CONCRETE evidence of how the current recession is impinging on the arts has been all too evident in the past few months, but if any conclusive proof were needed, the cancellation of The Outsider festival surely provided it.

A creation of the Edinburgh-based Unique Events for Highland 2007, the inaugural festival was plagued by bad weather, but this year’s scheduled second running of the music-meets-outdoor activities event at Rothiemurchus has fallen victim to slow sales.

In announcing the cancellation, Peter Irvine of Unique Events admitted that less than 2,000 tickets had been sold when they decided not to go ahead in early May. The risk of running up a considerable loss was too great, and they opted to cancel the festival at that point. He would not entirely rule out a future attempt to revive it, although that seems unlikely.

On a more modest level, the excellent traditional music promotions at Farr Hall in Strathnairn also seem likely to call it a day after the visit of Session A9 on the band’s current Tune Up tour in early June. The growth of alternative venues in and around Inverness and the increasing costs of staging concerts have eroded the viability of the promotions in this much-loved venue, and this may well be the last concert they host.

Highland Council, meanwhile, have now followed the deletion of the Area Cultural Officer posts by doing the same thing with the Mhairi Mhor Gaelic Song Fellowship, a position held by Gaelic singer Fiona MacKenzie since its inception. The official line is that the funding will be redeployed to establish other Gaelic Arts residencies – we shall see what comes of that pledge.

On a brighter note, a number of significant events do go ahead this month, including Rock Ness, GoNorth, the St Magnus Festival in Orkney, and the Nairn Book and Arts Festival. Scottish Opera bring two new productions to Eden Court in Inverness, the National Theatre of Scotland’s Peer Gynt plays the same venue (and their Transform projects in New Elgin, Thurso and Orkney reach their culminations), and the Artist Rooms project (see our interview with Cathy Shankland and Dean Melville this month) reaches the Pier Gallery in Orkney. 

I have referred to the agonising gestation of Creative Scotland on several occasions in this column, and those following that sorry tale may be interested in podcasts of speeches by Michael Russell and Ewan Brown on the Scottish Government website. In the light of the problems with which I began this Editorial, funding – or the lack of it – is going to be a more crucial issue than ever in the coming months and years.

Kenny Mathieson
Commissioning Editor, Northings

Kenny Mathieson lives and works in Boat of Garten, Strathspey. He studied American and English Literature at the University of East Anglia, graduating with a BA (First Class) in 1978, and a PhD in 1983. He has been a freelance writer on various arts-related subjects since 1982, and contributes to the Inverness Courier, The Scotsman, The Herald, The List, and other publications. He has contributed to numerous reference books, and has written books on jazz and Celtic music.