The city's unexpected and underestimated music scene

Plus what you won’t want to miss as the brilliant Tradfest gets underway

Rising folk star Dara Dubh on stage

Every time a friend visits Edinburgh, I make sure I take them to hear some live music. There’s not a single person who hasn’t been impressed sitting in the Jazz Bar, the Royal Oak or one of a number of other favourite venues. Guests are usually surprised that I suggest music in Edinburgh; sure, a Fringe show in August makes sense, but for the rest of the year Edinburgh is known much more for its history than anything contemporary or cool. But while Edinburgh has recently lost one of its cornerstone music venues when the Jazz Bar closed, the city does have a thriving music scene, and one with a unique balance of inclusivity and high quality. 

“This pub is historical and quite mythic… Scotland’s folk revival was all essentially started in this pub,” said Katherine Keanney as we sat in a corner of Sandy Bell’s bar. She is a member of staff at Sandy Bell’s and a regular performer at the pub’s open folk sessions. However, Keanney is much more concerned with the present day of Edinburgh’s pub folk scene than its history- so much so that she wrote her Performing Arts masters thesis about the golden triangle (Sandy Bell’s, Captain’s Bar and the Royal Oak). 

Keanney believes that, because Edinburgh’s folk scene is concentrated in pub sessions and small venues, it has a unique feeling of community. In small venues with no stage, and often not even a sound system, there’s little divide between the audience and the performers. And of course, in the free-for-all group structure of an open session, audience members can simply decide to pick up an instrument and join the band. Add to this that folk tunes usually have a simple structure, or use well-known traditional refrains, and you have a recipe for very sociable and accessible music performance. “They become your friends; everyone who drinks here whether they’re a punter or a performer, it's such an interactive platform that it really does become a community,” says Keanney.