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Review: Azealia Banks @ the 02 Academy Glasgow – Glasgow Guardian

Unapologetic authenticity meets aggravation, as Banks delivers an furiously efficient yet audacious set.A tour titled “back to the union jack” could have been a hard sell in Glasgow. A post-10pm, sub-40 minute set should be harder still. As the unremarkable supporting DJ set rumbled on, anticipation of Banks’ arrival turned into frustration, then for some, indignation. We danced, but more reluctantly, we debated buying more shit booze. A minority took to Snapchat to have their moment: “Come out...
The Glasgow Guardian •

Simon Murphy’s Govanhill: a bold photographic portrait

Simon Murphy’s new exhibition Govanhill captures a transient snapshot of the Glasgow Southside area.

Framed on the wall of Street Level Photoworks is a photograph of a young girl, she is around 11 or 12 years old. School uniform on, cigarette in hand, head cocked to the side, she poses, defiantly, outside the entrance to one of the Southside’s tightly packed tenement flats. I want to know her name.

She’s just one of hundreds of Glaswegians—more specifically, inhabitants of the Govanhill area—w
The Glasgow Guardian •

Review: Baek Sehee’s i want to die but i want to eat tteokbokki

i want to die but i want to eat tteokbokki is marketed as “part memoir, part self-help book.” Its format is unusual: recorded conversations between the author and her psychiatrist constitute the bulk of the text, before an epilogue serves as a personal reflection. In this epilogue, Baek Sehee discusses her experience of finding books which are like medicine for her. It is implied that these are self-help books.

As instances of mental ill-health skyrocket among young people, substituting the adv
The Glasgow Guardian •

Tinderbox Orchestra Review: Ordinary people doing extraordinary things

As one component part of the registered charity Tinderbox Collective, the orchestra returns to the Edinburgh Fringe for a dazzling showcase of fusion music.

Two rows of numbered PCs, a dozen red office chairs and a photocopier are already incongruous additions to Edinburgh Central Library’s grandiose, wood-panelled reference room. A modest stage, a smattering of instruments laid out on the floor and a multitude of criss-crossing wires only add to what looks like, at first glance, a messy bricol
The Glasgow Guardian •

Glasgow Film Festival 2023: Rye Lane

Naming a rom-com after a bustling street running through the heart of Peckham (South London) emphasises the special importance of setting to Rye Lane. The plethora of spaces which Dom (David Jonsson) and Yaz (Vivian Oparah) navigate are unmistakably and proudly in Zone 2, whether that be chicken shop Morley’s, under the arches of the London Overground, or Brixton Market. In a Q&A, director Raine Allen Miller mentioned filming in the latter location as especially important, because South London i
The Glasgow Guardian •

Review: Big Joanie @ Mono

Punk died six years ago according to Joe Corre (the late Dame Vivienne Westwood’s son). Though he lambasted its transition into a “marketing tool” used by the music industry, the success of Big Joanie’s UK headline tour - Glasgow being their 3rd sold out show - suggests a radical alternative is alive and thriving.

Big Joanie are a Black feminist punk band. Its three members - Stephanie Phillips on guitar, Chardine Taylor Stone on drums, and Estella Adeyeri on bass - charmed veggie bar-turned-gi
The Glasgow Guardian •

Review: Bongo’s Bingo Christmas @ SWG3

There is no greater accumulation of heteronormative slaying than at Bongo’s Bingo Glasgow. Almost everyone in the queue snaking down Eastvale Place was sequin-clad or generally glammed up, and some were dancing on the benches before 7pm. In Glasgow there’s no settling down into your forties, fifties, or beyond - going off out to get plastered is still the done thing. A scour of the Bongo’s Bingo website listings unsurprisingly revealed nowhere else in the UK to have as many shows this month as G
The Glasgow Guardian •

Review: The Book of Mormon @ Theatre Royal Glasgow

“Jesus lived here, in the USA”, supposedly. It’s the kind of writing that should be so ridiculous, so satirical, as to bear little resemblance to reality. But what The Book of Mormon does so well is make us, among cackles and giggles, question and engage critically with so much - charity, race, religion are only the start.

The actual Book of Mormon is a founding text of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. What Robert Lopez, and South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, do wit
The Glasgow Guardian •

Review: Sugababes @ O2 Academy

It was an eclectic assortment of us filing into the O2 Academy on a Monday night. Lots of forty somethings were reliving their glory days, sporting semi glamorous attire scrambled together after a Monday slog in the office. But the Sugababes are a timeless phenomenon, and the number of young people in attendance was both heartening and unsurprising.

We were first treated to two support acts following on seamlessly from one another. Kara Marni is 22 and on TikTok. She releases EPs (not albums) a
The Glasgow Guardian •

Buzzcut’s Double Thrills: A masterclass in experimental performance art

“This week he moppin' floors, next week it's the fries”. “That bitch knew her cheeses”.

Both lines emanate from the theatre on display at the CCA on Wednesday 19 October. This is par the course for Double Thrills; a recurring night of experimental art. It’s put on by Glasgow’s Buzzcut, who describe themselves as an “internationally recognised organisation, supporting radical performance practises from all over the world”. Karl Taylor is their administrative director, and he spoke to The Glasgow
The Glasgow Guardian •

Review: Mr Singh’s India

A birthday-related curry was in order. Alas, this was week 11 in semester two - a period largely characterised by burgeoning eye bags and stress-induced insomnia - so we craved somewhere safe, solid and stable. Mister Singh’s seemed the perfect fit, adequately local and seemingly unremarkable, so off we went: an 11-strong assemblage of varying degrees of overdressed first-year flatmates supporting a local business. A mediocre undertaking, surely.

Well, not quite. Mister Singh’s had other ideas,
Ed Fringe Review •

Review: Tokyo Fugue

Johann Sebastian Bach is turning in his grave. His Prelude and Fugue in D minor has been completely deconstructed and its structure reapplied, becoming the backbone of an enthralling production with just three bodies and three chairs. Directors Kentaro Suyama and Tania Coke are joined by Toshihiko Nishimura on stage, as they present a philosophical exploration of the repetitive, dehumanising and overwhelming nature of the commute. Through this,
The Glasgow Guardian •

Review: Amartey Golding’s Bring Me To Heal @ Tramway

It’s our ability to heal, or lack thereof, that determines our ability to forge human connection. Amartey Golding underlines this in his exhibition Bring Me To Heal, elaborating upon Joy DeGruy’s thesis of post-traumatic slave syndrome to explore the impact of intergenerational trauma on the political injustice and interpersonal hatred that bubbles underneath 21st century race relations.

A cavernous and dimly lit room in Glasgow’s Tramway hosts a bricolage of Golding’s work. This includes a gar
The Glasgow Guardian •

We’re fighting the same fight: collectivism in the climate crisis

Living 10 minutes away from COP26 hasn’t fostered my engagement with it. The plethora of bollards, railings and police motorbikes physically separate the happenings of the conference from the rest of Glasgow. It was on the other side of the Clyde, in a repurposed tramworks, where climate justice felt almost tangible last Thursday.

"From Scotland to Sarawak: Global stories of climate resistance" is a pop-up exhibition curated by Friends of the Earth. Running until the end of COP26, it unashamedl