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Glasgow Times
18-05-2025
- Business
- Glasgow Times
New Glasgow cafe that's been generations in the making
Decked out in black and orange signage, the eye-catching logo shows coffee spilling onto a vinyl record. The words 'championing coffee and records' tell me my ears and tastebuds are in for a treat. Walking in, I'm greeted by the beaming smile of Alessandro Alonzi, the 22-year-old owner of the fledgling coffee spot, who's just started cleaning up shop for the day. He put a record I'd picked to be played in the space that week, The Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit, on the turntable. As we chatted over the 14 songs, I was given an insight into just how much the cafe means to him and how it's been a long time coming. New Glasgow cafe that's been generations in the making (Image: Anthony Flett @ Sweeping up shop and rousing up the rich coffee aromas already seeping into the pores of the cafe, Alessandro explains that running a place like this is 'in his DNA'. He comes from a long line of Italians who've owned and run a variety of businesses, from chip shops to newsagents and, of course, coffee shops. Producing a photo of his Nonna (Grandmother) Nilda, 90, working behind one of the shop's counters in the 70s, Alessandro proudly shows a photo of them together in Revival when it opened. READ MORE: I tried Glasgow's new viral TikTok spot - but what is it exactly? He studied Business at Strathclyde University, and as part of the course, he took a 'family business' module that explained how the entrepreneurial spirit is carried through generations. Being brought up around those businesses had a big impact on him, Alessandro explained: 'I grew up hearing stories about my Nonna's business and then my first job, when I was about 12 or 13, was working every Saturday in my Nonno's shop selling sweets and ice cream.' Alessandro's Nonna, Nilda, working in a shop in the 1970s (left) and her with Alessandro (right) (Image: Supplied) Being paid five pounds for three hours of work in Edinburgh gave him more than pocket money; it was enough to ignite a spark in him and start his journey to Revival. Paolo, his dad, took him out for coffee as a teenager, and the love affair was born. His parents have recently moved to Glasgow, and Alessandro admits the cafe dream came from his dad, who's taking every opportunity to enjoy his caffeine creations after giving him the push he needed to start the business. Alessandro said: 'It was one of those Scottish moments of being too humble or scared to be seen as ambitious. I used to say I wanted to do this when I graduated, and I'd laugh and put myself down that way. READ NEXT: Arrests after Glasgow restaurants and fast food shops raided 'But at some point, I said to myself that I needed to do this, and my dad had a wee chat with me and was like 'either commit to this or go and look for a job', and here we are taking the plunge.' The passion he has for the business comes through in every word. Flipping over to side B of the record, Alessandro reveals plans to 'keep pushing forward.' He said: 'It's been a dream come true opening here, but now that I have, I don't want to just open and settle. Because it's a different concept, there's so much I can do with it, especially the vinyl side of things.' Revival's community-building focus has cemented the vinyl concept with regulars. Only a few months in, Alessandro's ran customer-picked record submissions to ensure the records always bring something new to the space. He's already planning collaborations with some local record shops and is feverishly working on other ideas he's keeping under wraps for now. Revival Cafe, located at 43 Hyndland Street (Image: Newsquest) In addition to running the cafe, Alessandro is a Hyrox competitor and will compete in the World Championships in Chicago later this year. With fitness being his passion and coming together to put yourself through your paces being a great bonding exercise, Revival Run Club was started up as the cafe opened. Led by Emily Gallacher, the run club has helped build the community around the cafe. Catching up with her as she visited the cafe, she said the importance of this is not lost on her: 'There's been great support for it. Every week, it's been building. It was an important part for Alle when it started. He wanted it to be more than a coffee shop—he wanted to build a community, which from day one he's managed to do.' As the crackle of the needle coming to the end of the record flows through the cafe, it signals the end of my stop in Revival. I can't help but ask as I'm about to head out the door to enjoy the evening sun, about which record holds a special place in Alessandro's heart as his favourite. After much deliberation, he narrowed it down to Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen. He's seen The Boss live twice already and hopes to catch him again this year.
Scotsman
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Muckle Flugga by Michael Pedersen review: 'an extraordinary first novel'
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... Like all the best adventure stories, Michael Pedersen's debut novel Muckle Flugga begins with a map. It's a map of an imagined island at the far northern tip of Shetland; a small island complete with lighthouse, bothy for accommodating visitors, cliffs, caves, coves, and also unexpected gardens, and wild places. It's to this island that the book's central character, a young Edinburgh writer and artist called Firth, makes what he intends to be a final journey, after he abruptly cancels his planned suicide off the Forth Bridge. He is inspired to live a little more by a visit - as he dangles from the ironwork - from a passing gannet; the bird reminds him of a promise he once made to his old seafaring grandfather - who used to tell tales of Muckle Flugga - that he would go there and paint a gannet for him. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Shaun Murawski | Shaun Murawski So it is that Firth arrives on the island, inhabited only by the fierce widowed lighthouse keeper and his gentle 19-year-old son Ouse; and begins a physical, emotional and psychological journey so vivid, intense, and fiercely tragic-comic that it often threatens to take the breath away. Indeed Firth himself seems to spend much of his time gasping for air, as he is overwhelmed by rain and seawater, pitched by the swaying hammock in his bothy into the bath that sits beneath it, attacked by the ravenous sea birds known as bonxies, or - most significantly - increasingly heart-struck by the beauty, wisdom and genius of the boy Ouse, a quiet lad relentlessly bullied by his distraught father since his mother's death, yet nonetheless filled with an inner poise and creative energy that enables him to survive his father's rages, and even to continue to love him. Until now, Michael Pedersen has been known primarily as a poet; currently Edinburgh's Makar, he has published three powerful collections of poems, as well as his acclaimed 2022 memoir Boy Friends, a study of love and friendship inspired by the death of his friend Scott Hutchison, of the indie band Frightened Rabbit. In Muckle Flugga, though, he delivers an extraordinary first novel, that takes a fairly simple narrative arc - despairing hero travels to a far place, where he rediscovers the will to live and love - and packs it with the most audacious forms of strangeness, including a weird, tangential relationship with the normal timelines of human history. It is difficult to know, on Muckle Flugga, whether we are in an internet-free past where a demented solo lighthouse keeper might avoid the attention of the authorities, in a disintegrating future where such systems are breaking down, or in a parallel reality altogether, where past and future collide in Firth's tormented, whisky-fuelled dreams. What is clear, through, is that Firth's time on the island reconnects him with the natural world in ways that are both comically emphatic and unbelievably rich in brilliant and rotting detail; and that that encounter with the physical extremes of life on Muckle Flugga has nothing to do with 'escape' from Firth's previous city life, and everything to do with a new recognition of the reality on which all life rests. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad For all its geographical distance, Muckle Flugga is intensely linked to the wider world in myriad ways that race and dance through Pedersen's story. There is the lighthouse lamp itself, and its intense connection to the lives of the ships and sailors whom it guides to safety, all filtered through the disturbed but energetic mind of The Father, who tends the light with fanatical dedication. There is the great library Firth discovers on the island, tenderly cared for by Ouse, and rich with stories and histories from across the globe. And there is that strand of Scottish history that links islands and maps and lighthouses through the Edinburgh family of Lighthouse Stevensons, builders of the Muckle Flugga light; and their rebel son Robert Louis Stevenson, the magical storytelling creator of the best loved of all treasure islands, who appears on Muckle Flugga as Ouse's familiar spirit and guardian angel. Stevenson, of course, is also the author of The Strange Case of Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and it's difficult not to see autobiographical elements both in Pedersen's self-mocking account of the briefly fashionable Edinburgh writer in flight from the shallowness of his world, and in his portrait of the strength, steady sweetness and sheer creative genius of Ouse, who designs and makes the most beautiful woollen artefacts Firth has ever seen. Pedersen's first novel, in other words, is as rich in meanings and resonances as a gorgeous painting laden with significant detail. And all of its threads and strands are transformed and re-energised by the brilliant refracting lenses of Pedersen's prose; sometimes tumbling over itself in haste and over-exuberance, sometimes glinting in perfection, but always conjuring up vital new realities, just when we need them most.
Scotsman
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Wrest, Glasgow review: 'trudging through the motions'
Wrest feels more like a functional business plan than a heartfelt musical endeavour, writes Paul Whitelaw Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter 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... Wrest, Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow ★★ Edinburgh's Wrest are a genuinely independent grass-roots success story. They're unsigned, they've self-released three albums, they run their own promotions company, and they recently played a sold-out headline show at the Barrowlands. That's all quite impressive, but Wrest are also a risk-averse MOR guitar band who needn't ever worry about being crushed under the weight of their own inventiveness. Blatantly indebted to the sensitive anthem-sized likes of Snow Patrol, Coldplay, U2 and Frightened Rabbit, they have no ideas or personality of their own. The paucity of ambition is bewildering. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Singer-songwriter Stewart Douglas has forensically studied those bands and worked out the basic formula for writing A Big Emotional Anthem, which wouldn't really matter if he had at least one gem in his arsenal to match the undeniable phones-aloft triumph of, say, Chasing Cars or Yellow. But he hasn't. Every mid-paced song sounds exactly the same – a generic grey mass of two or three strummed chords, simple lead guitar lines, pulsing With or Without You bass, derivative vocal melodies and 'soaring' arrangements designed to surge dramatically at just the right moment. It's all so predictable. Whereas Frightened Rabbit once used this well-worn template to express complex feelings in a powerfully honest way, Wrest deal in mere Hallmark platitudes. Douglas is constantly urging us to 'keep going' in the face of adversity etc. Well-meaning sentiments, but hardly useful in the grand, challenging scheme of things. Performance-wise they're just four nondescript – and probably very nice – men trudging through the motions, their ordinariness emphasised by the surrounding beauty of this old Glasgow venue (which wasn't sold out).
