WELCOME to our countdown of the 20 most significant Scottish gigs of all time. What's at No1? You'll need to stay with us until Friday to find out, as we count down from 20, four each day. You'll find the final four in our brand new weekly 16-page Friday arts section, Scotsman Review - where you will also find regular arts news, features, interviews, and all of our critics in one place: Kenneth Walton, Duncan Macmillan, Joyce McMillan, Alistair Harkness and Fiona Shepherd.
Our 20 choices - all gigs taking place in Scotland, from before the birth of rock'n'roll to the present day - were chosen by a six-strong panel of experts, who will explain the choices between now and Friday. These are: Scotsman pop critic Fiona Shepherd; veteran writer and broadcaster Brian Morton, a particular authority on jazz; Brian Hogg, author of The History of Scottish Rock and Pop; respected BBC radio producer Stewart Cruickshank; critic Sue Wilson, who regularly writes about folk music for The Scotsman and other newspapers; and, finally, myself.
In choosing our top 20, we set certain rules. This would not be a list of personal favourite gigs, because that would be too subjective. It wouldn't be a predictable list of "classic" rock gigs by famous names. Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, the Stones and the Who, for example, were all considered but didn't make the final 20, despite all having played famous shows in Scotland. Neither did we want to tick off a list of successful Scottish bands - once again, fondly remembered shows by Simple Minds, Wet Wet Wet, Texas, Travis and the Blue Nile were all considered but ultimately rejected. Finally, we weren't interested in paying lip-service to festivals and promoters. Sorry Triptych, T on the Fringe, Gig on the Green and the much-missed Flux. None of your shows is on the list, although a few came close.
So what were we playing at? There were three main considerations. First, these should be gigs that had cultural impact or importance. Second, they should also have provided a unique experience. (A stunning Radiohead show in a tent on Glasgow Green around the time of their Kid A album, for example, was considered but rejected, because the band took that same tent all around the UK, and, by all accounts, were stunning everywhere.) Finally, each choice should have the "I was there" factor - the sense of witnessing something extraordinary, that people would be talking about for years. Even after all this, some tough decisions still had to be made. On a personal note, I was sad to lose that legendary early Franz Ferdinand gig at the Chateau in Glasgow - an art opening in a disused warehouse, lit by sunbeds, which ended in a visit from the police (I caught the art, but missed the police). Virtually every Franz Ferdinand interview for the next few years mentioned this show, but our list won't.
We're not stopping here. Over the next few weeks, we'll be giving you more top 20 classic countdowns. What is the best Scottish theatre production of all time? What is this country's best movie moment? Find out what our experts think, from Monday to Friday every week, and tell us what you think. In the meantime, our gigs countdown continues tomorrow with numbers 16-13. See you then.
DO YOU AGREE? If you disagree with our choices and omissions we'd love to hear your views, by post or at
www.scotsman.com/top20 where from Friday the whole list will be available to dissect at your leisure.
20: PETE DOHERTY: BURNS AN A' THAT FESTIVAL, TOWN HALL, AYR, 28 MAY 2005
Pete Doherty Burns at his brightest
THE infamously chaotic Pete Doherty was regarded as a rogue choice of participant for a festival named in honour of Scotland's national bard - although his staunchest acolytes would have no trouble proclaiming him a poet in his own right.
At the time of this much anticipated appearance, Doherty had been ejected from The Libertines, the band with which he had secured his cult status. But his reputation as libertine rather than Libertine was of greater interest to the paparazzi sniffing around Ayr Town Hall on the night. His on-off relationship with Kate Moss had been making headlines for a few months and Doherty was already the veteran of a number of rehab attempts and court appearances.
Notorious for his no-shows, then as now, the fact he turned up at all (without Moss, at it happened) was surprising enough. That he was sober was a bonus. That he created such heart-stopping lyrical magic with just a guitar and his vulnerable voice was simply remarkable.
The combination of Doherty's natural talent and charisma, so often overshadowed by his tabloid disrepute, and the ardour of the crowd created an artist/audience rapport that was electric and a performance that was unique. Nothing he has achieved since has been quite so dignified.
FIONA SHEPHERD19: MILES DAVIS, GREEN'S, GLASGOW, 18 NOVEMBER 1973
The night when jazz was a-hurtin'
TWO houses, both of them less than full, but what a volcanic noise. This was Miles in the aftermath of On the Corner, where he'd thrown overboard every last vestige of bebop phrasing in favour of a hard, urban funk.
There were no "tunes" or numbers, as such, just a single, continuous block of sound built in long, single-chord vamps over Michael Henderson's thudding bass guitar, Miles himself with the wah-wah pedal constantly distorting his trumpet, the others just trying to find some space for themselves in the maelstrom. A contingent of old jazzers got up and walked out, just as they'd planned to.
We'd all had an inkling of what was coming, but even those who felt able to remain in the presence of this performance felt less than comfortable with it.
This was also the turned-back years, when, depending on how you look at it, Miles either demonstrated his contempt for audiences or his solidarity with the group. Halfway through the first house, though, he tipped down his glasses and gave a slow, baleful look round the room. Suck on this, it seemed to say, jazz might not be dead, but it's hurtin' and music won't ever sound quite the same again.
BRIAN MORTON18: THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS, GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL, 26 JANUARY 2003
Scottish folk's first fantasy line-up?
NOTHING quite like it had ever been seen on a Scottish stage - nor, very probably, on any other stage. The debut performance by what was instantly dubbed the "Scottish national folk orchestra" featured no fewer than 32 musicians, including fiddlers, singers, pipers, harpists and accordionists, plus a heavyweight rhythm section and four crack jazzers on brass.
The concept was dreamed up a decade earlier by its musical co-directors, David Milligan and Corrina Hewat when they met at college, but it took the tenth Celtic Connections festival to bring it to fruition.
Described by Milligan as "the musical equivalent of Fantasy League Football", the Unusual Suspects raised the Scottish folk scene's game to a whole new level.
The massed potency of this much contemporary roots talent delivered a near-seismic impact, both sonically and in terms of sheer spectacle.
But the crowning glory was the bravura boldness and finesse of the music's arrangements, covering the full dynamic spectrum, from juggernaut jigs and reels to spine-tingling vocal harmonies.
A protracted standing ovation bore witness to a true watershed event.
SUE WILSON17: BELLE & SEBASTIAN, BOTANIC GARDENS, GLASGOW, 12 JUNE 2004
La
id
-back gig on home soil was a perfect day
BE
LLE and Sebastian now have a global following, but the band's identity is as firmly rooted in Glasgow's leafy west end as Martin Scorsese's is in New York, or Stephen King's is in Maine. They met there, continue to live there, and Glasgow's character and characters are weaved into the fabric of their distinctive and evocative songs. Fans have been known to travel from across the world to Glasgow, on a kind of B&S pilgrimage.
This gig, a free all-day outdoor show on home turf (or, rather, lawn) was organised by Belle & Sebastian for Glasgow's West End Festival, and it summed up the spirit of this homely, community-minded band more than any other they'd ever played. Like the Bowlie Weekender, the Sussex festival they founded in 1999 (which evolved into the now hugely successful All Tomorrow's Parties), it was a laid-back, civilised affair, a pop festival for people who didn't like being splashed with lager or mud while listening to "prosaic, hollering guitar bands", as frontman Stuart Murdoch put it at the time. Instead, there were picnics, families and children, and support from fellow Glaswegians who were friends of the band - Camera Obscura, V Twin, Mother and the Addicts, and James Orr Complex. All against two enormous glass houses - how many rock bands would be trusted to do that?
Purely in terms of musical performance, Belle & Sebastian have played better shows, as have the other groups on the bill, but that's not really the point. This was just one of those perfect days. The sun shone (mostly), the gardens were bursting with life and colour, and 10,000 people milled around, many of them looking like they'd sprung out of a Belle & Sebastian song.
ANDREW EATON
16:
SON HOUSE, LEITH
TOWN HALL, JULY 1970
A genetic blueprin
t
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.
BRIAN HOGG
15: NI
RVANA, THE SOU
THERN BAR, EDINBURGH, 1 DECEMBER 1991
A very, very speci
al
guest appearance
IT WAS a gig organ
ised 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.
BRIAN MORTON
14:
BLUR, MANIC STRE
ET PREACHERS AND PULP, T IN THE PARK, STRATHCLYDE COUNTRY PARK, HAMILTON, 30 JULY 1994
Festival's debut w
as
Britpop preview
T IN THE Park is a
lmost 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.
ANDREW EATON
13:
DUKE ELLINGTON,
USHER HALL, EDINBURGH, 27 NOVEMBER 1973
You knew that this
w
as 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.
BRIAN MORTON
The
top 20 so far
20: Pete Doherty, Bu
rns an' a' That Festival, Ayr Town Hall, 28 May 2005
19: Miles Davis, Gre
en's, Glasgow, 18 November 1973
18: The Unusual Susp
ects, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 26 January 2003
17: Belle & Sebastia
n, Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, 12 June 2004
16: Son House, Leith Tow
n Hall, July 1970
15: Nirvana, The Souther
n Bar, Edinburgh, 1 December 1991
14: Blur, Manic Street P
reachers and Pulp, T in the Park, Strathclyde Coutry Park, Hamilton, 30 July 1994
13: Duke Ellington, Ushe
r Hall, Edinburgh, 27 November 1973
