When Rosalind Main and her dad Graham decided to start Borrowed Nostalgia, a radio programme about Edinburgh’s lost music venues, they had plenty of material to play with. As an artist, model and researcher steeped in the local scene, Rosalind had been spoon-fed war stories of gigs past by her old man. The fact that Graham’s first hand experience came, not just from attending gigs as a music hungry teen dating back to the 1970s but, as bass player with auld reekie’s premiere art/punk combo, Fire Engines, playing some of them as well.
‘Growing up with dad’s music was really important’, says Rosalind. ‘Driving round, he would point out places where he’d seen things, so I’d be listening to David Bowie in the car, dad would point out the Empire Theatre, which is now the Festival Theatre, where Bowie played twice.’
The title of Borrowed Nostalgia comes from a line in Losing My Edge, LCD Soundsystem’s ironic 2002 pastiche of too-cool-for-school hipsters that finds James Murphy talking about ‘borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties’. Murphy’s closing litany of uber-cool artists even namechecks Fire Engines.
Now three episodes in, to date, Borrowed Nostalgia has looked at Leith Theatre, Tiffany’s nightclub and the Empire Theatre, now the Festival Theatre. With the first recently opened up for the first time in decades, the second demolished and flats built in its place, and the latter long re-established as a theatrical institution, this selection is itself is a marker of Edinburgh’s losses and revivals in terms of venues across generations.
‘It’s been really enlightening for me,’ says Graham. ‘I’ve been looking at a lot of books about the architecture of the buildings, and it’s interesting what’s going on in the city just now, because there’s a lot of building going on, so it seems to be expanding, but culturally it’s contracting.’
While this makes it even more vital that lost spaces are historicised and their social and artistic significance celebrated, it’s not all doom and gloom.
“We’re going to be covering venues that still exist, like the Liquid Rooms and Summerhall, which have their own histories,’ Rosalind adds. ‘Borrowed Nostalgia is a melting pot of past, present and future, and is a reminder that there’s plenty of things going on in Edinburgh all year round.’
Borrowed Nostalgia is on EHFM every second Monday of the month, 3-4pm. A full archive can be found on Mixcloud. https://www.ehfm.live/residents/borrowed-nostalgia
The List, March 2024
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