Promoters bring festival to Southside
The Great Eastern various venues, Edinburgh ✪✪✪✪
Founded in late autumn 2019 and back for a delayed return earlier this month, one-day, multi-venue music festival the Great Western makes a feature of its setting around the venues of Glasgow’s Great Western Road. Last weekend, for the first time, promoters 432 decamped to the Southside of Edinburgh for the perfectly-renamed Great Eastern sister festival.
To call this iteration a multivenue festival was accurate, but maybe pushing it a bit. The largest halls hosting shows through the evening included the queen’ s hall on clerk street, which welcomed Tracyanne & Danny (side-project of Tracyanne Campbell from Camera Obscura) and Beak>. The latter is Geoff Barrow of Portishead’s current ongoing concern, and the trio’s noisy and very analogue brand of space-rock was a cataclysmic synthesis of Neu! and Hawkwind, just perfect for this old church hall.
An equally capable but littleseen venue is just across the road, and the chance to see gigs in the King’s Hall – a similar space to the Queen’s Hall – was a real treat, among them Edinburgh’s own Broken Records and Sunderland’s eternally underrated Field Music, who mixed songs from this year’s eighth album Flat White Moon with a captivatingly diverse repertoire.
There were four other rooms in use but, thanks to the wonder ofthenearbymulti-spacevenue Summer hall and their in-house promoters Nothing Ever Happens Here, they were all in the same place. Amid this atmospheric Victorian maze could be found poetry readings, mar gate’ s BABII performing a set of off-the-wall electronic pop while standing on a table twirling a cheerleader’s streamer, Yorkshire-formed prog-punks Dead letter playing to a rammed bar, and much more.
Singer Anne B Savage shed a tear in the afternoon forth elate Stephen Sondheim as a packed hell hung on her unearthly voice and gently reverberating solo electric guitar, and Rachel Aggs of de facto late-night head liners Sacred Paws( sadly Free Love and Romeo Taylor both had to cancel) told her crowd that “this has really lifted my spirits” after a typically joyful set. Throughout the day, the feeling had been mutual.