Arts company creative director returns to his roots
A leading arts company boss says Paisley has “lost its sparkle”.
As revealed in the Paisley Daily Express, Outspoken Arts has moved from Glasgow to Paisley and is set to embark on a series of projects with local people and organisations.
Steven Thomson, creative director of the company, who was brought up in Paisley, said: “I love Paisley, but I feel it’s lost its sparkle
“I absolutely had turned my back on Paisley when I left to go and work in Glasgow and wouldn’t have thought of Paisley culturally other than the library and the arts centre and the occasional show such as Barbara Dickson at the town hall.
“It was predictable. You knew it would always come.”
Mr Thomson said that “prior to the death of the High Street”, Paisley was a much more vibrant place.
“Up until the mid-eighties Paisley had a regular programme and a night life,” he said.
“It had a thriving club scene in the eighties, it had still a few of its cinemas left, there were regular shows at the town hall with fairly big leading names.
“There were regular concerts at the abbey. The arts centre wasn’t necessarily built but there was a small, nascent arts scene, the libraries and the museums were thriving places with regular programmes that were turning around.
“And from the eighties onwards, that last 25-30 years, it’s really gone downhill rapidly.”
Mr Thomson put this down to shrinking public funding.
But he said things are turning round, and that started with Paisley’s ultimately unsuccessful UK City of Culture 2021 bid.
“For any City of Culture bid to fail, to not win, but still to have a legacy of £175 million being invested in venues, and £4 million in cultural programming being invested by the council – I can’t think of a council in the land doing that investment in its people’s cultural fabric.
“So that was the great win of Paisley, where everyone recognised how much we had lifted people up, their expectations and how much they wanted to benefit from a cultural project.
“The sad thing is we weren’t able to share all of it with them because it was a competition.
“There were 400 projects in programmes, packed full of ideas that referenced people, their history, the buildings, great moments in our cultural history and also represented a movement amongst young people to really take hold of culture and see it as their own in a populist and non-stuffy kind of way.”
Mr Thomson said he personally was positive about Paisley’s cultural future.
“I’m from here and I always had a sense that at a certain point, I’d bring all this wealth of knowledge, and the great people I’ve worked with – come back to Paisley and try to do something for it.
“I was always conscious Paisley was a project in my own career that, at a certain point, in that slightly mid-life way, that I would have to come and do this.”
Visit www.outspokenarts.org for more information.