ALL this week in The Scotsman we are counting down the 20 most significant Scottish gigs of all time. Welcome to day two. If you're wondering our No1 pick will be, find out on Friday in our new weekly 16-page arts section, Scotsman Review - where you will also find arts news, features, interviews, and all of our critics in one place: Kenneth Walton, Duncan Macmillan, Joyce McMillan, Alistair Harkness and Fiona Shepherd.
The 20 choices - all gigs taking place in Scotland, from before the birth of rock'n'roll to the present day - were argued over by a six-strong panel of experts: our pop critic Fiona Shepherd; arts editor Andrew Eaton; writer and broadcaster Brian Morton; Brian Hogg, author of The History of Scottish Rock and Pop; BBC radio producer Stewart Cruickshank; and folk writer Sue Wilson, a regular contributor to this paper.
This is just the first of a series of top 20s we'll be running over the next few weeks in The Scotsman, covering theatre, film, classical music, opera and visual art, all assembled by unique panels of experts. You can read our top 20s every weekday, finishing in Scotsman Review every Friday.
We'd love to know what you think of our choices.
In choosing our top 20 Scottish gigs, we set certain rules. This would not be a list of personal favourite gigs, or a predictable list of "classic" rock gigs by famous names , neither did we want to tick off a list of successful Scottish bands.
As explained yesterday, three main factors were considered: the gigs should all have had cultural impact or importance; they should also have provided a unique experience; and, finally, each choice should have that vital "I was there" factor.Join us again tomorrow, for numbers 12-9.
13:
DUKE ELLINGTON, USHER HALL, EDINBURGH, 27 NOVEMBER 1973
You knew that this was the end of something.
..
HE LOOKED thin and sick, with greasy, thinning hair bunched over his collar at the back.
He wasn't playing piano too well either, seeming to drop off his own rhythm and missing bars of some of his own best-known compositions. This wasn't a concert, though. It was a history lesson, a farewell, and a kind of benediction.
If the history of jazz music can be told through the careers of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, it's the Duke who seems to hold the middle ground and bridge what sometimes seems like a deep divide between jazz as raw vernacular, rooted in dance, and jazz as art. With Duke, it was always both and always magnificent. This, though, was like saying goodbye.
Ellington spoke in that rolling Washingtonian voice that always sounded aristocratic. On this particular night, his eyes seemed wet, and you sort of knew that this was the end of something.
At the end of a long medley, he played a phrase lifted from In a Mellotone that seemed to sum up everything he had done, in jazz piano and in jazz composition.
He left a long gap afterward, looking down at the keyboard as if meditating on what he had just played. He never came back to Scotland.
14:
BLUR, MANIC STREET PREACHERS AND PULP, T IN THE PARK, STRATHCLYDE COUNTRY PARK, HAMILTON, 30 JULY 1994
Festival's debut was Britpop preview
T IN THE Park is almost taken for granted now, so reliable has the festival become in its ability to lure virtually every big name and rising talent you could hope for to Balado, then give them such a warm welcome that they tell all their friends to come next year.
Everyone who has been will volunteer a different favourite memory - the Flaming Lips standing in for the White Stripes in 2003 is one that just failed to make our panel's list - but there is, in the end, nothing quite like the first time. T in the Park's debut was a historic event for various reasons. It arguably marked the beginning of a new, more confident phase in Scottish pop music - a road that would lead eventually to Franz Ferdinand, the Fratellis and Paolo Nutini.
More immediately, though, for three hours on its first day it offered an early glimpse of Britpop - Pulp, Manic Street Preachers (without Richey Edwards, who was ill but not yet missing) and Blur played the King Tut's Tent, one after the other, all offering a very different kind of voice to the US rock of main-stage headliners Rage Against the Machine. And, buried half-way down the bill the following day, were some promising young thugs called Oasis.
IT WAS a gig organised by The Joyriders, ostensibly as a charity event for the Sick Kids' hospital, which is how I managed to coattail it.
The flyer had promised "very, very special American guests" and, given that Nirvana were in town, there didn't seem much doubt. Even so, most of those who'd come along on the strength of the rumour that they were going to play buggered off again on the assumption that a rumour was all it was. Somebody got up and actually said so, which thinned the crowd still more, leaving maybe two dozen.
But then Kurt and Dave rolled up and, proving that Nirvana were probably the only band who sounded better unplugged, played about half a dozen songs on acoustic instruments, presented as Teen Spirit. Krist Novoselic didn't play for some reason. It's pretty much axiomatic with memories of this kind that you don't remember a single thing they actually played - someone says they did a cover of Shonen Knife's Twisted Barbie, but I couldn't say - just that sense of moment and occasion that comes from a very special gig and from the feeling of pride that comes from having waited out the sceptics and the non-believers.
16:
SON HOUSE, LEITH TOWN HALL, JULY 1970
A genetic blueprint for rock songs
EDDIE 'Son' House was a founding father of Delta Blues. That alone would make this gig exceptional. A contemporary of Charley Patton and Willie Brown, he was befriended by the young Robert Johnson whom House, reportedly, taught to play guitar.
He recorded sporadically between 1930 and 1942, before retiring from music the following year. In 1964 House was "rediscovered" and began performing again. Mike Leadbitter, co-publisher of Blues Unlimited, promoted Son's second UK visit in 1970, during which he appeared at Leith Town Hall.
Leadbitter informed the audience the singer, now approaching 70, was somewhat frail and the set would, necessarily, be short. Indeed it was, but afterwards, in his dressing room, House proceeded to play informally for enraptured fans. One observer, future Simple Minds manager Bruce Findlay, recalled this impromptu - and by then loose - that performance lasting almost twice the length of the official show.
The following day Leadbitter brought House to Bruce's Record Shop where your then-teenaged scribe, still coming to grips with the various Kings (BB, Albert and Freddy), stood awestruck. A little of Son House's DNA is in most rock songs we listen to. Just ask the White Stripes.
His influence is incalculable and, for one summer evening, that originating voice was heard in Scotland.
News RSS