Taking Glasgow’s festivals seriously

The dark days of January may hold a sense of hibernation for some, but in Glasgow they are the month when the city starts to have a whole new lease of life, thanks to three of its biggest and best cultural events.

Almost as soon as I had drawn a line under Edinburgh’s Hogmanay festival, my thoughts were turning west. The sheer audacity of launching a new traditional music festival in Glasgow 30 years ago is still reflected in the response of those who have never been to the two-and-a-half week long festival, which starts next week.

But the unstoppable growth of Celtic Connections is reflected in the surge in popularity of the acts it has showcased, many of whom are now staging extensive tours and even festivals.

Its younger siblings, the Glasgow Film Festival and Glasgow International Comedy Festival, have both come of age after notching up their 20th and 21st birthdays. At the latest count, they will offer more than 1,000 separate events in the space of ten weeks.

These cultural celebrations are now gold-standard in Scotland in terms of the quality of experiences they offer. It is hard to argue they all offer the best showcases for Scottish talent in their specific field.

By any standard, these festivals are also as accessible as any of Scotland's major events, no small feat in the face of a crippling industry costs crisis and some frankly staggeringly high ticket prices elsewhere in the calendar.

The three festivals are not marketed together and each have firmly separate identities. But, more than ever, Glasgow seems to have a collective festival programme between January and March that can be treated as seriously as the one on offer in Edinburgh each summer.

The big three festivals in Glasgow do not attract huge numbers of international visitors. Instead they have all nurtured fiercely loyal local audiences who can be relied upon to underpin their box office operations.

But none of the above seems to have held Glasgow’s festivals back and these factors could all be counted as major reasons for their undoubted success. They have, thus far, avoided the kind of controversies about their impact on the city that Edinburgh’s cultural celebration has attracted.