Seeing people singing with others will get me every time. Especially if those people are giving it everything they’ve got, eyes forward, chin up, chests out and demanding to be heard. I found my own voice through singing with others. I wasn’t bullied as a teenager, but I did get the piss ripped out of […]
Cultural Adviser Tom Campbell and Guardian writer Homa Khaleeli published a piece in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago asking questions around exploitation, under-representation in the cultural sector. The piece touched on a number of issues that I’m often on my mind: the changing nature of internships, how dependent arts marketers are on programming […]
West Nile Street runs through the City Centre from Cowcaddens in the north, to Argyle Street at the heart of the city. On a good day, I can do the length of it in one pedal revolution on my bike on my way to work from the west end to the Gorbals. Those days are […]
A long night, but here we are. Labour lost that election all by themselves. Even if all the SNP seats – all of the Scottish seats – the overall outcome of yesterday’s election would still stand. If they’d spent less time dismissing the SNP and more time dismantling Cameron’s – promises? – things might look […]
When are Better Together going to start telling us what the consequences of a ‘no’ vote will be? The news this morning is that Prime Minister David Cameron is declining to take part in a televised debate with First Minister Alex Salmond. Instead, Salmond should be debating with Alistair Darling, chair of the Better Together […]
A few months ago, I was walking to my place of work, the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, behind a group of young boys, behaving with the same levels of bravado and cockiness you would expect from boys aged 10 – 13 the world over. As they started pushing one boy towards the door of the […]
I’m very pro-Christmas. It’s a week until Christmas and I’m using up one of my days of annual leave sitting on a coach on my way to sing in a concert in Aberdeen because I think it’s a nice thing to share with others. I’ve been making and ordering presents since the end of October. […]
ENO have launched a big sparkly audience engagement campaign today titled: ENO Undress As well as a good value ticket (good thing), information about the opera available before the event (good thing) and the production in a pre-performance event (good thing), they’re going in pretty heavy with how laid back and relaxed Undress events will […]
Last week I went to the BBC SSO’s performance of Act 1 of Tristan and Isolde which was really astonishing. I’ve always had reservations about attending a concert performance of opera and always feel like I’m missing some of the key parts of what’s going on. Not here. Perhaps because pretty much all of the […]
I went to the theatre last week to see some new opera. I didn’t really enjoy it. To me, the most epic and universal human drama came at the end of the evening when the theatre staff were ushering out the last remaining members of the (extremely small) audience. A man I assume to have […]
