The Variety on Sauchiehall Street is one of my favourite bars anywhere, and a truly great spot in Glasgow. Directly opposite what was the grandest art deco hotel in the city, the Variety was part of that deco cocktail renaissance the city went through in the 1930s and the interior is largely untouched since that time. Sure, it's a little crumbling and tatty round the edges but its combination of hardened drinkers and students from the art school up the road is a winner, as is the music beamed in from an iBook behind the bar - I heard Sonic Youth, Dusty Springfield and Boards Of Canada in a little over half an hour the other week. The Variety is also conveniently on my way home from work, and I'm off there now for a quickie before going home. It's going to be strange being in there now that the nights are getting longer: somehow its charm is enhanced by it being a bit dark and gloomy, but on the other hand I'll be able to read the paper and do the Glasgow Herald crossword without squinting or having to stand at the one spot at the bar that has enough light on it. It's been a long and busy day but I'm all content with it.

On Friday night, while the youthful denizens of most major British city centres were binge drinking themselves into a numbed stupor, Hitch and I went along to the brutalist concrete marvel that is London’s South Bank Centre for the final events of their Ether festival. Ether is an annual celebration of electronics and music that usually mixes some high culture (contemporary composers like Stockhausen or Charlemagne Palestine) with the more hip electronica of today, Apxex Twin or Matmos or their ilk. It was a long and highly entertaining night, so enjoyable that it prompted me to blog about it at length.

First up: Finnish multi-instrumentalist mentalist jazz star Jimi Tenor providing a live specially composed soundtrack to a rarely seen film from the late ‘60s, Mister Freedom.


Tenor’s music has long been part lounge, part swing, part Blaxploitation funk, always a treat when he plays live. (It can be a bit anodyne on record, to be honest.) How fitting a match were Tenor and Mister Freedom? Like Charles and Camilla or fish and chips, that’s how. Made in 1968 as a satire on American political policy and imperialism (apparently) Mister Freedom was directed by the great American photographer William Klein in what has to have been a burst of severe madness, heavy drinking and an attempt to ruin his peer respect. Imagine Henri-Cartier Bresson creating an episode of The Banana Splits and you might be half way there. It’s a gloriously terrible film on all levels, not least in its supposed political aspirations - made in Paris at a period of social revolt and obviously with some kind of nod to French New Wave cinema, it tries to ally it to the camp aesthetic of Adam Ward’s Batman TV series and thereby treads the fine line between so-bad-it’s good and so-bad-it’s fucking-awful. Here’s the plot: Mister Freedom must go from the US to France to stave off the terrible influence of communist culture, which appears in the form of Mr. Red China Man, a giant red snake-like beast lingering in an after-hours Metro station. At some point Jesus and Mary Magdalene make an appearance, and an obviously alcoholically refreshed Serge Gainsbourg presides over the uprising in the superhero lair as the freedom fighters prepare to take to the streets. Made on a quite evidently low budget (the actor playing the lead is wearing mesh underpants in a love scene and the superhero costume seems to be constructed from foam rubber and sporting equipment) it’s a gaudy triumph of absolute nonsense. Every now and again – and this is where it’s hard to gauge just how much Klein is being knowing and arch or just plain stupid and insensitive – he intercuts footage of actual street revolts, black civil rights protestors and rioting Parisian left-wing intellectuals with the staged buffoonery of the main body of the film. Throughout all of this Tenor and his big band performed perfectly synchronised music that played up the absurdity of the whole affair. Somewhow the sum of the parts managed to add up to a hugely entertaining 90 minutes, though I’m not sure that I’d particularly want to sit through William Klein’s ‘lost treasure’ ever again.

Then off to the boxy concrete slabs of the Hayward Gallery to catch the Dan Flavin retrospective. Anyone who knows me even half decently will know by now how much I love the strain of American reductive art that Flavin, along with his great friend Donald Judd, so perfectly embodied. (Actually, they stopped being great friends at a certain stage of their lives, but that’s another blog entry to come…)


As it was Ether festival, the Hayward had installed some cellists and violinists to play a piece by the droning minimalist composer LaMonte Young, ‘Composition 1960 No.7’, a four hour repetition of the same bowed, drawn out note. I don’t know how much this really added to the experience of seeing the Flavin installations - though there was certainly a kind of soothing beauty to the music, it couldn’t help becoming upmarket muzak in this context. But the Flavin pieces themselves were truly wonderful and the show mapped out brilliantly how he refined and built upon his simple motif of arranging prefabricated fluorescent light fittings into glowing shapes and delicate plays of pure colour – complemented indeed by the stark concrete of the Hayward’s own architecture. There’s a lot of guff written about this kind of art that either tries to elevate it into some kind of plugged-in Renaissance altarpiece or totemic corny new age spirituality, and I don’t buy any of it. Like Judd always claimed, it’s just about appreciating the thing itself. What Flavin did was markedly straightforward, using the simple tenets of art – arrangement, composition, how colours play against themselves – and presenting that in as modern a form as he could create. I have to say that you either get it on an instinctive level or don’t, and for me it hits the spot almost every time because I think it looks absolutely beautiful and fresh and modern in the same way that I can listen endlessly to the sounds made by a Moog synthesiser.

Which takes me quite neatly to the band Ladytron. Closing the festival, they curated an evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with an assortment of electronic music weirdos, DJs and the like, among them the video director Chris Cunningham and a machine called 386DX. 386DX is an archaic hard drive that ‘busks’ on the streets of Moscow, and is ‘operated’ by a lunatic man in a tie-dyed Ban & Jerry’s t-shirt with a computer keyboard strapped across his chest in an approximation of an electric guitar.

As the machine proudly proclaimed at the start, everything performed is untouched by human hands and the guy on the stage is supposedly a mere facilitator for the hard drive to do its stuff – this stuff being tinny electronic cover versions of classics such as Light My Fire and Imagine sung with that computerised voice we all now think of as Stepehn Hawking’s. I’m sure it’s a hoot on the streets of Moscow and it’s a good post-Glasnost one-line gag that the computer equipment itself is closer to Atari than PowerBook, but after 15 minutes I’d had enough.


Ladytron hail from Liverpool and are roughly what would have resulted if Kraftwerk had produced an Abba record. Yes, that good. I have to say that it beats me how a group with songs this good can still be such a little known thing. When the day comes that Ladytron’s Greatest Hits (sic) fills the shelves people will surely ask how they could have missed out on them for so long. If they handed any one of their best tracks to Girls Aloud or Liberty X or some such collection of preening mannequins it would be number one for a month. Naturally the crowd just wants to dance – it is getting near midnight after all, and an all-seated theatre is not Ladytron’s natural habitat. Naturally, the obstreperous jobsworth security guys won’t let them, so we have to just stand up and shake about a bit in Row E seats 29 and 30. Of course they end with Seventeen, the most immediate of all their hits-that-never-were, a song with a dazzling flash of minimalist genius that would have made Donald Judd proud (if he hadn’t been such a curmudgeonly old shit). No verse – only chorus, stripped back to the ‘thing that matters’ in a great pop record.
Then into the foyer for a pint to catch up with the binge drinkers on the night bus home. Is that really a DJ playing minimalist techno inside an illuminated wendy house? And did this constitute most people’s idea of a great Friday night out? No matter – Hitch and I go home grinning at the end of a truly memorable evening.

Lezzies On X (above)
My Cat Is An Alien
Father Yod And The Spirit Of 76
News From The Shed
Servants Of The Apocalyptic Goat Rave
Afternoon Penis
Uncle Jim’s Superstars Of Greenwich Meantime
The Bent Moustache
Sunburned Hand Of The Man
Ceylon Mange

Despite all good intentions, I’ve been consumed by blog apathy again, and I’m determined to snap out of it. I have the usual litany of excuses (work, travelling, concerts, country pub, more work) but none of them are really right. I’m torn as to what the tone of this page is – is it meant to be serious, or funny, or just me droning on about chubby men? Should I put effort into how it’s written, or just dash off the odd post as often as possible?
But I’m thinking that at a time when I’m away from home so much this should be a good way for the people I know to keep up with me and get the stuff I’d bore them with if I saw them in person so I will try to keep to a more regular schedule in the coming months.
Pointless worries about the tone of a weblog aside, I did have a really life-changing experience recently. A few weeks ago we started shooting on the TV series I’m currently producing, which is looking at Britain through its mountains. We started in the furthest reaches of Scotland, around the coastal area of Sutherland, in what was the most extreme weather they’d had for about 30 years. Everything was covered in a blanket of blindingly pure white snow, and the landscape was breathtaking at every turn.


On the fourth day of our trip we climbed the highest of the northern Scottish mountains, Ben Hope, which is a bit over 3000 feet to the summit. The weather had been pretty changeable every day, and our first attempt got no further than the breakfast table when our expert mountain guides decided the conditions were too dodgy to go up. The following day we reassembled, but due to a combination of impassable roads, bad cellphone signals and staying in separate hotels we were missing our on-screen presenter. When we finally sorted this out it was midday, three hours behind our allotted start time, and we had a long climb up ahead of us. I think it’s fair to say that we were all getting a bit anxious at this stage.
Turns out the local council had heard we were going up and were appalled, as were the local mountain rescue, because it was still considered to be bad weather warnings. And there were a couple of moments of hail and wind and blizzard, but by and large it was as clear and sunny a day as you could have asked for, and not actually that cold for the first half of the ascent.


And at around half way up, as we stopped to set up cameras for another sequence, where Griff the presenter and Cameron his guide would have a conversation on a promontory of the hill, I turned round and had the most incredible feeling. Here I was, 2000 feet up in the air, knee deep in snow, a bit breathless, and the view out across into this blue sky and vast panorama of white was one of the most stunning things I had ever seen and I really felt quite overcome. I can’t really explain it – I’m afraid it was a real you-had-to-be-there moment. The stillness and the calm air and the sheer hugeness of what I was seeing were beyond equal. (Is that an epiphany I feel coming on? I’d better stop now before I start reading Deepak Chopra). But truly, all cynicism aside, those couple of minutes will never go away for me now and I only hope these pictures give some sense of what it felt like up there, in this otherworldly glow.








We made it to the top just as late as we could probably have safely left it, buried in cloud and with no view to speak of, but it didn’t matter. Then we made our way down as night fell (not something we relative novices should have been doing, even with trained guides) and as it got dark we were just a trail of tiny lights scattered around this vast rock, using our head torches to steer through the path. When you read anything about mountains and the people who go up them I can see how tempting it is to think (as indeed I once did) that it’s part macho mumbo jumbo and part talking to the trees but take it from me, it is indeed another world up there.