Kelvingrove Music Festival Origins - Festival Director John MacCalman

Radio Clyde was very much community based. Managing Director Jimmy Gordon recognised how much the listeners had contributed to the success of the station and wanted to give something back by way of a thank you. In 1976 the Clyde Festivals were born. Radio Clyde would run a series of events every May in the area it served under the Banner Clyde XX for the year of the event. It would provide an umbrella for community events as well as promoting its own concerts and arts oriented activities.

I suggested that we should run a free open-air concert using only local musicians who performed original material. This would encourage talent on our doorstep to grow and reach a wider audience. The funding of the event was possible because commercial radio had in these days (sadly, no more) an obligation to spend 3% of their net revenue on live music. This was why Radio Clyde was able to have its own recording studio and mobile.

At Radio Clyde we had a very good relationship with the Glasgow City Parks Department and provided them with summer roadshows, Parks Patrol, with Richard Park - the infamous “Dr Dick”. Kelvingrove Park had a great bandstand with a natural amphitheatre and this was chosen for the venue for the first Kelvingrove Free Music Festival. 

The naysayers said nobody would turn up for unknown bands even it was free but they were wrong. The sun shone, the bandstand was full and an event was born. Sadly, the first Kelvingrove was not recorded but subsequent years were.

The basic principle of original material from local bands was the mainstay throughout the years which the Festival ran, though occasionally we would allow the odd cover song.

Many people still ask what happened to the old Clyde Kelvingrove Festival recordings, and do any of them still exist?  Each band did receive a copy of their performance on tape or cassette. Radio Clyde did keep the master tapes over the years but they gradually began to decay. When Radio Clyde was taken over by E-map, a project was set up to take many of the archive recordings and transfer them to digital format before it was too late. The tapes were passed over to River Records who subsequently released many of them. The loft in Clydebank was stripped of all the tapes of name acts and sent for processing. Sadly the Kelvingrove tapes were not included. They would be totally unplayable now and were probably destroyed when E-map or Bauer cleared out most of Radio Clyde’s past history.

- John MacCalman.

By kind permission, taken from chapter 8 of John’s Autobiography “I’M QUIRKY” Just Weird Enough To Be Intriguing But Not Enough To Repel.