stories
-
Adventures in Theatre, Scotland style
Theatre is the most dynamic art form because it makes you feel, think, and experience then and there on your chair. It’s immediate, but also long-lasting. Sometimes, the encounter is a pleasurable one, something that zips past, smooth, and diaphanous. That isn’t a bad thing, of course. We need light entertainment as well as thoughtful,…
-
Version 2.0 by Garbage
Sometimes you find success with the first thing you do, the follow-up often failing to equip itself quite as confidently. There are also times, very rare instances, when an artist or band break out a sequel so boldly confident, it overturns their debut in the affections of fandom. Version 2.0 had a lot to overcome…
-
Lost in the Spencer Mansion: How I defeated Resident Evil ’96 (and what keeps me going back)
Three friends sitting in a dark bedroom with the only source of light being a large box against a wall. One of us carefully press a disc on top of the box, a grey plastic rectangle with a lid on a hinge. Once we’re ready, the power button (or The On Button, as I always…
-
Pop Satori by Étienne Daho
Let’s just get something straight here: Étienne Daho is very cool. He’s cooler than the coolest popstar you have at the top scale of cool. Better still, his voice is so good it makes every song it graces sound like the coolest song you’ve ever heard. All those styles from synthpop to surf rock, Étienne can do…
-
Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon) by Win
Sometimes the best popstars are the ones who start off in another genre, whose viewpoints and perspectives differ from traditional pop performers, and as a result have a new take on an old form. It doesn’t always land. Punks going pop has a sort of condescending attitude about it, that somehow they feel it’ll be…
-
“Lady In Rid”
A few months ago, Tom Brogan of Short Attention Span Theatre reached out and asked if I’d like to contribute a short play to a charity night. They’re raising money for River Garden in Ayr, a facility to help people in the recovery state of addiction. So I wrote Lady In Rid, or Lady In…
-
Goodbye 2022! What’s happening 2023?
The start of the year was slow until I got busy. Suddenly, the end of the year was here and I realised it was time to make one of these annual Best Of lists. For me, this blog will also be a glimpse into the future, signs and portents of things to come – because…
-
Debut by Björk
My eldest sister loved Debut and that’s how I knew it was something special. “A” had listened to music but by the time she left school and got a job in the factory, it was something purely functional for her, an incidental backing track for her adventures in Björk Papa Docs, the infamous Cumbernauld shithole…
-
Cumbernauld Hit: the attempted listing of a concrete eyesore.
It’s easy to spot a tourist in Cumbernauld. They’re the people with cameras looking around in awe at the places that make the rest of us shake our heids in disgust. They’ll ask for directions to ‘The Plaza’ or try their luck at finding the bus that’ll take them to the school where Gregory’s Girl…
-
A Secret History of Cumbernauld Town Centre
Cumbernauld Town Centre eats pigeons alive, but not before they eat each other. The building is in such a bad state that the birds have plenty of broken windows and pipes to get through, and they’ve made the top floor their home. Even up on the third floor, where the library sits almost abandoned because…
Kirkland Ciccone 