³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

One of the nicest things about Celtic Connections - apart from having a month of music in the darkest month of the year - is the way it brings together artists you wouldn't normally think to unite.

Whether that's informally through the almost homeless Festival Club or formally in staged concerts, it's one of the most succesful strands of the festival.

Transatlantic Sessions are a tried and tested formula - both live and recorded - and this year's show, which brings together 16 different performers from Scotland and North America, is so good they're once again doing it twice during the festival (with the final concert recorded for broadcast).

It's a starry line up. From the States - Nanci Griffith, Kathy Mattea, Tim O'Brien, Bruce Molsky and Dirk Powell, not to mention Dan Tyminski, familiar to some from Alison Krauss' Union Station, but ladies and gentleman, also the singing voice of George Clooney in O Brother Where Art Thou.

The Scots send in their big hitters too - Eddi Reader and Julie Fowlis, Celtic Connections' own artistic director Donald Shaw, a late substitution in the form of the multi-talented John McCusker and Phil Cunningham.

Phil's sparring partner Aly Bain - never Aly McBain or Mr Bean as we later discover - is the Scots musical director, while dobro expert Jerry Douglas keeps the Americans in line. Kind of.
That's part of the joy of these concerts, people come and go, can't find a seat - at least twice, long legged Eddi Reader clambers over chairs to find a spot - provide impromptu backing and occasionally sit on a sofa at the back, as if they were in someone's living room.

But for all the spontainety, it's finely tuned - they admit to hours of rehearsals - and as individual performers, they're all so adept, there's barely even a false start.

The music is a mix of Gaelic songs (Fowlis on fine form), Scots reels and jigs, American traditional music - cue all the banjo jokes, and songs from their own respective releases.

Dan Tyminski is working hard. Between sessions, he's off to the Central Hotel, apparently, to record his contribution to a Radio 3 broadcast, but he's back in time for a memorable rendition of A Man Of Constant Sorrow.

There's a hasty but heart felt addition of the John Martyn song - May You Never - in tribute to the singer who died just the day before.

Almost every musician on the stage worked with him.

"I remember interviewing him for a radio show and asking if it was the first time he'd ever been interviewed by an accordion player," recalls Phil Cunningham.

"And he mumbled, the first time I even had one in the house."

Jerry Douglas recalled a Transatlantic Sessions snooker match in which the usual rule of "one leg on the ground at all times" had to be hastily rewritten for Martyn.

There's a determined squeeze to get all 16 performers back onstage for a rendition of Randy Newman's Sail Away, ably led vocally by Tim O'Brien.

With so many performers, even a two and a quarter hour concert leaves the audience wanting more - but unless they have tickets for Sunday's show, they'll have to wait for the highlights on television in February. Or indeed next year's festival.

There's something faintly embarassing about the Carbuncle awards.

And I should know, having followed the team from Prospect magazine around delapidated town centres as they've attempted to hand over their plastic "plook on a plinth" to some unsuspecting member of the public.

Noone takes too kindly to being told their town is the Most Dismal Place in Scotland, even if quietly they agree.

When they were first instigated, their aim was laudable - to raise the level of debate about town planning and design and to encourage more discussion about how contentious planning decisions are made.

Nowhere is that more obvious than the Carbuncle for Worst Planning Decision for Donald Trump's £1 billion pound golf resort in Aberdeenshire, one of the most talked about planning decisions of the last year.

But somehow the healthy design debate is overshadowed by the Carbuncle for Most Dismal Town, shortlisted by a judging panel with a little help from the voting public.

Thankfully, this year's award broke into North Lanarkshire's winning run (or unlucky streak) with past awards to Cumbernauld (twice), Airdrie and Coatbridge.

If Motherwell had won, it would have further fuelled the argument that the judges were simply kicking towns when they were down rather than encouraging them to get back up and fight back.

Instead, it was Glenrothes, which as a new town adds insult to injury by being built specifically for its 40,000 strong population.

Yet its windowless mall, concrete centre and lack of civic space fly in the face of good planning judgement.

And for once, rather than feeling insulted, many members of the local community see it as a catalyst for change.

Ronald Page of the Glenrothes Area Futures Group, which is made up of community councils, resident groups and local churches said: "This award coincides with the aims and objectives of the Glenrothes Area Futures Group, set up one year ago and very much supported by the people in this area, especially in terms of a quest for a new Glenrothes Town Centre Plan.

"We reckon Fife Council has ignored the Glenrothes area for 10-15 years."

Will it be enough for the council to sit up and take notice? The Carbuncles people hope so.

After criticism about their awards, they've changed a few things.

This spring they'll take their experts back to Glenrothes to stage a conference which they hope will come up with some design solutions for the town, as well as criticisms of what's gone wrong.

It's a step in the right direction and will hopefully provoke the sort of debate they set out to do.

But they need to ditch that awful lump of plastic - and the photocalls in damp shopping centres around the country.

I'm sure SNP MSP Christine Graham has the best of intentions with her motion to recognise the achievements of AC/DC.

Everyone is allowed to let their hair down now and again and if a blast of Highway to Hell does it, good luck to you.

But a formal motion in the Scottish Parliament entitled "AC/DC, we salute you"?

Surely enough to make an ageing rocker's hair curl with embarrassment (then again, since this is a band whose 53 year old lead guitarist insists on wearing a school uniform on stage, embarrassment clearly doesn't come into it.)

Surely the band's achievements are best summed up by the 200 million records sold around the world, not some formal forelock tugging back home.

It's just not rock and roll.

Then again, this is just the latest government attempt to simultaneously nail pop policy and get down with the kids.

The problem is that pop music and policy are words which should never be in the same sentence.

By all means, offer support at grass roots level, helping young musicians access instruments, tuition and rehearsal spaces.

There's scope for extra funding for showcase tours which take bands and musicians out of the cities and off to parts of the country ill-served by the big promoters.

I don't even have an issue with politicians talking to organisations like T in the Park about their expansion plans, since their event is now so huge it encroaches on all sorts of issues, like transport and environment.

But when it comes to the music itself, politicians are advised to leave well alone.

Fans will choose their bands themselves and for ACDC, the biggest accolade is that they're still touring 30 years on and fans still want to see them.

PS The National Theatre of Scotland have asked me to point out there have been no formal complaints about the sectarian songs in Be Near Me.

Their press officer says: "The information we provided from the anti-sectarian charity nil by mouth was not reactive or defensive.

"We thought that it promoted a positive message and we had sought advice from the charity so it seemed fitting to provide information about what they do in this field."

To the civic grandeur of Kilmarnock's Palace Theatre and the opening of the much anticipated National Theatre of Scotland production Be Near Me.

Based on the Andrew O'Hagan novel of the same time, and set in the rundown fictional west of scotland town of Dalgarnock, it stars Ian McDiarmid as an English priest, out of his depth in a community entrenched in its views of football, politics, religion and life.

McDiarmid is a tour de force, onstage for the whole two and a half hours, and at times it seems that the large cast surrounding him, are an afterthought.

There are fine performances from the supporting cast, particularly Blythe Duff as his housekeeper, Mrs Poole, and Richard Madden and Helen Mallon as the troublesome teenagers Mark and Lisa.

The first act is gripping, MacDiarmid's lonely priest hurtling towards the event which will turn his life upside down.

Director John Tiffany uses the technique of on-stage song and movement to move the scenes along and like Black Watch, it works brilliantly.

There've already been a flurry of complaints about the use of sectarian song in the play -a bundle of flyers were in evidence on the bar at Friday's first night opening - but how on earth do you deal with a tale which references small town sectarianism, if you're going to ban the songs themselves?

I suspect your take on the play will depend what you thought of O'Hagan's 2006 novel in the first place.

It's a slightly far-fetched story and there's a long dinner party scene in the second act which seems only included to allow the writer to put all his characters on a soapbox.

The second act is also overlong, the play's breathy momentum abandoned after the interval.

It will also be interesting to see how the play is received outside of the west of scotland - it's a co-production with the Donmar Warehouse and it's off to London next week before returning for a full Scottish tour.

The belly laugh the beautifully choreographed "slosh" got in the wedding scene, for example.

Or the cringy reference to composer James MacMillan.

But McDiarmid's performance is worth the ticket price alone, even if his first stage adaptation probably requires a little pruning.

Ten years on from Glasgow being crowned the UK City of Architecture and Design in 1999, it was interesting to get the original pitch on VHS from the Mitchell Library.

The 12-minute film, narrated by Kirsty Young before she decamped to London, is an enthusiastic race round the city's key historical and modern buildings.

To the fore of many of their shots of the cityscape is the newly built Science Tower - which subsequently proved to be less than practical in its design and is now nicknamed the Hypodermic by the locals.

But it was also interesting to note the projects that didn't happen at all.

Like the Sandy Stoddart idea to make a massive monument at Glasgow Cross to Robert Adam and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Or the massive retail experiment which promised new designs alongside the museum artefacts which inspired them.

Long overdue

Admittedly, Glasgow landed one of the most challenging topics of the somewhat flawed Arts 2000 project, which encouraged UK cities to compete to showcase different artforms.

Architecture - in the days before wall-to-wall DIY programmes - wasn't ever going to bring in the crowds, although an exhibition devoted to the much-neglected Alexander "Greek" Thomson was both long overdue and popular.

Design, in some ways, was an easier sell.

From Graeme Obree's washing machine-part bicycle to high fashion, there were some entertaining exhibitions.

Lots of design companies got a break with a special fund which allowed their new ideas to get off the drawing board, everything from carrot cakes to steel baths were lauded as design classics.

But what was its legacy?

An independent report published a year later suggested the murmurs of "elitism" weren't far off the mark.

Substantial boost

It hadn't secured record numbers of visitors, many of those surveyed said their perception of Glasgow hadn't changed at all, and only a handful of jobs were created as a result of the year.

Then again, it did provide a substantial boost to the economy and continued the regeneration started when Glasgow was named European City of Culture in 1990.

Today, the only structural legacy of Glasgow 1999 is the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖs for the Future enclave off Glasgow Green (its second phase never completed because of problems over acquiring the land rights - with the credit crunch in full swing, it's unlikely to happen) and The Lighthouse.

The latter - Scotland's first centre for architecture and design - has never really mastered that tricky balance of commercial activity (its conferences and private hire generate a substantial amount of its income) with its public exhibitions and events.

It's not helped that its prime city centre location is down an alleyway, although I'm told new signage on Buchanan Street is coming soon.

The profile of architecture and design has certainly risen since 1999, along with the confidence of its architects and designers.

Whether that would have happened with or without a year-long festival is anyone's guess.

Happy New Year! And the process of creating Creative Scotland continues to drag as slowly in 2009 as it did in 2008.

Now more than 400 artists, performers and writers want to see the scheme abandoned altogether.

According to crime writer Val McDermid, novelist Louise Welsh, actress Alison Peebles and more than 400 writers this new body shouldn't be born at all.

In a petition to MSPs, they're calling for the whole merger to be abandoned. They say the cost of the merger - which has still not been formally confirmed - could lead to cuts in any grants they receive.

"Whilst many of us have been critical of the existing institutions, Creative Scotland does not offer improvement on the current provision managed by the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, and will impact negatively on Scotland's international reputation," says the petition.

Which comes as close to an endorsement of the Scottish Arts Council as you're likely to hear.

But despite rumblings behind the scenes - with staff in both Scottish Screen and the Scottish Arts Council's respective headquarters unsure of what will happen next - it seems the troubled merger will still go ahead.

Having been voted down by MSPs last June, it's due to be reintroduced as part of John Swinney's Public Services Reform Bill later this month. And according to the Scottish Government, they're not for turning.

"The Scottish Parliament voted unanimously in favour of the establishment of Creative Scotland as a statutory body," said a Scottish Government spokesman.

"And we will proceed with the democratic legislative route, not least to enshrine the important arms-length principle on arts funding."

"The culture minister has agreed to meet a number of representatives from across the sector to hear and address their concerns about the transition process and remit of Creative Scotland."

But she may not have heard the end of the debate. According to the organisers of the artists' campaign, they hope to gather further support and stage more events to highlight the issues.