Lothian Road's Picture House: The reincarnation game

This Lothian Road venue has had many different names. David Pollock finds out why its new owners think the Picture House is here to stay

DIFFERENT generations of Edinburgh people will have their own memories of the building at 31 Lothian Road. Any students who first lived in the city during the 1990s, as this writer did, will be aware of its lengthy incarnation as Century 2000 and then, one new-millennium-enforced rebranding later, Revolution. Neon-streaked, student-friendly nightclubs which now provoke a hazy blend of nostalgia and embarrassment didn’t come much more tacky, or more popular.

A slightly younger crowd might well have attended during the brief few months earlier this decade in which the place was rebranded as Gig, a tentative and cut-price trial effort which nevertheless demonstrated the building’s potential for live gigging. Of course, its late-1970s/early-80s glory days as the Caley Palais saw many famous bands take to the stage here, while the building’s history as the Caley Picture House cinema dates all the way back to 1923.

Now, not before time, a hybrid of the Palais’s popularity and the Picture House’s elegance seems to be the intention of the building’s new owners. The Music and Media Assets (MAMA) group – which also own London venues the Hammersmith Apollo, Borderline, Jazz Caf and Kentish Town Forum, as well as Aberdeen’s Moshulu and Birmingham’s forthcoming Institute – have ploughed almost 4.5 million into creating the state-of-the-art, 1,500 capacity live music venue which will open its doors to the public for the first time tomorrow.

Even in a state of partial completion, with only eight days to go until opening at the time of my visit, the Picture House is showing the results of money very well spent. “We usually try to renovate older buildings when we’re creating new venues,” says David Laing, operations director of MAMA, as welding sparks fly with an echoing crackle from the new, less-obtrusive stairway being fitted to the balcony. “It usually works out much more expensive than new-builds, which you wouldn’t expect, but older spaces just tend to make the best and most atmospheric venues.”

He points out certain minor impracticalities of the building, though – the fact it has no traditional theatrical scene dock area, and that its main entrance is on one of Edinburgh’s busiest roads – as the main reasons that MAMA have spared no expense and fitted a dedicated, permanent sound and lighting setup.

Those who remember the space as cavernous might also be in for a surprise when confronted with the current dimensions – although the Picture House dwarfs Edinburgh’s busiest venues, such as Cabaret Voltaire and the Liquid Room, it’s much smaller than the Corn Exchange, or newer Glasgow venues such as the ABC and Academy.

Where the large stage eats into the floorspace, however, the steep, mostly standing-area balcony looks like it stretches almost from floor to ceiling when viewed from the stage, and the hidden period cornicing of the room hasn’t even been retouched in gold paint yet. Gigs here, you feel, will be a great pleasure to play as well as to attend.

“I’m from Falkirk, and I’ve been based in or around the Scottish music industry for many years,” says Laing, now settled in the production offices upstairs, where irony has decreed that a scuffed old Gig banner be detailed to keep the shiny new floors clean. “I’ve done a lot of work with Scotland’s biggest promoters and it’s something that always comes up with these guys, that Edinburgh doesn’t have a rock’n’roll venue of this capacity. So we’ve kept our eyes open, and it was an obvious choice to purchase this venue when it became available.

“Of course, any good venue of any size or type will help the local music scene, but when there’s an obvious gap in provision at a certain level for bigger touring bands in a city, that affects every venue there. These bands are less willing to play smaller venues there if they don’t know they can keep returning and building that up – you know, why bother with a smaller, sold-out gig if you can’t come back for three years to play the next venue up?”

So the Picture House, says Laing, is a big part of the cure for a malaise which has seen Edinburgh’s gigging stature look increasingly stunted by what’s happening at the other end of the M8, particularly with the loss of some key venues in recent years.

“Edinburgh was the first city I came to see gigs in,” he says. “This was back before [Glasgow’s] King Tut’s even opened, we’d go to places like the Venue and the Cas Rock, and the Playhouse for bigger bands. The presumption that Glasgow’s more of a music city wasn’t there then, although it seems to have developed over time, and that’s because Glasgow has this route for progression through the venues that Edinburgh doesn’t.

“Nowadays a lot of bands’ managers will look at the venue situation in Edinburgh and decide to do somewhere like Leeds or Newcastle instead, but there are more people in this city than either of those, and it’s a capital city. Why shouldn’t it see as good, if not better, gigs?”

Laing acknowledges that this is a space which will probably play host to occasional stand-up comedians, and which may even look at propositions from Fringe shows, though it will be used by the organisers of next August’s Edge music festival, and hopefully to such a degree that all other possibilities are precluded.

There will also be weekly indie club nights for a music-conscious crowd, but the place has been designed specifically for live music and that’s the main reason to get excited about it. By the end of September both Idlewild and Travis will have played the venue, and the next two months will see Dirty Pretty Things, the Charlatans, Martha Wainwright, Todd Rundgren, Feeder and the Cardinals (featuring Ryan Adams) appear. The ideal, according to Laing, is to have a couple of big names on every week.

“Taking Glasgow as an example just once more,” he says, “people like Biffy Clyro talk about great gigs they’ve seen at places like the Barrowland, for example, which helped inspire them to form a band. Unless you have those experiences in an easily accessible venue during your formative years, though, you might not go and pick up a guitar or a keyboard or a pair of decks yourself – we’re here to help ensure people do that, in the long run.”

• The Picture House’s “preview show” featuring Idlewild is tomorrow. The official opening gig will be Travis on 25 September. For ticket information, tel: [phone] or visit the Picture House website at www.mamagroup.co.uk/picturehouse