this point our conversation seems to be winding down. Prior to the interview, we’d been encouraged by the band’s publicist not to focus on the experience of writing songs
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WOMB is released on 3 Apr via 4AD Purity Ring play SWG3, Glasgow, 13 Sep purityringthing.com
April 2020 — Feature
and a decade into their existence, they’re up against a preconceived notion of what a Purity Ring song should be. “That’s a constant battle in the back of my mind,” James acknowledges. “It would be easy to be superstitious about it. Corin and I don’t talk about that element or feeling; it could be a cloud over the songwriting. But it’s not always there. We want to make the best Purity Ring record according to us. It doesn’t matter how people define us because it’s coming from us. And by nature, it should. It should fit. And if it doesn’t, then too bad, we like it, and that’s fine.” WOMB doesn’t exactly muddy the waters, but sonically it skews more contemplative, more melancholy. Opener rubyinsides is harsher, less polished. Closer stardew is a banger, but its piano chords twinkle rather than slap as it plays out. It’s dreampop, with emphasis on the dream. But James has found a renewed sense of thematic purpose. It isn’t blatant – her lines still favour abstract imagery. But the album has a throughline, running all the way from its all caps title. “Womb” is a word that still seems shockingly radical when placed front and centre. It’s a place that’s still bitterly fought over, subjugated and legislated for mainly by people with no right to its realm. Its mere presence as the album title plunges the listener into James’s headspace. The mid-album highlight femia is her treatise on the vital role of women in families and society. Its etymology is entangled with the word female, and was also the name of one of James’s aunts. “My mum’s sister passed away a couple years ago and she was the first of their siblings to die, so it was really impactful,” she says. “That song [femia] represents generationally women in my family, and I’m trying to give them perspective. A lot of [the album] is my take on how women and non-binary people struggle for power within the patriarchy in an intimate way, even within their own family, whether it’s one they’re born into or one they’ve gathered.” James’s explanation of it is a little muddled – she admits that the lyrics came “slowly and laboriously
for other artists. After all, there’s an exciting new record out. And many industry horror stories come from flourishing independent artists being brought in to give these untouchable stars some personality. It can’t help that the album they contributed to ended up being a bomb – Katy Perry’s career has barely recovered, though that has as much to do with how pop has mutated than the quality of those songs. Just as we’re about to finish up, James says, “It’s hard because I feel like I have to be nice about pop music, but there’s a lot of things about LA that I’ve found I really don’t like.” As she begins to go off virtually unprompted (“Sorry, I’m just realising like, ‘Oh, I can go a little harder on this’”), it’s clear that her experiences as a hired hand affected the band’s desire to remain firmly independent and keep their best writing for themselves. “Not everyone in pop music has a tonne of power,” she says. “I’m sceptical of that, especially when it’s unevenly distributed, and pop music is absolutely an example of that. Five years ago, there were a lot of indie bands who were like, ‘I’m going to make pop music.’ And it’s just such a different beast than any of us thought. You can’t just write a pop song and it gets on the radio. It just doesn’t work that way, because there are so many gatekeepers and so much unfairness. It’s designed that way, so certain people benefit more, and it’s so frustrating.” She continues: “It’s really disheartening when it comes to your art. You get in the writing room and everyone’s like, got to make a hit because they make 100 or more songs for every record. And then they get sometimes thousands of people involved and it’s just like, ‘Where’s that hit?’ And it’s so gross. And they get them in the end, because everyone wants to be involved. And no-one’s getting paid, unless they get that hit.” She lets out a cathartic “uggghhh”. If the sound of pop has moved on, then perhaps the business of how it includes outsider independents in its process has to change too. For a band like Purity Ring, that can only be a good thing.
Music
Purity Ring are not quite the unicorn they once were. Stylistically similar bands sprung up around them, borrowed their sound, or ripped them off outright. “I like to think we have carved out a small space in the world,” says James now. “OK, so we’re not the only one doing that thing we were doing anymore.” The band haven’t waivered much from their sound. Now three albums
from trying to identify how I felt about a lot of difficult things, good and bad, that I had never taken the time to face, or had a chance to touch on”. But that reflects the work of a band who have rarely demoted the simple aesthetic pleasures of their music in favour of a concrete message. Even if it isn’t fully successful, it’s an attempt at moving forward what Purity Ring can be. Since they broke out, Purity Ring’s sound has been the subject of a kind of mutual cannibalisation. After Shrines, it was vociferously desired by the industry, and that desire was fulfilled. And by Another Eternity, they took what was reflected back at them and processed it into their own music. They collaborated with Danny Brown and were sampled by Pi’erre Bourne for a Playboi Carti track. They made writing contributions to Katy Perry’s last album Witness. According to James, WOMB became their opportunity to push back.
THE SKINNY
Valley Girl Books
Wendy Liu went from Silicon Valley software engineer to an outspoken critic of the tech industry. Here she discusses the future of technology without capitalism, being a woman in a male-dominated industry and the pitfalls of corporate diversity Interview: Katie Goh
T
April 2020 — Feature
here’s a common saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism so it seems fitting that Wendy Liu is discussing the abolition of capitalism during a global pandemic. Once accepted social norms are currently being exposed as a veneer, including the logic of capitalism that dictates everything from rent payments still expected on time while unemployment skyrockets to supermarket staff going from ‘unskilled’ to frontline emergency workers in mere weeks. The absurd fundamentalism of capitalism is exactly what Wendy Liu seeks to interrogate in her book, Abolish Silicon Valley, a memoir-exposé hybrid about Liu’s personal journey into and out from technology’s literal and abstract home, Silicon Valley, and a manifesto for a technological future liberated from capitalism. Why did you decide to write a book that is both an analysis of capitalism and the tech industry and a personal memoir about your own experience in the field? I wanted to write the book that someone in the same position I was in a few years ago – someone who was in the industry and didn’t understand the criticisms – could read and relate to. I didn’t want it to just be a critique of everyone in the tech industry. When I started looking at my notes from the last few years, I realised that I didn’t know how to write a book about the tech industry unless it was through my personal story. I wanted to take people along on a journey while recognising that not everyone is going to follow everything and believe everything I say but I want them to see how it’s possible to get from where I was to a very different position. When did you first discover Silicon Valley and your love for computers? As a teenager, I had a haphazard understanding of what Silicon Valley was; I didn’t know anyone personally who had been successful in tech. But when I was a teenager, I started making websites for fun, not really knowing that this could actually be a lucrative career. The more I got into computers and involved with the open source programming community, the more I picked up on the culture of programming and how it fits in with the rest of the economy. At that time I was very
unhappy at school but the world of computers felt like it was giving me a way out and I clung to it. You write about your experience of being a woman on the internet, particularly the hostility of internet culture towards women, especially women of colour. How did that shape your relationship with technology? The environment I encountered was one where being male was the default and that was entwined with the idea of meritocracy, in that, if being male was the default then there must be something special about being male. I didn’t really know how to internalise that when I was a kid. I tried to grapple with it the best way I could which was when people were saying girls are stupid then they meant other girls and not me. I internalised that pretty hard for a while which meant that when I dove deeper into the tech industry and started hearing stories of sexism and harassment at first I was sceptical. But as more of these stories came out from women I knew and feminist critiques about the industry appeared, I started realising there were multiple sides to the story that were connected to broader socio-economic problems.
“Tech only welcomes a diverse workforce if they agree to do what their bosses tell them to do” Wendy Liu In the book you write about how technology and capitalism often exist in a codependent relationship. Why are they perceived as being inseparable? Capitalism’s involvement in the tech industry dictates what kind of technology is going to get funding. I think it’s pretty safe to say that if technology is being developed today by or for private corporations, then it’s developed with the purpose of helping capital accumulate in some way. We live in an era where so much funding is given over to the purview of private corporations
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and they’re not going to develop technology that threatens their own power. In the context of companies employing people to do work and then making profits from products of their workers’ labour, this means that companies are going to find ways to increase the control they have over their workers. You write about this idea of technology being a utopia and a dystopia simultaneously. How do you see that manifesting? You have these two sides of a coin and while you’re only going to see one side at any given time, it doesn’t mean they both don’t exist. Technology as a utopia is a common rhetoric in the way companies market themselves and the prevailing understanding of what tech is for those in power, like politicians who will praise Silicon Valley for being innovative. There’s this idea that if you just work hard enough and you learn to code, then you too can experience the amazing possibilities of technology under capitalism but that’s a myth trying to disguise the fact that the system is designed to produce a certain number of winners and losers. The side you’re on depends much more on factors outside of your control, like where you are born, what your parents do, your education, if you’re white. What vision do you have for a tech industry liberated from capitalism? We live in a world that is so financialised and that really enshrines capital accumulation above all else, that to suggest a way of developing tech that is not for profit and not in the service of capital feels weird! I think of it in terms of baby steps, starting with firms that prioritise social good in some ways explicitly funding companies with some kind of good mission. I think that’s the first of many steps as eventually we want to de-link capital accumulation from technology altogether through institutional change. We’re already seeing some examples of this, like the open source movement, so there are people working on tech that isn’t necessarily driven by the priorities of capitalism. It’s a ray of light that points to a different way of doing things. There’s a lot of talk about the lack of diversity in tech and its impact on building algorithms
THE SKINNY
Photo: Jackie Luo
Books
created with inherent biases. As someone who has seen the inside of Silicon Valley, do you think diversity makes a difference? I think the tech industry understands that they need a more diverse workforce but I don’t think they’re putting a lot of effort into it and I doubt any of the heads of these companies really care that much. I don’t think they realise what’s at stake because none of them are going to be harmed by any of these technologies. Having technology built by a very narrow range of people from a specific socioeconomic lens feels obviously wrong to me, not only because of the introduction of bias but because so many problems won’t be solved. They’re only going to be interested in solving their own problems and they’re all rich and most of them are white men. But I think it’s useful to look at this beyond the lens of diversity because you can still have a company that is 100% women and still producing a product damaging to some women elsewhere. The frustrating thing about diversity right now is that corporations have accepted they need to have at least a veneer of diversity. But they only welcome a diverse workforce if they agree to do what their bosses tell them to do.
Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism is published by Repeater Books on 14 Apr
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April 2020 — Feature
Are you optimistic about the future of technology? I try to stay hopeful. The thing I’m most hopeful about is the unionisation that’s happening right now and efforts to exert worker power. The media has also been much more negative in covering tech companies which I think is a good sign as it means people in the industry are more familiar with the critiques of it. They’re going to have to reflect more about what they’re doing. I’m hopeful for the new generation who have grown up with the tech industry as a sort of villain which I think will change how people interact with the industry. We live in an age of massive political upheaval which in a lot of ways is bad, but it also means that young people now understand that radical action is needed to change institutions. I can’t wait until those people enter the workforce and hopefully try to change the world we live in.
April 2020
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THE SKINNY
Fear and self-loathing in South Africa South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus returns with Moffie, an extraordinary drama about a gay teen conscripted to fight in the Angolan war in Apartheid-era South Africa Interview: Jamie Dunn
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released on Curzon Home Cinema on 24 Apr
April 2020 — Feature
reading the novel. “I’m not white, so I wouldn’t have done national service. It’s the one thing that white South Africans had to do that black and coloured people didn’t.” In fact, until Hermanus’ producers approached him to adapt Moffie, he hadn’t given the concept that white men could be suffering through Apartheid a second thought. “It wasn’t something that I could’ve ever imagined,” he says. “That’s why, even now, when the film comes out in South Africa [in 2020], it’ll be interesting to see if there’s any space in our society for audiences to empathise with these characters.” The question of “why tell this particular story?” haunted Hermanus through pre-production until he shifted focus. “I began to realise that, as a society in South Africa, we have a collective sense of trauma and we have a collective repression,” he explains. “It’s probably the one thing we have in common among the different races; that’s our thread. And maybe this story, in a way, is a more challenging way of demonstrating that.” Perhaps Hermanus also started to get a handle on the material when he began to personalise it. The director realised he could take certain liberties with the novel after sitting down with its author. “Once I met with [van der Merwe] I found out the book wasn’t fully factual, and once I knew that I felt that I could be playful with it. So there are many things in the movie that are from my personal memory.”
Film
S
outh African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus is propping up the May Fair Bar and sipping on a well-deserved lager after a day of press at the London Film Festival. He’s also having a chuckle to himself after bandying about one of the most hateful words in Afrikaans all afternoon: “moffie”, the title of his new movie. The slur doesn’t have an appropriate equivalent in English, although the subtitlers of the film have gone with “faggot”. “I don’t think there’s an English word that has the same level of venom to it,” the filmmaker tells us. “In South Africa, the word is an insult to your masculinity; it’s a belittling, it’s a shaming. It can be about your sexuality, but ultimately it’s got to do with your value as a man in some way. And it really is a weapon.” In his home nation, the word is toxic, so he’s enjoyed the incongruity of it being splashed over newspapers. “My favourite one says ‘Moffie goes to Venice’, which, in South Africa, is the most revolting, disgusting sentence. It’s so insulting. Like what does that mean?” Set in 1981, at the height of Apartheid, Hermanus’ film is inspired by André Carl van der Merwe’s autobiographical novel of the same name. It follows Nicholas, a gay 19-year-old who’s conscripted to national service, which will involve army training at a pitiless boot camp followed by a stint on the front line of South Africa’s border conflict with communist-backed Angola. Hermanus, who’s black, explains that the brutality of these boot camps wasn’t known to him before
An example he cites is an extraordinary flashback that punctuates the movie. The dreamy scene, which takes the form of a single unbroken shot, takes us back to perhaps eight or nine years earlier, to a sun-dappled public lido, where a younger Nicholas is first called a moffie by an irate middle-aged brute who sees the boy’s eyes linger on a fellow swimmer in the male changing rooms. “That exact thing didn’t happen to me, but something like that did. So by the time it got to the script, I’d already infused it with a lot of memories – both mine and other people’s.” It’s hard to imagine the film without this scene, given it gives us context to the past trauma that Nicholas has been repressing, but Hermanus had to fight to keep it. “The producers at one point thought the flashback was out of place; it would be destabilising. But I negotiated with them that I was at least going to shoot it and then we could fight about it in the editing suite.” Hermanus also felt the scene was essential because it gets to the heart of what Moffie is about: shame. “The word is not used just to shame the gay characters,” he explains. “It’s used to shame them all. It was about showing how a generation of South African men, who are alive and well today, were coded with something that they passed on to our society.” This is Hermanus’ second drama centred on a closeted gay character. His intoxicating, deeply disturbing sophomore film Beauty, from 2011, followed a middle-aged businessman who becomes obsessed with a disarmingly handsome young man who’s friends with his college-aged daughter. While Hermanus admits that both films share similar DNA, he doesn’t recognise the younger filmmaker who made Beauty. “I feel like I was an angry filmmaker back then. I made an angry movie about a man who was dangerous and violent. But with this one, my attitude is very different.” What has changed, we ask. “I’ve gotten older or become more emotional, I guess. I think maybe I’ve also started to think about these things differently and my intention with the audience has changed. Maybe with Beauty, I was trying to shock you and take you hostage in some way. With this one, I think that the desire is totally different: it’s softer and more caring about its characters.”
THE SKINNY
Out of Time Lucio Castro discusses his elegant use of time, space and memory in the moving romance End of the Century, which is like watching all of Richard Linklater’s Before movies rolled into one film
“I
feel like the gay world changed drastically over the last 20 years.” Filmmaker Lucio Castro is musing on the revolution to the lives of gay men over this period because that’s the precise time span of his bittersweet debut feature, End of the Century. The film’s elegant structure takes us from present-day Barcelona, back to the Barcelona of 1999, and then returns to the present again, although a slightly different version of it. When Castro started writing, however, he had something more straightforward in mind. “I didn’t know the structure at all,” he recalls. “I started writing the story in a very linear way.” The initial idea was to meet the main character, Ocho (Juan Barberini), and simply follow him around. “It started: a man arrives in the city, he does sightseeing, he eats, he gets horny, he jerks off, goes on Grindr, and the next day he finds someone and they start talking.” The initial set-up recalls Andrew Haigh’s Weekend or Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, two other great films about passionate but ephemeral romances. Things got more complex – cosmic even – when Castro got into the meat of the relationship. “It was while I was writing the dialogue that it changed. I thought, ‘Oh, actually they’ve met before.’ So then I wrote scenes of how they met, and then at the end of that I said to myself, ‘OK, maybe they’ve been together all this time.’ So I just discovered the story as I was writing it.” The film opens with Ocho, an Argentine writer who’s around 40, arriving in town and crashing at a soulless Airbnb. Javi (Ramón Pujol), a kids’ TV producer from Berlin, is the man Ocho blithely invites up to his room after spotting him
on Las Ramblas from his balcony. The choice of an Airbnb apartment over, say, a hotel or a friend’s spare room was crucial to the atmosphere Castro was trying to create. “He’s living in an Airbnb, and that space is kind of weird, you know? It’s not really a home, it’s not a hotel, but it has some books, it’s meant to feel a bit cosy, but it doesn’t belong to anyone, but it does belong to someone; it’s in limbo.” This feeling of limbo extends to the characters themselves. “Both Ocho and Javi are going through this moment in their lives where they’re moving around and not settled, so, to me, the movie happens in a transient space.”
“Our memories don’t always make sense. It isn’t like a perfectly art-directed film” Lucio Castro Space isn’t the only thing that’s transient in End of the Century. Time and memory also prove slippery. After spending the day together, the men come to the epiphany that they’ve met before – 20 years earlier. Cut to 1999 in the same city, when Ocho and Javi are both around 20 and still in the closet, where chance threw them together the first time. What’s most striking – and initially discombobulating – about this flashback is that the 20-something versions of Ocho and Javi are played by the same actors, with no attempt to make them appear any younger.
April 2020 — Feature
Film
Interview: Jamie Dunn “That’s my favourite part of the movie,” says Castro of this artistic choice. The inspiration to eschew de-ageing was partly practical. “Ageing is always tricky,” he says. “I always focus too much on the effect when I see it in movies. I just think ‘OK, good make-up/bad make-up, good wig/bad wig.’” Even more jarring is subbing in a different actor. “To me, that’s super weird; you don’t grow up to be a different person. So I wanted to kind of get rid of that and just say, OK, it’s the same actors, and if the audience is smart enough, they’ll understand that it’s a different time.” But using the same actors for both timeframes also resonated thematically. “If I were to tell you that we actually met ten years ago, I wouldn’t picture myself younger with you, or you younger, I would picture us the way we are now in the past,” Castro explains. “That’s the way we experience memory, I think.” To illustrate his point, Castro asks me how I feel when I see old photographs of myself. “It’s always surprising, isn’t it?” he says. “We think, did I look like this? Because we forget. Our memories don’t always make sense. It isn’t like a perfectly art-directed film.” End of the Century has been sharply described as “Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, distilled into a single film,” and it has all the emotional power that description would suggest. It’s so evocative it’s sure to have you looking back at your own love life, and the fleeting romances that could have been so much more in different circumstances. “For all the great people you meet throughout your life, it’s with very few that you end up actually developing something, and I always wonder why. Why isn’t the right person sometimes the right match? Is it just about meeting at the right moment? Or maybe there needs to be something right with both people when they meet? So I feel love is strongly related to time in some way, and this movie definitely explores that.”
End of the Century is available now on DVD from Peccadillo Pictures, or to rent from BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema — 34 —
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Album We're Excited For
Album We're Excited For HINDS — The Prettiest Curse Released 5 Jun by Lucky Number rrrrr Listen to: Good Bad Times, Boy, Take Me Back
have to be able to move in that direction without things becoming clinical, without abandoning the ramshackle charm that makes their gigs such irresistibly good fun – and they toe their way across it with real, palpable confidence. There’s disco cool to the Heart of Glass-indebted opener, Good Bad Times, and freewheeling riffery on the standout Take Me Back; Boy, meanwhile, rings out with the sort of lush, multilayered mayhem that came to define The Go! Team at their peak. The groundwork laid by the likes of Soberland and Linda last time out, meanwhile – with which they wore their gentler, more vulnerable side firmly on their sleeves – is smartly built upon here by Come Back and Love Me <3, all wist and Spanish guitar, and woozy closer This Moment Forever, as well as Riding Solo, an achingly sad treatise on the loneliness of the road. Four years ago, both the band and their audience would have baulked at the idea of a grown-up Hinds album – surely that’d suck the joy out of things. Instead, The Prettiest Curse is their finest work to date – full of assurance and poise, and still an absolute riot. [Joe Goggins]
Read more online: theskinny.co.uk/music/reviews/albums
Daughters Of Reykjavík Soft Spot RRrrr "a multi-faceted feminist statement"
Purity Ring WOMB RRrrr "a welcome return" — 35 —
BC Camplight Shortly After Takeoff RRrrr "emotionally engaging"
April 2020 — Review
Hinds have always been a very difficult bunch to dislike. From the beginning they’ve fizzed with a chaotic energy at every turn. Putting out a debut record as deliberately messy as 2016’s Leave Me Alone after months of hype would sink a lot of bands, but it was the making of Hinds, a hectic collection that was every bit as endearing in its boisterousness as the Madrid outfit’s Cheshire-cat grins are on stage. There was a sense, too, that a real jumble of emotions lurked beneath the surface, and that was something delicately brought to the fore two years ago on I Don’t Run, sonically more 60s girl group than garage-rock and thematically more clear-eyed than confused. The songcraft had been noticeably honed, and the push-pull dynamic between singers Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote clearly tightened. Even with that in mind, though, The Prettiest Curse still feels like a head-turning leap forward. In decamping to New York and installing Jenn Decilveo behind the desk, Hinds have produced a pop record in glorious technicolour. There’s a tightrope to be navigated in embracing these kinds of sharp melodies and infectious hooks – they
THE SKINNY
Disco Dynamics We speak to Glasgow’s Walt Disco about their new EP and how the coronavirus outbreak has affected them as a band on what will hopefully still be their breakout year
Local Music
Interview: Madeleine Dunne Walt Disco release their new single Cut Your Hair on 29 Apr; the release of Young, Hard and Handsome is now TBC Walt Disco play Tunnels, Aberdeen, 15 Sep; Hunter S Thompson, Dundee, 16 Sep; PJ Molloys, Dunfermline, 17 Sep; Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 18 Sep facebook.com/waltdisco
H
arken, if you will, back to the era of neon, mullets, and synths. If you plucked Glasgow six-piece Walt Disco out of 2020 and dropped them in the 1980s, they’d fit right in. From their theatrical performances on stage, to their personal aesthetic of ruffled shirts, plaid skirts and shoulder pads, they aren’t even embodying the style and sound of the 80s, they’ve adopted it effortlessly and made it their own. We sit down for a coffee and a chat with the band’s frontman James Power, who, smiling over the brim of his cup, tells us that “probably Queen and glam rock compilations,” were his first encounter with the kind of sound his band have become synonymous with. “The good stuff that my parents put on.” Walt Disco are vibrant figures in the Glasgow music scene. Feet firmly planted in the nostalgia of Scottish post-punk, sure, but as the old adage goes, it’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to. From incorporating aspects of drag performance into their shows, to peppering their songs with addictive pop hooks and powerfully direct lyricism, they’re taking the whole thing to stellar heights. “The references in terms of sound on our upcoming EP were Christine and the Queens, St. Vincent, Grimes, FKA twigs, because, let’s face it, they’re the best artists in the world right now,” enthuses Power. “So many people say that we’d have been huge in the 80s, but I’m so glad we formed because of those bands but are around to be inspired by the amazing queer and female pop that’s thriving now.” The result is their new Young, Hard and Handsome EP, a
April 2020 — Review
Photo: Marilena Vlachopoulou Walt Disco
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diverse, genre-bending collection addressing some of the most complex issues of our decade, from sexuality to employment. More than anything, it’s four very good, very addictive songs about being young.
“This band has helped me figure myself out, it’s helped all of us in a way” James Power It’s also the first endeavour with the band as a six-piece. It’s been an organic change, Power says, one that’s helped the band come into its own. “Walt Disco has been around for a while, but as a six-piece the dynamic feels amazing,” he says. “It’s just six people who really believe in the music we’re making.” Power tackles delicate topics in his lyrics, from facing bigotry, to exploring sexuality and gender. But they ring out confidently, vague enough to be broadly prescriptive, but specific enough to cut your teeth on the issues behind them. It’s a near perfect balance. “This band has helped me figure myself out, it’s helped all of us in a way. It’s easier to believe in your lyrics if they’re about you. Everyone has a feeling about their sexuality or gender, I just use my own experience to talk about it,” he explains. “We always have a strong core of young queer people at our gigs,” he continues. “But we want to have a broad appeal, and I want to bring in the kind of people who might not embrace what I sing about, so they can come and change their mind.” Tentatively, he suggests it’s “like delivering the message of a new generation with the sound of an old generation.” When we initially met with Power, back at the beginning of March, we had a notebook full of questions on Walt Disco’s year ahead. It looked to be their biggest yet with a new EP set for release in April, a place at SXSW on the British Music Embassy stage, and a string of April and May UK tour dates which included a slot at The Great Escape. Within a couple of weeks, the reality of all of those things had crumbled. The coronavirus pandemic has shaken the very core of the Scottish music industry. For Walt Disco, this has lead to postponing the EP and their most extensive tour to date, and the biggest festivals they’d ever been booked to play have been cancelled. “It’s been quite devastating, to be honest,” Power says via email. “We’ve lost a lot of our personal money and band funds. We’ve had to completely change our plan for releasing music this spring – everything that goes into releasing songs like press shots, artworks, videos have had to be postponed due to health concerns within the band.” They’ve been extremely fortunate, he says, to be supported by management, booking agents, promoters, and press working tirelessly to minimise the impact this will have on the band’s future. “The support artists are giving each other in this dour time is heartwarming, and we can’t thank our fans enough for continuing to listen to us and buy our merchandise – our only source of income at the moment,” he says. “It’s still early days, everyone is feeling a bit confused on how best to deal with it. It felt like 2020 was planned as a breakout year for us – we’ll see if that still seems to be the case!” On the strength of their latest EP alone, we reckon it still will be.
THE SKINNY
Photo: Marina Fini
Mercury Rising Interview: Joe Goggins Elisabeth Elektra Mercurial [Occult Babes, 8 May] facebook.com/ elisabethelektramusic
Local Music
After years spent honing her craft, Glasgow synth queen Elisabeth Elektra is finally ready to make her mission statement
“P
eople talk about perfectionism holding you back, but I don’t see it like that.” For Elisabeth Elektra, the proof of that has been in the pudding. Addressing the ongoing coronavirus crisis on Twitter recently, she joked that “if everyone had just started to self-isolate at the same time I did – approx seven years ago – none of this would have happened.” Over that same period, she’s written heaps of ethereal electronica, recorded and then aborted a slew of tracks for a debut album, then reshaped her ideas and recut them with a different producer – all the while carving out a reputation in Scotland and beyond for searingly theatrical live shows, and all the while struggling on and off with chronic illness. Now, finally, she’s ready to release the aptly-titled Mercurial, a name that suggests she’s accepted the ever-changing nature of her creative voice. With the record arriving at a time of unprecedented global turmoil, you could be forgiven for feeling as if this is a case of the best-laid plans going awry, but even a cursory listen to Mercurial suggests that Elektra has been vindicated in taking her time with it – it’s a towering, intelligent, meticulouslyconstructed affair, packed with clever flourishes and considered idiosyncrasies. “I’m a very detail-oriented person,” she says over the phone from Glasgow. “It took years to get to this point, but I was always very, very sure about what it was that I wanted to present to the world, and I was never going to compromise on that. I needed to be as sure as I could be that I was doing myself justice. I didn’t want to just say, ‘here’s everything I’ve made’, and just put out 18 or 20 songs.”
Elisabeth Elektra Instead, Mercurial is a lean, smart ten-track collection that brings the listener into the world that Elektra’s slowly built for herself. Early sessions for the record saw her working with Julian Corrie of Miaoux Miaoux and Franz Ferdinand on production duties, but she decided after the fact that “those versions, they were really great, but I wasn’t convinced that they were what I wanted to put into the world first. The energy wasn’t totally right. I write music very intuitively; it’s more about how my body responds to the chords that I’m playing than it is about conscious process. So I just knew.” She went on to retool the tracks with Lewis Gardiner, although Elektra took on a co-producer role, and it’s clear that she felt the need to retain influence across every aspect of Mercurial. “I’m not the most musically social person,” she laughs. — 37 —
“I’m introverted. There’s musicians who’ll jam with a band and write things together, and to me, that sounds like the most crushing hell.” Mercurial is a work entirely in Elektra’s image, all the way through to the striking visual side of things, with a consistent aesthetic referencing witchcraft, tarot and crystals running through videos, artwork and costumes, with her friend Marina Fini acting as a de facto artistic director. Even now, aspects of Mercurial remain a mystery to Elektra; the musical and visual sides of the album are linked, but in ways that are still revealing themselves. What she does know about these songs is that they held powerful cathartic value to her; from the intimacy of Sadie, a paean to an ex-girlfriend, to the drama and high concept of Inanna, which chronicles the corruption of the ancient Sumerian goddess of the same name, the through-line on Mercurial is an investigation into love, loss and grief. “I think for any artist, across different mediums, there has to be an element of catharsis for your work to be meaningful,” she explains. “I’m quite an emotional person, and one of the ways I work through my inner world is through my creative practice, for sure.” What the next stage of that looks like for Elektra is unclear, with coronavirus putting live shows on ice for the foreseeable. It might be tricky to imagine a stripped-back performance from such an inherently dramatic performer, but it’s something she’s considering as she navigates these choppy new waters. “It’s on my mind. I’m actually quite excited about the challenge of just working with what I have in my flat. I won’t have a big, fancy projector, but I’ve got a degree in art, so hopefully I can come up with something that looks cool. I’m an extroverted performer, so to be playing to a screen with nobody else in the room feels a little bit scary, but hopefully, it’ll help me grow. It’s an insane situation that nobody could have predicted last year, but it’ll be interesting, too. Creative people will always find a way.”
April 2020 — Review
“There’s musicians who’ll jam with a band and write things together, and to me, that sounds like the most crushing hell”
Elisabeth Elektra
Albums
THE SKINNY
Goth GF Spooky Bitch [Self-released, 12 Apr]
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April 2020 — Review
Listen to: Horse Girl, Goth GF
Savage Mansion Weird Country [Lost Map, 3 Apr]
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Listen to: The International, Monument
Awoooo! Goth GF’s debut EP Spooky Bitch is a high-kickin’, janky joyride. The Glasgow three-piece specialise in chaotic, ramshackle sludge that veers recklessly between doom, garagerock and country, fuelled by total riot grrrl energy. Hannah Morice, who fronts the band, has the gothy flamboyance of Noel Fielding – but most importantly enough charm to endear any audience to Goth GF’s very fast, very loud, fully eccentric live shows. Spooky Bitch captures much of their ride-or-die DIY spirit; imaginatively titled opener INTRO is a hectic, punchy jumble of feedback and heavy riffs with so much reverbed shouting it’s basically a candlelit tribute to Kathleen Hanna. What Do Want From Me is a high-octane punk-rock headbanger, and closer Goth GF breaks it down before running head-first into the record’s most frantic assault. The EP’s total triumph, though, is Horse Girl. A six-minute piss-take multi-genre odyssey, it’s silly, addictive and completely unpredictable. ‘I came out of my mother at an extended trot’, shrieks Morice, ‘And when I die […] just turn me into fucking glue, I’m a horse girl’. An unpolished, loveably bonkers debut from a brilliantly weird new band, you’ll find us howling at the moon outside Goth GF’s next show. [Katie Hawthorne] Weird Country is the second album from Craig Angus and co. The record comes with the option of a pink vinyl, while their restless frontman has taken to donning a black cowboy hat on stage. It’s emblematic of a playful, witty record which urges the listener (or the band) not to take themselves too seriously, while still finding time to tackle some ambitious themes. Disappointingly, opener Karaoke is one of the weaker tracks on the record. Described by Angus as “an homage to Glasgow”, it’s more two-and-a-half stars on Trip Advisor than a wild night on Sauchiehall Street. Much better is the satisfying chug of Taking the Four. Elsewhere There’s No Time to Waste zips by on livewire energy alone, while the title track is a monster guitar workout with chanted vocals that make it sure to be a live fave. One of the strongest facets of Weird Country is the arrangements: from the supremely melodic intertwining guitars of Old Country, a witty indictment of British nationalism told through a tale of a pair of Italian immigrants, through to the melancholic tiptoe of Battlefield Boss Dream. Overall Weird Country is a triumph, and a clear step forward from their debut. [Max Sefton]
Anna Burch If You’re Dreaming [Polyvinyl Record Co. / Heavenly Recordings, 3 Apr]
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isten to: Party’s Over, So I Can L See
Yves Tumor Heaven to a Tortured Mind [WARP, 3 Apr]
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Listen to: Romanticist, Super Stars
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Drifting away from the energetic fuzz of 2018’s Quit the Curse, If You’re Dreaming shares sonically in the subtle merriment of a day spent in bed through stormy weather, its lyrical footfalls guided by the melancholy of sleepless nights. At its most delicate points, slow climbing chord progressions carry as much emotion as her lyrics, while parts that might feel overly simple – though sparse – are bolstered by them. Despite a move away from Quit the Curse, not all energy is lost; Party’s Over toys with catchy lyrics and more memorable hooks, delivered over the idiosyncratic warmth of a 12-string guitar. So I Can See is a honey-sweet wake-up call and Ask Me To is a burst of light, emblazoned with playfully punchy lines like ‘it won’t be long before it hits, like too much wine on empty stomachs’. Energetically and emotionally the record regresses from this high point, as though Burch is guiding us through the end of a bad relationship. At points If You’re Dreaming feels so meticulously planned it becomes dreich and sluggish, with a couple of minute-long instrumentals thrown in to explicitly delineate a shift in mood. Otherwise, it is simply lovely. [Bethany Davison]
There are two things you can always expect from Yves Tumor: noise and chaos. The strained vocal delivery and the warped synth effects would certainly form a fitting soundtrack for a Safdie brothers film. But there’s often beauty to be found in chaos, and Yves Tumor always manages to find it. The title of Tumor’s latest album, Heaven to a Tortured Mind, seems apt then, and feels particularly poignant in such troubling times. Not a single emotion is spared, as manic meltdowns (Medicine Burn) blend into polished pop (Kerosene!) and moments of melancholy (Romanticist) – all of this depicting a mind running riot. It’s through this chaos and emotional warfare, though, that Tumor appears to find peace. Whether it’s thrashing around in a pile of sand at fashion shows (see: Hood By Air’s June 2016 show) or starting mosh pits in Berghain, it all feels like some sort of release. A tortured mind needs reprieve after all, and this is Tumor’s. Heaven to a Tortured Mind plays out like a message that in amongst the chaos there’s a calm to soothe you through it, and it’s a calm we all need right now. [Nadia Younes]
THE SKINNY
isten to: Black Qualls, Dragonball L Durag, King of the Hill
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Viscerals [Rocket Recordings, 3 Apr]
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isten to: Rubbernecker, New L Body, Halloween Bolson
Despite the fact they clearly know their way around a tasty riff, it’s difficult to credit the mainstream successes of Pigs x7 to much other than their daft name, and the semiironic devotion it instils in the average 6 Music listener, which grants them an excuse to rediscover their love for Maiden without losing too much credibility at the PTA meeting. Their latest LP Viscerals, much like its predecessors in style and statement, shows that they’re to be dismissed at one’s own peril. The one-two punch of Reducer and Rubbernecker smarts as much as any burly number we’ve heard from Pigs x7, and New Body and Halloween Bolson offer as much guitar inventiveness as any of the longform songs on 2018’s King of Cowards. Sam Grant and Adam Ian Sykes’ combined fretwork is as engaging as ever, but Matt Baty’s deep-felt lyricism is still easily missed, sounding the changing nature of modern masculinity and substance abuse from under his pained yelp. The only superficial changes between Pigs x7 releases to date are in track quantity, and mercifully un-qualitative; they’ve gone from mammoth, side-long pseudo-jams to relatively bite-sized chunks without sacrificing any of the fury they’ve harboured from the beginning. [Dafydd Jenkins]
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Listen to: XS, Dynasty, Snakeskin
Harkin Harkin [Hand Mirror, 24 Apr]
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L isten to: Nothing the Night Can’t Change, Bristling, Dial It In
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From the first notes of wistful opener Mist On Glass, we’re right back in the hazy bliss of the noughties. But that doesn’t mean that Harkin – despite her former band Sky Larkin’s heyday peaking around a similar era – is planted in nostalgia. Since her days fronting the Leeds trio, Katie Harkin has arguably become one of the most prolific collaborators of our generation, having worked with SleaterKinney, Courtney Barnett and Waxahatchee among others. With such a bumper black book, Harkin naturally leans on some touring pals to bring this work into being. Indeed, her eponymous debut includes contributions from Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa. But the subject matter is self-reflective. Decade examines the feeling of regret while conflict-bruised Bristling heralds a howl of a chorus line, calling out across the misty moors. Red Virginia Creeper nods to the album’s (and musician’s) dual roots capturing some of upstate New York’s vast plateaus in its roaming reverb and warm feedback. Her career to date might have been bolstered by a stellar string of friends but there’s one thing that the multi-instrumentalist is more than capable of handling herself – the artful knack for sincere songwriting. [Cheri Amour]
April 2020 — Review
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Rina Sawayama SAWAYAMA [Dirty Hit, 17 Apr]
‘I’m gonna take the throne this time’ declares Rina Sawayama in the grunge-meets-Disney SAWAYAMA opening track Dynasty. The high drama, industrial electric guitars are reminiscent of t.A.T.u’s 2002 hit All the Things She Said, but the amoral pseudo-lesbian duo’s influence thankfully stops at the soundscape. Album highlight XS follows. A part-time R’n’B bop, with the sugar content of a bowl of Angel Delight, it’s full of sarcasm and satire. Tokyo Love Hotel then marks the most overt reference to Sawayama’s Japanese heritage. With lyrics rejecting the whirlwind neon lights of the capital and its no-tell love motels, she’s crying out to a lover to forgo the chaos of casual relationships. Innovation wanes momentarily on the penultimate track, Chosen Family, before Snakeskin closes proceedings, offering a camp celebration of the record’s cartwheeling transitions between genres. This is a carefully crafted, complex pop record that benefits from the production contributions of industry heavyweights like Nicole Morier (Britney). But, undeniably it’s the new-fangled delivery and star appeal of Rina Sawayama that gives SAWAYAMA its sparkling essence. [Andrew Wright]
Albums
Thundercat It Is What It Is [Brainfeeder, 3 Apr]
After his world-conquering turn on 2017’s Drunk, Stephen Bruner returns in a more laid-back mood on his fourth full-length as Thundercat. It Is What It Is sees the bass guitar virtuoso return to his earlier work’s looseness but through the other side of the looking glass of Drunk’s intense ‘night-out-gone-wrong’ concept. Black Qualls and Dragonball Durag are more examples of how Thundercat continues to produce catchy singles with a healthy dose of self-deprecating humour. I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole) sees Bruner utilising Cole’s breakneck speed to cross over poppy jazz with thrashpunk beats. Elsewhere, Interstellar Love and the title track explore Bruner’s love for deeply spacial atmospheric jazz. Though Thundercat has always been Bruner’s project it has increasingly become more collaborative. King of the Hill, originally released in 2018, for instance, sees Bruner team up perfectly with BADBADNOTGOOD as another example of how healthy the modern jazz and soul scene currently is. As usual, Flying Lotus produces, with his fingerprints particularly keenly felt on tracks such as Unrequited Love, assisting Bruner with yet another fantastic release. [Adam Turner-Heffer]
Film of the Month
THE SKINNY
Film of the month — The Invisible Man Director: Leigh Whannell Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer, Michael Dorman, Oliver Jackson-Cohen
April 2020 — Review
RRRRR Out Now Released by Universal Pictures Certificate 15 theskinny.co.uk/film
Leigh Whannell’s take on the iconic H.G. Wells monster and 1933 Pre-Code horror finally sees the light of day after 13 years in development, and the results are surprisingly satisfying. In San Francisco’s present-day haven of technology start-ups and 30-something millionaires, Cecilia (Elizabeth Moss) is first seen painstakingly sneaking out of the gated mansion she shares with her husband Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Two weeks after this heart-poundingly narrow escape, Adrian is dead of an apparent suicide – and yet Cecilia cannot shake the feeling that he is just around the corner. The Invisible Man’s extraordinarily effective opening immediately establishes the excruciating tension inherent in the premise, punctuating moments of suspicious mundanity with some of the most well-crafted and dramatically necessary jump-scares in recent horror cinema. It also relishes some of the genre’s trademark framings – notably by placing the uncanny just out of the character’s eyeline – honing them to perfect effectiveness and celebrating these classic traditions in the process. Unfortunately, the film morphs into a new monster once the central trick comes to light, and it subsequently loses much of the mystery and mind games that make the premise so compelling. An arguable plot hole at the film’s climax similarly detracts, but the film earns enough momentum and goodwill that the subsequent resolution is still appropriate and satisfactory. That said, The Invisible Man still has much going for it – a thorough commitment to this tech fantasy nightmare rooted in all-too-recognisable gaslighting maintains genuine emotional involvement in Cecilia’s fate through to its dual conclusions. The titular figure’s omnipresence and Cecilia’s growing panic – and confidence that this panic is justified – is a heavy-handed
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metaphor for domestic abuse, but its anchor in a real phenomenon gets under the skin. The film is sensitive yet honest in its portrayal of a deeply unhealthy relationship, showing Cecilia’s coping mechanisms but letting the abusive behaviours play largely off-screen; any details necessary to the plot are instead narrated by her. The choice reinforces Cecilia’s agency and does not dwell on her victimisation while highlighting the severity and truth of the thread she faces. The explicit violence is saved for the monster movie – and delivers in spades. As Cecilia, Moss – who has gone from strength-to-strength in her career – becomes the latest actress to deliver a showstopping, awards-worthy performance in the horror genre. She captures the tiny deflective habits developed from living one step from a panic attack as well as the steely self-certainty honed by facing habitual falsehoods. Additionally, watching Cecilia test the waters of a carefree life between her husband’s ‘death’ and the uncertainty thereof injects pathos into the ensuing nightmare, skilfully establishing the emotional stakes that are maintained even in the film’s schlockier third act. While not maximising its sophisticated premise, The Invisible Man is a bold revisioning anchored by an all-too-familiar horror. It may not be the most restful home viewing – living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens become sights of unique terrors through Whannell’s lens – but what has been seen, or not seen, will stick in the mind long after a triumphant denouement. [Carmen Paddock] Available to rent on Amazon, YouTube and iTunes
THE SKINNY
At Home
Hunters
Feel Good Creators: Mae Martin, Joe Hampson Starring: Mae Martin, Charlotte Ritchie
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Streaming on All 4
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Memories of young love and regret intertwine in this brilliantly bittersweet debut from writer-director Lucio Castro. Initially, End of the Century presents as a pleasant Spanish knockoff of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend. Two men – Ocho (Barberini), a writer based in New York, and Javi (Pujol), a director based in Berlin – begin a sweet, passionate romance under a tight time constraint while both visiting Barcelona. Castro, however, has some magic up his sleeve that takes the film somewhere extraordinary. It turns out these men have met before, around 20 years ago near the end of the last century, an unenlightened time for gay men still in the closet, as Ocho and Javi were back then, long before hookup app Grindr
and HIV prophylactic PrEP. The film then cuts to 1999, and we find Ocho and Javi still played by the same actors, with no attempt made to make them look any younger. Is this a flashback? Are we inside one of the men’s memories? Details that echo in both timeframes – a book, a song, a Kiss t-shirt – take the film into the world of magic realism, while a third chapter presenting an alternative present is almost cosmic, suggesting we all have parallel lives belonging to choices not made. End of the Century has been sharply described as Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy compressed into one movie, and the film’s three acts have the cumulative emotional power that description suggests. A deceptively simple film brimming over with poetry and melancholy. [Jamie Dunn] Available to rent via BFI Player
Hunters
Moffie Director: Oliver Hermanus Starring: Kai Luke Brummers, Ryan de Villiers, Matthew Vey
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A title card tells the audience that our story takes place during Apartheid, precisely the thing that makes the disorienting opening sequences of Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie suspicious. The misguided abdication of responsibility in Laszlo Nemes’s Son of Saul comes to mind in this first act, where 19-year-old Nicholas, a closeted gay man, is introduced as a new conscript to the South African Defence Force in 1981, dispatched to help defend the border from potential invasion by Communist-led Angola. At first, Hermanus gives into the same temptations as Nemes, isolating the protagonist in the frame via soft-focus and handheld, distancing him from the barbarisms committed
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Streaming on Amazon Prime
Moffie
by the brusque, moustachioed drill sergeants. One worries that, should Hermanus show us Nicholas in a warzone, he might pull the same trick to the much more damaging effect of removing blame for war atrocities from the protagonist, simply because he is the protagonist. But Hermanus’s imprecision slowly, purposefully, gives way to tight, controlled direction. He attempts to construct the white male army drone, in all its self-destructiveness and hyperreal masculine image of muscly, heterosexual perfection, as the root of South Africa’s hatred. In the heady world of military outposts, being gay is a sin, and speaking anything other than Afrikaans will separate you from the herd. For Hermanus, the military is no more adult and honourable than a school playground filled with bullies. [Thomas Atkinson] Released 24 Apr on Curzon Home Cinema
April 2020 — Review
Director: Lucio Castro Starring: Juan Barberini, Ramon Pujol
Hunters is not terrible; it’s just that it’s not great either. And when you’re talking about a premise as intriguing as a diverse group of heroes hunting Nazis in 1970s America, a resounding ‘meh’ is not ideal. Yes, Al Pacino is captivating as Meyer Offerman, a Holocaust survivor hell-bent on destroying an insidious Nazi plot against America with the help of his band of merry men and women, but therein lies the show’s problem. It takes a balancing act like no other for any fictional narrative to soberly depict the horrors of the Holocaust and the gleeful revenge of its survivors, without the latter’s celebratory tone inherently undermining the former’s
End of the Century
Feel Good
End of the Century
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unimaginable tragedy. Hunters desperately struggles to find it. It doesn’t help that the show tries to have and do it all: frequent flashbacks to concentration camps, the escapades of Offerman’s hunters including training Logan Lerman’s newbie Jonah, the Nazis’ mysterious endgame, and an FBI agent discovering all of the above for herself while trying to keep alive her relationship with her mother’s nurse. The result is somehow not a mess – in fact there are certain standouts, such as Dylan Baker’s undercover Nazi Biff Simpson and Josh Radnor’s Lonnie Flash – but it does mean that it’s so hard to identify what exactly Hunters is trying to be that you quickly give up and just let it wash over you. That’s not an ideal reaction to a show about Holocaust survivors killing Nazis. [Benjamin Rabinovich]
At Home
Feel Good abides by the number one rule of standup comedy. If you’re making it up, the audience will smell it from miles away and come for you. Be honest, don’t embellish too much and you’ll get a genuine laugh. Feel Good is a semi-autobiographical series co-written by Canadian queer comedian Mae Martin and Joe Hampson. Martin stars as Mae, navigating her relationship with ‘straight’ teacher George (Ritchie) and her standup career in London, while ghosts of past and present addictions lurk around the corner. The show is peppered with inadvertently humorous lines in hope-
less conversations, often courtesy of George’s straight, white, boring friends, and Feel Good also boasts a great performance by Lisa Kudrow as Mae’s mum Linda. But the series is surprisingly sweet too. The whirlwind romance between troubled Mae and down-toearth George explores all aspects of queer dating. From not being out to friends and family to an iconic sexual role-play involving Susan Sarandon, Feel Good feels refreshing but also brutal in its honesty. Don’t let the short six-episode format fool you. Martin has created a dramedy about addiction and the ways we try to deal with it that is both unsparing and relatable at once. [Stefania Sarrubba]
Creators: David Weil Starring: Al Pacino, Logan Lerman, Dylan Baker, Jerrika Hinton, Lena Olin, Saul Rubinek, Carol Kane
At Home
THE SKINNY
Noughts + Crosses
The Letter for the King
Directors: Julian Holmes, Koby Adom Starring: Jack Rowan, Masali Baduza
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Creator: William Davies Starring: Amir Wilson, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Thaddea Graham, Gijs Blom
Malorie Blackman’s young adult novel series Noughts + Crosses has a clever premise: what if white people were given the treatment that has been historically reserved to people of colour? It’s set in a modern-day London where white Noughts are considered somewhat inferior to black Crosses. Seven hundred years before the story takes place, an alliance of West African nations known as the Aprican empire conquered Europe. In this alternative history, Albion – comprising Great Britain and Ireland – is still ruled by Aprica. This adaptation opens with race-reversed police brutality that’s harsh enough to have everyone check their privileges. As the city is torn by the clashes between Aprican police and the white-led Liberation Militia, the frowned-upon friendship of Cross Sephy Hadley (Masali Baduza) and Nought Callum McGregor (Jack Rowan) blossoms into something else. Relying on a tense atmosphere reminiscent of the Troubles, Noughts + Crosses is at its best when it deals openly with injustice and the political intrigues beneath a seemingly calm surface. That appeal fades away when it focuses on Sephy and Callum, whose rushed storyline borrows heavily from Romeo and Juliet. That Noughts + Crosses is stylised with a plus sign, just like Baz Luhrmann’s update on the Montagues and Capulets, doesn’t help its case. Noughts + Crosses is an uncomfortable, necessary watch in uncertain times where racial and social tensions are at an all-time high, yet it isn’t as riveting as one would hope. [Stefania Sarrubba]
Netflix’s latest fantasy original is wholly unremarkable. Some easy charm from the cast – from underseen actors and endearing up-and-comingtalent – wins goodwill in the early portions, but it is not enough to save The Letter for the King from a dismally underwhelming impact. The show is not served by the fact that the character design, world-building, and thinly-drawn lore underpinning Tiuri’s (Amir Wilson) quest to deliver a life-or-death missive clearly riffs on recent Arthurian adaptations – The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones – without the triumph, urgency, or political astuteness that define the genre at its best. Even considering that this is a sanitised tale for young adult audiences – the bloodless deaths do nothing to raise the stakes – the plot feels so much like a mashup of past successes that nothing comes as a surprise. After an exposition-heavy opening episode, the narrative picks up only to be shot down by laughably bad dialogue and characterisations that – while well-acted – are nothing more than tropes seen throughout this literary and cinematic tradition. These are the main problems, as the stilted development undercuts the required sincerity. High fantasy thrives on an earnestness that other tales would not get away with, and there is not enough conviction in this story to justify its development – or lack thereof. Combine that with a laughably CGI-heavy finale, and you’ll forget The Letter for the King as soon as Netflix pushes the trailer for its next programme. [Carmen Paddock]
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April 2020 — Review
Streaming on BBC iPlayer
Noughts + Crosses
The Trip to Greece
The Trip to Greece Director: Michael Winterbottom Starring: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon
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If your heart sank when Rob Brydon shared the location of this fourth and apparently final Trip on Twitter last summer, it’d be entirely understandable. Neither The Trip to Italy nor The Trip to Spain came close to the masterful heights of the original jaunt around the Lake District. Where the bleak beauty of the Cumbrian countryside was rich with pathetic fallacy, perfectly framing the middle-aged melancholy lurking beneath the bickering, the sunny splendour of Amalfi and Andalusia didn’t complement the pathos at the heart of proceedings anything like as profoundly. Greece was never going to provide that kind of left turn in the same way that Ireland or the US might have, but as much as the vistas are stunning and the summer is scorching, the sense of sadness is inexorable this time around. Personal tragedy and a relationship crossroads loom for Coogan, while Brydon appears to be tentatively rebuilding his marriage, and the combined effect is that the duo no longer strain to mask just how much they enjoy each other’s company. It’s a joy to see the wonderfully warm chemistry between the pair that’s front and centre, and it both reinvigorates the familiar impressions – Anthony Hopkins and Mick Jagger return, as do Michaels Caine and Parkinson – and makes the fresh ones all the more endearing. Ray Winstone as Henry VIII is the standout on that front: “if that Anne Boleyn dicks me about, I’ll chop her fackin’ head off”. [Joe Goggins]
Streaming on Netflix
Streaming on Sky
The Letter for the King
TV & Streaming Highlights in April 2020
Never Have I Ever 27 Apr, Netflix Coming-of-age comedy inspired by writer Mindy Kaling’s own childhood.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine Weekly from 26 Mar, E4 The saved-from-the-brink fanfavourite cop show comedy returns to UK TV.
Quiz Apr, ITV A million-pound prize fund, and a coughing Major; TV’s biggest scandal gets dramatised. — 42 —
The Lighthouse Apr, Amazon Prime Think your cabin fever is bad? You could have a flatulent Willem Dafoe as your flatmate.
James Bond Franchise Apr, Amazon Prime Get set to be shaken, stirred and slightly offended by the classic Bond movies.
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April 2020
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Books
Book Reviews
Rainbow Milk
Exciting Times
Spit Three Times
Sharks in the Time of Saviours
By Paul Mendez
By Naoise Dolan
By Davide Reviati, trans. by Jamie Richards
By Kawai Strong Washburn
In a remote village in Italy, Guido and his fellow slacker friends pass their days skipping school, smoking joints and playing pool in the local bar. Entangled in their Ferranteesque lives are the Stančič, a family of Romani who fled Yugoslavia and fascist Germany for safety, only to be met with renewed suspicion and xenophobia by Guido and his community. Davide Reviati’s graphic novel unravels as a memory-soaked, coming-of-age tale, interspersed with historical accounts of the Romani people’s violent plight under the Third Reich. Some of the panels are breathtaking in their simplicity, the minimal swipes of black ink conveying the stagnation and frustration of both post-war Europe and adolescent masculinity. The narrative isn’t always easy to follow, with flashbacks and scene changes blurring indiscriminately into one another, but this isn’t necessarily a criticism: it adds to the novel’s dreamy, impressionistic quality, the half-remembered stories highlighting how memory comes to form our later identities. Spit Three Times is a novel that is almost impossibly fluid, conveying the haze of the summer it yearns to remember and the fumbling desperation of the marginalised and neglected. Hard to grasp but almost impossible to forget, it is a work of rich and poignant artistry. [Anahit Behrooz]
When he is seven years old, Nainoa Flores is saved from drowning by sharks in Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i. It’s an event that becomes the springboard from which Sharks in the Time of Saviours, Kawai Strong Washburn’s first novel, launches its examination of the family’s fortunes in the wake of the sugar cane industry’s collapse. Washburn’s narrative is structured something like a bildungsroman, following the three Flores siblings (Nainoa, Dean and Kaui) as they grow from children into adults, told both from their multiple perspectives and, occasionally, that of their mother, Malia. What keeps the narrative consistently engaging is how developed each of the main characters feels. Not only do they have their own unique voices (Dean is more colloquial, Nainoa more self-reflective), but their feelings towards each other are also skilfully reflected in their respective segments (Malia’s sections are almost exclusively centred on Nainoa, much to Dean and Kaui’s annoyance). What results is a story that blends Hawaiian myths and elements of magic realism with insightful examinations of the changing nature of relationships and identity, both with each other and with Hawai’i itself as the siblings’ paths diverge on mainland America. Washburn doesn’t shy away from issues of poverty as the family struggles or how the idea of salvation on the mainland becomes hollow. Kaui sums it up best: “No more saviours, okay? This is just life.” [Eugenie Johnson]
April 2020 — Review
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Jesse McCarthy is young, gay, black, despised by his mother and recently disfellowshipped by the Jehovah’s Witness community he grew up in. So, he cuts loose from everything, escaping from the Black Country to London with the £300 he’s saved up. In London he discovers a whole new world of barriers and opportunity. There’s the racist snobbery that comes with a job in an upmarket restaurant and then there’s also the long line of old white daddies who can’t wait for Jesse to fuck them – in the pub, at the station, in their plush flats. He turns to sex work, and he’s good at it. The prose is muscular, the sex graphic, the dialogue sharp. The whole thing fizzes with energy and drive, set to a soundtrack that runs from Ella Fitzgerald to Jay-Z, Joy Division and Mary J. Blige. Jesse finds friends, a partner and success. But beneath it all are the structures of racism that keep white men at the centre and connect everything, from the hostility faced by the Windrush generation in the 1950s, to the burning looks you get as the only black man at a rural Suffolk town market in 2016. At its core, Rainbow Milk is a complex and intersectional treatment of race, class, sexuality and sex work and a powerful, thrilling and accomplished debut novel. [Galen O’Hanlon] Dialogue, £14.99, 23 Apr
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Finished university – what’s next? Ava, for one, swaps Dublin for a cockroachinfested Airbnb in Hong Kong, taking a job teaching English to rich kids. When she meets British banker Julian, she wants the relationship’s power balance to be tipped in her favour, despite moving rent-free into his apartment with free reign on his Amex. But with Julian away on business, Hong Kong native Edith enters Ava’s life and changes everything. Exciting Times is a novel about love, relationships, class and colonialism – and not necessarily in that order. Intelligent and witty, Exciting Times toes the line between romcom and scathing satire with expert precision. Dolan meticulously ties the personal to the political, revealing the layers of discrimination witnessed in Ava’s life: her school only employs white teachers due to demand from local parents, yet Julian’s Eton-educated friends treat her Irishness like a novelty attraction and despite Edith’s Cambridge education and English accent, waiters insist on speaking to her in Cantonese because of her looks. Hong Kong becomes a global microcosm of colonialism and classism, highlighting Irish, British and Chinese political imbalances as well as those of Hong Kong itself. Yet, more than anything, this is a novel about discerning love and friendship from amid the noise of modern life and how difficult yet rewarding that can be, all at once. This debut announces Naoise Dolan as a sensational voice for our times. [Emily Hay]
Seven Stories Press, £22.99, 23 Apr
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Canongate, £16.99, 2 Apr Orion Publishing, £14.99, 16 Apr
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THE SKINNY
ICYMI Prop’a Geordie lass Lauren Pattison meets the inimitable David Brent for the very first time. Illustration: Julija Straižytė Comedy
U
how people speak, giving it that authenticity that helps ramp up the cringe because it feels so real. It’s as dry as cranberry juice and I love it. You can’t help but love the characters too – for as much as they make you wince, you recognise them as the harmless and unintentionally hilarious souls we meet in everyday life. I love Dawn (Lucy Davis) and the heart she brings to the show, but it’s Gareth (Mackenzie Crook) who steals it for me. He’s one of the least self-aware people you’ll ever meet and every Monday morning he’ll claim to have had an ever wilder threesome with some girls you don’t know because they work in a different office. He’s undeniably a loveable loser. I genuinely didn’t realise there were so few episodes made – it’s such a huge part of British comedy culture, I’d just assumed it ran for years. When Netflix informed me that there were no more to watch, I was bitterly disappointed. What am I meant to do now Netflix, my actual work? I don’t think so. Saying that, there’s something quite refreshing about a show finishing while it’s still in its prime, leaving us wanting more before we have a chance to be disappointed at the outcome and for it to lose what we loved about it (I’m looking at you, Lost). It also worked wonders for fixing the complex I have whenever I’m doubting my comedy abilities and think getting an office job might suit me. I wouldn’t last a day with Brent as my manager, and I salute all of you out there who have to. Anyway, I’m going to move on to something a bit longer, the American version, to fill the void… see you in a bit. Keep an eye on Lauren’s Twitter for updates/rescheduled gigs of her WIP @laurenpattison In the meantime watch Lauren’s Best Newcomer nominated-show Lady Muck on watch.nextupcomedy.com
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April 2020 — Review
pon hearing the cult comedy I’ve never seen is The Office (UK version obvs), I know there are bound to be people who can’t believe I’ve not watched it. In my defence, and sorry if what I’m about to say sends you off on one, but I was only seven when The Office first came out so it passed me by. I know I could have returned to it when I was older but I’ve been busy to be honest, making lists of things I need to do and then not doing them. Very busy. So here we go. Now, first thing’s first, watching The Office 19 years after it first aired proved to be quite difficult initially, because I kept getting excited seeing people whose careers have now sky-rocketed. It’s Aunt Hilda from the Sabrina reboot! Look, look at Martin Freeman’s little face – you’re gonna be Bilbo Baggins in a bit mate! MACKENZIE CROOK LOOKS SO YOUNG. Also, Tiff Stevenson pops up in one. Hi Tiff. Once I’d stopped having to rewind the show to rewatch bits I’d missed because I’d been distracted googling each actor, I started to realise why it was such a hit. Taking the format of a mockumentary following the goings-on in the office of a Slough paper company, this toe-curlingly-cringey comedy is exactly the kind of awkward British humour we get behind as a nation. The stuff that really makes me laugh is anything that holds a mirror up to our own lives, and The Office does just that. We have all met a David Brent or two in our time, we’ve sat through pub quizzes with people we want to stab in the eyeballs with the designated pen. The charity episode will surely provide many a viewer with painful flashbacks to being hostage in the workplace during fundraising attempts. The writing is absolutely sublime. Everything is so subtly done, allowing the humour to spring from the awkwardness that’s been created, rather than a script obviously packed with unnatural lines to fit a laugh track, and it’s that which gives it such a richly realistic quality. That doesn’t mean the writing itself isn’t funny – it bloody is. It seems to genuinely capture
THE SKINNY
The Skinny On...
The Skinny On... Kieran Hurley Beats and Mouthpiece playwright Kieran Hurley was meant to debut his new play, The Enemy, this month, but the COVID-19 crisis has postponed the premiere. Here he reflects on other important topics, like what to cook on lockdown and when he last spewed What’s your favourite place to visit and why? Anywhere in the Western Isles. My wife’s family are from Lewis, and further south, I’ve been going on holidays to the Isle of Bute since I was a wee boy and have an enormous affection for the place. Favourite food to cook on lockdown and why? Specifically on lockdown? We’ve got two wee kids and so there’s a lot of meals and no time for anything fancy I’m afraid. We do a lot of big batch cooking. Soups, veggie stews, pasta sauces. Luckily I quite like the challenge of seeing what meals you can pull together from whatever is in the cupboard, though I can’t promise my kids are always consistently delighted with the results. Favourite colour and why? Green. Dunno why. Cos I’m a Hibs fan? Cos of my Irish roots? It’s also
the colour with the widest range of symbolic meanings: envy, sickness, money, environmentalism, go. It’s got range. Who was your hero growing up? When I was about 13 or 14 I was kind of in love with Kurt Cobain. Or the idea of him, given he was already dead. The fact of his death was maybe part of the fascination for me, as my life had been profoundly affected by suicide at that point. I think I felt his music and words could help me understand something about myself that other people couldn’t. So aye, Kurt Cobain, a boring and predictable answer for a white teenage boy but it’s true. Whose work inspires you now? Loads of folk! My wife and frequent collaborator Julia Taudevin. She’s a braver, funnier, more ruthlessly adventurous artist than I am and she’s amazing. I’ve also been watching a
bunch of Lukas Moodysson films recently and finding them really inspiring. I think he captures something about young people in particular with really compassionate insight. Together is one of my favourite ever films. What three people would you invite to your virtual dinner party and what are you cooking? Does ‘virtual’ mean we’re doing this like a Zoom call or something? I enjoy cooking for lots of people, but when it’s just me I frequently can’t be arsed. So probably I’m doing a weird video conference call with Bernadette Devlin, Spike Lee and Björk while I eat four slices of toast. What a weird night. What’s your all-time favourite album? I honestly hate trying to answer this question. Let’s go with In Utero today, for the reasons listed prior. Even though tomorrow I’ll regret that choice.
April 2020 — Chat
What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen? There are lots to choose from, isn't there? But let’s be honest it’s Love Actually, isn’t it? It is. What book would you take to a protracted period of governmentenforced isolation? You mean I have to get rid of all my books bar one now as well? Since Alasdair Gray died I thought I might re-read Lanark, so I’ll hang on to that one, thanks. Who’s the worst? It is obviously Boris Johnson. When did you last cry? Last week, when All This was feeling a bit much. What are you most scared of? In the biggest widest sense, climate change and fascism. In a personal sense, something terrible happening to someone I love. Those fears frequently overlap. — 46 —
When did you last vomit and why? The start of this year, we’d moved the whole family up to Lewis to open a show called Move,which Julia had made and we’d produced under our company Disaster Plan. Premiering a piece of experimental theatre in village halls in the Outer Hebrides in winter with the kids in tow was already a bit much, but then we got a vomiting bug so that was a great laugh for everyone. Tell us a secret? Everyone else is as scared as you are. Which celebrity could you take in a fight? Quite aside from me being utterly hopeless in a fight, there are just so many famous people I don’t know where to start, so I’ve narrowed it down to celebrity namesakes. A battle of Kierans. Tierney? I don’t stand a chance. Culkin? Let’s be honest, he’d probably have me too. If you could be reincarnated as an animal, which animal would it be? Dunno. My daughter watched a YouTube video of some beluga whales lately and they looked like they were having a nice time. How do you stay inspired by the world when you are isolated from it? Honestly, right now, I don’t. The idea that isolation or lockdown is a good time to be a writer is probably bollocks for everyone but it's certainly bollocks if you’ve got kids. I’m not inspired right now, I’m exhausted and anxious. Sorry! The Enemy was due to premiere on 24 Apr, but has been postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis. Keep an eye on National Theatre of Scotland’s website for the new dates Beats is available on Sky Movies, Google Play, Amazon & BFI Player Bubble has been put out by Theatre Uncut in digital form and can be found on YouTube for a limited time: theatreuncut.com
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March 2020
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March 2020 — Feature
Clubs
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