The future looks bright beyond the Hidden Door

Published on Wednesday 27 January 2010 18:06

Could a festival this weekend begin an exciting new era at Edinburgh's Roxy Art House?

• Rupert Thomson, new artistic director of the Roxy Art House, inside the former church building. Picture: Neil Hanna

EDINBURGH is justly famous for its festivals, and from this weekend the city can add a new one to its collection.

Hidden Door, at the Roxy Art House on Saturday and Sunday, promises "an exciting multi-sensory snapshot and celebration of the incredible creativity in the arts going on across Edinburgh and Scotland".

It will feature around 40 bands, almost 50 artists, and a programme of poetry and short films, with an emphasis on showcasing rising local talent.

David Martin, the artist who organised the event, is certainly not short of ambition. Talking up his eclectic festival as "the first of its kind in Scotland", he says he hopes to offer "a truly new way of presenting the arts together". The audience at Hidden Door will be encouraged to explore the whole of the Roxy Art House "and discover the artists and performers through a series of linked passages, secret spaces, doors and a large hidden stage featuring the crme de la crme of Scotland's rich musical heritage".

It sounds impressive, even if it's not quite as new as it claims. For those of us who have been kicking around for a few years, Hidden Door brings back fond memories of Spectrum at the Queen's Hall (which had a similar grassroots sensibility, organised by and for Edinburgh's underground creative community), Triptych (which often ran eclectic, multi-artform events), the Chateau in Glasgow (home of the now legendary art parties where Franz Ferdinand played their first gigs) or Edinburgh cabaret nights like Silencio and Neue Liebe. I co-curated a similar event at Edinburgh's Bongo Club myself four years ago, featuring music from ballboy's Gordon McIntyre, theatre by Highway Diner, art by Kirsty Whiten, and music videos by local bands such as the Magnificents.

Two things are noteworthy about Hidden Door, though. The first is its sheer scale – anyone who can pull together the efforts of hundreds of creative people in this way deserves admiration.

The second is its location. The Roxy Art House has felt like a building bursting with potential for some time now. For the past year it has been home to the Bowery, a music venue with a DIY sensibility, bags of personality, and a talent for luring some of the city's most exciting young bands. The building is also home to artist-run gallery the Embassy, and has hosted events as diverse as the Reel Iraq film festival and gigs by Salsa Celtica. Located between the Pleasance and the Gilded Balloon, it is also ideally placed as an Edinburgh Fringe venue, although in recent years it has been reduced to a venue-for-hire in August, the latest recruit to the Pleasance's expanding empire. For the most part, though, this beautiful former church building has felt – to an outsider's eyes, at least – frustratingly underused.

This, though, could be about to change. The Edinburgh University Settlement, which owns the Roxy, hopes to transform the building into a thriving international arts centre with a year-round programme. To this end, it has just recruited a young and ambitious artistic director, 27-year-old Rupert Thomson.

While Thomson claims no credit for Hidden Door – it was already planned before he got the job – it is exactly the kind of event you'd expect to see him at, and the kind of event you'd expect him to programme. Before he got the Roxy job he was editor of the Skinny, a free, Edinburgh-based monthly listings magazine which has thrived under his watch, hosting gigs, exhibition openings and debates about everything from new technology to sexual morality, becoming a serious rival to the List in the process. He is also the co-founder of Ten Tracks, an innovative music website which sells "bundles" of ten songs at a time for 1, by independent labels such as Fatcat and One Little Indian, and by everyone from little-known Scottish bands to Bjrk. If Edinburgh's indie music scene has begun to flourish in recent years, then Thomson is one of the people who helped make it happen.

A wiry bundle of energy who seems to know everybody, he joined the Skinny, fresh out of university, as a sales rep, "to get my foot in the door". "I didn't have any training in how to sell," he recalls. "It toughened me up." He then became the magazine's comedy editor, then "towards print deadline I'd start staying late and I suppose that's where it became clear that I could offer more."

When Thomson co-founded Ten Tracks with his flatmate Ed Stack, he says, "we thought we were going to be MySpace in six months. We got a lovely article in the Guardian ten days in and we thought, yes, this it! But getting people to part with their money on the internet is tricky. What we're finding now is that live music events are our bread and butter rather than the internet. We've had ten, of which eight have sold out. The plan is to build it as an Edinburgh-based music entity which people on the local scene respect and love, and then use that to draw people towards what is a unique and attractive pricing model. It's definitely taking longer than we thought but there's still lots of reasons to be optimistic, and some of the gigs have been magic."

Ten Tracks might not be game-changing enough to make Thomson a dotcom millionaire, but it offers a persuasive solution to the question currently dogging the music industry – how do you persuade a generation that has grown up with internet filesharing to pay for music? Ten Tracks' answer is simple. "We felt that, even if music was free, people would still value a curated service to help them sift through all the music out there," says Thomson. Ten Tracks is choosy, but charges only 10p per song.

Now, though, Thomson's main focus is the Roxy; he has already struck up a partnership with Zoo Venues which will see the Roxy running its own Edinburgh Fringe programme again this year. "The ambition is to create an internationally recognised arts centre in Edinburgh, but that's a big long-term project," he says. "The main thing is to curate brilliant new events – music, theatre, art and discussion events, anything else we can think of."

This will not be an easy task in a recession. What Thomson has in his favour, though, is bags of enthusiasm and an established relationship with the capital's grassroots creative community – a community in dire need of affordable rehearsal and performance spaces. "One of the things I wanted to integrate into the Roxy plan at a fundamental level is being in touch with the Edinburgh scene," he says. He talks of creating an Edinburgh version of Glasgow success story the Arches, a venue that combines "a slightly underground aesthetic with very high quality stuff" – although, he is keen to point out, without noisy Arches-style club nights that would alienate the local residents. A priority, he says, will be "getting the sound system and the toilets right. If you can create somewhere that at a very basic level will make people feel comfortable then that goes a long way."

He has a few endearingly wacky ideas too. "I'd really like to set up some kind of permanent cultural institution. My initial thinking is a museum of futility, which there is yet to be anywhere in the world. I'm a big fan of the futility of life and my hunch is that a lot of artists are on an instinctive level, so I'd like to celebrate that." He'd also like to paint the entire building white, if they'll let him.

For now, though, he has a weekend-long festival to help run, an event which should offer a taste of things to come. "There's definitely a very positive feeling about what's going on now," he beams. "There's this idea that the Roxy could be a place where inspiring work of an international standard can be in the same building as the best new Scottish stuff."

&#149 Hidden Door is at the Roxy Art House, Edinburgh, on Saturday and Sunday. For more information, visit the festival website, www.hiddendoor.org