Kevin Buckle: Mini-Murrayfield could be The Cure for our gig ills

Huge excitement on social media this week when The Cure were announced as the first headline act for the Glasgow Summer Sessions a whole ten months away.

Robert Smith and co are heading for Scotland for the first time in 27 years. Picture: Thomas SamsonAFP/Getty Images

It is 27 years since The Cure were last in Scotland so the excitement was understandable.

However that wasn’t all, with Mogwai and The Twilight Sad both announced as support. For many this is a dream gig and a warning to Edinburgh that it really can’t afford to lag behind Glasgow in this way.

Interestingly it was announced this week that there is to be a new 7800-seater stadium to be built as the new home of Edinburgh Rugby next to Murrayfield stadium.

Josef K backstage while supporting The Cure at the City Halls in Glasgow. Picture: Simon Clegg

Often now when a football stadium is expanded other possible uses including putting on gigs are included when considering the design and maybe this could apply to the new “mini-Murrayfield”. Certainly an arena of this size could cater for some big names who feel that the SSE Hydro in Glasgow is too big for their needs and it would clearly make sense to purpose-build the stadium rather than consider gigs as an afterthought.

I’ve no idea what other plans the owners of the stadium have but hopefully it is something they will at least consider.

Tickets for The Cure/Mogwai/The Twilight Sad went on sale yesterday.

Rip It Up’s coming to an end, so let’s get started on the ScotPop Centre

As the National Museum of Scotland’s Rip It Up exhibition comes to an end next month I’ve been getting an increasing number of enquiries about the ScotPop Centre I’ve been working on for some time now, asking if it has found a home. The short answer is no, but with the museum’s exhibition about to end it has focused some minds on the need to move things forward.

I have certainly done all I can and the building and finance is now down to others. I have an amazing amount of memorabilia, photographs and much more at my disposal, with many other items still to be looked at.

The museum exhibition finishes on Sunday, November 25 and I have already had several enquiries from folk visiting over Christmas and New Year asking if there will be anything they can go to. As I’ve said before the museum’s exhibition is a different beast from what I envisage for the ScotPop Centre and the recent excitement over the announced Cure gig is a good example of that as the centre will feature bands playing in Scotland and not just Scottish bands.

I have access to memorabilia from all those early Scottish Cure gigs and photos of Josef K backstage when supporting at the City Halls Glasgow in 1980 along with Altered Images.

The poster for that tour of Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen says “The Cure tour Scotland . . . at last” and nobody then would have guessed how infrequent further visits would be. With Josef K as support it was £2.50 well spent!