Updated Senior police officer denies wrongdoing as he is suspended amid criminal investigation
ONE of Scotland’s most senior police officers has been suspended after an investigation into a “number of criminal and misconduct allegations.”
How Scottish music is winning a place on the global map
BACK in the days when I worked as a journalist, I spent a memorable night in Paris interviewing Texas before they took to the stage to promote their album The Conversation. What struck me wasn’t that Sharleen Spiteri and the boys were on particularly top form (they were) or that the singer was honest and forthright on this, that and the other (she was). It was the tangible love that this French audience felt for a band from Glasgow, so relatively far from home – a love that had remained true for more than 20 years.
The island life and political perspective of Kris Drever
QUARFF, on the South Mainland of Shetland, is a remote spot by anyone’s standards. Walk for a few minutes to the east, and you’ll be gazing out across the North Sea. Walk for a few minutes to the west, and you’ll be dipping your toes in the Atlantic. It’s a narrow stretch of the islands, with only one road running north to south. But, if Kris Drever’s Twitter timeline is anything to go by, there’s no problem getting a broadband connection up here.
Drever in Lau-Land
When Kris Drever released his debut solo album, Dark Water, in 2006, it was still early days for Lau, the folk trio he plays with alongside fiddler Aidan O’Rourke and accordionist Martin Green. Already an acclaimed session musician and collaborator, he’d formed the band in 2005 but it would be two years after that before Lau released an album of their own, Lightweights And Gentlemen.
Celtic Connections review: Lucinda Williams at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
A WAIL of electric blues guitar greeted Lucinda Williams when she stepped onto the Celtic Connections stage, and that pretty much set the tone for a gig that at times rocked harder than anything you’d expect from someone with a country background who turns 63 next Tuesday.
Celtic Connections review: Admiral Fallow at Mackintosh Church, Glasgow
Last year’s album Tiny Rewards showed how Admiral Fallow were ready to expand from their indie-folk origins and embrace a more compositional process of writing and recording music.
Top 10 Scottish EPs of 2015
Not only Scottish Album No 3 with The Waltz Of Modern Psychiatry but top of the Scottish EPs list courtesy of the final of four shorter but no less ambitious records released over a 13-month spread. The Glasgow hip hop band are at their most melodic – but also most socially cutting – on cautionary tale They Made A Porno On A Mobile Phone… and music industry invective Empty Jackets.
Top 10 Scottish classical albums
1 Dunedin Consort Bach: Magnificat (Linn) Great scholarship and tremendous musicality ensure the top spot here, as John Butt reconstructs Bach’s seasonal offering within its original liturgical setting. This is how the work would have been presented in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig in 1723, with organ music, hymns and the Christmas Cantata 63. This Linn recording, made in Greyfriars Kirk, has so much atmosphere you’d swear you were sitting on the front pew.
