Scottish festivals Let’s Rock Scotland and Party at The Palace have joined forces for a new partnership.

The link-up unites the two brands, with the first joint “super-festival” to take place on 10-11 August in Linlithgow Palace in West Lothian, featuring the likes of Ali Campbell, Lulu, ABC, Heaven 17, Big Country, Go West, Skids, Toyah and Thereza Bazar’s Dollar.

Let’s Rock Scotland and Party at The Palace are working alongside Scottish music promoter Regular Music “to create a strong and compelling festival experience for audiences” across the two-day event.

“We’re thrilled to be partnering with Party at The Palace,” says Nick Billinghurst of UK Live, owner of Let’s Rock Scotland. “We discovered that our values align and that we put equal importance on what we feel festivals represent. Teaming up makes perfect sense, both organisationally and emotionally, and we’ll be bringing the very best of both festivals to Linlithgow this summer.”

“It is something that we have been wanting to do for a few years and we are very excited about what the future will bring”

Edinburgh-based Regular is Scotland’s longest established independent music promoter. German powerhouse DEAG announced the acquisition of a majority stake in the company in December 2022, having secured a majority stake in UK Live the previous year.

“We are delighted to bring a little of our knowledge and experience to help the dynamic duo in their quest to present the best party weekend in Scotland,” says Mark Mackie, CEO of Regular Music.

This year marks 10 years since the very first Party at The Palace.

“We are absolutely delighted to be teaming up with UK Live,” says Party at The Palace director John Richardson. “It is something that we have been wanting to do for a few years and we are very excited about what the future will bring. They have a vast wealth of experience and knowledge which we will no doubt benefit from.”

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Scottish post-rock band Mogwai will headline and curate the new Big City Festival in their hometown of Glasgow this summer.

In partnership with local promoter Regular Music, the event will launch on 29 June at Queen’s Park, with 12 acts performing across two stages.

The bill includes seminal shoegaze group Slowdive, returning songwriter Nadine Shah, Neu! guru Michael Rother, and Scottish Album of the Year winner Kathryn Joseph.

Beak>, Michael Rother, bdrmm, Cloth, Elisabeth Elektra, Free Love, Goat Girl and Sacred Paws also feature on the lineup.

“It’s an honour to have so many brilliant artists join us for what promises to be a special day”

“We are proud to announce the inaugural Big City festival in Glasgow this June in partnership with Regular Music,” says Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite.

“It’s great for us to have this event in our hometown of Glasgow. It’s an honour to have so many brilliant artists join us for what promises to be a special day.”

In addition to live music, Big City Festival will feature a literary tent in association with White Rabbit Books and a “full selection of licenced bars and food trucks”.

Mogwai were formed in Glasgow in 1995. Along with Braithwaite, the band consists of Barry Burns, Dominic Aitchison and Martin Bulloch.

Last month, the quartet released a trailer for their new documentary If The Stars Had A Sound which follows their journey from inception to the present day.

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DEAG is on course to attract a record number of visitors to its festivals this summer, with crowds set to soar past 800,000 across its core markets of Germany, the UK & Ireland, and Switzerland.

The company has expanded its portfolio over the past few years with acquisitions such as Regular Music, tickets.ie. platform, Indian Spirit, Classic Open Air and Airbeat One, and is anticipating a 40% year-on-year increase in visitors in 2023.

German electronic dance festival Airbeat One attracted 70,000 people to its 20th anniversary last weekend, which featured headliners such as Charlotte de Witte, Hardwell, Steve Aoki and Fritz Kalkbrenner at the airfield in Neustadt-Glewe in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Before that, more than 400 DJs thrilled the electronic dance fans at

Elsewhere, in Switzerland, the Sion sous les étoile festival featured artists including Soprano and Joss Stone from 12-16 July and set a new attendance record of almost 60,000 visitors.

In the UK, DEAG’s Kilimanjaro Live staged Kew the Music with the likes of Bastille and Jools Holland at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, near London. The previous weekend, stars such as The Lumineers, Rod Stewart, The Who and Dermot Kennedy drew more than 50,000 visitors to six sold-out shows at Regular Music’s Castle Concerts in Edinburgh, Scotland.

“DEAG’s festival segment is showing fantastic growth across all genres of music in England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Switzerland”

“DEAG’s festival segment is showing fantastic growth across all genres of music in England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Switzerland,” says DEAG CEO Peter Schwenkow. “The outstanding response from audiences points the way for us to new formats, new locations and a gratifying further development of this extremely interesting music festival field.”

Other successes included Rave the Planet and the Kessel Festival in Stuttgart at the end of June, along with the sold-out Legends at the Sea in Büsum. In addition, the UK’s biggest retro festival series Let’s Rock, attracted around 100,000 fans to 10 locations.

Upcoming DEAG festivals include the Sylt Open Air 2023 at the end of July with Sarah Connor and Scooter, Summer Nights in Glasgow; the Wider Than Pictures Series in Dublin; Germany’s Nature One at the beginning of August with over 70,000 fans expected; Indian Spirit in Eldena as well as the new PennFest in Buckinghamshire, England, as well as the established Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival” in Scotland.

For the first time, around 75% of the tickets for DEAG events were sold, some exclusively, via DEAG’s own online ticket distributors, myticket.de, myticket.co.uk, gigantic.com and tickets.ie.

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German powerhouse DEAG has further expanded its international promoting network and enhanced its UK activities by acquiring a majority stake in Scotland’s Regular Music.

Edinburgh-based Regular is the country’s longest established independent music promoter and has staged concerts by acts such as REM, Oasis, Tom Waits, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey. CEO Mark Mackie will remain a shareholder in the company and will continue to manage the firm in the long term.

Regular Music is also a key partner of Scottish talent including The Proclaimers, Primal Scream, Garbage, The Jesus & Mary Chain and Mogwai.

“We admire the achievements of Mark with Regular Music in Scotland and are excited about the opportunity to support the business in the future whilst creating synergies between all of our UK companies including Belladrum,” says DEAG CEO Peter Schwenkow. “DEAG’s success is based on entrepreneurship and Mark will be a valued addition to our group of entrepreneurs. DEAG‘s presence in the UK and Ireland will be significantly strengthened through this new partnership and it fits extremely well with our strategy to further grow our business in our core markets.”

“It’s clear that DEAG care deeply about local identity and autonomy and with Stuart Galbraith and his team at Kili it has been proven to work”

Regular also produces the award-winning annual Summer Nights at the Bandstand series of concerts in Glasgow, which has featured the likes of Brian Wilson, The National, Pixies, Patti Smith, Van Morrison and Texas.

DEAG’s Kilimanjaro subsidiary already owns and operates Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival, Scotland’s largest camping festival and the acquisition of Regular will add significantly to the Group’s footprint in Scotland.

The Belladrum Inverness office and the Regular Edinburgh office will now liaise extensively together.

“Lots of my agent friends have been telling me for years I needed more of a global presence but until I met with DEAG I had never felt comfortable enough with anyone to form such a partnership,” says Mackie. “However, it’s clear that DEAG care deeply about local identity and autonomy and with Stuart Galbraith and his team at Kili it has been proven to work so I’m delighted to be joining up with a like minded group of people moving forward.

“I have personally known Stuart for more than 35 years, since we both started out in the business and am very much looking forward to working closely with him and the Kilimanjaro gang.”

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Scottish grassroots music venues have received a £2.2 million boost from the government, following concerns that a previously announced £10m fund for performing arts venues neglected the commercial sector.

The fund, announced by Scotland’s culture secretary Fiona Hyslop last week, aims to provide “immediate support” and “much-needed stability” to grassroots venues in the coming weeks.

The Scottish government had been involved in ongoing discussions with the Music Venue Trust (MVT), who had stressed the need for sector-specific funding for grassroots music venues in Scotland.

“We are delighted to have agreed this funding with the Scottish Government, and we thank them very much for their commitment to grassroots music venues,” comments Nick Stewart, MVT’s Scottish co-ordinator and manager of Edinburgh venue Sneaky Pete’s.

“This funding will stabilise venues in the short term and prevent permanent closures, and we can begin to plan towards reopening every venue safely.”

“This funding will stabilise venues in the short term and prevent permanent closures, and we can begin to plan towards reopening every venue safely”

MVT, along with other members of the Scottish live industry, had previously raised concerns that a £10m relief fund for performing arts venues in the country did not benefit the for-profit sector.

An open letter sent to the culture sector by a newly formed Scottish commercial music industry taskforce, which includes representatives from promoters DF Concerts, Regular Music, ATC Live, Fly Events, Active Events, Craft Management, A Modern Way Management, Ironworks Venue, Asgard and Sneaky Petes, asked the the government to “fulfill the Music Venue Trust and the Scottish members of the Music Venues Alliance’s request for specific funding for grassroots music venues”, noting “a lack of consultation with the commercial music sector”.

In the letter, which was also signed by artists including Biffy Clyro, KT Tunstall, Simple Minds, the Proclaimers and Primal Scream, the task force urged the government to provide a “clear, conditional timeline” for reopening venues without social distancing and to establish a culture and creative industries infrastructure fund with the £97m earmarked for Scotland from the UK government’s £1.57 billion arts and culture rescue package.

The taskforce was also among those to call for a value-added tax (VAT) exemption on ticket sales, days before the UK government’s reduction in VAT on concert tickets from 20% to 5%.

This article forms part of IQ’s Covid-19 resource centre – a knowledge hub of essential guidance and updating resources for uncertain times.

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Let’s talk about Scottish independence. We’re referring, obviously, to Gerry Cinnamon, the staunchly indie, Glaswegian guitar-basher who has packed a career’s worth of touring milestones into the past two or three years.

There was the pair of sold-out shows at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom in 2017 – the first unsigned artist to manage such a feat. Then Cinnamon really went up in the world, with two Christmas 2019 gigs at Glasgow’s SSE Hydro and one at Aberdeen’s 15,000-capacity P&J Arena – the biggest indoor show ever in Scotland. And, surely capping it all off, next summer’s show at Hampden Park: 50,000 tickets… all long gone.

“He grew up literally a stone’s throw away from Hampden, in Castlemilk,” says Geoff Ellis, CEO of DF Concerts. “We sold it out in a day.”

The fact that Cinnamon has also quickly converted local-hero status into arena-filling UK and Ireland success underscores Scotland’s status as a rigorous proving ground for its own artists, of whom he and Lewis Capaldi, are just the latest to break in a big way.

“If you go down well here, you are not going to be too shabby when you go out in the rest of the world,” theorises Hold Fast Entertainment’s Donald MacLeod, who operates Glasgow venues the Cathouse and the Garage.

Scotland in 2020 isn’t necessarily an easy place to get ahead, but it is bursting with local talent, busy promoters and full venues. The nation’s live industry added £431 million to the broader economy last year and sustained 4,300 full-time jobs, as well as drawing 1.1m music tourists – a jump of 38% from 2017 [source: UK Music].

Scotland in 2020 isn’t necessarily an easy place to get ahead, but it is bursting with local talent, busy promoters and full venues

There are all sorts of storylines in the wider drama of Scotland’s live music business. Edinburgh is on the up, with the tantalising prospect of an arena on the horizon at last. Glasgow, traditionally a supercharged music city with a perpetual tendency to steal the thunder of the more genteel capital, a 45-minute journey away, still does the business, but it isn’t having its best moment after losing the pivotal O2 ABC to a devastating fire last year.

Meanwhile, the festival scene evolves – out with T in the Park, in with TRNSMT and others. The Highlands, islands and notable towns and cities work hard to make the case that there is life outside the Central Belt. And Scotland’s thriving trad scene makes the case that there is more to life than pop.

But still the talent keeps coming. “We are not short of talent and bands coming up. We punch well above our weight,” says MacLeod.

Biffy Clyro, Franz Ferdinand, Calvin Harris, Young Fathers, Chvrches, Paolo Nutini, Amy Macdonald and Tom Walker have all attested to that in recent years, and Scottish venue calendars are reliably stuffed with local favourites: Capaldi, Simple Minds, Texas and Deacon Blue at the SSE Hydro this year; Jesus & Mary Chain and The Twilight Sad at Barrowlands; Edwyn Collins and Susan Boyle at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall.

And new artists, too: “Walt Disco, Slow Readers Club, Tamzene, The Snuts, The Dunts – are all selling out venues above 1,000-cap,” says Ellis. “We have got a really good, healthy scene at club level and that gets people engaged a bit more in terms of live music.”

“We have got a really good, healthy scene at club level and that gets people engaged a bit more in terms of live music”

Promoters
You might imagine Scottish promoters were a tough, rivalrous bunch, but a photo tweeted by Donald MacLeod in December was a picture of harmony: the key figures from DF Concerts, Regular Music, PCL Presents and Triple G, smiling on the fairway at Loch Lomond Golf Club at an away-day put on by SSE Hydro.

“Aye, that was a good laugh,” says MacLeod, who in addition to his Glasgow clubs is a director of promoter Triple G, chair of Nordoff-Robbins Scotland and a columnist for The Sunday Post. “It’s a lot of promoters for the size of the market. But we all get on well. We are not bitter rivals, we are frenemies. We will all, at times, work with each other.”

Glasgow-based DF, part of LN-Gaiety Investments since 2008, is Scotland’s largest promoter, proprietor of the three-year-old TRNSMT at Glasgow Green, and the Summer Sessions series in Edinburgh and Glasgow each August, as well as shows from club- to stadium-level, and the celebrated King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut on St Vincent Street in Glasgow.

“2019 was a great year for us as a business,” says Ellis. “I think it was great for the market generally in Scotland. But it’s not easy – you have to get the pricing right, and you have to really work it. Scotland is only five million people. If you are doing a show at the Hydro, you are selling to all of Scotland.”

There are numerous independents, including PCL, Triple G, Synergy, 432 Presents, EDM specialists Fly Events and Electronic Edinburgh, and Highlands and islands specialist Beyond Presents.

“Scotland is only five million people. If you are doing a show at the Hydro, you are selling to all of Scotland”

But the largest is Edinburgh’s Regular Music, which continues to do large-scale business. Its properties including the annual concerts at Edinburgh Castle’s Esplanade and Summer Nights at Kelvingrove Bandstand in Glasgow. Eleven of the latter’s twelve 8,500-cap nights sold out in 2019, with stars including Teenage Fanclub and Hue & Cry, plus Suede, Patti Smith, Burt Bacharach and The National.

“We only promote in Scotland, and that’s our identity,” says Regular’s John Stout. “We are always conscious that Live Nation and AEG can offer Europe-wide and kind of exclude us. But we have got good relationships with a lot of bands that come back to us year after year. Stereophonics come back to us every time; we are working with Bon Iver and Lana Del Rey, so it’s not all going to the big guys.”

Another Regular regular are local boys The Proclaimers, who are in a career purple patch. “In Scotland alone, between September 2018 and September 2019, we did just over 70,000 tickets,” says Stout. “That includes two sold-out Edinburgh Castle shows, a sold-out Hydro, and a theatre tour. They will tour any town that has a 500-capacity venue. They have built that audience through hard work and quality.”

Beyond Events, which operates from Ullapool on the north-west coast, 45 miles from Inverness, has operated for 20 years across the great open spaces outside the two largest cities, from festivals down to tiny rooms, and latterly sometimes in Glasgow and Edinburgh, too.

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