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The Herald Scotland
29-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Tips for 12 Edinburgh Festival shows outwith the city centre
However it is still possible to experience the best of the festivals off the beaten track, as well as discover hidden gems and lesser-known venues. Here are some of the best places to take in the festivals well away from the city centre. Jupiter Artland There's nowhere in Scotland quite like the award-winning sculpture gardens and art attraction Jupiter Artland. Founded in 2009 by art collectors Robert and Nicky Wilson, the attraction features more than 30 permanent site-specific works by artists including Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Phyllida Barlow, Anish Kapoor, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Marc Quinn and Andy Goldsworthy. A highlight of recent summers at the site has been Jupiter Rising, which offers the chance to explore the site and its latest exhibitions after dark. Ticketholders will also be able to enjoy experimental music, poetry, performances and late-night DJ sets outdoors, with this year's line-up featuring club night Ponyboy, singer-songwriter Roxanne Tataei, artist and DJ Taahliah, dancer and choreographer Florence Peake, and author Sacha Coward. A radical retelling of the William Shakespeare play As You Like It will be staged at the Church Hill Theatre in Morningside as part of thr Edinburgh International Festival. (Image: Dahlia Katz) Church Hill Theatre The long-time home of many of Edinburgh's amateur theatre companies has also regularly featured in the Edinburgh International Festival's line-up. Handily placed for the many cafes, bars and restaurants in Bruntsfield and Morningside, the venue will be playing host to two of the EIF's main theatre productions. Cutting the Tightrope will feature a series of short plays short plays exploring the power of the arts in global conflicts, political resistance and displays of artistic freedom. William Shakespeare's play As You Like It will also under a radical reimagining for an adaptation which is said to be 'unafraid to confront the thorny truths of our time.' Performance artist Linder Sterling will be staging a special show partly inspired by Sir Walter Scott at the Royal Botanic Garden as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. (Image: Ross Fraser McLean) Royal Botanic Garden Arguably the most idyllic oasis within easy reach of the city centre, the Royal Botanic Garden is far from a culture-free attraction. The garden is playing host to the first ever retrospective exhibition in Scotland devoted to the trailblazing feminist photographer and performance artist Linder Sterling, which spans 50 years, back to her student years in Manchester. The former frontwoman of the Manchester post-punk band Ludus will be opening this year's Edinburgh Art Festival on August 7 with a special performance inspired by the Scottish writer Walter Scott's early definition of 'glamour,' while the feminist collective Femmergy lined up to perform at the official launch party in the nearby Grange cricket club. The garden will also be hosting Botanic Lates, a festival event offering rare night-time entry to the attraction, which will feature exclusive access to the exhibition, live music, and pop-up bars and food stalls. Harpist Esther Swift will be part of the Bellfield Brewery's Fringe line-up. Bellfield Brewery More than 500 Fringe shows have been announced since the official programme was announced at the start of the June. One of the most intriguing new elements is the Taproom Sessions, a new series of events at the Bellfield Brewery and Taproom in the Abbeyhill area. Two cornerstones of Edinburgh's year-round cultural life, the Hidden Door festival and music promoters Soundhouse, previous collaborators with the brewery, have joined forces on a programme which will encompass live music, spoken word and film. Billed as 'a grassroots alternative to the city centre mayhem,' the Taproom Sessions programme will feature jazz stars Graeme Stephen and the Phil Bancroft Trio, singer-songwriters Kate Young, Cahalen Morrison and Adam Holmes, harpist Esther Swift, and poets Iona Lee and Kate Ailes. The seaside town of North Berwick is transformed by the Fringe by the Sea event in Berwick Fringe by the Sea was originally envisaged as an event that would offer the prospect of a day trip to the seaside town as an alternative to the hustle and bustle of the historic heart of Edinburgh. Now it is firmly established in its own right as one of the biggest and best of Scotland's summer festivals, transforming The Lodge Grounds into the main hub for North Berwick's annual event. It has previously secured acts as varied as Del Amitri, Travis, Texas, Sister Sledge, The Jacksons, Richard E Grant, Frankie Boyle and Alexander McCall Smith, and sold more than 86,000 tickets last year. This year's line-up includes live music from Air, Ezra Collective, Hamish Hawk, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, The Bluebells and Eddi Reader, as well as appearances from Judy Murray, Irvine Welsh, Vic Reeves, Ruby Wax and Flawless. Lego artist Warren Elsmore will be creating a new exhibition made entirely from Lego bricks for this year's Fringe. Picture: Neil Hanna Granton Long-held ambitions for the former industrial area on Edinburgh's waterfront to be transformed into a new cultural quarter for the city have finally been taking shape in recent months. The former gas holder, the most distinctive landmark in Granton, has become home to a new public park, close to where a former railway station has become home to artists and creative industry workers. A few minutes walk away, on West Shore Road, The Pitt has become a major new food, drink and cultural destination since it opened in December thanks to its bars, food stalls and event spaces. It will also become a Fringe venue for the first time when it plays host to Brick Journeys, an exhibition built by artist Warren Elsmore entirely from Lego bricks which celebrates how humans have travelled, from planes and trains to hot air balloons. The FirstStage Studios complex in Leith will be opened to the public for the Edinburgh Art Festival. (Image: Liam Anderstrem) FirstStage Studios It is more than five years since a former wave power plant on the outskirts of Leith Docks was turned into Edinburgh's first full-time film studio. Industry giants Amazon, Sony and Netflix have all used the vast warehouse complex since then, for shows including The Rig, Outlander and - most recently - Dept Q, the new Edinburgh-set crime thriller starring series adapted from the novels of Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen. However the festival season will open the building up for rare public access for a spectacular one-off event. Former world champion gymnast Lewis Walker, who now works across multiple dance, theatre, film, fashion and music projects, will be bringing the Edinburgh Art Festival to a close. Co-commissioned with the Serpentine Galleries in London, the show is expected to explore the human search for authenticity in a world built on repetition. Citadel Youth Centre If you're looking for a good local project to support at this year's Fringe look no further than the long-running youth project. It will be entering the Fringe fray for the first time with two fundraisers for its work with young people and families in Leith. The first, Punchline on Leith on August 6, will feature a surprise line-up of Fringe favourites and rising stars, as well as a raffle of works of art donated by the comics Joe Lycett and Phill Jupitus. Storm in the Citadel, on August 7, will serve up three garage punk bands – local favourites The Bad Moods and The Screamin' Kick, along with Spanish stars Los Retumbes. Portobello Town Hall One of the most under-used venues in the city will finally be playing a major part in the Fringe when it a hosts a four-day festival of Palestinian art and culture. Running from August 12-15, the programme will feature theatre, dance, comedy, storytelling, music and poetry performances, as well as panel discussions and talks with artists. The Creative Scotland-backed project involves writers, dancers, theatre-makers, publishers and producers based in Scotland who have worked regularly in Palestine and the Middle East for decades. A crowdfunding campaign raised £40,000 from more than 430 supporters. Leith Depot The grassroots culture powerhouse of Leith Walk is well worth a trip across town at any time of year and it's no different in August. A major new addition to its Fringe offering is a series of music and in-conversation events hosted by BBC broadcaster Vic Galloway. Musical guests lined up so far include Haiver, Constant Follower, Siobhan Wilson, Broken Chanter, Adam Ross, Gillian Fleetwood and Rick Redbeard. Other festival highlights include Riot Reveals Cabaret, a show expected to feature burlesque, comedy, magic, drag and live music, a performance showcasing the 'radical subversive poetry' of Robert Burns, and Karaokekarma, a play set in a karaoke booth. Hibernian Supporters Club While Oasis and AC/DC will be filling the home of Scottish rugby over four nights in August, a social club a stone's throw away from Easter Road, the home of 'The Hibees,' will be turned into a Fringe venue to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the club. It will play host to 1902, the story of the club's famous bid to claim glory in the 2016 Scottish Cup Final to bring an end to the club's trophy drought, told through the experiences of four friends desperate to see their team at Hampden. Nathan Scott-Dunn's play lifts the lid on the bravado of the fans in a story which is said to have been built on the 'passion, humour and resilience of working-class people. The Bowlers Rest Tucked away off the main tourist trail in Leith, The Bowlers Rest on Mitchell Street is nonetheless one of the easiest Fringe venues to reach from a tram stop in the city. The pub has become increasingly well-known of late for its jam sessions and intimate live music gigs. Now it will be playing host to a South African film and TV actor's one-man play. Sean Higgs' show will explore the unravelling of a white South African man who is forced to survive as a beggar in a black township. To purchase tickets for the Fringe, please click here
The Guardian
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I was always obsessed with death': how Linder turned pornography and trauma into art
In 1977, the punk band Buzzcocks released a single called Orgasm Addict, with a record sleeve as jolting as the song's title. It depicted a lean and muscular, oiled-up naked woman with an iron for a head and smiling, lipsticked mouths for nipples. The collage was scary, sexy and shocking – especially since it was mass produced, seen in record shops and on the streets, rather than confined to a gallery. 'Buzzcocks had just signed to United Artists, so there was quite a large publicity budget,' Linder Sterling, the creator of the collage, remembers. 'So that poster was in cities everywhere. It was unmissable. There was no social media, so the effect was hard to track, but years later people say to me 'I saw that poster in Glasgow, or in a back street in Birmingham, and it changed my life.'' The poster is in the collection of MoMA (Malcolm Garrett did the graphic design). The iron-headed woman is still Linder's most recognisable image, and a version of it advertises her new exhibition, Danger Came Smiling. Like her other collages, it was made from found imagery – often pornography. So what was the woman's real face like? 'When I die, I'll tell my son that he can finally show the world the source image,' she promises. 'Because once you see it, you can't get it out of your head.' Linder was born Linda Mulvey, in Liverpool; at 21 she decided to go by a Germanic version of her first name only. She's sitting in a cafe upstairs at the Hayward Gallery in London, dressed in jeans and a cycling top. 'To have a retrospective at age 70 – there's something very joyous about that,' she says. Danger Came Smiling is named after the second album by her band Ludus; she originally took the title from one of her grandmother's romance novels. 'If you're looking at pornography, those workers are vulnerable and they often have to smile,' Linder notes. 'And think of Trump, that horrible gurning.' The exhibition consists of four huge rooms filled with 50 years' worth of work. There are pictures by the photographer Birrer of Linder tying cellophane around her face, in pearls and dramatic makeup; many more collages, including old porno postcards with the heads of the models replaced with consumer durables like kettles and TVs; and masks made out of peephole bras and black lace knickers. There is footage of Linder's notorious performance with Ludus in which she took to the stage in a bodice made of chicken carcasses (decades before Lady Gaga's meat dress) and then whipped out a strap-on dildo. She says it was inevitable, once punk hit Manchester, that she would form a band: 'It was like national service in Manchester, you had to pick up an instrument at some point. For a short while, the space between the audience and the stage just seemed to disappear. A lot of us were poor working class, we hadn't had music lessons as children. But extraordinary music was happening then.' There are dramatic images of the artist bodybuilding in 1983, in an otherwise all-male gym in Manchester's Moss Side; and a photograph of her tenderly painting the nails of her friend Morrissey on tour in the early 90s. Linder has known Morrissey since 1976; she is the pal he arranges to meet 'at the cemetery gates' in the 1986 song by the Smiths. Linder confirms they are 'still friends, obviously, for ever, for life', but is reluctant to discuss their friendship with his least favourite news organisation. 'I'm wary of clickbait,' she explains. As well as joyous – and funny, alarming, perceptive, uncanny and somehow deeply northern – the show is long overdue. Linder has never had a retrospective in London, let alone enjoyed art-world accolades like a Turner prize nomination. She is delighted she's finally making a splash in London's Southbank Centre, contrasting its now celebrated brutalist concrete with the 'soft, yielding and inviting architecture of women's bodies' depicted in a stash of Playboy magazines from 1968, the year the Hayward Gallery opened. Linder acquired the mags from her late uncle and has used them in the exhibition's two most recent works, collages partly inspired by deepfake porn, which feature her face on a porn star's body. 'Pornography used to be print media,' she says. 'Whereas now it's quite aerosolic. You know, pornography is all about profit, so why print a magazine when you can just have a website?' But Linder is wedded to print media, and few other artists wield a scalpel so effectively. Collage is the medium to which she keeps returning, most recently for the piece she has made for the Guardian. 'That Roman sculpture of an unnamed emperor just seemed quite apt right now,' she says of the work, adding that her selection of images is usually intuitive. There is a drawing of a baby in the womb – Linder has made a lot of work expressing her despair at the overturning of Roe v Wade in America – and a very explicit orchid. 'Flowers are basically nature's pornography,' she says. 'It's like, come over here and be attracted to me.' Linder's work casts doubt on the idea that material comforts will make us happy. 'In capitalism, you have this progress narrative, like: buy this, do this, and life will get better,' she says. 'Suddenly you think, 'It could get a hell of a lot worse, very quickly.'' At the moment, she says, 'everything we fought for feels as fragile as a magazine from the 1950s. You put the blade into it and it just tears.' Linder discovered collage in 1976, when she was studying graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic; she saw the work of artists including Hannah Höch, Max Ernst and El Lissitzky in a book by Dawn Ades called Photomontage. Her initial collages were taken from magazines, which at that time were divided into 'men's' and 'women's' interest in newsagents. Women's interests were confined to fashion, homemaking and cooking, but 'in men's interest you'd have pornography, music … Music obviously wasn't a woman's interest,' she notes drily. In splicing the two types of media together, her collages comment on the way women are objectified, stereotyped and pressed into domestic and sexual servitude, exposing the tension and aggression seething between the sexes and beneath the surface of family life. They seem to have extra resonance in the era of OnlyFans, when anyone can be a sex worker, broadcasting porn straight from your own home. 'Pornography can be ethical,' says Linder. 'But when you've made a product in your bedroom it needs to be distributed, and that's when the tech companies take ownership of it. That's when it gets very, very murky.' Linder's dad was a bricklayer, her mother a hospital cleaner. Born in 1954, she says her life has followed the trajectory of British pop music. 'I grew up with Merseybeat and I remember that sense of excitement,' she says. 'Harold Wilson was our local politician, and the people from my city were globally changing culture. Success could be local, it wasn't something far away. As a small child, you just sense that.' There was a much more malevolent influence in Linder's young life: her step-grandfather, who would show her pornography when she was as young as three, and sexually assault her in the family home. Linder believes this trauma is responsible for her lifelong desire to take control of porn and turn it into a feminist statement – she has spent a lifetime looking at it, and using it in her work, joking that these days when she tries to buy an old porn mag, she finds that someone from the British Museum is also trying to acquire it. 'I feel comfortable working with pornography,' she says. 'It feels analytic – no, forensic. That's the word.' The abuse she suffered stayed with her. A couple of years ago, Linder had eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. 'A whole new swathe of imagery came up and it was very, very vivid,' she says. 'I was somehow recalling the ballet books I used to have aged three. I think that kind of grooming begins with the handling of the child's body in a certain way in domestic spaces. In my montages, I reverse-engineer what a paedophile spends their time engineering.' At 10, Linder experienced the culture shock of moving from Liverpool to a small mining village near Wigan. 'I'm still recovering from it,' she says. 'Liverpool's a port, so you're importing goods but you're also importing ideas. You have that sense of America ahead of you; it's about reaching outwards. But in a mining village, the idea is boring down into the earth.' Gender roles were strictly enforced. 'I was called a wench!' Linder remembers. 'Maybe if I hadn't have grown up there, I wouldn't have identified as a feminist aged 16.' Linder discovered Germaine Greer's galvanising second-wave feminist text, The Female Eunuch, in a bookshop in Wigan in 1970. She was inspired by the book's cover by the surrealist artist John Holmes, depicting a woman's torso as a neutered hot-water bottle, complete with handles. I suggest the image is quite Linder-esque, and she says: 'It really is! It was very striking at the time – it sort of popped off when you saw it in a bookstore. I think that's why I was interested in doing graphic design rather than fine art. I really loved record sleeve and book cover design. My family didn't go to art galleries. We might have sheltered in one in the rain. I didn't even quite know what art was then, I guess.' She was delighted to get back to the big city to study, and her horizons expanded further on 20 July 1976, when she went to the second Sex Pistols concert at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall after seeing it advertised on the side of a passing van. 'I remember John Lydon taking my money on the ticket box and he looked quite extraordinary,' she says. 'He was wearing a sparkly jacket, almost like an Elvis jacket. I remember thinking, 'Oh, this is a good way in. I haven't seen anyone looking like that in Manchester before.' And it was all quite gloriously shambolic.' Between bands, she got talking to a group called Buzzcocks, who at that point had only played one gig. They asked her what she did, and on telling them that she was a graphic design student, they invited her to design 'posters and things. So it was all very casual.' Linder started dating Howard Devoto, Buzzcocks' frontman, who soon left the band to form another, Magazine. 'We'd go to London, stay in Malcolm McLaren's flat, hang out in Sex' – McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's boutique, and the source of the Sex Pistols' stage wear. Nonetheless, as far as Linder is concerned, punk was over by April 1977. 'I was about to hand in my end-of-year thesis about punk. And my mum's magazine had a big feature about how to make a bin-bag skirt for your daughter and how to knit her a mohair jumper. I remember thinking, 'Well, that's it, then.'' Punk's premature demise didn't staunch her creativity, but Linder's desire to be a great urban photographer like Diane Arbus or Weegee ended in horrifying fashion when she was on her way home after photographing a gig by the Damned. A man followed her off the bus and down a shortcut home, then held a stiletto knife to her throat. 'I said, 'Take my cameras, they're worth a fortune.' And I bluffed that my friends were coming, so he ran off with my cameras.' When the police finally caught the man two years later, they discovered he had raped seven women, one of them on the night he attacked Linder. She didn't pick up a camera again until her son was born in 1990. Linder says her retrospective feels 'quite tender, because so many people haven't made it', although she admits that even as a girl, she 'was always obsessed with death'. One room features costumes for a ballet Linder created called The Ultimate Form, made by the fashion designer Richard Nicoll, who died suddenly aged 39. There's also an unusual (to put it mildly) tribute to Linder's late father – three huge pictures of Linder and her friend Marie Blum in ecstatic poses, covered in custard, cream and rice pudding. It's inspired by the niche sexual fetish sploshing, in which people get aroused by having messy food dumped over them. 'He was an Irish builder, very strong even in his 80s, and then suddenly he had a severe stroke, so I and others would feed him, trying to maintain his dignity,' says Linder. 'He was in hospital, so it was rice pudding, custard, jellies, those kinds of soft and sugary foods. At the time, I was aware of the splosh fetish happening, and was collecting all the magazines. It felt really cathartic to have this extraordinary splosh session after feeding my father so carefully and so tenderly.' Danger Came Smiling is an object lesson in creating art out of even the most abject materials, and Linder is justifiably proud of the inspiration she has provided to others. 'I'm on the school syllabus now,' she says. 'Sometimes people follow me on social media. I look at their profiles and they've been doing collage, photomontage, and that feels good in these cut up, fractured times. If you can find the psychological or the physical glue, it keeps you sane.' Linder: Danger Came Smiling is at the Hayward Gallery, London, 11 February-5 May Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
