City of Music: A guide to live music in Glasgow

When LCD Soundsystem came to play Glasgow in 2017 after a long layoff, James Murphy recounted onstage that it was the Barrowland Ballroom, where they now stood playing, that they specifically wanted to return to. It’s an anecdote that sums up the atmosphere around live music in the city – often a band will tell you they’re playing to the best crowd in the best room in the world at a show, but in Glasgow they actually mean it.

Homing in, it’s difficult to question Glasgow’s music credentials. An illustrious musical history has seen almost every major band through the decades make a pit-stop here. Kurt Cobain famously called The Vaselines his favourite band in the world. Where to even begin with how potent this city of no more than 600,000 people has been in producing great acts like them: Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura, The Blue Nile, Franz Ferdinand, CHVRCHES. The list could go on. Most wonderful is seeing formative experiences repeatedly germinate in the same locations. Take Edwyn Collins and Orange Juice coming together in the closed but soon-to-reopen Vic bar at the School of Art, and then later Life Without Buildings, and Still House Plants after them, developing within the art student community.

Even greater still is the way individuals from the city’s best bands stay connected with the wider music scene: Stephen McRobbie of The Pastels opening Monorail, just one of a number of excellent Glasgow record stores, or bands like The Delgados and Mogwai establishing labels Chemikal Underground and Rock Action respectively and supporting local acts. There are bands from just outside the city limits – The Jesus and Mary Chain (East Kilbride) and Teenage Fanclub (Bellshill) for example – who came up thanks to Glasgow’s burgeoning and fruitful scene. Electronic acts like SOPHIE, Hudson Mohawke and Rustie made their name here and went on to have genre-defying influence across music full stop. And there’s a thriving pocket of radically, defiantly weird musical acts blazing a path for Scottish experimental music.

Glasgow is a place where mainstream and fringe music can sit side-by-side. Look at how the city equally adeptly hosts experimental music festivals, like Counterflows and Tectonics, and huge multi-purpose musical gatherings like TRNSMT, and small genre-specific ones like Celtic Connections (folk and trad) and Riverside (electronic). It does so through world-class venues and knowledgeable, thoughtful crews.

The aforementioned Barrowlands is just one of a number of iconic places bands pull up to play, from the mammoth big hitter the Hydro on the Clydeside, which rivals Madison Square Garden for popularity on annual lists of the world’s best places to see live events, to the Gorbals' O2 Academy, housed in a former Art Deco cinema, to tiny basements in pubs like The Hug and Pint on Great Western Road.

Snapped Ankles at Mono, Glasgow. Photo: Shenna Heard

In these smaller fronts – King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, Stereo, The Old Hairdressers and Broadcast in the city centre, or Mono in Merchant City, or SWG3 under the arches by the river, or The Glad Café in the Southside, or the converted church of Òran Mór in the West End, or the CCA on Sauchiehall Street, or St Luke’s, a hop, skip and jump from the Barras – is where Glasgow’s music community really feels like a teeming cultural hub of familiar faces and like-minded individuals. Many double as arts spaces of all stripes, and that’s the reason so many go on to be the origin of bands that spring up here.

The pandemic posed a significant threat to Glasgow’s status as a music city. And, while the storm hasn’t passed for these venues, it’s a credit to the strength and solidarity in its scene that they’ve come this far.