Latest news with #Outsider
The Sun
24-05-2025
- Sport
- The Sun
Horse racing tips: Watch out for first-time cheekpieces sparking this live outsider into life
Scroll down for the selections FIVER FLUTTER Horse racing tips: Watch out for first-time cheekpieces sparking this live outsider into life SUN Racing's Sunday picks are below. Back a horse by clicking their odds below. Advertisement LONGSHOT QUITE THE GETAWAY (3.33 Fontwell) Has been running well over three miles and first-time cheekpieces could make all the difference. EACH-WAY THIEF Advertisement VINTAGE FIZZ (3.48 Uttoxeter) Ran well at Ayr two starts ago and had excuses over further last time. ROCK OF IRELAND (4.50 Curragh) Has been hitting the line well over 1m2f and looks ready for a step up in trip. Advertisement Commercial content notice: Taking one of the offers featured in this article may result in a payment to The Sun. You should be aware brands pay fees to appear in the highest placements on the page. 18+. T&Cs apply. Remember to gamble responsibly A responsible gambler is someone who: Establishes time and monetary limits before playing Only gambles with money they can afford to lose Never chases their losses Doesn't gamble if they're upset, angry or depressed Gamcare – Gamble Aware – Find our detailed guide on responsible gambling practices here.
The National
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Why singing in a Scottish accent makes Findlay Napier an 'outsider'
Findlay Napier doesn't just want you to listen to his new songs. He wants you to read them as well. 'It's maybe like reading the Internet Movie Database when you're watching a film,' says the Highland folk singer of his album and book project. 'The idea is to pull people in a bit. They can read up on the background of the songs.' At 154 pages, Napier's book, accompanying his new album Outsider, is more a pictorial catalogue – the songwriter's equivalent of a user's manual. 'It has a full introduction to the record, including biographies of all the 'cast and crew', and then it's got a couple of deep dive essays,' he says. 'Jen Anderson, who runs the record label The Bothy Society, told me she thought it might be interesting to know a bit more about the songwriting process. She asked me for a paragraph or two. So, 10,000 words later . . .' Not quite. The book, part of a new strand by The Bothy Society, is as heavy on photographs as it is on verbosity. There are even guitar tabs for the ardent followers who want to learn these folky tunes themselves. 'I've written a whole thing about recording from the point of view of the singer,' he says. 'I spent most of my youth reading things like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, so I find it hard to take myself too seriously. The back of the book is a songbook-style thing, words with the chords above them. Years ago I had a Christy Moore songbook that I was obsessed with, and The Scottish Folk Singer was the other one. 'I used to love the idea that you could just pick it up and play along and it had the chords in it. It never had the fancy chord shapes. So I put in all the shapes for the one teenager who might listen to it and realise what the chord is.' The Arran-based singer has also been inspired by the writing of comedian Stewart Lee, in his recent book The Life and Near Death of a Stand Up Comedian. 'He has annotations all the way through. Sometimes it's half a page of script and half a page of annotations. I thought that was really funny. I learned a lot from that book and that was what I wanted to go for.' In reality, Napier's book is in part a reaction to the transience of releasing music in the digital age, when even major act album releases come and go without ever being held, opened, read, smelled. Vinyl revival or not, in 2025 most new music is digital vapour. Napier, from Grantown on Spey, shares a quip from Jen Anderson about missing having something to read in her hands that isn't her phone when she puts a new album on, opens a bottle and sits down by the fire. 'People don't buy as much physical product any more,' he says. 'So this is in lieu of the album cover. There are a lot of people listening on Spotify who don't pay for it but many do and we do get a tiny percentage of that.' Spotify says it paid £7.7 billion to artists last year, but for artists such as Napier, whose strong work ethic and diversity (he also teaches and runs music workshops) keep him afloat, it's a pittance. 'I'm making about £15 a month,' he says. 'Back in the day I would have been selling about 15 CDs at gigs and a bunch of merchandise too. That paid the mortgage or filled the car up.' As for the demise of CDs, streaming services aren't the only ones to blame. Another culprit has four wheels. 'Musicians have been talking about this since 2007,' said Napier. 'The car industry started phasing out CD players because everyone had iPods then. The CD was dead if not dying. And people are realising even the CDRs you might have backed stuff up on in the 90s have started delaminating.' Whether accessed by ears or eyes, the lyrics on Napier's new record flesh out the title of the album. 'All the songs are about people who perceive themselves to be outsiders yet who perhaps aren't outsiders at all. There's even one about a piece of audio equipment, Amberola Blue, a wax cylinder recorder which people don't use now, of course. 'At some point everybody thinks they're an outsider. I know I have. I've made some choices. I sing in a Scottish accent. Immediately that makes you an outsider, not going for an American or Mid Atlantic accent. But when I heard Ian Dury singing in his Essex accent I was overwhelmed by how real it sounded. "Folk like John Prine, Joni Mitchell, Nick Lowe have never been about trying to fit into boxes either. So when you look around, you realise the idea of being 'in' is bullshit. Nobody's on the inside. Everybody's fighting to get in. Maybe if we were all a bit happier being ourselves then the world would be a better place.' Outsider is out now. Visit for Album Books. Findlay Napier is at Orkney Folk Festival, May 22; Irvine Folk Club, May 28; King Tuts, Glasgow, June 23; Ely Folk Festival July 13 and Birnham Arts Centre, Dunkeld, November 7.
The Herald Scotland
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Why singing in a Scottish accent makes Findlay Napier an 'outsider'
'The idea is to pull people in a bit. They can read up on the background of the songs.' At 154 pages, Napier's book, accompanying his new album Outsider, is more a pictorial catalogue – the songwriter's equivalent of a user's manual. 'It has a full introduction to the record, including biographies of all the 'cast and crew', and then it's got a couple of deep dive essays,' he says. 'Jen Anderson, who runs the record label The Bothy Society, told me she thought it might be interesting to know a bit more about the songwriting process. She asked me for a paragraph or two. So, 10,000 words later . . .' Not quite. The book, part of a new strand by The Bothy Society, is as heavy on photographs as it is on verbosity. There are even guitar tabs for the ardent followers who want to learn these folky tunes themselves. 'I've written a whole thing about recording from the point of view of the singer,' he says. 'I spent most of my youth reading things like Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, so I find it hard to take myself too seriously. The back of the book is a songbook-style thing, words with the chords above them. Years ago I had a Christy Moore songbook that I was obsessed with, and The Scottish Folk Singer was the other one. 'I used to love the idea that you could just pick it up and play along and it had the chords in it. It never had the fancy chord shapes. So I put in all the shapes for the one teenager who might listen to it and realise what the chord is.' The Arran-based singer has also been inspired by the writing of comedian Stewart Lee, in his recent book The Life and Near Death of a Stand Up Comedian. 'He has annotations all the way through. Sometimes it's half a page of script and half a page of annotations. I thought that was really funny. I learned a lot from that book and that was what I wanted to go for.' In reality, Napier's book is in part a reaction to the transience of releasing music in the digital age, when even major act album releases come and go without ever being held, opened, read, smelled. Vinyl revival or not, in 2025 most new music is digital vapour. Napier, from Grantown on Spey, shares a quip from Jen Anderson about missing having something to read in her hands that isn't her phone when she puts a new album on, opens a bottle and sits down by the fire. 'People don't buy as much physical product any more,' he says. 'So this is in lieu of the album cover. There are a lot of people listening on Spotify who don't pay for it but many do and we do get a tiny percentage of that.' Spotify says it paid £7.7 billion to artists last year, but for artists such as Napier, whose strong work ethic and diversity (he also teaches and runs music workshops) keep him afloat, it's a pittance. 'I'm making about £15 a month,' he says. 'Back in the day I would have been selling about 15 CDs at gigs and a bunch of merchandise too. That paid the mortgage or filled the car up.' As for the demise of CDs, streaming services aren't the only ones to blame. Another culprit has four wheels. 'Musicians have been talking about this since 2007,' said Napier. 'The car industry started phasing out CD players because everyone had iPods then. The CD was dead if not dying. And people are realising even the CDRs you might have backed stuff up on in the 90s have started delaminating.' Whether accessed by ears or eyes, the lyrics on Napier's new record flesh out the title of the album. 'All the songs are about people who perceive themselves to be outsiders yet who perhaps aren't outsiders at all. There's even one about a piece of audio equipment, Amberola Blue, a wax cylinder recorder which people don't use now, of course. 'At some point everybody thinks they're an outsider. I know I have. I've made some choices. I sing in a Scottish accent. Immediately that makes you an outsider, not going for an American or Mid Atlantic accent. But when I heard Ian Dury singing in his Essex accent I was overwhelmed by how real it sounded. "Folk like John Prine, Joni Mitchell, Nick Lowe have never been about trying to fit into boxes either. So when you look around, you realise the idea of being 'in' is bullshit. Nobody's on the inside. Everybody's fighting to get in. Maybe if we were all a bit happier being ourselves then the world would be a better place.' Outsider is out now. Visit for Album Books. Findlay Napier is at Orkney Folk Festival, May 22; Irvine Folk Club, May 28; King Tuts, Glasgow, June 23; Ely Folk Festival July 13 and Birnham Arts Centre, Dunkeld, November 7.
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in dance: Rachid Ouramdane: Outsider; Pam Tanowitz: Neither Drums Nor Trumpets
It's a rule of life that dancers can do anything with their bodies. In Rachid Ouramdane's new work, Outsider, made with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, they slide across the stage like oil, tumbling and curling like acrobats, swinging one another around like supple dolls. One woman falls and rises like a pendulum across a mass of bodies that gently push her from side to side. The stage, in Sylvain Giraudeau's stark design, is crisscrossed with a cat's cradle of taut climbing wires held on gantries. French-Algerian choreographer Ouramdane's stroke of magic is to introduce four extreme sport athletes who hang aloft seamlessly in semi-silhouette, their weightlessness contrasting with the gravity-bound dancers beneath. When they walk the tightrope, their arms wobble gently as they seek balance. Towards the close, they pull up four dancers from below, letting them dangle lengthways like human mobiles. Against Stéphane Graillot's pale lighting, and accompanied by Julius Eastman's minimalist score, the effect is meditative, transfixing. It's also slightly alienating: dance as an exercise in physics and composition. The excellent dancers are ciphers, parts of a puzzle. It's thanks to the thrilling range of London's Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections festival that it was possible to watch Outsider on the same day as a new piece by the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz that uses pattern in a much more human way. Neither Drums Nor Trumpets (the title taken from a line in a film by François Truffaut) is performed in the up-close space of the Royal Opera House's Paul Hamlyn Hall. Using seven of her own dancers and a phalanx of students from the Rambert School, Tanowitz weaves a layered 45-minute work that fills the room with movement and life, at once rigorous and playful, tugging at aspects of the building's history as a floral and dance hall. Her dancers are in flowery costumes (by Maile Okamura, who also performs), and the score composed by Caroline Shaw additionally features long stretches of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and a scratchy recording of Second Hand Rose, sung by Fanny Brice and beloved by Tanowitz's late mentor, the postmodernist choreographer David Gordon, to whom the work is dedicated. What's so impressive about Neither Drums Nor Trumpets is the power of its structure; the way Tanowitz builds repeated skeins of complex movement that thread in and out of the piece, conjuring ideas and fleeting thoughts. There are deep balances on one leg, little hugs of the arms across the body, sharp jumps from standing with arms raised like Merce Cunningham angels. At moments, the dancers sit thoughtfully, legs curled, like the Little Mermaid or a Nijinsky faun. Victor Lozano, in silver trainers, taps quietly round the performance square. Caitlin Scranton and Anson Zwingelberg crouch on their haunches and walk like children. Marc Crousillat carries the ethereal Christine Flores like a dart and then a scrunched-up ball. Lindsey Jones jumps across the stage, arms flailing wildly, then flattens herself against a screen. They are all superb – strong, striving human, raw. The students, meanwhile, make grave processions of detailed movement, the most basic dance positions of dance vocabulary transformed into subtle embroideries. Seeing these young dancers alongside professionals is remarkably inspiring – it feels like a gift to the future. Star ratings (out of five)Outsider ★★★Neither Drums Nor Trumpets ★★★★
The Guardian
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It was wonderfully innocent': Boy's Own, the fanzine that defined the acid house generation
When Andrew Weatherall suddenly died in February 2020, the outpouring of grief was monumental. The DJ and producer was a revered figure, known for producing and remixing indie-dance crossover acts such as Primal Scream, as well as being a curatorial guru on everything from thumping techno to deep dub via obscure rockabilly. His status as an influential and beloved music figure even garnered him the nickname the Guv'nor. But prior to this he went under another name: the Outsider. This was his nom de plume as a writer for the fanzine Boy's Own, which launched back in 1986. In the first issue Weatherall set out its intentions: 'We are aiming at the boy (or girl) who one day stands on the terraces, the next stands in a sweaty club, and the day after stays in bed and reads Brendan Behan while listening to Run-DMC.' Founded by Weatherall, Terry Farley, Steve Mayes, Steve Hall, and Cymon Eckel, the intention was to document their own world, a predominantly working-class one, in a way that they didn't see being covered by the music weeklies or glossy monthlies. It was a boisterous and scrappy mixture of football, fashion, music, clubbing, politics and biting humour. Almost 40 years on from that first issue, and five since the sad passing of Weatherall, the collective have reprinted a hardback collection of all the fanzines, as well as launching a new line of Boy's Own clothing. Initially, Boy's Own was sold in pubs, clubs, warehouse parties and football terraces but 'nobody bought it', recalls Farley. 'It was very niche – just us talking about our mates.' The gang had all bonded growing up on the outskirts of London, in Slough and Windsor, as a hodgepodge suburban crew of soul boys, football casuals, clothes obsessives and ardent clubbers. Every Friday they took acid at 9pm and hit London – a tradition known as 'the nine o'clock drop'; years later this would also be the name of a compilation album Weatherall released. It would take a widespread youth culture phenomenon for things to really blow up for Boy's Own. 'A few people identified with it but it didn't kick in until acid house happened,' recalls Eckel. 'Then it went fucking wild.' By their spring 1988 issue – featuring a front cover of a bunch of young kids, one in a Boy's Own T-shirt, in front of a brick wall with graffiti reading 'drop acid not bombs' – they were publishing articles such as Bermondsey Goes Balearic by Paul Oakenfold, exploring the burgeoning scene in London around clubs like Shoom and Future, as well as chronicling his adventures in Ibiza. Two to three thousand copies of each issue were printed and the publication quickly became something of a scene bible, complete with its own in-jokes, digs and unique lexicon, so much so that by 1989 Weatherall even wrote a handy guide to the definitions of commonly used slang, such as 'Log: If you don't know what one is, you are one.' Its tagline – 'The only fanzine that gets right on one, matey' – soon became a staple saying for those in the know around drug culture. The message even spread overseas, with German outfit the Beat Pirate releasing the acid house track Are You on 1 Matey? 'It was just a bit of humour and fun,' says Hall. 'But it became the language that kids were using to explain this new experience.' In 1988, with the second summer of love around the corner for a new generation, Boy's Own was about to graduate from making DIY magazines to throwing legendary parties. That spring Eckel was working as a carpenter on a video shoot for George Michael when he had an industrial accident and lost a finger. While he was in a specialist reconstructive surgery ward he became friends with another young person there who had trapped his fingers in a credit card machine. They bonded 'over music and drugs' and would sneak a spliff every Friday at the back door of the hospital. Through this connection, Eckel learned of a guy who owned a studio in a barn that he also threw parties in. Soon enough the Boy's Own crew, operating as the Karma Collective 'because we didn't do branding then', were throwing their own. They landed in the Berkshire countryside and laid out hay bales, blew up a bouncy castle and set up a pumping sound system. The end result they describe as 'part-rave, part-punk gig and part-garden party', which brought together 'football lads, punks, fashionistas and the wide-eyed ravers who were discovering ecstasy for the first time'. It was a combination that few had experienced before. 'It was definitely the first time I'd been to an acid house party that was outdoors,' recalls Hall. Boy George could be heard singing a cappella in the early hours as the sun rose and when the police arrived at about 8am – to find a group of smiling, dancing young people in smiley face-covered bright clothes and bandanas listening to squelchy electronic sounds – they didn't have a clue. 'They just told us to keep it down and be careful when driving home,' recalls Farley. 'It all looked quite innocuous to their eyes – no alcohol and just people lounging about in a beatific sort of way.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The parties continued and the crew was soon in huge demand. Such was their growing reputation for spinning killer records and having their finger on the pulse that Weatherall and Farley started to be hired as producers and remixers for the likes of Happy Mondays, New Order, the Farm and Primal Scream. Between 1990 and 1993 London Records gave them their own label to play with, on which they released music by Bocca Juniors, Jah Wobble, DSK and Denim, but the success didn't match up to the work the crew had done for other labels and they became fed up with one another. They wrapped up the fanzine in 1992, the same year that Hall and Farley started their own independent label, Junior Boy's Own, which signed the Chemical Brothers and Underworld before the label was split into two in the late 1990s, before things wound down in the mid-2000s. In hindsight, Boy's Own was something of an all-encompassing lifestyle brand before such a thing was commonplace: a magazine spanning music, politics, fashion and their own subculture, that released records, signed artists and threw parties. But all they wanted to do at the time was be creative and have fun. 'I'm proud that we did it for the sake of doing it, as opposed to for commercial ends,' says Eckel. 'It was wonderfully innocent. We could have been Cream or Ministry of Sound, but we just did things we believed in.' It still takes Farley by surprise how a bunch of working-class lads, made up of gas fitters and carpenters, created something that connected on such a profound cultural level. 'This guy recently pulled his sleeve down and he had a Boy's Own tattoo,' he recalls. 'And he's like: 'I love you guys'. I didn't know what to say. I smiled, it made me laugh, but it also made me kind of go: 'Fuck! This was important to people. A lot of people. And if we in any way influenced other people to do better things in their lives then it was more than worth it.' When Weatherall wrote the introduction to the final ever issue of Boy's Own, he was able to write his own obituary. 'It's with sadness (and a slight smirk) that I must announce the death of The Outsider,' he began, before painting a scenario of a body discovered around a pile of King Tubby records and Boy's Own back issues. Sadly, Weatherall didn't get to plan out his own ending in such detail, but being surrounded by music, words and his own creative output feels like a fitting, and symbolic, closing chapter. 'We miss him,' says Hall. 'But I think he'd be proud to this day of what Boy's Own achieved.' Boy's Own clothing and fanzines are available from
