The sanitisation of Edinburgh's alternative music soul
One of the city's longest-running grassroots venues is set to be replaced by a cowboy-themed karaoke bar, as Will Quinn reports
The Cowgate is facing pasteurisation. For three and a half decades, the venue at 71 Cowgate has been the city’s premier sanctuary for the loud, the weird, and the gloriously unpretentious. Known to veterans as Opium and lately as Legends, it stands as a defiant middle finger to the polished commercialism creeping across the capital.
Well, that finger is being amputated. While the blade has been sharpened in plain sight for weeks, the uncertainty has finally evaporated. The guillotine has fallen: the venue has confirmed that Monday will be its final night ever.
The lease is transferring from Old Town Pub Co to Encore Bars. The incoming operators - known for heavily themed, commercial ventures like Freddy’s in Frederick Street and Westside Rodeo in George Street - are widely expected to gut the space and install a cowboy-themed karaoke bar. Decades of authentic, gritty, and out-there musical history stand to be traded for a manufactured, trend-chasing aesthetic.
A grassroots community evicted
The transition process has been disturbingly opaque, leaving the venue and its patrons in a toxic state of limbo. The Legends team has released a public statement expressing their heartbreak and anger, framing the crisis as a symptom of a much wider cultural rot.
“For a while now, we’ve had to be careful about what we say and how we say it. We’ve kept things quiet and tried to handle things the right way. But we’re done staying silent. Legends/Opium isn’t just a venue - it’s our community, it’s our family. For 35+ years, it has been the home for people who don’t always fit in the mainstream.”
Confirming the bleak reality of their impending eviction, they added: “We asked if we would be able to have a last night. We were told no.”
Faced with the threat of the doors being permanently locked without warning, the community took matters into their own hands with a frantic DIY wake on Friday the 13th. But they aren’t finished yet. An Instagram statement issued yesterday morning confirmed the finality of the situation:
“The outpouring of support over these last few weeks has been incredible and truly humbling, it means the world to us... we have had confirmation that Monday 23rd will be our last night ever, so please, get down, raise a glass and have a final toast to this place we love so much. Legends out.”
To that end, the team has pulled together three “final banger shows” to see out the weekend, featuring local acts like High Noon, Permacrisis, and The Lost Boys of Niddry Street. Readers, I can’t say I know any of these bands, but the history of music is one of bands no one knew taking their early steps up onto stages like Legends.
The human cost of corporate apathy
Behind the bricks and mortar, livelihoods hang by a thread. The exhaustion radiating from the staff is palpable. Speaking with someone who works at the venue, the picture is one of burnout and grief.
“I’m absolutely gutted,” they told me. “The place is a great stepping stone for young bands who maybe are not ready to jump in big support slots but need a place to grow and experience. It’s going to be sorely missed - I think there will be a hole in the live music vibe of the city. There’s no real uncertainty (about the long-rumoured closure) anymore.”
Before Encore called last orders, staff had sought to engage with the Unite Hospitality union to prevent the closure, but the sale was reportedly agreed before they could act. Patrick Duffy, organiser for Unite Hospitality, confirmed members have been “sidelined and blindsided,” receiving no meaningful consultation despite months of rumours.
The situation is particularly grim for those on zero-hours contracts. As Duffy explained to The Herald:
“Our members are low-income workers. Every effort should have been made to keep them fully-informed so that they could make contingency plans. Instead, they are unnecessarily facing imminent and impending financial hardship in one of the UK’s most expensive cities... they still do not know when their last pay day will be.”
This treatment reflects a “concerning trend” of disregard for staff, echoing the recent closure of BrewDog Cowgate next door, where workers were given mere minutes of notice before being declared “surplus to requirements”.
More locally, it wasn’t until the cleaners turned up at locked doors that staff at the Princes Street branch of Yo Sushi discovered they were surplus to requirements. I’m not saying it’s time to take to the barricades to the strains of ‘Do you hear the people sing?’, but society can, and should, demand better. But I digress…
In the interest of fairness, I approached Encore via letter and e-mail through their commercial agents to offer a right of reply. I received absolute silence. It is a deafening non-response. So far as I know, the outgoing captains of Legends haven’t heard anything either. You might think that utterly unacceptable.
The homogenisation of a capital city
Let’s be pragmatic. Edinburgh requires an economically viable hospitality sector. A capital city cannot be preserved in aspic, immune to changing tastes or harsh financial realities. Venues open, and venues close.
Yet, we sanitise this city at our peril. Legends is not just a bar; it is an incubator for talent. It is one of the fiercely guarded spaces where self-expression outranks the ability to pay eighteen quid for a cocktail served in a novelty Stetson. For over 35 years, it has been the home for people who don’t always fit in the mainstream - a place where anyone could feel “safe, accepted, and understood.”
As the team’s public rallying cry stated: “We need to prove that this community is real, it is powerful, and it refuses to disappear quietly.”
When we allow grassroots sanctuaries to be bulldozed for tourist-oriented pastiches, we tear out the city’s cultural roots. The alternative scene is refusing to vanish without a fight, and it may be that the Legends phoenix will rise in flames elsewhere. However, if such relentless, themed homogenization is allowed to run its course, we will wake up one day to find our vibrant capital replaced by a sterile theme park.
Legends must not become a Legend.