Review: You Won't Break My Soul, Oran Mor, Glasgow
⭐⭐⭐
When Beyoncé came to Murrayfield in 2023 as part of her Renaissance tour, the bootylicious diva caused a sensation. Beyond the show itself, there was likely plenty of drama for her fan base who worship at her feet, and not just among the single ladies either.
Take Jordan and Russell. The neon pink boudoir that passes for the living room of these gay best friends in JD Stewart's new play for A Play, a Pie and a Pint's lunchtime theatre season may be a shrine to their queen, but it also requires an overload of Febreze to clear the body odours that hang around.
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Partly responsible for these is the bit of rough trade Jordan who has just beat a hasty retreat with two stolen tickets in hand. When Russell gets home, the pair's despair at their loss sees them embark on a quest for replacements that takes them from their friend Sooz's cafe to the local cop shop that seems to be run by a refugee from the Village People. Finally, they enter a drag contest at real life Glasgow nitespot, Delmonica's, where first prize might just get them to the show.
So far so camp in Laila Noble's production, in which Jamie McKillop and James Peake rise to the occasion as Jordan and Russell, who reaffirm their personal bond as they revive their olds double act on stage. Aided by Kaylah Copeland as Sooz, and with an extra special guest in the house, the inevitable floor show all this has been leading to is delivered with glamtastic abandon in a play that goes beyond its initial japes to a more serious look at friendship, staying true to oneself and the restorative powers of a life on stage for these destiny's children in waiting.
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Scottish Sun
4 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
I was KICKED OUT of Dubai and had my £3,000 glam holiday ruined over my face tattoos – despite being allowed in before
Jordan said he was 'terrified' as he was not given his passport back for some time TATT'S NOT FAIR I was KICKED OUT of Dubai and had my £3,000 glam holiday ruined over my face tattoos – despite being allowed in before Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A HEAVILY-inked Brit has vowed to never return to Dubai after claiming he got kicked out for plastering his face in tattoos. Jordan Howman, 34, said he had his passport confiscated and was held by airport workers for six hours before being given the boot - ruining his £3,000 holiday. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 4 Jordan Howman, 34, says he was kicked out of Dubai because of his face tattoos Credit: SWNS 4 The dad said it ruined his holiday with his partner Theresa Credit: SWNS The plasterer, from Crewe, Cheshire, covered his face in tattoos of geometric cubes and words including "blessed" and "crazy life" almost a decade ago. Jordan said his ink addiction hadn't caused him any issues during his previous two trips to his "favourite country in the world", the UAE. The dad told The Sun: "My missus has been crying her eyes out. "It has absolutely devastated me. I feel like I've been massively discriminated against. Read more about Dubai BOT TAKEOVER World's first AI government minister to join cabinet in Dubai in 2026 'There's no law against face tattoos - there's nothing like that. "I'm a lovely lad, I get on with anyone. It's made me feel absolutely rubbish. I'm not allowed in a country because of the way I look. It's properly, massively affected me. 'It was my favourite country, but this has absolutely ruined it. Now I'll never go again. I've lost all of my money because of a pattern on my face.' Jordan landed at Dubai International Airport on Wednesday for a dream week-long holiday with his fiancée Theresa, 38, and daughter Kaic, 16. But he said as he ventured through passport control he was pulled to one side. After taking Jordan aside, the worker asked if he'd had his passport stamped before taking it from him. Moment hardcore anti tourist mob surround Brit tourists in Majorca chanting 'go home' & telling Brit ex-pats to 'go to hell' 'Then he snatched my passport out of my hand," Jordan said. "There had been nowhere to stamp it - we'd used the electronic gates. It was just an excuse to get the passport out of my hand.' After being held in a waiting room for more than four hours, Jordan was transferred to immigration at around midday, he said. By this time, his family had reached their five-star Anantara hotel. He called his partner and she got a taxi to the airport - but Jordan said airport staff refused to let her go to him and so she got a cab back, costing a total of £250. Jordan said he was "terrified" as he was not given his passport back for some time. 4 The dad has vowed to never return to Dubai Credit: SWNS 4 He said his passport was taken away for hours Credit: SWNS 'A woman came and took me upstairs to immigration, where they said: 'He's not coming in because of his face tattoos - you're not coming in because of the way you look'," he claimed. 'One of the staff behind the desk said a more senior immigration officer made the decision, saying I was not to enter Dubai and that I must leave the country immediately.' At 2.30pm - six hours after arriving - Jordan was put on another Emirates flight heading back to the UK. 'They sent me on a flight back to Manchester," he said. "It was only when I landed that I got my passport back. "Friday morning was the first time I got to see my daughter, over Facetime.' The General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs Dubai have been approached for comment. Dubai Airports was also contacted for a response.
The National
8 hours ago
- The National
McScenius: Let's put brains together to bring about a smarter Scotland
Those emeritus professors of snark, Steely Dan, put one aspect of the genius myth very well. Once you declare your geniushood, all the rest of your behaviours – however cranky or cruel – come to be justified. As Helen Lewis writes in her funny, combative new book, The Genius Myth, we have plenty of current examples of this. Most notable at present is Donald Trump, declaring himself a 'pretty stable genius', while his conversational 'weave' baffles all who hear it. Trump then appoints Elon Musk as a 'pretty high-IQ individual', on the basis of his tech business success. Yet he departs from his Doge post in ignominy, leaving a trail of administrative destruction behind him. READ MORE: Owen Jones: Opposing Israeli violence is 'extremist'? The world's upside down As Musk advances both on our brains with neuro-filaments, and on the starry skies with satellites and Mars ships, the temptation is to say: let us be protected from such 'high-IQ geniuses'. Lewis lays out the historical seeds of what she regards as a 'dangerous' idea. Originally and classically, genius was visited upon us, a bolt of insight from a higher realm. It became individualised from the Renaissance onwards. Leonardo da Vinci was the original 'scatter-brained polymath' archetype of genius. The Romantics liked their geniuses 'boyish, naughty, in the late stages of tuberculosis and, best of all, dead by suicide', as The New Yorker review puts it. Geniuses were also natural and child-like; and out of that fragility, we assume their 'precious gift' extracts a 'terrible price'. This archetype also excuses behaviours like 'alcoholism, family abandonment, unfaithfulness, abuse, weirdness, failure to take responsibility'. The shit-posting, ketamine-gobbling, games-obsessive, promiscuously-parenting Musk is all too exemplary of these cliches of genius. To top it off, Victorian and early 20th-century eugenicists like Francis Galton and Hans Eysenck believed they could measure genius, by using tests to identify a person's 'intelligence quotient' (IQ). Lewis has grim fun with Nobelists like William Shockley, who got a Nobel for inventing the transistor, but then descended into arguing that 'caucasians' had higher IQs. Shockley even tried to set up a sperm bank for Nobelists (it's noteworthy he didn't consider an egg bank), and advocated for the eradication of lower-IQ people. Great delight is taken by Lewis in pointing out that Shockley came to his world-changing transistor idea while working at Bell Labs. This was an 'alchemical space of collective achievement', a set of 'ripe social conditions constructed by previous breakthroughs'. That is, Bell Labs was a place of 'scenius' (using Brian Eno's term for a fertile milieu of talents and experiments). It's out of these scenes that superhuman acts of 'genius' might occur. Lewis admits that this sociological explanation is deeply unsatisfying for most people. READ MORE: Scotland wants no part in further dangerous nuclear experiments 'We find it intuitively easy to understand human-sized stories, where someone does something,' Lewis says in a recent interview. 'Our brains crave stories with protagonists and don't want mushy explanations that involve complex social forces.' I accept this, as well as Lewis's injunction that ascribing genius 'says as much about us as it says about them'. The educationalist Howard Gardner, in his 1997 book Extraordinary Minds, emphasised how great innovators need a coherent field around them, in order that their novel moves make sense. Picasso's paintings, like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or Guernica, shake up traditions of portraiture or landscape. Joyce's Ulysses, or Woolf's To The Lighthouse, have the great 19th-century novels around them to trouble and unravel. It's even clearer in music. I wouldn't hesitate to call John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder or Prince 'geniuses' of pop and jazz music. I also wouldn't deny that they came to their moments of blinding newness from imbibing and inhabiting long-standing traditions. Coltrane was trained in barroom blues and big bands. Wonder came from the gospel tradition, as well as passing through the Motown hit factory. Prince drank from all those wells self-consciously throughout his musical life, giving himself an enormous toolbox to use. However, I still feel that genius – even if it is a 'lightning strike' upon individuals, already thriving in 'fertile conditions', as Lewis concludes – is something that extraordinary minds can and do perform. The thrill is when separate domains are conjoined, in ways unimaginable before the act of genius, to produce a new domain – one that triggers a cascade of fresh activity. There are two Scottish geniuses who exemplify this. Firstly, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, of whom Einstein said 'the special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell's equations'. Maxwell had a profound ability to see analogies between different areas of science and mathematics. His crowning achievement – Maxwell's equations – unified electricity, magnetism and optics into a single theoretical framework. This synthesis anticipated Einstein's later unifications (of spacetime and mass-energy), establishing the basis of modern field theory and quantum electrodynamics. But it's Maxwell's conceptual leaping across domains that remains awesome. In literature, this reminds me of another I would call 'genius', novelist and artist Alasdair Gray. The domains Gray effortlessly bridges is fictional prose and figurative illustration. His 1981 masterpiece Lanark, illustrated and fashioned by Gray as an object, also connects wildly different literary domains – angst-ridden realism, dystopian science-fiction, the end of the novel's narrative placed at the beginning. Gray tangles up the frames of causality, in many of his novels, just as Maxwell challenged mechanistic visions of physics. The thrill of Gray's genius is felt when you go through the original novel of Poor Things (1991). Its Frankensteinian tale of self-creation is richly illustrated throughout. It feels like a wholly different historical world. I'm not so sure of Maxwell's milieu. But one would have to accept that Gray was partly produced by the 'scenius' of the second Scottish Literary Renaissance – embedded in the bohemias of Glasgow and Edinburgh, embarking on groups and magazines with James Kelman, Janice Galloway, Liz Lochhead, Philip Hobsbaum and many others. So is one implication of Lewis's social explanation of 'genius' that such hot-beds can be fomented and prepared? Not so much the 'genius bars' of an Apple showroom, but the bars and 'third places' in which flashes of genius might occur? Can these be nurtured, even planned? If domain-crossing is a fundamental process leading to genius-like activity, then one would have to say, in Scotland, the buildings and ambitions to support it are moving into place. I was honoured to accept an invitation to become an associate at the Edinburgh Futures Institute earlier this year, because I could see in the edifice (and its research prospectus) that domain-crossing is an expectation, not an exception. READ MORE: Interim head appointed at university after damning report into financial crisis But in Dundee and Glasgow universities, there are also 'advanced studies' centres. All of them look at major challenges and megatrends – around AI, health, urban development – and declare their intent to rub together many different talents and specialisms, in pursuit of lasting solutions. So there's your 'McScenius' – but of course there can always be more of it. For example, is there enough traffic between the universe-building taking place in Dundee's games sector, and the massive computations – now to be even greater with the supercomputer recommission – operating in Edinburgh? What worlds could we be virtually simulating, in order to help repair the actual world? Another example: will the tumult around community power – whether land ownership, renewable energy generation, ecological lifestyles – compel innovations in democracy and organisation, supported by radical tech? And if so, what Hume- or Smith-like Second Enlightenment minds might survey this, and elaborate new models of progress and development from it? There's doubtless many other zones like this in Scottish life. And it's as important to identify and foment them, right where we are now – when proximity and engagement are vital. An independent Scotland should be the ideal framework for such a culture of immanent, everyday genius. But we shouldn't be put off from pursuing a Scottish 'scenius' by political or constitutional log-jams. It may be that we have an answer to the Dan. And that, thanks to Helen Lewis's excellent provocation, we do know what we mean by 'genius'.
Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Daily Mirror
Daisy Lowe marries in low-key ceremony as famous dad misses nuptials
Daisy Lowe has tied the knot with her husband Jordan Saul - but her famous dad was missing. Daisy tied the knot with the property developer this week in London, surrounded by family. Daisy's half sister Betty Goffey shared sweet pictures from the post-wedding reception, where they enjoyed pasta and tiramisu at Brutto, a popular Italian restaurant in East London. She wore a stunning white off-the-shoulder gown, covered in beautiful detailing, with Betty captioning the picture: "Da bride." Pearl Lowe, Daisy's mum, also shared a pictured of the family getting ready for the nuptials. Daisy's mother Pearl - a musician, and her stepfather Danny Goffey were in attendance as well as her half-siblings Betty, Alfie and Frankie. Godmother and musician Zoe Grace was also in attendance as well as Jordan's parents and close family. However, Daisy's famous father Gavin Rossdale was missing from the nuptials. The pair are thought to be on good terms and he is expected to turn up to a bigger wedding in Somerset later this year. Gavin is the frontman for band Bush and Daisy discovered he was her real father when she was a teenager after he took a paternity test. Daisy and Jordan met in 2020 when they were walking their dogs separately in lockdown. Daisy and Jordan also plan to move to Somerset and will rent for the time being until they find something they want. "We don't want to just build it without any footing. Community is really important. I love old houses, but Jordan said, 'if you really care about the environment, you should build a home,' and I was easily swayed," she said.
