Solas Festival – a brief history
Solas has a reputation for being one of Scotland’s best wee festivals, a unique blend of artistic expression, intellectual engagement, and community spirit. This note covers briefly its origins and history.
The Background
It was fitting that Solas - gaelic for “light” - should hold its first full-blown weekend festival over the solstice weekend, at Wiston Lodge, near Biggar, in June 2010.
The festival had been several years in the brewing. It was the brainchild of several Scottish-based enthusiasts at the Greenbelt Festival, held annually in southern England. These intrepid souls wanted to not only avoid the August bank holiday weekend but to put on something more culturally relevant to Scotland. A small group got together to plan an initial one day event in Edinburgh largely put together by Graham Maule. And the following year the first weekend festival was delivered.
We learnt lessons from that first festival - not least that, at least for this audience, a dry festival was a thoroughly bad idea!
But the tone was set immediately. From the very start, Solas developed its own vibe and distinctive persona. The eclectic mix of high-quality music and other art forms, workshops and stimulating talks, recognisable to today's festival goers, was in evidence from 2010 onwards.
Solas always saw itself as an arts festival, created by a mixture of people of faith and not, artists and not –a deliberate strategy to try to involve and encourage different points of view. It never identified itself as an explicitly Christian festival, although its values were deeply rooted in the Christian tradition (and enshrined in its constitution). The vision was – and is - that excellence in the arts can be shared by all and can sit comfortably alongside a vein of spirituality that has always been an important part of the festival.
2013 took us to the Bield near Perth, and the start of our happy relationship with the Perth and Kinross Council. Like everywhere else in Scotland, the 2014 festival buzzed with the independence debate, whilst in 2016 our panel with four newly elected MSP's was inevitably dominated by the Brexit referendum five days later.
Our music in those middle days was dominated by the likes of Michael Marra, Mackintosh Ross, Karine Polwart, Raju Dixit and emerging stars such as Rachel Sermani. Ricky Ross broadcast his Radio Scotland show several times slap bang in the middle of the festival site. And who can forget the brilliance of the theologian-poet Padraig O’Tuama, the stunning verbal dexterity of slam poet Harry Baker or Alistair McIntosh's thesis that Trump was the fruit of seven generations of Western Isles trauma? Or our first forays into welcoming Syrian and other refugees as both guests and performers?
2019 saw us move to Errol Park near the Tay, a beautiful site where we could put down roots - literally as we planted fruit trees to symbolise our commitment to stay. We loved immediately the welcome from the village as our festival coincided with the Errol Gala, to the benefit of us both, and as we coaxed out the wealth of artistic and other talent which Errol has to offer.
Faced like everyone else with the challenge of Covid, Solas decided not to shut up shop but to keep commissioning artists and paying our team, producing an online Hearth with a spellbinding collaboration on Michael Morris All Will be Well, and in 2021 two (very wet!) one day Wee Solas events to keep the fire burning. Through the loyalty of our supporters - including the Saints who have given every month since the very beginning - and of our staff, we survived the trauma and emerged strong.
And so we pressed on. In the three years since covid, we have delighted in bands such as Tidelines, Shooglenifty, and King Creosote; been honoured to welcome displaced Ukrainians; marked creatively and sensitively the crisis in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East; and debated vigorously the politics of the day with the likes of Sir John Curtice. We have worked particularly hard to make the most of our annual festival themes such as Kindling Hope, the Human Touch and, this year, Rest and Be Thankful, a nod to the ever growing and ever successful well-being strand for which Solas is becoming well known.
We look forward to many more years of this precious little thing called Solas.
Frank Strang.
Photo: Jackie: https://www.flickr.com/photos/68853789@N00/4743749596/in/pool-1465335@N21/
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