Glasgow Music City Tours set to return this weekend

Glasgow has a rich musical heritage as many famous bands and artists have emerged from or visited the city over the years.

From The Beatles to The Rolling Stones, the great and the good have visited to play in front of packed audiences.

If you want to find out a little bit more about the music scene in the city, whether you are a local or visitor, the Glasgow Music City Tours are exactly right for you.

They offer two separate tours which explore different parts of the city as you have the option to select the Music Mile or Merchant City tour.

Tours are designed to be entertaining and fun and cater for even if you are dragged along by your other half. During the tours, you’ll visit some of the sites which have formed part of the music story in the city such as The Barrowland Ballroom and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut.

If you fancy that is something a bit more exclusive you can also request a private your and have it suited to a specific as they cater for anyone having had a number of North American tourists making the pilgrimage to Glasgow to find out more about Belle and Sebastian in the West End.

The tours have now been running in the city for a few years so we spoke to lead guide and music journalist Fiona Shepherd who gave us a flavour of what to expect and how they came to be.

“I was one of the co-founders of the company back in 2015 along with my colleagues Alison Stroak and Jonathan Trew. We decided that we felt that Glasgow had such a rich music heritage that we wanted to celebrate it in some way.

“All our tours are forged from the same premise. The Music Mile tour in some respects are for the hardcore music fan but we have deliberately conceived all our tours that even if you’re not such a fan of music and are the reluctant partner, you should get something out of it as well. The whole point is story telling and in Glasgow we feel that we can use the venues to tell the stories.

“The tours are entertaining, we make them funny as they are not facts and figures or dry. We are using the venues as an excuse to tell lots of daft stories about not just rock and roll, we’ll cover the classic bands and also cover the big Scottish and Glasgow names. We are trying to entertain with storytelling so even if I’m telling a story about an artist you’ve not heard of, hopefully you’ll find it entertaining because we wouldn’t put it in the tour if we didn’t think it had a bit of punch and wit to it.”

Tickets for the tours are available to purchase here.