Glasgow’s Eastern Promise festival raises the bar

IT’S Glasgow, but not as we know it. Now in its fourth year, the Eastern Promise festival is designed to draw fans of good alternative music away from the city centre and towards Easterhouse’s well respected arts and community centre Platform for a couple of days.

Saturday at Eastern Promise will feature The Vaselines  such bands add lustre to the events reputation. Picture: Wattie Cheung

Rather than a tokenistic suburban jolly, however, Eastern Promise works because its line-up is as good as similar events elsewhere in the city.

“It’s important that we work hard marketing and spreading the word, but people will come if they think the line-up is interesting,” says Platform’s music programmer Alun Woodward, “and so far they have. It’s very self-contained and I like the feeling that it exists outside of everything. If you come early you can go for a swim or relax in the library.”

His headliners this year are Fife troubadour James Yorkston on Friday and ever-acerbic Glaswegian indie duo the Vaselines on Saturday, but quality runs right through each evening’s bill. Also appearing will be Phantom Band solo offshoot Rick Redbeard and the updated traditionals of Alasdair Roberts, while Woodward correctly points to the minimalist industrial blues of the Glasgow-based Ela Orleans as being a less-heralded attraction.

“To me Glasgow is paradise,” says Orleans, a sometime visual artist and theatre practitioner who is originally from Poland. “The scene’s very inclusive and nurturing, and the artists I know seem to like the art in themselves rather than themselves in art, which to me has a huge impact on the sense of artistic community. I like when art’s both genuine and good and I find plenty of that in Glasgow. At times I feel overwhelmed by its greatness.”

Another anticipated highlight should be folk modernists Trembling Bells in collaboration with the Incredible String Band’s Mike Heron. “We’ve all been listening to Incredible String Band since we were in our mid-teens, so their music is branded in our DNA,” says Trembling Bells’ Alex Neilson of a project which visits both artists’ catalogues (although “not a verbatim rehash”) via the voices of Heron and the Bells’ Lavinia Blackwall, with Heron’s daughter Georgia Seddon on keyboards.

“They used their songs as a float to parade visions of a mythic Britain, and that had an incalculable effect on the way we think about music. I was on course to become a professional footballer until I heard ISB and decided to become a drummer. They’ve ruined my life...”

Eastern Promise, Easterhouse, Glasgow, 4-5 October.

www.platform-online.co.uk