For people of a certain age, Rothesay Pavilion means pretty much just one thing: a date in April 2001 when Glasgow post-rock band Mogwai took their growing band of fans on a wee jaunt “doon the watter” for a very special gig. You will still find much about it on the internet, and amusing reading it makes too, as strangers to the Clyde estuary, from London, the Manchester Guardian and New Musical Express, marvel at the ferry that took them there, the capacity for drink of the local fanbase, and the number of golf courses. With a brass section, strings and Gruff Rhys from Welsh band Super Furry Animals augmenting their colossal sound, it was a special Mogwai performance, one which caught them at a crucial stage of their development, the album after which they named their label, Rock Action, newly released.
But for Rothesay Pavilion, designed by architect James A Carrick on the model of Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion and completed in 1938, it was just another gig. This weekend Rothesay Pavilion is enjoying a Closing Weekend Festival, and the Mogwai event was marked only by a picture of a ticket for the concert in a slide show that forms part of its core theatrical event. Blink and you may have missed it. Fear not, though, the Isle of Bute will not be missing its quayside pleasure palace for long. It closes only to undergo an overdue £8.5m refurbishment programme and is scheduled to reopen in October 2017.
Before work starts in the spring of next year, after the building has had its over-winter remedial work done, the good folk of Bute are this weekend remembering eight decades of high jinks and good times. In this they have been assisted by writer and director Linda Duncan McLaughlin and choreographer Natasha Gilmore, who fashioned their memories into an hour-and-a-half multi-media show called Pavilion People, which had its sole performance last night to launch the weekend’s activities.
The Pavilion’s story began in hard times, and the spanking new building sat in a town where the depression had locals scavenging for firewood and collecting shellfish on the shore because food was short, but McLaughlin’s script and Gilmore’s moves for the 68-strong community cast (and 25 piece band of local musicians led by Anthony Spencer) focuses more on later decades. The writer’s own brother used to take the ferry to the dancing at the Pavilion, where the boys from the mainland were made less than welcome by the local lads, who suspected their exotic attraction to the local lasses. Cue a West Coast Story sequence – Jerome Robbins eat your heart out.
Then there is the memory of the visit by the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1961, when Jenny Brown, now in her mid-eighties, found herself dancing with the cousin of Constantine of Sparta, young ladies in the hall for the Royal visit being in such short supply that the waitresses were pressed into extra service.
This weekend would normally have seen the annual Flower Show at the Pavilion, when prize preserves are identified, but that happened last month to meet the timetable for the building work. Let’s be clear: this festival marks a very temporary au revoir in Rothesay.
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