1991 HEADLINE NEWS PRESIDENT BUSH LAUNCHED OPERATION DESERT STORM - MAJOR ABANDONED POLL TAX - ROBERT MAXWELL WENT OVERBOARD - YUGOSLAVIA ENGULFED BY CIVIL
WAR 0 GORBACHEV
Long before fame and fortune came his way, Phil Kay was spotted by The list at the Traverse - ‘slithering across the stage, ambling through the set with his matted mop of hair flopping in all directions’. Phil Kay was hailed as the only Funny Farm comedian able to stretch the stand- up form. His inspired improvisations and fanastical leaps of logic reaching up into ‘the higher realms of surreal comedy’.
in London. This, his first major film
‘Nirvana are poised to become the biggest American import since Sonic Youth’ was our wild claim in November as the band topped the bill, alongside Captain America and Shonan Knife, in Edinburgh’s Calton Studios. (Meanwhile, the same night, at the very same hour, a few hundred yards away, Deacon Blue were playing a sold out gig before thousands at The Playhouse: only in Scotland). As if the close confines of the Calton Studios weren’t enough, Nirvana then rounded off their capital visit with an impromptu acoustic set before a lucky few in the town’s Southern Bar. MTV Unplugged before its time.
DEPOSED AS SOVIET UNION SPLINTERED 0 BEIRUT HOSTAGES JOHN MCCARTHY AND TERRY WAITE RELEASED
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debut. Whether Blur are vital enough to last out the year is quite another matter. The List
FILM/ BOOKS ’
Serial killers were the cultural vogue as the human appetite for ’orrible murder became artistically respectable. Anthony Hopkins sipped Chianti in nightmares across the world as the Oscar-winning Hannibal Lecter in Silence 0! The lambs, while a much more unsettling, morally ambiguous take on the phenomenon finally slithered onto our screens in the shape of Henry: Portrait 0! A Serial Killer. The literary supplements, meanwhile, were in a stir over the pros and cons of Bret Faston Ellis’ American Psycho. The list saw it for the shameless exploitation it was: ‘scenes which read like a high- speed collision between Open Beaver Monthly and the Black & Decker catalogue’.
V FILM/THEATRE
" 'N ‘I want this written Iarge,’ Muriel Gray commanded. ‘We
‘ climbed those mountains for real; sometimes twice. The next day, when we came back with the helicopter and they dropped me off for those dramatic, panoramic shots, these bastards would say, “Oh
I aye, that’s how you do it.” Well
i _' no, it’s not how I fucking do it.’
1 ,1; ~ Forceful as ever, Gray outdid
the bearded traditionalists and '3 brought Munro bagging to the masses via a television show and a best-selling book.
“.7me. Years before he slipped into the
uniform of the Highland polis, Robert Carlyle kitted himself out for the building site setting of Ken Loach’s Biff-Raff. Before making it as an actor, Carlyle had worked for five years as a painter and decorator, including eighteen months on construction sites
I ‘Punk’s Not Dead’ yelled our October cover, as The list polished the rust from its safety pins and celebrated a wave of punk nostalgia ‘Scotland really has a new talent,’ said The list of A.L. Kennedy’s Night Geometry And The Garscadden Trains, which went on to win the Saltire Society award for Best First Book blink and you missed another short-lived stab at a new tabloid, the Sunday Scot Roddy Doyle’s nublin vernacular tickled our readers as The Commitments won The list Beaders’ Poll Film while the Pixies set at the SECC lasted a mere two-and-a- half songs before a safety barrier collapsed, the legal debacle over refunds ran and ran.
THIS WAS THE LIST THAT WAS
role, took him to the Cannes Film Festival, but his heart was still with his Glasgow-based Rain Dog Theatre Company, whose first Mayfest production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, directed by Carlyle, had been praised in The listtor its ‘strong acting and atmospheric setting’.