o HOT10008
55 Cora Bissett HIGH-LIVIN’ LADY
With the second series of High Times finally airing on STV, the star of the tower block comedy drama has got some long-deserved recognition. She’s had a brilliant, busy year off the box, too, with an acclaimed new tour for her musical Amada, a grotesque comic turn in Slick, and her gleeful, sparkly performance in David Greig’s lovely Midsummer. (KI)
54 Vox Motus PUPPET MASTERS
They've been bubbling away at the edges of the Glasgow theatre scene since 2004, and started off the year with a couple of funding disappointments. However, the innovative company have had a triumphant last six months: abandoning their usual multimedia shenanigans for decidedly low-tech, squidgy-bodied puppets, new show Slick won a Fringe First and led to a sold-out Scottish tour. (KI)
53 Washington Garcia FLOATING STOATERS
This excellent Glasgow artist-run collective and ‘floating gallery’ took over various unused spaces around the city to put on consistently innovative exhibitions. Their coup in bringing the New York video artist Kalup Linzy over for Glasgow International, led to a little-known artist in a non-gallery space becoming one of the best-reviewed shows of the
festival. (KI)
24 THE LIST 11 Dec 2008–8 Jan 2009
45 A year in the life of . . . Allan Hunter ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL
‘The programme was launched in January so we hit the ground running post-Hogmanay. The festival itself in February was just a whirlwind: introducing screenings, leading Q&A sessions and meeting the guests who were such a joy. This year the mighty John Sayles came to visit, which was a personal highlight.
‘When the festival ends that should be the time to take a break but that is usually when we decide on some of the special events and retrospectives for the following year that require a time and organisation. The 2009 retrospective is devoted to Audrey Hepburn and the country focus is on Mexico so my co-director Allison Gardner has been chasing prints since March and I’ve been making contact with the Mexican Film Institute and arranging to meet up at the Cannes Film Festival which is indispensable in terms of meeting people, seeing films and helping to spread the word about Glasgow. The summer was spent starting to work on the long list of titles we might like and that really starts to come into sharp focus in September after attending the Toronto Film Festival given the range of films we can see there. After that it was pretty much all systems go. September and October are spent watching submissions, chasing titles, wooing distributors. Then come November we really start to make the key decisions about the opening night film and the guests we might afford to bring to Glasgow. Everything goes right to the wire. Last year we even chased someone down over the Christmas holidays to get a final decision on a film we really wanted.’
52 John Burnside GLISTER IN THE SUN
A solid year for the Fife author and poet as he brought us Glister, the bleak tale of the fictional Innertown, where schoolboys start to go missing. Time at the Scottish Book Trust’s writer retreat in Jura will have helped recharge his creative batteries. (BD)
51 Optimo (Espacio) DEVIANT CLUB GENEI
Twitch and Wilkes continue to provide the soundtrack at Scotland’s most beloved Sunday institution. Even after hitting their 11th birthday in November they kept the night at the cutting edge of club culture with events like the Optimo Barn Dance and inspired guests such as Joakim, Chrome Hoof and Simian Mobile Disco. (HN)
48 Johnny Lynch CHIEF PICT
46 Stoats OATS DEALER
If the simple but effective idea of selling porridge to cold commuters from vans wasn’t genius enough, Tony Stone has broadened out his burgeoning Stoats brand in the last 12 months with even more flapjack-style cereal bars and amazing pots of their fruit laced oats for instant consumption anywhere. A young entrepreneur making something resolutely new from something cheerily traditional. (MR)
50 Francis McKee CREATIVE CURATOR
This year’s Glasgow International was that very rare thing: an international art festival programmed to showcase the city itself, with as much prominence given to grassroots guerrilla artworks as the major galleries. Outgoing artistic director McKee has also overseen an excellent year of exhibitions and events at the CCA. (KI)
49 Scott Agnew CATHARTIC COMIC
One of the sharpest comperes around, Agnew put the ghosts of the 2007 Scottish Comedian of the Year final behind him (he was unplaced) by taking the prize in a blaze of glory with non- camp tales of gay threesomes and being a Catholic comic performing to
the Orange Order. (BD)
This was the year that Johnny Lynch, aka Pictish Trail, who runs Fence Records with his friend King Creosote, stepped forward with his own first album Secret Soundz Vol. 1, a dreamy, bleepy, electro-pop take on Fence’s trademark lo-fi folk sound. The spotlight suits him, and KC’s sidekick deserves to spend next year above the radar. (CS)
47 Dominic Hill STAGE MANAGER
The artistic director of the Traverse made a strong impression in his first full year in the job, helming Zinnie Harris’ provocative play Fall at the Fringe, and directing both The Dogstone and Nasty, Brutish and Short, part of the Traverse’s Debuts series of plays by new writers. Hill also found time to branch out from his day job, creating a colourful, energetic production of Verdi’s Falstaff for Scottish Opera. (AR)