Glasgow stamps its pop map in blue plaque form

Lulu launched Glasgow’s first Music Heritage Trail on 10 September 2026. Her own blue plaque is to be installed in Union Street at the site of the Lindella Club, where she performed at the age of 14 in 1963 — an early stop on a career that would carry a Glasgow voice onto British and international stages.

The trail is funded by Nordoff and Robbins and backed by ScotsRock. It plans ten plaques honouring the artists and venues that built the city’s reputation as an engine of British and Irish pop and rock. Locations already identified include Simple Minds’ first gig site, the Apollo Music Theatre, Wet Wet Wet’s recording studio, King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut and the home of Postcard Records. Further plaques are set to recognise Lewis Capaldi, Belle and Sebastian, Texas and others. A Scottish rock and roll hall of fame is proposed for summer 2028.

Venues that still carry the noise

The list is not a museum of closed rooms. King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut remains one of the best-known small stages in the country, a room where generations of acts have tested new songs before moving to larger halls. The Apollo Music Theatre belongs to an older chapter of Glasgow gig-going, when the city’s big nights ran through a single, storied address. Postcard Records, the label that helped define an era of sharp Scottish independent pop, stands as a reminder that the city’s influence has always run through catalogues and A&R as much as ticket stubs.

Simple Minds’ first gig site anchors the trail in the Glasgow that formed Jim Kerr’s band — a Scottish group that took local ambition onto international stages and kept a line open between the city and the wider rock mainstream. Wet Wet Wet’s studio marker does similar work for another Glasgow-rooted act whose records filled British charts and radio for years. Texas, fronted by Sharleen Spiteri and long associated with the city, sit in the same living continuum: bands that never treated Glasgow as a backdrop, but as the place the work started.

Belle and Sebastian’s place on the trail points to a later, quieter strain of the same story — songwriting and independent culture that still draws listeners back to the city’s rooms and labels. Together the plaques sketch a map rather than a single era: club stages, theatres, studios and label addresses, each one a fixed point in a long run of records and gigs.

Capaldi and the living catalogue

Lewis Capaldi’s inclusion brings the trail into the present tense of Scottish songwriting. The Bathgate-raised singer-songwriter broke through on a scale few contemporaries matched. Nominated for the Critics’ Choice Award at the 2019 Brit Awards, he won Best New Artist at the Brits in 2020. In March 2019 his single “Someone You Loved” (2018) topped the UK Singles Chart and stayed there for seven weeks; by November 2019 it had reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100. The song was nominated for Song of the Year at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards and won the 2020 Brit Award for Song of the Year. It was the bestselling single of 2019 in the UK, and by May 2020 it had become the longest-running top ten UK single of all time by a British artist.

His early run of releases — the Bloom EP in 2017, Breach in 2018, and the singles that followed — set the terms of that breakthrough. Later work, including the Survive EP in 2025 and further singles in 2024 and 2025, has kept him in the current conversation rather than as a fixed historical name. Putting a plaque to Capaldi beside markers for Simple Minds, Texas and the Postcard era is a deliberate statement: the trail is meant to hold the living catalogue as well as the heritage one.

From one plaque to a hall of fame

Lulu’s Lindella Club plaque is the opening move. The trail’s full set of ten is still being rolled out across the addresses already named and those still to be confirmed. ScotsRock’s backing and the Nordoff and Robbins funding frame the project as both a civic marker and a charity-led celebration of the music itself — the records, the stages and the craft — rather than a tourist gimmick.

The proposed Scottish rock and roll hall of fame for summer 2028 would extend that logic from street-level plaques to a permanent institution. Nothing further has been set out in public about its site, board or founding collection. What is clear is the ambition to give the country’s rock and pop story a fixed home after the trail has mapped its Glasgow chapter.

For a city whose bands, labels and rooms have fed British and Irish pop for decades, the blue plaques are a first concrete index. Readers who already know the albums and the venues now have addresses to match the discographies — and, if the 2028 hall of fame arrives on schedule, a larger room still to come.