With its ambitious remit to bring culture, politics, music and art together in a glorious mash-up, every year is noteworthy for the Perthshire-based Solas festival.
But nine months after an invigorating national debate on the merits of independence and just weeks after a historic General Election in which Scotland played an important role, the 2015 festival has more to chew over than usual.
The midsummer festival has always been a place for big ideas - as well as the music, that's one of the reasons it was started, says co-founder Mary Ann Kennedy - but this year's ideas could be among the biggest yet as novelists, poets, critics, musicians and artists meet to take the measure of what has been a breathtaking 12 months, and bring their collective wisdom to bear on what lies ahead both in Scotland and beyond. They'll sing and play a bit too.
"People are coming to Solas to think a bit harder, party a bit harder, experience new music, new ideas and challenging debate," says Kennedy, who as well as being an acclaimed traditional singer and composer in her own right, is a noted broadcaster with berths on BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio nan Gaidheal and BBC Radio 3.
Among this year's attending "thinkers" are the Makar, Liz Lochhead, authors Janice Galloway and Denise Mina, historian Tom Devine and the Sunday Herald's political commentator Iain Macwhirter. On the party side there's music from a wide range of acts including Kennedy herself, hip hop band Hector Bizerk, hotly-tipped indie bands Tuff Love and Honeyblood, ex-Delgados singer Emma Pollock playing with SAY Award-winner RM Hubbert, musical polymath Bill Wells and cult 1980s band The Vaselines. There's also theatre, dance and visual art to enjoy.
Now in its sixth year, the festival runs in the grounds of the Bield centre on the outskirts of Perth, which it turns into a sort of tented village complete with its own mini-campsite. The festival began as a response to the peripatetic Greenbelt Festival, held annually in southern England since 1974, and as with Greenbelt the roots of Solas are broadly faith-based. But as Kennedy says, Solas is for "all faiths and none".
Appropriately, it's also politically neutral, a place for edifying and robust two-way debate where all positions are open for challenge and discussion. "That is something that Solas would very much see as having always been part of its nature," says Kennedy. "It's able, as much as any event in Scotland, to be a really constructive contributor to the ongoing debate and the evolution of what is happening here."
In other words it welcomes No and Yes with equal warmth, though Kennedy admits that where Scotland's musicians and writers are concerned, there's probably still more support for the second position than the first. "I suppose that comes through to a certain extent, but I don't think the festival pushes that from one side or the other," she says. "But what the festival does do is encourage people to consider concepts of identity and what that means to people on lots and lots of levels."
Solas is a place in which to ponder, then, as well as to read, dance, sing, play, talk or perform, and all in a space which encourages the breakdown of the barriers between artist and audience. Artistic and intellectual stimulation are guaranteed; this being Scotland at midsummer, the only thing that can't be relied upon is the weather.
The Solas Festival runs at the Bield at Blackruthven, Tibbermore, Perth, from June 19-21, www.solasfestival.co.uk
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