The Reeling Festival, Rouken Glen Park, Glasgow ****

“There are so many people here I know from lots of different places,” smiled young Scottish singer Josie Duncan, the penultimate act on the second stage at Glasgow’s new folk festival The Reeling.

It was a throwaway comment about what a pleasant day she was having, but it summed up the wonderful sense of community fostered here and within a part of the Scottish music scene which hasn’t felt more youthfully alive for some years.

Founded by Michael Pellegrotti, co-creator of the much-loved Skye Live, The Reeling has foregone the latter’s focus on a blend of music from trad to techno, in favour of a purely roots-based line-up, and carried the energy of one of Scotland’s island-based music festivals to Rouken Glen Park on the edge of Glasgow this weekend.

Held over Saturday and Sunday, with an anticipated audience of 5,000 over the weekend, this debut event had a great demographic profile – older music fans lounged on a sea (or perhaps a loch) of camp chairs towards the rear of the grassy main arena, while families with young children buggied them about or let them play in the kids’ area, in view and earshot of the stage.

Looking at the crowd near the front, meanwhile, revealed an audience which looked under 40 by a majority, with a substantial minority probably under 30. That was echoed by the roster of names on both stages during Saturday’s bill, which offered a bunch of the biggest stars of contemporary Scottish folk – including Dàimh, Breabach and RURA – alongside some perfectly-chosen rising artists.

None echoed the current sound of Scotland’s folk scene more counterintuitively than Glasgow-founded trio Talisk. Comprising concertina player Mohsen Amini, fiddle player Benedict Morris and guitarist Graeme Armstrong, their sound was trad but their energy was worthy of rock headliners at Hampden.

Amini, in particular, carried fierce, over-excitable energy, clearly buzzing as the band skipped from one loud, breakneck reel to another. “We’re not Edinburgh, we’re Glasgow!” he yelled, getting a wee bit carried away as he instructed everyone in the crowd to climb on one another’s shoulders. It felt more like we were in Inverness or Stornoway as many dozens of joyful people did as they were told.

At the first-ever event, organisational hitches were probably to be expected. It was well-catered, but the queues at food trucks still seemed endless, while the tranquillity of the gladed A’Choille (“The Wood” in Gaelic) second stage was marred by sound bleed from the main area.

Josie Duncan’s light, folk-toned voice and melodies – so strangely yet perfectly suited to covering Blondie’s Heart Of Glass – got away with it, but the ever-wonderful Rachel Sermanni was less fortunate as the solo acoustic delicacy of her music came up against the full pounding might of Talisk. Yet her perseverance with songs about motherhood (Swallow Me) and reflections on her own childhood (In Her Place) won deserved adoration from the crowd.

“It’s like parallel universes, but there’s a hole… it’s definitely interesting,” said Sermanni as her unanticipated backing band kicked in once more. “I’m enjoying myself though, I hope you are too.”

The first Reeling was the kind of event which deserved such warm-hearted indulgence, because it tried something different and necessary for Scotland’s roots music scene, and got it almost exactly right. The main stage closed with Skye veterans Peatbog Faeries, whose blend of end-of-the-night rhythms, jazz-infused pipe-playing and psychedelic experimentalism echoed this festival in highlighting the exciting potential of Scottish trad music.

Music review: The Reeling Festival, Rouken Glen Park, Glasgow