Celtic Connections

In anticipation of his Celtic Connections gig, we’re delighted to have a guest blog from Dean Owens, one of Scotland’s finest singer songwriters. His fans include Irvine Welsh who called Dean “Scotland’s most engaging and haunting singer songwriter”. Legendary BBC broadcaster “Whispering” Bob Harris reckons that Dean is “Scotland’s best troubadour”. Photo by Neilson Hubbard In 2017…

In between raiding the mince pies and making inroads on the whisky, Glasgow Music City Tours will spend much of the festive period polishing our stories for our Trad Trail Walking Tour for Celtic Connections 2019. The tours have sold out for the past 3 years so if you’d like to get your hands on…

Here’s Part 2 of our Guest Blog by Lesley Shaw, Producer at Celtic Connections, one of the busiest women in the business, it’s a great read. Thanks Lesley, we don’t know how you found the time! Lesley after a couple of drams and a hoolie When or how did you get into folk/trad music? Many…

We’re hugely grateful to Lesley Shaw, Producer at Celtic Connections, one of the busiest women in the business, for writing a guest blog for us. Here’s Part 1 — it’s a great read. Thanks Lesley, we don’t know how you found the time! Lesley Shaw having a right good time! Could you describe what…

We often say on our music tours that Celtic Connections is as much about the connections part of its name as it is about Celtic music, and there can be no better example of this than the Grit Orchestra, a 75-piece beast of a group comprising musicians from Scotland’s classical, jazz and folk fraternities. The orchestra was…

It’s our third year at Celtic Connections, and we’re very proud to run our Merchant City Trad Trail tours again. The tours have sold out for the last two years and we’re expecting to do so again in 2018. Places on the tours are limited, but there are still some tickets available here. The tour begins at…

This weekend, folk legend Shirley Collins will make her Celtic Connections debut. A lot of people are very excited about welcoming this esteemed singer to the festival for her first Scottish show in decades. Emerging from the British folk boom of the 1950s and 60s, Shirley has released some of the most influential albums in…

Like many musicians, Alice Marra is braced for a busy Celtic Connections. Firstly, she will be playing with her band, rootsy pop combo The Hazey Janes, in collaboration with the writer Liz Lochhead and saxophonist Steve Kettley. Their sold out show, The Light Comes Back, like their album of the same name, is a mix of spoken word and atmospheric, jazzy…

The redoubtable Rab Noakes, our favourite stylish veteran troubadour from the Kingdom of Fife, has already kindly blogged for us about his early gig-going experiences in Glasgow, and his stories were so good that we incorporated them in our Glasgow’s Music Mile tour (paying full credit to Rab, naturally). But as he prepares to celebrate his 70th birthday and fifty years…

Big Country were one of the biggest Scottish noises of the 1980s, renowned for their anthemic singles and the distinctive twin guitar attack of the late Stuart Adamson and Bruce Watson, which seemed to echo the skirl of the bagpipes. The current incarnation of the band, including Watson and his son Jamie, original drummer Mark Brzezicki,…