Deep breath. And in we go. October is a big month for live music in Scotland. Veterans from the 1960s and 1970s, eighties nostalgia, nineties chamberpop, 21st century popstars and the most exciting talent of 2025 - all are present and correct and on tour this month. The question is not who you're going to see, but who you won't have time for?
The Irish singer is the aforementioned exciting talent (though Ethel Cain could also make that claim - see below).
Singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson known as CMAT(Image: Patrick Gunning)
Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson started releasing music under the CMAT name in 2022, but things have really taken off for her in the last 18 months, thanks to a run of wonderful singles including Running/Planning and Take a Sexy Picture of Me (a more considered song than that title implies). She's the funniest, feistiest pop star that's come along for a long time. Rolling Stone suggested her Glastonbury set in the summer announced the arrival of a superstar. She's not quite there yet, but you wouldn't bet against her. These Barrowland gigs should be barnstorming. If you can get a ticket.
If CMAT is all colour, fizz and furious energy, Ethel Cain is the alternative; dark, brooding, brilliant. The American singer - Hayden Silas Anhedonia - trades in a strain of southern Gothic; a doomy mix of post-rock, metal, country and bruised balladry. Raised in Florida, homeschooled and fed a diet of Christian music, she discovered Florence + the Machine as a teenager, came out as a trans woman aged 20 and then started releasing music as Ethel Cain. She can do pop when she wants (Crush may be my favourite single of the last five years), but it's the dark, downbeat A House in Nebraska that is her signature tune - a seven-minute plus song which is as beautiful and brutal a lost love song as any I can think of. Her latest album Perverts is a more withdrawn, oppressive, extreme thing. The sound of someone running away from the limelight perhaps? This Glasgow gig may give us an answer to that.
And now the end is near ... Edwyn Collins's current tour (which starts in Glasgow's Theatre Royal on September 27) will be the last one. After 40 years and counting at the coalface of pop the former Orange Juice frontman will be staying home in (although, hopefully, he will continue to make music as good as his latest album Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation). Collins is one of the great survivors. He has recovered from not one but two cerebral hemorrhages to build a new life for himself with his wife and manager Grace Maxwell up in Helmsdale; surely one of the best and most deserved happy endings in Scottish pop. This Edinburgh gig should be a last glorious hurrah for one of the country's finest singer/songwriter, so, understandably, tickets are at a premium. If you've got one, lucky you.
A celebration and a memorial perhaps. The band's current tour comes only a few months after the death of founding member and keyboardist James Prime, a fact likely to give an added potency and poignancy to these Glasgow appearances. Earlier this year the band released a fine new album, The Great Western Road; a reminder that they are anything but a nostalgia act. But the old songs will have an added brightness and melancholy this time around, one suspects.
Back in her native Wales after a decade in America, Le Bon has a new album - Michelangelo Dying - to promote and a heart to heal after a break-up. She remains one of the most singular artists of the last few years. This gig should offer a reminder of just how singular.
Neil Hannon returns with a new album - with the very Hannonesque title Rainy Sunday Afternoons - in tow. It's the 13th Divine Comedy album, a line that stretches back to 1990's Fanfare for the Comic Muse (though 1993 album Liberation, with its archly humorous-stroke-melanholic lyrics and chamber pop dressings, was the first proper glimpse of what was to come).
Hannon has spent the last three decades crafting gorgeous happy-sad pop music. As is often the case, his biggest hits (National Express; Something For the Weekend) are those where he's come closest to self-parody. But his back catalogue is full of songs - Our Mutual Friend and A Lady of a Certain Age spring to mind - that have the air of imperishability about them.
Music is memory, right? If I think of the Psychedelic Furs I think of my girlfriend's student room at Stirling University in 1982, listening to the Furs single Love My Way over and over and over again. It is one of the key romantic texts of my life and I'm liable to tear up any time I hear it. The Furs emerged out of post-punk but were always art rockers at heart. At the beginning of the 1980s, though, they found a pop edge on tracks like Pretty in Pink which made them cult favourites. Lead singer Richard Butler is now in his late sixties, but by all accounts his voice remains the same raspy nicotine pleasure it's always been.
Emma Pollock
Perth Theatre, Perth, October 24; Tolbooth, Stirling, October 25; Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, October 26; Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, October 28; Oran Mor, Glasgow, October 29
Can it really be the best part of a decade since Emma Pollock last toured? So it seems. But with a new album - Begging The Night To Take Hold - coming out on Chemikal Underground at the end of September she's hitting the road the following month to introduce it to us.
So what flavour do you want your nostalgia to come in this month? Is it 1960s/1970s folk pop you're after? Well, Graham Nash is at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on October 15. Some 1970s prog? How about Rick Wakeman? Same venue the night after. Or, if you prefer, 1980s dandy pop, Adam Ant is also at the Concert Hall on Sunday, October 26 and Monday, October 27.
Can we point you, though, in the direction of this short acoustic tour by none other than former 1980s pop pin-up Nick Heyward? He reunited with the rest of Haircut 100 for a tour in 2023 and dates last year, but this is a stripped-down solo excursion (although he will be accompanied by guitarist Ryan Robinson). Heyward has a new solo album due, but you can expect a few old favourites such as Whistle Down the Wind and Kite (one of the great should-have-been-huge songs of the 1990s).
No room to mention Jade, Katy Perry, Jessie J, Suzanne Vega, The Blow Monkeys, Ash or John Grant. But let's squeeze in Haim. The last gig of a tour that will see Danielle, Este and Alana Haim play all over the United States and the United Kingdom in support of their latest album I Quit - a record full of break-up songs. Recently endorsed by Stevie Nicks no less, Haim have always had the air of an-out-of-time 1970s soft rock group about them. Nothing wrong with that. And at their best - on songs like Hallelujah and Summer Girl - comparisons with the Mac are not unfounded.