The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Outwith festival
Various venues, Dunfermline, September 3 to 8
Dunfermline’s Outwith Festival has its roots in the beginning of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe way back in 1947.
Namely, when the 70th anniversary of the Fringe arrived in 2017, it was noted by a group of Dunfermline creatives that the town’s Abbey had hosted one of the very first shows of the Fringe, then an unnamed reaction by eight working class theatre groups to the supposed exclusivity of the main Edinburgh Festival.
“We approached (the Fringe) at the time of the anniversary, to ask if we could do a commemorative event as part of it,” says Chris Foote, Outwith’s festival manager,
“But we were told that because we were outwith the EH (Edinburgh) postcode, we wouldn’t be able to take part. So that’s where the decision to put on our own festival came about, and where the name Outwith came from.”
A collaboration between Dunfermline Delivers and local creative organisations Firestation Creative, Avocado Sweet and Write Rammy, the Outwith festival has grown rapidly in that three-year period. In 2019, Outwith will welcome 200 artists for the same number of performances across its six-day period, in 23 venues around the town.
The centrepiece of the festival will be a live music day on Saturday 7, where one ticket will provide entry to a number of multi-artist gigs.
Alongside a bunch of young Scottish artists including Honeyblood, Siobhan Wilson, Meursault, the Van Ts, Beerjacket and DJ Rebecca Vasmant, there will also be headline appearances from Idlewild and a DJ set from the Charlatans’ Tim Burgess.
William McCarthy – formerly of New York rock group Augustines – will also perform a solo set on the Saturday, following a screening of the film Rise: The Story of Augustines at Carnegie Library and Galleries, while elsewhere there will also be separate gigs from locals James Yorkston and The Countess of Fife (featuring Fay Fife).
On Friday Shaun Ryder will host an in-conversation event.
Outside of the music programme writers Chris McQueer, Alan Bissett, Catherine Simpson and David Keenan will appear as well as a programme of workshops and film screenings, the latter of which includes Beats, Nae Pasaran and a dementia-friendly screening of Singin’ in the Rain.
Last year’s event was attended by 7,000 people and this year the expectation is that number will top 10,000.
“To go from nothing to 10,000 people in three years is remarkable,” says Foote.
“The public and the artistic community have bought into what we do, and that’s because they see it as their festival.”