🚀 go-pugleaf

Bass Breweries (in Scotland best known as the makers of Tennents Lager)
owns the Tron Ceilidh House in the centre of Edinburgh; probably the
busiest folk pub in the British Isles.  They have suddenly decided to
close it and turn it into a "student pub" to be called "It's a Scream".
In the process they will be evicting the Tron Folk Club, which meets in
the basement room.  All this with only a month's notice.

This pub has had sessions and concerts over the years that have featured
almost every traditional, blues or singer-songwriter musician in Scotland.
I'm sure many readers of these groups have either attended performances
at the Tron or played there.  Several scheduled acts have been told to
cancel at very short notice: Calluna, Alistair Hulett & Dave Swarbrick,
Peggy Seeger, Adam MacNaughtan, Colum Sands.  The club has firm bookings
to the end of the year, including the Festival Fringe.  They may be able
to find somewhere else for club, but there is no other pub in the city
combining such flexible space for sessions and convenient location for
both locals and visitors.

This information comes from the local folk newsletter "Broadside", which
quotes an "angry Tron session regular": "Next time you drink a pint of
Tennents, consider that you are contributing to the profits of a big
English brewer which is ethnically cleansing its increasingly anodyne
boozers of whatever last vestiges of Scottish native culture remain in
them".  Amen to that, whoever you are.  It is bitterly ironic that we've
been having complaints in u.m.f about the restrictions imposed on folk
musicians by English law, whereas here, where there are no such legal
restrictions, the efforts to suppress tradition come from English-based
transnational corporations.  So what difference would changing the law
down there make?

There is a contact email address: Tron@scotfolk.com.  But nobody I've
talked to about this is optimistic about influencing Bass's decision.

Meanwhile, I would hope that no festival organizer reading this would
consider ordering their beer supply from a Bass subsidiary.

[ Followups to uk.music.folk, please. ]

---> email to "jc" at this site: email to "jack"  or "bogus" will bounce <---
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html  food intolerance data and recipes,
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