I LOVED being in Edinburgh for the last two weeks – and I mean the place, not just the Fringe. The most brilliant thing about doing the Free Fringe at Bannerman’s Bar is that I was at the very centre not just of the Festival but also of the whole city.

Bannerman’s is the beating heart of the independent music scene and is my chosen venue. I’ve played there on tour at other times of the year: it is an atmospheric, authentic metal/punk bar with wonderful, friendly staff and locals. Performing there, and doing my two early music shows at the totally contrasting St Cecilia’s Hall, the Concert Room & Music Museum literally 40 yards away, I was truly “playing Edinburgh”: local institutions, not ghastly corporate pop-up monstrosities cashing in for three weeks and, so I’m informed, spending forty-nine as literally a waste of space in a city which desperately needs it.

Festival time is a tale of two cities, as I saw when I walked from Bannermans to Easter Road to watch Hibs v Luzern in the Conference League. I walked down the Royal Mile, crammed with visitors and festooned, like everywhere else in the centre, with endless streams of corporate billboards advertising endless streams of corporate or, mostly, would-be corporate comedians (virtually nothing else!) making endless streams of revenue for corporate Festival promoters – and guaranteeing financial misery for many performers with stars in their eyes. Then I turned left and was in a different world: one called “Edinburgh all year round.”