THERE was an evocative line yesterday from Sharleen Spiteri, of Texas, when talking about the forthcoming Summer Nights festival at Kelvingrove Bandstand. Her group is one of those that will play the venue in August. “This feels like truly going home, where I spent most of my formative years,” Sharleen said. “It’ll be great to have a stage and a PA, just like the six-year-old me running up and down the park singing to an imaginary audience would have wished for.”
Indeed. It’s been good to have the old bandstand back up and running again. It’s a civilised little pleasure to sit in that amphitheatre and listening to some good music on a balmy summer evening (or as close to balmy as Glasgow ever gets. It never quite seems to be T-shirt-and-shorts weather in the bandstand in August: sometimes you need some alcohol to help ward off the nip in the air. But I digress.)
Before it closed in 1999 and toppled over into disrepair, the Kelvingrove bandstand staged some pretty good concerts: Wet Wet Wet, Deacon Blue, brass bands and Radio Clyde roadshows. Plans to revive it received enthusiastic backing, but it was a long time before they eventually came to fruition.
The Summer Nights festival has over the last few years attracted lots of big names, from Van Morrison to The Waterboys, Steve Earle, Teenage Fanclub, Roddy Frame and Echo & the Bunnymen. “This is a nice place,” Sir Tom Jones observed during his gig there last year. “Not quite like the Apollo.” This year’s acts include Brian Wilson, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Pixies, Hipsway, Arab Strap and Seasick Steve.
Speaking of The Waterboys, Mike Scott said a couple of years back, prior to their show at Edinburgh’s Ross Bandstand: “Do you know, I used to look at that bandstand when I was a kid and think, ‘I’d love to play on the bandstand’, when I had dreams of being a rock musician, and now I’m going to get to do it, so I’m pleased about that.”
The Ross bandstand, which lies in the shadow of the castle, is the subject of an international design competition to create a high-profile replacement and regenerate West Princes Street Gardens. Hopes have already been expressed that the Ross Pavilion will have a beneficial impact on local business the way the SSE Hydro has had on Finnieston.
If you’d like to see other bandstands from across Britain, Paul A. Rabbitts’s website (www.paulrabbitts.co.uk) is well worth a look. An author, parks historian and public speaker, he has plunged into the history of bandstands.
The first domed bandstand is believed to be one erected in the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens in South Kensington, in 1861.
By the end of the 19th century, almost every public park and seaside resort had a bandstand of its own, but the popularity of bandstand concerts waned in the 1950s as other attractions, such as TV, began to catch on, and many fell into disuse.
A true connoisseur, Mr Rabbitts knows what he likes in bandstands. Not all are to his taste, however. One, in Billingham, Stockton-on-Tees, is dismissed thus: “It has to be the worst, most brutal bandstand in the kingdom”.
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