Here is truth that we need to hear and confront in this viral age. Gordon Munro finds it in new work by Ben Okri and Marianne Faithfull
music
You’ve changed: a playlist for life
What I love, still, more than anything, is a message from a friend saying ‘hey – you might like this’. Craig Angus shares
On the threshold: songs and poems for a Covid-safe Christmas
Covid has closed the doors at least for now. But, there’s death-defying joy in Michael Marra’s song, a lockdown escape to be played loud and long. Here’s Frida Kahlo cutting an intoxicatingly exotic dash dancing to Perdido among the locals in the singer’s favourite bar.
Voices for humanity: Max Richter’s quiet protest
‘If we get back to public performance in time the piece is tailor made to open next year’s Edinburgh International Festival – at its source is the same inspiration that reached out a hand to the vanquished of the Second World War and also led to the creation of the first festival in 1947. It would be apt too given that Max Richter studied at Edinburgh University’.
Songs for our time
From Scotland to Canada, four musicians and an artist came together during lockdown to create a song to raise funds for Medecins Sans Frontieres, to help the worlds most vulnerable people.
In praise of the album: #SAYAward
Why make an album now? Craig Angus celebrates the longform and the Scottish Album of the Year for upholding it.
Pop Matters – in and out of lockdown
Craig Angus explores the lines between pop, politics and using art to both escape from, and make sense of a fractured world. Meet the makers of Pop Matters workshops: Maria Sledmere and Conner Milleken
Katie Lynch: Ventures in lockdown
“The arts, like everything, have absolutely fallen victim to capitalism. The ‘product’ of artists ripped from them while people in charge decide its value.”
We’re all islanders in a pandemic
In retrospect it seems eerily prophetic. Those faces framed in small screens, distant voices interconnecting in the ether. Yet that’s not really it. What interests Giles Perring is something simpler, but more profound than a Zoom event.
Declan Welsh: Ventures in lockdown
‘Feeling helpless, isolated, scared, alone, trapped, nostalgic, missing people, missing the pub: these are all feelings we will always feel. Except for maybe the pub bit. My songwriting tends to be really misty eyed over that communal drinking with friends thing anyway. Now that’s gone into overdrive.’