BGT finalist surprise gig at Glasgow Central Station
We previously reported that the 24-year-old bingo caller became a national sensation after Simon Cowell hit the golden buzzer during his audition.
READ MORE: Glasgow bingo caller makes Britain's Got Talent final
READ MORE: Vinnie McKee performs at Marie Curie Hospice in Glasgow
The proud Glaswegian from Ruchazie moved both judges and viewers with his powerful rendition of Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars, earning him a spot in this year's final.
Before heading off to London for the BGT grand finale on Saturday, May 31, he gave fellow Glaswegians one last emotional performance at the station that helped shape his journey.
We sent off one of Glasgow's own this morning- @vinniemckeeuk is off to the Britain's Got Talent finals!! 🎤 But not before giving us one last performance on the station piano.👏🎹
Best of luck Vinnie- Glasgow's behind you all the way!💙#BGT #GlasgowCentral@AvantiWestCoast pic.twitter.com/ZALClkJcR1 — Glasgow Central (@NetworkRailGLC) May 28, 2025
Glasgow Central Station shared footage of the moment on social media, writing: "We sent one of Glasgow's own off this morning - Vinnie McKee is off to the Britain's Got Talent finals!
"But not before giving us one last performance on the station piano.
"Best of luck, Vinnie- Glasgow's behind you all the way."
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Edinburgh Reporter
3 hours ago
- Edinburgh Reporter
Edinburgh International Book Festival: James Kelman: Your Stories are Your Own
James Kelman is Glaswegian through and through. Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, he has always been committed to giving voice – their own voice – to the Scottish working classes. He's been published since the 1970s, and is a prolific writer of short stories, essays and novels. In 1994 he won the Booker Prize with How Late It Was, How Late, the story of a shoplifter who is beaten up by plain clothes policemen and wakes up to find himself blind. The book was a highly controversial choice, causing one of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, to call it 'crap…deeply inaccessible to a lot of people' and its win 'a disgrace', which allegations Kelman countered with, My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that right. This week Kelman was at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to talk about The Story of the Stone, a new collection of short fiction, and All We have is the Story: Selected Interviews 1973-2022. Chair Dr Scott Hames wrote his PhD on Kelman; all this publishing, he jokes, is diluting his work no end. Story and style have always been central to Kelman's work. When friends lent him books and asked if he enjoyed them, he could never separate the story from the writing, A writer is a maker. I outgrew writers who didn't work on the basics; the teller of the story tells the story; they should never throw a pile of words at people and say 'make your own story,' He grew up in a family full of stories. His Gaelic-speaking grandmother 'lived and breathed the tradition' in which everyone told stories and ballads. At school she was punished for speaking in Gaelic; he regrets the fact that he and his brothers made fun of her, …the laugh was on us because we never learned the language…imperialists told us not to value our own family Later Kelman and his friends were similarly punished for speaking in the Glaswegian they used on the street at school. As a young writer, he says, he was banned from telling stories about his 'ordinary' background; such stories were only acceptable if written from the outside 'like a social worker.' Starting work at the age of 15 in a printing factory, he heard the men around him telling amazing stories all day, often with very inventive use of the F word, but he realised that he could not tell their stories to his friends, the stories did not exist without the men who told them, and the men did not exist outwith the factory. Kelman has a lifelong interest in fonts and typography; as an apprentice compositor he learned to study the page, to judge not only words but spaces. One of his tasks was to insert slivers of lead between the words and remove them after printing. He still likes to explore different fonts for different stories. When he started to write short fiction he needed the freedom to do what he wanted to do, And what I wanted was a story Publishers, he says, always want to impose uniformity on a writer, but the voice changes from character to character. If it didn't How would the characters breathe? How would I breathe? And if a character can't breathe, they won't come alive on the page. He began to write without using speech marks or any indicators of dialogue, he wanted to retain ambiguity, to remove the barriers between a character's inner and outer world. This, he says, was the only way he could create stories from within a character's psyche; he didn't want any distinction between their voice and the narrator's. Kelman has always fought the literary establishment, always used the language he grew up with. When the printer of one of his first collections wanted him to rewrite his very first story (about an old man in the printing factory) removing all the swear words, he removed the story instead and wrote another one, There was no story without the language. You have to have that honesty. A young writer, he says, needs to find their own speaking voice and not be hampered by the rules they are taught in school. They must accept that their very best writing will still be attacked or ignored, will fail to attract the attention they expected. 'You just need to hope that other artists will at least appreciate it.' He's always been attracted to the writing of Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka; art is also a huge influence, particularly Cezanne and Rodin – as a teenager he was more interested in visual arts and writers from other cultures. He's immensely well read and well informed; the entire session is crammed with references to ideas, radical history, philosophy and literature, but he has always wanted his stories to be, above all, self-referential, for everything to be there on the page, just as it should be in a painting. People shouldn't have to bring anything to either form unless they want to, The thing is dead until a person is looking at it or reading it; the relationship between that person's self and the work of art is where that thing exists. Kelman says he's 'beyond anger' and now simply 'mystified' as to how politics have moved towards the right in recent times. What the hell happened here? Bloody Sunday, the miners' strike, Thatcher. The 1979 race riots in Southall. People over 50 (he's now 79) thought things were on a constant upward trajectory, but 'it was a misunderstanding of how history functions.' Despite all the radical work that took place in the 19th century, 'here we are.' An audience member asks about Kelman's editing process; are editors brave enough to challenge his work? His answers gives rise to much laughter, It's very difficult with editors. In fact, he says, he revises all the time and finds it hard to finish anything; he has a store of hundreds of unfinished stories. On 31 July 2025, the Scottish Languages Bill, giving official status to Gaelic and Scots languages and making changes to support them in Scotland, was enacted at Holyrood. How will this affect things? Kelman replies that he has not been published in the UK since 2012; his current publisher is a small left wing press in the US, There is a continuous push to sanitise language as it is used by ordinary people. He thinks some Scots writers have been too timid, and it infuriates him that Glaswegian is described as slang. It's a language, derived from West coast Gaelic and Norse. If you are not allowed to use your language then your culture is dead. This is happening all around the world; African and Asian languages are being killed just as Gaelic was when I was a child. In the 1970s Kelman attended Philip Hobshaum's creative writing group; other members included Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead and Alasdair Gray. I recall last seeing Gray on the stage at EIBF for a tribute to one of the founders of Canongate Books, Stephanie Wolfe Murray. Each contributor was allocated a 5 minute slot. Gray was still talking 10 minutes later, unbothered by Jamie Byng's increasingly frantic hand signals. Hames, who has had precious little to do in Kelman's hour-long stream of consciousness, is now faced with a similar problem; Kelman has so much to say, about writing, politics, history and so much more, and there are still many audience questions to be answered. Eventually Hames does manage to bring the session to a close, but only on the basis that people can continue to chat with Kelman in the festival bookshop. An uncompromising supporter of the language, culture and truths of 'ordinary' people, of community, artistic freedom and above all, the story, James Kelman remains one of Scotland's most important writers, whose strange, new sentences are brilliant adventures in thought James Wood, The New Yorker, August 2014 James Kelman's The Story of the Stone: Tales, Entreaties, and Incantations: 6 and All We Have is the Story: Selected Interviews (1973-2022) are published by PM Press. Edinburgh International Book Festival continues until Sunday 24 August. Authors yet to come include Kirsty Logan, Richard Holloway, Irvine Welsh, Kit de Waal, Naga Munchetty and Ian McEwan; for details visit Like this: Like Related
Scotsman
20 hours ago
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Fringe Theatre reviews: Nowhere + more
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Nowhere ★★★★☆ Traverse Theatre (Venue 15) until 24 August The interconnectness of our lives with the political events of our times and previous times, as well as those who came before us and will come after us, is at the heart of Khalid Abdalla's biographical-plus-much-more show. It starts with the story of his involvement in the Egyptian revolution of 2011 – something that may come as a surprise to anyone who only knows him from his screen work, including playing Dodi Fayed in The Crown. It then develops into a broader, highly ambitious attempt to contextualise where he and we, sitting in the 'nowhere' space of the theatre, have come from, but also where we are heading, before finally focussing back in on the mass murder and starvation of the people of Palestine that is happening right now. Khalid Abdalla in Nowhere | Helen Murray Directed by Omar Elerian, in a production produced by Fuel, who are known for their immersive, imaginative sets, Abdalla's varied life – as both the actor who played the 'lead terrorist' in the film United 93 and as the real-life grandson of a man imprisoned by the Egyptian regime in previous uprisings, it's a personal and also, through drawing in other conflicts, global charting of the history of resistance to authoritarian power. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad A piece that's delivered with passion, sometimes polemic and constantly questioning its own purpose and potential, there's the ever-present danger but also excitement of it overwhelming itself with its sheer scope. A huge infrastructure of visible and invisible architecture is required to hold together its many strands. Abdalla's warm narration – with his polished Cambridge tones at one point brilliantly dissolving into his native Glaswegian – constantly finds new ways to connect the personal with the geopolitical in a piece that makes ingenious use of a screen, juxtaposes photographs and live drawings (including some of ours) with film footage of past protests, immersive audio and a powerful final call for 'never again' to apply to all. SALLY STOTT You're an Instrument! ★★★☆☆ Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August When Alon Ilsar and Ciaran Frame, aka the Sonicrats, tell their young audience that they're university lecturers, the white-coated duo aren't just playing characters. They really are music technology researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, and this show doubles as both a fun hour for children between the ages of five and twelve, and an opportunity for Ilsar to show off his invention, the AirStick. An AirStick is a device which can be held or attached to clothing and connected wirelessly to a speaker, then when it's moved it causes a different tone of sound to be played depending on the movement. What begins as an apparently wider piece about musical instrumentation becomes a more focused demonstration of the AirStick's capabilities, especially when a willing apparent stooge from the audience (the play's third actor, Erick Mitsak) is brought onstage to become a kind of human theremin. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The piece's focus narrows as it becomes all about the device's capabilities, and while it's a really novel tool presented with enthusiasm, charm and a degree of fun interactivity by the hosts, it appears to be quite tricky to get a complex tune out of it. In this regard it's as much a piece about the simple pleasures of noise-making as it is about music, although that's also an activity many kids enjoy. DAVID POLLOCK The Long Good Bye Bye ★★☆☆☆ Laughing Horse @ Freddy's (Venue 194) until 24 August This noir crime spoof features some cringey puns, uneven acting and an all-round handmade aesthetic but it is also silly, infectious fun if you can overlook its more slipshod elements. Reports (by cub podcaster Veronica Scoop) of the deaths of pop group The Femme Fatales have not been greatly exaggerated. Someone has a grudge. Could it be ex-member-turned-private investigator Justin McGuffin, or is he the next victim? The amateurish action is narrated by a Philip Marlowesque gumshoe, presiding over a parade of stock characters from shady sources to rookie cops, and laced with a host of song titles and lyric references for the sheer merry hell of it. FIONA SHEPHERD Not Without Right★★☆☆☆ C ARTS | C venues | C alto (Venue 40) until 25 August This boisterously performed two-hander about a curmudgeonly characterised Shakespeare looking back on his life, as he's chastised by his female muse, presents its own offbeat version of 'the truth'. With the booming voice of a classically trained actor, Colin Cox's direct-to-audience address, as the playwright, at times feels like an assault, while Alessandra Mañón, as his fickle inspiration, adopts the beaming and bedazzled delivery often favoured by American actors performing Shakespearian plays. The sparky dialogue between them is more successful and Tudor London well-evoked in a piece that's rich with research and an original if surprising take. SALLY STOTT Consumption ★★☆☆☆ Paradise in Augustines (Venue 152) until 24 August There's more than a hint of NF Simpson's whimsical surrealism to some parts of Beware of the Theatre's promising three-hander about a couple with idiosyncratic culinary tastes, and the neighbour who threatens to expose their nefarious activities. But from moments of daft humour, it swerves unconvincingly into tragedy and even grand guignol, and it really needs to be snappier, tighter and a lot shorter to make its mark, and for its themes of forced dependency (I think) to emerge. There's potential here, and a likeable young cast, but Consumption needs a fair amount of work before it's the convincing piece of drama it could be. DAVID KETTLE Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here Agent Red's AUDITION ★☆☆☆☆ The Royal Scots Club - the Speakeasy (Venue 241a) until 24 August You've got to feel for Ruth Rosie, aka Agent Red in this audience-reliant recreation of a movie audition. Beset by technical difficulties, she's hardly been able to offer the experience she clearly intended – but it was unwise, nonetheless, to include a litany of her tech problems as a substantial part of the paper-thin show's content. There's something here, but it needs an awful lot more work and finessing. As things stand, despite its interesting starting point, AUDITION simply isn't in a state yet to put in front of an audience, paying or otherwise. DAVID KETTLE Wait, What Is This? ★☆☆☆☆ PBH's Free Fringe @ CC Bloom's (Venue 171) until 24 August The best guess as to the question posed by the title is: possibly what passes for entertainment on an alien planet — albeit one that speaks English and is really into rhyme. The Rhyming Rogues are an unlikely couple who have clearly rigorously rehearsed this presentation, which arguably may be a sketch show. It is so tightly drilled as to be hermetically sealed and allows for little in the way of light, spontaneity or laughter. As such, it perhaps transcends such bourgeois notions of 'good' or 'bad' but one is forced to admire their commitment.
South Wales Argus
a day ago
- South Wales Argus
15-year-old Newport teen gearing up for Britain's Got Talent auditions
Melissa Carter aged 15 will travel to London's Kia Oval on September 7 to perform as a solo artist in front of the show's judges. Melissa has been singing since she could talk but only started pursuing it seriously two years ago with help from vocal tutor Paul Cook. Since then, she has built up an impressive list of achievements. Young artist Melissa Carter who is going on Britain's Got Talent (Image: Melissa Carter) Her journey has already seen her reach the quarterfinals and semi-finals of Talent Search UK, before earning recognition as Best Young Female in 2024 and Best Rising Vocalist in 2025 at the Music Recognition Awards. Earlier this year she also claimed second place in the Rhyme and Shine open mic karaoke competition. Speaking about her upcoming audition, Melissa admitted she feels a mix of nerves and excitement. She said: 'I'm really excited, but I am a bit nervous. 'If I get through to the live rounds, I can't wait to perform in front of Simon Cowell just to see what he says.' Young artist Melissa Carter who is going on Britain's Got Talent (Image: Melissa Carter) Melissa who studies at Cwmbran High School is also working on her debut album at Creative Sound Hub in Oakfield. So far, eight tracks have been recorded, with two more in progress. The album title has yet to be confirmed. Speaking about her love for music Melissa said: 'I love singing because you can express your feelings through music in a way that you can't with anything else.' 'I enjoy all kinds of songs, but pop is my favourite.' Melissa hopes her Britain's Got Talent audition will be another step in her musical journey and possibly the start of something much bigger.
