The long road to the Castle.
Callum Beattie will headline one of the biggest concerts of his career next week before moving on to another extraordinary date later this year, when he’ll perform alongside members of David Bowie’s legendary band at the Bowie: Live on the Loch charity event alongside Duff from Guns N’ Roses and Peter Frampton.
The concert setting is on the banks of Loch Lomond. The milestones are remarkable for any artist, but especially for one who has spent years dragging amplifiers into pubs, handing out homemade CDs outside concerts and refusing to bend to an industry determined to sand away the rough edges that made him who he is. None of it has happened by accident.
Beattie doesn’t speak like a man who believes he has “made it”. He talks like someone who still feels he has something to prove. “I’ve been doing this for 22 years, since I was 14,” he says. “There were years when I played seven nights a week. I spent years playing along the Royal Mile and Easter Road. I’d stand outside gigs by The Who, Paul Weller or Oasis and hand out my demos as people came out.”
It is a familiar story for any budding singer/songwriter. Long before streaming numbers and sold-out theatres, there is a grind that has to take place. A working-class kid from Musselburgh trying to carve out a career in an industry that often expects artists to arrive fully formed, polished and marketable. Instead, Beattie learned his craft the old-fashioned way. “When I wrote songs like Salamander Street, I always imagined them in a big venue with people singing them back.”
That dream became a reality last year when he stepped onto the stage at Glasgow’s Hydro. “We played it last year and sold that out. On stage, I was actually thinking it was like an out-of-body experience and wondering: ‘How do these people know who I am? It was weird but wonderful, like the most special night of my life. These people love you, and you feel it. It was a really, really beautiful thing.”
Asked about Edinburgh Castle, he reflects. “Getting to the castle isn’t easy either, I mean, it’s impossible, so we’ll go for it.” As a boy growing up in Musselburgh, Beattie inherited his father’s love of David Bowie. After fulfilling a lifelong ambition by headlining Edinburgh Castle, later this year he’ll head to Loch Lomond to perform alongside the musicians who helped shape Bowie’s sound, a full-circle moment that would have seemed unimaginable when he was handing out demo CDs on the streets of the capital. “I mean, other kids were listening to the Spice Girls or whatever, that’s when I first got into Bowie.”
He’ll stand alongside Bowie veterans, including guitarist Earl Slick, whose work with Bowie stretched from David Live and Station to Station through to The Next Day and pianist Mike Garson, whose extraordinary playing graced albums including Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs and Outside. “I mean, it’s kind of what every musician wants, respect from other musicians rather than people on TikTok having an opinion. I feel a strange alignment with Bowie’s life. I’ve lived in similar places. I went to Berlin, used to drink at De Schoengel, and basically lived that life. You know, he lived in a basement flat in Edinburgh (Bowie spent time at Lindsay Kemp’s Edinburgh flat in Drummond Street). I also lived in London for a bit.”
Beattie’s journey has not been without its battles. While his music is steeped in stories of ordinary lives, his own career has been shaped by a determination to resist an industry he believes too often rewards conformity over originality. His years with a major record label left him increasingly frustrated by what he saw as a system more interested in chasing trends than nurturing artists. “I was with a record label for a number of years, and I hated it. They would be telling me I needed to be singing ballads or that they were looking for a George Ezra-style on one song. They put out the same record every year because it sells.”
He believes many artists find themselves at odds with that approach, arguing that individuality is sacrificed in pursuit of commercial success.
Beattie argues that the industry’s growing obsession with streaming algorithms and social media has only deepened the problem, with songs increasingly engineered to capture attention rather than creating great art. “With all these algorithms and plastic pop nonsense, there are unbelievable tunes out there sitting in record company basements just because nobody found them. A great example of destroying art is when they cut the intros to songs because they want to take all the atmosphere away and keep it short. They’re not even allowing an emotion to be set or drawing in the listeners.”
Even his voice became a target for reinvention. Record executives wanted to smooth away the grain that has since become one of his defining characteristics. “They used to bring in voice coaches, and they would say: ‘We need to make you sound as young as possible. All that huskiness, we’ve got to try and get rid of it. Just nice and clear, and maybe a little bit of the Scottish accent.’ I refused, I’ve always loved that husky influence of singers like Rod Stewart and Frankie Miller.”
Now working independently, Beattie admits the route to major stages is harder without the backing of a multinational label, but insists it is a challenge worth embracing. “As an independent artist, obviously, it’s a bit harder to get yourself on big stages in front of people who don’t know you. It’s a mission that I’m willing to take on. I’m really lucky with the Bowie project, because those are the sort of opportunities that get handed to pop stars that are signed with Universal.”
Salamander Street is a much-loved song that has been embraced, especially in his homeland. “I wrote that song when I was 18. I just remember being in a room and thinking, ‘This is a great idea for a song.’
The best ideas just come and land in your lap; they are written in ten minutes. It has its own thing going on. When I wrote it, I thought it was good, but I didn’t think all of Scotland would adopt it. Both Salamander Street and Easter Road, much like Bruce Springsteen writing about New Jersey or Shane MacGowan capturing the spirit of London’s Irish diaspora, Beattie found all kinds of humanity in the city’s dark street corners and turned them into a song.
“I played in one bar at the bottom of Easter Road, and the police came in to close it down because the man in the Chinese takeaway next door, a lovely guy, had just been murdered outside. There are a lot of stories to be written and told, and as devastating as those things are, I’ve managed to find a beauty in them. It’s about trying to hold a lantern up for it all.”
Springsteen’s influence is perhaps heard most clearly in It Always Rains in Glasgow. “I feel Bruce Springsteen could have written that if he were from there instead of New Jersey. It wasn’t necessarily intentional; it’s just what I listened to as a kid and what grabbed me. I loved that sort of depth.”
Callum Beattie will perform at Edinburgh Castle Esplanade on 10 July 2026
Bowie: Live on the Loch 10th Anniversary Charity Gala Weekend, 7–8 November, Cameron House, Loch Lomond, in aid of Save the Children.
