Music in Film 05: Since Yesterday: the Untold Story of Scottish Girl Bands (2024)

I was posting about some music-related films I had seen in 2024 and somehow distrcaction meant I never got round to posting about this music documentary from Carla Easton and Blair Young about Scottish bands formed of women and girls. The Scottish music tradition is focussed on bands that are all or mostly men. When women appear in bands they are either the singer or one of a minority of female musicians in the line-up. Bands entirely composed of women are far less common, to the extent that once you've thought of Strawberry Switchblade it is a bit difficult to think of any other Scottish all-women bands (don't @ me if you know loads of Scottish all-women bands). This documentary attempts to correct that picture by looking at the secret history of Scottish girl bands. The filmmakers argue that drawing attention to their existence is important as a way of encouraging girls to pick up instruments and form bands themselves, on the grounds that people can't visualise themselves doing something if they don't have examples of people like them doing it already.

It felt to me that the heart of the film was the postpunk-DIY scene that emerged in Scotland in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That appears to have seen an explosion of bands, some of which were had no men in them and so make ideal subjects for the film. That is the scene from which Strawberry Switchblade emerged, but it also produced many other bands that all seemed somewhat interesting, even if most of them are now largely forgotten because they were never that successful. The film does go back further in time to talk about The McKinlay Sisters (or The McKinlays), a pop duo from the early 60s who seemed to have enjoyed some short-lived success, and it goes later to talk about riot grrl and The Hedrons, a band from the mid 2000s (who seem to have been pretty successful without my ever being aware of their existence), but the postpunk stuff is what the film seems to be happiest engaging with, possibly because there is such a cornucopia of acts from the era.

This very much is the kind of music I like: relatively lo-fi, guitarry, drummy, female vocals, etc. But I'm not too surprised that the scene did not produce many girl bands who went on to all conquering success. It is minority interest music and not really the kind of thing that is ever going to trouble the charts too much. It is striking that the one really successful band from this milieu (Strawberry Switchblade, whose global hit gives the film its title) did so after having their vocals married to a synthpop backing (something they were a bit uncomfortable with, but they appreciated that the record company needed to make a return on their investment). And Strawberry Switchblade then folded, partly for their own internal reasons and partly because when it came down to it they didn't really like being pop stars after all. The one other almost-contender from the early 1980s scene were Sophisticated Boom Boom, who recorded some Peel sessions before changing their name (primarily because they had mislaid their lead singer but perhaps also to avoid confusion with a new wave Swiss girl band that had the same name). As His Latest Flame they signed to a major and released an album that received some push but never shifted too many units before the record company lost interest and terminated the contract.

Most bands are unsuccessful. Maybe Strawberry Switchblade being the only truly successful one from that scene isn't too surprising: it may not be an indication that the odds are stacked against girl bands once they have formed as they are successful at about the same rate as bands with boys in them (not sure how you would test this assertion); the real question is why do so few girl bands form in the first place.

And yet, I did find myself thinking that there is a gender-specific structural barrier girl bands face that does not seem to trouble boy bands. There is a bit in the film where the Hedrons are talking about how record labels were wary of signing them because they are a band of young women at an age where women start having babies: the record companies were afraid that pregnancy and children would derail the band's career and cause the company's investment to be wasted. In the film that is presented as indication that the men from these unnamed record companies are all sexist dinosaurs, but the film itself seems to say that part of the previous failure of Sophisticated Boom Boom / His Latest Flame stemmed from band members becoming pregnant and either dropping out or being pushed out by the rest of the band. So it felt to me like there is a structural problem separate to record company types being sexist dickheads.

I don't know how you can get around this. People should be able to have children if they want without it killing their career, but there's no maternity leave set up for musicians and I am not sure how there could be, given that they are not salaried employees. Nevertheless it is an indictment of social structures and people's behaviours that you never seem to hear of men dropping out of bands because they have become a father.

Towards the end of the film maybe it lost a bit of focus when it started going on about non-white non-cis musicians: I thought sticking to girl bands would have been better. I was also a bit disappointed that it didn't mention Girls Rock School Edinburgh, a laudable initiative to teach interested women and girls how to play musical instruments (something I only know about because I've met one of the organisers on Unthanks singing weekends). There is also something a bit nostalgic about the film's focus on bands playing with traditional rock instrumentation, as it feels at times like the day of the band is over or coming to an end (the subsequent rise of Wet Leg and the Last Dinner Party might prove me wrong here).

Afterwards my beloved and I were talking about why there are so few women working as sound engineers and producers in music. I was reminded of an interview with Anjali Dutt I read a while back. Dutt is not a household name but she engineered and/or produced a load of records in the 1980s and 1990s, with credits on records as varied as My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Oasis' Definitely Maybe, and Spacemen 3's Recurring. She says that her engineering career ended because she started having kids and there was no way to combine the demands of parenthood and the demands of the music business. And by the time her kids were old enough to need less looking after the music business had moved on and found other people to hire for engineering jobs (again, this seems not to be the kind of salaried work you can go away on maternity leave for). You can read the interview for yourself here.

I don't know how you get around these problems. It might help if looking after children stopped being seen as something that is exclusively a woman's thing, but I suspect the problem is more structural than attitudinal.

You can listen to a playlist of music from bands mentioned in the film on Spotify and Mixcloud.

The whole film appears to be on YouTube at the moment here.

You can see my previous posts about music in films I saw in 2024 here, here, here, and here.

images:

Since Yesterday (Screen Scotland / Sgrín Alba: "Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands")

Anjali Dutt (Reverb: "The Engineer Who Helped Save MBV's Loveless & Oasis' Debut")

Snow Is Falling All Around Us: Unusual Christmas-Adjacent Films

Ho ho ho! It is now March, but that will not stop me from looking back on a season of Christmas films they showed in the Light House in December. First up we have Comfort & Joy, Bill Forsyth's 1984 film. Now, some background here. This was Forsyth's third feature, following Gregory's Girl and Local Hero. Local Hero is a bit of an obsession in my beloved's family so I found myself heading off to see this with her and her sister. Despite the title, it's not really a Christmas film, or at least only in the sense that it is set around Christmastime without actually being about Christmas. It takes its inspiration from Glasgow's ice cream wars of the 1980s, when criminal gangs were selling heroin from ice cream vans and laying into any of their rivals who encroached on their turf. However, instead of being a film about drug gangs the film imagines a strange alternative history in which the ice cream wars are instead between rival producers of ice cream. The main character plays a radio DJ who somehow finds himself mediating between the battling gelato merchants after going through a bad break up.

I liked this film a lot. For all its whimsy, the plot seemed more coherent than the better regarded Local Hero. The humour is appealingly gentle and the Mark Knopfler soundtrack so effective that I started wondering if I might have reached the age where engaging with Dire Straits becomes a good idea. But I think a really big part of what appealed about this to me was all the Glasgow locations. Some of the city looked very familiar while some of it was very different: there is a scene on the banks of the Clyde with the Finnieston Crane in the background, something I saw lot of in my 2024 Worldcon related trips to Glasgow, except that instead of being surrounded by hotels and conference centres it is out in the middle of a semi-derelict port site. I also found it highly amusing that the protagonist seemed to be living around the corner from one of my gamelan friends, with whom I was staying on a November gamelan trip to GIOFest.

You can see a trailer for the film here.

The Holdovers is more directly a Christmas film. It's about some rich kids who have to spend the Christmas holidays in their posh boarding school because their families can't or won't take them, and also the cook and grumpy teacher who have to stay with them. In premise it sounds like heartwarming glurge but it is actually pretty affecting and has strong performances from all three of the principals: Paul Giamatti as the teacher, Da'Vine Joy Randolph as the cook, and Dominic Sessa as the main held over student. Sessa's performance, his film debut, is particularly impressive. I think this is the kind of film that will deservedly get shown every year around Christmas so you will get a chance to see it and should take that opportunity. I did overhear some young people talking about how they found it much more moving on the big screen.

The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best and most faithful adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, both funny and deeply moving. I suspect I will be going to the cinema for this every year until I die. The Light House audience was a bit boisterous but I decided it was best to lean into this.

Strange Days is Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 SF film set in the last days and hours before the start of the 21st century. It's not a Christmas film as such, but it does feature a guy dressed as Santa Claus being chased by some angry hookers. The setup revolves around this dodgy tech that allows people to record their physical sensations for playback by themselves or other people, with Ralph Fiennes playing a shifty vendor of these recordings. The plot is multi-layered, with one angle covering a rampage by murderous cops seeking to recover an incriminating recording but another key theme is the importance of letting the past go (something Fiennes' character takes a while to realise, as he spends a lot of the film playing back experiences from before his girlfriend left him). The central performances from Fiennes and Angela Bassett as his kickarse limo driving friend are very impressive and overall I like this film as much as I did when I first saw it. My beloved did however think it went on a bit, and given its 145 minute runtime I can see where she is coming from. It's also not always an easy watch, with one particularly intense scene inspired by Michael Powell's Peeping Tom making for extremely uncomfortable viewing.

images:

Bill Paterson in Comfort and Joy (Film-authority.com: "Comfort and Joy 1984 ****")

Strange Days (Dust on the VCR: "Renewed Access and Relevance in Strange Days (1995), a Film That Predicted Too Much of the Future")

Zut alors! J'ai vu les films français!

Are French films screened here less frequently than they used to be, attracting less attention when they do make it to our screens? Perhaps so, but I still managed to recently see some interesting offering from the French film industry.

Dossier 137 is a 2025 film from Dominick Moll. It was shown in a French film festival, which I suspect means it is not going to get a wider release, which is a shame as it features strong performances and deals with important subjects in a sensitive and nuanced manner. Léa Drucker plays a police investigator of malpractice by other cops, with the film set around the time of the Gilets Jaunes protests. A youth attending the demonstrations with his mother is severely injured by a policeman, and the investigator is trying to find out who is responsible and whether they acted inappropriately. Discovering that the youth comes from the same small town as herself, she pursues the case a bit more doggedly than she might otherwise have done. The film is good on the way cops close ranks to protect their own and the human cost of being on the receiving end of state violence, while also giving a sense of how stressful it is to police riots and how easy it is to slip into making bad decisions in such an environment. Drucker's own performance is particularly impressive. It deserves a wider audience.

Alpha (another 2025 film, this time from Julia Ducournau) was screened more widely, although it proved somewhat divisive, with many seeing it as a confused load of old bollocks, for all that it did have its supporters (notably Irish Times film guy Donald Clarke). It is an odd one, with the basic premise that there is this blood-born disease going around that turns people into statues. The film mostly follows Alpha, a 13 year old girl, who unwisely gets an A tattooed on her arm at a party, leading to her mother fearing that she has been tainted by the virus. There's also a split time thing going on, for as well as the present-day Alpha storyline there is a separate storyline in the past involving her mother as a doctor treating patients in the early days of the virus. And there is also stuff about how Alpha and her family are of Berber origin, and about her recovering heroin addict uncle.

I can see why people didn't like this. I found the split time sequence a bit confusing, which irked me as missing the cues made me feel like I was too stupid for the film, which made me hate it for insulting me. But also the relationship between the two time sequences is a bit strange and contradictory, which made it unclear as to what was real and what was imaginary and who was doing the imagining. But it still felt like the film had something. The principals' performances are all very impressive and the film also makes great use of music, most notably Portishead's "Roads" at the disorienting party sequence at the start of the film. So: worth seeing even if you might not like it.

L'Atalante is an old French film from 1934, directed by Jean Vigo, who died in the same year it was released at the age of 29. It's one of those Sight & Sound top ten films and is about the eponymous barge and the people who sail on her: Jean (the cap'n), Juliette (his newly married wife), Père Jules (the salty sea dog), and the young lad (who doesn't have a name). It's mostly about Jean and Juliette and their romantic travails. It's entertaining enough and it looks very nice but I did wonder if I was missing something as it all felt a bit inconsequential and unworthy if its one-of-the-best-films-ever status. But I am wary of being too down on it as it reminded me somewhat of F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, a film I disliked greatly on first viewing and have since grown to love.

There are cats.

images:

Dossier 137 interview (Critikat: "Dossier 137")

Mélissa Boros in Alpha (Independent: "Alpha may have inspired walkouts at Cannes – but they were out of boredom rather than disgust")

Three Key 2025 films: "One Battle After Another", "Sorry, Baby", "Palestine 36"

I've become a bit wary of that Paul Thomas Anderson guy. Some of his films I like a lot (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Hard Eight, Punch-Drunk Love) but some of them I found both over-long and disappointing (Licorice Pizza, The Master). One Battle After Another I initially decided to skip as it is long and didn't look too appealing in the trailer. However my interest was piqued by stories about how it had done very well with critics while being largely shunned by audiences. Also, one or two of my buds who had seen it spoke very highly of it. So fuck it, I gave it a go.

And… it's OK. It does maybe go on a bit and the bit of the film that comes before the "16 years later" jump is a bit formless for its admirable kinetic qualities, but the whole storyline of the former urban guerrilla (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter (Chase Infiniti) on the run from a crazy Fed is pretty engaging. People like to go on about DiCaprio's girlfriend age event horizon, but such talk obscures what a compelling actor he is, and he's not the only one giving strong performances here. And it uses music well and all flows along. But I can't but feel that there are better films to be made about urban guerrillas, for all this one improves as it goes along.

If you went into Eva Victor's Sorry, Baby knowing nothing about it bar what you had seen in the trailer then you might think it is a quirky comedy-drama about a neurodivergent hottie and her fun-packed oddball adventures with friends, a neighbour and a cat. It's only the bit in the trailer where she says "Something bad happened to me" that might give you pause. Of course this is actually a film about recovery from sexual assault, a difficult subject that initially had me deciding to avoid it until a late change of mind brought me to the cinema. And it's an odd fish, dealing sensitively with the sexual assault (offscreen but described afterwards) and having moments of emotional intensity while also being at times rather funny. That Eva Victor also plays Agnes, the main character, and has reported that the film is based on her own experiences adds further heft to it. I really liked it and a I encourage everyone to see it. I also hope that Victor makes and appears in more films, not necessarily at the same time.

Some random Sorry, Baby things:

• When Agnes goes round to a male neighbour's to borrow some propellant so that she can set fire to her assaulter's office, she waits outside while he goes to get it, and I could totally see how someone in her situation would be loth to go into the home of a man.
• The way Agnes is coded as neurodivergent but so is Natasha, a fellow PhD student and her enemy. Maybe only neurodivergent people take postgraduate courses in American liberal arts colleges.
• Agnes rescues a kitten and goes into a shop to buy food for it while hiding it unconvincingly under her jacket; this is funny and relatable.
• When Agnes has sex with the neighbour (who is nice), this is presented as the kind of intimate fumbly sex real people have and not the kind of amazing Hollywood sex people have in films (don't @ me if you have amazing Hollywood sex all the time).
• Agnes has a nice friend called Lydia who appears to be the token non-neurodivergent postgrad student in her college. She is played well by Naomi Ackie who I thought was some kind of up and coming person to watch out for but actually she has been in loads of stuff.

Annemarie Jacir's Palestine 36 is a film about the Palestinian revolt against British rule that erupted in 1936. Aside from wanting to be free and not have the Brits bossing them around, the Palestinian rebels are also trying to prevent their country being taken over by Zionist settlers. The film follows different Palestinian characters, mostly from the same village, and also some British officials, including the High Commissioner, a well-meaning but ineffectual civil servant, and the oddball counter-insurgency army officer Orde Wingate (more famous for leading the Chindits in the Second World War). It generally looks great (although I had reservations about some use of what appeared to be colourised newsreel footage) and was very evocative of the period. I don't think it resolved very well, however. That might be a consequence of the history it is based on (the revolt failed and its defeat paved the way for the disaster that befell the Palestinians in the late 1940s) but I still felt that some kind of more satisfying narrative conclusion should have been possible, even if the revolt is shown as a failure.

I also thought it was unfortunate that the film has no Jewish characters. The Zionist settlers are an offstage presence, having arms imported, shooting at the Palestinian villagers from their fortified settlement, paying newspaper editors to run favourable copy, etc. but we never see them as actual people and we never get a sense of why they are coming to Palestine and how they see things there. In a film where British antagonists share screen time with the Palestinians (in a manner reminiscent of The Battle of Algiers), the absence of the Zionists is a curious omission, particularly given that Wingate's real-life suppression of the Palestinian revolt partly revolved around recruiting, arming and training a Jewish militia.

Despite those reservations I enjoyed this film greatly and I recommend it to anyone curious about how the Middle East got into its current crazy state.

image:

Eva Victor and friend in Sorry, Baby (The Travers Take: "Sorry Baby")

Four Pay-What-You-Like Hive Mind Records

Dream the Dreams So Far Denied: Devotional Music from the Gujarat (2021)

v/a Jaipongan Music of West Java (2020)

v/a In the Heart of Sumedang: Field Recordings from West Java (2024)

v/a The Uncanny Times (2020)

These releases come from Hive Mind Records, a Brighton-based label I recently became aware of thanks to a successful piece of targeted advertising that revealed they were having a pay-what-you-like sale, which runs until Friday 6 February. I could obviously have downloaded their entire catalogue and paid them nuppence but I opted instead to take a punt on these four albums that touched various of my buttons and chuck them a fiver each for them. How much do you hand over for blind purchases of pay-what-you-like records?

The Hive Mind roster is eclectic. It tacks towards world music but does appear to also include contemporary original releases from people who are not from the world. I lent towards the world end of their offerings in picking my four downloads, for reasons. And the first one is Dream the Dreams So Far Denied: Devotional Music from the Gujarat, which is a mix of music from cassettes. There's no artist information or tracklisting, because the record label people can't read the native lingo and didn't go looking for anyone who could. And it's great, a mix of hypnotic instrumental and vocal music that merges together seamlessly and makes for a great accompaniment to pretty much any activity.

You may have concerns about a UK record label selling other people's music like this. Perhaps to allay such qualms, Hive Mind report that any money given to them for this mix is donated to a COVID appeal for India, although given the passage of time since the mix was released I am unclear as to whether the appeal is still active or relevant.

Jaipongan Music of West Java is a 2020 release, which I picked up out of curiosity regarding non-gamelan music from Java, although it turns out that there is a lot of gamelan here, just not the gamelan I am used to. The notes and perusal of the Wikipedia page for jaipongan reveal this to be music from something of a manufactured tradition. In 1961 Sukarno, Indonesia's then leader, banned western music in an effort to promote indigenous and traditional culture. In response the composer Gugum Gumbira added gamelan instruments to a separate folk tradition that had seen female singers and dancers performing over accompaniment from percussion instruments and rebab (a stringed instrument). Most of the recordings here are from the ensemble based in his Jugala studio, with vocals from Idjah Hadjijah. The music is a good bit more frenetic than the gamelan of central Java I am used to, and for all that there are gamelan instruments being played here they don't come across as the main focus. Instead we get a lot of the singer, which for someone like me is pretty mysterious as the vocals are in Indonesian or Javan and could be about anything.

The second half of the record consists of reworkings of jaipongan pieces by electronic musicians working with samples and stuff. As music the reworkings are quite pleasant, but they are so different from the original jaipongan pieces that I think they might have been better released on a separate record. They could also have done with including more information on the people doing the reworkings. From their names they seem to be a mix of Indonesians and Westerners (including the record's compilers).

In the Heart of Sumedang: Field Recordings from West Java is another recording of Indonesian music, this one released in 2024 from recordings made in 2023. Three of the five tracks are tarawangsa trance music, but the album is book-ended with two long pieces from the Panca Buana Reak Group, whose music is pretty raucous and features a lot of percussion, rattles, hints of gamelan, mysterious vocals and whatever you're having yourself. This kind of thing apparently appeals to young people interested in Indonesian punk and metal. The tarawangsa pieces are a different kettle of fish, with each featuring one person playing the tarawangsa (a two stringed fiddle) and the other a kacapi, which could be absolutely anything (confusingly, the notes say that tarawangsa trance music is played by two musicians, one on the tarawangsa and the other on a jentreng, which is a zither-like thing, but each piece is credited to a tarawangsa and kacapi player). These pieces are very subtle, sounding initially like they are just repeating the same lines but then revealing delicate variations that put me in mind of minimalism. The notes say this type of music might encourage listeners and/or dancers to drift into a trance-like state and commune with their ancestors or entities from the spirit world. Yeah I can see it. The combination of the two different types of piece on the record works surprisingly well, offering up different kinds of opportunities for hypnotic trancing.

The Uncanny Times is an eclectic 2020 compilation. Here's who appears on it:

• Nev Clay: Northumberland folk-adjacent artist. I thought the name sounded familiar and it turns out he was on the bill of a concert I was at last year, playing support to Poor Creature, except I missed him by going to the wrong venue.
• Jally Kebba Susso: Gambian and not just a kora player but an Afro-Futurist kora player.
• F.Ampism: he is actually paul wilson, who can't afford upper case letters, and he makes electronic music of the wibbly wibbly variety.
• Moulay Ahmed El Hassani: there are vocals from more than one person (a man and a woman) as well as guitar and some kind of percussive accompaniment. He is from Morocco and sounds like he is from the same world of music as that Group Doueh guy even though he is from Western Sahara, which I consider a separate country (the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic).
• Nicolas Gaunin: an Italian weirdo music guy who makes outsider rock incorporating a lot of percussion and some electronics.
• Blood Neon: electronic, mysterious.
• Bad Amputee: the most guitar-bass-drums-vocals of any outfit so far. They are a three-piece from Newcastle. Interesting.
• Hassan Wargui: he is a songwriter and banjo player from the Issafen region of Morocco whose music marries modern technology and 1970s Berber music. The track has vocals and a percussive accompaniment that may have programmed elements.
• Family Ravine: this appears to be a vehicle for Kevin Cahill, a Toronto-based musician with an Irish background. The track is instrumental and acoustic guitar focussed.
• Spiritczualic Enhancement Center: "an outernational movement" offering "awe inspiring, lysergic telepathic shamanic jams guaranteed to transport you far from home".
• Maalem Mahmoud Gania: another Moroccan outfit, and this time one from Essaouira playing more of that gnawa music. So call and response vocals, percussion, a stringed instrument, etc. The kind of thing that makes you convert to Sufi Islam, so be careful.
• Md. After Hussain & Paq: this is a collaboration between a Bengali singer and musician from the trancey mystical Baul tradition (also linked in to Sufi Islam) and an Italian electronic music guy. It seems to work.
• Khan El Rouh: mysterious, Syrian-born, and Sweden-based. The track is short, minimal, electronic, and intriguing.

The Hive Mind pay-what-you-like sale runs until 6 February, so don't delay. You can check out these and other Hive Mind records here.

Le Guess Who 2025: Thursday

I somehow never got round to properly writing about 2024's Le Guess Who festival, which left many people disappointed [CITATION NEEDED]. I won't make that mistake this year. But before talking about the festival itself, I need to describe how we got there. The first time my beloved and I went to Le Guess Who, we flew. Then we switched to travelling overland to Utrecht (boat and train to London, Eurostar to Rotterdam, then local train to Utrecht) with a stopover in London. But this year we decided to try making the journey overland to Utrecht in one day, skipping the London stopover. This was partly for financial reasons (a night in London costs money) but also for cat reasons, as cat name of Billy Edwards is getting on a bit and we like to leave her on her own as little as possible. So it was we booked a sail-rail ticket from Dublin that would get us into Euston station in London about 20 minutes before the recommended arrival time in nearby St. Pancras for the day's last Eurostar to Rotterdam. Our time window was very tight, with a delay on our train to London of 30 to 40 minutes meaning that we would definitely miss the Eurostar. But live lives of gay abandon and so we were willing to take the risk.

And in truth, everything worked. We reached St. Pancras in good time and then had the usual uncomfortable wait in the overcrowded holding area on the other side of the security gates before we were allowed board our train. We did have some vague contingency plans for if we missed the Eurostar, of which the night bus to Rotterdam was the cheapest but most terrifying. The more expensive (but not crazily so) alternative would be the night boat from Harwich to Hoek, for which the connecting train leaves Liverpool Street at a time making it easy to catch.

But as I said, it all worked and we arrived at our hotel at around midnight and once they let us in (which took worryingly long) we hit the sack. And then our Thursday began with the first mimosa breakfast of the weekend. We were now ready for whatever Utrecht had to offer. Our first stop was the Centraal Museum, where two Le Guess Who related exhibitions were taking place. The first of these was Broken Spectre by Richard Mosse. He is an Irish artist whose The Enclave was one of the highlights of the 2022 LGW. That work saw footage projected onto multiples screens of material shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo in a rebel-controlled enclave, with an infra-red colour filter making everything look purple. Broken Spectre was in some ways a more conventional film work, in that it was projected onto a single screen (or maybe several screens that were all in the same place), which meant that you weren't having to keep looking around behind you to see what was happening on other screens. The subject matter of this one was environmental devastation in the Amazon as the forest is destroyed to make way for cattle farming, with an invasion of gold miners polluting everything else being the icing on the habitat destroying cake. It's a pretty grim watch, from the scenes in a vast industrial abattoir as cows are butchered, to the scenes of forest burning and on to indigenous people being driven off their land. It is such a downer that it didn't make for a great start to the festival; in retrospect this would have been better watched as a palate cleanser on the second day.

We talked a bit about what made Broken Spectre so much grimmer than intense artworks included in previous years of Le Guess Who. The Enclave does include some dead bodies but overall it just feels weird rather than depressing as you never really get much sense of what is actually going on. There was a Forensic Architecture exhibition at our first Le Guess Who that examined a number of horrendous events. That was pretty grim too, but my beloved reckoned that it was less upsetting than Broken Spectre was that it felt like Forensic Architecture were gathering evidence that might conceivably be used one day to hold the perpetrators to account (most likely an illusory hope, particularly for the Israeli killers of schoolchildren). But with Broken Spectre it's just a shit show and I'm not even sure there is anyone to hold to account, as it felt like we are dealing here with vast socio-economic forces.

There is a bit in the film where this Yanomami woman is complaining to camera about how her people are being driven off their land, and then she starts giving out about the film itself, basically saying "What good is your stupid film going to be for us?" And it's a fair point, if all that happens is people watch the film and feel sad about a situation they see as intractable. I also found myself wondering whether the film might land differently with meaters, who I could imagine thinking "It's sad the forest is being destroyed, but I've got to get my burger!". The film did provide a link to where you can donate money to the Hutukara Yanomami Association. The other LGW-related piece in the Centraal Museum was called Drama 1882 and was a film by Wael Shawky of a stage play (or opera) about the ultimately unsuccessful revolt by Egyptian army officers led by Ahmed 'Urabi against the country's ruler, the Khedive, seen as in thrall to foreign powers. The film shows the progress and ultimate defeat of 'Urabi by a British expeditionary force through song and stylised movement that hovers this side of counting as dance, and manages to be a fun watch despite being about the irresistible power of imperialism.

You may at this point be wondering if this festival featured any actual musical performances. Fear not. The first actual act of this kind we saw was Omar Hayat, a Gnawa musician from Essaouira in Morocco (where I went on holidays some years back; I don't remember meeting him). Gnawa is I think linked to an ecstatic version of Sufi Islam popular in those parts. Omar is an old-ish guy playing some kind of stringed instrument while some younger guys played percussion stuff. But also the younger fellows did some acrobatic dancing, making this Sufi Islam religion a bit different from the kind of staid Christianity I grew up. It was generally felt that Mr Hayat won the milking-the-audience award for Le Guess Who 2025.

Valentina Magaletti was one of the curators of this year's festival, playing several times over the weekend. We did catch a bit of her playing with Upsammy in the Ronda (the largest Tivoli Vredenburg venue that isn't the Grote Zaal) but they had already started when we came in and it was hard to connect with from the back, so we made our excuses and left. But we did come down good and early to see SUNN-O))) and in fact I was able to get right to the front of the stage, to the extent that I could hold my phone up past the onstage monitors to photograph the band. If you've ever seen SUNN-O))) you'll get the basic idea: they wear capes, they play guitars very loud, they have loads of speakers onstage, they fill the stage with dry ice, their music consists of very slow guitar chords, and so on.

On this occasion it was just the core members of SUNN-O))), Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson, so they didn't have the weird Hungarian guy dressed as either a tree or one of the Cylons from original Battlestar Galactica or any of the other musicians they sometimes play with. This brought me back to times when I saw them play first and I enjoyed their ritualistic set a lot, although I can see why someone might feel that it gets a bit repetitive.

Did I then see a bit of forward thinking jazzers [Ahmed] playing up in Cloud Nine (at the summit of the Tivoli Vredenburg, although there are rumours of a secret other venue even higher in the building)? It is possible but as no documentary evidence of this having occurred exists I am not disposed to discuss such an incident at this present time.

And so to bed.

images:

Broken Spectre cows (Photo Elysée: "Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre")

Broken Spectre Yanamami (Atmos: "Richard Mosse: Depicting Ecological Collapse in the Amazon")

Drama 1882 (Le Guess Who: "Centraal Museum presents Wael Shawky and Richard Mosse at LGW25")

My Le Guess Who pictures

Music in Film 04: Last Night (1998)

I had been writing about films I saw in 2024 that featured a strong musical element but somehow became sidetracked. Now I return to this important endeavour. You can see previous posts in this series here (The Zone of Interest, Perfect Days, etc.), here (All You Need Is Death, Eno, The Colour of Pomegranates, Portishead, Lone Star), and here (Star Wars, The Long Goodbye, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat).

Now I turn to Last Night, Don McKellar's film about Toronto people getting ready for the world to end at midnight. It follows a number of different people as they prepare in various different ways, but it focuses on Patrick, played by McKellar himself, who has decided to spend his last hours alone, to the consternation of his family. The film manages to be both sad and quirkily humorous, sometimes at the same time.

But what of music? Well there is plenty of it. Every so often we hear the voice of this radio DJ who is counting down through the greatest songs of all time ("as chosen by me"), all of which are soft rock classics. Then there is this guy who is frantically trying to have as much sex as possible with as many different people as possible before the world ends, and each time he is about to get down to it he puts on this sexy funk tune (which investigation suggests might be Parliament's "I've Been Watching You (Move Your Sexy Body)"). At another point there is a news report on people who are spending their last hours taking part in the world's largest ever guitar jam (which looks totally awesome). And then there is a piano concert being put on by this dorky guy the main character went to school with. As he plays his music we see the audience in the concert hall, some of them people we have seen previously, and the music (by Howard Shore) is indescribably beautiful and definitely the kind of thing I would want to listen to as the world comes to an end (except there are a million other things I would want to listen to and do in those last moments).

It was definitely great seeing this film again some 26 years after I last saw it. It still delivers and it is something that I think should be seen as a real classic of the niche "world coming to an unavoidable end" genre of films. I also had the poignant moment of looking up biographies of some of the less famous people in the film and discovering that McKellar's own life had sadly repeated aspects of his film character's prehistory, fortunately without the world then ending.

I should perhaps mention that the screening in the IFI was preceded by an introduction by Dorian Lynskey, who was pimping his book Everything Must Go, about the end of the world in cinema (the book's title comes from an early onscreen image in McKellar's film). He made the bold claim that Last Night was the first film to show ordinary people doing fairly ordinary things as the world's end approached, and I had immediate "O RLY?" thoughts as I thought of the films On The Beach (1959) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), both screened previously in the IFI.

images:

Last Night poster (Wikipedia)

Everything Must Go (Picador)

Battling Gamelan records: Palegongan and Kyai Jati Roso

Imagine if in Germany there was a centuries old tradition of orchestral music, but the orchestras only played music by German composers. And then in France there was a separate tradition of orchestral music, played on similar or identical instruments to those of their German counterparts, but the French orchestras only played music by French composers and professed complete ignorance as to the ways of German composers and German orchestras. That at least seems to be the way it is with Javanese and Balinese gamelan, with the neighbouring islands developing musical traditions independently of each other with little or no cross-fertilisation. Or so I have been led to believe. As presented to me, the Javanese tradition (the one I have been playing in classes in the National Concert Hall) was historically a court music played by ensembles in the employ of local sultans, while the Balinese music was played by village ensembles for more local purposes. This to some extent drove how the music worked, with the Javanese music being more stately and focussed on group playing (perhaps so that no individual player would become so noted in their own right that they overshadowed the patron), while Balinese music has more in the way of virtuosic individual playing and can get a bit raucous.

But how accurate is this thumbnail description of the two traditions? I found myself thinking about this when I found myself listening to Palegongan, a recording by a performance by Sanggar Sidakaria released by Bali Gamelan Sound. This is Balinese gamelan, recorded in Denpasar, Bali's capital, yet the first two tracks sound almost like they could be something that might be played by a more advanced Javanese gamelan group: they have a certain stateliness and they retain the cyclical qualities of Javanese music. The later tracks get considerably more frenetic and do not sound so much like you could imagine anyone in Java playing them. But I'd still like to get some sense of how Balinese gamelan works and indeed what interplay there has been between the traditions on the two islands, as I find it hard to believe there has been no cross-pollination whatsoever between them.

You can listen to and/or purchase Palegongan here.

Kyai Jati Roso meanwhile is a 2024 recording from the NCH Gamelan Orchestra. The pieces are mostly traditional pieces from the Javanese repertoire but there are two interesting exceptions. The first very short track is from a field recording of a workshop where gamelan instruments are being tuned. Because this involves workmen bashing the metal pots to a natural rhythm, it ends up sounding almost like music itself. Then the second track, "Embat", is a composition by the NCH's gamelan director, Peter Moran, and an updated version of a track released in 2020. This deliberately evokes the rhythms of the workmen on the previous track, but in this new version we also have trumpet from British jazzer Byron Wallen. I've become a bit of a gamelan purist over time (ironic given how little I really know about Javanese gamelan and my complete lack of direct personal connection to the cultural heritage of Indonesia generally and Java in particular). As a result, I am wary of Western compositions being played on gamelan instruments or of gamelan being combined with instruments from outside the tradition. However, this does not mean that I always dislike gamelan fusion. "Embat" works for me, without feeling like an unnatural meshing of things that should not be combined. I think partly this must be down to Wallen himself being gamelan-curious (apparently he has his own gamelan set back in his base) and, obviously, Moran's deep immersion in the tradition.

After that it's all pieces from within the Javanese tradition. These are mostly ladrangs and lancarans, two types of music we have played in our class. The basic difference between these is that in lancarans the basic melody line is played pretty quickly while in ladrangs the melody is slower but there is considerable ornamentation from the other instruments (I can hear the grinding of teeth of any serious gamelan people reading this simplistic description of the difference between ladrangs and lancarans). On this record however elements are introduced that are beyond klutzes like me: handclaps, vocals, and complex variations that you need to have your wits about you to play. There are also Javanese pieces of a type I have not played myself and so find rather mysterious.

I've always had the idea that on hearing a gamelan recording blind I would be reasonably likely to guess whether it was from Java or Bali (stately: Java; flashy: Bali). These two records rather challenge that, with Palegongan moving in a rather stately direction while the NCH Gamelan Orchestra's album sees the playing at times getting a bit flash on us. Could it be that the two traditions are not so very different? Either way I think Kyai Jati Roso might be a useful introduction for anyone curious about gamelan played in the Javanese style. If you are curious you can check it out here.

2024: My Favourite Audio Dramas

I've been posting about my favourite 2024 things. In my last post I looked at theatrical productions while the whole series can be seen here. And now my attention turns to audio drama I enjoyed in that year, some of which is from further back in time.

Limelight: Money Gone (2024)

This begins with all the bank accounts in the world suddenly emptying, leaving everyone with only whatever cash they have on them. The multi-stranded narrative follows different characters over a chaotic few days, with their paths eventually coming together at the end (mostly). It's good but at times the intense drama jarred with the more slapstick comedy elements (although I did really like the out of her depth prime minister and her stupid aides), while the ending was a bit pat.

Listen here

Limelight: Exemplar (2022)

This sees Gina McKee playing a sonic investigator, who listens to audio recordings to investigate crimes and stuff. It is episodic, in that individual episodes are largely self-contained (and somewhat variable in quality). However, hints of an overarching story lurk in the background, with this exploding into view in the superb last episode that is alone worth the price of admission.

Listen here

The Foundation Trilogy (1973)

This is a vintage BBC radio adaptation of the Isaac Asimov novels, featuring voices you've probably heard on Doctor Who, I Claudius, and other TV programmes of the era. It suffers from the fundamental Foundation problem: the Foundationers are a shower of imperialist shits and the story only really becomes interesting when The Mule shows up to kick their ass. But it's well done and in particular The Mule twisteroo is very enjoyable. The bits with the Encyclopedia Galactica voice are also amusing as a clear influence on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Listen here and here.

Limelight: There’s Something I Need to Tell You (2023)

While on holidays with his new girlfriend in Dubai a man meets some Russian guy in a bar, who offers him ten grand to mind an envelope for a few hours. In a situation like that there is a right choice and a wrong choice to be made, but let's face it, it is making bad choices that drives narrative. And I know, jaded cynics might well feel that the setup here is a bit hokey but I assure readers that this drama manages to ratchet tension up to an unbearable level.

Listen here.

The Specialist (2024)

This superb drama from the ever-reliable Matthew Broughton tells of a doctor and her brother who move to an isolated Welsh community where the recently deceased previous doctor had a somewhat cavalier approach to medical ethics, scientific experimentation, and doctor-patient relationships.

Listen here.

Limelight: The Incident at Ong's Hat (2023)

BBC audio dramas are typically set in Wales, but this moves the action to the United States. Jon Frechette and Todd Luoto have created a faux documentary about some weird stuff that is actually a real internet conspiracy except that was made up too by some japester (OR WAS IT?). The faux documentary format working very well, giving things a disconcerting and strange ambience.

Listen here.

Limelight: Spores (2023)

Written by Marietta Kirkbride, this is a split narrative in which a woman in the present day is being interviewed by someone (a journalist? a psychiatrist? a scientist?) about past events, with the other strand being flashbacks to those past events. And in the past she describes working as a social worker (in Wales) and seeing a strange mould appearing first in a client's home and then her own. But somehow only she is able to see the mould. It wobbles slightly in the middle but overall this is a deeply unnerving and my audio highlight of the last year.

Listen here.

2024: My Favourite Theatrical Productions

I am reviewing stuff from 2024. In my last post I looked at the best old films I saw for the first time that year; you can see all of the posts in my series here. Now my gaze turns to the theatre.

While I officially love the theatre, I don't actually go to see plays that often for a variety of reasons. One of these is my own idiosyncratic tastes, which mean that that the kinds of plays I like tend not to be performed that much. But also there is the problem that the theatre is something you have to book tickets for ages in advance, which does not suit a disorganised person like me. And there is the simple fact that the theatre is a lot more expensive than the cinema (for good reasons), which makes me more wary of taking a punt on a particular show. So this is not actually a list of my favourite productions of 2024 but all of the ones I made it to.

Exit Pursued by a Bear (Whyte Recital Hall)

The title is a stage direction from William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Publicity material suggested that this production from the innovative Pan Pan theatre company would retell Shakespeare's play from the point of view of the bears. Sadly this proved not to be the case and it was actually a kind of deconstructed performance of the original with a lot of songs (including the David Essex one, which I see now was written by Mike Batt and Tim Rice). It could have done with either featuring more bears or being a straighter Shakespeare production.

The Sugar Wife (Abbey Theatre)

Back in the 1990s there was a lot of theatre on that I liked and a lot of it featured Liz Kuti in key roles. I particularly remember her as Florence Nightingale in a production of Edward Bond's bananas Early Morning and in the title role in a production of The Duchess of Malfi. Then she stopped acting, became Elizabeth Kuti, and pursued a career in academia in the UK. And she also took to writing for the theatre. This one was first staged in Ireland in 2005 but I somehow missed it, but I went to this revival to chase the 1990s theatre buzz. And… it's not great. The play is about fictionalised analogues of the 19th century Quaker founders of the Bewley's cafes in Dublin, who are faced by awkward questions about where sugar comes from in a time when the United States is still a nation of slavery. But it all felt a bit didactic and suffered badly from their supposedly idealistic visitor being a transparent dickhead from the moment he appears onstage. And for a play partly about race it gives the one black character very little to do.

Dracula: Lucy's Passion

Last year as a Halloween treat Joan Sheehy brought Dracula: A Journey into Darkness to the Abbey, a staged reading by Andrew Bennett of the first four chapters of Dracula. Now she follows that with this multi-actor reading of the bits of Dracula that see the Count travel to England and prey upon the unfortunate Lucy. And it was also staged for one night only as part of the Bram Stoker Festival. Atmospheric and at times chilling, it maybe suffered from being less focussed than the single point of view we got last year as Jonathan Harker describes himself becoming ever more ensnared by the Count. I nevertheless can't wait for the third part next year.

Old Times (Smock Alley Boys' School)

There is this Liverpool theatre company called Purple Door and they regularly tour to Dublin with what seems to be always either plays by Shakespeare or Pinter. This year they were doing two Harold Pinter plays in rep, with this one the most Pintery as it starts off with a couple talking about how some old friend of the wife has invited herself to visit after a hiatus before it becomes harder and harder to work out what exactly is going on, with past, present, and imagination seeming to merge in one unsettling splodge of menace. Excellent stuff.

Some impressive shots of the production on Instagram here

Na Peirsigh (Peacock Theatre)

Someone had the great idea of staging this nearly 2,500 year old play by Aeschylus, translated into Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. It tells of people in the Persian capital learning that their invasion of Greece has gone horribly wrong. And I went to see it, despite my Irish not being great, hoping that I would be able to follow it well enough thanks to having an outline idea of how Greek tragedy works without having to look too frequently at the surtitles. And it's great, capturing the ritualistic aspects of what even by the standards of Greek tragedy was an early work, from a time when the theatre had not long left behind its origins in religious ceremony. I think the most striking part of the play was when the Persians summon up the ghost of the late emperor Darius the Great, which did feel like an actual summoning (all the more amusing for the shade of Darius then pretty much just grumbling about how his idiot son has fucked it all up). But a close runner up is when Xerxes (said idiot son) arrives at the end, alone and in rags, his army destroyed, to sing a sean-nós style lament about how miserable he is. Really superb stuff and that's without getting into how the original play was striking for its sympathetic presentation of the people who had burned Aeschylus' city to the ground barely ten years previously.

I read some reviews of this excellent production and they were really sniffy about it, which I think illustrates how removed I am from mainstream theatrical opinion.

Dune! The Musical (SEC Glasgow)

Everyone loves Frank Herbert's novel Dune but what if instead of having to read it you could see it performed onstage by one guy taking on the role of Gurney Halleck telling you the whole story through the medium of song? So it was that I was pleased to see this production by Dan Collins at the Glasgow Worldcon.

Betrayal (Smock Alley Boys' School)

More Purple Door Pinter, performed in rep with Old Times. This one is more conventional than Old Times in that it is always clear what is going on: we have a narrative about a woman who is having an affair with a close friend of her husband. Adultery narratives can be a bit ho-hum but this hits the spot. Part of it is the formal innovation of telling the story backwards: we start with the two former lovers meeting some time after their affair ended, then we jump back to the affair's end, then to it in full flight and finally to its beginning. One thing I found as it rolled along was that my sense of which of the characters I liked (or disliked the least) kept changing as the perspective through which they were viewed adjusted. An unnerving classic staged and acted with bravura.

Betrayal did get me thinking about the whole business of ongoing affairs (not shagging around or copping off with someone you then leave your significant other for, but an ongoing bit-on-the-side you want to keep secret from everyone). They sound like a lot of work.

Intstagram shots of the production here.

images:

Martha Dunlea as Lucy Westenra (Bram Stoker Festival: Lucy's Passion)

Caitríona Ní Mhurchú i Na Peirsigh (Amharclann na Mainistreach: Na Peirsigh)