Preview: Eastern Promise Festival

To many observers, the unique selling point of two-day autumn music festival Eastern Promise might appear to be its location. While Easterhouse arts centre Platform has built a name for itself as a home for good quality arts events, it’s not exactly on the beaten track as a city centre venue of choice for Glasgow’s hipster army.

So, as a festival which champions the alternative and the esoteric over the mainstream (although it quite credibly pitches itself as “recommended for the whole family”), Eastern Promise’s real point of recommendation is the same as every festival hopes to attain – a genuinely exciting and versatile line-up of guests who you won’t see anywhere else, or at least not all in the same place.

Programmed by Alun Woodward of Glasgow’s Chemikal Underground label and formerly of the Delgados, this third annual edition of the festival draws from the familiar and the thrillingly unknown. Perhaps the biggest attraction will be Lightships, the new project of Teenage Fanclub’s Gerry Love, a Glasgow supergroup whose debut album of blissed-out Americana, Electric Cables, was recently released on Domino. Also from the file marked “classic” emerge Smiths-influencing and recently reformed London post-punk outfit the Monochrome Set, and Davey Henderson of Edinburgh’s Fire Engines and Nectarine No.9’s new project the Sexual Objects.

Irish singer-songwriter Adrian Crowley and avant-folk soloist Alexander Tucker will also be appearing, as well as award-winning jazz composer Matthew Bourne, while a wealth of boundary-pushing will be going on: krautrock instrumentalists Plank!, James Brooks’ psychogeographic solo project Land Observations, eclectic Glasgow-based songwriter Richard Youngs and Body Parts, the new project from Sparrow And The Workshop’s Jill O’Sullivan and Strike the Colours’ Jenny Reeve. For those of even a mildly inquisitive bent that’s a great line-up, and one which deserves a little travelling.

• Eastern Promise is at Platform at the Bridge, Glasgow, 5-6 October, see platform-online.co.uk