27 Jan 2009 The Culture Show : Season 2009 Episode 5

The Culture Show comes from the Old Fruitmarket in the heart of Glasgow's Merchant City, one of the main venues in the city's Celtic Connections festival. It's one of the world's largest winter music festivals with 1,500 musicians from all round the globe performing in 300 concerts. Lauren Laverne looks at the growing appeal of a simpler, stripped-back approach to music in these new economic times. To mark the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns' birth, we've brought together some of Scotland's finest actors, led by Robert Carlyle and Siobhan Redmond, to perform Burns' most striking and rarely celebrated works. We profile the work of rising star theatre director Rupert Goold whose controversial and much criticised production of King Lear comes to the Young Vic on January 29th. Glasgow band Franz Ferdinand are due to release their much awaited third album Tonight: Franz Ferdinand this week. The Culture Show has been following the progress of the new work in the run up to its release. Nihal joins the group in their rehearsal room in Glasgow for some exclusive acoustic performances from the new album and we're backstage with the group as they perform some of the new material live at a gig in Manchester.