Skip to primary navigation Skip to content Skip to footer
Back to Blog

We’re all doomed! Not really.

We found Dave Pollock’s Guardian piece about the ‘slow death of music venues’ thought-provoking and a lot of research has gone into it.

We’re less convinced that it told the whole story about Glasgow.

A number of us at Glasgow Music City Tours have or still do work as music journalists. We understand that an article has to fit the brief, make clear points and not muddy the waters but Glasgow’s live music scene appears to be in rude health rather than facing a slow death.

We wrote a reply on the article’s comments page:

‘As a former music journalist who wrote about many of the same Glasgow and Edinburgh venues as David Pollock, I appreciate the power of a punchy headline.

However, this article greatly exaggerates the slow death of live music in Glasgow.

While the closure of The Arches was indeed a blow, it could be argued that its demise was the exception around these parts.

In fact, new music venues open regularly in the city – The Hug and Pint and St Luke’s are both new for 2015; if somewhat inconvenient for the jist of this piece.

As befits the UK’s only UNESCO City of Music, Glasgow has a vibrant music scene with a pretty good infrastructure at every level from the 12,000 capacity Hydro (second busiest venue in the world by some measures) to the grassroots bar venues like Box, Sleazy’s, 13th Note Old Hairdressers, Stereo and, of course, King Tuts.

The diversity and depth of Glasgow’s current music scene, as well as its musical heritage, is one reason why we set up Glasgow Music City Tours

If you want to send a journalist along for a tour, we would be happy to demonstrate exactly how and why Glasgow’s music scene is alive and kicking.

Incidentally, I can’t speak for the other cities mentioned but Edinburgh’s music scene is far from dying. The Picturehouse has closed but Stramash is about to open and Summerhall has recently started developing a lively schedule of live bands.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Honest.’