The Scotsman 7 September 2023

Plays about rock bands have a tricky path to navigate. By necessity, they are performed by actors, but to be convincing, those actors have to look and sound like musicians. More than that, the songs must be authentic – either as good or as bad as the narrative needs them to be. If the band have a hit single, it needs to sound like a hit.

Writer, composer and director Andy McGregor knows how important this is. His new play is about a fictional indie band from Greenock called Battery Park who almost make it in the Britpop days of tuneful guitar anthems. It is 1992 and they are preparing to support Oasis at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom. Thirty years later, a student writing a dissertation on Britpop tracks down lead singer Tommy McIntosh in order to figure out what became of a band once tipped as the next big thing. [READ MORE]

By Mark Fisher

MARK FISHER is a freelance theatre critic and feature writer based in Edinburgh and has written about theatre in Scotland since the late-1980s. He is a theatre critic for The Guardian, a former editor of The List magazine and a frequent contributor to the Scotsman and other publications. He is the co-editor of the play anthology Made in Scotland (1995), and the author of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide (2012) and How to Write About Theatre (2015) – all Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. He is also the editor of The XTC Bumper Book of Fun for Boys and Girls and What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book (both Mark Fisher Ltd).