The Skinny January 2026

The Skinny's favourite song with in or out in the title?

Kate Bush - The Man With the Child in His Eyes

The Platters - Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime

Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out

True Steppers and Dane Bowers - Out Of Your Mind (ft. Victoria Beckham)

50 Cent - In Da Club

Linkin Park - In the End

Georgia - Started Out

DJ Zinc ft. Ms Dynamite - Wile Out

The Prodigy - Out of Space

Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell

K2 - In My Garden

Mazzy Star - In the Kingdom

Donnie and Joe Emerson - Thoughts in My Mind

Luna - Lost in Space

Sorry - Screaming in the Rain

The Japanese House - Good side in

Roy Orbison - In Dreams

Mylo - In My Arms

Listen to this playlist on Spotify — search for 'The Skinny Office Playlist' or scan the below code

Issue 240, January 2026 © Radge Media C.I.C.

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Championing creativity in Scotland

Meet the team We asked: Who would you most like to wreak revenge upon?

Senior Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief

"So many people I literally can't choose. Rest assured though, it's coming."

Commissioning Editors

Myrtle Boot Clubs Editor

"Every single person who has even thought about calling me Moaning Myrtle. It’s going to be a long and revengeful year."

Business

Laurie Presswood General Manager

"If I tell you, they'll know it's coming."

Sales

Sandy Park Commercial Director

"The people that play music without headphones on public transport. Every last one of them."

Peter Simpson Deputy Editor, Food & Drink Editor

"I'm not a wreaker; your revenge is coming in a bunch of small instalments, each less impressive than the last."

Eilidh Akilade Intersections Editor

"I have a list and late trains are on it. "

Anahit Behrooz Events Editor, Books Editor

"Don't worry about it, I already did it."

Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist "Commercial landlords – they truely are the scum of the Earth!"

Rachel Ashenden Art Editor

"The last person I played Guess Who with."

Polly Glynn Comedy Editor

"Not even 'would like to', I NEED to wreak revenge on the silent disco tour guy. Guru Dudu and imitators, you have been warned. Not even for anything specific, just for *existing*."

Tallah Brash Music Editor

"All the people that don't understand bus etiquette. They literally drive me insane."

Mika Morava Theatre Editor "Redacted"

Production

Dalila D'Amico Art Director, Production Manager "Too many to name. I’m booked and busy."

Joanna Hare

Business Development Executive

"The man who fixed my windscreen wiper and charged me £210. "

Phoebe Willison Designer

"Everyone I hate is already a minger so I don't bother x."

Ema Smekalova Media Sales Executive "The passage of time."

Ellie Robertson Editorial Assistant

"There were some truly diabolical teachers in my high school, but the worst were all like a hundred years old, so I think the passage of time has done all my wreaking for me."

Emilie Roberts Media Sales Executive "Ryanair."

Editorial

Words: Rosamund West

Here we are, in 2026, although as ever this is being covertly written in 2025 as finishing up before Christmas lets us all have a few days off to rest and recuperate from all the intensive cultural journalisming we’ve been doing for the last 12 months.

For this new year we’ve decided to really lean in to the annual tradition of trend forecasting, and invited the team to share their most arcane and petty ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ for an unhinged flow chart-esque spread. The overarching theme of the issue is ins and outs / vengeance / trend forecasting, however there is very little in the way of things that are out in the main features as we fundamentally enjoy writing about things that we like. Plenty of outs on the opening spread though, apologies in advance to marathons, rude emails, and being agressive in swimming pools, turns out you’re now over.

So to the things that are in. We’ve got an extensive roundup of the musical acts you might be excited about this year, with a Spotlight on 2026. The inaugural Cowgate Block Party promises to warm up the winter darkness with a programme spanning Sneaky Pete’s, Legends and Bongo Club. Filmmaker Ben Wheatley returns to low budget filmmaking, which is very in, touring BULK around cinemas in the UK.

Books talks to author Roxy Dunn about her new novel Wants and Needs, in a feature which is simultaneously in and out – the underlying message of the book, that relying on

relationships to fix us is out, but the book and author are both definitely in. If it feels like the theme might be unravelling you would be right but let’s keep going. We’re six hours from print deadline, let’s get through it together.

Art examines performance art, which is very in in 2026, speaking to five Scottish artists who use the medium in their practice. One writer considers Glasgow as a filming location – popular as a site to mimic eg the streets of Philadelphia in a zombie apocalypse, but where are the films that are actually about Glasgow itself? Not making films about Glasgow is out.

Our new Clubs editor Myrtle talks to zolf about digital spaces, livestream culture and the importance of club production, which is very in. Intersections has one in, one out – community saunas are good, the Nordic model is not. We talk to Decrim, the local grassroots organisation spearheading the movement against Ash Regan’s controversial Prostitution Bill.

Two comedians share some weird encounters which lead them to suspect parasocial relationships with your favourite stand-up are very out. And one writer shares their vision for a theatre sector which reflects and includes the diversity of society in a meaningful way. That’s in.

We close with The Skinny on… Alan Cumming, who’s got a big year coming up at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre and has been professionally advised that he could batter Drake if it came to it. That’s both in and out. Happy new year! We did it, lads.

Cover Artist

Valentina Vinci is an Italian freelance illustrator and graphic designer specializing in digital collage, combining handmade drawings with digital elements, photography, and typography. Her colorful and playful work spans publishing, editorial, and music, exploring themes such as politics, social issues, the environment, and emotions. She holds a BA in Illustration from the University of the West of England (Bristol) and has collaborated with Rolling Stone, Breathe Magazine, Beneficial Shock!, Left Cultures, and L’Espresso.

I: @valentinavinciart

Love Bites: More Than Casual

This month’s columnist reflects on the universal importance of discussing romantic relationships with our closest friends

Words: Billie Estrine

The intimacy and even ecstasy that comes from a crush feels so personal. Yet, I find it impossible to keep these feelings insular. All I want to do is talk to my close friends about how a person makes me feel. This is especially true when I feel connected to them beyond attractiveness and instead, it’s our conversations that pull me in. However, being on the receiving end of these conversations recently has been a mixed bag of emotions. Luckily, with some reflection, all those scattered pieces have fallen into place.

I moved back to my hometown two months ago for a remarkably short stint of one month before packing up two suitcases and moving back to socalled Australia. Being home, winding my way through the familiar streets of New York City, left me entranced by bittersweet emotions of nostalgia as I relived memories of attempting to learn how to be an adult in Brooklyn. The month was also full of catch-ups.

While meeting up with my close friend from university and walking to a noodle spot, she shared how happy it made her to be in a new relationship. I was delighted to hear that this new boy made her feel so loved. But, then, it began to scare me when that was the only thing we seemed to talk about. Dinner ended with a pit of dread in my stomach. This sensation soon dissipated when it dawned on me how universally important it is to discuss relationships, both romantic and platonic, with the people closest to us. Sitting back and realising that helped me recognise that these conversations are much more than a casual topic. In fact, avoiding these conversations would be unhealthy. If left to our own devices, I believed we’d never be able to sort out the madness of emotions created by intimacy that our brains conjure into thoughts. I, for one, am thankful for these not-so-casual conversations.

Heads Up

Cowgate Block Party

Various venues, Edinburgh, 31 Jan, 5pm

If you thought the Cowgate was hopping before, just wait for the inaugural Cowgate Block Party, a new multi-venue music festival split between The Bongo Club, Legends and Sneaky Pete’s, celebrating the depth and breadth of local grassroots talent. On the bill are the likes of Bikini Body, Insider Trading and Fourth Daughter.

Felicity Hammond: Variations

V4: Repository

Stills, Edinburgh, until 28 Feb

Happy 2026! Kick the year off in style with the best gigs, exhibitions, festivals and films to see you through the darkest days.

Compiled by Anahit Behrooz

There’s still two months to go of the fourth iteration of Felicity Hammond’s experimental exhibition. Following three previous chapters staged in Brighton, London and Derby, this new evolving installation explores the relationship between image-making and machine learning, drawing on various artificial intelligence technologies to map how digital photographic material makes its journey from mineral to pixel.

Mon Rovîa

SWG3, Glasgow, 22 Jan, 7pm

A leading voice in the Afro-Appalachian music scene, Liberia-born and USraised folk artist Mon Rovîa draws on his experiences of war, displacement and struggle to create music that centres empathy, grace and healing. If this sounds at all schmaltzy, it isn’t – his songs are tender yet sharp, building on the political foundations of folk music.

Falastin Frames: Jenin Jenin Filmhouse, Edinburgh, 8 Jan, 6pm

Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes

The King’s Theatre, Glasgow, 27-31 Jan, various times

Based on the classic Powell and Pressburger film and the even more classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, this lavish ballet tells the tale of a young ballerina who lives to dance, and whose ambitions get caught between two men who inspire her passion. Acclaimed choreographer Matthew Bourne’s production won two Olivier Awards, and is the exact dose of colour and beauty needed for the January blues.

Celtic Connections

Various venues, Glasgow, 15 Jan-1 Feb

Spilling across venues big and small in Glasgow –from the grand Royal Concert Hall to the wee Hug and Pint – Celtic Connections returns to the city with a two-week programme of the best of trad, folk and world music. There’s performances from Gaelic girl group Sian, Malian singers Rokia Koné and Boubacar Samake, as well as workshops, ceilidhs and open stages filled with emerging talent lineups.

Natalie Wildgoose

Leith Depot, Edinburgh, 18 Jan, 7pm

Delicate folk inspired by her native Yorkshire landscape, Natalie Wildgoose’s music is recorded on vintage pianos and her grandfather’s reel to reel tape recorder, bringing the ambient sounds of the environment into her music. Her latest EP Come Into the Garden has an uncanny, haunted quality, perfect for those dark January evenings.

Ali Smith - Glyph launch

The Portobello Bookshop, Edinburgh, 29 Jan, 7pm

Emergence 2026

Various venues, Glasgow, 2124 Jan

Platforming new work by graduating artists from the Royal Conservatoire Scotland’s Acting/Directing Classical and Contemporary Text MFA, this year’s edition of Emergence programmes nine live performances and three short films, from verbatim theatre about crisis points and puppetry about displacement to a trans retelling of the life of Jesus shot through with queer revolutionary potential.

Size Matters

Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow, 30-31 Jan, 7:45pm

A collaboration between Vanishing Point and Manipulate Festival (it’ll also be showing at Manipulate next month), this new experimental work by visionary Scotland-based theatremaker Mamoru Iriguchi – following his much talked about 2023 Fringe piece What You See When Your Eyes Are Closed / What You Don’t See When Your Eyes Are Open – uses puppetry to explore ideas of subjective perception.

Lauren Gault: bone stone voice alone

DCA: Dundee Contemporary Art, Dundee, until 18 Jan

There’s a few weeks left of Dundee-trained artist Lauren Gault’s exhibition bone stone voice alone, in which works across sculpture, print, sound and moving image use the mythological figure of Echo to investigate the land of Tayside and beyond, and the silenced human and nonhuman voices that populate it.

GLASTAR x Stereo: VV Pete x UTILITY Stereo, Glasgow, 30 Jan, 11pm

Martha Orbach: To Build a Home Glasgow Women’s Library, Glasgow, until 28 Mar

FOKUS: Films from Germany

Various venues, Scotland, 21 Jan-22 Feb

The tenth edition of FOKUS, Goethe-Institut

Glasgow’s German film festival, is a special anniversary edition, curated by Glasgow-based filmmaker and writer Rastko Novaković. Ten films, pulled from the archives of Goethe-Institut, DEFA and the Werner Herzog Foundation explore over a century of German cinema through the eyes of female protagonists, spanning the Weimar Republic, the division of Germany and reunification.

Peach Crumb

The Hug and Pint, Glasgow, 9 Jan, 7:30pm

Glasgow-based Peach Crumb, named after an anagram of lead singer Becca Murphy (minus the Y), play

The Hug and Pint as part of First Footing, the venue’s packed January local lineup. The indie-pop outfit recently released their EP You’re Too Young and Pretty to Be Sad, a tongue-in-cheek mediation on mental health, coming of age and love.

Potpourri

Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, 22 Jan, 11pm

From some of the team behind iconic queer club night Femmergy, Potpourri is a collaboration between DJs Annafleur and Sweet Philly and is quickly becoming a mainstay of the Cowgate. This month sees them welcoming Danyo and Groundskeeper Fanny to the club: get yourself down for sexy queer dance tracks, hyperpop and fast-paced edits.

Naima Bock

The Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh, 22 Jan, 7:30pm

What's On

details correct at the time of writing

Music

Regular gig series kick off the new year with a bang courtesy of The Hug & Pint’s First Footin’ (5-14 Jan) and King Tut’s New Year’s Revolutions (2-25 Jan). At the former, head for Peach Crumb’s lo-fi pop (9 Jan) or James LeBaigue’s sparse indie-pop (14 Jan), while at King Tut’s you can catch alt-folk outfit Curiosity Shop’s gorgeous vintage-tinged harmonies (16 Jan) or KuleeAngee's party-starting beats alongside support from Bodysystem, Pleasure Trail and Saint Sappho (17 Jan).

A focal point of January, of course, is Celtic Connections. Taking over a multitude of venues across Glasgow from 15 January to 1 February, they’re committed to “making January sound better”. While the opening weekend sees indie-folk and pop artist Katie Gregson-Macleod play her first headline show for the festival at The Barony Hall (16 Jan), you’re spoiled for choice on the 17th: M. John Henry brings his latest solo album to The Glad Cafe, Pictish Trail celebrates Life Slime at St Luke’s (support from Callum Easter and Isa Gordon), nonet Megalichen bring their experimental alt-folk to Òran Mór (support from CLR Theory) and Amal Kaawash brings Songs from the Palestinian Tradition to City Halls. On the 18th, Kathryn Joseph and Lomond Campbell play Òran Mór, with support from Dundee artist SHHE.

On Wednesday 21 January, Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys plays Mackintosh Church; two distinctive voices in roots music – Isle of Skye smallpipes virtuoso Brìghde Chaimbeul and American multi-instrumentalist Shazhad Ismaily – will come together at St Luke’s; and Sound of Young Scotland nominees Tarran will fuse together folk, funk, blues and jazz in the Strathclyde Suite at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Winner of the Scots Trad Music Awards’ Album of the Year for their stunning record araon, Scottish Gaelic folk trio Sian (22 Jan) will play The Barony Hall with an extended lineup of musicians as featured on the album. The 24th will see Glasgow-based mokusla’s haunting Irish electronic dream-pop take centre stage at The Glad Cafe, while Aberdeen’s Fiona Soe Paing will bring her hypnotic AV show Sand, Silt, Flint to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall’s Strathclyde Suite on the 27th, with support from Scots singer Quinie who’ll be joined by her full band for the occasion.

Winner of the 2025 Sound of Young Scotland Award, the inimitable Alice Faye plays Citizens Theatre on the 28th before two big album launch shows take over the festival’s final Friday (30 Jan); Hen Hoose Collective launch The Twelve with a special show at Tramway featuring all 12 of its contributors (read more about this on p23) and Inyal celebrate the release of Fathoms, their latest LP combining Gaelic folk and electronica.

Elsewhere in Scottish music, Biffy Clyro play an enormous show as part of their Futique Tour at OVO Hydro (21 Jan) and The Just Joans celebrate the release of Romantic Visions of Scotland with shows at Glasgow’s Mono (23 Jan) and Edinburgh’s Wee Red Bar (30 Jan). In celebration of Burns Night, in Glasgow you’ll find Byrnes Night at King Tut’s (21 Jan) with, a touring house band featuring members of Black Country, New Road, Fat Dog, Goat Girl, Clementine March, The Golden Dregs and more, while in Edinburgh Burns Baby Burns! takes over Port of Leith Distillery with live music planned from Valtos as well as a ceilidh. Rounding out the month in Edinburgh will be the inaugural Cowgate Block Party in, you guessed it, the Cowgate. Taking over

Sneaky Pete’s, Legends and The Bongo Club, you’ll be able to bounce between the three venues all day on the 31st, enjoying live music from the likes of Bikini Body, Sarah/Shaun, Fourth Daughter, Gurry Wurry, Doss and loads more. [Tallah Brash]

Film

You’ll find lots of great new films covered in this month’s issue, but one title we couldn’t wrench from its distributor ahead of print was Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s loving tribute to Jean-Luc Godard and his gamechanging Breathless. Never fear, though: Glasgow Film Theatre and Filmhouse will be giving Linklater’s film the fanfare it deserves with two unmissable retrospectives. As part of its ongoing CineMasters series, GFT has a season of Jean-Luc Godard films across January and February. Eight screen in total, from that incredible debut, Breathless (screening in 4K), to his swansong, The Image Book, via masterworks like Une Femme est Une Femme, Le Mepris and Bande a Part. Full details at glasgowfilm.org Filmhouse takes a different tack. Its season is dedicated to the many directors associated – both directly and tangentially – with the French New Wave. So think Claude Chabrol (Le Boucher), Jacques Rivette (Paris Nous Appartient) and Agnès Varda (Cléo from 5 to 7) as well as crucial influences like Jean-Pierre Melville (Bob le Flambeur), Roberto Rossellini (Journey to Italy) and Robert Bresson (Pickpocket). Full details at filmhouse.org.uk

The first film festival of 2026 is Goethe Institute’s Fokus: Films from Germany. Rather than give a snapshot of contemporary German cinema, this tenth edition of the festival digs into Goethe’s archives with the programme Women: Words and Worlds. “I wanted to cover a century of German cinema, to revisit different moments in German history and women’s changing roles and experiences,” says the curator. The festival kicks off with Ula Stöckl’s The Cat Has Nine Lives (GFT, 21 Jan; also DCA, 4 Feb), and other highlights include G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (GFT, 29 Jan), Angela Schanelec’s The Dreamed Path (Institut français d'Ecosse, 3 Feb) and Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman (GFT, 5 Feb). Full details at goethe.de

Ben Wheatley remains one of the UK’s most surprising filmmakers. On p31, the Kill List and Sightseers director tells us how he went from making a big-budget studio picture (Meg 2: The Trench) to a wildly inventive microbudget sci-fi (BULK). You can watch and discover more about the latter this month as Wheatley takes BULK on a Q&A tour across the country with three stops in Scotland. On 18 January, he’s at both Filmhouse and GFT, and the following day he’s at DCA.

DV8 Film Club is a new indie film night in Glasgow with an intriguing MO: it’ll be celebrating films shot on the miniDV format that was popular with indie filmmakers in the late 90s and early 00s. Richard Linklater is clearly in the water, because DV8 Film Club’s inaugural screening is TAPE, Linklater’s 2001 drama in which three high-school pals (Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman) hash out painful memories in a Michigan motel room. It’s an underrated and gripping film that unfolds in real time; this rare screening shouldn’t be missed (The Old Hairdressers, 31 Jan). [Jamie Dunn]

Clubs

Start the year off on the right foot with Mile High Club on Thursday 1 January in Edinburgh, with noodle, yung kidd and Lowree keeping Sneaky Pete’s bouncing until 5am. Alternatively, muster some energy and head over to HEALTHY & EXIT’s annual New Year’s Day party for 16 hours of Glasgow’s finest – no hangover cure needed. Round the corner, Giles Petersen takes to the Sub Club for those in search of a jazzier entry into 2026 (1 Jan).

On Friday 9 January, Glasgow techno royalty Slam play a home crowd open to close at Sub Club. Drum ‘n’ bass heads look no further than Pray to Good on Saturday 10 January, with Refracta and Coben at The Art School, Glasgow. For a more eclectic mix of electronic sounds, dgoHn and Djinn are hosted by Seraphim Sound at Nice N Sleazy in Glasgow (10 Jan). A Chicago House legend meets Edinburgh’s favourite sweat box on Sunday 11 January, as Lil’ Louis takes to Sneaky Pete’s for an evening.

Make Art Make Noise debuts Glasshouse, a night of heady experimentation at Glasgow’s Stereo on Thursday 15 January. UK Garage pioneer Zed Bias

returns to raise the roof of Sneaky Pete’s on Sunday 18 January, with haptic residents on the warm up. On Saturday 24 January, Edinburgh’s newest club, People’s Leisure Club, welcomes Aly P for her Scottish Debut as part of EPiKA SOFT’s second installment – think house, electro and acid blends. Go wish Hometown Soundsystem a happy 10th birthday at The Art School in Glasgow on Friday 30 January; on the same night, 1-800 GIRLS returns to the capital for another all-nighter packed with electro, UK bass and leftfield picks for Sneaky Pete’s. Sound System Legacies takes over Edinburgh’s The Pitt Market for a day rave on 31 January to see out the end of the month. With a line up boasting Tim Reaper, Dwarde and Neil Landstrumm, expect all things bass-heavy to carry you through to February. [Myrtle Boot]

Art

Supported by the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Partnership, Edinburgh Art Festival HQ is the temporary home to a quilt panel commemorating the life of Derek Allan Fraser. Lovingly handstitched, the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt tells stories of people who lost their lives during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s. Fraser was a proud Scottish gay man who worked at London Lighthouse, a centre for people affected by HIV and AIDS. Each square of fabric is a facet of Fraser’s life, as told by those who loved him most. The quilt can be inspected from the window of the French Institute of Scotland until 31 March, in anticipation of the arrival of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt in its entirety at Tramway this September.

The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, celebrates their 200th birthday with an expansive programme of exhibitions throughout 2026. To kick off the celebrations, Origin Stories explores the network of artistic connections that the artist-led organisation has nurtured through teaching and tutorship. Alongside, RSA presents Generation, which traces the connections and routes of 16 architects who formerly worked at the practice of Richard Murphy RSA. Both exhibitions run from 24 January until 8 March.

Meanwhile, at the Glasgow School of Art, Mother Curator celebrates motherhood in “its fullness, its challenges, its strengths and profound creativity”. The group exhibition is grounded in lived experience, uniting works by GSA staff and students who are mothers to question the systematic undervaluing of motherhood. The exhibition runs 10-26 January in the Reid Gallery. [Rachel Ashenden]

Theatre

There are still pantos clinging on, but on the whole, January in Scottish theatre is leaning toward classic adaptations, gothic chills and dance for people decidedly done with the holidays.

A few festive favourites linger into the New Year, though. Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre sees Jack and the Beanstalk run until 11 January, with Jack scaling a beanstalk of truly heroic proportions in a final burst of post-Christmas panto. Over in Glasgow, Scottish Ballet opens the month with The Snow Queen at the Theatre Royal (3-17 Jan), a winter spectacle set to RimskyKorsakov’s shimmery score. It’s a fitting bridge between December’s fairytales and January’s more sober pleasures.

Comedy arrives mid-month with Fawlty Towers: The Play, which tours to both The King’s Theatre, Glasgow (13-17 Jan), and The Edinburgh Playhouse (27-31 Jan). Adapted from one of Britain’s most beloved sitcoms, the production promises a dose of manic nostalgia, misunderstandings and Basil Fawlty at his most exasperated.

Drama takes a sharper turn at the Royal Lyceum Theatre with The Shawshank Redemption (20–24 Jan), a stage adaptation of the film (and Stephen King novella) that foregrounds hope, endurance and human connection in dire circumstances. It runs parallel to The Woman in Black at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow (20-24 Jan), the long-running gothic classic proving how little is needed to terrify an audience beyond atmosphere and a good story.

Dance lovers are particularly attended to as the month presses on. Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes lands at The King’s Theatre (27-31 Jan) with his psychologically rich reworking of the Powell and Pressburger film. Meanwhile, the Varna International Ballet and Orchestra brings classical spectacles to Glasgow’s SEC Armadillo, with Swan Lake (23 and 24 Jan) and

The Nutcracker (24 Jan matinee), part of an extensive UK tour showcasing traditional ballet at its most opulent.

From fairytales to ghost stories and bouts of hope through the bleak, January’s theatre pickings might be slim, but promise to start the year wide awake. [Mika Morava]

Comedy

Alongside The Stand and Monkey Barrel’s flagship mixed-bills, there’s a handful of excellent monthly gigs across Scotland we want to draw your attention to. First up is the wickedly funny freestyler MC Hammersmith and his improv, musical and stand-up pals on 11 January (Monkey Barrel, 7.30pm, £9/7). A week later (and every other Sunday) at Gilded Balloon’s new yearround home, The Gilded Saloon, is Hot Comedy. It’s a red-hot, super inclusive night of laughs presented by Scottish up-and-comers Nicholas Elliott and Eva Peroni (18 Jan, 7pm, £5. Also 1 Feb), who we featured a wee while ago for Behind the Mic

Out west, Glasgow Improv Theatre hosts classes and shows several times a week, but each month presents Perfect Improv, with a team of some of the best Scottish improv talents and a special guest from the stand-up scene. This month, it’s Clydebank’s Marc Jennings’ turn (Old Hairdressers, 20 Jan, 7pm, £6). And at the end of the month is Susan Riddell and Amanda Dwyer’s all-women mixed bill gig, Material, Girl. In a regular last Sunday of the month spot, January’s gig features our two hosts, Kat Powell and headliner Kim Blythe (The Stand, Glasgow, 25 Jan, 3pm, £8/£7).

And here’s a handful of touring shows to nab tickets for lickety-split: mentioned as our book ahead tip last month, household name Sara Pascoe’s in Edinburgh for three nights shaping up a new show about her Dad’s jazz epic (Monkey Barrel, 12-14 Jan, 7.30pm, £10); Irish rising star Grace Mulvey works up her next hour (Monkey Barrel, 16 Jan, 8pm, £7.50); and Vittorio Angelone takes his acclaimed tour you can’t Say Nothing any more to Whitehall Theatre Dundee (29 Jan, 8pm, £20-£24).

Finally, put Dan Tiernan’s third solo hour All In (Monkey Barrel, 3 Feb, 7.30pm, £15) in your diary. The sweatiest, most aggressive show nominated for the big Edinburgh Fringe Award this year, it’s not for the faint of heart but perfect for those who love their comedy dangerous and frenetic. [Polly Glynn]

Books

It is an extremely quiet month in books, as all the bookshops rightfully recover from the Christmas rush, but there’s still a handful of unmissable events to get you out of the house (and isn’t that what we’re all after in January).

Over at Lighthouse Bookshop, Madeleine Gray launches her latest book Chosen Family in collaboration with Wuthering Dykes (27 Jan). There’s also an indie poetry night on 28 January exploring ideas of ecology with Julie Laing, Vicki Husband and Eloise Birtwhistle. Over at The Portobello Bookshop, Ali Smith launches her latest book Glyph on 29 January – get in quick before tickets sell out – and Bryan Washington launches his novel Palaver on 26 January. And at Good Press in Glasgow, Tyler Coburn launches his experimental collection Some Monologues (8 Jan).

There’s also the monthly Story Cafe at Glasgow Women’s Library on 29 January, centring the art of storytelling and oral traditions. And over at Glasgow Zine Library, there’s the first session in a new writing workshop series called Revolting Now & Then: Anti-Capitalist Writing Workshops, running also on 29 January. [Anahit Behrooz]

Features

20 What’s In and what’s Out in 2026. Amateur trend forecasting at its finest.

23 Innovative songwriting collective Hen Hoose on their latest record, The Twelve

26 We shine a Spotlight on 2026’s most exciting music.

30 Beat the January blues with the inaugural Cowgate Block Party all-dayer.

31 Ben Wheatley on his new film BULK, and the freedom of making sci-fi on a shoestring.

32 Author Roxy Dunn on her smart and sexy new novel Wants and Needs

35 Glasgow’s often used as a major filming location, but what happened to all the films about the city?

38 We talk to five of the artists shaping performance art in Scotland.

41 Zolf talks DATACLASH 2 and digitalising the club.

45 Two comedians talk about the dark side of your parasocial relationship

46 Kaouther Ben Hania on her new film The Voice of Hind Rajab

47 One writer explains a vision for creating theatre for all

On the website...

Podcasts a-plenty: The Cineskinny is our fortnightly film chat pod; Music Now has Celtic Connections-adjacent chats with Alice Faye, Kathryn Joseph, Malin Lewis and more. More new music with our Spotlight On… interviews every Thursday; recap last year’s music with our Great Scots playlist of the best music d’Ecosse. Still getting caught up on The Films of 2025? Our writers’ top tens will help you find the good movies quicker than a Google search for ‘good movies 2025 no ai overview’.

Oklou @ QMU Glasgow, 1 December by Marco

Sturoi

Trinket – originality (7) 10. Overture (7)

11. Conspicuous (9) 12. Motionless (5) 13. Terra (5)

14. Detach – withdraw (9)

15. Novel by H.G. Wells – nimble is the vain (anag) (3,9,3)

20. Alter (9)

23. Murk (5)

25. Enlighten (5)

26. Grifter – halt, a narc! (anag) (9)

27. Way below the surface (4,3)

28. Admiration (7)

Compiled by George Sully

1. Lazy (8)

2. Profile picture – Cameron franchise (6)

3. Continue regardless (6,2)

4. Very many (6)

5. Post-slopes fun (5-3)

6. Quit (6)

7. Tepid (8)

8. Resolve – accept (6)

16. Studied (8)

17. Rock solid – old cairn (anag) (8)

18. Dense judicial language (8)

19. Appoint (8)

20. Tendencies – fashions (6)

21. Most timid (6)

22. Scant (6)

24. Socket – shop (6) Feedback? Email crossword@theskinny.co.uk Turn to page 7 for the solutions

In this month’s advice column, one reader asks how to keep up with a busy life

I have a 9-5 and also 500 hobbies and goals that I love dearly, how do I balance all these and keep up socially??

Something I tried recently on a week off (it failed on the first day but I think more because, like the noble bear, I don’t want to do anything past November) was to block in my activities almost like I am copying down my timetable on the first day of school. This is perfect for those of us who yearn for the days when all we had to do to be loved was hand in our homework and be a delight to teach, and less perfect for those who...what is the phrase? Had a life. Still, given the nature of your question I’m guessing you belong to the former group so: at the start of the week, block things in. First the social things that cannot be moved and then, and this is the important bit, the time you’ll spend by yourself doing your pottery or whatever. Pottery, 7-9pm on Thursday. You’re busy! You have an appointment! You can’t possibly say yes to anything else! I think part of having a rich internal world is making commitments to yourself like you would anyone else and sticking to them.

Another useful trick, and this might seem to contradict the previous point but stick with me, is to sometimes bring friends into these activities. Very often we see our social life as distinct from our ‘real’ life, but siloing friends away from the lived reality of our life makes both scheduling and intimacy more difficult. Do some of your hobbies with them, invite them over for a work-fromhome session if that’s available to you, go on errands together, send voicenotes while wrist-deep in clay. You’ll be surprised how much time opens up when you’re not seeing time as a dedication to one pursuit, but more a way to enrich various aspects of your life concurrently.

The other tip I have is to accept you can’t do everything and that’s OK. Sometimes the desire to do something is just as important as doing it: there is only a finite amount of time, but an infinite amount of yearning for the ability to crochet a sock, and it is in the yearning that we open ourselves up to the world. Do I really believe this or is it just a way of justifying latestage capitalism? Maybe the real answer is quit your job, stage the Communist revolution, and take back that 9-5.

Do you have a problem Anahit could help with?

Get in touch by email on pettyshit@theskinny.co.uk, send us your quandaries with an almost-unhelpful level of anonymity via NGL, or look out for Ask Anahit callouts on our Instagram stories

Curator and writer Brooke Hailey

Hoffert responds to Andromeda M. Rodriguez’s Reminders of Her from My Fierce Aunt Bianca, an exhibition dedicated to the life and legacy of Bianca ‘Exotica’ Maldonado

Since curating My Fierce Aunt Bianca, I have been haunted by the lingering presence of Andromeda M. Rodriguez’s Reminders of Her. The exhibition marked the first solo exhibition by New York–based artist and filmmaker María José Maldonado, unfolding as an intimate encounter with the life and legacy of her late aunt, Bianca ‘Exotica’ Maldonado (1965–1996). What follows has emerged from that haunting. What is the first thing you think when you hear the candle crackle? Your hands and hers? The wax drips time into pooled remembrance, each warm tear a second suspended. The candle knows what we cannot speak. Smoke spirals across, wispy tendrils reaching through dimensional veils, threading our distance. Incense curls, caught mid-flight, an ephemeral witness. I breathe it in, and it becomes prayer, the kind I don’t know how to say out loud. Glass refracts my iridescent invocation, light splitting into spectrum, my whispers, each hold a different colour for the ache that sits in my chest when I try to picture her face clearly. The roses hold their breath. Feathers tremble with invisible wind from another realm pressing close. I feel the pull of the threshold, the way altars create doorways for spirits to cross through. This is a ritual of what remains when touch is no longer possible. Objects laid out like coordinates, mapping the route back to her essence. The material becomes a way to speak to someone when they can’t easily answer back. Or maybe she does answer. This is a ceremony of tenderness, the arrangement as its own form of devotion. She’s conjured through careful placement, this altar a capture of connection. The love shared between becomes a portal, a place you can inhabit, a shimmering space where two worlds touch and you stand held. I am a participant now, not an observer, my own grief folding into theirs. She flickers here in the illumination from your hands that gathered. The memory and matter contain vibrations with the frequency of her name. The photograph holds multiple hauntings: hers, theirs, mine, all of us who slip between worlds. We recognize the ghost and reconstruct what it conjures. This is how we reach: through smoke, through ritual, through the insistence that love transcends dimension.

My Fierce Aunt Bianca, presented by FEMME, took place at Strange Field, Glasgow, 22-29 Aug 2025

Molly Hankinson is an artist based between Glasgow and London. Her work interrogates and celebrates ‘safe spaces and the people who occupy them’, weaving narratives of collective gendered experiences, shared empathy, and radical confidence. Incorporating the aesthetics of bright and considered colour placement with use of continuous line, Molly is particularly interested in how her art can evoke a feeling, offer comfort, and serve as sites of power.

It’s a classic January theme – Ins and Outs, amateur trend forecasting, an opportunity for the team to arbitrarily cancel or attempt to wreak revenge upon the many things that displease them.

We’ve got three pages of quick-fire judgments on everything from queuing (out) to beans (in) via cliques (out) and long films that don’t seem like they’re going anywhere (in). The features are almost entirely things we deem to be in because why else would we devote the time and energy to writing about them? Apart from the Nordic model, that’s definitely out, as are parasocial relationships with comedians.

Read on for a chaotic and highly biased guide to the top trends of 2026.

Ins & Outs

We’re getting involved in trend forecasting with the team’s idiosyncratic and periodically vengeful picks of what’s hot and what’s not in 2026

Words: Jamie Dunn, Rosamund West, Rachel Ashenden, Tallah Brash, Anahit Behrooz, Peter Simpson, Mika Morava, Eilidh Akilade

IN: Reading in micro chunks

“But what do I do during all those boring chunks of the day (queueing, busing, pooing, etc) if I can’t Doomscroll?” I hear you ask. Get used to carrying a good paperback around and reading a few paragraphs at a time rather than reaching for your phone. [JD]

IN: Beans

They’re delicious. They’re cheap. And if we all ate more beans and less meat, the climate apocalypse might be averted. [JD]

IN: Whittling

Whittling here representing craft, the handmade, the human presence in the creation of objects. We’re bringing back the Arts and Crafts movement, basically. [RW]

IN: Having a good think.

…and not letting AI do it for you. [RA]

IN: Old man pubs

The drinks are cheaper, the atmosphere is better, and you’re guaranteed some good banter at the bar. My fave no-nonsense pubs in Glasgow are The Doublet, The Laurieston, The Rose Reilly, The Allison Arms, The State or The Arlington, while in Edinburgh try The Blue Blazer, Bennets or Diggers. [JD]

OUT: Doomscrolling

I dread to think of the number of hours I wasted scrolling on Instagram in 2025. I’ve much better things to do in 2026, although I might check back periodically on that chef/farmer I have the hots for. You know the one. [JD]

OUT: 3D printing [RW]

OUT: Queuing

Queuing at bars has no place in our society, fight your way to the front and then make friends with strangers to work out who’s first like a grown up. And queuing as a tourist activity needs to stop. Queuing’s for monarchists pass it on. [RW]

OUT: The new wave of chain coffee shops

Because the coffee is disgusting. [RA]

IN: Rep cinema

We’re so lucky to have a lively rep scene in Scotland, thanks to cinemas like GFT, Filmhouse and DCA and countless indie film clubs up and down the country. Treat yourself in 2026 by seeing as many old movies as you can on as big a screen as possible. [JD]

IN: Leaving the flat

It’s so tempting to cocoon yourself indoors at this time of year, but by staying in, you miss out on all the random interactions that make life so fun. You know, petting other people’s dogs while out on walks, running into pals while grabbing a coffee at your favourite cafe, going for an unplanned pint after the cinema with someone you got chatting to in the foyer; the good stuff! [JD]

IN: Mixtapes

Instead of letting the algorithm decide your music taste, ask your friend to make a ‘mixtape’ or playlist for you of stuff they think you’ll like. Make them one too! [TB]

IN: Going to see local bands play in tiny wee venues

Arena headliners have to start somewhere and that’s in venues like Sneaky Pete’s, The Hug & Pint or King Tut’s. For the price of one arena show you could go see multiple bands in your local scene. [TB]

OUT: Writing pitches with AI. Just why? [RA]

OUT: Tapping objects in videos on social media. It’s not ASMR, it’s just annoying. [RA]

OUT: Glasgow food influencers

I recently saw a guy recommend a Japanese restaurant in Partick while also saying he’d never tried miso soup before. There are a couple of exceptions, but on the whole, these people don’t like food; they like free food. [JD]

OUT: Stodgy Italian restaurants muscling in on beloved pizzerias I don’t think I’m alone in thinking my favourite pizza joint has gone a bit downhill following a recent expansion. [JD]

OUT: Spotify algorithms

Don’t let the algorithm dictate your listening habits, the algorithm is funded by major labels and everything will end up sounding the same. [TB]

IN: Buying merch

Buying a T-shirt, record, cap or a pair of socks from a local or touring artist can make a huge difference to them. It will also make you look cool. [TB]

IN: Comedy not just in August

I love going to see as many dumb clowns in August as is humanly possible, but what about the other 11 months, don’t they deserve lols too? [TB]

IN: Local radio

Community radio is so important for your local music scene. Support it in any way you can – listen, tell others to listen, go to their events. [TB]

IN: Second-hand fashion

There’s an unmatched thrill to finding your new favourite outfit on Vinted or in a charity shop. What’s more, you might find an absolute bargain and it’s better for the environment! [TB]

IN: Typos

I recently got an email where a PR told me how diverse his rooster was and it made me laugh more than it probably should have. [TB]

IN: Swimming pools

Love them, love that we have so many beautiful ones easily and cheaply available in the Edinburgh city centre. [RW]

OUT: Rude emails from entitled men in bands

If you’re in a band and think I owe you something because you released an album in Scotland then no, I don’t. Learn some manners before sending that next email or I will out you. [TB]

OUT: Rude emails in general

Also tagging private accounts in Instagram rants when they haven’t consented to your following them is unacceptable. [RW]

OUT: Cancelling longstanding music shows on BBC Radio Scotland

Having your music played or being interviewed on national radio can be invaluable for an early-career artist and can lead to airplay and recognition outwith Scotland. Down with their reasoning to make way for more ‘easy listening’ programming. No. [TB]

IN: Newspapers

No more infinite news. Read some pages and throw them away. [AB]

IN: Low-rise jeans

Listen I don’t like it anymore than you do but I simply have to be down with the kids. [AB]

IN: Libraries

They’re very magical and I also have so much work to do. [AB]

IN: Going out out

Guys the reason we’re all depressed is that we’re sitting in our houses not moving. [AB]

IN: CDs

So much better than vinyl! Cheap! Tiny! [AB]

IN: Emptying the freezer

Girl it still counts as food waste if you throw the frozen leftovers away a year later. [AB]

IN: Fight clubs

Specifically to provide accountability for Anahit. [RW]

OUT: Aggression in swimming pools

I am so over (mostly) men being unhinged, aggressively overtaking people who are just swimming at the pace of the people in front of them because that is how lanes work I get it, you hate your life because you’re terrible. Doesn’t mean you have to make my one little moment of calm stressful. [RW]

OUT: Cliques

We’re all in our 30s. Get a fucking grip. [AB]

OUT: Being depressed If you see me being depressed this year punch me in the face. [AB]

IN: Being Cringe

‘Oh no, you’ve adopted a conversational posture that doesn’t fit with my carefully curated liiiiife’. Grow up: some of us are weird, or earnest, or difficult to get on with at first. Call me ‘difficult’ or call me ‘snarky’, but do not call me ‘cringe’ or I swear down I Will Get The Manager. [PS]

IN: Long films that don’t seem to be going anywhere

Worried about your focus or attention span? Looking for a window into another world? Keen to spend the evening in a big comfy chair with the heating on? It’s called ‘A 2h30m+ Film at The Cinema’, and here’s what it means for your weekend. [PS]

IN: Straight-leg jeans

I don’t like it any more than you do, but we need to bridge the gap between ‘baggy 2000s skatecore’ and ‘late 2000s skinny jeans’ somehow, and it’s this or chinos. [PS]

IN: Ordering a bottle of wine

It is just easier. No faff, no mess; if it’s bad we’re all in the same boat, if it’s good we can have another one. It’s an entire round of drinks in one neat package. Why is no-one talking about this? [PS]

IN: Starters as Mains

Why spend all your money on one big dish, when you could fill your field of vision with a bunch of small dishes? Will it annoy the kitchen? Absolutely. Will you run out of room for plates? Indeed. Is it a good idea? Definitely. [PS]

IN: The gym but not in a weird way

Don’t be obsessed, do get endorphins. [MM]

IN: Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way

To live your one wild and precious life, embrace these insights from Martin Scorsese’s scorned ex. [MM]

IN: Reading bby fiction

Stop reading theory and start acting, then in your downtime revisit the books you read as a kid. [MM]

IN: Animals

I’ve been feeding the birds in Lochend Park and feeling my place in the world or whatever. [MM]

IN: Walkie-talkies

Yeah you have to live next door to your friends. Make it happen. Over!!! [MM]

IN: Half-marathons

Because I want to do one. [EA]

IN: Grayscale on your phone

It’s the best I can do to detach myself from its grips. I might as well be on commission for grayscale at this point. [EA]

OUT: Starters as Starters

No starter for me thanks, just bring me a bunch of nibbles… for the table. A little bit of this, and a bit of that, and now I don’t have to steal any of your food because it’s not stealing if it’s for the table. [PS]

OUT: Long TV series that don’t seem to be going anywhere

Waste my time once, shame on you. Waste it three or four times in a row because the autoplay’s switched on, shame on me. [PS]

OUT: Speaking as a small business owner

You and everyone else, buddy. [PS]

OUT: Amateur pathologising

I am going to go out on a limb and say that you’re about to talk a whole bunch of horseshit. [PS]

OUT: Being snatched

Why are people wanting to be super skinny again… soo boring to fight your body. [MM]

OUT: All social media forever [MM]

OUT: Monogamy-shaming

I promise it’s fine for queer people to not want to spend all their time navigating relationships and boundaries. Hobbies are cool. You can live in radical friendship and community no matter your relationship structure. [MM]

OUT: Marathons

Because I don’t want to do one. [EA]

OUT: AI, obvs

I don’t want to hear another thing about it, like ever. [EA]

OUT: Internal Logic

Finding meaning in the layout of the ins and outs spread is over. [PW]

The Island

Innovative songwriting collective Hen Hoose holed up in the Outer Hebrides’ Black Bay Studios for their latest record, shedding everyday responsibilities like selkies slipping out their skins. Now they’re bringing that island magic to Celtic Connections

While many of us were wrangling the ironing board into a makeshift workfrom-home desk during lockdown, Tamara Schlesinger had a bigger brief on her mind. The musician – who has written and performed mononymously as MALKA for the last decade – was reflecting on representation. From these musings, Hen Hoose was born: a Creative Scotland-funded songwriting collective based in Glasgow with a mission to create bold new music and champion fairer opportunities within the music industry. While the rest of the world came to a standstill, 2020 was the year that things started moving again for Schlesinger.

The group’s debut album, Equaliser, showcased songs from Scotland-based artists including founding member of The Delgados Emma Pollock and euphoric art-pop performer Elizabeth Elektra. An inspiring string of contributions propelled the first full-length into the shortlist for the 2022 SAY Award. It was during this period that SHEARS – the moniker of Ayr-born Rebecca Shearing – entered the fold. “I remember going to the event when we were nominated and being like, ‘I’m now in Hen Hoose!’” she recalls from her Leith flat, acutely aware of how the inclusion affected her as an artist. “It was such a transformational process for me, being trusted with all the technical things, mixing and producing.”

Multi-instrumentalist Cariss Crosbie was another new voice to enter the collective, initially to bring the group’s recorded work to life on stage. “I joined as part of the core band, but then quickly, that evolved into so many other things.” Schlesinger wanted more for the collective’s members, whose work had already appeared in Hollywood films, Netflix series, and global advertising campaigns. Hen Hoose was never just about platforming or profiling. The collective is about evolving artistry and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible for women and non-binary musicians. “Within a year,” Crosbie says, “I’m writing and producing. Things I didn’t really have the confidence to do. Watching another woman just go for it makes you think, ‘Okay, if they’re not scared, then I’m not scared.’”

There was no fear then when the collective set out to create The Twelve, a powerful celebration of collaboration. The project was born at Black

Bay Studios, a residential recording space perched on the shoreline of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. During an intensive week-long writing and recording retreat, Schlesinger, Crosbie and SHEARS were joined by fellow Hen Hoose members Susan Bear, Inge Thomson, Carla J Easton, Frances McKee, AMUNDA, Djana Gabrielle, Emma Pollock, Ray Aggs, and Jill Lorean – the first time members have come together in one place. The power of that union is palpable across the album’s nine tracks, even if it was a little unconventional, as Schlesinger explains: “If you look on paper, the idea of this album was quite ridiculous, but the way it was achieved was unbelievable. It was one of the best musical experiences of my life.”

“It’s important for us to do these things to show that we can, and also that other female and nonbinary musicians know they can”

Rebecca Shearing, aka SHEARS

Across the seven days, the musicians were put into rotating groups of four, each with a delegated person in charge of ‘pace-making.’ If the method sounds quite rigid, the output is anything but. Ego Death channels gnarly 90s, PJ Harvey rumblings while Out My Mind is Studio 54, disco dynamite with octave-leaping harmonies to match. Surely, the fluidity was hard to contain in a traditional tracklisting? Not so, admits Schlesinger. “The groups rotated each day, so there was always something that sounded familiar or a bit like another song. Ray Aggs and Jill Lorean played strings across several songs. Susan Bear played drums and bass across songs, so you have this sonic bed.”

While there’s power in The Twelve, another force undeniably shaped the record. “Emma

Words: Cheri Amour

Pollock described the island as the 13th member,” shares Crosbie. “There were no distractions. It wasn’t like you finish in the studio, you go home, do loads of emails, look after your children. We’re removed, so you were completely creative.” In the evenings, as the sun set over Loch Roag, the 12 shirked conventional responsibilities like selkies shedding their skins, transforming into their true forms. Stripped back to the basics, they huddled over crosswords, clutching a nightcap nip of wine. “The entire experience was magical because they looked after us so well. We didn’t have to cook a meal. No one had to do anything but be together. Every studio had a view of the sea and the water, and so even if you didn’t mean for the sound of the island to come in, it did.”

Leaving their duties at the door also created space for the members to switch up roles within the studio. SHEARS is credited as producer on tracks like Out My Mind and Ego Death, while Schlesinger leads on songs like Sirens Call My Name and In Control. Keeping the task in-house was another way to demonstrate the collective’s women-led mission. “It’s important for us to do these things to show that we can, and also that other female and non-binary musicians know they can. You can do these things. You can produce. You can use a desk,” insists SHEARS.

Collectives like Hen Hoose feel even more vital against the current musical landscape. The 2023 Musicians’ Census from Help Musicians and the Musicians’ Union shows that a huge 79% of women in music are performing musicians. But only 15% of live sound engineers and 12% of studio/mastering engineers are women. For Schlesinger, the problem is as much about safe, supportive spaces as it is about reclaiming roles that haven’t traditionally been associated with women or non-binary creatives. “When we started Hen Hoose, there were 13 writers; only two people said they were record producers in the entire collective. When we finished, nine had produced the music. These artists have sat in that role, doing all the technical things, but never called themselves producers.”

SHEARS admits she too felt intimidated entering production environments. “It took me a while because of the spaces Tamara was talking about being predominantly male. I would go in and

I would be like, ‘Oh, I am too scared to make a mistake in this room.’ So I stayed as top lining.” (The process of writing the vocal melody and lyrics (the “topline”) over a pre-existing instrumental track or beat). Fast forward over a decade since the producer’s Paper Lung EP, and she’s now at the helm of Black Bay’s modular analogue mixing console. Ever the collective’s cheerleader, Schlesinger is quick to point out that, whether the artists recognised it or not, “We had beyond the right amount of producers in that room.”

In the continued spirit of coming together, the Hen Hoose collective will bring The Twelve to life at a special album launch party as part of this month’s Celtic Connections Festival at Tramway. Crosbie and original Hen Hoose member and fellow multi-instrumentalist Sarah Hayes have been putting their heads together about how to bring some of the island magic into the space. “I want it to feel like Fleetwood Mac, really organic, but I want us to come across super powerful and confident in what we’ve made.” The logistics alone are a triumph, she says. “It’ll be so lovely to actually have all 12 of us there, which is an unbelievable feat to be able to have that many people organised!”

“I want us to come across super powerful and confident in what we've made”

Cariss Crosbie

Schlesinger is equally heartened. “It’s just going to feel incredible for us all to be back together, like a little mini reunion.” The bandleader is typically aspirational about how much of the Black Bay experience they can channel on stage. “I’m looking forward to an extra drum to hit. I haven’t told Cariss that I’m looking at a bunch of toms… In the studio, me, Becca, Jill and Emma went in and grabbed sticks. It was quite cathartic.” But ever the empowering sisterhood, Crosbie only leaps at the innovation. “If you get the drums, you don’t even have to mic them up. You can just go into the audience…” Because Hen Hoose, after all, has always been about marching to the beat of your own drum. The Twelve is out 23 Jan via Hen Hoose; Hen Hoose Collective play Celtic Connections, Tramway, Glasgow, 30 Jan

WHERE MUSIC COMES ALIVE

SUNDAY 8 FEBRUARY NASHVILLE THE ENCORE TOUR

WEDNESDAY 18 FEBRUARY THE STREETS

SUNDAY 1 MARCH THE ULTIMATE K-POP LIVE SHOW EDINBURGH

FRIDAY 6 MARCH

SATURDAY 7 MARCH CMAT

SATURDAY 11 APRIL BILLY GILLIES

SATURDAY 25 APRIL SCOTLAND CALLING 2026

WEDNESDAY 6 MAY THE CHARLATANS

FRIDAY 8 MAY THE ROYSTON CLUB

SATURDAY 3 OCTOBER THE UNDERTONES: 50TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW

VARIOUS DATES BONGO’S BINGO

Friday 9 January Antarctic Monkeys

Saturday 24 January Miles Kane

Saturday 31 January Hardstyle Superheroes Presents Gearbox Fusion

EDINBURGHCORNEXCHANGE.CO.UK Get your tickets now via

Friday 6 February Maxïmo Park

Saturday 7 February Magdalena Bay

Wednesday 11 February Ashnikko

Saturday 14 February Of Monsters and Men

Saturday 15 February K-Pop Kingdom

Monday 16 February DMA’s Hills End 10th Anniversary

Tuesday 17 February DMA’s Hills End 10th Anniversary

Thursday 26 February

Friday 27 February The Fratellis

Saturday 28 February The Vaccines

Thursday 6 March Hardstyle Superheroes presents Rebelion

Friday 13 March Fell Out Boy + The Black Charade

Saturday 14 March The 30+ Club

Saturday 15 March Sombr

Monday 16 March Scouting for Girls

Tuesday 17 March Audrey Hobert

Friday 20 March Billy Gillies

Sunday 29 March Kreator: Krushers of the World Tour

Friday 3 April

Shane Todd: Hold Me Back Scan for tickets

Spotlight On... 2026

Step into 2026 with us as we look forward to new music from names you might already know and names you should – it’s our Spotlight On... 2026

Acolyte

Words: Tallah Brash

Following an impressive run of performances at last year’s Hidden Door festival at The Paper Factory, Acolyte remained quiet for the most part in 2025. But in the unseasonably warm run up to Christmas they released Warm Days in December, with a stunning turn from poet and performance artist Iona Lee at the helm. The Edinburgh outfit that also features Maranta’s Gloria Black will release their debut EP on Lost Map Records in early 2026. @acolyte.band

Bemz

Glasgow-based, Ayrshire rapper Bemz may have had a quiet 2025 in terms of releases, but he headlined the BBC Introducing Stage at TRNSMT, hosted his second ever M4 Festival and featured on Vagrant Real Estate’s Neither Collar Nor Crown album released at the end of November. We’re reliably informed that you should expect new music in 2026, but that’s all we can really say right now. @bigbemz1

Bratakus

Highland sisters Brèagha and Onnagh Cuinn, aka Bratakus, have been making noise and doing their own thing since 2015. Having formed a friendship with The Hives after touring with them, their new album Hagridden arrives in February. Produced by Hives bassist Johan Gustafsson, their single Turnstile also features the band’s Chris Dangerous on drums, bringing a new ferocity to the pair’s already thrilling sound. @bratakusband

Cowboy Hunters

Cowboy Hunters were an absolute highlight of our stage at Kelburn last summer with their snappy brand of tongue-in-cheek pop-punk. Their cover of Perfect (Exceeder) followed later that month with 90-second zinger, Money For Drugs, arriving in November. Expect a new EP from the duo in March and if you happen to catch them live before then, you’ll likely be able to grab a copy early, such is the DIY ethos of this pair. @cowboy_hunters

Curiosity Shop

Edinburgh alt-folk five-piece Curiosity Shop haven’t released any music yet, but they’re headlining King Tut’s on 16 January. After a busy 2025, which included a fortnight on the road with Divorce, this year is set to be a big one with even bigger harmonies for the band that cite Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Whitney, Fleet Foxes and The Corries as influences. Expect their first recorded material to arrive this year along with more live outings. @curiosityshopmusic

CUZINO

Glasgow-based producer CUZINO is just about as fresh as they come, sneaking in as a late highlight for us in 2025 as he released his self-titled debut EP. Featuring collaborative tracks with fellow producer and DJ Plaintainchipps, he brought a much-needed party vibe to the end of last year and assures us he’ll be working on more new projects in the new year. This is your early heads up to not sleep on CUZINO. @cuzino_

Feyvo

Edinburgh-based Scottish-Nigerian rapper Feyvo first caught our attention when she co-released Like Me last March alongside Katherine Aly, which featured as Track of the Week on BBC Introducing. A self-proclaimed “bad bitch”, she later released the standalone single TMS (This My Shit), a riff on Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl. While her plans for this year are still being finalised, we’re hopeful for new music. @feyvo

Fright Years

Edinburgh outfit Fright Years had an epic 2025 playing TRNSMT and recording a BBC Introducing session at Maida Vale off the back of their Still Life EP. Their huge single Wait For Nothing followed in September with their biggest headline tour due to take place in the spring and, we’ve been told, there’s more new music on the way. Could 2026 be their biggest year yet? @fright_years

GAÏA

If you’re invested in the Scottish jazz and neo-soul scene, you may well have already come across GAÏA. She features on Rebecca Vasmant’s latest album, has supported corto.alto and she sold out her debut headline show in September. Capping off the year with nominations for the Scottish Jazz Awards and the Sound of Young Scotland, expect GAÏA’s debut(!!) single in April, with more as the year unfolds plus lots of live shows. @gaia.jea

Haiver

Formed by Frightened Rabbit’s Billy Kennedy, Haiver released So Slow in 2023, with not a whole lot since then. With the album version of the single arriving late last year, they announced that their debut album, The Ghost Dance, is due in 2026. An album that charts Kennedy overcoming depression and grief following the loss of his close friend and bandmate Scott Hutchison in 2018, it’s sure to be a cathartic record for many. @haiverhaiverhaiver

Kohla

The follow-up to Edinburgh singer-songwriter and producer Kohla’s debut album, Romance, is on the way this year. On it you’ll find a more orchestral sound that centres around her diagnoses of C-PTSD, endometriosis and falling half in love with a close friend. With visuals inspired by the 1800s, the album has been mixed in Dolby Atmos surround sound to give it a more cinematic feel, perfect for her brand of delicate, yearning pop. @kohlamusic

Lacuna

Glasgow atmospheric folk outfit Lacuna first grabbed our attention with their Valentine’s Day single Shelley last year. By then they’d already played sold out shows at King Tut’s and London’s Windmill Brixton, and they’d been nominated for Best Newcomer in the 2024 SAMAs. Having just released their beautiful third EP, Nest, in December they’re set to play Belladrum next summer with loads more in the pipeline. @lacuna.music

Majesty Palm

Winners of Best Newcomer at the 2023 SAMAs, Glasgow pop duo Majesty Palm went on to be shortlisted for BBC Introducing Scottish Act of the Year in 2024. The pair released their Learning to Swim EP in March last year, showing off their talents at writing a serious pop hook. Rounding out last year with a live EP and headline show at King Tut’s, Majesty Palm have plans for more new music in 2026. @majestypalmband

Nani Porenta

Nani Porenta spent most of 2025 on the road with Jacob Alon as part of their touring band, but still found the time to release the gorgeously intimate South Clerk St Demos towards the end of the year. With plans to further develop their live show in 2026, including an exciting performance at the Bruntsfield Pianodrome in March, they have more projects in the works for the year too. @naniporenta

Radhika

As last year began to wind down a wee buzz started to surround Glasgow dream-pop artist Radhika as her single Starry Eyes (featuring Gerard Love and Mitch Mitchell) was picked up and celebrated by the likes of BBC 6 Music’s Radcliffe and Maconie. With its official release due in January courtesy of Glass Modern, her debut album Cine-Pop is set to follow later in the year and we can’t wait to hear it. @radh__1ka__

Rahul.mp3

Since we last spoke to Rahul.mp3, things have taken off for the Glasgow-based Scottish-Indian producer and DJ. With a feature in Vogue celebrating his music and club night Scandal, he was later nominated for The SAY Award’s Sound of Young Scotland as well as Best Newcomer in the SAMAs. Following the release of Big Dog and Want It, Rahul.mp3 is now working towards a new project for the autumn with big plans for Scandal in 2026 too. @rahul.mp333

Rubie

Glasgow-based artist Rubie won a much coveted slot at last year’s End of the Road festival as part of their annual New Wave competition. Playing the Boat stage, we caught the end of her set and you could have heard a pin drop. A mesmerising talent that calls to mind artists like ANOHNI, Rubie has plans to release a new album in 2026, which she’s describing as “apocalyptic campfire-prog.” Yes please! @rubie____

Sarah/Shaun

Edinburgh husband-and-wife dream-pop duo Sarah/Shaun have relelased three EPs since April 2024. Following the general release of In Silence Love Speaks Loudest this month, the pair have a busy year ahead; embarking on their debut UK tour in the spring, they play Cowgate Block Party this month, the Queen’s Park Weekender in May and plan to release their debut album at the end of the year. @sarahshaunofficial

School of Paris

Dundee duo School of Paris released their debut EP, S.O.P., last September, five tracks they wrote over the course of two years. “We moved away from writing songs to wallow in and instead built something that feels physical, urgent, and euphoric,” they said. “Music to move to, not sit with.” With a sound they describe as dark disco, the pair are currently working on a new project with a run of summer shows in the offing. @schoolofparis

Selkie

Following the release of singles Hours and Heartspeak in 2025, Scottish ambient pop artist Selkie spent a lot of her time last year playing over 30 live shows across Japan, Chile and Mexico. Returning to Glasgow in March, she’s set to release her debut EP in the spring with, we’re sure, plenty of live dates to follow across Scotland. @selkiesound

SOAPBOX

One of the most exhilarating shows we caught last year was SOAPBOX at Horatio’s on Brighton Pier for The Great Escape. The energy was electric, a blend of confrontational, sweaty, cheeky and uneasy. They’ve a whole bunch of festival shows already planned for this year, including Manchester Punk Festival, 2000 trees, Stockton Calling and Eurosonic. And we’re hoping their November single Boiling a Frog is a hint at more to come. @soapboxband

Sounds of the Underground

Ahead of the inaugural Cowgate Block Party, we look forward to beating the January blues with festival booker Craig Gornall and Bikini Body’s Vicky Kavanagh

On 31 January, a brand new festival all-dayer is coming to three of Edinburgh’s grassroots live music venues, Sneaky Pete’s, Legends and Bongo Club. Named the Cowgate Block Party and organised by Craig Gornall, the festival’s lineup is sure to leave your cold flat and into the heart of the capital’s underground music scene. To further the incentive to get you out the house and hit the Cowgate, Gornall shares that the ethos of the festival is “built around the idea of ‘discovering tomorrow’s headliners today’. Cowgate Block Party brings together emerging artists across genres – from indie and punk to alt-pop and experimental sounds.” With January’s Cowgate Block Party only the festival’s first iteration, Gornall promises that this all-day festival will become a fixture in the Scottish music calendar, with more events expected to follow in April, July and October.

While it seems unconventional to have a block party in the dead of winter, Cowgate Block Party is shaping up to be the serotonin boost we need to bear the rest of the chilly months. The Cowgate is the perfect location for the all-dayer, giving punters the quickest route to get from venue to venue on the last day of January. “In my opinion the Cowgate is the life and soul of Edinburgh’s live music and club scene, it was an obvious place to host this event”, Gornall tells us. As one of the bookers behind Sneaky Pete’s year-round programming, Gornall adds: “Having [Sneaky’s] as a starting point just made sense; Legends is next door and Bongo Club is a 30-second walk. Letting people dip in and out of sets really ensures they can see loads of great new music on one street in one day.”

Getting into the music you’re expected to hear across the three venues, Gornall has booked a stunning lineup. To name a few of the local Scottish bands set to perform, there’s singer-songwriter Alex Apolline, hometown post-punk favourites Bikini Body, Glasgowbased electronic post-punks Doss, Edinburgh husband-and-wife

Words: Billie Estrine

“A day spent scurrying around the Cowgate with pals, pints and plenty good tunes sounds like the perfect way to beat the January blues!”

Vicky Kavanagh, Bikini Body

dream-pop project Sarah/Shaun, and alt-rockers Filmstar, for whom the all-dayer will be their debut gig. A stand-out on the lineup is also Londonbased punk trio Dream Nails who will be playing Cowgate Block Party just a week before releasing their third album, You Wish. “I wanted to bring the best new bands to the Cowgate, bands who have been popping up in blogs, radio shows and new music playlists over the past six months,” Gornall explains, adding, “for me, these are the bands who will be playing much bigger stages in the future.” Cowgate Block Party is a homecoming gig for Bikini Body. “Cowgate Block Party is our first local gig since our recording session in Margate back in October,” the band’s vocalist Vicky Kavanagh shares. So hot on the heels of recording, Bikini Body are set to perform some new tunes for their loving Scottish fanbase at the end of this month. “Though we’ve road-tested a couple new ones here and there, this will be the first live outing for the majority of our new material and it feels completely fitting that it should be in front of our beloved hometown crowd.” Kavanagh is also keen to spend the day soaking up the music herself, saying that her and the rest of the band are all, “looking forward to checking out as many of the other bands as we can.” She adds: “Our pal Ryan [Marinello] plays drums with Sarah/Shaun who we’ve been meaning to catch for ages, so we’re really excited for that!”

Gornall is psyched that the all-dayer offers punters and musicians a day to warm up from the winter’s cold temperatures in the sweaty venues on the Cowgate. “We all know January can be a bit grim,” he admits. “Hopefully by the 31st people will be ready to embrace going out again. What better way to do this than with a load of friends and mutual lovers of new music.” Kavanagh agrees: “The prospect of a day spent scurrying around the Cowgate with pals, pints and plenty good tunes sounds like the perfect way to beat the January blues!”

Cowgate Block Party takes place at Sneaky Pete's, Legends and The Bongo Club, Edinburgh, 31 Jan

Making Movies Weird Again

Ben Wheatley went from big-budget Hollywood behemoth Meg 2: The Trench to his new film BULK, a micro-budget wonder that he’s taking on tour across the UK. This protean filmmaker discusses the freedom he finds in making sci-fi on a shoestring

Ben Wheatley is one of today’s hardest-topigeonhole filmmakers. He returns to the world of micro-budget B-movies with his new movie BULK, a time-and-space-hopping caper centred on a quest to find an eccentric inventor and stop his string theory experiments before the world changes beyond any normalcy. As wild as the plot is the film’s release strategy: Wheatley is taking BULK on a 15-day, 20-stop Q&A circuit across the UK (including stops in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee – Wheatley’s first time in the latter city, which he’s particularly excited for).

BULK came about thanks to a four-month gap in filming schedules; what better opportunity to shoot a movie inspired by his recent work in comics and graphic novels, as well as what he loves about science fiction? “I missed the elasticity, boldness, and madness of sci-fi,” Wheatley says, taking cues from the Quatermass series and Eraserhead in BULK’s tactile models and singleroom settings. It’s not his first overt citation to low-budget cult cinema: he made 2021’s In the Earth on the budget and schedule of Halloween “The world of the B-movie, of scientists gone mad, is a very interesting place. As a filmmaker, it was exciting,” he says, noting that many now-classic films are “not that expensive or complicated.”

BULK’s retro aspects, including unsynced sound recorded in post-production, contrast thrillingly with its futuristic subject matter. The clarity and artificiality of post-recorded sound is something Wheatley wanted to do for a long time, inspired by French New Wave films and Studio Ghibli animations. “Every sound is purposeful,” he says; “the worlds feel empty but specific.” Other

“I missed the elasticity, boldness, and madness of sci-fi”

Ben Wheatley

influences include Alphaville (just post-New Wave), Blade Runner (though this calls back to Alphaville: “all these movies are interconnected,” he notes), and 1970s Doctor Who

Wheatley finds directing low-budget indies and big-budget blockbusters (his most recent cinema release is the giant shark sequel Meg 2: The Trench) similar in practice but not intent. “On the floor, they’re essentially the same,” he says. “But with a bigger budget, you’re talking to a broader audience and have to be conscious of that. Meg 2 had to play in San Francisco, Paris, and Hanoi, making for a very different kind of filmmaking.” Budget is a double-edged sword, wielded to suit circumstances. “It is an incredible privilege, but if you make something that doesn’t play, you’ve wasted that money,” he notes. “You might not get to work again, and possibly the people around you don’t either. With something smaller like BULK, you can be more niche and take more chances, but you’re talking to a much smaller audience that already likes a certain kind of sci-fi. If you talked to a tiny audience with a tentpole budget, you’d be in real trouble.”

Making fanzines, preparing the BULK tour

Words: Carmen Paddock

(prioritising indie and grassroots exhibitors), and the still-breaking news of a Warner Bros acquisition clarify some of Wheatley’s thoughts on the stories he tells and how he tells them. “There’s a real awakening in the UK of people setting up cinema clubs, defining their own taste, and refusing to be told what they get to see,” he says, excited to see community exhibitors popping up across the UK, boosting films that might not break into the mainstream. He recalls attending a screening of his trippy psychological horror A Field in England at Manchester’s Cultplex and a young audience member saying she goes every week “because they show mad shit” – a curatorial and viewing attitude he finds “brilliant” in its openness and curiosity. He cites the films of Bergman, Kurosawa, Jodorowsky and Lynch as having created this appetite for the weird, and his fondness for the tradition of “midnight movies” is evident in BULK

“BULK is light on its feet,” he says. “It doesn’t have a massive budget. There isn’t the pressure to get the money back. It’s not a disaster if it has a modest showing.” To that end, he plans to keep touring, taking the film to audiences rather than waiting for them to discover it on streaming. Indeed, BULK will remain a roadshow, cinema-only event for the foreseeable future.

While calling back to cult classics, BULK relishes undercutting narrative clichés, including when the protagonist discovers his story is no Campbellian hero’s journey but rather a bildungsroman about a “naïve dunce.” Wheatley stresses the importance of telling stories you love – if only for yourself. “I write all the time,” he says. “If I like a character from a comic, I won’t get the rights, but I’ll write a spec script so I can read and enjoy it.” He recently found a home for a script written 20 years ago – not a plan, but an opportunity formed by following his interests. Then, “test your taste against the world’s taste,” he says, “because it might be different, divergent, and difficult.” It is all part of the art, science and business of filmmaking. “When you get an audience, it’s incredible,” he says. “But if you’re making stuff, if you like it and feel it hasn’t been compromised, that’s okay. Writing it, reading it back, and enjoying it is a success.”

Ben Wheatley takes BULK on a tour of UK cinemas, from 15 Jan to 1 Feb. He comes to Scotland with a matinee Q&A screening at Edinburgh Filmhouse, followed by an evening Q&A show at GFT, on 18 Jan, and a Q&A screening at DCA on 19 Jan. For the full tour dates, head to rookfilms.co.uk/pages/bulk-narrative-tour

Wanting to Want

This year, relying on relationships to fix us is out. We talk to author Roxy Dunn about her smart and sexy new novel Wants and Needs, and how we figure out who we are outside of our desire for love

WWords: Anahit Behrooz

hen the newly dumped Misty meets Christopher on a dating app, she is immediately smitten. He is funny, he is charming, he is attractive, and he… seems to be into some cool new genre of music called ENM? Emotional intelligence, sexual chemistry and his own hobbies and interests – she has, she is convinced, hit the jackpot.

This is how Roxy Dunn’s incredibly clever and funny relationship novel Wants and Needs begins: with a woman desperately looking for love and lacking the knowledge basis to go about it in the modern world. Because, as it turns out, ENM is not some niche subgenre of techno but a whole world of ethical non-monogamy and polyamory that Christopher has been exploring alongside his wife of several years. He is available, but also not available. He is made for Misty, but also for someone else. She is absolutely fine with it, but also not. It is a sticky paradoxical quagmire, but Dunn is less interested in either venerating or damning polyamory than in exploring the ways in which we lean on relationships to fix us, whatever the cost.

“No form of love can offer security,” Dunn explains. “It sounds bleak, but actually it’s liberating, because if you can get rid of want[ing] it to offer you security, you can allow it to do all these other things: growth and fulfilment and excitement.”

Dunn began writing Wants and Needs at a crossroads in her own life, having recently met her now-partner and caught between her single life and the new promise of a ‘settled’ life. She was struck, she explains, by the rhetoric that separated the two: the supposed stability of monogamy and marriage, and the supposed insecurity of polyamory and dating. “It got me thinking, is there a guarantee to monogamy? Does any form of love offer safety?” she explains. “I didn’t set out to write about non-monogamy, but I quickly realised that was going to be the framework, because if you start with a character who wants security and goes to the opposite end of the scale [with] non-monogamy and the uncertainty that provides, you realise the two are much closer than you think, because neither is offering a guarantee.” If no form of love offers a guarantee, then does it matter which we feel safest in? Misty

“Sometimes we’ve got to question whether what society is telling us to want actually has our interests at heart, or whether it’s the interests of a capitalist economic working model”

Roxy Dunn

spends much of the novel trying to disentangle her deep attachment to Christopher from the anxiety not being his primary partner causes, caught – eponymously – between her wants and her needs, and deeply uncertain of which either is anyway. “Yes, I would choose to live with the bitty, rich uncertainty of being with him, because what was the point of choosing safety and security when they were only fallacies anyway?” Misty asks. Yet while they may be fallacies, there is only so much, Misty comes to realise, that you can

rationalise away your need for them. Throughout the novel, Dunn pays tender care to Misty’s desires, and the often non-sensible direction they take: it is a question, she explains, of reconciling these slipperier urges with our fundamental needs.

“[There’s] this screenwriting device,” Dunn says, “where a character sets out at the start of a story with a very clear objective, and it’s what they want. But of course, the thing they need is the thing they’re going to discover over the course of the story. And sometimes they get the thing they want and the thing they need, but very often they have to sacrifice the thing they want in order to get the thing they need. However, that’s relatively simplistic and Misty even makes that point, about why wanting is seen as inferior to needing, its dirty degenerate sibling.”

Dunn doesn’t quite have the answer to this, but it is the lack of answers that is the point. If monogamy offers an illusion of security, and polyamory an illusion of freedom, then perhaps the only solution is to dispense with the illusion and realise that no relationship structure can offer anything that you do not already hold yourself. It is difficult, however, to fully rely on yourself and your own needs, Dunn points out, when the social structures around relationships remain so prevalent, and the narratives around them so narrow.

“I think this is why there’s such a conversation around non-monogamy right now, because people are querying the status quo,” she says. “We’ve all been told that we’re meant to want to get engaged at 28, get married at 30, move into our house, have two children, get a dog. And people are beginning to say, hang on, is this the setup that’s going to fulfil me? Sometimes we’ve got to question whether what society is telling us to want actually has our interests at heart, or whether it’s the interests of a capitalist economic working model. There’s an assumption that people in long-term monogamous relationships put on people who are non-monogamous, that ‘yeah, you still want what I want ultimately’. And I do wonder

if that comes from a place of fear.”

Ultimately it is this pressure, and the concomitant fear of being alone, from which Misty has to disentangle herself. Her relationship with Christopher, sweet and sexy though it is, is also marked by the kind of anxiety that speaks to a need to be in a relationship more than it does with a particular person. “I remember going in to meet my editor and she said, ‘but why is Misty scared of being alone?’ And I said, ‘I don’t think that needs dissecting, that’s just the human condition, isn’t it?’ And my editor said, ‘no, no, most people don’t fear that,’” Dunn laughs. “It’s interesting because a healthy attachment is a positive thing. It’s the dependent strand of attachment that Misty has that we are told is unhealthy.”

It is telling, she continues, that the original cover draft for Wants and Needs featured both Christopher and Misty on the front, the two interlocked but staring away from each other. But the final cover features Misty on her own, contained within the boundaries of the page. “On the surface, it’s a book about a woman entering into a non-monogamous relationship, but on a deeper level, it’s a woman trying to work out who she is and what she wants,” Dunn explains. “And it may be that she ends up with somebody, but she’s got to learn to be independent and accountable for herself in a way that she never has been before.”

It’s a new kind of happy ending, one that is entirely independent from another person –whether you end up with them or not. Inherently temporary though it may be, Misty’s relationship with Christopher holds enormous weight, the kind of weight that only an entire novel can confer. Maybe Christopher isn’t the great love of Misty’s life, but her desire for him, and what she learns from it, becomes the story. “To say he’s inconsequential is an understatement,” Dunn laughs, “but it’s not actually a novel about them. It’s a novel about her. Her journey, and he’s a huge part in it. But ultimately it starts and ends with her.”

Where’s Glasgow?

In recent years, there have been plenty of films shot in Glasgow, from comic book movies to zombie apocalypses to sci-fi dystopias. But what happened to all the films *set* in Glasgow telling local stories?

Scottish filmmaking is in a parlous state. Don’t let the slew of big-budget Hollywood movies shot in Scotland fool you into believing otherwise. The Running Man (2025), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) and The Batman (2022), all shot in part in Glasgow, boost our economy by flooding the coffers of hotels and restaurants and provide work for local craftspeople. But they’re not culturally Scottish, and don’t contribute to our nation’s rich cultural tapestry. They certainly don’t, authentically, represent Scotland. In fact, they go out of their way to efface Scotland altogether. Buchanan Bus Station is Boston Bus Station (in The Running Man); George Square is Philadelphia (in 2013’s World War Z). Looking at Glasgow as a microcosm of the state of the Scottish film industry more generally, the picture is worrying for those of us who love film, and who relish authentic representations of our city and our people.

But first, a brief history of filmmaking in the city. For my book, Scottish Films, published last year, I watched and wrote about feature films set, at least substantially, in Scotland. 427 are covered; 72 of these are set in Glasgow. Earlier films set in Scotland were usually placed in a romanticised Highlands or glamorous Edinburgh. The first to take place in our biggest city was 1940’s Hoots Mon, a vehicle for the comedian Max Miller, made with strong ‘Britain together’ propaganda supporting the war effort. Two more films were set in Glasgow in the 1940s: The

Shipbuilders (1943) and Floodtide (1949), both based around shipbuilding.

In the 1950s, five features were set in Glasgow. These are a varied mix, from a comedy repurposing the University of Glasgow as ‘Skerryvore’ University (1952’s You’re Only Young Twice) to true-crime (Madeleine, 1950) to the social realism of The Gorbals Story (1950). From 1955 through 1978, there were TV movies set in Glasgow (most notably, Peter McDougall’s contributions to the Play for Today series) but only one cinematic feature – the torrid German crime story The Devil’s Girls (1967) (it’s a hoot).

Everything changed in 1979, however. Bill Forsyth released That Sinking Feeling, which was exceptional for being a truly Glaswegian production, set and shot in the city with a Scottish director and cast. Fifteen more films were set in Glasgow in the 1980s and ‘90s. Some were international productions taking advantage of Glasgow’s heritage; others were inspired local films made by Scottish directors.

By the 2000s, the floodgates had opened, driven, in part, by Glasgow’s attempts to attract filmmaking. Jet Li’s 2005 hit Unleashed, for example, a UK/US/French co-production, includes a credit to ‘La Ville de Glasgow’. Glasgow was opportunistically chosen for the versatility of its location and its burgeoning network of filmmaking support facilities, combined with UK-wide tax incentives. In all, 22 features were shot here in the 2000s, and 25 in the 2010s. Alongside the ‘could

Words: Mark Furse

be anywhere’ films like Unleashed, there were still plenty of truly Scottish films. Among them were works directed by Peter Capaldi (Strictly Sinatra, 2001), Peter Mullan (Neds, 2010), and Robert Carlyle (Barney Thomson, 2015); David Mackenzie made Young Adam (2003) and Perfect Sense (2011). Glasgow-based May Miles Thomas made three films, and Andrea Arnold shot the superb Red Road (2006).

But in this current moment of filmmaking abundance in Glasgow (Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s shoot created huge excitement last year; The Batman 2 should generate a similar buzz when filming begins in the city this month), homegrown stories are few and far between. In the 2020s, I count only two Scottish fiction films that are substantially set in Glasgow: Ciaran Lyons’ micro-budget feature Tummy Monster (2024) and Adura Onashile’s Girl (2023). While there have been fine Glasgow-shot documentaries in this period (My Old School (2022), MOGWAI: If the Stars Had a Sound (2024), Janey (2024)), lots of small screen productions (The Nest (2020), Nightsleeper (2023), Fear (2025)) and a relatively thriving short film scene, the paucity of fiction films coming out of Glasgow is alarming.

The reasons for this downturn are myriad. COVID clearly took a toll on feature filmmaking here, as it did in most territories, and filmmakers have accused funding body Screen Scotland of focusing too much on supporting films, rather than the career development of Scottish directors (although it appears changes are now being made, with Screen Scotland announcing last year a new talent development initiative called Talent Builder). And many of our finest filmmakers are choosing to make films on a bigger stage, and who can blame them? Mackenzie’s most recent film, Relay (2024), is set in New York; Lynne Ramsey’s Die My Love (2025) is set in the US, as are all her films since Morvern Callar (2002).

This year does look slightly rosier for both Scottish and Glaswegian cinema. A record-breaking seven Scotland-made films have been selected for this year’s Sundance Film Festival, among them Felipe Bustos Sierra’s documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street, which centres on Glasgow citizens’ civil resistance to a Home Office dawn raid on the eponymous Southside street. Glasgow Film Festival, meanwhile, will close with James McAvoy’s eagerly-awaited California Schemin’ (2025), which is set partly in Glasgow. These titles offer a glimmer of hope that local stories can still be told on the big screen, but the truth is, Scottish filmmaking, which has never had real strength in depth, is now in a precarious state.

Scottish Films is published by Luath Press luath.co.uk

After Shock

Inspired by an exhibition on Marina Abramović’s first performance in Scotland, we interview five artists about the enduring appeal of the experimental medium

Edinburgh, 1973. A crowd gathers around an up-and-coming artist, engrossed but a little terrified at the sight of her splayed fingers on a white sheet of paper, now streaked with lines of blood. She is playing a game, a reckless one. From a line-up of perfectly sharp kitchen knives, she picks another and goes again: rhythmically jabbing the narrow space between her fingers to the disorientating sound of a tape recording of the previous round.

This is the sight of Marina Abramović, the ‘grandmother’ of performance art, finding her medium. Through pain and physicality, Abramovic is worshipped for pushing the medium, the body and the audience to their limits. And though it was her first-ever performance, Rhythm 10 can be read as a public declaration of her intent to shape the medium through her own body.

Rhythm 10 is a mythologised moment in the history of performance art, anchored in Scotland. It was part of the Edinburgh Arts 1973 programme, organised by Richard Demarco. Photographs from that extreme performance are now on display at Fergus Purdie Architects’

Window Gallery in Perth, in an exhibition titled Marina Abramović, Rhythm 10 Revisited. While the exhibition looks back to that violent spectacle and its bloody aftermath, what if we were to take stock of how artists are currently shaping the medium in Scotland? In our conversations with five visual artists active across the country, we learn that performance serves as an integral developmental force for their ideas, which are expanded into different media.

Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊

For artist Rae-Yen Song, family outings sometimes take the form of performance. The ongoing song dynasty series involves unannounced processions on the streets of Glasgow, as Song’s immediate family wear an elaborate sculptural costume that requires multiple bodies to move. Audiences are deliberately de-centred, as passers-by encounter the performances without any context. Song is intrigued by the idea of people “stumbling upon the work rather than gathering for it”. “The audience is part of the environment, not the focus,” the artist reflects. The work, rooted in diasporic family

Words: Rachel Ashenden

“Performance is not a commodifiable object that can sit easily within an archive, or even within a gallery or a show”

Tako Taal

experience, is ultimately “more for us – being together, taking up space, documenting these as a growing archive.”

To mark the recent opening of the critically acclaimed •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• at Tramway, Glasgow, the Song family convened inside the gallery space. Together, they awakened song dynasty ○○○○, a multi-limbed parasitic worm costume, by flowing together as ‘one organism’ and navigating the gallery space with limited vision, relying on mutual guidance.

Hanna Tuulikki

While Song’s performances are rooted in ancestral mythology and familial connection, Hanna Tuulikki creates place-responsive performances that navigate “the emotional terrain of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss”. Occasionally, the artist invites multispecies interaction through performance. In Seals’kin (2022), Tuulikki improvised seal calls on the banks of the Ythan estuary, prompting seals to return her calls and meet her eyes from the water. Rather than treating this as a one-off encounter, Tuulikki developed the work into a participatory performance, which began as a vocal workshop and culminated in a collective lament at the turn of the tide, inviting seals to surface in the water. “What moves me the most,” Tuulikki reflects, “is how our vocalisations open a parallel connection among the humans as well: a brief sense of attunement, of being-with, that mirrors the possibility of encounter with the seals.”

Just as care is foundational to Song’s family outings, it is also for Tuulikki, whose performances invite a recalibration of perception. “I believe that performance has the capacity to open and hold space for audiences to feel, to connect and to encounter the world differently,” Tuulikki offers. She speaks of Away with the Birds (2010-15) – a multidisciplinary project that explored mimesis of birds in Gaelic song – with a particular fondness, as its performance on the Isle of Canna (2014) made her reflect deeply on the power of the medium. In part, this was due to the audience’s

reaction, as they reflected that they heard the island differently – that “every sound, from water to birds to wind, suddenly felt like music.”

Ashanti Harris

For Ashanti Harris, performance becomes a site of embodied history. Originally trained in sculpture, Harris took to performance because she found the process of making more rewarding than the finished object itself. She roots this in her childhood experience of attending Afro-Caribbean dance classes: “When I danced, I always felt like I was embodying my culture and its associated histories,” she says. Over time, performing with others, frequently with BPOC communities, became a way of processing histories “together as a collective body.”

Second Site (2019) was informed by Harris’s research into women of African-Caribbean heritage in Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. The performance took the form of a collaborative ritual with women of shared African-Caribbean heritage in Glasgow, shaped by the group’s ancestral legacies as an embodied experience. In Civic Room Gallery, a mercantile-era building, the group inhabited the space “like ghosts.” In this empowering and vulnerable collective action, the visitors responded by giving the performers the space they needed in the building.

Saoirse Amira Anis

“I […] dance while making art, so why not make the

dancing the art?” queried Saoirse Amira Anis as she found the medium of performance. Sharing synergies with Harris’s focus on movement, Anis’ performance practice began “simply as an extension of [herself].” While the audience is not the primary focus for Song, Anis regards onlookers as an essential dimension to performance. “It wouldn’t exist without them,” she reflects. A world away from Abramović’s tests of endurance (for both artist and audience), Anis puts parameters in place to ensure that spectators feel “held,” rather than “on edge”.

In 2024, Anis performed breach of a fraying body as part of Art Night Dundee. The performance saw the artist embody a sea-dwelling creature inspired by myths both Scottish and Moroccan, as she moved and improvised through the city from dusk to dark. Behind a tentacled costume and mask, the artist’s gaze set up a dialogue between creature and onlooker. Anis reflects on the culmination of the performance, in which she smeared henna on audience members’ hands and addressed them, breaking the fourth wall: “I could see in people’s body language their gratitude for the performance... for what I hope was a feeling of being held.”

Tako Taal

While Anis’s and Harris’s performances encourage fluid movement, Tako Taal’s performances are predominantly text-based, involving collective situations such as readings, table works, as well

as rehearsed and unrehearsed encounters. She is drawn to performance as a means of interrogating the psychic impact of colonialism. “Performance is an experiment... about how we’re living together in this specific moment,” Taal mediates. She reminds us that the idea of creating a condition where everyone feels safe is a “falsehood,” or simply not possible. Instead, Taal is interested in creating conditions to “get better at feeling.”

Taal is keen to challenge institutional pressure around scale and growth, observing that the expectation for each artwork to be larger than the last is unsustainable. We discuss the current inaccessibility of the medium, as galleries and institutions are reluctant to invest in performance, which is timely and costly to realise, compared to physical artworks. Performance is unique, Taal argues, because it is not “a commodifiable object that can sit easily within an archive, or even within a gallery or a show.”

In the afterlife of Abramović’s Rhythm 10, we gather what it might’ve been like to be a witness by examining photographs and hearing secondhand testimonies. The overwhelming consensus is shock. In Scotland today, performance thrives as an experimental and ephemeral tool, one that resists easy documentation but lives most vividly in the memories of those who took part.

Turn On, Tune In, Dance Out

Ahead of the return of Dataclash, zolf talks digital spaces, livestream culture and the importance of club production

Over two nights in mid-December 2023, producer, DJ and sound design student zolf broadcast Dataclash to the world by means of YouTube livestream. Having wrapped up his second year assignments, zolf formed a collation of audiovisual works created by friends – both online and off – spliced together with weird and wonderful interludes. Each Dataclash set took a turn down a different creative path: field recordings taken in the recesses of a supermarket, psychedelic visuals paired with breakneck jungle, weighty dubstep overlaid with blown-out video game play. In anticipation of Dataclash 2, we speak to zolf about the blurring of the physical club and the digital abyss.

Zolf first encountered audiovisual livestreams in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. With public spaces closed indefinitely, online communities exploring music, art and digital culture opened up to him. “I was 16 and shut in the house on my computer every day doing schoolwork,” he says, “[I was] researching tons of stuff and that’s how I found all these crazy concepts.” The discovery of livestreamed shows led to zolf finding the communities behind them: “[Each show] always had their little community and [a] pocket of people that really liked it.” While zolf was experiencing aspects of club culture through livestreams, the reality of the club environment was still an unknown: “I never really had a perception of the physical space, but the online space was really starting to give me the edge to go and explore it when I was older.”

So, how does a real club differ from an online space seeking to reimagine it? “I did start to realise that the physical space of the club can be really similar to the online space,” zolf says. “It emulates it because you talk to strangers at the club and you talk to strangers online.” There is an element of mystery that shrouds underground club culture and niche online platforms alike: “The club is unpredictable just like online. You can turn up at the club and not know what’s going on…. I didn’t understand at all until I actually went and experienced it for myself.” Despite this, zolf found familiarity through his years of internet exploration: “Everything I know is from the internet and [that] came to the club with me, all [my] knowledge of music is just me digging up online constantly.”

For Dataclash 2, zolf has combined the digital and the physical, hiring Stereo’s basement for the afterparty – also set to be broadcast live. “[Stereo is] like a massive playground,” says zolf, who provides lighting and visual production to the club’s programming. “It felt right to choose it for an after party location.” In an age where clubs are grappling with the ramifications of phone usage on dancefloors, encouraging attendees to immerse themselves completely is key: “[Club production is] underappreciated; there is a big correlation between audio and visual, especially when you’re in a club... People want to see and hear at the same time,” says zolf. “Syncing the lights to what’s being played out in the club really does have an effect on people on the dance floor… It’s more engaging.”

Zolf similarly keeps engagement in mind for the livestream URL, interspersing sets with bumpers and adverts: “I’ve asked folk if they want to include a few videos, it just keeps the pace flowing between [sets],” says zolf. “It’s so nice coming off of a set and then a little [video] plays and tells you who’s on next so you know what’s going on.” Unlike the first Dataclash, zolf has invited the contributors to create their own bumpers: “It’s a collaborative effort this time around for the little

Words: Myrtle Boot

“There is a big correlation between audio and visual, especially when you’re in a club” zolf

interludes, [so there will be] a really unique scope of different things going on.… Rather than having just my brain, it [will be] everyone’s brains combined together.” Most importantly for zolf, Dataclash 2 is about encouraging people’s creative freedom, as he puts it: “bring your artistic vision, whatever it may be!”

So, what will Dataclash 2 look like? It’s a mystery - even to zolf. “I don’t watch any of the sets when I get sent [them],” he says. “I like the idea of going [online] myself, watching it all in full and not knowing what people have done.” That doesn’t mean there’s no temptation – zolf mentions receiving a video from Japanese grime collective, nullrebel: “I’ve been mutuals with a lot of them for a long time and we’ve been praising each other’s work for ages, so I got them to record an exclusive set straight from Japan. I watched the first 30 seconds and I was like, ‘right, I can’t watch anymore.’”

Zolf has already managed to fuse the digital realm of livestream URLs with the vibrant reality of Glasgow club culture, so where next for Dataclash? Rather than setting his sights on expanding, zolf encourages others to explore in their own way: “The main thing I want to happen is more people doing the exact same thing as me,” he says, “the more people the merrier… Everyone is welcome to get involved, to watch it, to turn up, to support it.” Whether you watch tucked in bed or see out the night on the dancefloor, Dataclash seeks to rejoice in the connections created by our digital age.

DATACLASH 2 can be watched back on zolf.xyz

For more at Stereo, catch Glasshouse x Stereo, Glasgow, 15 Jan

Standing Together

Facing an all-too-close unspeakable future, sex workers and allies across Scotland are uniting to oppose Ash Regan’s controversial Prostitution Bill. We chat with Scotland for Decrim, the local grassroots organisation spearheading the movement

Late last year, a collection of sex workers, allies and members of Scotland for Decrim congregated outside the Scottish Parliament building. The chant “these are our streets” floated through the icy ancient city, and a somber sadness was uplifted by collective comradery and hope. Tight smiles between the crowd indicated the razor edge the community is currently teetering on; friendly but fearful.

The protest, held on 18 November, was opposing MSP Ash Regan’s proposed Prostitution Bill or, as Regan refers to it, the ‘Unbuyable Bill’ which was introduced in May 2025. Also known as the Nordic Model, this Bill aims to criminalise sex work clients, meaning that paying for sexual acts would be a crime.

The Nordic Model aims to diminish the industry and allegedly ‘save’ sex workers from oppression, with the ultimate goal of eradicating commercial sex. Currently, Scotland has a partly decriminalised industry, which Scotland for Decrim – a grassroots campaign fighting for the full decriminalisation of sex work in Scotland – say is already fraught with unnecessary dangers for workers, especially due to laws preventing sex workers working in unison. Scotland for Decrim’s opposition to the Bill cites safety concerns, a fear the industry will be forced underground, and clear demands to the government asking for total decriminalisation in Scotland.

The creator of the Bill, Ash Regan, is currently an Independent MSP for Edinburgh Eastern, however up until October 2025 Regan was part of the Alba Party, which she left to focus on the Unbuyable Bill. Since going independent, Regan continues to double down amid criticism of the Bill, referring to buyers of sex as “exploiters” in a Criminal Justice Committee meeting on 26 November, 2025.

Although the Bill is rooted in alleged safety concerns for women, Laura Baillie, Scotland for Decrim Publicity Officer, says the cure for helping those in the industry, who are participating out of need rather than want, is not the Nordic Model. “Obviously if anybody doesn’t want to sell sex, we don’t want them to do so, but the only way to get people out of sex work who don’t want to do it is to make sure that we have really strong anti-poverty measures,” Baillie says. For instance, a universal basic income, access to good and stable housing, flexible and free childcare, and adequate mental health support, could reduce people joining the industry out of need instead of want, Baillie explains. “The fundamental reasons why people enter sex work, such as poverty or disability, are not changed by the Nordic Model.”

Indeed, Porcelain Victoria, a Scotland-based dominatrix and full service sex worker, says the Bill would present difficulties for her career. “It would make every part of the job more dangerous than it already is, and the moment you criminalise clients, you push the entire industry underground,” Victoria says. “It means less time for screening and that some clients won’t even want to be screened... It creates more pressure to take risks just to survive.”

Like others, Victoria says she would also be less likely to report an assault to the police if the Bill passes. “If I was assaulted by a client, I wouldn’t tell the police because then they could just follow me around and arrest all my clients, and then I wouldn’t make any money,” she says. It is critical that sex workers feel they can report assault to police and be taken seriously, not face stigma, ridicule, or be in danger of arrest themselves; an industry that is forced to become self-regulated is one of danger.

For Amelia Lavery, a Scotland-based dominatrix, the Bill brings concerns about potential

Words: April Shepherd

“It would make every part of the job more dangerous than it already is, and the moment you criminalise clients, you push the entire industry underground”

Porcelain Victoria

ramifications on much-needed support services. “I’m really worried about the services that are going to be available to sex workers because if they’re not anti-sex work or trying to push me out of sex work, are they going to lose funding from the government?” As well as physical health services and emotional support and safety tools, platforms such as National Ugly Mugs’ (NUM) signature ‘ugly mug’ list –  an ever-evolving list that workers can contribute to and reference, collating bad clients – are crucial.

“We’ve seen it happen in Ireland, in Northern Ireland,” Lavery continues. Lavery here refers to Northern Ireland’s criminalisation of the buying of sex in 2015, which was followed by a 225% increase in sexual assaults in 2016-2018, as reported by Uglymugs.  “Sex workers are losing the resources that they desperately, desperately need.”

Unfortunately, Baillie says that efforts to work with Regan have not been successful. “She considers us to all be pimps or exploited women in need of saving, and neither of those have any sort of agency in the matter,” says Baillie.

Lavery echoes Baillie’s sentiment, noting that politicians need to actively involve sex workers in policymaking. “I want a politician to go into Parliament and speak on behalf of sex workers because they’ve already spoken to us, and have drafted a bill while sitting with a sex worker,” she says. Scotland for Decrim has found positive support from a handful of MSPs, but is actively seeking more support and collaboration.

As for the future of Regan’s Bill, the Criminal Justice Committee will write and publish a report, and then release the parliamentary agenda for when debating of the Bill begins. The sex work community will keep fighting for full decriminalisation and opposing the Bill, turning looming fear into fierce group action.

For more information go to scotlandfordecrim.org

Sweating It

Robes off, swimsuits on. We chat to Glasgow Community Sauna and Puffin Sauna about access to wellness, building strong social bonds, and the wonders of steam

Bring two towels – a pair of flip-flops is a good shout, too. Phones wait outside and conversation is very much welcome. Scotland’s community saunas are well and truly heating up, and they’ve got a flair for connection and collaboration.

Opened in November of last year, Glasgow Community Sauna sits at the back of Pollokshields Bowling Green. The sauna (an upcycled horse trailer) is accompanied by a plunge pool (an upcycled barrel). Already, it’s received the warm Southside welcome befitting of its logo – a smiling, anthropomorphic flame. “Glasgow Community Sauna’s aim is to make sauna culture accessible for those who are often left out of wellbeing spaces, and to create a place where people can slow down, connect and feel looked after,” says founder Tami Pein. While very lovely, the starched white robes and mint-infused tea of a spa-based sauna aren't affordable to everyone. No matter our pay cheque, we all deserve to feel relaxed and at ease. As Pein notes, we live on the same latitudinal line as Latvia – it’s unsurprising that Scotland would look to any Baltic or Scandinavian nation’s long-established sauna culture and grow a little envious. After all, cold winds and heavy rains call for at least a little heat.

On the east coast, Leith is home to Puffin Sauna (likewise an upcycled horse trailer) which took founder Max Schilling the best part of last summer to convert, with the help of a Moffatbased joiner. Although Schilling had no immediate location in mind, Leith Community Croft soon emerged as the perfect place. “I don’t think there are enough [saunas] in Scotland. Particularly in urban areas – there are lots of beautiful saunas in beautiful locations but our aim is to enable people to have these great wellness experiences on their doorstep, locally,” says Schilling. “It should be easy and fun to take care of yourself so making saunas accessible and affordable is really important to us, somewhere you can go after work, after the gym, meet with friends without it being a special treat, just part of your routine.”

We know the physical benefits – reduced stress, pain relief, improved blood flow – but the social benefits are equally rewarding. “There’s something about sitting together in the sauna that creates a bond. Every time I’ve been to a community sauna, even if you arrive by yourself, not in a chatty mood, you end up talking to people you never usually would and having a great time,” says Schilling. At Puffin Sauna, it isn’t unusual to end a session with sauna-goers swapping numbers or arranging to reconvene at the same time next week. Such bonds are formed through the very environment of a community sauna. To strip down and sweat together, we must respect one another via a shared etiquette.

The term third place – referring to a social space that is neither work nor home – is fairly commonplace these days; primarily because we’re

Words: Eilidh Akilade

“There’s something about sitting together in the sauna that creates a bond”

Max Schilling, Puffin Sauna

all awakening to the widespread destruction of third places in the UK. Our libraries, our community halls, and our pubs: it’s all under threat. The rise of the community sauna is, in part, a response to such developments. “Part of the motivation was very practical: Glasgow City Council simply doesn’t have the budget to keep many of our public saunas and steam rooms open, and yet the need for warm, accessible wellbeing spaces keeps growing,” says Pein. In recent years, our local council swimming pools have had their opening hours squeezed tighter and tighter; with this, there’s less access to saunas, too. A community sauna isn’t the third place we knew we wanted but maybe, just maybe, it’s the third place we need.

Okay, we’re all thinking it: what’s the difference between a sauna and a community sauna, bar a marketing buzzword? “What makes us a community sauna is our community partners,” Pein continues. “We work closely with the Bowling Green to support the local BME community and collaborate on events. We currently run dedicated sauna sessions for trans people, refugees and asylum seekers and immunocompromised groups, with more to come.” Neither Glasgow Community Sauna or Puffin Sauna are interested in an exclusive

experience for only a handful of folk. Nor are they interested in pricing the local community out of nearby facilities and resources. Rather, they want to look towards what the community needs (and wants) and ensure that the sauna provides this.

Of course, staying put within a community is no mean feat. “The most challenging thing is creating a great experience while weaving between permissions, legal restrictions and keeping the affordability,” says Schilling. Unsurprisingly, standard council planning permissions are not designed with community saunas in mind. Regardless, Puffin Sauna is feeling positive – Leith Community Croft has been a great help and it’s a collaboration they’re looking forward to building on. It’s a heart-warming reminder: none of us are islands, and that includes your local community sauna.

While no amount of steam will solve all manner of socio-political ills, we could all do with a little more pleasure and a little less stress. Throw in a nicely-heated chat with our fellow sauna-goers and we’re all leaving each session with that warm, gentle glow – here’s to making it last.

Follow @glasgowcommunitysauna and @puffinsauna on Instagram

Parasocial Activity

Not a new phenomenon, but one widely felt by comedians at the moment, parasocial relationships with audiences and fans are keeping Chloe Petts and John Tothill on their toes

We think we know stand-ups: it’s an art form that encourages a sense of intimacy, and we can forget that carefully crafted stage personas are distinct from the messier reality of fully rounded, flawed human beings. Throw podcasts into the mix – hour upon hour of easy conversation piped into listeners’ ears – and boundaries can’t help but become an issue. We asked Chloe Petts and John Tothill about their experiences with audience expectations, from the importance of framing to the distorting effects of celebrity on fan behaviour.

As a queer performer speaking about queer issues, Petts thinks that the dynamic can’t help but forge a certain kind of intimacy. “We are speaking so many truths that queer folk need to hear, which they’re not hearing in mainstream society,” she says. It’s tempered by the fact that the queer community is very mindful of consent. Petts mentions the much loved – and missed – Trusty Hogs podcast (helmed by Helen Bauer and Catherine Bohart), which did great work

educating their listeners about “being a kind and respectful audience,” and getting comedians “talking about what feels good and what doesn’t feel good after a show.”

That being said, however, Petts does feel the injustice of being held to a different standard from others – the way an off-the-cuff remark can be judged or taken out of context. She mentions one experience which clearly rankles. At the end of a long tour, with bronchitis, she went ahead with a two-show day, not wanting to let anyone down. Using a tried and tested opening, Petts asked “Any butch lesbians in?” heard a few people cheer, then went “Oh there’s a few butch lesbians in and there’s a few liars.” Seeing a cluster of queer people in the darkness, Petts waved to them; one waved back and she quipped “don’t wave at me you lovely little butch.”

Afterwards she received three lengthy complaints which accused her of misgendering and belittling the trans community. Petts felt really wronged and upset: “I’d been up and down the

Words: Emma Sullivan

country promoting trans rights and trans issues in the show and I make one mistake... But then I thought ‘the trans community is in such fight or flight at the moment ...people are being really shitty to them, so why wouldn’t I be as well.’ I had to reason it that way.”

The incident Tothill muses upon is less fraught, but still gives him pause for thought. At a recent corporate gig, he was doing his “usual nonsense” (aka delightfully flirty crowdwork): asking “Where are we all going for drinks after?” then was taken aback when the audience duly did expect to go out with him post-show. His “elevated persona” is very distinct from other, more confessional stand-ups, and usually ensures the intimacy is read as artifice, but in this case, with a less comedy-literate audience, he felt guilty at having “actually misled them.” He says that he probably won’t risk that line again, especially if “we’re taking the same exit!”

The parasocial dynamic is not new: “I’m sure in the past people thought of Terry Wogan as a friend,” Tothill says, but driven by podcasting and social media, “it’s a modern phenomenon in its intensity.” He’s an avid podcast listener himself – and recognises the slippage involved: “I mean, I think of Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland as friends!” It’s as much a question for listeners as it is for the artists, he suggests. Given the majority of people have a healthy relationship with performers, with only a fraction developing unhealthy parasocial or even stalker-style relationships, “it shouldn’t be an occupational hazard that has to be accommodated”.

And if confusion about intimacy is one issue, Petts foregrounds something a little different: those occasions when people “come up to you wanting to show you something - like they’re funny, too and that can be a bit difficult, because, after all, we’re not in a battle here”. It’s not necessarily a competitive thing either: “People often just don’t know how to behave around those they perceive to have celebrity.” She’s been at parties where conversation disintegrates once other partygoers realise she’s been on the telly – and finds they can no longer string a sentence together.

After four Fringe shows in as many years, Chloe Petts has finally given herself a year off the Fringe in 2026, so make sure to catch her on tour in March (The Stand, Edinburgh, 4 Mar; The Stand, Glasgow, 5 Mar)

John Tothill and his gorgeously flamboyant alter-ego will also be touring in 2026 (Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, 21 Feb; Òran Mór, Glasgow, 20 Mar), just remember: he’ll not be up for post-show drinks

Cinema of Empathy and Resistance

The murder of five-year-old Hind Rajab by IDF soldiers shook filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania to her core. She tells us why she felt it was her responsibility to tell Hind’s story as a devastating piece of cinema

When Western news outlets reported in January 2024 that Hind Rajab, a fiveyear-old Palestinian girl, had been killed by Israeli gunfire in Gaza, Kaouther Ben Hania was in the process of preparing a completely different feature to the one she is promoting as she speaks to us, but the conflict was rarely far from her mind. “I was always thinking about the Palestinian struggle,” says the Tunisian director. “The genocide in Gaza is such a wound, but still the Palestinian people are not given the right to a voice, to a face. They are numbers.”

By the fourth month of Israel’s assault on the 141 square miles of the Gaza Strip, the IDF had already claimed the lives of at least 26,000 Palestinians. Individual tragedies were lost in a sea of statistics. But the voice of Hind Rajab – captured in a recorded phone call with volunteers at the Red Crescent rescue service – cut through and echoed around the world. Her voice also altered the course of Ben Hania’s career: she immediately put her shoot-ready project on hold.

“We talk about representation in cinema,” Ben Hania explains. “Whose story gets to be told? Stories from the occupied Palestinian territories are not heard very widely at all. So when I first heard this recording, the voice of Hind Rajab, I felt it was my responsibility as a filmmaker to amplify her voice, however I can.”

What resulted from Ben Hania’s rapid production, wrapped by May 2025, was The Voice of

Hind Rajab, a nerve-jangling work of hybrid cinema merging action-thriller aesthetics with harrowing documentary. For nearly the full span of its brutally effective 90 minutes, the film puts audiences in the room with Red Crescent emergency responders who are portrayed by actors but are responding in real time to the actual recording of Hind Rajab’s voice from that fateful call.

Despite being made at speed under exceptional circumstances, The Voice of Hind Rajab remains consistent with Ben Hania’s oeuvre to date. In the Oscar-nominated Four Daughters (2023) and The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020), she similarly manipulated filmic codes to blur the divide between fiction and documentary, performance and reality.

“We already had these detailed investigations into Hind’s case by the news media, so the question I asked myself was ‘What can cinema do?’” she explains. Her answer appears to be raw emotion and empathy: “Cinema can bring the immediacy I felt in Hind’s voice. Cinema does not explain, it makes you feel, it connects you to the Other. That’s why I decided to focus on the responders, because you can feel the urgency with them. They want to help her, so you do too.”

While watching The Voice of Hind Rajab, it’s easy to get swept up in the tension, convinced that everything will work out fine, like in a Hollywood blockbuster directed by Michael Mann or Kathryn Bigelow. Ben Hania’s challenge was to constantly

Words: Rhys Handley

“Cinema can bring the immediacy I felt in Hind’s voice”

Kaouther Ben Hania

remind viewers that they are watching a representation of something real: a real little girl who was killed by the IDF, and real rescue workers who desperately tried and failed to save her. “That’s why I knew I had to use her real voice,” explains Ben Hania. “This isn’t a Michael Mann movie. This is real life for Palestinians every day.”

Real life and real experiences sit at the heart of the film’s emotional realism. In assembling her cast, Ben Hania proactively sought out performers from the Palestinian diaspora who could draw upon their own experiences of exile and dehumanisation. “Motaz Malhees [who plays phoneline operator Omar A. Alqam] was born in the West Bank, in Jenin,” she tells me. “His neighbourhood was constantly raided by Israeli forces when he was the same age as Hind when she was killed. That memory was an engine for his performance, seeing himself as a child in the place of Hind as he tries to rescue her.

“Everyone had a story like that, which they brought to set. They are actors, but they are also Palestinians. Their performances became part of the struggle of their people.”

The Voice of Hind Rajab has stormed the international film circuit since its celebrated premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, where it received the event’s longest-ever standing ovation. A raft of big Hollywood names, including Brad Pitt, Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix, have committed their clout and finances to boost the film’s market profile. Despite this, it still lacks a distributor for a wide US release.

But the film’s most significant screening came in October, when it opened the inaugural edition of the International Festival for Women’s Cinema in Gaza, organised by Palestinian filmmakers Ezzaldeen Shalh and Najwa Najjar amid the rubble left behind in the wake of the tenuous and oft-violated ceasefire agreed earlier that month.

“To know that this film, a Gazan story, is playing to a Gazan audience, it’s such an act of resilience and resistance,” says Ben Hania. “It’s a reminder to us all that, even after all this killing, destruction and displacement, Gaza still wants cinema. They want art. They want to live.”

A Theatre For All

Looking into a new year, this month’s writer pulls back the curtain on shallow diversity schemes in theatre – and points to new roots from which he and all can thrive

It’s 2065 and the global majority no longer feel minoritised. The big wigs have woken up to discover that white people can stomach Black and brown stories on stage. Having plenty of people of colour in power certainly helps. We’ve stopped asking if the straights are okay because they now regularly see gay lives on stage and are better off for it. Audiences and creatives alike revel together in a radical new reality where theatre isn’t for ‘theatre folk.’ It’s as popular as the movies again. It speaks to all. As a breadth of worldviews regularly reach the biggest audiences, theatre finally grasps what it has always strived for: truths that reflect our world.

‘Diversity’ has been on an odyssey in recent years, thanks to the tireless work of many minoritised people and our allies. But we all know the fight is far from over. We need regular rallying cries to take stock and energise ourselves for the next leap.We’re seeing more diverse casting, but for high-profile productions, ‘progress’ looks like Black Juliet on the West End – which still draws a not insignificant amount of bigoted vitriol. The reality for actors of the global majority is that we’re still commonly afforded race-doesn’t-matter roles

Words: Aaron de Veres

Illustration: Viki Mladenovski

‘Our whole language and architecture of theatre commands hierarchical thinking and upholds exclusivity’

written for white people, especially once we emerge from the grassroots seeking a sustainable professional career. The chance to tell our own stories? Well, they’re surely too niche for mainstream audiences.

Except we, the so-called ‘ethnic minorities’ make up a fast-growing 13 percent of Scotland’s population. We are the mainstream too. And when global majority narratives do get big platforms (Dark Noon, Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who…) they can attract large audiences and rave reviews. Part of the problem is that the global majority are not making up the audiences, or the people in power. To start, we need intentional intersectional diversity in leadership, in artistic directors, programmers, and CEOs of funding bodies, so broader worldviews are deciding which stories are platformed. When the vast majority of Edinburgh Fringe attendees are white, and only one person of colour leads a theatre in Scotland (by Engender’s latest report), it’s clear the issue is both institutional and cultural. Hiring strategies alone won’t dismantle an industry built on blackface, gross stereotyping, and narrative erasure. We have to pick apart the whole structure. Anti-racist and progressive culture must be cultivated widely, so the responsibility isn’t left to our new leaders to hold the burden of change-making.

In Scotland, we are seeing a diversity bottleneck in theatre. At the grassroots level, we meet many queer, women, global majority and otherwise minoritised performers. At the Edinburgh Fringe, which attracts many independent and international theatremakers, I can fill my personal watchlist with excellent stories centring minoritised lives; I still have to work hard to find these stories, though. Fringe of Colour calculates a mere seven per cent of shows centring people of colour – hardly representational for a group we call the global majority. And at the bigger theatres year-round, I can’t find nearly the same diversity. Funds and schemes for global majority creatives receive fleeting support, can’t sustain themselves and mostly target the early-career levels. We’re calling for diversification of the system, but don’t have sustainable support streams to allow people from diverse backgrounds – especially low

socioeconomic backgrounds – to rise up. Diversity is being funnelled out at higher levels, and the stories that do make it out risk being flattened for the market, or co-opted by those in power who influence how they can be presented.

Whiteness and a middle class sensibility are currently the twin tickets to thriving carefree in Scotland’s theatre culture, but this hasn’t always been the way. We’ve shaken our traditions of creating folk plays that speak to and include the working classes. We’ve almost lost the onceprevalent open air theatre, where the cheap seats are not intimidated by the ‘Grand Circle’, ‘Upper Circle’, and ‘Royal Boxes’. Our whole language and architecture of theatre commands hierarchical thinking and upholds exclusivity. We glaze over this as part of the spell cast on us when we’re sat hushed in our pews waiting for the curtain to rise – that undeniable feeling we all get that attending theatre feels special. But scour the theory books and ask any theatregoer why theatre really feels special, and the answer won’t be the upholstery.

Theatre gave me confidence in my strength. As a performer, being able to trust my body, and have others trust it with their truths, empowers me. As I grow into a new stage of my career, seeking paid work and more ambitious auditions, my mixed race identity and queerness come up more often. I’ve been advised to play into it, asked to represent minoritised views at large, even dismissed when I question script portrayals. I’ve also had incredible experiences with Edinburgh directors who have helped me celebrate my identity while allowing me to be more than queer and brown. Increasingly diverse representation on stage and screen gives me hope that I can pursue a career in acting, compared with eighteen-year-old me who had very few role models that looked or lived like me.

So, let’s dream. Let’s envision Scotland if an honest diversity of worldviews were regularly platformed. If we commit to sustained funding opportunities for minoritised creatives beyond early-career platforming, we have a greater pool of mentors to steward future generations, creating possibility for a positive cycle. If we take risks in decolonised programming, we can celebrate the immense contributions the global majority have already made to theatre. Our scripts become less restricted to struggle stories. Minoritised folk can feel like theatre is being made for them. The culture of theatre itself can begin to change, without losing what has always made it special.

It’s 2065, and there’s a little girl in the front row who recently moved to Scotland. She gets that feeling when you recognise something you’ve never been able to articulate, but know immediately upon arrival to be true.

to: Out My Mind, Game Of

Album of the Month

Hen Hoose Collective — The Twelve

Written and recorded on a retreat to the Isle of Lewis, Hen Hoose’s album The Twelve is a richly textured and fiercely innovative body of work that highlights both the individual artists’ talent and the power of creative collaboration. While each track has a decidedly unique world of its own, the album overall has a nuanced combination of ingenuity and rawness that makes it flow with intuitive coherence.

Opener Wipe Out immediately sets the tone of the album: defiantly eclectic but touched with a dash of humour. Its blend of electronic sheen with a sly country twang is a good example of the record’s playfulness and sonic curiosity. Rich (Katy’s In Space) follows with an almost comically sickly sweet vocal lead, launching into a satirical but also oddly empowering take on girl power. The track leans into exaggeration, using a sugary aesthetic to comment on the performance of confidence and femininity.

The catchy and danceable disco track Out My Mind displays impressive vocal range as well as tight production and songwriting, where repetitive soundbites such as glittery piano notes add to the dynamism and delirium rather than detracting, creating a sense of spiralling and dizzying momentum. In the album’s third single, Sirens Call My Name, whispery woodwind adds a new sonic

dimension alongside the more matter-of-fact vocal performance and shimmering orchestration, expanding the emotional palette. Promise returns to the electronic psychedelia, with pulsating beats that are as dreamy as they are eerie.

In the latter half of the album, Game Of Two shifts the atmosphere again. Rhythmically taut, the track is menacing but liberating (‘It’s not my fault you’re just not enough’, goes the chorus), with Britney Spears-inspired vocals adding a mischievous edge. Ego Death, one of the album’s most evocative tracks, provides a stark contrast with the previous beat-heavy songs; the snare drum pattern, the bluesy guitar, and a slightly honky-tonk piano give the track an almost nautical, nomadic vibe, lending it an earthiness that adds warmth and maturity.

On the penultimate In Control the instrumentation is explosive and the vocals are passionate and fiery, seemingly juxtaposing with the track title, before the album ends with Blessings On the Day, a meditative track that incorporates somewhat foreboding bass and synth, ending the record on a pensive but slightly haunting note. Ultimately, The Twelve stands as a testament to the power of collective artistry, offering a bold, unpredictable, and deeply enjoyable sonic and narrative journey.

[Rhea Hagiwara]

Pem

other ways of landing Fascination Street Records, 30 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: other ways of landing, milk, blue

Utilising a distinctive voice is a core trait not just for musicians, but for all kinds of creatives. Pem, a Bristolbased multidisciplinary artist, songwriter and gardener, is someone who knows this very well. She toured with the likes of Jacob Alon last year, but has been embraced by much of the UK’s alternative music community for the last few years through her earthly, yet mythical style of songwriting.

other ways of landing is Pem’s latest project, and its contrasting senses of place (both literally and metaphorically) evoke an ethereal feel throughout. The opening title track sets this otherworldly tone via transcendental synths and lilting vocal melodies. m4 windy, named after the motorway between London and the West Country, showcases Pem’s shifting states between rootedness and anemophily (being taken by the wind).

The world building aspect to this EP is vast, but Pem’s vocals are startling. From balladry (to earth will you tell me when we land) to alt-indie ((easily) moved) and raw intimacy (milk, blue), her hypnotic tremolo technique has the uncanny ability to wash the world away, even if just for a few short minutes. It’s a delightful body of work from an innately distinctive artist. [Jamie Wilde]

Searows

Death in the Business of Whaling Last Recordings On Earth, 23 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Belly of the Whale, Dearly Missed, Hunter

Searows’ second album, Death in the Business of Whaling, pries and forces confronting emotions to surface. With the title alluding to lines from Moby Dick, Alec Duckart pieces together the divided forces of life and death, the in-between, and feelings unable to be pinpointed.

Opener Belly of the Whale envelops us into a trance, setting the tone for an album gripping at dark corners. Haunting lullabies meet lyrics of death and solitude: ‘After the plummet, sinking into the grave / I’m left in the stomach at the bottom where I live’. It feels cinematic, with instruments creeping around sparse vocals. Dearly Missed begs us to solve a puzzle ending in tragedy, soundtracked by death knells of blazing guitars. Kill What You Eat similarly builds with lyrics that lash: ‘If I say it’s not really all that much / I’m cutting out the heart of the fish I caught’.

The Phoebe Bridgers-esque In Violet starts with siren-like drones, hinting at hope through soft banjos and love confessions. Closer Geese is a call to the void, a hopeless attempt to rescue someone lost and flailing. We aren’t given closure, only hurtling into uncharted waters.

[Juliette Pepin]

Jenny On Holiday Quicksand Heart

Transgressive Records, 9 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Every Ounce Of Me, Quicksand Heart, Dolphins

Jenny Hollingworth is on sabbatical. One half of Let’s Eat Grandma since the age of 13, Quicksand Heart marks a temporary departure from the group, during which she is trading under the fittingly apt alias, Jenny On Holiday. Hollingworth began working on her solo debut during the hazy summer of 2023. Unsure of what she wanted the album to be, the Norwich-born artist penned These Streets I Know. Reflecting on a close personal loss and a bout of depression, it’s laced with melancholia, though its glistening synths suggest that the 26-year-old is now approaching life with a sense of cautious optimism.

This positivity explodes into euphoria on Every Ounce Of Me, a bubbly dancefloor filler dedicated to the draining process of falling in love. Hollingworth recruits bandmate Rosa Walton on a trio of songs, including the rather crushing Dolphins, on which the pair mourn the space left behind by someone who is no longer around. It’s no surprise then that the album doesn’t make for a grand departure from Let’s Eat Grandma’s sound, though fans of the band will have no problem hearing about what Hollingworth got up to on her holiday.

[Danny Munro]

Yoo-hoo Zelone Records, 23 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Protect Your Brain, Numb, Yoo-hoo

Where Shintaro Sakamoto’s former band Yura Yura Teikoku favoured volatility, his solo records proceed at lower pressure, privileging texture, spacing and grooves that remain deliberately underdeveloped. On Yoo-hoo that approach resolves into a two-part movement, the record gradually shifting from suspension into motion without ever announcing the change. Is There a Place For You There? establishes the album’s opening register, its unhurried and blown-out vocal and flattened delivery setting a mood of controlled inertia. The early stretch is governed by tactile detail. Protect Your Brain turns on a dry, wooden guiro scrape, its rhythm skeletal and insistent, circling rather than advancing. From On the Other Side of Time, propulsion begins to register. The track reconnects with Sakamoto’s band-era psychedelia, its motorik pulse loosened and partially obscured. The Clock Began to Move extends that shift through repetition and muted groove, aligning Sakamoto with Stereolab’s cooler end of pop abstraction. Numb introduces a sharper rhythmic profile, its pinfire funk, horns and tape-warped guitar bringing the album’s latent groove into clearer focus. The title track closes in the same manner, unforced and economical. Yoo-hoo maintains its equilibrium to the end, resisting emphasis or release. [Rhys Morgan]

The Just Joans

Romantic Visions of Scotland Fika Recordings, 23 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Limpet, Back On the Meds, The Day We Missed the Train

Like a sausage supper or a good slug of whisky The Just Joans will keep you warm during these dark winter months. One of Scotland’s greatest indie bands, they’ve been around for two decades, and their latest LP mixes their trademark sardonic humour with a new year music cocktail of Blur, The Kinks, Elastica and The Lightning Seeds.

Led by siblings David and Katie Pope, The Just Joans’ latest album, Romantic Visions of Scotland, is about “mundane failings, bitter regrets and missed opportunities”, perfect for those January blues There are great titles like Strictly Presbyterian, Here Come The Rugby Boys and Drinking On a Weeknight and whipsmart lyrics like Back On the Meds’ ‘I started crying in the chip shop / Do you want salt and vinegar?’

This is gold star indie-pop but with none of the affected feyness of Belle & Sebastian. From the stomp of album opener Think Fast, Make Conversation to electro banger Romantic Visions (Prepare For Disappointment), this is librarian louche with muscle. See for yourself when they play Glasgow Mono on 23 January and Edinburgh’s Wee Red Bar on the 30th. [Rick Fulton]

Sleaford Mods

The Demise of Planet X Rough Trade, 16 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Flood the Zone, Gina Was, The Good Life

‘Much hasn’t come in the way of good shit / Now MAGA’s on the tightrope / MAGA’s off their tits / The pied piper can’t handle this / You better flood the zone with shit / The pied piper can’t handle worms / This Domestos kills all germs’. Or so we are told on Flood the Zone, a standout moment on The Demise of Planet X. This kind of jawing is typical of vocalist Jason Williamson: semipolitical, invariably absurdist, and bordering on incoherent.

Accompanied by Andrew Fearn’s minimalist beats, it stays true to the pair’s established style: uncompromising, raw, messy and darkly funny. It sometimes roars to life, while other tracks present a flat wall of noise.

Gina Was emerges as the album’s most musically complete moment, while another highlight comes from The Good Life featuring a throbbing guitar loop, angry vocals and... Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie? It’s also striking how homegrown the record feels, pulling in East Midlands collaborators like soul singer Liam Bailey and MC Snowy to good effect. In the end, The Demise of Planet X is a strong addition to their discography that flicks the Vs at a world gone mad. [Calum Skuodas]

Tashi Dorji

low clouds hang, this land is on fire Drag City, 30 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: black flag anthems, storm the heavens

Tashi Dorji has spent the last decade and a half playing solo guitar with the fiery fervour of free-jazz, his output sometimes beautifully dextrous, sometimes magnetically slipshod. Where on previous records his guitar has rattled and clanged as a scrapheap retort to the tumult of our times, low clouds hang, this land is on fire is muted and resigned, the stark tactility of his acoustic work shed in favour of softer tones and languorous reverb. A vision of the aftermath of the political battlegrounds of his previous records, it sounds like we lost.

A deliberate attempt to reflect the political exhaustion of the era, it is well done; Dorji remains a superb judge of when to introduce melody into the haze, but you can’t help but wish for more. There are swathes of the album where the directionless drift becomes grating, the ease with which it slips into the background troubling. It makes a track like black flag anthems, which in its scrambled noise allows character and drama to wander through the fog, desperately tantalising. It reminds you that it is an incredibly evocative sound world he has created, but it begs for further exploration than it is afforded.

[Joe Creely]

Dry Cleaning Secret Love 4AD, 9 Jan rrrrr

Listen to: Hit My Head All Day, Evil Evil Idiot, I Need You

‘I make sure there are hidden messages in my work’, goes Florence Shaw’s now-familiar deadpan from the POV of a cruise ship designer, a profession so absurdly specific you question if Dry Cleaning didn’t already have a song on this subject. Whether Shaw is merely vocalising the inner monologue of her chosen character, or hinting towards the riddle of her enigmatic lyrics, being able to reflect your own meaning in her gnomic intonations is their strength. On the band’s third fulllength, Shaw returns to her usual writerly concerns while expanding her methods of delivery.

However, Secret Love feels like a sonic holding pattern. One of the easiest criticisms to level at Dry Cleaning early on was wondering how many tricks Shaw’s bandmates could sprinkle around her expanding lyrical worlds. On their underrated Stumpwork though, they found surprising ways to provide setting, but their and Cate Le Bon’s production choices here are mostly safe. The album’s second side starts meaner, muddying the palette nicely, while the shuffling, pretty I Need You’s electronic elements are a breath of fresh air. Hopefully they can subvert like that again while Shaw continues to hone her weapon. [Tony Inglis]

Music Now

It’s the first new music column of the year featuring the warm glow of synths as a recurring theme across releases from Inyal, Sarah/Shaun, Amulet and Lariats with loads more to get stuck into

Words: Tallah Brash

What better way to start a new year than by looking back? Let’s go! December kicked off with two excellent debuts from Glasgow-based artists on the 5th; CUZINO released his self-titled, dancefloor-bothering EP, featuring collaborations with Nwanneka, aka DJ and producer Plantainchipps, and Charlotte Devlin released sonicinvoluntaryreflex, an EP of experimental electronica using found sounds to create something that feels urgent and exciting.

This month, Glasgow indie-pop group The Just Joans step comfortably into their third decade with Romantic Visions of Scotland, set for release on 23 January via Fika Recordings; turn back a page to read our full review. And on the 30th, Hen Hoose Collective return with their latest project, and our album of the month, The Twelve. Recorded during an intensive week-long recording and writing session on the Isle of Lewis, the collective will celebrate the album’s release with a show as part of this month’s Celtic Connections festival. Find out more about all of that on p23.

Also celebrating their latest album with a Celtic Connections show is Scottish folk/electronica outfit Inyal, who return to the stage this month for their first live show in more than five years. Recorded at Glasgow’s GloWorm Recording Studio and co-produced by Andrea Gobbi (Glasvegas/Laki Mera), Fathoms arrives on 23 January. Balancing more tender and orchestral moments (Fadachd) with dancefloor-bothering, full-fat takes on Gaelic waulking songs (Calum Bhàn), the singles preceding Fathoms’ full release offer the perfect taster for the album, but they are a mere toe dip into the vastness and innovation of the album's nine tracks; there's a cinematic feel to the attention to detail, warmth of the production and outstanding arrangements.

A deft exploration of genre, Fathoms dabbles in trip-hop and late 90s/early 00s trance on Baile m’ Àrach, house and electronica on Calum Bhàn and tender piano balladry on For Eamonn; you’ll find the most Celtic sounding moment on Lucky Ones, while beautifully rich orchestral string arrangements add depth across much of the record. The mix and interplay of genres offers up constant notes of interest and, despite not having a clue what she’s singing about (sorry, I don’t speak Gaelic), former winner of the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award, Josie Duncan’s vocals are incredibly evocative and gorgeous throughout.

Another record we’re excited for this month is In Silence Love Speaks Loudest, the final in a triptych of EPs from Edinburgh husband-and-wife duo Sarah/Shaun (Hobbes Music, 30 Jan). While woozier moments could easily soundtrack a night

in Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse, the beat kicking in on Heart Started Beating (Backwards) is a rush, and the Nico-esque quality to Sarah’s mournful turn on Desperation Looks III (From the Other Side) makes us long for a Sarah/Shaun take on All Tomorrow’s Parties. Tackling some pretty big topics, from human resilience, love and relationship breakdowns to the state of the world in four tight songs, there’s an impressive cosiness and fullness to the record as crisp electronics, shimmering synths, scuffling drums and breathy vocals melt into one another.

There’s yet more warm electronics to be found on Forgetful Universe (1 Jan), the fourth studio album from Glasgow-based experimental psych duo Lariats. Slippery sticky grooves, otherworldly synths and introspective samples are the throughline of this record that finds inspiration in electronic pioneers of the past with an ambient palette that sometimes bursts into a full blown dance beat; a concept record they say has been designed with deep listening in mind, to be enjoyed as a continuous piece, there might be no better time than January to get lost in their cosmic universe.

On the 16th, following the release of his 2025 solo record, Strange Is the Way, former De Rosa frontman M. John Henry revisits his back catalogue for Early Songs, Of Late, featuring reworkings and new versions of old songs as well as previously unreleased material. The following week, Amy Duncan’s tenth studio album and second working alongside lyricist David Paton, Greetings From Gartnavel (23 Jan) arrives via Last Night From Glasgow. Exploring Paton’s experiences with schizophrenia, it’s an incredibly insightful and personal record buoyed by rich instrumentation and Duncan’s at times devastatingly beautiful vocals.

There are plenty of EPs to look forward to this month too, starting with Glasgow pair Joseph Flower and Isaac Tendler, aka Amulet. Releasing Amulet II on 11 January, the two eightminute long incantations that make up the EP combine field recordings, analog synths, guitar and vocals, finding inspiration in Scottish Gaelic and Romanian Yiddish folk to create something alluring and full of subtle textures. Indie-folk artist Erin O’Callaghan embraces vulnerability on her second EP, Dreaming is (14 Jan), and Scottish Borders-based indie-folk-pop singer-songwriter Robyn Elliot releases her debut EP, Free Rein (16 Jan). Also this month expect new music from Dictator (Screwball Scramble, 2 Jan), with singles all due on the 9th from Radhika (Starry Eyes), Rachel White (Man Overboard!) and Elsie MacDonald (Pint Glass).

Scan the QR code to follow and like our Music Now: New Scottish Music playlist on Spotify, updated on Fridays

Film of the Month — Peter Hujar’s Day

Director: Ira Sachs

Starring: Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall

RRRRR

Released 2 January by Picturehouse Certificate 12A

theskinny.co.uk/film

At once familiar and ethereal, Peter Hujar’s Day is a gorgeously intimate portrait of an artistic life led in the heyday of downtown New York. As its title promises, Ira Sachs’ film sees photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Wishaw) recount his previous day to writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall). The dialogue is taken verbatim from a transcript of a 1974 conversation between the friends, recorded as part of an intended wider project led by Rosenkrantz, and eventually published as a single volume in 2019.

As Hujar, Wishaw – displaying a pitch-perfect New York drawl – astounds. In particular, his irritation is mesmerising. Hujar grumbles about photography fees and recounts how the phone will not stop ringing; he speaks disparagingly of Allen Ginsberg and scrunches his nose at a particularly strange Vogue editor. We – like Rosenkrantz – are captivated by his every sentence.

Which begs the question, how do we listen to an artist? How do we listen to a friend? Peter Hujar’s Day is an exercise in listening, and it is a joy to practice with Rosenkrantz. In one instance, the camera rests on Rosenkrantz while Hujar speaks; it unfocuses, her attention slipping – then, it focuses again. Through Hall’s utterly singular performance, Sachs has us listen with Rosenkrantz. Her love for Hujar – coupled with her enviable sharpness – is palpable.

Under Sachs’ generous lens, their close relationship delights. Here, art and friendship sit side by side – rubbing elbows, leaning into one another. The duo’s familiarity is not forced, however. The friends begin sitting across from one

another; later, Hujar lays his head across Rosenkrantz’s lap. It’s as if their conversation itself facilitates the closeness. On one occasion, Hujar mentions, briefly, his own brilliance and Hall’s knowing smile is utterly perfect; it communicates Rosenkrantz has heard this rant before, and she is unsurprised by its reappearance, but she welcomes it, simply because he is Peter, her dear and terrific friend.

Despite taking place entirely within Rosenkrantz’s apartment, Peter Hujar’s Day does not suffocate. We move from room to room – the kitchen, the bedroom, the rooftop terrace – their conversation never stagnating. Hujar is depicted as being at complete ease with Rosenkrantz’s apartment: he pours himself a drink, peruses her record collection, reclines on her sofa. This attention to such spatial intimacies is one of Sachs’ film’s chief pleasures. A mid-interview dance break gives a natural respite. Hujar and Rosenkrantz shuffle towards each other, clicking their arms up and down, and swinging their heads. Neither Sachs nor the friends being depicted take matters too seriously.

Hujar and Rosenkrantz mention the tape sparingly, noting how it will soon cut out. A heavy click sounds the presence of a new tape, and they pick up where they left off or, often, in the midst of an entirely different conversation. The recorder itself is often – but not always – present in the frame. Sachs reminds us that this is both fact and fiction; the film is bound to the transcript, but not by it. Such is its triumph.

(Added bonus: in an era of near three-hour epics, Peter Hujar’s Day’s slender runtime of one hour and 15 minutes is a real treat.) [Eilidh Akilade]

Scotland on Screen: A Year in Scottish Film

From the grind of poverty to the perfection of porridge via samurai and swearing, this was 2025 in Scottish film

The finest Scottish film of 2025 had already made itself known to audiences the year prior, thanks to its rapturous run on the autumn festivals circuit. I refer to, of course,

On Falling, the melancholic debut from Laura Carreira, which premiered at Toronto before going on to win awards at San Sebastian (Best Director) and London Film Festival (Best First Feature). With precision and care, the film follows the struggles of Aurora (Joana Santos), a 30-something Portuguese woman who works at an Amazon-like fulfilment centre in Edinburgh as a ‘picker’, one of the workers responsible for running around the sprawling warehouse to find items customers have ordered. It’s a process that’s very convenient for the shopper but anything but for the worker, whose speed and efficiency are monitored and tracked. If you’ve ever wondered how your online Christmas shopping gets to you so fast, a big part of the expediency is down to the exploitation of people like Aurora.

The daily humiliations of trying to navigate late-stage capitalism are laid bare. Carreira’s film shows how working so hard for so little reward damages not just your bank account and your body, but also your soul. The loneliness of poverty, the insulation from never having any spare cash to do something as frivolous as leave the house, has turned Auroa into a shell desperate for connection. Carreira’s great skill is that she communicates this isolation and instability almost entirely visually and through Santos’s performance. Her film was a worthy Best Feature winner at November’s Scottish Bafta awards.

On Falling screened at Glasgow Film Festival, as did two more promising homegrown works that never quite took flight. Tornado, the second feature from Beta Band member John Maclean, opened GFF. Its unique premise – a samurai Western set in the Scottish Borders in 1790 – had the potential for something special, but there wasn’t much to cheer about. Maclean’s script was deeply malnourished and was missing the subversive wit of his debut, Slow West. A charitable reading would be that he was reaching for something mythic with his threadbare plot and thinly-sketched characters, but harder to forgive was the stilted action. Why so many scenes of the bad guys walking slowly across the screen? Why so little swordplay?

There was much buzz, too, around Harvest, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s adaptation of Jim Crace’s 2013 novel of the same name. It’s a gorgeous film dripping in atmosphere, with Good Time cinematographer Sean Price Williams delivering the goods with 16mm cinematography that captures the feral beauty of the Highlands better than any film I know. I was so deeply immersed in the sound and visuals of Tsangari’s film that it took me a few minutes to register how shapeless her story is. Set over seven days, we’re introduced to an isolated Highland village on the precipice of inevitable change. The community has some strange rituals and customs, and there’s a vague menace of folk horror suggested, but the existential threat to the village isn’t the occult; it’s plain old capitalism. Harvest may be an analogy for the Highland Clearances, but it’s so meandering and unfocused that it’s hard to tell. In the end, the film’s got little else going on but vibes.

I Swear is less ambitious but more satisfying. It’s an unashamedly straightforward biopic telling the story of John Davidson, a lad from Galashiels whose life alters overnight, going from golden boy football prospect to social outcast, when he starts displaying symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome as a teen. Scott Ellis Watson plays John at 13, while Robert Aramayo plays him across the next three decades. Both are terrific, and there are rich, soulful supporting roles from Shirley Henderson, Maxine Peake and Peter Mullan. Does writer-director Kirk Jones lay on the sentiment a bit too thick at times? Absolutely, but he’s not afraid of digging into the darkness of social attitudes towards anyone who was different from the norm in the 80s and 90s, either. The resulting balance of humour and heart is pretty much note-perfect.

Edinburgh Film Festival’s closer was Paul Sng’s Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough The Trainspotting author is a tad over-exposed at this point (this is the second documentary about Welsh to screen at EIFF in three years), but he’s an undeniably engaging subject, and his left-field musings on everything from Brutalist architecture to Thatcher to Scottish independence almost always elicit some good lines. Sng deploys a rich tapestry of techniques to keep things interesting. Clips from the various movie adaptations are used judiciously, and some famous voices (Liam Neeson, Maxine Peake, Stephen Graham) are brought in to read revealing excerpts from Welsh’s novels. Like its subject, the film is loose and hazy, verging on the hallucinogenic at times; it’s also pleasingly unconventional and consistently funny.

Edging Sng’s film for Scottish doc of the year is Constantine Costi’s delightful The Golden Spurtle, which takes us inside the annual World Porridge Making Championship in Carrbridge. The colourful kooks who put on the tournament and take part each year feel like they’ve come directly from a Christopher Guest mockumentary, while the playful, picturepostcard framing by cinematographer Dimitri Zaunders is straight out of Wes Anderson. Costi gets so much mileage from the central joke: the enthusiasm these people have for creating the perfect bowl of porridge and the inherent futility of such an endeavour, given that every bowl passed in front of the camera looks identical. It’s also a beautiful portrait of community, and how having a passion in life is as deeply nourishing as, well, a hearty bowl of porridge.

No Other Choice

Director: Park Chan-wook

Starring: Lee Byung-hun, Son Yejin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min, Yeom Hye-ran, Cha Seung-won rrrrr

Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice opens to such an idyllic garden scene that you may think you’re watching the wrong film. Family man You Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is celebrating his wife Miri’s (Son Ye-jin) birthday with their two kids and two golden retrievers. As summer fades into autumn, a group hug seals the deal on an intro that marks the beginning of the end.

Shortly afterwards, Man-su is left stunned when the paper factory he’s worked at for 25 years unceremoniously fires him. Making paper in all its textures, grammages, and uses is the ground zero of who he is, to the point that he won’t consider any other job. When there’s an opening at Paper Moon, the protagonist takes things

The History of Sound

Director: Oliver Hermanus

Starring: Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Chris Cooper rrrrr

Oliver Hermanus’ latest, The History of Sound, serves as a fusion, of sorts, between his last few acclaimed period films: South African queer drama Moffie and his Englishlanguage Ikiru remake Living. It tells the story of a secret romance between two men (partly) set against the backdrop of a real war, with an older man looking back on what he’s managed to accomplish in his life. The latter element is told as bookends with narration and an onscreen appearance by the ever-reliable Chris Cooper, while the majority of the film follows Paul Mescal as the character’s younger self across two decades. In Boston, 1917, Kentucky-raised music student Lionel (Mescal) finds a kindred spirit in David (Josh O’Connor), a peer who shares his affinity for folk music. Owing to

into his own hands to get rid of his competition — literally.

Man-su is far from the only casualty of the unemployment crisis, as the movie delves into how men are expected to cling to their roles of providers and crumble under such pressure. Park frames Man-su’s descending moral spiral with elegance, with No Other Choice ultimately leaving its resolution to its women.

A Machiavellian dramedy of snowballing events, this adaptation of the 1997 horror novel The Ax is Park at his most accessible and relatable. The filmmaker began this passion project in 2009, working in the background to secure funding and assemble the right cast. As the economic downturn shows no signs of improvement 17 years later, the result is an ever-relevant, pitch-black divertissement that’s a sharp takedown of capitalism and gender roles.

[Stefania Sarrubba]

Released 23 Jan by MUBI; certificate 15

issues with his eyesight, Lionel is extra sensitive to sounds, and that medical matter means he’s not called up for the draft when America gets involved in World War I, unlike David. When David returns from Europe, he invites Lionel on a reportedly university-funded trip across New England to record folk songs from various walks of life, for historical posterity – it’s an endeavour that both deepens and fractures the men’s relationship.

Adapted by writer Ben Shattuck from his own short stories, The History of Sound feels too muted in its direction and pacing for many stretches of its runtime. But the epilogue with Cooper proves very effective in bringing palpable passion and crucial context to a story that skimps on a few too many character details. [Josh Slater-Williams]

Hamnet

Director: Chloé Zhao

Starring: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal rrrrr

A well-constructed but contrived family drama, Chloé Zhao’s  Hamnet centres on William Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, played with feral energy by Jessie Buckley. Like the 2020 book by Maggie O’Farrell on which it’s based, the film reverently tiptoes into the Bard’s quarters to weave facts and fiction into the genesis of Hamlet. As with all Zhao’s previous films, her latest is a feast of vibrant colours and lively sounds, with nature’s tapestry providing the backdrop to Agnes and Will’s (Paul Mescal) romance and domestic life, which turns ominous after their son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) dies. Mescal draws on his Aftersun turn to portray a tormented Shoreditch Shakespeare, an ‘iPhone face’ version of the Bard that universalises this tale of loss but is occasionally distracting.

Is This Thing On?

Director: Bradley Cooper Starring: Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Andra Day, Bradley Cooper, Amy Sedaris rrrrr

A guy walks into a bar... and changes the course of his life. This is how John Bishop began his comedy career, signing up for an open mic to avoid paying the bar’s entry fee, and Bishop’s story is the unlikely template for Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? Alex (Will Arnett) and Tess (Laura Dern) are going through a largely amicable separation when Alex wanders into a comedy club for a drink. His marital woes and reemergence into the dating pool provide him with plenty of gag material, and he finds both catharsis and support in this new milieu.

Cooper is working in a lighter and looser register here than in A Star Is Born and Maestro. He and cinematographer Matthew Libatique establish a sense of casual intimacy

Luckily, though, this isn’t Shakespeare’s story. Buckley is magnificent as an untamed woman whose spirit remains unbridled even when embracing the consuming roles of wife, mother, and daughter. As a celebration of her uniqueness and creativity rivalling those of her husband, Hamnet is undeniably Agnes’s. Her howling grief and Will’s restrained sorrow struggle to meet halfway when renegotiating death. This tension shapes the film, which feels as intense and uncomfortable as prolonged eye contact, but, at times, just as artificial.

Zhao’s latest unfolds slowly, with Max Richter’s grandiose score and Buckley’s performance hustling to make up for the movie’s lack of rhythm. Gasping for the authenticity of the filmmaker’s previous works, Hamnet ultimately alienates as it searches for a tempo and a truth of its own. [Stefania Sarrubba]

Released 9 Jan by Universal; certificate 12A

with these characters, and Cooper intelligently links Alex’s domestic and performative lives, literally connecting a marital argument to the standup set it inspires at one point with a fluid transition.

Is This Thing On? is never quite funny enough (Cooper tries too hard as Alex’s bozo pal), and it’s dramatically undercooked, leading to a pat resolution, but it’s never less than engaging. Arnett and Dern excel, with Dern delivering the film’s standout moment when Tess discovers Alex’s new hobby, a complex range of emotions playing beautifully across her face. Cooper’s film doesn’t dig deep enough to linger in the memory, but it’s often perceptive and heartfelt as a portrait of a marriage in a rut, and it’s a refreshing change of pace for the director. [Philip Concannon]

ROTI KING / WOK & SAMBAL, EDINBURGH

It’s a tale of two rotis as a London legend arrives in Edinburgh while some local aces open their own Malaysian street food spot

R8 South St Andrew St, Edinburgh, EH2 2AZ

Sun-Thu, 11.30am-10pm; Fri-Sat, 11.30am-11pm

Wok & Sambal

388 Gorgie Rd, Edinburgh, EH11 2RQ

Tue-Sun, 5.30-10.30pm

oti King have all the flash you could want from a new arrival from London; recognisable branding, lots of existing restaurants, their own cookbook, etc. On our lunchtime visit not long after opening, they also have a fair few floor staff looking for things to do.

Once Edinburgh realises they’re here, they shouldn’t have any problems, because their signature roti remains fantastic. It’s paper-thin in places, supremely flakey and squidgily soft. It’s light in flavour and texture, which makes it ideal for all the dipping you’ll do; we pair ours with a mutton kari (£11.95) that is well-spiced but not too spicy, warming without being overly intense. There are pleasingly enormous chunks of mutton; it feels like the spices are just about being held in place; it’s a delicious bit of lunch that it is simply impossible to eat without getting your hands dirty.

Sometimes when you’re very good at something, you mix it up a bit – the spinach and cheese murtabak (£10.50) is a wafer-thin filled roti stuffed with the classic combo.

There’s a lot of cheese, and a lot of spinach, so grabbing one piece may result in everyone coming along for the ride, but it’s another treat. It’s served with a creamy, earthy dal which holds its own against the rest of our dishes, including two pieces of fried chicken (Ayam Goreng Berempah, £4.95) with a brilliant crust and a particularly lively sambal.

Then there’s the Roti planta (£4.95), a large rectangular sweet roti just absolutely covered in condensed milk. It’s almost caramelised in places, it’s puffy and sugary in others, it’s like the most fantastical pancake you’ve ever had and it’s an early leader for ‘silliest dish of 2026’.

When IG tastemakers and list-takers try to sum up Edinburgh’s food scene, they invariably stick to certain parts of town, and certain kinds of place. We’re guilty of it – you’re making a magazine, you need pictures, and well-funded city centre venues are much more likely to have sorted out a professional photoshoot

or a free press night. For an example, look at this page of this magazine.

But then you go up the Bridges and reap a whirlwind of Korean, Japanese and regional Chinese cooking; heavy strip lights, light inscrutability, and cheap and incredibly flavourful food. You head to Leith and find the wildest mish-mash of high-end restaurants and holes-inwalls; you wander through Canonmills and Stockbridge and hit a bunch of cafes where European innovations in soups and sandwiches still get the praise they deserve.

And Gorgie and Dalry are becoming the place to go for food from South Asia. The shops have been fantastic for a while, home to any and every ingredient you could wish for. Siyamsunthar Charlie Sigaganasundaram – the man who set up Amma Spices, the excellent Indian grocery on Gorgie Road – passed away in November, and part of his legacy is the incredible array of food that’s now available up and down this strip of western Edinburgh.

Wok & Sambal on that stretch of Gorgie Road is a classic unassuming shopfront fit-out, in that it’s somehow both grey and shiny, but it makes up for it with so many lamps and hangings we genuinely lose count. It’s early days for this spot – the two guys running the place occasionally lapse into some Laurel and Hardy-esque bumbling – but there’s plenty of pedigree here. W&S is the new place from the folk behind Chennai’s Marina, the excellent string of Sri Lankan and Indian restaurants across the city, and their emphasis on big vibrant flavours continues. These rotis are slightly thicker and a little more rustic, but that comes with a little more flavour and bite. There’s plenty of both in the mutton curry (£11.95) which brings real robustness and depth, as well as a good bit of spice. The chicken curry (£10.95) also pairs well with the roti, with a thicker sauce and fuller flavours turning everything a whole bunch of notches at once.

It’s pretty much a tie when it comes to the Ayam Goreng (£5.95)

– the marinade seems to have got deeper than back in town, but Roti King wins on crispiness – but the sambal at the place with Sambal in the title is excellent. Pairing loads of chilli flavour with just the right amount of spice, and a lovely fishy fermented tang, it’s just great.

Both of these are the kind of places we want to see more of in 2026. We want flawed, funky new venues where the energy is entirely focused on the cooking. We want solid, reliable spots where the food is great and the vibe is curated. We’re looking for chaos, comfort, precision and panache. And lads, we’re off to a good start.

Door’s Open

O Street’s Keli Mitchell is opening the studio door to anyone who needs a way in, and offering time, honesty and a little hope

Keli Mitchell is hopeful. Having been around the block in the design industry, she’s well aware of the pressure and precarity that come with working in the arts. She knows things are looking a bit bleak out there, especially for those just starting out. But still, she’s hopeful.

Mitchell is a partner at O Street, a multidisciplinary creative studio in Glasgow’s West End, which has stood as a mountain in Scotland’s design landscape for the last 17 years. Their footprints are everywhere, from the big screen of Glasgow Film Festival’s identity, right down to the little RBS fiver in your pocket. On top of all that talent, as Keli says herself, “they’re just really nice people, invested in creativity and craft and community and collaboration.” She pauses. “Boutique is a wanky word, but it’s a lovely little space where we get to play and make work.”

In November, Mitchell spoke at a design event. The final question came from a student, honest and frustrated. “How do we get into the

industry? We can’t. We’re all graduating. We’re scared. We can’t even get any job, let alone a job in the industry.”

“It kept me awake that night,” Mitchell confesses, noting it’s all very well to sit in our design echo chamber, moaning about this and that, “when actually there’s a bunch of people that are going to be shaping our industry behind us that feel lost here.” She realised she needed to take action. Unable to offer the ideal solution – getting every student and grad a job – she set up Open Door: “The next best thing was basically opening the door and inviting people in, sitting them down and giving them time and access. Listening, empathising, helping.

“Scotland’s always punched above its weight creatively,” Mitchell notes, while recognising “it’s the responsibility of the people in our industry to be on the lookout for the next stage, for the next generation. And we have to take that responsibility quite seriously, because they’re going to be in our seats. We have to train the next punchers.” For her, that responsibility starts close to home. “The best demonstration of community is just being a neighbour – opening your door and seeing people in.”

Which put the O Street team to work, dedicating one day a month of studio time to delivering an organic, flexible session for anyone looking for some insight into the industry. And it’s not just students. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a graduate or someone returning after mat leave or someone changing their career path entirely.” A quick social media post was made, explaining the initiative, and they were inundated with over 100 inquiries for the first session. The inbox avalanche only galvanised Mitchell: “I was a bit like, shit, what have I started? But actually, it was reassuring, because it’s like, right, well, this is clearly needed. If I’d had three

Words: Phoebe Willison

“The best demonstration of community is just being a neighbouropening your door and seeing people in”

people, I’d be thinking, actually, the problem’s not as big as I think it is.”

Initially, Mitchell planned for the sessions to focus on hiring insight and portfolio reviews, but she found the real spark came from the participants. Although strangers initially, she noticed a natural shift as the sessions began to direct themselves, with participants discussing their practices, their challenges – listening to each other. This listening turned to sharing, and the energy has been palpable. “They are as invested in making brilliant work as we’ve always ever been. Regardless of whether they feel hopeless about the job market, there is certainly no sense of creative apathy. They love it. It’s in their bones, in their blood. There’s certainly no, ‘oh, well, you know, I don’t even know if I want to do this anymore.’ The creative fire is still burning. Brightly, actually.”

“I think their confidence comes from a place of rebellion. When I started out, I was blindly naive and hopeful. They’re more selective. One of the things that I said to them was ‘find a studio or an agency that aligns with your values. Don’t just take any job’. And they’re like, ‘oh, I know’”.

This sense of rebellion, the desire to create in a world which feels like it’s trying so hard to stop us must feed into Mitchell’s hopefulness. Up against myriad obstacles, she’s accepted that she can’t solve it all. “A portfolio review won’t fix the world, but it might spark a change – someone’s path might change a little bit.” I ask her what she wants the participants to achieve, and it’s hardly surprising to hear her say “Loosely, I would like everybody to feel hopeful.”

We close off our chat looking forward to the new year, and I tell her about our January issue theme of hots and nots of 2026. She responds with: “Hot: hanging out with other humans IRL and being weird together. Not: slagging off other people’s creative work on LinkedIn. Actually, just LinkedIn in general.”

To sign up for the next Open Door session, email Keli at opendoor@ostreet.co.uk

ostreet.co.uk, ostreetstudio on Instagram

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: Wilding @ Fruitmarket, Edinburgh

A survey exhibition at Fruitmarket raises vital questions of land stewardship and offers tender insight into the life of the late artist-activist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Above Fruitmarket’s stairwell hangs a slim, red canoe, populated by a picture book array of wild animals. An oversized fox smiles knowingly at you, a miniature llama ponders a painting on the opposing wall. The animals’ surreal scale and plasticky sheen evoke nursery toys or cobbled together nativity sets. But the canoe, a strange, floating utopia where predator and prey lose distinction, also evokes Noah’s Ark and its promises of hope and renewal. Titled All my Relations (2025), this tender piece by late artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith foregrounds her concern with land, nature, and collectivity, and is the star piece of her show Wilding, currently running at Fruitmarket.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025) was an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. An artist, curator, and political activist, Smith made art to fight for Native American rights, drawing rich inspiration from her lineage, the natural landscape, and the cultures of North America. Smith’s work is characterised by bold expressiveness: there’s a sense that each painting and sculpture is newly finished, that the paint hasn’t fully dried. The exhibition booklet includes this passionate quote from the artist: “My work comes right from a visceral place – deep deep – as though my roots extend beyond the soles of my feet into sacred soils. Can I take those feelings and attach them to the passerby? To my dying breath, and my last tube of burnt sienna I will try.”

Wilding opens with a series of large collage works that riff on maps of the United States. Each map is outlined in crisp, even black, as though scanned from a student’s workbook, and overtaken with thick brushstrokes whose warm hues evoke desert landscapes. The maps are covered with small, neat labels: in War is War (2023), synonyms for conflict bristle threateningly above different states; American Slang Map (2023) displays a litany of American stereotypes and slurs; while in American Citizens Map (2021), the most brightly coloured of the three pieces, Smith peppers the names of

her Native American friends all over the country.

These works show Smith’s gift for blending politics with vivid storytelling. The first two maps are sardonic inversions of the authoritative newspaper infographic: hijacked by roughly applied paint, their nondescript, sans serif labels look foolishly bureaucratic. In American Citizens Map (2021), however, the labelling tactic feels intimate: this piece isn’t just a political statement, it’s also a private map of Smith’s friendships, a contact book, a diary. Short, horizontal dashes flit around the names, giving them movement and buoyancy. I see visitors pause for a long time before these works. These are bold paintings, through which a polyphony of voices – accusing and playful, demanding and gentle – make themselves heard to you.

When you ascend to the upper level (with All My Relations (2025) drawing your gaze skywards as you climb the stairs), you’ll be met by a group of sentinels. The Tierra Madre (Mother Earth) series (2024-5) features a group of female ecological activists: Rachel Carson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Amy Bowers Cordalis, Wilma Mankiller, and Maria Sibylla Merian. Inspired by the Tsagaglalal,

‘There’s a sense that each painting and sculpture is newly finished, that the paint hasn’t fully dried’

‘she who watches’ over Native land, Smith portrays these women as guardians, framing them in bold patterns and surrounding them with expressive pictographs of plants, animals, and dancing human figures. Despite being faceless and at times even limbless, the women, ensconced in a rich universe of symbols, radiate kindness and warmth. I don’t know how Smith achieves this – it’s testament to her narrative ability. I promise you: you will see these paintings and instantly pick up on benevolence.

Wilding touches lightly on Smith’s connection to Scotland, but in a way that raises more questions than provides answers. The guide briefly mentions Smith’s concern with “the politics […] that speak to both Scottish and American contexts,” and the exhibition book says Smith showed a “fierce interest” in the Highland Clearances. However, the exhibition texts don’t really

elaborate on this – had I not seen the guide or book, I wouldn’t have read the show in a Scottish context at all.

Nonetheless, Wilding presents a striking series of Smith’s work and raises important questions on ecology and land stewardship. And despite its relatively small scale, Wilding very successfully conveys a sense of Smith’s personal charisma. Perhaps the tenderest part of the show are the interviews with Smith’s son, played on a loop in the upper floor. Reflecting on All My Relations, he says: “It’s more about being together and moving into a space together, and I think that’s a great place for us to go.” This line, I think, perfectly encapsulates the ethos of the show.

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: Wilding, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, until 1 Feb fruitmarket.co.uk

Apparitions

By Margo Glantz, trans. Ellen Jones rrrrr

Margo Glantz’s Apparitions is a sensual, sensuous and sensational novel, one which challenges readers’ beliefs about sex, religion and art. There are three figures at its dark heart – a mother, her partner, and her daughter – who are involved in a complex trinity, one which is simultaneously holy and unholy, blurring the lines between the two. While the man and the mother are involved in a relationship which could be described as one of dominance and submission, the daughter is their observer, at once apart but still a part of this ménage à trois.

Told in a series of very short chapters, the distinct narrative voices are significant in that they not only show who is speaking, but why and what their role in the affair is. This is erotic fiction with a message, not explicit for its own sake, but commenting on ecstasy in a number of senses; physical, spiritual, and cultural – where desire and devotion are inextricably linked. It is about abandonment and the notion of consent, and what that means for those who give themselves over to another.

Originally published in the 1990s in Glantz’s home country of Mexico, Apparitions courted controversy on its release. Time has not dimmed its impact but Ellen Jones’ translation manages to capture a strong sense of place as well as Margo Glantz’s passionate and vivid prose. This is a novel to which you have to commit. [Alistair Braidwood]

By Ali Smith rrrrr

Few writers are as playful as Ali Smith, who seems to delight in the process of putting words onto the page in as artful a way as possible. This is clear before you even begin her latest novel, the title Glyph immediately recalling her previous Gliff. What is the link, homophone aside? It’s referred to by one of the characters who has just read it, and this is just the sort of in-joke Ali Smith revels in. But where Gliff was set in a dystopian future, Glyph looks to the past. It’s a ghost story which is at its heart a treatise on the horrors of war, lamenting that we never seem to learn lessons from what has gone before. Two young sisters, Patricia (known as ‘Patch’) and Petra are told a terrible tale from the past and, as a result, they invoke a figure from that past who they come to refer to as ‘Glyph’. But is this a case of vivid imaginations trying to make sense of something they don’t understand, or is there more?

This is a novel about the importance of stories and how they can affect people for better or worse. Glyph’s is one of hardship and heroism, leading to tragedy. Petra and Patch’s are eternally entwined, connected beyond the usual familial bonds. Glyph proffers that the stories we tell, and how we tell them, matter greatly. [Alistair Braidwood]

By Erin Somers rrrrr

Cora lives in a sleepy little mountainside town, raising two chaotic young kids alongside her sadly unchaotic husband. Her life is comfortable, manageable and totally devoid of romance – until a man named Sam walks into it and she decides to have an affair.

Except not really. What makes Erin Somer’s The Ten Year Affair more than just another novel about a bored suburbanite trying to treat mid-life ennui with a dose of adultery is that Sam and Cora’s affair exists almost exclusively in her mind. She fantasises about the life she could be living while dealing with the one she’s got – dreaming up romantic getaways while fixing her daughter’s pick-up schedule or trying to figure out who to call about that mushroom growing on the bathroom wall.

This setup gives the novel plenty of room to ruminate on fantasy, reality and the messy way that they collide. And Cora is an enjoyable ruminator, full of amusing observations delivered in a detached style that makes The Ten Year Affair eminently readable. But the other characters are fairly flat and while the reality / fantasy split is an interesting conceit, the book never really commits to it – dipping into Cora’s imagined life here and there rather than taking a formal risk and really splitting itself in two. So we’re left sitting with Cora, wondering about what might have been. [Ross McIndoe]

By Jose Ando, trans. Kalau Almony rrrrr

Jackson, a Black, queer man in Japan, finds himself the victim of a bizarre workplace prank in this short debut novel by Jose Ando, translated into English from Japanese by Kalau Almony. When a QR code on the back of a gifted shirt reveals a pornographic video of him – or, at least, someone who looks just like him – to his colleagues, Jackson must stop the rumour mill by finding both the culprit and the real person in the video.

What follows is a sort of whodunnit minus the murder, carried out by a group of hapless and near-identical-looking young men. When Jackson meets Jerin, Ibuki and X, who have also anonymously received shirts that led to the same video, the four decide to work together to clear their names.

Soon, the investigation moves away from typical manhunt territory. Instead, it provides an opportunity to enact their own doppelganger experiment and gives way to reflections on the isolating nature of the Black, queer experience in Japan. Ando writes in the sparse, assured prose typical of classic Japanese mysteries but, whether a symptom of Almony’s translation or an issue present in the original Japanese text, the prose lacks the clarity necessary for the convoluted plot to fully satisfy. Despite a compelling premise, the issue becomes a barrier towards emotional engagement with the characters which the short novel never quite overcomes. [Louis Cammell]

Listings

Looking for something to do? Well you’re in the right place! Find listings below for the month ahead across Music, Clubs, Theatre, Comedy and Art in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. To find out how to submit listings, head to theskinny.co.uk/listings

Glasgow Music

Fri 2 Jan

PAPERCUT PEACH

(KINGSTON + PEAK + THE HIGH PRIESTESS)

KING TUT'S Blues rock from Glasgow.

Sat 3 Jan

KLOANS (EWAN MCKENNA + SYRENA + VAL MAVIS)

KING TUT'S Indie rock from Scotland.

Sun 4 Jan

JUAN LAFORET (FUZZY + MANKOVER + THE BLEEDERS)

KING TUT'S Indie from Scotland.

Mon 5 Jan

BOOK LORE (VOITURES + CLOSE CONTROL)

THE HUG AND PINT Eclectic lineup.

Tue 6 Jan

THE MOLOTOVS

KING TUT'S Rock from London.

VERTIGE (RAGGED SCHOOL UNION + GODOT)

THE HUG AND PINT Post-punk from Glasgow.

Wed 7 Jan

FRASER MACCALLUM

KING TUT'S Post-punk from Glasgow.

MAJORCA (EVE BERRY + LECKI LECKI)

THE HUG AND PINT Synth pop from Glasgow. MCGARRY SWG3

Singer-songwriter.

Thu 8 Jan

COUNT THE DAYS (COMFORT GIRL + DALMATIC + THE NOISE CLUB)

KING TUT'S Rock from Paisley.

SCOTT LEVI JONES

THE HUG AND PINT Americana from Tennessee.

Fri 9 Jan

FATALE (MATT WHITE & THE EMULSIONS + GUEVARA + SLOWDANCE)

KING TUT'S Pop rock from Lanarkshire.

PEACH CRUMB (REBEKAH KIRK + KAIT)

THE HUG AND PINT Indie from Glasgow. THE SWISS FAMILY ORBISON STEREO Indie pop from Scotland.

NOVA SCOTIA (THE PALLADIUMS + WHITNEY KING) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Alt rock from Glasgow.

Sat 10 Jan

HEAVYSKINT (ALLSORTS + DIRTY MIKE + EYES OF HOME)

KING TUT'S Indie from Glasgow.

MUDFLOOD PRESENTS: FIENDZ YT (GUILT CHAMBER + GROGG + INK DRINKER) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Eclectic lineup. DGOHN (OBAKEGAKU + BRAW BONES) NICE 'N' SLEAZY Jungle from Glasgow.

Sun 11 Jan

THE DRIVE (BLUE NICOTINE + CARMEN + ORNUM)

KING TUT'S Alt rock from Glasgow.

JORDAN RAWSON (PLASTIC BOY + ALDO) THE HUG AND PINT Indie from Glasgow. KAI REESU NICE 'N' SLEAZY Nu-jazz from Glasgow.

Mon 12 Jan

CALLUM STEWART (YOUTH FOR SALE + WOEFUL IDOL) THE HUG AND PINT Indie. MIDNIGHT TIL MORNING SWG3

Pop from the US and Australia.

Tue 13 Jan

WHAT IT MEANS (FROG COSTUME + HALF AWAKE EYES)

THE HUG AND PINT Emo from Scotland.

Wed 14 Jan

HALFBAKED (FORFAUNA + JACK HILL + SNAILS FROM JUPITER)

KING TUT'S Alt rock from Glasgow. JAMES LEBAIGUE (BONES OF THE SUN + SOPHIA SAUDI) THE HUG AND PINT Indie from Glasgow.

Thu 15 Jan

AWFUL EYES (CITZEN HEAD + OEDIPUS & THE MAMA’S BOYS + VACANT PAVEMENTS)

KING TUT'S Post-punk from Glasgow. THE WONDER YEARS SWG3 Alt rock from the US.

CIVIL ELEGIES (SMIRK + VIBRATOR + SHAG

NASTY + JAW)

NICE 'N' SLEAZY Metal from Glasgow. Fri 16 Jan

FALASGAIR ORAN MOR Folk from the Isle of Skye. CURIOSITY SHOP (ENEKO LANE + STUFFED ANIMALS + NANI PORENTA)

KING TUT'S Alt folk from Edinburgh. ROKIA KONÉ (SIRABA)

ST LUKE'S Singer-songwriter from Mali.

ANGEL EYES (SECRET BREW) THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Rock from Glasgow. HUMBIRD (QUIET MAN)

DRYGATE BREWING CO. Folk and indie rock. PALEFACE SWISS SWG3

Deathcore from Switzerland. RUMAC SWG3

Singer-songwriter from the UK. THE LOCAL (KLOZER + THE GOODTRIPS + LUCAS H.)

NICE 'N' SLEAZY Indie from Glasgow. Sat 17 Jan

KEVIN MCGUIRE THE GARAGE Country pop from Scotland.

MEGALICHEN ORAN MOR Folk from Glasgow.

KULEEANGEE (BODYSYSTEM + PLEASURE TRAIL + SAINT SAPPHO)

KING TUT'S Indie from Scotland. ADEM (JO MANGO) THE HUG AND PINT Rock.

PICTISH TRAIL

ST LUKE'S Indie from Scotland.

LANDLESS (NATALIE WILDGOOSE)

DRYGATE BREWING CO. Folk from Ireland.

MICHAEL MCGOLDRICK BAND (SONA JOBARTEH) THE OLD FRUITMARKET Folk jazz.

Sun 18 Jan

DIVA DOWN (LIMERENCE + MODERN RUIN + PARALLEL SENSES) KING TUT'S Rock.

SOUND OF THE SIRENS

THE HUG AND PINT Indie from Exeter.

LAURA JURD (CHRIS AMER SEXTET)

DRYGATE BREWING CO. Folk from Ireland. SUPERHEAVEN SWG3 Post-hardcore from Pennsylvania.

KATHRYN JOSEPH & LOMOND CAMPBELL (SHHE)

ORAN MOR Indie from Glasgow.

Mon 19 Jan THE LAURETTES ORAN MOR Indie folk from Scotland. JOHNNIE GUILBERT

KING TUT'S Alternative. DUST THE HUG AND PINT Jazz from Australia. YOUTH CODE (KING YOSEF + STREET SECTS) ROOM 2 Industrial from LA.

Tue 20 Jan

ALL TIME LOW (MAYDAY PARADE + FOUR YEAR STRONG + THE PARADOX) THE OVO HYDRO Pop punk.

MARMOZETS KING TUT'S Rock from the UK.

MIKEY KENNEY (SAM GRASSIE) THE HUG AND PINT Trad.

Wed 21 Jan

BIFFY CLYRO THE OVO HYDRO Rock from Scotland. FEDERATION OF THE DISCO PIMP

ORAN MOR Funk from Scotland. AMARANTHE + EPICA BARROWLANDS Metal

ADAM BEATTIE + FIONA BEVAN (THE WILLOW TRIO)

THE HUG AND PINT Folk.

BRÌGHDE CHAIMBEUL + SHAHZAD ISMAILY (CAHALEN MORRISON TRIO)

ST LUKE'S Trad. THE MACLEAN BROTHERS THE OLD FRUITMARKET Trad.

Thu 22 Jan

MEEP (CLAY RINGS + FLAME + THALADELA)

KING TUT'S Pop.

RED SKY JULY

THE GARAGE

Alt country from the UK. BAIUCA (MALIN LEWIS)

ST LUKE'S Electronica from Spain.

MICHAEL MCGOVERN (GRAYLING)

DRYGATE BREWING CO. Folk from Glasgow.

GRAHAM ROBERTSON SWG3 Singer-songwriter. MON ROVÎA SWG3 Folk from Liberia.

SHARON SHANNON (ALI LEVACK BIG BAND)

THE OLD FRUITMARKET Trad. Fri 23 Jan

DYLAN WINTERS & THE POSTERITY (AZALEAS + DUGOUT + LOW TIDE)

KING TUT'S Rock from Glasgow. THE JUST JOANS MONO Indie pop from Scotland. KIRSTEEN HARVEY (GRACE MORTON + HECTOR SHAW)

ORAN MOR Folk from Glasgow. HORSE BARROWLANDS Singer-songwriter from Scotland. NAIMA BOCK (JASPER LLEWELLYN)

THE HUG AND PINT Indie from the UK.

SIOBHAN MILLER BAND (SALTFISHFORTY + WRAN)

THE OLD FRUITMARKET Folk.

GORESHIT + BYE2 + PSYCHOANGEL + LUNA CLIPPA STEREO Breakcore and drum 'n' bass. THE REBEL NICE 'N' SLEAZY Post-punk from Scotland. Sat 24 Jan

VANDERLYE (LINT BIN + LONELY DAZE + PAPERHOUSE)

KING TUT'S Alt rock from Glasgow. DLÙ ST LUKE'S Indie trad from Glasgow. VÄRTTINÄ

ORAN MOR Folk from Finland. MILES KANE O2 ACADEMY Rock.

ORKNEY ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: THE CHAIR 20TH WITH FARA 10TH BARROWLANDS Folk.

NICK HARPER THE HUG AND PINT Indie.

AMYTHYST KIAH DRYGATE BREWING CO. Americana.

LE VENT DU NORD THE OLD FRUITMARKET Folk.

MRS FRIGHTHOUSE

STEREO Industrial from Glasgow. Sun 25 Jan

STRATUS (DELIRIUM + MARCELINE + TOO RED)

KING TUT'S Rock from Glasgow. ORIANTHI ORAN MOR Singer-songwriter from Australia.

GREG RYAN THE HUG AND PINT Folk from Wales. SAM SHACKLETON DRYGATE BREWING CO. Americana and folk. ST PAUL & THE BROKEN BONES (TYLER BALLGAME) THE OLD FRUITMARKET Rock 'n' roll and funk. Mon 26 Jan

SATURDAYS AT YOUR PLACE THE GARAGE Alt emo from the US. THE JAMES HUNTER SIX ORAN MOR Blues. THE 502S SWG3 Indie folk from the US. Tue 27 Jan

NIMBUS SEXTET ORAN MOR Jazz from the UK.

PIERCE BROTHERS ST LUKE'S Folk and blues. DANI LARKIN DRYGATE BREWING CO. Folk from Belfast. JINJER SWG3 Heavy metal from Ukraine.

CELTIC FANDANGO THE OLD FRUITMARKET Eclectic trad lineup. Wed 28 Jan

RYAN BROWN (AMY LOUISE + FRASER MCLEAN + MAR CHARAV)

KING TUT'S Pop from Glasgow.

RETROFILE THE HUG AND PINT Pop.

LEN PENNIE + PAUL LEONARD-MORGAN ST LUKE'S Folk from Scotland.

WILD AT HEART SESSION VOL 1: ZOË BESTEL + BROKEN FOREST + JACK HOUSTON THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Folk. THE TRAVELING JANES (CELTIC DJANGO PROJECT)

DRYGATE BREWING CO. Jazz and blues.

WHITE LIES SWG3 Indie rock from the UK.

DREAM WIFE STEREO Punk from London.

Thu 29 Jan

BEN WALKER THE GARAGE Folk from Montrose. MUTAGENIC HOST THE GARAGE Metal from London.

JASON DERULO THE OVO HYDRO Pop from the US.

BRODIE BARCLAY (ANGELFACE + NIAMH CORKEY + ÖPAQUE)

KING TUT'S Singer-songwriter from Scotland.

JOHN BLEK THE HUG AND PINT Folk from Cork.

MAMA TERRA (ARIANE MAMON) ST LUKE'S Jazz.

MAIRI SUTHERLAND THE RUM SHACK Folk rock from Perth.

MACHINE GIRL SWG3 Electronica from the US.

SHOOGLENIFTY (MOXIE)

THE OLD FRUITMARKET Electro-trad from Scotland.

OSLO TWINS NICE 'N' SLEAZY

Trip-hop from Bristol.

Fri 30 Jan

RESOLVE CATHOUSE

Metalcore from Lyon.

TORRIDON AND THE TUMBLING SOULS

ORAN MOR Country from the Hebrides.

FAT SALAMI (IDEAL HUSBANDS + STATIC SKY + THE NAUTICS)

KING TUT'S Psych rock from Glasgow.

TOM MCGUIRE & THE BRASSHOLES BARROWLANDS Funk from Glasgow.

NEEV THE HUG AND PINT Indie from Scotland. ANNIE & THE CALDWELLS (MICHELLE WILLIS)

ST LUKE'S Disco soul.

RUM RAGGED (AILIS SUTHERLAND + EWAN ROBERTSON)

DRYGATE BREWING CO. Folk from Newfoundland. INYAL (MAL) SWG3 Electro-trad from Scotland. MAX COOPER SWG3 Experimental. GIRL GROUP NICE 'N' SLEAZY Pop from Liverpool. Sat 31 Jan

A.A. WILLIAMS THE GARAGE Folk rock from London. SAMSON SOUNDS XL FEATURING AZIZA JAYE & MC BRYTE: ATLANTIC VIBRATIONS ORAN MOR Afrobeat.

SLEEPY BADGERS (BISTANGO + THE SHAMBLES + THE WALKERS)

KING TUT'S Noise from Glasgow.

DÀIMH BIG BAND AND JIGGY BARROWLANDS Trad from Scotland.

AK PATTERSON (ÉTÁIN) THE HUG AND PINT Singer-songwriter. CIARAN RYAN (PUMPEGRIS) ST LUKE'S Folk.

DARRELL SCOTT (HANNAH WHITE)

DRYGATE BREWING CO. Roots from the US. SECKOU KEITA & THE HOMELAND BAND SWG3 Kora from Senegal. FRIENDS AGAIN THE OLD FRUITMARKET Folk rock.

NGANGA (HIDEOUS CRAWLING ABOMINATION)

STEREO Death metal from London.

JERKCURB NICE 'N' SLEAZY Indie from London. Sun 1 Feb

XANA ORAN MOR Pop from Vancouver. MATT MAESON ORAN MOR Indie from the US.

Sun 25 Jan

Fri 16 Jan

Cabaret

Voltaire

TUESDAYS

MIDNIGHT BASS, 23:00

Big basslines and small prices form the ethos behind this weekly Tuesday night, with drum’n’bass, jungle, bassline, grime and garage aplenty.

FRIDAYS

FLY CLUB, 23:00

Edinburgh and Glasgowstraddling night, with a powerhouse of local residents joined by a selection of guest talent.

SATURDAYS

PLEASURE, 23:00

Regular Saturday night at Cab Vol, with residents and occasional special guests.

Sneaky Pete’s

MONDAYS

RIDE N BOUNCE, 23:00

R‘n’B, pop, rap and hip-hop bangers every Monday.

TUESDAYS

RARE, 23:00

House, UKG and occasional techno from special guest DJs and rising locals.

FRIDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)

HOT MESS, 23:00

A night for queer people and their friends.

SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)

SOUL JAM, 23:00

Monthly no-holds-barred, down-and-dirty disco.

SUNDAYS

POSTAL, 23:00

Bass, breaks, grime and more from a selection of Cowgate all stars.

The Bongo Club

FRIDAYS (THIRD OF THE MONTH)

ELECTRIKAL, 23.00

FRIDAYS (MONTHLY, WEEK CHANGES)

SOUND SYSTEM LEGA-

CIES,23.00

Exploring the legacy of dub, reggae and roots music and sound system culture in the contemporary club landscape.

FRIDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH)

DISCO MAKOSSA, 23.00

Disco Makossa takes the dancefloor on a funk-filled trip through the sounds of African disco, boogie and house – strictly for the dancers.

FRIDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH)

OVERGROUND, 23.00

A safe space to appreciate all things rave, jungle, breakbeat and techno.

SATURDAYS (FIRST OR SECOND OF THE MONTH)

MESSENGER, 23.00

Roots reggae rocking since 1987 – foundation tune, fresh dubs, vibes alive, rockers, steppers, rub-a-dub.

SATURDAYS (MONTHLY)

CHROMATIC, 23.00

Championing all things UKG, grime, dubstep, bass and more, with disco, funk and soul from Mumbo Jumbo upstairs.

SATURDAYS (EVERY OTHER MONTH)

PULSE, 23.00

Techno night started in 2009 hosting regular special guests from the international scene.

SATURDAYS (MONTHLY)

HOBBES MUSIC X CLUB

NACHT, 23:00

The

Liquid Room

SATURDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)

REWIND, 22:30

Monthly party night celebrating the best in soul, disco, rock and pop with music from the 70s, 80s, 90s and current bangers.

The Hive

MONDAYS

POPTASTIC, 22:00

Pop, requests and throwbacks to get your week off to an energetic start.

TUESDAYS

TRASH TUESDAY, 22:00

Alternative Tuesday anthems cherry picked from genres of rock, indie, punk, retro and more.

WEDNESDAYS

COOKIE WEDNESDAY, 22:00 90s and 00s cheesy pop and modern chart anthems.

THURSDAYS HI-SOCIETY THURSDAY, 22:00 Student anthems and bangerz.

FRIDAYS

FLIP FRIDAY, 22:00

Yer all-new Friday at Hive. Cheap entry, inevitably danceable, and noveltystuffed. Perrrfect.

SATURDAYS BUBBLEGUM, 22:00

Saturday mix of chart and dance, with retro 80s classics thrown in for good measure.

SUNDAYS

SECRET SUNDAY, 22:00

Two rooms of all the chart, cheese and indie-pop you can think of/handle on a Sunday.

Subway Cowgate

MONDAYS

TRACKS, 21:00

Blow the cobwebs off the week with a weekly Monday night party with some of Scotland’s biggest and best drag queens.

TUESDAYS

TAMAGOTCHI, 22:00

Throwback Tuesdays with non-stop 80s, 90s, 00s tunes.

WEDNESDAYS

TWISTA, 22:00 Banger after banger all night long.

THURSDAYS FLIRTY, 22:00 Pop, cheese and chart.

FRIDAYS

FIT FRIDAYS, 22:00

Chart-topping tunes perfect for an irresistible sing and dance-along.

SATURDAYS

SLICE SATURDAY, 22:00 The drinks are easy and the pop is heavy.

SUNDAYS

SUNDAY SERVICE, 22:00 Atone for the week before and the week ahead with non-stop dancing.

The Mash House

TUESDAYS MOVEMENT, 20:00 House, techno, drum ‘n’ bass and garage.

SAMEDIA SHEBEEN, 23:00

SHARK STUFF

BANNERMANS Rock from Brighton.

JOANNE SHAW

TAYLOR

THE QUEEN'S HALL Folk and roots from the UK.

Mon 26 Jan

HAVER QUARTET

USHER HALL Folk from Scotland.

Tue 27 Jan

DYLAN LE BLANC

THE VOODOO ROOMS Americana from the US.

ANTHONY GOMES

LA BELLE ANGELE Blues rock from Canada.

Wed 28 Jan

TV CULT (KB & THE RASCALS) BANNERMANS Metal from Cologne.

CALLUM BEATTIE

THE LIQUID ROOM Singer-songwriter from Scotland.

Thu 29 Jan

PAULIE'S BLUES BOYS BANNERMANS Blues.

THE REID SCHOOL WEE RED BAR Folk and indie.

Fri 30 Jan

HARSH (DEADFIRE + DEUS CULPA) BANNERMANS Glam rock.

CÉLESTE AT SUB CLUB SUB CLUB Techno. PARADE AT THE BERKELEY SUITE: W/ OLDBOY + ROY DON + GEORGE BEST + HU-

SANE THE BERKELEY SUITE House and garage. NØXX PRESENTS: BØĘRY X RAGETRAIN ROOM 2 Gabber. D/RANGED STEREO Drum 'n' bass and jungle.

Sat 17 Jan

DISCO LOVE THE BERKELEY SUITE Disco. CRUCIAL ROOTS SOUNDSYSTEM EXIT Dub.

Fri 23 Jan

DR. BANANA SUB CLUB House and garage. INK TANK STEREO Bass, breaks and dubstep.

Sat 24 Jan

A_VOID (LUNA FRIGHTHOUSE) STEREO Industrial.

Thu 29 Jan

SAMEDIA SHEBEEN THE MASH HOUSE Global sounds.

Wed 7 Jan

CLUB_NACHT SNEAKY PETE'S Disco.

Thu 8 Jan

MANGO LOUNGE SNEAKY PETE'S Bass.

Fri 9 Jan

PALIDRONE: ULTIMATE BLENDS SNEAKY PETE'S Club.

DAVID BOWIE'S BIRTHDAY PARTY LA BELLE ANGELE Pop and disco.

Sat 10 Jan

TEMPORAL: THE 00S THE LIQUID ROOM House. THE MIRROR DANCE SNEAKY PETE'S House.

Sun 11 Jan

FREE TIME LIL LOUIS (DAY PARTY) SNEAKY PETE'S House.

Wed 14 Jan

DILF BURNS WEEKEND WINTER WARMER LA BELLE ANGELE Club.

Wed 28 Jan

SATSUMA SOUNDS SNEAKY PETE'S House.

Thu 29 Jan YBZ: SKALA SNEAKY PETE'S Bass.

Fri 30 Jan

1-800 GIRLS ALL NIGHT LONG SNEAKY PETE'S House. CALL ME MAYBE LA BELLE ANGELE Pop.

Sat 31 Jan

MAISON D'AMOUR PEOPLE'S LEISURE CLUB House and disco. HARDWARE WEE RED BAR Industrial. MUNGOS LA BELLE ANGELE Dub.

Dundee

SATURDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)

Joyous global club sounds: think Afrobeat, Latin and Arabic dancehall on repeat.

SATURDAYS (LAST OF THE MONTH)

PULSE, 23:00 The best techno DJs sit alongside The Mash House resident Darrell Pulse. Regular

Sound system and crew, part of a music and art collective specialising in BASS music.

A collaboration between longrunning club night and Edinburgh record label ft. house, techno, electro, UKG and bass.

Regular Glasgow club nights

The Rum Shack

SATURDAYS (LAST OF EVERY OTHER MONTH)

VOCAL OR VERSION, 21:00

Vintage Jamaican music on original vinyl by resident DJs and guests.

BENEATH A STEEL SKY

THE HUG AND PINT Post-metal.

TROUSDALE

ST LUKE'S Folk from LA.

SHIT & SHINE: MOTHER + K.YALO + HOLY AUSTIN + MURIEL GRAY THE OLD HAIRDRESSERS Techno and acid.

YANN TIERSEN

THE OLD FRUITMARKET Experimental from France.

Edinburgh Music

Wed 7 Jan

SCOTT LEVI JONES

THE VOODOO ROOMS Americana from Tennessee.

Thu 8 Jan

THE SWISS FAMILY ORBISON THE CAVES Pop from Scotland.

Sub Club

FRIDAYS (SECOND OF THE MONTH) RETURN TO MONO SLAM’s monthly Subbie residency sees them joined by some of the biggest names in international techno.

SATURDAYS SUBCULTURE, 23:00 Long-running house night with residents Harri & Domenic, oft’ joined by a carousel of super fresh guests.

Sun 18 Jan

NATALIE WILDGOOSE LEITH DEPOT Folk from London. TOMMY EMMANUEL CGP THE QUEEN'S HALL Rock from Australia.

Mon 19 Jan

ADAM HERON USHER HALL Classical from Glasgow.

Tue 20 Jan

ANGELFISH THE LIQUID ROOM Alt rock from Edinburgh. THE JUST JOANS WEE RED BAR Indie.

Sat 31 Jan

THE DRIFTERS

USHER HALL Rock & roll.

ANGELFISH THE LIQUID ROOM Alt rock from Edinburgh.

COWGATE BLOCK PARTY

SNEAKY PETE'S + LEGENDS + THE BONGO CLUB Eclectic lineup.

Sun 1 Feb

THE REAL MCKENZIES BANNERMANS Celtic punk from Canada.

Dundee

Music

Mon 26 Jan

CALLUM BEATTIE FAT SAMS Indie from Scotland.

Sat 31 Jan

GIMP FIST

BEAT GENERATOR LIVE! Punk rock from the UK.

RARE CLUB: SIDNEY CHARLES SUB CLUB Tech house. THUDLINE: DJ JM + NORA B2B ROY DON + DAKSH THE BERKELEY SUITE Breakbeat and electro. DEEP PURPLE: F*** Z*** LA CHEETAH CLUB Techno and acid. STUDIO STEREO Deep house, acid and techno.

Fri 30 Jan

VELOCITY & FUZED

PRESENTS: SANTØS & N|E|O ROOM 2 Techno and gabber. ENVY X EXIT PRESENT: THE CALL EXIT House and techno. 10 YEARS OF HOMETOWN SOUND SYSTEM THE ART SCHOOL Bass and dancehall. GLASTAR X STEREO: VV PETE X UTILITY STEREO Rap and club.

REDEMPTION SNEAKY PETE'S House. THE DISCO BOYS WEE RED BAR Disco and pop.

Thu 15 Jan

MIDNIGHT BASS SNEAKY PETE'S Bass.

Fri 16 Jan

HEADSET SNEAKY PETE'S Bass.

NINE LIVES WEE RED BAR Disco and funk. BPM LA BELLE ANGELE Hip-hop.

SATSUMA SOUNDS THE MASH HOUSE Dance.

Sat 17 Jan

POPULAR MUSIC SNEAKY PETE'S House.

JANUS WEE RED BAR Guaracha, baile funk, techno and disco.

DECADE LA BELLE ANGELE Pop punk.

Sun 18 Jan

Old Hairdressers HAROLD NIGHT

TUE 6 JAN

Two Glasgow Improv Theatre house teams performing The Harold. Feat. Saved By The Beep and With Bits!

HAMISH NIGHT TUE 6 JAN

Two Glasgow Improv Theatre house teams performing The Harold. Featuring tubducky and Smoking Cat.

SPREAD: UNDER THE COVERS TUE 13 JAN

Improvised comedy inspired by print media.

BOUNCE HOUSE: SOLVES EVERYTHING TUE 13 JAN

Solving all of the petty squabbles they come across with improv comedy.

Fri 9 Jan

BURNSIDE BURNERS BLUES BAND BANNERMANS Blues. VOLKA (BRASSER + HEMLOCK)

SNEAKY PETE'S Rock from Edinburgh.

Sat 10 Jan

MORTAL REMAINS (GRIEF INCARNATE +DISSOLVING ENTITY) BANNERMANS Metal from the UK. KIERAN CROSBIE (SILENCED BLUE + EVIE LAING)

SNEAKY PETE'S Pop rock from Scotland. SOUTHSIDE OF THE TRACKS 2026

THE QUEEN'S HALL Folk and roots from the UK.

Mon 12 Jan THE STONE COMBO USHER HALL Jazz from Glasgow.

Tue 13 Jan

DANIELLE NICOLE (MALINA MOYE) LA BELLE ANGELE Blues from Kansas.

Wed 14 Jan

ROSE COUSINS THE VOODOO ROOMS Singer-songwriter from Canada.

Fri 16 Jan

PAN PAN THE VOODOO ROOMS Synth pop from Greece. THE RACKETS (NERVOUS HABITS)

SNEAKY PETE'S Indie from London.

Sat 17 Jan

EARTH TO DUST (SOCIAL INSECURITY + A.V.L. + NOISEPACK)

BANNERMANS Metal from Edinburgh.

SPORTS DAY SNEAKY PETE'S Rock from Dundee.

YOWL SNEAKY PETE'S Indie rock from London.

Thu 22 Jan

NAIMA BOCK THE VOODOO ROOMS Indie from the UK. ASHLEY CAMPBELL THE VOODOO ROOMS Americana from the US.

Fri 23 Jan

TV SMITH (BILLY LIAR)

BANNERMANS Punk from the UK. SILENCED BLUE (THE LAST TIME + WIG + CORALIE)

SNEAKY PETE'S Multi-genre from Edinburgh.

Sat 24 Jan

A THOUSAND CUTS BANNERMANS Metal from the UK. THE REBEL

SNEAKY PETE'S Art punk from Edinburgh.

Glasgow Clubs

Thu 8 Jan

PEDESTRIANISM 9: KICK OFF LA CHEETAH CLUB Techno and garage.

Fri 9 Jan

CO-ACCUSED WITH LEE CEE & LAZLO THE BERKELEY SUITE Techno and acid. RUSH W/ WHEELMAN THE ART SCHOOL Techno and acid.

Sat 10 Jan

PRAY TO GOOD: REFRACTA + COBEN THE ART SCHOOL Jungle.

Thu 15 Jan

GLASSHOUSE (USER2222 + ERIN HOPES + CU-S1TH + PRL + SAIRN) STEREO Techno.

Sat 31 Jan DAIRE SWG3 House. DUNT THE BUFF CLUB House. I AM PROBABLY PERFECT STEREO Experimental club and bass.

Edinburgh Clubs

Fri 2 Jan

ALIEN DISKO: RESIDENTS ALL NIGHT THE BONGO CLUB Drum 'n' bass and techno. 2026 NEW YEAR'S LATIN DANCE WEEKENDER (PART 1) LA BELLE ANGELE Latin dance club.

Sat 3 Jan

TEMPORAL: THE 90S THE LIQUID ROOM House. 2026 NEW YEAR'S LATIN DANCE WEEKENDER (PART 1) LA BELLE ANGELE Latin dance club.

FREE TIME: ZED BIAS (DAY PARTY) SNEAKY PETE'S Garage.

Wed 21 Jan

BORLEY ROOM SNEAKY PETE'S House.

Thu 22 Jan

POTPOURRI SNEAKY PETE'S Club.

Fri 23 Jan

DISORDER PRESENTS: SULLY & ANIKONIK THE BONGO CLUB Drum 'n' bass and jungle.

LIONOIL SNEAKY PETE'S House.

CRAZY BEATS: REFRESHERS SPECIAL BOLLYWOOD NIGHT LA BELLE ANGELE Bollywood.

FRENZY THE MASH HOUSE Hard techno.

Sat 24 Jan

EPIKA SOFT: ALY P PEOPLE'S LEISURE CLUB Electro and acid. ATHENS OF THE NORTH SNEAKY PETE'S Disco.

PERFECT IMPROV: MARC JENNINGS TUE 20 JAN

Our flagship improv show with a special guest monologist and an all-star improv cast.

IMPROV FUCKTOWN TUE 20 JAN Welcome to Improv Fucktown, population: YOU! Different teams, trying different things.

COUCH SURFS THE WEB TUE 27 JAN

A night of improv comedy where Couch looks up bad reviews of places the audience have been to.

GIT IMPROV CAGE

MATCH

TUE 27 JAN

Two improv teams battle to be crowned champions of the Glasgow Improv Theatre this month. Audience decide who wins!

Edinburgh Comedy

The Queen's Hall

JUSTIN HAWKINS

RIDES AGAIN... AGAIN

SAT 24 JAN

Comedy from the frontman of The Darkness. The Edinburgh Playhouse

ROB BECKETT: GIRAFFE

THU 15 JAN

Host of Sky’s Rob Beckett’s Smart TV and Rob & Romesh Vs.

AL MURRAY: ALL YOU NEED IS GUV

SAT 17 JAN

The world's favourite pub landlord returns with his like-nobody-else Common Sense hot-takes

Monkey Barrel Comedy Club

DAVID WILLIAM BRYAN: WORK IN PROGRESS

SAT 10 JAN Hull’s 37th finest export

David William Bryan presents an hour of brand-new work in progress material.

MC HAMMERSMITH AND FRIENDS

SUN 11 JAN

Multi-award winning freestyle rap comedian MC Hammersmith presents an evening of improvised comedy raps.

SARA PASCOE: JAZZ

MON 12 JAN-WED 14 JAN

Sara’s dad has made an 18 CD Jazz interpretation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and she would like to make some jokes about that.

TONY CARROLL: THINK I'M ARS*D?

THU 15 JAN

Tony Carroll has been a standout in the comedy scene since 2010, earning a reputation as a crowd and comedian favourite.

GRACE MULVEY: WORK IN PROGRESS

FRI 16 JAN New work in progress show from BBC Galton & Simpson Bursary winner Grace Mulvey.

ROBIN MORGAN:

LET’S OVERSHARE!

SAT 17 JAN

Join Robin for more of his trademark cheeky charm, more quick wit and even more hilarious oversharing

TOM MAYHEW: DESTROY CAPITALISM

OR DIE TRYIN' (WIP)

THU 22 JAN

Tom Mayhew brings a WIP of a new show to the Monkey Barrel.

ANNA HALE: CONTROL

FREAK

SAT 24 JAN

Armed with killer punchlines and catch songs, Anna Hale delivers an upbeat hour.

SIBLINGS:

DREAMWEAVERS

SAT 31 JAN

After a sell out run at the Edinburgh Fringe 2025, award-winning character comedians Maddy and Marina Bye are back in Edinburgh.

AMANDA HURSY: CARTED

SUN 1 FEB

A hilarious show that navigates the funny side of failure.

Glasgow Theatre

CCA:

Centre for Contemporary Art

EMERGENCE 2026: MORE THAN CONQUERORS

THU 22 JAN-FRI 23 JAN

A gently comedic family drama exploring the ways our relationship with our faith can bring us together and pull us apart.

EMERGENCE 2026: THE PRINCE OF THE UNDERGROUND

THU 22 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

A blinding light and shadow duel over a forbidden prize in a silent, inherited house, blurring innocence and madness.

EMERGENCE 2026: ROCKPOOLS

THU 22 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

A darkly comic, surreal, one-woman play which uses comedy, 12 porcelain dogs and a secret room to dive into a story of female identity, fertility, hoarding and love.

EMERGENCE 2026: BIRD EATS BREAD

THU 22 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

A woman learns to live in a body that no longer feels her own. Combining music, object puppetry and multilingual text, Bird Eats Bread traces displacement, and the quiet work of repair.

EMERGENCE 2026: NUCLEAR WAR

THU 22 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

A probing, experimental collaboration between physical theatre, music, and design that asks what we mean to each other in a world that won’t stop changing.

EMERGENCE 2026: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS, QUEEN OF HEAVEN

THU 22 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

A revolutionary queer ritual where bread is shared, wine is drunk, and Biblical stories are reimagined by a transgender Jesus.

EMERGENCE 2026: THE KILLING STEEL

FRI 23 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

Over sixteen years, an ambitious young woman paints Alexander the Great as he rises from prince to king to conqueror.

EMERGENCE 2026: SAMADHI

FRI 23 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

A celestial musician, disrupts the heavens — unravelling the “model minority” myth, disrupting cosmic cycles, and daring to chase transcendence through chaos.

EMERGENCE 2026: YOU KNOW WHO

FRI 23 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

Following Toni, a young Black woman in Glasgow, as an ordinary evening reveals a deeper truth she has learned to carry.

EMERGENCE 2026: UNICORN

FRI 23 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

A modern coming-of-age sitcom episode journeys Jaz, a Black American, who is met with the horrific realization she might be the only person of colour in Scotland.

EMERGENCE 2026: HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

FRI 23 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

369 days after everyone disappeared, Jane finds another survivor. As their different approaches to the apocalypse collide, two strangers discover what it takes to be human when the world has ended.

Glasgow School of Art

EMERGENCE 2026: A PAN***IC PLAY

WED 21 JAN-THU 22 JAN

Inspired by verbatim theatre and works such as The Vagina Monologues, A Pan***ic Play shares the real, lived experiences of everyday people during the COVID-19 pandemic through the voice of one actor.

The King's Theatre

FAWLTY TOWERS: THE PLAY

TUE 13 JAN-SAT 17 JAN

One of Britain's most classic sitcoms gets the stage treatment.

MATTHEW BOURNE'S THE RED SHOES

TUE 27 JAN-SAT 31 JAN

Magical adaptation of the legendary Powell and Pressburger film by legendary choreographer.

Theatre Royal SCOTTISH BALLET: THE SNOW QUEEN

SAT 3 JAN-SAT 17 JAN

A lavish production of the winter classic with music from Rimsky-Korsakov. THE WOMAN IN BLACK

SAT 20 JAN-FRI 24 JAN

One of theatre's most chilling plays, this classic Gothic horror has been terrifying audiences for decades.

Edinburgh

Theatre

Festival

Theatre

JACK AND THE BEANSTALK

SAT 13 DEC-SUN 11 JAN

Jack climbs a beanstalk of enormous proportions in this Christmas panto.

Royal Lyceum

Theatre

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

TUE 20 JAN-SAT 24 JAN

An ode to hope against the odds based on the acclaimed film, in turn based on the acclaimed Stephen King novel.

The Edinburgh Playhouse

FAWLTY TOWERS: THE PLAY

TUE 27 JAN-SAT 31 JAN

One of Britain's most classic sitcoms gets the stage treatment.

Glasgow

Art

Compass

Gallery

THE WINTER SHOW 2025

SAT 6 DEC-SAT 31 JAN

A mixed seasonal show of paintings, drawings, prints, ceramics, glass and sculptures featuring works by a selection of Scottish modern masters, contemporaries and recent graduates.

Glasgow Women's

Library

MARTHA ORBACH: TO BUILD A HOME

THU 30 OCT-SAT 28 MAR

An exhibition about homemaking amidst the climate crisis, using domestic waste and debris as building material.

CHLOE AUSTIN:

DARLING

DIAPHANOUS

SAT 6 DEC-SAT 28 MAR

Poetic meditations on queer feminist archives, intimacy, and the act of writing as touch act as a love letter to the library's lesbian archive.

GoMA

JOHN AKOMFRAH: MIMESIS: AFRICAN

SOLDIER

SAT 26 OCT-MON 20 APR

A film installation from acclaimed artist exploring the significant contribution of over six million African, Caribbean and South Asian people from across former colonies who fought and died in World War I.

THE MILKY WAY

SAT 13 SEP-FRI 9 JAN

Part of a touring exhibition looking at the culture of infant feeding in public spaces.

STILL GLASGOW

SAT 29 NOV-SUN 13 JUN

An extensive exhibition using photography to look at Glasgow's past and present.

South Block

CATHERINE

LILY MEARNS: INTERPRETATIONS

SAT 13 DEC-MON 26 JAN

Mixed media looking at expressions of subjectivity by RSA x Wasps Award Winner 2024.

Street Level

Photoworks

NATIONHOOD:

MEMORY AND HOPE

SAT 1 NOV-SUN 8 FEB

A group exhibition celebrating the diversity of the UK.

The Briggait

KRZYSZTOF

AUGUSTYN: RIVERS

WED 7 JAN-WED 14 JAN

An immersive exhibition tracing a river’s journey through animated paintings, an original score, and visual art.

The Modern Institute

LEWIS MILLER: A DOLL'S ROOM

FRI 7 NOV-WED 14 JAN

Models of domestic and interior life explore ideas of social convention, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.

WILLIAM E JONES: IT ONLY LOOKS AS IF IT HURTS

FRI 7 NOV-WED 14 JAN 16mm advertising films from the 1960s scratched over and handpainted explore the materiality of commercial products.

CHRIS JOHANSON

FRI 7 NOV-WED 14 JAN

A new suite of paintings made from reclaimed materials evoke feelings of harmony and peace.

Tramway

LEAP THEN LOOK: PLAY INTERACT EXPLORE

SAT 27 SEP-MON 11 MAY

An exhibition of interactive artworks created by artists Lucy Cran and Bill Leslie.

RAE-YEN SONG

WED 15 OCT-MON 24 AUG

Glasgow artist transforms Tramway’s vast gallery space into a sub-aquatic world, which serves simultaneously as a spectacle, a memorial and a refuge.

Edinburgh Art

&Gallery

PAPER TRAILS

SAT 10 JAN-SAT 31 JAN

A focused selection of works on paper by the gallery's artists.

City Art Centre

MICHAEL FULLERTON

SAT 22 NOV-SUN 1 MAR

A new body of paintings by Glasgow-born artist, as well as prints and works selected from the City Art Centre Collections.

Dovecot

Studios

IKEA: MAGICAL PATTERNS

FRI 18 JUL-SAT 17 JAN

An innovative exhibition exploring six decades of textile design by IKEA and the development of interior design.

PICKING UP THE THREAD: THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF TAPESTRY

MON 20 OCT-FRI 14 FEB

68 artists from nine countries present over 90 tapestries in The British Tapestry Group’s celebration of its 20th anniversary.

DRAWING ON STYLE: ORIGINAL FASHION ILLUSTRATION

SAT 10 JAN-SAT 11 APR

Original fashion illustratons from the 1960s and 1970s.

Fruitmarket

JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE

SMITH: WILDING

FRI 7 NOV-SUN 1 FEB

The first posthumous exhibition in a public gallery or museum of the work of the artist, activist, curator and enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation.

Ingleby Gallery

WINSTON ROETH

SAT 31 JAN-SAT 28 MAR

Abstract paintings by American artist making incredible use of colour, shape and texture.

Jupiter Artland

GEORG WILSON: THE EARTH EXHALES

SAT 11 OCT-SUN 1 MAR

Folkloric, eerie paintings imagining a wild natural landscape untouched by humanity, and the inherent autonomy of the nonhuman.

TAI SHANI: THE SPELL OR THE DREAM

SAT 11 OCT-TUE 1 SEP

A new sculpture by Turner-prize winning artist, in which a luminous giant figures lies and breathes gently in Jupiter Artland's orchard space.

Open Eye

Gallery

OLIVIA IRVINE: FIGMENT

FRI 9 JAN-SAT 31 JAN

Debut solo show with Open Eye Gallery for the SSA exhibition prize winner.

THE EDINBURGH ROOM

FRI 9 JAN-SAT 31 JAN

A collection of works reflecting each artist's unique take on our majestic city.

Regular Glasgow comedy nights

The Stand

Glasgow

FIRST MONDAY OF THE MONTH

MONDAY NIGHT IMPROV, 20:30

Host Billy Kirkwood & guests act entirely on your suggestions.

TUESDAYS RED RAW, 20:30

Legendary new material night with up to 8 acts.

FRIDAYS THE FRIDAY SHOW, 20:30

The big weekend show with four comedians.

SATURDAYS THE SATURDAY SHOW, 20:30

The big weekend show with four comedians.

Glee Club

FRIDAYS FRIDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00

The perfect way to end the working week, with four superb stand-up comedians.

SATURDAYS SATURDAY NIGHT COMEDY, 19:00

An evening of awardwinning comedy, with four superb stand-up comedians that will keep you laughing until Monday.

Regular Edinburgh comedy nights

The Stand

Edinburgh

MONDAYS RED RAW, 20:30

Legendary new material night with up to 8 acts.

TUESDAYS (FIRST OF THE MONTH)

STU & GARRY’S IMPROV SHOW, 20:30

The Stand’s very own Stu & Garry’s make comedy cold from suggestions.

THURSDAYS THE THURSDAY SHOW, 20:00

Simply the best comics on the contemporary Scottish circuit.

FRIDAYS THE FRIDAY SHOW, 21:00

The big weekend show with four comedians.

SATURDAYS THE SATURDAY SHOW (THE EARLY SHOW), 17:00

A slightly earlier performance of the big weekend show with four comedians.

SATURDAYS THE SATURDAY SHOW, 20:30

The big weekend show with four comedians.

Monkey Barrel Comedy Club

SECOND AND THIRD TUESDAY OF EVERY MONTH

THE EDINBURGH REVUE, 19:00

The University of Edinburgh’s Comedy Society, who put on sketch and stand-up comedy shows every two weeks.

WEDNESDAYS TOP BANANA, 19:00

Catch the stars of tomorrow today in Monkey Barrel’s new act night every Wednesday.

THURSDAYS

BEST OF THE FRINGE, 19:00 + 21:00

Four acts every Thursday take to the stage to try out new material.

FRIDAYS MONKEY BARREL COMEDY’S BIG FRIDAY SHOW, 19:00/21:00 Monkey Barrel’s flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.

SATURDAYS MONKEY BARREL COMEDY’S BIG SATURDAY SHOW, 17:00/19:00/21:00 Monkey Barrel’s flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.

Royal Botanic Gardens

Edinburgh

FUNGI SESSIONS

SAT 2 AUG-SUN 11 JAN

The premiere of Edinburghborn composer Hannah Read’s albums The Fungi Sessions Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 as an audiovisual installation.

RSA: Royal Scottish Academy

TURNER IN JANUARY

THU 1 JAN-SAT 31 JAN

The annual display of Turner's striking watercolours comes out once more.

NATURE TURNS

SAT 6 DEC-SUN 18 JAN

Bringing together painting, print, drawing, photography and sculpture, this exhibition explores solace in the natural world.

ORIGIN STORIES

SAT 24 JAN-SUN 8 MAR

Exploring the web of artistic relationships that have manifested through the evolution of art teaching in Scotland.

GENERATION

SAT 24 JAN-SUN 8 MAR

Curated by Richard Murphy RSA OBE, this exhibition explores the idea of the architectural family tree and creative legacies.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

RESISTANCE: HOW PROTEST SHAPED BRITAIN AND PHOTOGRAPHY

SHAPED PROTEST

SAT 21 JUN-SUN 4 JAN

An unmissable exhibition conceived by acclaimed artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen.

Scottish Portrait Gallery

ALFRED BUCKHAM: DAREDEVIL

PHOTOGRAPHER

SAT 18 OCT-SUN 19 APR

Take to the skies in this extraordinary exhibition looking at the life and work of the pioneering 20th-century aerial photographer.

Stills Gallery

FELICITY HAMMOND: VARIATIONS V4: REPOSITORY

FRI 7 NOV-SAT 7 FEB

Staged in four venues across the UK, this exhibition is an evolving installation exploring the relationship between geological mining and data mining, image-making and machine learning.

SUNDAYS

MONKEY BARREL COMEDY’S BIG SUNDAY SHOW, 19:00/21:00 Monkey Barrel’s flagship night of premier stand-up comedy.

The Gilded Saloon FRIDAYS (EXCEPT LAST), 20:00 THE COMEDY SHOW Mixed bill comedy lineup. LAST FRIDAY OF THE MONTH 19:30 AND 21:00 STORY PLATFORM Comedy sketch show with local comedians.

SUNDAYS (FIRST AND THIRD), 19:00 HOT COMEDY Mixed-bill of stand-up comedy with a focus on inclusivity.

SECOND THURSDAY OF THE MONTH, 20:00

ROBIN GRAINGER'S SPECIALIST SUBJECT Mixed-bill of stand-up comedy and live podcast. LAST THURSDAY OF THE MONTH, 20:00 GARETH MUTCH Mixed bill comedy lineup.

Rice Gallery

THE CHILDREN ARE NOW SAT 25 OCT-SAT 7 FEB

Examining the relationship between children and the structural global challenges we face, this group exhibition draws on imaginative practice to articulate patterns in history.

Dundee

Art

DCA: Dundee Contemporary Arts

LAUREN GAULT: BONE STONE VOICE ALONE SAT 25 OCT-SUN 18 JAN

Sculpture, print, sound and moving image using the mythological figure of Echo to investigate the land of Tayside and beyond.

V&A Dundee

GARDEN FUTURES: DESIGNING WITH NATURE SAT 17 MAY-SAT 25 JAN

Bringing together artists and thinkers such as Derek Jarman and Jamaica Kincaid, this exhibition looks at the politics and aesthetics of the modern garden.

DESIGN HOPES: FROM HOPE TO HEALTH

THU 2 OCT-SUN 8 FEB

Exploring how healthcare systems can build towards a healthier planet.

The Skinny On... Alan Cumming

Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s Artistic Director looks forward to a busy year by taking on our Q&A

What’s your favourite place to visit and why?

Scotland. Always Scotland. Even though I live here and I have travelled around so much, I still get so excited about the new places to discover and the beauty I have yet to see.

Favourite food and why?

Mushy peas. I’m just obsessed with them. I think it’s because I love the high and the low: you can get mushy peas in a corner chip shop and in the swankiest restaurants. Mushy peas are the most egalitarian food there is! And the most delicious!

Favourite colour and why?

Yellow. I just love how it changes with the light at different times of day. And it’s so happy. It doesn’t look good on me though, and so I never wear yellow clothes, much as I would like to. But I have many yellow walls, and even a yellow fridge and cooker!

Who was your hero growing up?

I didn’t have one. I think that’s perhaps why I have always been pretty resourceful. As a child I had to make up my own mind about things and not assume others would inspire or help me.

Whose work inspires you now?

There’s a guy I follow on instagram called Josh Donaldson (@earthdr0p) who goes around Scotland picking up litter from forests and does these amazing inspiring posts about it. People who are selfless and giving back, they are who have always inspired me.

What’s your all time favourite album?

The Kick Inside by Kate Bush. It came out in 1978 when I was 13 and it made me realise I was not alone in being different and arty and weird. So it has a special place in my heart in terms of self-awareness and confidence as well as being a beautiful piece of music.

What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen?

Don’t want to say. I was in it!

Who’s the worst?

All the Republicans who are appalled at Trump but say and do nothing. History will not treat them well.

When did you last cry?

The other day, at work. I’ve been crying a lot recently because I’m shooting TipToe, new Russell T Davies series, and it is really intense and I have a lot of teary scenes. It’s actually quite cathartic to have a cry in front of a whole crew.

What are you most scared of?

People turning a blind eye to fascism, and violence and bigotry. So my worst fears are coming true right now.

When did you last vomit and why?

I got food poisoning about a year ago when I was in Napa, and had to stay in my bedroom for days and miss all the wine tours and deliciousness. I suppose I lost a few pounds though.

Tell us a secret?

I have never had wisdom teeth. Make of that what you will.

Which celebrity could you take in a fight?

I had a boxing teacher in New York who was looking very pissed off one day when I came for a lesson. When I asked him why he said he had seen a boxing-themed rap song video with loads of rappers pretending to box, and he was furious about how bad they were. I asked who was the worst and he replied it was Drake. “You could take Drake,” he continued. So there you have it. My former boxing teacher thinks I could take Drake!

What’s your favourite plant?

I have an aloe vera plant that one of my neighbours in my old flat in Edinburgh gave me and it has survived several moves and long periods of neglect but has always rallied and is now in my cottage in Pitlochry and is looking better than ever.

What are you most looking forward to in 2026?

To having all of my plans for Pitlochry Festival Theatre come to fruition, and to spending practically the whole year in Scotland

What’s in and what’s out?

Kindness, openness, transparency are in. Undermining, obstruction and gaslighting are out!

Who would you most like to wreak revenge upon?

I believe in karma, so no need for me to do anything. Also it’s giving them or it too much oxygen and energy.

Out in the Hills Festival runs at Pitlochry Festival Theatre from 16-18 Jan

The Pitlochry Festival Theatre Season 2026 runs from May-Dec 2026. For tickets and info visit pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com