Slightly inspired, quite soggy and super Scottish
FESTIVAL 2018
Sonica Presents Portal
Clyde Tunnel, Glasgow
“IS IT really scary,” asked a woman pushing a pram, at the end of our health and safety briefing outside the entrance to the Clyde Tunnel. “Naw,” said the security man confidently. The collective shoulders of our small group sagged a little in disappointment. What about the monsters?
This was officially the opening day of Cryptic’s Portal, and already its 12 day residency in the south pedestrian Clyde Tunnel was officially booked out, although the organisers say they will find a way to release more tickets, and it certainly seems that rocking up in the middle of the week on the off chance is worth a try.
The popularity of Sonica’s new subterranean adventure is not hard to fathom; the advance word is that the 762 metre pathway under the Clyde has become a home to futuristic robots and inchoate beasts. Mostly, however, it is pitch black. After the gloom swallows up the daylight by the entrance, we were guided by a white luminous track fizzing deeper inside the tunnel, and occasional lowkey sidelights. The Teenage Mutant Ninja pizza shop at the Balshagray entrance started to feel very far away; except that, like the Turtles and New York’s alligators we now seemed to be in the kind of sewer environment that might be capable of evolving something ominous and biological.
Even with its usual fluorescent lighting and without Sonica’s audio-visual installations, the isolated walk from Whiteinch to Govan can feel dankly oppressive. Now it throbs with Alex Menzies’ electronic score, and soon after the descent a bot waving a surveillance camera scuttled out of the darkness towards us like a spider checking out the contents of its web. In the distance, lights briefly flickered to frame the tunnel’s arch.
What follows is a half hour walk and a series of woozily unsettling encounters framed by multimedia artist Robbie Thomson. A watertank draped in salvage and fishbone fronds occasionally bubbles significantly, and a carcass of pipes squirts water at inattentive passing visitors.
Portal feels like a haunted house put together by Ridley Scott in his 1980s Alien and Blade Runner heyday, a cinematic age before CGI where unease was created out of metal and latex. The fusion of subway and submarine nightmare packs plenty of mood, but it barely breaks a sweat when it comes to pressing your buttons, despite the robotics. It might have been more challenging and transformative to create something to interrogate and challenge our automatic dread of a tight underpass that leads whoknows-where; a bright, breezy Little Mermaid-type world for instance, rather than a sombre spacewalk of morbidities and technofear.
Despite the reassurance above ground, there are works that might resonate for some time after you climb up towards the light at the end of the tunnel, such as a bald mottled human head which comes to life, the mouth gulping fishily and the eyes struggling to open. Like Portal’s underpass adventure, it is strikingly creepy and certainly worth seeing, if not entirely persuasive.
SIOBHAN SYNNOT
MUSIC Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Academy, Glasgow
IF THREE copies of The Velvet Underground’s White Light/white Heat album cover somehow gained sentience and formed a band, they would look and sound exactly like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.
Despite hailing from San Francisco, their take on psychedelia is distinctly lacking in peace and love. As you’d expect from a band who named themselves after Marlon Brando’s leather gang from The Wild One, they’re more in tune with the murky brown acid and Hell’s Angels era of the late 1960s counterculture. You can imagine them playing at Altamont and thoroughly enjoying the experience.
Their whole aesthetic is affected, of course, but that doesn’t matter when they make such a bruising, exciting, powerful noise. The BRMC live experience is a violent sonic attack.
Singing bassist Robert Levon Been’s heavily distorted bass sounds like a battalion of angry robots wrestling in a swamp. It’s enormous. The same goes for Peter Hayes’
FESTIVAL 2018 The Great Big Opening Party
George Square, Glasgow
FESTIVAL 2018 – the cultural wing of the European Championships – kicked off with this family friendly opening event just as normal Scottish summer weather service resumed. The Great Big Opening Party (right on one of those counts) featured a good cross section of Scottish acts, but no serious big hitters to galvanise the crowd.
This would have mattered less on a glorious sunny night rather than one where rain was either threatening or falling. Throughout proceedings, the atmosphere was good-natured and stoic rather than celebratory. So there was polite appreciation of the classical chart-topping Ayoub Sisters, Sarah on cello and Laura on violin, and their chamber take on the likes of The Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 sturm and clang guitar and the elephantine whomp of Leah Shapiro’s kick drum.
BRMC are sexy and threatening, like Jessica Rabbit with a flick-knife. They’ve somehow managed to sustain their stoic commitment to garage rock minimalism over 20 years. Even the Ramones and The Jesus and Mary Chain never managed that.
Highlights tonight included lysergic sea shanty Beat The Devil’s Tattoo (of course they have a song called that) and the climactic double whammy of Spread Your Love and Whatever Happened to My Rock ‘n’ Roll? A rhetorical question, of course. Its renegade spirit is in safe hands.
PAUL WHITELAW Miles) and of the sumptuous harmonic soundscapes of fellow Royal Conservatoire graduate C Duncan.
Incumbent Scottish Album of the Year Award winners Sacred Paws fared better thanks to the danceability of their sunny Afrobeat guitars and post-punk spikiness, a hip foil to the anticlimactic official opening proceedings, involving underwhelming flag-waving, displaying of trophies, “inspirational” poetry, teen choir Voice Factory and a tribute to David Bowie’s unintentional sporting anthem Heroes.
Nina Nesbitt was more practised in how to encourage participation from a soggy crowd and soldiered on with a blend of her moody new electronica sound and older, catchier acoustic pop tunes before headliners Elephant Sessions rounded off a patchy evening with their slick but not always satisfying electric ceilidh fusion.
FIONA SHEPHERD
FESTIVAL 2018
Citizens of Everywhere!
George Square, Glasgow
AFTER weeks of glorious sunshine, it probably seemed like a droll wheeze to open Citizens of Everywhere! with a recording of a thunderstorm to clear the air. But with predictable irony, it was raining hard anyway and so the most intriguing and relevant event of the Festival 2018 George Square programme, curated by artist Douglas Gordon, played out to a small but receptive audience in plastic ponchos.
Citizens of Everywhere! celebrated George Square’s history as a place of celebration and protest, particularly highlighting a visit from the great American bass baritone
and civil rights activist Paul Robeson, who led the 1960 May Day Parade around the square and through the city.
Silent pa the news reel footage of the march spooled out on the big screen as scots makar jackie Kay, pictured, provided poetic recollections of the parade alongside contemporary global events and injustices.
Jazz singer Suzanne Bonnar sang softly on the sidelines as Kay noted the marchers pledge of “no return to the hungry 30s”. In a week of headlines about “adequate food supplies” post-brexit, this was a timely reminder that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Afterwards, Gordon touchingly danced Kay offstage and Bonnar took centre stage for an a cappella improvisation on Robeson’s signature Ol’ Man River, introducing the event’s other main theme of Glasgow as a city caught between a river and mountains.
The musical centrepiece was the premiere of an orchestrated version of Mogwai’s Music For a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain), originally commissioned for one of Gordon’s installations and given fresh impetus by the RSNO under Associate Conductor Jean-claude Picard.
Like many Mogwai works, it sustained a slow and stately pace, leavened by twinkling glockenspiel, until the strings took a more romantic turn and then a sudden surge in volume. Its mesmeric, melancholic and at times magical qualities were complemented by a greatest hits programme themed around sea and landscapes, including Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, capturing the drama of the eddying ocean, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Smetana’s Vltava and Grieg’s impish and exuberant In the Hall of the Mountain King, as well as an outing for Hamish Maccunn’s 1887 concert overture The Land of the Mountain and the Flood.
Suitably stirred and anchored by the performance, the soggy audience joined Bonnar and the RSNO in a closing communal reprise of Ol’ Man River which was far from a wash-out.
FIONA SHEPHERD