A life without live music is a grey existence ...

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Garry Tallent, Oran Mor, Glasgow
My diary for August 2020 is almost blank. Every gig and show is ripped out - apart from one.

Compare that to August 2019 and 75 shows shoehorned into three weeks of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, haring across the city from venue to venue, trying to catch four, sometimes five shows every day.

The cost was ludicrous, but the memories and experiences priceless.

Coronavirus has come perilously close to destroying the arts sector in the UK.

Theatres are entering redundancy talks with staff amid fears they will close permanently, the summer festival season has been lost in its entirety, and shows rescheduled once will, almost certainly, be kicked further into the long grass as the entire industry hunkers down.

March 2021 is the date many have ringed in their calendars for a possible return to gigging and live stage shows, and that may be too late to save many venues. A full calendar year without revenue is a horrific prospect.

We are in serious danger of losing something incredibly precious and valuable.

Launching a campaign to support our theatres and live venues sparked so many memories of great gigs and shows which have never dimmed.

Black Watch - the only stage show which has ever earned a standing ovation and then absolute silence ass the audience sat down to fully what it has just witnessed.

Charlotte Church leading her remarkable band through a gobsmacking set at Summerhall until something like 3:00am. The sweat dripped from the ceiling.

Bruce Springsteen transforming Wembley Arena into a village hall on the Pete Seeger tour and having to be hauled off stage as his audience danced eightsome reels of sheer delight

Paul Simon  at Hyde Park delivering the whole of the Graceland album with the original musicians, and finishing with 'You Can Call Me Al' which lifted 45,00 to their feet to dance with glee and utter joy.

Discovering just how moving masked theatre could be thanks to  Finding Joy - a haunting, achingly beautiful story of  a confused elderly lady and her wayward grandson who taught her how to laugh like a child in her final days.

Countess of Fife, Woodside Hotel
Watching Damien Rice grin with joy as half the audience piled on stage to become his backing singers at the Usher Hall ... and Ray Lamontagne on the same stage,  the most awkward, fidgety front man ever and yet when he sang ... breath-taking

Hearing Richard Ford deliver an extract from his book, The Sportswriter, and realising his voice was exactly how I heard it in my head when I first read it years earlier.

Laughing until it hurt watching Craig Hill and Jason Byrne in full flight at the Fringe, and the triumphant return of Doug Anthony & The All-Stars, whose set had the woman in front of me watching through her fingers, popping up like a meercat every few minutes as if to ask the audience what was so funny as we all collapsed into laughter as red line after red line was shredded.

Drinking in the sheer scale and spectacle of Les Miserable, and the Lion King, and falling asleep at some late night Radio4 jazz shindig in a big tent at the Fringe, only to be awoken by a singer shrieking like wounded hyena.

Watching Derren Brown  play with our heads in a stunning live show which defied logic or explanation, and sent an audience out all asking the same question "so, how DID he do that ...?"

And festivals packed with incredible moments, most of them on the smaller stages and marquees - from Butefest in Rothesay to Festival No6 in Portmeirion in South Wales in the village where they filmed The Prisoner.

Only in Wales would a male voice choir deliver a set which included songs by New Order, while a DJ played chill-out tunes down at the seafront, and a bloke sported  a bowler hat with a light bulb on it.

Bruce Springsteen, Wembley Stadium
The rollcall of memories runs long into the night.

They started with my first ever gig in 1979 - Nazareth at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, and stretch to my last, Cash Back In Fife, the week before lockdown where we joined Rab Noakes, Ian Rankin, Dean Owens, and Fay Fife at the  Woodside Hotel in Aberdour for a celebration of Johnny Cash's links to Fife. It was damn near perfect.

Four months on, all my scheduled gig sand events  have been pushed back to 2021, and the first, tentative drive-in shows, post lockdown, pulled after the promoter got the jitters.

Just one remains - Arthur Smith, a stalwart of the Fringe, is coming back to host a walkabout tour.

If he can do it, so can others - but they need the support of the public.

We need to find the confidence to take those steps back into the crowd.

If we do, we will be rewarded with many more memories of great gigs, and amazing live shows for years to come.

A life without either is surely the greyest of existences.







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