And he’s not the only one to get his break at the Stand Comedy Club in Edinburgh, which is about to mark its 15th year

When Frankie Boyle wanted to get started as a comedian, he showed up at the door of the Stand Comedy Club in Edinburgh and asked for a slot that night. “I remember this lanky, speccy guy coming down the stairs in quite an animated fashion,” says Tommy Sheppard, who had started running comedy nights in a basement bar a few months earlier.

“Trying to sound all professional, I said to him, ‘No, you can’t just turn up on the night. That’s not how it works.’ He told me he had 12 mates upstairs and they’d all pay the ticket price, I was sold. The lure of 12 paying punters made me amend all my principles — he was on the bill that night.”

 That was in 1995. These days, you can’t throw a brick without it landing on something broadcasting Boyle or advertising his latest book or comedy tour.

In the past 15 years, Sheppard has helped to launch the careers of plenty of comics. Household names such as Dara O Briain, Jimmy Carr, Johnny Vegas and Michael McIntyre all played some of their earliest stand-up gigs in one of Sheppard’s tiny venues. Even now, high calibre acts such as Daniel Kitson insist on performing their Edinburgh Fringe shows at the Stand.

“You’ve got to remember, it started out as a hobby for my partner and me,” says Sheppard, who now sells 100,000 tickets a year for comedy gigs at his two venues in Edinburgh and Glasgow, featuring more than 600 performers.

When the Stand opened a dedicated, seven-nights-a-week comedy club in Edinburgh’s York Place in 1998, it was the first of its kind in Scotland. Other stand-up nights were held in pubs or arts venues but, beyond the Fringe, there was no hub where the comedy community could base itself or venue where performers could hone their material in front of a regular crowd.

“I’d lived in London during the early 1980s, and had seen that first wave of modern stand-up comedy. I saw Julian Clary doing his Joan Collins Fan Club bit in some tiny room above a bar, or Jo Brand when she was just starting out. These places seemed to be combining very theatrical, alternative comedy performances, but in these informal venues. I really enjoyed that.”

Moving back to Scotland in the 1990s, Sheppard was surprised to discover that there were no equivalent venues here.

“Even then, with the Edinburgh Fringe being the biggest showcase of stand-up comedy in the world in August,” he recalls, “come September 1, all that was left were the tatty posters flaking off the walls. It was weird how it went from such a huge comedy scene to nothing overnight. That really shocked me.”

Sheppard and his girlfriend at the time, Jane McKay, began running comedy nights at WJ Christie’s bar in West Port, Edinburgh, in 1995. They wanted to provide a platform for emerging Scottish comedians, as well as a place for people, just like them, who enjoyed comedy “that looks at the world from a slightly different perspective”.

Describing himself and McKay as a “pair of old lefties”, Sheppard says the pair were determined that the comedy venture would be run fairly.

“There’s always been a desire to treat people decently,” says Sheppard, who was deputy general secretary of the Scottish Labour party from 1994 to 1997. “It’s important to build an organisation that is a win-win for everyone.”

That means punters are charged a reasonable ticket price, bar prices are low, the staff are paid fairly and fledgling performers, rather than being asked to produce the cash upfront for their debut Fringe runs, have their costs covered by Sheppard and the club.

“I can’t stand these venues that want to put the financial risk on to the backs of the performers,” says Sheppard, who also helps to organise the Glasgow International Comedy Festival in March, in his capacity as director of the Scottish Comedy Agency. The agency has produced recent big-name tours, featuring comedians Rory Bremner, Ross Noble and Fred MacAulay.

“If Tommy’s booked you and Tommy likes you, there must be, hopefully, something about you that’s unique and entertaining.”

“When we bring along a new act, we want to give them a break,” he says. “Financially, we hope to break even with them, but we would never want to turn things into a sordid marketing exercise or a giant corporate effort, that’s not what we’re about.” From a performer’s point of view, Sheppard’s attitude is a refreshing one. “You know, after 20 years in the comedy industry, that ethos is pretty unique,” says the comedian Paul Sneddon, who performs under the comedy aliases of Vladimir McTavish and Bob Doolally. “Trust me, there are some real s**** in this business.”

Sneddon, who will compere a BBC Scotland radio programme about the club next month, rounds up opinions from Stand veterans including Stewart Lee, Bruce Morton, Des Clarke, Miles Jupp and Johnny Vegas.

Jupp, who has gone on to appear as a government press officer in the BBC satire The Thick of It, made his first tentative steps into comedy when he attended the Stand’s Sunday afternoon comedy workshops. Vegas, who Sheppard insists gave some of the club’s best ever live performances in the 1990s, filmed his first live DVD at the Stand.

In fact, Sheppard was so supportive of the nascent talent of Vegas, who had studied art and ceramic design at Middlesex University, that he exhibited some of the comedian’s pottery in an exhibition at the Stand club in Edinburgh shortly after it opened in March 1998.

“I suppose we’re a bit like a dysfunctional family,” says Sheppard. “For a while in the early days, our flat was like a really badly run B&B. Johnny [Vegas] used to sleep in our spare room, and there were times when three performers would be living with us in our two-bedroom place in Gladstone Terrace.”

On one occasion, Sheppard and McKay had gone on a trip to London, leaving their flat in the care of up-and-coming Frankie Boyle, who needed a place to crash for a few weeks.

As Boyle describes in his autobiography, My Shit Life So Far, the couple came home to find him blatantly disregarding McKay’s no smoking request.

“Eh, it wasn’t so much the smoking thing that was a problem,” says Sheppard. “I think it was more the ‘don’t shag the staff’ rule that he was breaking. We’d come home earlier than planned, to find the flat in a real mess and we saw Frankie coming out of our bedroom, looking very, very sheepish.”

Building up close relationships with performers, as well as with the regular gig-going crowds in Glasgow and Edinburgh, means Sheppard has developed an unmatched reputation for providing quality comedy in Scotland.

“As a result, the [Stand] audience comes in with very high expectations, but with very high expectations for all the right reasons,” says Vegas.

“If Tommy’s booked you and Tommy likes you, there must be, hopefully, something about you that’s unique and entertaining. It’s pretty symbiotic between Tommy, the acts and the audience. We’re all striving for the same thing, which is unique stand-up.”

In the face of comedy chains, where lowest-common denominator gags pull in the stag and hen night crowds, the Stand remains a venture run with principles and an eye for the next big thing in comedy. As the stand-up Susan Morrison puts it: “It’s not that there was never any talent in Scotland before; there just wasn’t any shop window, and now there is.”

No Going Back, BBC Radio Scotland, January 4, 11.30am

The List

Anticipating the annual landslide of pap music that descends round about Jesus’ birthday, and inspired by the Saddle Creek Christmas album, Avalanche Records commissioned a non-rubbish collection of Christmas songs, with no child choirs or festive raps anywhere to be found.

Local indie and folk darlings were enlisted, and Meursault, Withered Hand, Broken Records and Zoey Van Goey are among the artists who donated specially recorded tracks. Fence’s Pictish Trail drops a catchy chorus of ‘hallelujahs’, backed by gentle guitars and soft electronica; Zoey Van Goey pay tribute to the title of Twilight Sad’s debut EP, on ‘In Scotland it Never Snowed, In Canada it Did’, and Ballboy’s Gordon MacIntyre collaborates with Maja Mangard on the awesomely quirky spoken-word musing, ‘Atoms’. The 80s electro and vocoder singalong of X-Lion Tamer’s exhilarating, yet deliberately un-festive ‘Little Drum Machine Boy’ is another highlight.

(Avalanche Records)

Go here to read a review of a Fuck Buttons gig that I did for Amelia’s Magazine. There are some (quite fuzzy) photos that I took on the night up there too.

I love the video for Surf Solar too - check it oot.

The List
2 December 2009

Setting the template for art-rock, and showcasing their ineffable cool in the process, Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled debut was a turning point for Scottish music. Claire Sawers asks Malcolm Ross of highly influential bands including Josef K and Orange Juice to explain the album’s significance

The slim, shiny ties. The side parts. The cardigans. Those first fifty seconds before ‘Take Me Out’ changes tempo – from jangly, indie guitars into a throbbing, suave, Scotpop anthem. Wherever you were in the first fortnight of 2004, chances are, if you were near an open car window, or a switched-on telly, you were listening to Franz Ferdinand.

Their break-out single ‘Take Me Out’ announced the arrival of ‘the archdukes of cool’, an art-rock four-piece from Glasgow. After meeting at Glasgow School of Art, Alex Kapranos (lead vocals and guitar), Bob Hardy (bass), Nick McCarthy (keyboards and backing vocals) and Paul Thomson (drums and backing vocals) blended louche but debonair style with melodic, chart bothering charm.

Malcolm Ross remembers seeing them for the first time on TV. ‘I was fed up of a lot of bands by then,’ says Ross, who began his career in the ’80s, playing guitar in seminal Scottish bands Josef K, Orange Juice and Aztec Camera. Releasing music through the cult Glasgow indie label Postcard Recordings, Ross was part of an influential set of performers who shared the label motto, ‘The Sound of Young Scotland’.

‘A lot of pop this decade just sounded like people throwing mud at a wall,’ shrugs Ross. ‘If you did it long enough, eventually something would stick. But I heard ‘Take Me Out’ and that, I thought, that was a good song.

‘There was something stylish about them. Witty. They did things with a lot of intelligence. I never ever got Belle & Sebastian I’m afraid, and Mogwai went straight over my head. But Franz Ferdinand, they really did it for me.’

The eponymous album from which ‘Take Me Out’ was taken bulldozed its way into the British, American and Australian charts. It produced three top ten singles with ‘Take Me Out’, ‘The Dark of the Matinee’ and ‘This Fire’, and quickly gathered a clutch of awards – two BRITs, an Ivor Novello, the NME’s album of the year, and 2004’s Mercury Prize.

‘I think they just had the package,’ explains Ross. ‘There was the technical competence on the album – bringing in Tore Johansson [producer of The Cardigans, A-ha and A Camp]; that was a masterstroke. Plus Franz Ferdinand love their art references – on the album sleeves, in lyrics, across their videos. You always got the sense that those ideas were really coming from the band members – as opposed to a svengali manager, or some camp stylist in the background.’

And how did it feel to Ross when Franz Ferdinand outed themselves as massive Josef K fans, also citing Orange Juice as a major influence?

‘Well, it was all vaguely flattering,’ he laughs. ‘To me, visually they definitely have a similarity to Postcard bands of the ‘80s, but musically, I think they’re somewhere between Josef K, who were always more edgy and dark, and Orange Juice, at the poppier end of things. I could hear synthpop sounds of Ultravox, or the post-punk of The Monochrome Set in there too.’

In a decade where Ross also enjoyed The Arctic Monkeys (‘That had such drive!’), Babyshambles and The Libertines (‘After all the hype, I found myself enjoying it despite myself’), he thinks Franz Ferdinand’s debut effort sums up the noughties sound. ‘There’s a real precision to the production – technically, they can craft great songs, with no boring verses, or album fillers. There’s an energy to it, and maybe they’ll never match it again, but that was a recognisably good album. A classic.’

www.franzferdinand.co.uk

The List

This year’s Merriweather Post Pavilion left a lot of Animal Collective fans thirsty for more. All those summery, melted hooks, the warped beats and echoey vocals, not forgetting the shimmery awesomeness of ‘My Girls’ – it was no wonder it made its way onto a lot of peoples’ lists of favourite albums of 2009 (including The List’s for that matter). So riding high on the wave that saw them crash into mainstream popularity this year (they’ve been on the go all decade long, but 2009 definitely seems to have been their moment for a breakthrough) – they return, with another release before the year’s over.

Fall Be Kind is a ‘leftovers’ EP, containing five tracks that didn’t make it on to MPP. Those who didn’t like them before won’t be converted by the wonky, dreamy electronica, and for fans it’s another solid chunk of goodness. Play it on iTunes, and it comes up with the genre ‘unclassifiable’, which is a good sum-up of the sublime, bleached out haze of stand-out track, ‘What Would I Want? Sky’ and the demented Disney lullaby of ‘Graze’.

An ephemeral, trippy treat. And something to keep fans happy until the band premiere their first film, the ‘visual album’ ODDSAC in late January at Sundance.
(Domino)

The Sunday Times
06 December 2009

The Brooklyn-based choreographer Mark Morris has helped create a ‘Scottish Riverdance’ a Dance Base in Edinburgh

Morag Deyes remembers when she met Mark Morris. What they said is bit of a blur. They had a few drinks and she vaguely remembers him liking her chandelier-sized earrings. What she does recall, though, is that something clicked. “We just got on,” she says, shrugging. “There’s something slightly under the surface about having conversations with creative people; you can be talking about the weather, or the wallpaper, but there’s an underlying understanding. It’s almost like flirting; there’s all sorts of other signals going on.”

Realising they each seemed to “get” what the other one wanted in dance, Deyes, the artistic director of Dance Base in Edinburgh, invited Mark Morris, the Brooklyn-based choreographer who wowed crowds at the Edinburgh International Festival six years in a row, to be the company’s artistic patron. He said yes. That was almost 10 years ago, and the pair have been friends since.

He, a gay, virtuoso dancer turned choreographer, with as much of a reputation for his envelope-pushing modern dance as his sense of humour; she, a fun-loving champion of Scottish dance, who blows a raspberry at anything too stuffy or earnest. Both have created hubs for world-class dance. Deyes runs the glass-walled shell of Dance Base on the Grassmarket, and Morris has his state-of-the-art New York studios. They use their centres to make dance something that can be enjoyed, if not by everybody, then at least by anybody.

So when Deyes began dreaming up a Scottish Hogmanay dance show to end all Hogmanay dance shows, she knew who to call. She wanted Morris to create a work for Off Kilter, a colourful, irreverent mash-up of hip-hop, ballet, Highland and Indian dance. The show needed to reflect the energy and diversity of Scotland’s dance scene.

“So Mark asks me if I know Beethoven’s Scottish folk songs. I’d never even heard of them,” she laughs. “Seemingly, Beethoven set quite a few of Robert Burns’s poems to music. I had to be told that by someone sitting in Brooklyn.”

Morris had wanted an excuse to use the songs since hearing them “maybe 30 years ago”. “I’ve actually always wanted to choreograph them. When Morag called, I thought of them immediately,” he says. “The Burns song we’re doing at the end is very gorgeous.” Called The Lovely Lass of Inverness, it’s a story of a girl whose family is massacred in a battle at Drumossie Moor.

Doesn’t that seem a bit maudlin for a new year’s celebration? “Oh, everyone cries around the holidays,” he replies. “There’s a drinking song in there too.”

Morris’s show will last about 15 minutes and is one of nine different sections in Off Kilter, which Deyes describes as a “brilliant night out, a bit like a dance talent show”.

The common thread is Scotland, but maybe not as we know it. In one section, called Innit Anat, the Highland dance choreographer Frank McConnell and hip-hop dance company Freshmess fuse their styles. “Their vocabularies are completely different,” explains Deyes. “But put the two together and you get this sort of house-party-meets-ceilidh.”

Scottish Ballet’s artistic director, Ashley Page, has been enlisted to create a piece around the offbeat, witty music of Ivor Cutler. And in an aerial dance segment, performed on silks suspended from the ceiling, a dancer will evoke the mythical darkness of the Highlands. “I like the dark underbelly and gothic weirdness of the Highlands,” says Deyes. “That kind of peat-bog sprite thing; the slight spookiness of Scotland.”

Scottish football gets a look-in with Gemmill’s Goal, a performance by male dancers, who rework Archie Gemmill’s moves for his World Cup goal against Holland in 1978.

“We’ve had these wonderful, overwhelming responses already,” says Deyes. “One of the biggest compliments was when [the artist and playwright] John Byrne got in touch. He said he’d love to be involved somehow.” Deyes is considering asking him to design the programme, or paint something for the show.

Deyes — who believes television shows such as Byrne’s Tutti Frutti help promote the notion that Scots are funny, not like their dour, Calvinist stereotype — wants Off Kilter to be full of humour.

Off Kilter will also include traditional Scottish country dancing — a version of Scots Wha Hae that will begin conservatively and slowly descend into a kitsch knees-up.

“We’ve had such a ball putting this piece together,” says Deyes. “It’s based on those ghastly ‘let’s modernise Scotland’ TV shows from the 1970s, like The One O’Clock Gang, The White Heather Club and Thingummyjig. They were gloriously camp and utterly desperate.”

It’s the Scots’ ability to poke fun at themselves that makes Deyes and Morris get on so well, the pair agree. “There’s a healthy cynicism that I like,” says Morris. “Everyone perpetuates their own stereotypes. I know all the jokes about those. So do Scots about themselves — I think that’s healthy.”

If the show is a success, Deyes would love to see it go on tour. She likes the idea of Off Kilter showcasing Scottish dance around the world, just as Riverdance did for Ireland, only “less showbizzy, and without Michael Flatley, please”.

“I’d like Off Kilter to be a dance ambassador for Scotland, and remind people of the truly inventive and sophisticated choreography we’ve got going on here. Riverdance didn’t have a laugh at itself. If we’re in a culture that can’t laugh at itself, we need to have a word.”

Off Kilter, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Dec 29 to Jan 2

The List

Simon Amstell is gifted. Gifted with the sort of comedy head-start that many aspiring stand-ups would swap vital organs for, that is. As a Jewish, gay, hapless, neurotic, slender whippet of a thing, with a tendency to stalk famous people he fancies, his routines must virtually write themselves. Add to that the fact that he has a background of TV work that has seen him interviewing glaikit pop puppets (on Channel 4’s Popworld) and hosting sarcastic celebrity panel shows for a living (on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, which he gave up presenting earlier this year), and he must surely have several decades’ worth of good-to-go comedy material at his fingertips.

Do Nothing, his very well-received Fringe show from this summer, does tap into his Jewishness, his gayness, and his obsession with Jared Leto lookalikes, plus the odd anecdote about famous people he happens to have met: ‘If I can be in a room with Keanu Reeves, then nothing is real any more.’ But mostly, his routine is just the very articulate, cerebral ramblings of a nerd, with the usual hang-ups about being good, being cool and being attractive to the people he finds attractive.

For those who didn’t catch the show back in August, it’s a chance to see what happens when the pop bitch drops his guard, and exposes his more sensitive, paranoid side. It will also explain why his dear old grandma is nothing but ‘an inauthentic sycophant’. Let’s just hope, for comedy’s sake, he never actually cottons on to how gifted he actually is.

Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, Sun 1 Nov; Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Tue 3 Nov

The List

When Charlie Brooker delivered a heartfelt five-minute tribute to Oliver Postgate in his Screenwipe show last year, his trademark acid-tongued sarcasm went right out the window. Instead, Mr Cynical looked like he might tear up as he remembered the ‘bloody lovely’ work of Postgate, one half of the tiny two-man team Smallfilms, which painstakingly produced The Clangers, Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine out of a shed in Kent.

Postgate’s autobiography, published a year after his death, reveals someone as modest, charming, downright wholesome and quirky as his kids shows were. Dreaming up musical trees, saggy cloth cats and grumpy professors to entertain a generation of now thirtysomething kids, there was an innocence and comforting kindness to his lo-fi work: a stark contrast to the screeching hyperactivity of corporate cartoons from this era. A wise and warm book from Britain’s favourite surrogate uncle, proving he’s just as good at storytelling for adults as children.

(Canongate)

The List

Pieter Waterdrinker’s clever wedding farce isn’t the average boy meets girl story. Here, rich girl meets conniving boy; girl fakes pregnancy to trap boy, boy lies through teeth to get hands on her colossal inheritance – and breathtaking ‘knockers’ – and respective families are invited to wedding party of the year. The German in-laws arrive at a Dutch seaside town in 1958, with a full oompah brass band in tow, oblivious to the bitter post-war, ‘anti-Kraut’ resentment filling the air.

The scene is set to end with, in the language of TV listings, ‘hilarious consequences’. And it does, with Liza’s bitchy, Lady Muck mother cavorting with young hotel staff, and the groom chasing skirt into toilets and Nazi party meetings. But under the camp soap opera icing, Waterdrinker’s plot conceals a poison-laced cake, where wartime crimes and national shame rear their ugly heads. A comedy of bad manners, full of bad people, and good fun.
(Atlantic)

Blood’s a Rover is most ‘redemptive, romantic and accessible’ to date

Iconic US author James Ellroy has just reached the end of an epic literary trail. Claire Sawers speaks to the man who creates history within a cultural vacuum

The final part in James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy comes as a hefty, rewarding brick of a book and is already being hailed as his masterpiece. Following up American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, Blood’s a Rover is a blazing, epic 650-page fusion of real events – including Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, Howard Hughes’ attempted takeover of Vegas, and the rise of the extreme right – and gloriously imagined fiction. But despite the crime novelist’s staggering attention to detail, Ellroy, whose LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia have both been made into films, claims he lives in a cultural vacuum. ‘I’m not being disingenuous when I say that,’ he insists, chatting on the phone from a London hotel room. ‘I don’t follow modern culture at all. I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t use the internet, I don’t read newspapers or books. I never go to the movies.’

So how, exactly, does he create these awe-inspiring worlds of double-dealings, political upheaval and brutal crime from inside his vacuum? ‘I have a team of researchers that compile the chronologies for me,’ he explains. ‘But then I just lock myself in a room and make the rest of it up. I’ve always been very good at narrowing my focus. I’ll write for six or seven hours, and then when I’m done, I lie around in the dark. And I think.’ It’s presumably during these thinking sessions when the good stuff comes to him – the spiderweb of conspiracies and odd romances, the cast of bent cops, militant leftie women and twisted megalomaniacs – which provides him with the colour he needs to paint over the black and white of history.

For the events in Blood’s a Rover, set between 1968 and 1972, Ellroy has had almost 40 years to think up what might have been going on behind the scenes. ‘I was 20 in 1968. Back then I was mostly drinking, using drugs, or peeking at women through their windows at night. I was dabbling in petty crime too. It takes many, many years for history to come to me.’ Ellroy describes Blood’s a Rover as his most ‘redemptive, romantic and accessible’ novel to date, and an indication of where his writing may be heading in the future. ‘It’s much less dark than previous books. In the last 100 pages or so, the tone softens, it becomes more elegiac, more reflective.’

Although he won’t give any clues about his next novel, in the meantime he will be releasing a memoir, The Hilliker Curse, a companion piece to My Dark Places, a blend of autobiography and investigative journalism where he discusses the murder of his mother. She was strangled when he was 10, and although he spent over a year working with the LAPD to find her killer, the crime remains unsolved. With such a preoccupation with crime – real and imagined, political and personal – does Ellroy ever feel he can’t escape the sinister, dark side of life? ‘You know, I have fun with it. I love my male characters, and I’m in love with the women. At the end of the day, I live to write the books. I’m not someone who relaxes. I don’t relax, I brood.’

Blood’s a Rover is published by Century on Thu 5 Nov. Ellroy appears at Borders, Glasgow and Glasgow Film Theatre on Thu 5 Nov.