Dreamers hit the Edinburgh trail

A small, dark-haired woman is staggering across departures at New York’s JFK airport, weighed down by a couple of suitcases and a backpack. She has travelled 2,500 miles, but has an ocean to cross before she can even begin to contemplate her new life of stardom. To help her on her way, she has stowed 1,000 needles among her luggage.

Meet Olivia Rhee, the still not-very-famous “singing acupuncturist” en route to the Edinburgh fringe. Brimful of hope, this morning  when she sets foot on British soil for the first time, Rhee will join thousands of others whose greatest desire is to find stardom over the weeks ahead.

It is easy to be cynical about the Fringe, all those slick comedy promoters and TV executives who fill up the city; the student luvvies so roaringly drunk for the first time in the their lives. But among the 21,000 performers who arrive, there are hundreds of dreamers who woke up one morning, and took the miraculous decision to abandon their job, or sell their house, or leave their partner – or any combination of the above – to prepare for their shot at fame in Edinburgh.

Rhee, 42, is one of that fearless breed. “I am so much closer to my dream now I am a performer,” she says cheerily, ahead of her second long-haul flight. “Every step further along makes me a little bit happier. Just having the opportunity makes me smile. I am on my way.”

In any other August, she would be working acupuncture clinic, founded in 1975 by Hak, her father, when he moved his family from Seoul, South Korea to Las Vegas. But while Rhee studied hard to become a qualified doctor of oriental medicine, her career has never quite been enough to douse that needling desire to enjoy the limelight.

Her Edinburgh debut is a mixture of stories and poetry, song and dance, but for all that, Adventures of a Singing Acupuncturist, ironically enough, might see a little pointless. Nothing of the sort, retorts Rhee, who has been rehearsing in New York for a week.

“I know four guitar chords, I can play the congas,” she says. “And I do have feet. I can’t really call myself a dancer, but I do a kind of freestyle. People look at me and point. There is a unique quality to it.”

If Rhee has all the optimism of the Fringe virgin, Lynn Ruth Miller, 78, is a grizzled veteran by comparison.

Professor Miller - in an earlier life she held the chair of humanities at the University of Toledo – had never performed on stage until her Edinburgh debut five years ago. This year, she flies in from San Francisco with a portfolio of shows and turns, including her unique rendition of that Sex Pistols classic, Anarchy in the UK, which ends with her throwing brassieres into the audience. Sid Vicious would have approved.

But the performance to capture Edinburgh’s heart is Ageing is Amazing, her one-woman burlesque that celebrates the sagging glories of senior citizenship. Conforming in almost every degree to Sam Goldwyn’s dictum: “Start with an earthquake, and build up to a climax”: it opens to the tune of the Strip Polka as Miller slowly undresses.

“If my mother knew I would be stepping out with tassels on my nipples, she would be spinning in her grave,” chuckles Miller, who has worked her way through two husbands (“both my own”). What on earth makes her stand up in a room full of strangers and disrobe? She has no hesitation. This is all about love.

“I go to Edinburgh, I make people laugh, and they stand and cheer,” says Miller. “It is as good as any orgasm. This is approval and love beyond anything I have ever had. In San Francisco I am an old lady; in Edinburgh I am something.” 

Peter Buckley Hill promotes the Free Fringe - a roster of over 300 shows with no admission charges – and sees more hopeful and hopeless acts than most. Very few of the dreamers will fulfil their expectations, he warns.

“The fringe is entirely fuelled, and financed, by performers backing their dreams – the wastage rate is high. People do succeed, but only by working hard at what they do all the year round. It takes a lot of effort to make your performance sound effortless.

“The overwhelming majority go away disappointed. Either they don't know how small the fringe audiences are, or they believe against all logic that the world will beat a path to their door. If you're a leaf, even quite a good leaf, you go to the forest if you want to hide, not if you want to stand out.”

After years of effort, some, a tiny handful, come into this year’s festival with a sliver of a chance, that finally the breakthrough will come, the reward for so impetuously leaving a former life behind.

Kate Smurthwaite, 34, was head of strategy for a hedge fund, who gave up finance six years ago to become a full-time stand up. Jools Constant, watched his marriage collapse and threw away a successful building business, employing 12 people, as he set about turning himself into comedy performer and writer.

“It has given me a new life. For the first time I feel ‘this is where I should be,” says Constant, 42, who lives in a single room, somewhere in central London. “I made a clear-headed decision to lead a life where I expressed myself, and which was rewarding. I found it among people that I like and respect.”

Smurthwaite, like Constant, she has acquired a healthy audience on the London stand-up scene. She has no regrets about swapping the dreary world of finance for the adrenaline rush of performance.

“I went back to my old job for a while – just three months,” she recalls. “After a couple of day, I was thinking, ‘This is just so not me’. I’d found stand-up, and was so thrilled and happy to be doing it. It’s strange to look back and think, ‘Why did I put up with a job I hated so much for so long?’ You’re young I suppose, and you have to be earning money. Instead of doing something that actually inspires you.”

Others are less sanguine. Like Rhee, Danny Hurst, from London, has turned his own life into art, and brings a comedy drama, I Was a Teenage Rentboy to the Fringe. It really is based on his own life story, the grubby assignations and the street-walking that funded him through college.

“It’s more cheerful than an average episode of EastEnders,” he says diffidently. “I’m not looking for stardom – all I want to do is make a living as a performer.”

And that is true of all these magical self-made artists. Each one craves wider recognition of the strange new talent they’ve discovered in themselves. Miller has set her sights on appearing on a big comedy club bill. Smurthwaite and Constant would love television to come calling.

And Rhee? In her mind’s eye, she is already hosting a TV chat show, the kind of thing that gets syndicated around the world. Like Ellen Degeneres?

“Yeah, I’d see it as a bit like Ellen. With good guests to talk to and some nice songs.” And acupuncture? “O yeah. And acupuncture.” It’s the stuff of dreams.

Comrades, this is from beyond the pay wall. It ran in the national edition of The Times, last Friday. Lynn Ruth, if you're reading this - that's about half a million readers.

Critic finds his voice again

A distinguished American critic who had his vocal chords removed during surgery for thyroid cancer has been given his natural voice back following the intervention of a Scottish company that specialises in synthesising speech.

Roger Ebert - the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize - appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show on Tuesday where he was able to deliver his Oscar tips and give an emotional account of how he regained his voice.

“It still needs improvement, but at least it still sounds like me,” said Mr Ebert, who uses a keyboard and laptop to voice his words. “In first grade, they said I talk too much. And now I still can.”

After a series of operations in 2006, Mr Ebert’s face-to-face communication was at first restricted to hastily scribbled notes and rudimentary sign language. Then he began using off -the-shelf text-to-speech computer packages that enable users to speak in a computerised version of standard English.

These made him sound like “Robby the Robert” said Mr Ebert, and in a blog entry last August, he complained: “Eloquence and intonation are impossible. I dream of hearing a voice something like my own.”

During an internet search, he came across CereProc a spin-out company from Edinburgh University that specialises in synthesising “natural” voices. He trialed samples of former President George W Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, and was amazed. “Their Dubya and Arnold wouldn’t fool their wives, but you can certainly tell it’s them," he said.

When he contacted the company - which occupies a single small office within the university's school of informatics - CereProc told him they could clone his voice if he could provide good quality tapes. Mr Ebert had recorded commentaries for classic films such as Citizen Kane and Casablanca and was able to provide these pure audio tracks. The result is the company's first historical recreation of a human voice.

“Roger doesn't want to sound like everyone - he wants to sound like Roger,” said Matthew Aylett, the company’s chief technical officer. “We took the audio commentaries but it was much more challenging than the normal process when we would control the recording environment."

For its business clients, CereProc records five hours of material to compile a library of hundreds of thousands of sounds. Common phrases are reproduced verbatim, but more complex sentences are blended from natural sounds on the database.
The same techniques have been used to recreate Mr Ebert’s voice and he already has three hours of sounds on his computer. CereProc say they will double that amount and could even include the sound of Mr Ebert’s laughing, sighing or screaming.

In commercial applications, such as an avatar devised for the Scottish Qualifications Authority website, the software has to overcome difficulties with words such as “permit”, in which intonation changes the meaning between a noun and verb.

Mr Ebert finds it easier to overcome these problems himself, said Dr Aylett. “He can type, listen and modify. He can control emphasis and pitch. He can modify the way he speaks, when he speaks. We want to give people more control so they can use the synthesis like a musical instrument.”

You can find this article, in abbreviated form, at the timesonline website. Readers may be interested to know that after a redsign of the Times pages, most news stories in the paper and online will be considerably shorter than before, around 500 words, rather than 650-900. A shame in my view, but I am merely the monkey, not the organ-grinder.

How many women does it take ...

“This is an empirical point. It is intensely annoying when you read that there aren't enough of us. There are so many women on the Fringe, from people like Lucy Porter, Sarah Millican and Pip Evans, to comedians who are just starting out. We're not a rarity. People should stop saying ‘Oh, there's a lady on stage'. Just say, ‘There's a comic - are they funny?” Treat us the same as you would a male comic.”

So says Susan Calman, the moving spirit behind a protest by women comedians. Read more here: Ladies.

Pic by James Glossop.

Dead centre of the city

Ian Rankin leads the way down a dark, stone stairway into the bowels of his city. He takes a turn, passes under the massive stone arch of a bridge and, after walking another 50 yards, turns and stops. "There it is," he shouts above the traffic. "Anyone who dies in Edinburgh starts their death here." We have arrived at an anonymous 1960s brick building, its two stories dwarfed by the towering structures around it. Inside, piled up against the highest window, is a stack of pots that look a lot like paint tins through the opaque glass. But it's doubtful that they ever contained anything quite so benign as paint, because this is the City Mortuary. Embalming f luid, perhaps?

Another Ian Rankin invterview - this one the cover feature in the T2 section of the Times. Read more here: Rebus Walk. The pun on the dead centre of Edinburgh was in the original copy but removed by a passing sub. It would never happen to Giles Coren, eh?

Here's a jolly spread about the joys of second hand books, which I helped out with: Old books.

On the pleasures of ownership

Climbing the staircase to the very top of his 19th century townhouse in the middle of Geneva, Jean Bonna itemises each magnificent work of art as he shuffles past, pausing a couple of times to gesture and offer an observation.

“Here you have some of the Italians,” he says languidly. “Castiglione … another Tiepolo. Those are three of the Durer prints of the unicorn. This is the Whore of Babylon” At the top of the staircase he pauses, and then heads off into an airy room. “Now this Courbet, it really is absolutely exceptional. And the Delacroix and the Gericault… “

The list goes on and on, through all three floors of his house. This Friday, the most spectacular of this endless parade of drawings will find their way into an Edinburgh exhibition: Raphael to Renoir: Master Drawings from the collection of Jean Bonna. It is, as they say, unmissable.

The show is the only European outing of a unique selection of artworks originally chosen by curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It will form the centrepiece of the National Gallery of Scotland’s festival exhibition schedule, an extraordinary display of works, which together capture, as Mr Bonna puts it, “the first thoughts” of the great artists. “Even when they are finished drawings,” he says, “they are more immediate than a painting, more spontaneous. There is movement, more life.”

Each of the Edinburgh works is taken from the walls of this rambling, very intimate house. From Raphael’s Study of Soldiers (which normally adorns the ground-floor sitting room) via Woman in a White Bonnet by George Seurat, and Odilon Redon’s vibrant pastel, La Barque, they hang in its bedrooms and parlours, the corridors and anterooms, arranged for their owner’s particular delight.

Mr Bonna, now retired, was the fifth generation of his family to enter the well-rewarded and very grown-up world of merchant banking, but he has been an incorrigible collector, since childhood. When he was 11, he was gifted a book written by the president of the Bouquinistes – or booksellers – of the Paris Quais, even then inscribed “to one of my good clients”.

Thus encouraged, for decades French Literature consumed him, until he had collected everything, “from the first literary work to the beginning of the 20th century”. Everything? It seems an astonishing claim. This dapper little man in his neat jacket, a striped shirt and braces, stops and considers for a moment. “I am missing maybe 15 major books.” he says thoughtfully.

But it was never just about literature for Mr Bonna. He has knitted together in his many different collections a personal world of high culture, in which his own good taste is arbiter.

There are autographs of most of those French authors, from A to Zola, filed away in a cabinet on the third floor of the house. The Durers on the staircase are symbols of what he modestly calls “the nucleus of a print collection”. He has an assortment of Louis XV and Louis XVI chairs and other antique furniture; an array of vintage photography; and what he describes as “a few bronzes and a few terracottas”. He loves music, though he protests that he doesn’t collect it. “I have a few things by Wagner I could show you,” he says, “but that is slightly besides the point.” Mr Bonna, in his mid-sixties, even collects ex-wives – there are two of those bumping around Switzerland.

Drawings by the great masters, however, have been the heart of his obsession for the best part of 25 years. He purchased his first in 1985, L’Aubergiste courtisee (The Courted Maid) by Hubert Robert, though it was three years before he bought again at Christie’s in New York.

Gradually he met dealers, curators and other collectors, becoming immersed in a whole new world of high culture, studying, learning and buying whenever he found something he liked and could afford. The 120 drawings he has loaned for the Edinburgh show represent slightly more than a third of his total collection, and the larger portion will remain on the walls of this house. He even employs two full-time curators.

There is a price on all this. Over these last two decades he has parted, he admits, with millions of dollars, including the [euros]650,000 he spent at auction on Parmigianino’s The Holy Family with Shepherds and Angels, a work he describes as “the most important Italian old master drawing, his best study for his finest painting”.

But playing this market is not just about wealth, he insists. “‘Means’, as they say in France, ‘is a condition which is necessary, but not sufficient,’” he says. “The first quality you require to build a collection of either books or drawings is passion. It you are not passionate you do not do it. Even when I was working, if I had a free hour, I would visit antique shops, a dealer, a museum, a curator. It consumed all my time, besides my profession and my family. It takes you over completely.”

Mr Bonna’s passion for art never ends. In a drawing collection, he says, each image has a different subject, and their number is almost limitless. Theoretically you could collect forever, though there are constraints.

“If you decide to make a collection, say, of French literature, you will inevitably buy an author which you don’t like. I am not particularly fond of Rousseau but I still have everything written by him, in first edition and in contemporary bindings, because he is very important in the history of ideas. But you could never buy a drawing you don’t like – or at least I cannot,” he says.

He has a some tips for anyone with a few spare shekels and time to cultivate the market. It is not wise to buy at auction too often, he advises, it only antagonises the dealers. Better to cultivate the dealers and curators, and keep track of the ownership of the finest drawings – this way you’ll know in advance when an opportunity to buy might arise.

And learn where to shop for bargains., he says Not at flea markets – “I never find things in flea markets” – but at booksellers who will occasionally buy whole libraries from dying collectors. Often there are drawings in among these books, and the dealers sometimes have little idea of their true worth. Occasionally, Mr Bonna has left a shop with an old master in a paper bag, worth many times its purchase price, and a satisfied smile on his lips.

From such efforts, great collections grow, and with them a warm sensation which he recognises as the pleasure of possession. “I wouldn’t say it made you feel good or even better. You simply feel different.”

Can he define the pleasure of passion more precisely? Mr Bonna has an anecdote to encapsulate exactly what he means. He recently spent a fascinating day at the Uffizi in Florence, poring over the drawing collections, and absorbing the wisdom of the curators. It was absolutely fascinating, he says.

“But ownership is another ingredient altogether,” he adds, suddenly animated. “To have a Raphael on your own wall – when you come home at night you can say: ‘This is mine!’”

* Raphael to Renoir: Master Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna, 5th June to 6th September. £4 (£3). National Galleries complex, the Mound, Edinburgh.

Gates funds intelligent aid to farmers

A donation of £17 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will enable an Edinburgh-based charity to set out this year to halt the spread of some of the most virulent livestock diseases in the developing world, armed with a war chest of vaccines and medicines.

In Galvmed's sights are 13 feared killers, including avian influenza, swine fever and Rift Valley fever, which in 2007 claimed 325 human lives in Kenya, Tanzania and Somalia, along with the deaths of tens of thousand of animals.

The charity's first campaign, which is already underway, is aimed at East Coast Fever a disease endemic in 11 African countries, and responsible for the deaths of 1.1 million cattle every year. The combined value of this devastation is estimated at $168 million, a loss carried by many inhabitants of some of the poorest nations on Earth.

Conditions could be undeniably difficult, said Hameed Nuru, a Botswanan vet who is the charity's director of policy and external affairs. Even in war-zones it was important that livestock was protected to ensure that many farmers were not thrown even deeper into poverty.

“We have to include livestock issues in the aid package, and look at how to give people a start, to rebuild. This is a difference between what we are doing and the aid which is given because people have to eat, because it is emergency. We see it in holistic terms: give a man a fish, he eats for one meal, teach him how to fish and he eats for his lifetime.” said Dr Nuru.

The full story is here: Galvmed

I haven't posted here for a couple of weeks but over that time, one or two vaguely amusing stories have made into the paper. The argument over parking charges in Tobermory, for example.

If you're only on this site because you're a spaced-out PR executive from Seattle, you possibly won't know that Tobermory is the principal 'town' (population 700) on a Scottish island called Mull, beautiful, calm, peaceful, the kind of place where traffic policemen and parking attendants are unknown and unnecessary. Until some bureaucrat in a faraway office decides: "What they need is a parking attendant..."

More here: Tobermory.

In the next story I get to sit in a very fast car while it is driven very fast around a test track. It's a very fuel efficent vehicle and could yet save the planet, but I can exclusively reveal that it doesn't provide a cure for motion sickness. Here it is: Hybrid.

McCall Smith digs up literary heritage

The Times, 3 January, 2009

... Connections with the city are shot through his own fiction. McCall Smith has virtually pioneered “the New Town novel”, with his social comedies set in 44 Scotland Street, a nonexistent tenement building in a very real Georgian street.

More recently, Isabel Dalhousie has come to the fore, an Edinburgh lady with a philosopher's inquiring mind. She flits around a very carefully realised landscape in the Bruntsfield and Merchiston districts of the city, where McCall Smith has made his home, within doors of two other world-renowned authors, J.K. Rowling and Ian Rankin.

Even Precious Ramotswe, the redoubtable founder of the No1 Ladies' Detective Agency - and the original source of McCall Smith's reputation as a writer - bears the mark of the city. McCall Smith spent part of his childhood in Zimbabwe, but something in his heroine's unshakeable moral core reminds many readers of a certain type of Edinburgh lady, most likely to be found living in Morningside, the city's most respectable area.

“Perhaps that's the subtle influence of the place on a writer,” he muses. “People say to me that my Precious Ramotswe novels are about Morningside. I see what they mean, because many of her attitudes would be perfectly resonant with the attitudes of Morningside.”

A literary tour of Edinburgh, with Sandy McCall Smith. You can read more here: Sandy.

This piece was written in a hurry and should have been better. 6 out of 10. Must try harder. But a happy New Year to all our reader.

Tam White, born to the Blues

The Scotsman, 16 July 2002

Everywhere he goes in Edinburgh, somebody knows Tam White, even behind his sunglasses. In the close below the Grassmarket flat where he spent his childhood, a woman stops and tells her teenage daughter: "See him, he's a great singer, he's famous." And next door in the White Hart Inn, the landlady greets White with the extravagant warmth of an old friend - even though he's been off the bevvy for 20 years.

We're revisiting his old haunts in the capital and each and every place throws up a friend or a fan. Outside the old Platform One, it's one of his stonemason buddies who greets him; at his former secondary school, the steely-faced headmistress comes to check out the group of people taking his publicity photos near the gates. She recognises Tam: "Good luck to you," she says, her mouth cracking into a smile, "I enjoy your music." "All this fame and no money," says White to no-one in particular. It's been like this for years.

At least at the Queen's Hall, Tam White will receive the recognition he deserves with his 60th birthday celebration. The show features this great blues singer with his own band, Shoestring, and then, on the same bill and for the first time in his career, at the heart of big band Power of Scotland.

It's the ideal opportunity to see an artist who's been called "one of the great European blues singers", a performer who reckons he's at the height of his powers. The critics appear to agree: The Crossing, his recent collaboration with pianist Brian Kellock, received the kinds of notice that most performers can only dream about.

If he seems the quintessential Edinburgh man, White has gigged with the greats in London and all over the world. He's played on Beale Street in Memphis, with Kellock at the Adelaide festival, and shared bills with Long John Baldry, Alexis Korner and the Animals. For six months in the mid-1960s his band, the Boston Dexters, were resident at the Pontiac Club in Putney, alongside the legendary John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, who also featured Eric Clapton in their line-up.

It's all been a fantastic buzz, he says. "It's like being in a gang, a tribe, a footballer in a team - that's what it's like in a band. You're all working together: no man is an island. Any adulation I've ever had has been down to the good fortune of working with great people. We've always had a rapport."

Music is in his blood. White's grandfather was bandmaster in Gilmerton, the mining village on Edinburgh's southern fringe, who had six sons who played in the local band. His mother, Marion, sang and Matthew, his father - "the most laid-back man I've ever known" - loved music. The pair used to cycle on a tandem at weekends up to Perth or down to Moffat, "him on the front, me at the back, singing."

It's a matter of pride that the family home was above the tavern where Burns spent his time during his last visit to Edinburgh, and you sense the songs of Burns in the moodiness of White's music. "What about Times Tougher than Tough?" he asks. "It's just the same deal as A Man's a Man for 'a That."

As a boy he took piano lessons - though he never learned to read music - and he was in the school choir. At Darroch Senior Secondary he sang tenor in the Mikado and the Beggar's Opera and, encouraged by his music teacher, auditioned with the Edinburgh Opera Company. "My teacher wanted me to join, but rock 'n' roll had just hit the streets," he says, as if no further explanation is required.

At 15 he was out of school and learning to be a stonemason. He made his musical debut in a skiffle band at Sandy Bell's, but honed his tastes for new American sounds on Lothian Road, where US servicemen hung out. "I got friendly with a couple of guys and they turned me on to Jimmy Witherspoon, so I got into blues, the jazzier side of blues. Then I got turned on to Mose Allison. He was doing all these songs with jazzy chords and good scenarios like Seventh Son, which was more interesting that: 'My baby woke up this morning'. I just kept moving on."

White moved happily into a booming Edinburgh club scene, with the Place and the Gamp club open for business on Victoria St, the Green Light Club on Gilmore Place and the Blue Door at Churchill. These were stages set for his band, the Boston Dexters. The Dexters have gone down in legend on the blues scene. These days their singles from the 1960s change hands for anything between £10 and £75, and one of their tracks, Ray Charles's I Believe to My Soul features on the EMI compilation, R&B at Abbey Road.

But the Dexters' stay in London was ultimately disastrous. Signed to Columbia, like many bands before them they were cast as "the next Merseybeats". Their single I've Got Something to Tell You, foisted on them by record company executives, was a disaster, completely at odds with their R&B style. " It blew our credibility," growls White.

There was more pushiness to endure from the entertainment business. "Decca wanted me to be the next Tom Jones. Everyone wanted me to be somebody else. I did a series for STV in the 1970s, my own show, and I ended up in a monkey suit - it was incredibly embarrassing - and doing working men's clubs, I got hooked into that, anything to make a living. And then I stopped and went back to the stonemasonry."

Later, as White set about reviving his singing career in the 1980s, he showed he had learnt his lesson, when his agent rang and asked if he would consider doing a commercial. "For a while I was walking up and down my house singing: 'Food GloriRoss food' then I thought: 'What are you doing man?' I rang my agent and told her to forget it. She said: 'But it's a lot of money.' 'I don't care, forget it.' She said: 'But Ken Russell's directing.' 'Tell Ken to fucking sing it himself then'.

"The funny thing was they made the advert with a director sitting with his back to the camera, and singers, dressed up like clowns, coming on and going: "Food ..." And then he'd shout: 'Next'. It would have ruined my image all over again."

White's return to stage and to top form began at a gig in Norway in 1982, and was swiftly followed by the reformation of the Dexters as a ten-piece band. Later, he started writing his own material and for a while in the 1980s hooked up with Boz Burrell; he also had headline gigs at Ronnie Scott's and even made a live album there. White's gravelly voice became known to millions when he sang the role of Danny McGlone for Robbie Coltrane in John Byrne's Tv classic Tutti Frutti. Coltrane was good, but an octave or two above where he should have been. "It's strange that," reckons White. "Sometimes you get big men with wee high voices."

Throw in the matter of a small acting career, including a part in Braveheart, his children, his grandchildren and a happy and enduring marriage, and you might wonder what Tam White's blues are all about, and what drives him on.

"It's just in my nature to perform, man," he answers. "I have to do it. I like the message in the music I play. Music is communication."

Tam White 60th Birthday Celebration, Queen's Hall, 26 July. Tam White's Shoestring Band, Bridge Jazz Bar, 82 South Bridge. 18-25 August.

Watch Tam White and Brian Kellock perform The Water is Wide.

On the trail of Rankin's Rebus muse

Sunday Times 18 January 2004

These are dangerous times for shrinking violets to be out and about in Edinburgh, even in an unassuming little pub in a shadowy street near the city centre. This is the Oxford Bar, and here Ian Rankin is at work researching his 15th Inspector Rebus novel. A careless word, a gesture, a nervous habit, and you might find yourself immortalised in its pages.

When he was in his early twenties and starting out as a writer, Rankin found "everything I wanted to say about Edinburgh" in the Oxford's claustrophobic rooms and social mix -policemen, postmen and the rest who jostled together at the bar.

Two decades on, munching on a "Rebus roll" of corned beef and beetroot, he finds the place as inspirational and congenial as ever.

It's not that he sets out to monitor the behaviour of his fellow citizens, Rankin explains between mouthfuls, it just happens. The other night he was listening to two taxi drivers discussing the computerised codes they use to identify police cars and speed cameras. "Brilliant stuff," he says. "I was scribbling it down on a beer mat, maybe for the next book or maybe not. Just that bit of inside information, then if you put it in a book, every taxi driver who reads it says, "Wow, he really knows his stuff," and all you've done is listen in a pub. It's like Muriel Spark says, 'Nothing is lost to the writer'. We loiter with intent, we sit around and without knowing it we are actually picking up characters, the tics, the little personal things they do, which they don't know they're doing."

For an interviewer -like those cabbies looking askance at him with his beer mat - this watching brief can be unnerving. "It's like you with your pen," he says, "click click, click. Six months down the line I might want a character who is slightly nervy and I'll think, 'Maybe he's clicking his pen ...' You just never know where you're going to get a character from, or a trait or a one-liner or a story. I don't know what's useful until I start writing, then this repository of stuff seems to come to the surface."

It may be part of creating the perfect Rebus environment, but weaving fact and fancy like this can be a risky business. In Let It Bleed, the fire, the fug of smoke and the folk musicians in the Oxford were lovingly described as "Rebus rested his foot on the polished brass bar-rail and drank his drinks". For years afterwards regulars were chiding Rankin about that nonexistent bar-rail. "I misremembered," he shrugs. "I was living in London at the time. Make a mistake about the Oxford and I get picked up more than for any mistake about police procedures or historical inaccuracies."

In the early novels some of the Edinburgh scenes were only composites of real places. Then, Rankin says, "I decided I was making life hard on myself -why don't I write about real pubs and real police stations?" So he burnt down the fictional Great London Road copshop; Rebus moved to St Leonards police station on Edinburgh's Southside.

More changes will be required for the novel due in the autumn. Lothian and Borders police recently closed their CID operation in St Leonards and the detectives moved out; Rebus will follow suit. "You have to stay true to the changes in the city," says Rankin. "It means he'll lose a lot of people he used to work with." Rebus is "95% certain" to be assigned to the Gayfield Square station off Leith Walk, though the author has never set foot inside it. "I just need a rough idea of the layout - I could do it by talking to a cop," he adds.

Here in the Oxford, the symbiosis between the writer's pub and his pen expressed itself in the names of his characters. John Curt was the post-graduate student who worked in the bar and introduced Rankin to its nicotine-stained charms. He lends his name to the trusty pathologist of the novels, outranked in fiction as in life by Professor Gates, named after the landlord of the Oxford, John Gates.

The pub began to feature by name by the sixth novel. Harry Curran was immortalised as "Edinburgh's rudest barman" in Dead Souls. When Rankin embarked on A Question of Blood, Curran asked the author to improve his sex life, at least in his fictional persona. The result? "Siobhan noticed that Harry, the dour barman, was smiling. 'He seems unusually chipper,' she commented to Rebus. 'I think young Harry's in love'." Rankin winks across his pint: "Mission accomplished."

Real customers began to appear at the bar alongside the fictional Rebus. Leith gallery owner Muir Morrison was consulted by the detective after an art theft, and Hayden Murphy, Edinburgh's most charming Irish journalist, was identified as "the writer", his work spread over a table in the Oxford's back room. "I went over to give a serious lecture at Trinity," says Murphy, who has joined Rankin among the late morning customers, "and their introduction was: 'Hayden's main claim to fame is he appears in Set in Darkness'." The Oxford has a website devoted almost entirely to its place in the literary hall of fame.

The blurring of fact and fiction, says Rankin, helps to suspend reality. Those featured in the books don't mind because it is done without malice. True, the cops who once used to drink in the Oxford have found a new watering hole ("You're not really surprised, are you?" asks Murphy) but the author insists most people are flattered to think they might make it into the novels.

On the other hand, there are many people who mistakenly believe they have appeared in a Rebus book. "I say: 'Have I ever met you before?' 'No.' 'Well how can it be you?'"

In Knots and Crosses, Rankin recalls, there is a reporter who plainly works for The Scotsman. "He's quite sloppy -not his journalism but his personal habits, egg down his tie and everything. James Naughtie reckons it's him." The villain (described as "insane ... the most dangerous-looking man Rebus had met in his entire life") works in the public library on George IV Bridge. Rankin says: "Alan Taylor (associate editor of the Sunday Herald) thinks it's him, because he was working at the library then."

Other hardened professionals discern themselves. Thomas Richey, serving 65 years for shooting a woman dead while under the influence of LSD, wrote to Rankin from an American jail in Washington state. "He said: 'In Dead Souls, you've got a Scottish guy who's released from Walla Walla state pen and comes back to Edinburgh with a score to settle. It must be me.' He wasn't pissed off, he thought it was just a bit odd." Rankin had chosen the prison because he had visited a friend who lived near it.

In fact, these days the most dedicated fans can book a place in a Rebus novel through charity auctions. A merchant banker parted with Pounds 5,000 for a mention in A Question of Blood; Belle and Sebastian's bassist got a part in another book.

One woman handed over Pounds 200 for her cat to appear. "That was really hard work," says Rankin. "The thing was called Boethius." The first time Rankin auctioned off a fictional role, a pal of his wife's won and asked for her American friend -Fern Bogot -to have a part. "Fern Bogot?" shrieks Rankin, still incredulous. "How the hell do you get her in an Edinburgh-based book? I made her a prostitute. Fern was a bit iffy at first, but she's fine about it now."

But Rankin continues to borrow from real life. One novel was based on the case of Bible John while Rankin admits a lingering fascination with the Edinburgh World's End pub murders. "I quite like writing about unsolved crimes because it's telling the people who did it, 'Look, we've not forgotten, people are never going to forget and eventually they are going to get you'."

But he doesn't approve of those true-life crime books, which fill the shelves next to the fictional detectives. They're apt to attract some unhealthy minds, though Rankin reckons he's in the clear on that score. "I'm not worried about being obsessive," he retorts in the face of the accusation. "I'm not that obsessive."

This from a man who has just eaten a Rebus roll for breakfast.

Artist's tribute to troops killed in Iraq

A powerful piece of war art, featuring more than a hundred men and women killed in Iraq since hostilities began in 2003, will be delivered into every home and office in Britain – but only if it is finally finished to the artist’s satisfaction.

Until then, Steve McQueen’s poignant work, Queen and Country, will be on show in Edinburgh. It commemorates 136 service personnel, each featured on their own individual stamps which are displayed in strips in a large oak cabinet.

Mr McQueen says he will regard the piece as incomplete until the Royal Mail issues editions of the stamps to the public.

His stance was supported by relatives of some of the dead soldiers, who attended yesterday’s opening at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. An on-line petition, with over 15,000 signitures, can be accessed from the exhibition.

The work occupies one room of the gallery, a looming presence which invites viewers to pull out drawers and examine the often-smiling faces of the dead.

The result said Diane Douglas, was an “incredibly moving” artwork. Her son, Lance Corporal Allan Douglas of the Highlanders, became the 99th British serviceman killed in Iraq when he was shot by a sniper in January 2006.

“All these young kids have died. We need something, because people forget that they are even out there. Hopefully the Post Office will come round,” said Mrs Douglas, from Aberdeen.

Mr McQueen’s multi-award winning film, Hunger, about the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, has made him an international star, though he underlined his credentials as a video artist as long ago as 1999, when he won the Turner Prize

He was appointed an official war artist in 2003, but his commission in Iraq at first seemed doomed to end in frustration. Chaperoned by MoD personnel, he was unable to gather the footage he wanted. It was only after he had returned home to Amsterdam that he had his eureka moment, as he was sticking a stamp on his tax return.

“The stamp had a picture of Vincent van Gogh on it. And then it hit me - a stamp has a beautiful scale, the proportions are right, the image, it is recognizable, and then it goes out into the world, who knows where,” he said.

Like the artist, relatives of the dead men said they were neither for nor against the war, but believed the stamps would at least bring the conflict Iraq into the public eye. Margaret Thomson, from Whitburn, recalled her son, Robert, had been part of the original invasion force.

“He felt they were liberating people and when they saw the conditions that people lived in they thought, given time, they would create a better Iraq. But as the months went on, it wasn’t to be. You wouldn’t like to think after five years that it had all been for nothing,” said Mrs Thomson. Her son, Sapper Robert Thomson, was killed in an accident in Basra in January 2004, aged 22.

Carol Paterson’s son, Private Scott ‘Casper’ Kennedy, 20, was killed by a roadside bomb in June 2007.

“This is a different type of war, there’s a lot of badness to it. But it’s something that’s happened and stamps would keep it out there in front of people,” said Ms Paterson, from Dunfermline. “If they do issue the stamp, I will get a special one of my own, so I can take it with everywhere. Just now I have a picture of Scott and when I go on holiday, I can take it out and give it a kiss.”

* Queen and Country, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, until February 15, 2009.

Sign the petition

Wind turbines - a blot on the landscape

David Bellamy, the broadcaster and environmentalist, has lambasted the Scottish government's “baffling” decision to approve the construction of the huge Clyde wind farm in South Lanarkshire, describing the project as “an enormous blot on the credibility of Scotland as a green place”.

His comments are a stark contrast to those of Alex Salmond, the First Minister, who last week announced the scheme as a step on the road to making Scotland the “green capital” of Europe. A total of 152 turbines are to be installed in clusters in the South Lanarkshire hill near the village of Abington, close to the M74.

Bellamy is one of that small band of environmentalists who doesn't believe in global warming. Read more at the Timesonline, Blot.

Over at the Edinburgh Fringe, I can report that I have met Lynn Ruth Miller, my favourite septuagenarian stripper, who quotes Browning: "Come grow old with me, the best is yet to be." That Lynn Ruth - she's a rum 'un.

And hats off to my colleagues at the Scotsman, whose unrivalled coverage of the "Fringe ticketing fiasco" led them to quote an apoplectic spokesman for the Ladyboys of Bangkok. Spokesman? Spokesman? Spokesperson surely.

Heard the one about the kid on the Fringe?

“Adults tend to keep quiet when kids are on stage. But if I did get a heckler, I'd have to deal with it - think of a couple of comeback lines, or hand them a colouring-in book or something like that,” said Eros, who debuted on the Fringe last year with a walk-on part in a children's comedy show.

That experience planted the germ of an idea, and next month he returns with Problem Child, a 50-minute set of his own. “I've been writing new stuff all the time, so I have way enough material to fill it out,” said Eros. “It's about pointing out the stupid things that adults do - then they go, ‘Oh yeah, he's right, I do that too,' and they laugh.”

The tale of a 12-year-old comedian, who is on his way to Edinburgh. Read more here: Kid on the Fringe.

Eros is just one of thousands of peculiarly-driven people who are about to descend on the city. I wrote recently about the 75-year-old stripper from San Fransisco who's heading to Edinburgh(a story subsequently picked up by Jay Leno, and by a number of US papers), and there are many, many more all with tales of their own.

A year ago, I had a proposal for a TV documentary about some of these fantastic people accepted by one of the bigger independent production houses, but unfortunately knocked back by the BBC. It's worth it though, I think. So if anyone out there feels like funding a book or a film don't hesitate to get in touch, because there is a great longer piece to be written about the eccentricities, dreams and ambitions which drive these folk on.

The Fringe is not the only show in town. Hit the link here to read a story in the Times at the weekend, about the £5 million cloud hanging over the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

PS: Overwhelmed by the publicity which has come her way since my article in the Times, Lynn Ruth Miller, the ageing stripper, has proposed marriage to me.

"How many people are walking in the sky?"

The Times, 19 June, 2008

It is 34 years since Philippe Petit performed his masterpiece of “intimate theatre”, suspending a rope 1,350ft (410m) above ground between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, and stepping out into the void.

In 45 minutes he walked the 60m line between “my new friends” eight times; he sat on the wire for while, and even lay down as if sleeping. When he finally gave himself up, police threw him in a hospital for the insane.

Now Petit, in Edinburgh for the European premiere of Man on Wire, the elegiac documentary that charts his astonishing feat, is gazing from his hotel window towards St Cuthbert's Church and gauging the pitch of an imaginary wire stretched from its spire to the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle.

“To conquer the world, to run a wire between that beautiful church and incline it towards the castle — I am ready to do that tomorrow,” he muses. “It would take a few months of research and organisation and weeks of rigging. And it will cost a lot of money. But then, it will draw in a few hundred thousand people, and through the press, the entire world will witness another miracle.”

Why is it not happening, he wonders? “If the phone rings, and the mayor of Edinburgh says, Hey, Philippe, I saw your film and I know you would like to walk. My city says, Come here, let's do something.' That is my dream.”

It took six years for Petit to plan and execute his early morning walk over Lower Manhattan. Over the same period he carried out two equally terrifying high-wire walks between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral and over the arches of Sydney Harbour Bridge. All three were illegal, but their magic impressed even the policemen sent to pluck Petit from the sky.

In James Marsh's film, Sergeant Charles Daniel of the NYPD, the officer in charge on August 7, 1974, is describing events in the usual “I was proceeding down Broadway” kind of way, when he suddenly breaks off, exclaiming: “I figured I was watching something that no one would ever see again, that is was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” Petit laughs: “He was pulled out of his condition of being a policeman.”

The walker himself describes his experience that day in mystical terms. “I had to make the decision to take my foot, anchored on the building, and put it on the wire. Not many people dare to take that first step - to land on the Moon, to dive into a great abyss in the sea. I feel that sensation each time I grab the balancing pole and start a high-wire walk. It is not exactly the same feeling each time, but it is a feeling of intimate decision. Not for nothing is it called the first step, like the first step on a new continent.”

There is he says, no fear, nor expectation, nor even a sense of letting go at this moment of absolute truth. “It is more of starting a voyage of exploration, in a world that has not been touched by man. Look out of the window. How many people are walking in the sky? None. It's a mythic voyage, something out of this world. What I feel out there - and I love it so much for that reason - is something that you do not feel on Earth.”

Petit, 58, was a childhood rebel from his bourgeois upbringing, who pulled off his most famous walks in his early twenties with the help of old friends from Paris. They are witnesses in Man on Wire, and most say the twin towers experience was as life-changing for them as it was for Petit. Few now send Christmas cards. Most poignantly, Annie, his lover and a partner in much of his training, lost touch with him soon after his “miracle of New York”. This severance, Marsh implies in the film, was because he slept with the American woman who embraced him after his release from custody and said, “Welcome to New York.” Petit recalls matters differently: his love affair with Annie was already dying.

As for the notion that he has changed, Petit insists he hasn't. He still performs conjuring shows in parks in New York, where he lives with his partner, Kathy, and practises high-wire four hours a day. But he hasn't had a professional gig for three years.

“The world has changed immensely,” he complains. “When most people think of what I do, they must say, ‘This man is mad. He's risking his life. It's insane. We should stop him and put him in jail.' We are surrounded by cowards, who have forgotten how to live.

“Why are we letting them dull our senses? My profession is to do beautiful things, but I need to be invited.”

STUNT THAT KEPT BELEAGUERED NIXON OFF THE FRONT PAGES

Philippe Petit’s walk between the towers of the World Trade Centre on the morning of 7 August, 1974, made him an instant celebrity, knocking Richard Nixon off the front pages, the day before the president resigned over the Watergate scandal.

The NYPD quickly relented, dropping charges of trespass and disorderly conduct, on the condition that the high-wire artist performed for local children. This he did, stretching a wire over the Central Park lake. Petit even received a lifetime’s pass to the twin towers’ observation deck from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and his signature, inscribed on a steel beam, was lovingly preserved.

The destruction of the buildings by al-Qaeda terrorists is not mentioned in Man on Wire, the documentary of Petit’s achievement, but the film has an elegiac quality for the buildings and the people who perished in them.

“It is hard for me to talk about my personal feelings with all this loss of life,” says Petit. “I had toiled so hard to get to know those towers, they grew on me almost as a living entity, and when they fell I felt something was pulled out of me.”

Salmond maddened by the end of the party

The Times, June 20, 2008

It is 4.30pm and time for a little something, yet, as he gazes at a pile of cakes, Alex Salmond looks vaguely mournful. Perhaps it is because Sophie Elm, a graduate art student, has told just him that the food isn't real, but made from cotton wool, glue and acrylic paint. She has created a Mad Hatter's Tea Party. The First Minister laughs - had he known he would have worn a boater and a big pair of white trousers.

Mr Salmond has come to Edinburgh College of Art to open a £20.6million new wing. Usually occasions like this are a cakewalk, but it's less than 24 hours since his government suffered its first defeat in Holyrood, the loss of the Creative Scotland Bill, and all around there are arty people who now have absolutely no idea where the Scottish government's cultural policy is heading.

At the grand plaque-unveiling ceremony, Mr Salmond offers a brief disquisition on the Edwardian architect James Pittendrigh MacGillivray before he is moved to address matters of policy and Wednesday's events in parliament.

“Running a minority government is like levitation. You have to keep the opposition parties in a state of suspended animation,” he explains to an audience of shaggy-haired professors, who look somewhat askance at the imagery. The balance, he complains, has been disturbed by the “dancing up and down” of the opposition parties. “The impertinence of it, the audacity of it,” he fumes.

Mr Salmond says that he understands the importance of the creative industries. They produce £4billion for the nation's wealth and sustain 60,000 jobs. But what he can't accept - despite growing evidence to the contrary - is that anyone other than his Holyrood opponents are against his Bill. Indeed - turning logic on its head in a Mad Hatter-ish way - his opponents are in favour of it, too! They just couldn't agree to support him. Curiouser and curiouser.

On Wednesday, Mr Salmond says, his culture minister had announced £5million of new money for the arts. “Are we actually saying that we are going to have a six-month delay in setting up an organisation that everyone supports, which will have more money in real terms, because they are worried about which pot of money it is coming from?”

Can Mr Salmond see that some people in the arts are confused? They can't work out who is driving the creative industries, the behemoth that is Creative Scotland, or Scottish Enterprise, the business development agency, which seems reluctant to release its grip on all those digital and TV industry fiefdoms that generate so much work for its bureaucrats.

“Responsibility has never been in doubt,” he snaps. “To regard these excuses for issues as the pretext for the sort of shambolic obstructing we saw is beyond belief.” If the Mad Hatter's tea cups hadn't been glued down, Mr Salmond would have started throwing them about.

“Furthermore,” he says - always a sign of impatience - “we had an agreement with the business managers which was respected by the Tories and the Liberals that if we withdrew the financial provision of the Bill, they wouldn't object to it being debated next week. All these things tell you that the behaviour of the Labour Party was the most abject piece of irresponsibility that we have witnessed in recent times in parliament. I put it down to end-of-term madness and the fact that the labour leader is no longer in control of her backbenchers.”

He sounds bitter. “I don't feel bitter. I feel concerned for the creative communities of Scotland.” And with that concern ringing in creative ears, the First Minister has sidestepped into a lift and gone.

Europe's finest hotel - in the pubic triangle

Walk past Edinburgh's seedy Western Bar and turn left near the Burke and Hare pub - “lap dancing” is proclaimed above its entrance - and next door to an establishment called Hooters you will find what you're looking for, a gem among the filth.

Welcome to the Knight Residence, the hotel that has seen off rivals such as the Hotel Georges V, in Paris, the Hotel Adlon Kempinski, in Berlin, and the Mandarin Oriental, in London, to be crowned Europe's best.

The Knight Residence was proclaimed the finest following a survey of 160,000 visitors to the internet travel website Expedia.com. Its nearest British rival is more than 200 places down the list of best places to stay, and only nine other establishments in the world are rated better than Edinburgh's winner. Yet here it stands, surrounded by these strip joints, a sauna and a sex-shop.

Talk about against all odds. Even the management of the Knight Residence admit that this is an unlikely location for a luxury hotel, particularly one that specialises in family accommodation.

It stands close to the heart of Edinburgh's notorious “Pubic Triangle”, where, lured in by tacky fairy lights and thumping music, many a stag party has foundered; it is rumoured that whole coach loads of visiting Welsh rugby fans have disappeared.

This a great story. Read more here: Don't blush.

Against all odds

"Violence erupted in the spring of 1992. 'For 48 hours, we were killing one another,' remembers Imam Ashafa. 'I was fighting, believing I had to defend my faith, maiming and killing the others. My spiritual teacher, a man of 70, was murdered by the Christian community in his area. Two of my cousins were killed, and I came to know that it was Pastor James's group who had organised that militia. I was nursing an anger. For three years, my group and I were planning to eliminate the leaders of these groups.'

"Later that same year, Pastor Wuye and his entourage were set upon. Wuye's bodyguard was killed, and he was left for dead. When his friends found him, Wuye was lying in a pool of blood, and his right hand, completely severed at the wrist, was on the ground beside him. He now wears a prosthetic hand. Throughout his recovery, he thought only of vengeance. 'I felt propelled forward, even with a bandage on my arm,' he says. 'I went out to train people to fight, to show that this thing must be continued. I thought, Even if I die in this cause, I will be happy. Even when I started working with the imam, I nursed the ambition of killing him.'"

Extracted from my feature in Spectrum magazine. Imam Ashafa and Pastor James Wuye are now the driving forces of a peace movement in Kaduna, Nigeria, which is slowly becoming influential around the world. This extraordinary tale of reconciliation is back online at Scotsman.com. Read it here: Against all odds

Salmond backs 'Project Edinburgh'

The Times, April 12, 2008

The First Minister, Alex Salmond, has given his backing to ambitious plans, designed to promote Edinburgh as a capital city “fit for the 21st century.” He believes that the city’s status was not properly recognised by the previous Labour administration, with its West of Scotland bias, and is anxious to promote its role as the capital of the whole nation.

His endorsement comes as a new manifesto for 'Project Edinburgh' is launched by Sir Terry Farrell, the leading architect who is the city’s design champion, and who has in the past charged local councillors and officials with being in the grip of “the forces of lethargy.”

Mr Salmond has had two meetings recently with Sir Terry and is said to be keenly interested in his ideas - though he has not yet seen the detail of his 12-point “action plan for change.” He is, however, known to be enthusiastic about the new mood within the city, following the recent change in its leadership, and is determined to promote its image as a great European city.

Last night Sir Terry said: “As the capital city in a Scotland which is increasingly self confident, Edinburgh has a crucial role to play and I told Mr Salmond that he had a role to play too. He understood and I think accepted that, and I was impressed by how much he had accelerated his knowledge of the issues involved in just a few weeks.”

Sir Terry, who was appointed to his council-sponsored position in 2004, revealed late last year that he had felt a sense of failure in the post, after working under the former Labour administration in the city, and its “atrophied” planning procedures.

But he said the new SNP/Lib-Dem coalition, which was formed after last May’s elections, and the appointment of Dave Anderson as a new director of city development had transformed official attitudes to Edinburgh. Mr Salmond’s support, he added, was a turning point for the city.

However Sir Terry warned that Edinburgh still faced the challenge of overcoming complacency and a lack of vision.

A spokesman for the Scottish government said that Sir Terry was to be congratulated for “raising awareness of the importance of good quality development and urban design in delivering a successful future for the city of Edinburgh.”

Her and her big mouth

She’s got big hands, bloody big feet and a great big voice. "Hurry up," she yells, "I’m freezing me tits off."

Janet Street Porter is sitting with her Olive Oyl legs dangling over the triangulation point on the top of Edinburgh’s Blackford Hill. She’s not being rude, unkind or unpleasant, she just’s being, well, Janet Street Porter. Sort of stentorian...

That's a flavour of my encounter with Janet Street Porter. The link is working again so you can go here for a funny interview: Walkabout with Janet

I was on holiday last week, but managed to contribute this column on TV sport to Scotland on Sunday: Armchair anaylst

Fashioned from the same mould

Sunday Herald, 30 March, 2008


SITTING IN the rooftop café of an expensive Edinburgh department store, a fashionable young couple are having a friendly row. "You know, you blow my mind on a daily basis," she says. "Seriously, all cringing aside, you're really brilliant." "I'm lucky," he grunts, "I love what I do." "You're not lucky. You're talented." "He gives her a look: "Give it a rest", it says.

Whatever is the opposite of sibling rivalry, fashion design duo Christopher and Tammy Kane have found it. Strangers are immediately struck by the sense of ease which surrounds them. They finish each other's sentences with no hint of rudeness or aggression; they throw insults and compliments at one another without fear of causing offence. The Kanes are brother and sister, young and beautiful, best of friends. They are also among a handful of the most successful and sought-after designers in the world.

This is an improbable story of rags to riches in the rag trade. After surviving the best part of 20 years in Newarthill, a village of numbing drabness near Motherwell, the Kanes suddenly find themselves taking dinner with Hollywood celebrities - "Patrick Dempsey and his wife" says Tammy, still in awe - and having camera lenses poked at them by Mario Testino.

In Tammy, the transformation seems more absurd. Four years ago she had a job offering art therapy to little old ladies in Lanarkshire; this month, at 30, she has arrived: her fashion tips are featured in the pages of Vogue. Until that moment, for the last three years of their success, Christopher, small and shy, has been sent out alone to gather up all the glory. "I don't think I'll ever get used to it," he says. "I feel like a complete impostor."

The storm of success has been blowing around them since Kylie Minogue bought dresses from Christopher while he was still studying at Central St Martin's College in London. In summer 2006, just three hours after his MA show closed, he was summoned into the presence of Anna "Nuclear" Wintour, editor of Vogue and the hatchet woman of the world's fashion press, who is thought to have inspired the main character in The Devil Wears Prada.

"I was in her hotel room, having a cup of tea and a wee chat," he recalls. "Anna Wintour's in front of me. I was like that ", his jaw hits the floor. "You hear about her, but you'd never think of meeting her. She was lovely."

Wintour told Christopher that he reminded her of the late Gianni Versace and that she would like him to meet Gianni's sister. Phone calls were made and three days later he was backstage at a Versace show in Milan, chewing the fat with Donatella, the grande dame of fashion. "There were models running about, dresses didn't fit, it was just insane, really far-fetched," he says, still shaking his head.

If you're used to the rarefied air of fashion, you'll recognise the synergy between the Versaces and the Kanes. Gianni was the brilliant designer who founded the Italian fashion empire, Donatella his muse and critic. After her brother's death in 1997, she took hold of the business and carried it forward with astonishing single-mindedness. So nine years later, when a gawky Scottish boy dropped a sheaf of his fashion shots at Donatella's feet and out poured photos of his sister modelling his clothes, a bond was forged. Two years on, Tammy and Christopher name-check Donatella as if they are regular house guests - and they are.

In the meantime, team Kane has become an international phenomenon. He is the driving force in design at their Dalston studio. Tammy runs the business, keeping factories organised and suppliers on the move. Then in the evening, as she has done since he was a student, she will try on the clothes which her brother has made during the day. "Models are extortionate," he notes.

The results are spectacular. Their London Fashion Week show this February was news all around the world. "Kane stands on his own with this collection," trumpeted the New York Times. "London's boy wonder" gave "a subtle elegance to simple clothes" agreed the International Herald Tribune.

Even to the untrained eye there is a certain democracy in the Kane style. All sizes and shapes are catered for. Last October, Christopher caused a stir at the Swarovski Fashion Rocks Show by dressing Beth Ditto, singer with The Gossip and a robust size 16.

"We made her two dresses, one for the red carpet and another one for onstage, all covered in crystals. When you're on the runway - the red carpet - the paparazzi are flashing and basically it would lighten up. Then when she was on stage it was like a huge spotlight," says Christopher.

"It was one of the best, definitely one of the best," says Tammy, still revelling in the moment.

The women they admire most are often from an older generation - Christopher's muse, he says, is Carine Roitfeld the 50-something editor of French Vogue - and sister and brother are exultant that Cher has just bought one of his jackets. "You can't go, Who?' when you hear her name. That really cheered us up," says Tammy. These are the kinds of endorsement they have dreamt about for years.

Tammy and Christopher are the youngest of five children, whose mother Christine was a cleaner and whose father was a draughtsman - "the posh side of the family". Though there are five years between them, brother and sister shared a talent for art from an early age, and it was Tammy who first recognised her brother's prodigious skills.

"We'd hibernate, in the living room," she recalls. "We'd paint and draw and when I was interested in something, I would share it with him and vice versa.

"I'll always remember his primary school teacher. No matter what he was given to draw, he drew a woman with a dress. The teacher said to my mum, I'm really concerned, this is all he ever draws.' We're just like, So? What's the problem? At least he's drawing something.'"

The things which interested them when they were children still inspire them now. The Clothes Show, fodder for wet Sunday afternoons, switched them on to fashion. For thrills they watched Prisoner Cell Block H. Now they pool memories like these in their catwalk shows.

"We were looking at denim last year, like the denim overalls they wore in the Cell Block H launderette " muses Christopher.

" the character, the feral feel of it " says Tammy.

" the feral feel gone wrong," amends her brother, "like something supernatural. It's like Carrie in a Stephen King film."

They draw on family and friends too. "One show was very much early Aunt Essie," remembers Tammy. "I still have some of her suits. It was just her, it was all lace and we were thinking about lace for our collection. We looked at each other, and we both said, Aunt Essie! Granny Kane!' There are just things that remind you of people.

"My mum's overalls " she nods at Christopher " those gingham overalls for cleaning. It's bizarre. But we never go, I want that to look like my mother's overalls', it's not like that. Whatever he makes will turn out like a reminder. They're just characters from the past."

"It's romantic when you get into it, and really quite personal too," says her brother. "Anyone creative might be like that. A poet might write a poem about his mum."

Their business has its roots in 2000, the year Tammy graduated from the Scottish School of Textile Design in Galashiels and Christopher was accepted at Central St Martin's. Already, they knew they would have their own fashion business. That autumn, they bought train tickets to London, Christopher to study, Tammy to earn their keep. At first they lived together in Dulwich in a house known as The Fashion Commune, a memory which still makes them giggle. "A crazy American pal put that sign up. I'm sure the neighbours were terrified of us," says Tammy.

Soon after they arrived in the city, Tammy got work with Russell Sage, but when she helped her baby brother find a work experience placement at the studio, her new colleagues were dismissive. "They said, Oh he's so young, he won't be able to use the sewing machine'. I'm like, That boy could sew youse out the room.' Tammy's voice still drips with north Lanarkshire disdain.

Not surprisingly, she didn't last long in her job. "I was surrounded by people who thought they knew better than me, and I can't handle that. I took a step back, and waited for Christopher and supported him." She worked in shops, then as a receptionist for Aston Martin. After the death of their father, Thomas, she moved back to Newarthill for a year to be with her mother, and do her stint as a therapist. But all the while she kept her room on in their London house.

"People must have thought I was really crazy," she says. "My boyfriend used to get frustrated. He'd go, What are you doing? Why are you doing a shitty receptionist's job? You can't. You need to go and get what you studied for.' No-one would believe me. There was definitely an element of doubt, like, She's crazy'."

Christopher mocks the detractors. "She's not using her degree, she's not doing what she's trained to do '"

"So it was just brilliant when it all happened," says Tammy, breaking out in triumphant laughter. "Everyone who'd been judging us for years - especially me. It was just a big " She leans back and grins over the big double-V sign which she's waving in front of her face.

"F*** you!" says Christopher, for the benefit of the blind. "Sometimes it gives you a lot of pleasure, basically saying that to people who thought it would never happen.

"It's true what he's saying," says Tammy, suddenly serious again. "Even people that we're still close to, it's that self-doubt."

Christopher agrees. "That's something in Scotland. If someone does well, there's always someone quick to put them down again. It's annoying."

Equally aggravating, they agree, are the wind-up merchants who accuse them of selling out and abandoning Scotland. They're like the irritating drone of flies. "People were talking about us doing shows up here," says Tammy.

"I was trying to explain that there's actually no point. If you want to give a show, do it with people from Glasgow Art School, Edinburgh Art School. Give them a platform. Our platform is London - the reason being the international press. We don't need to do a show here to feel good and feel Scottish."

Quite right, says Christopher: "Our mum and dad are Scottish. Our whole family is Scottish. We're Scottish."

Fashion, which can seem so ephemeral, sticks deep with the Kanes. The passions it arouses are intense, and often make it hard for them to part with the things they have made. Christopher admits that he can hardly bear to see some women wearing his clothes.

"Even when you see a dress on the shop floor, hanging there. It's something personal something you worked on in the small world of the studio. And then you see it on a girl, or in the street "

"If it's someone amazing, then you're happy," puts in Tammy.

"Yes, you can't influence who buys it," her brother admits. "But sometimes it's like: Shit.' Because you really care for it. It's our intellectual property in a way. I still find it very weird."

Life, for both siblings, has recently taken a new turn. Last September, they moved out from each other and in with their respective boyfriends. They are happy with this development. "It's good to divide work and home life," says Tammy.

"Yeah, it's good to get away from each other sometimes," rejoins Christopher.

But parting is such sweet sorrow for these poets of the fashion world, and they are already playfully devising new domestic arrangements. They would like to buy a house, announces Christopher, and then in unison they shout: "Next door to each other!"

Christopher giggles. "We could ring a bell in the hallway." Tammy laughs too. "That's sick isn't it?"

And then her brother gets all serious. "I don't see anything wrong with that, I don't. Tammy's my best pal. Best pals live together. Best pals see each other. So that's what it is."

Pictures show Kylie in one of Christopher's dresses, and Chirstopher and Tammy, 2nd left, and 2nd right,with friends

Lovelock: optimistic, but not for humanity

The Times, Saturday 29 March, 2008

For a man billed as one of the most important environmental thinkers of his generation, Professor James Lovelock does not sound like a regular tree-hugger.

Yes, of course he accepts that mankind’s energy consumption has brought on the climatic catastrophe which is engulfing us. But he immediately scoffs at the technologies which have been most frequently proposed as alternatives to oil and gas. Wind and wave power? They are “a wicked joke”, he says shaking his head. He prefers the nuclear option.

And the notion of planting trees to offset carbon emissions? He dismisses that as “a crazy idea”. Then with a sigh he says, “That’s the trouble with the Greens, they live in a Green world. It is an ideology and not a science.”

Lovelock is speaking at his home, an old mill in an idyllic corner of Cornwall, but audiences at the Edinburgh International Science Festival will soon get a taste of one the great contrarians, who insists he deals in neither optimism nor pessimism, but realism. Next week he will award the Edinburgh Medal to his friend and colleague Christopher Rapley, the director of the Science Museum in London, and introduce an oration, “Great While it Lasted - Now what?”

The “it” of the title refers to humanity’s relatively comfortable existence on Earth, and the answer, should you be rooting for humanity, is likely to err towards the apocalyptic. Rapley and Lovelock are friends and colleagues and their views entwine. “I think 20% alive by the end of the century would be optimistic,” says Lovelock.

All of his thinking is based on the increasingly influential Gaia hypothesis which he first proposed more than 40 years ago. This described the Earth as a self-regulating, interconnected super-organism within which life ebbs and flows. In his most recent book, The Revenge of Gaia, he warned that the ebb tide is on the rise, bringing on a catastrophe which will have deep consequences for every living thing.

The prognosis is grim. The Sahara is already marching northwards, and swathes of mainland Europe will soon become a desert. Britain, with its maritime climate and relative fertility will inevitably become “a lifeboat” and its population will treble as Europeans migrate here (well, it is their “unconditional right” to come, because of EC membership, notes Lovelock).

When will this happen? “If you believe the [United Nations] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – I do, but I think it’s an underestimate – by before mid-century, say 2030 or 2040.” If you look back on the Earth’s history, he says, you can see that change happens quickly.

So, within two or three decades, as climate rises by eight degrees centigrade, populations will shift rapidly over the face of the globe, most heading North as the arctic warms up.

Canada will be obliged to open its door to its southern neighbour. Russians will be relocate to a rapidly-warming and congenial Siberia: “no more gulags there” chuckles Lovelock. China will look westwards and complete a process which is already firmly established by annexing Africa. “I don’t think the Africans will lose. The Chinese mightn’t be the most ideal colonists, but it’ll be better than the current state.”

Again, Lovelock insists, this is not a pessimistic view. “You have to recognise that we are not the end product of evolution. Everything keeps evolving. It is wonderful that a planet, after three and a half million years has evolved a species like us, that can think and communicate and to begin to understand what the universe is all about. But we haven’t got far enough yet – we have a lot more steps to make.”

Though he has a PhD in medicine and a fellowship of the Royal Society, Lovelock dislikes academia. He has worked alone since the age of 40, developing a device which detected CFCs in the Earth’s atmosphere. But for years, his environmental theories ensured he remained on the fringes of accepted scientific wisdom. Then in 2001, 800 scientists signed the Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change; suddenly Lovelock was the wise old man.

In a recent contribution to the magazine Nature, with Rapley, Lovelock proposed a possible solution to the crisis engulfing the world. They suggested a system of sea-going pumps and pipes which bring algae to the surface from nutrient-rich layers of the oceans which lie at depths of 100m and more. At the surface, the algae could absorb man-made carbon dioxide and excrete it to the ocean floor.

It sounds plausible and an American engineering company is already investigating a similar system, but success is only a possibility. “It’s not impossible we might find a way out,” shrugs Lovelock, “but I wouldn’t put your shirt on it.”

For now the challenge of his work drives him on. He has been offered “the ultimate upgrade” next year by Sir Richard Branson, a flight on the Virgin Galactic. This will take Lovelock and tourists who can afford the £100,000 fare on a sub-orbital flight over the Earth at a height of 100km. Lovelock is already preparing a book, Seeing the Face of Gaia, to coincide with his flight. “ It will hit the fan as far as publicity is concerned – and what a bright moment to publish,” he says.

He has a shorter journey this weekend – from his home in Cornwall to Edinburgh. But while po-faced Greens insist on taking the train, Lovelock has different ideas.

“Did you know that if you calculate the amount of breath the 6.7million people put out, it’s four times as much carbon dioxide as all of the airlines put together? If you want to improve your carbon footprint – don’t give up you flight, why not stop breathing or hold your breath? A lot of old fashioned envy comes into the flight business. It’s nothing to do with the planet.”

So he didn’t consider taking the 10-hour train journey? “O God no, I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m flying from Exeter. It saves you a pile of money. All you have do is book a couple of months in advance.”

* The Edinburgh Medal Presentation and Address, McEwan Hall, Edinburgh. Monday, 6.30