Young Fathers, Frightened Rabbit and Edinburgh’s Music Scene

Young Fathers are Edinburgh’s most significant active band – a trio of mixed Scottish-Nigerian-Liberian background whose music combines hip hop, electronic, gospel, punk and everything else into something that sounds like nothing that came before it. They won the Mercury Prize in 2014 for Dead, their debut album, and have since released work – White Men Are Black Men Too, Cocoa Sugar, Heavy Heavy – that is consistently among the most interesting British music being made. They formed in Edinburgh, trained at the Saturday music programmes at Out of the Blue arts centre in Leith, and the city is embedded in their music in a way that is more complex than geography.

Frightened Rabbit came from Selkirk in the Borders but Edinburgh was their city. Scott Hutchison wrote songs about heartbreak and landscape and the specific quality of Scottish self-destruction with a directness that was uncomfortable to listen to and impossible to ignore. The Midnight Organ Fight (2008) is one of the finest Scottish albums of its era. Scott Hutchison died by suicide in May 2018, and the grief that followed his death in Edinburgh was public and real. His music is still everywhere in the city.

Idlewild formed in Edinburgh in 1995 and spent a decade making guitar music that went from the chaotic energy of their early singles to the more considered indie rock of The Remote Part (2002). They sold out arena shows in Scotland at their peak and were genuinely important to the cohort of Scottish students who grew up with them. Rod Jones and Roddy Woomble still work in Edinburgh and the band continues to tour when the schedule allows.

Fence Records was a Fife label rather than an Edinburgh one, but the connection to Edinburgh’s folk and acoustic scene through artists like King Creosote, James Yorkston and The Pictish Trail created a broader east-coast Scottish music identity that Edinburgh participated in. Cabaret Voltaire and the Queen’s Hall both hosted Fence-connected shows. The label’s combination of genuine eccentricity and high musical seriousness is very Scottish and very east-of-Scotland specifically.

The Voodoo Rooms, the Queen’s Hall, Summerhall, the Corn Exchange, the Liquid Room – Edinburgh has a working circuit for live music across all scales. The Summerhall complex in particular, occupying the old Royal Dick Veterinary College, has become one of Scotland’s most interesting live music venues in recent years alongside its gallery and theatre programming.