WALTER MacIntyre was a retired merchant seaman who lived in a caravan in preference to the house he had built on his croft in Kilbride on the Isle of Skye. A caravan is more like a cabin, and it rocks in the wind.
THIS is a tale of BBC Radio Scotland back in the day when we were able to explore Scottish culture in unprecedented depth. Martin Dalby had retired as head of music and Hugh MacDonald was his equally benign successor, and Martin was once again free to produce.
RADIO gave many of our best writers their earliest public hearings. Poetry from Scotland was regularly broadcast UK-wide
IN February 1967, the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow gave the British premiere of Brecht’s The Visions of Simone Machard. It is not well known but is a powerful retelling of the story of Joan of Arc in the context of Second World War France, pitting collaborators against resistance fighters. The translation was by Arnold Hinchcliffe.
THE “Citz” in Glasgow is due to re-open this year after five years of refurbishment. Mossman’s statues are back up, Shakespeare taking his place beside Burns and the Muses of Tragedy, Comedy, Song and Poetry, and Dance. I can’t wait to see it.
JOHN Purser concludes his series on Scotland’s early music with a look at the unearthed instruments that played their part in the Caledonians defeating the Romans.
CONTINUING his series on Scotland’s early music, John Purser takes us out of our own time of waste, war, wantonness and want and into an era when you spent what you had on the things that really matter most to our
I’D best come clean from the start: this is Stone Age rock Music I’m on about. I was already 15 when Jailhouse Rock came out. That may seem a long time ago to most of you, but we’re headed way, way back beyond that – a good 4500 hundred years back, and when they talked about rock music in those days they meant real rocks – proper whopping great stones. It isn’t called the Stone
JOHN Purser opens a new series on Scotland’s earliest music to rejuvenate us in the dark of winter and the unknowing time when the future is held in the balance ...
William Drummond of Hawthornden’s “sweet notes” of music and poetry sounded out among the “floods, rocks, meadows, [and] forests” around Hawthornden Castle and Rosslyn Chapel and maybe birds, fishes and beasts, “danc’d to their silver sound”. But humanity in the 17th century had
