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Fringe venue operator planning year round music venue for Edinburgh
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 11 August 2015
As the Edinburgh Festival swung into action last week, one of the Fringe’s venue operators announced plans to open a new year-round music venue in the Scottish capital.
Like many of the big venue brands at the Edinburgh Fringe, Assembly traditionally rented other people’s buildings for the month of August and set up pop up performance spaces, originally in the city’s Assembly Rooms, from which it took its name. Though in more recent years Assembly operator William Burdett-Coutts actually bought two of the venues he uses each August, and it is one of those that could become a music space all year round.
For a time, the former church in question on the edge of the Edinburgh University city centre campus was home to the grass roots arts set up Forest Café, and now operates as Assembly Checkpoint during the Fringe.
On his year round plans for the building, Burdett-Coutts told the Edinburgh Evening News: “The shortage in Edinburgh at the moment really does seem to be space for music events. I keep getting approached by people who are looking for that kind of performance space [so] it just seems like the logical thing to do. I also feel that there is not enough live music during the Fringe, so if we could build up a year-round presence it would actually provide a good platform to showcase more music during the Festival”.
CMU’s sister magazine ThreeWeeks Edinburgh is covering the world’s biggest cultural event as we speak at ThreeWeeks.co.uk.
