Gone but not forgotten: 7 lost Edinburgh music venues

Originally established in 1923 as a cinema, the Caley Picturehouse, the space became a part-time gig venue in the 1970s and '80s before being reimagined as a night club. Known in the 1990s as Century 2000 and then Revolution, the club had a reputation for playing cheesey dance and house music. It was adapted once more in the 2000s to become the HMV Picture House, a hugely-popular, full-time music venue, which played host to a large number of well-known acts in a short space of time. When HMV dropped, the name reverted to the more traditional Caley Picture House, and so it remained until its controversial closure at the tail end of 2014. Despite a campaign to save it as a live music venue, it has since reopened as a JD Wetherspoon gastropub.

The search engine-unfriendly Venue opened as the Jailhouse on Calton Road back in the early 1980s.

During its relatively short life, it served the city exceptionally well, introducing Edinburgh punters to an eclectic mix of traditional guitar-based bands and electronic acts. The Stone Roses (twice); Sonic Youth; Manic Street Preachers; Suede; My Bloody Valentine; LCD Soundsystem; NOFX; Hot Chip; The Comsat Angels, are just some of the many famous names who graced its hallowed stage over the years.

The Venue was an advocate of techno music almost from the day it opened. Its signature club nights ‘Pure’ and ‘Tribal Funktion’ were considered two of the best the Capital had to offer. Pure, in particular has lived long in the memory for those who made it along regularly – no mean feat when you consider the possible substances involved…

Unfortunately, the good times couldn’t roll forever.

In 2004 it was announced that the building occupied by the Venue had been sold to a property developer. With the club regularly matching the decibels of a passenger jet during take-off, it was never realistically going to work out.

The Venue was given a stay of execution of four years, it received just two. The final night at the 900-capacity Venue arrived in June 2006.

The graffiti sprayed across the doorway shortly after it closed read, ‘The Best R.I.P.’ A fitting epitaph for what many from the ‘Burgh consider to be the greatest club of them all.

Edinburgh’s historic West Port: Most notable for Burke & Hare, strip bars and… The Cas Rock.

When seminal West Port punk bar The Lord Darnley was taken over in 1992, a name change followed. The bar was refurbished and changed to The Cas Rock Café – the café part swiftly dropped following a few legal noises from the new Hard Rock on George Street.

Devoted to a mix of punk, rock, metal and indie music, the Cas was a tooth-cutting shop for aspiring local talent, as well as attracting a string of household names: UK Subs; Snow Patrol; Idlewild; Annie Christian (signed by Virgin records the night they played); Mogwai; The Fall; Teenage Fanclub; New Bomb Turks; The Meteors; Cornershop; Arab Strap; BMX Bandits; The Vaselines, to name but a few… Today’s Bannerman’s Bar residents, the Rab Howat Band, played to a crammed Cas audience each Saturday afternoon.

The Halloween shows courtesy of top Edinburgh punk outfit, The Gin Goblins, were the stuff of legend. Each year (against the express wishes of the bar) singer Mikie Jacobs made a point of ripping off a doll’s head filled with (presumably fake) blood during the performance. The first time it happened, the morning cleaner spotted the blood-splattered stage area and was left in a state of abject shock, thinking a murder had taken place.

Cas Rock’s former bar worker, Jooly Blackie, who took over as manager/band booker in 1998 had this to say, “The Cas wasn’t just a pub, but a meeting place for bands and the like, never to be repeated in Edinburgh. Quiz nights would see local bands pitted against one another with banter-a-plenty. Bands became friends, became staff, became partners.
“People would arrive on a Saturday night and be greeted with the question ‘which band are you here for?’, the answer usually being, ‘I don’t know… Just a good band’. I don’t believe any other venue was operating like that at the time.”

The Cas Rock was replaced in 2000 by El Barrio salsa bar, prompting the message: ‘F*** tapas, support rock ‘n’ roll’ to be spray painted on to the side of the building. The individual responsible remains a mystery.

Electric Circus on Market Street is one of the latest in a whole string of popular music venues and nightspots to have closed down in Edinburgh over the last ten years.

The premises were formerly home to Club Mercado and, before that, Buster Brown's. The latter was Edinbugh's first contemporary nightclub when it opened in 1977 and seen as Scotland’s answer to the legendary New York nightclub, Studio 54. Big acts like Blondie and Duran Duran were rumoured to have held aftershow parties here and it became the first club in the Capital to offer valet parking and to introduce the early Friday evening club for office workers. The club's dark red, cavernous spaces revolutionised Edinburgh’s social scene.

Speaking to The Scotsman, when the club closed for refurbishment in 2002, Jane Thomson,whose husband played in a band at the venue in the 1980s, recalled: "I remember having my first hen night there in 1979. It really was a revelation because there was nothing else like it at the time. There was nowhere you could go and it was the first modern-day nightclub of that kind in Edinburgh. Everybody loved it, and it became a real institution."

With the Fruitmarket Art Gallery next door looking to expand, it was announced in December of last year that the premises, now called Electric Circus, were to close down as a music venue for good.

In the early hours of May 7th of this year, we waved goodbye to yet another of Edinburgh's most popular clubs and live music venues: The Citrus Club on Grindlay Street.

The Citrus Club, which had been in business since the early 1990s, was seldom empty at the weekends and played a vibrant mix of different musical genres. It also provided for a stage for a great number of bands, both local and otherwise, over the years.

Perhaps the only silver lining for fans of this reknowned venue, is that it has since reopened as a new nightclub and wasn't sold on for an alternative use.

Edinburgh hasn’t seen anything like it before or since.

Princes Street’s legendary Fire Island was the brainchild of club owner and entrepreneur Bill Grainger, who ran Shadows, Glasgow’s first ever regular gay disco in the late ‘70s.

Unlike its counterpart along the M8, Edinburgh’s gay scene offered very little. The LGBT community often found themselves restricted to the corner of the few city centre bars forward-thinking enough to entertain them.

Grainger changed all that in 1978 when Fire Island was launched on Monday nights at Jimmy Roccio’s famous West End Club, formerly the International Club, ‘The Nash’. When the West End Club lost its drinking licence due to patrons fighting, the increasingly popular (and non-violent) Fire Island became the permanent fixture.

Fire Island was widely renowned for its HI NRG dance music and disco nights. The club’s spectacular lighting effects and stunning audio quality attracted clubbers, both gay and straight, from up and down the country. It was perhaps the closest thing Edinburgh had to Studio 54. Heterosexual guests were made welcome on the understanding that they tolerated the fact it was a place for gay people. Any trouble and they were swiftly shown the exit.

During its tenure, the club played host to the likes of Eartha Kitt; The Village People; The Three Degrees; Hazell Dean; and Mel & Kim. Even Simon Cowell popped in on the odd occasion, accompanied by his then partner, Sinitta, leading to Bill working with the future X Factor mogul on various projects during that period.

Fire Island was forced to close in September 1988 when the owners of 128 Princes Street sold the premises to the Waterstones chain of bookstores. Fittingly, the final ever song played at the club was ABBA’s hit, Thank You For The Music.

Edinburgh’s gay scene faltered in the wake of its demise, but managed to recover and flourish over the course of the 1990s. To say that Bill Grainger’s Fire Island helped lay the foundations is an understatement.

Eros and Elite was one of the showpiece attractions at the Fountain Park complex in Fountainbridge when it opened its doors in November 1999.

Developers promised the £5 million venue would be "the discotheque for the new millennium," featuring the latest in sound and light technology.

One of the largest 'superclubs' in Europe, the venue boasted 10 bars and a 2,200 person capacity between the two interlinked clubs.

Eros had six Greek god-themed bars and a private VIP lounge overlooking the dancefloor,with an American-style diner. Elite had four themed bars and a small dance floor, catering for an older crowd.

"We have the night club that everyone wants to come to and I don’t blame them! We are changing the way designers, owners, operators and the general public perceive a night club to be, not since the days of studio 54 has there been as much well deserved hype, we have set the standard now everyone else can try and catch up” Damon Crawford, general manager said at the time.

But within two months of opening, police were raising concerns about the club after it emerged there had been 105 violent incidents there, including an assault on Celtic star Jackie McNamara.

By 2003 revellers were being scanned with a hand-held metal detector "glove"while they queued outside the club.

Eros and Elite closed down the same year due to violence from both the partygoers and the bouncers.