Inverness-born Hollywood film composer Lorne Balfe said loss of The Ironworks was a ‘horrid shame’ for the Highland capital’s music scene
The loss of the Ironworks as a major music venue was a “horrid shame” that robbed Inverness of a venue comparable to those in other Scottish cities, one of the Highlands’ most famous musical exports has said.
Lorne Balfe, who has scored the soundtracks for some of the world’s biggest movie blockbusters - such as several recent Mission: Impossible films, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, and Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F - and whose work was most recently heard on BBC1 on Christmas Day in the new Wallace & Gromit feature, was speaking in an exclusive interview with The Inverness Courier.
Mr Balfe was born and raised in Inverness, and his mum still lives in the city, and he said the Ironworks had been a real feather in the cap for the Highland capital before its untimely closure in February 2023.
The venue shuttered its doors after a planning application was granted for a multi-storey, 155-bedroom hotel on the site.
Despite getting the green light in summer 2022 no construction or demolition work has yet taken place, and planning permissions normally only last three years before expiring if no work is undertaken - raising the possibility that its closure may yet have been for ‘nothing’.
Mr Balfe said the loss of the music venue was a blow, as it had “legitimised Inverness in such a great way” because it could serve as a “proper base” for touring bands.
“I think it's a horrid shame that Ironworks has shut down,” he said. “The amount of fascinating bands that were coming up and being able to play there was extraordinary. Apart form the large stadium-sized acts, it was getting acts that Edinburgh and Glasgow were able to have. It was a real disappointment to see that, because I think that legitimised Inverness in such a great way, because it made it a proper base that people could go on tour to. That's what bands need to do. Before you used to tour to sell your album, but now you make your album so you can tour. So it's a very much different scene. So that's very disappointing.”
But although the loss of the Ironworks was damaging for the city’s musical reputation, Mr Balfe believes other venues have helped provide a foot up for genres of music often neglected in many other locations.
“On the positive side, MacGregor’s, I think has been a great establishment to get music accessible,” he continued, referring to MacGregor’s bar on the corner of Academy Street and Friars Lane, which has won a devoted following among Celtic music fans for its live performances. “The fact that the main USP to it is relying on live music and embracing the culture I think is fantastic for that genre of music.
“Ironworks was doing everything from dance acts, all kinds of acts. But MacGregor’s is something else because that was always something I felt was so strange - why can't you easily access Celtic music? Every Irish pub on the planet has Irish music, but Scottish places just seem to run away from it. So I think Bruce [MacGregor] has done a great thing at MacGregor’s.”
He continued by saying that Eden Court Theatre had also helped by being a launch point for touring musical theatre productions.
“The fact that all those touring productions are starting off in Inverness now I think is a massive steppIng stone for them,” he said, while also praising the cinema for its mix of mainstream and more niche movies and productions.
“It’s not the usual planning cinema-wise, [which] is also very exciting, because the big chains tend to play the big movies, like the size of movies I work on - but there are other movies out there for other audiences. And I think Eden Court has been doing very well at showcasing that.”
Mr Balfe’s music career involved studying at Fettes College in Edinburgh as a child, before moving to music college in London aged 18 and on to Los Angeles in his mid-20s and a career working on Hollywood productions.
He was also immersed in music at a very young age through his father’s residential music studio, Highland Studios, which welcomed major musical figures like Ozzy Osbourne, and Echo and the Bunnymen, something Mr Balfe said had been a big influence on his future career.
“All these bands would just come and record and I thought it was pretty normal,” he said. “I thought a normal job was waking up at lunchtime and playing music all the time. That very much was how I was brought up, and I think that was the initial introduction to it all.”
Fresh from his work on Wallace & Gromit, the next production people will likely hear the London-based 48-year-old’s music in is the upcoming Missing Impossible sequel, Final Reckoning in the summer.
