Something For The Weekend has received a very exciting makeover. We’ve selected a crack team of art and culture specialists to bring you their recommendations on how you should spend your weekend, and we’re featuring a special guest from the local creative scene every week to give you the inside scoop (our first contributor is the comedian Ifrah Qureshi, who's done a bang-up job). We’re quite happy with the new look. Hopefully you enjoy it too.

AROUND TOWN

Author: Evie Glen

If you’re in a university city this week then expect a prosecco drought, small-plates deficit and more nuclear families than you’d normally find in the pub: it’s graduation time!

In Glasgow, relish the spirit of these hedonistic graduands at a Northern Soul Night in The Buffs Club, Whiteinch, on Friday 26 June. You know it’ll be pure authentic nostalgia when tickets are £5, the bar is cash only and the location needs the clarification: ‘Behind Jem Carpets’. Sick.

For a gentle return to reality, head to the capital for a series of free performances, workshops, talks, art installations and food stalls in the meadows organised by Edinburgh Climate Festival. Highlights of the programme include some somatic dance, medicinal mushrooms and a talk on the implementation gap between climate science and action. I’d say the heatwave is perfect weather for it, but then again…

MUSIC

Author: Danny Munro

Kelburn Garden Party is right around the corner, and on Friday night you can sample the 2026 programme with their Festival Warm Up at The People’s Leisure Club, Edinburgh. Kelburn’s head programmer, Chris Astrojazz, joins The Mirror Dance and Lezzer Quest, making for a great-value evening out with tickets costing less than a tenner. 

Across the M8, Swedish pop icon Robyn is headed for the Hydro for an evening of sexisentialism. Fellow Scandis Smerz are on support duties and, unlike Ethel Cain and Hayley Williams, who are also central belt-bound this weekend, tickets are not yet sold out. 

Hundreds of independent venues in every corner of the UK are taking part in the Everywhere At Once festival this weekend, including Glasgow’s The Glad Cafe, where on Sunday evening you can wind down to the serene sounds of Juni Habel. Habel's finger-picking guitar style and folky vocals have drawn comparisons to the likes of Jessica Pratt and Julia Jacklin.

STAGE

Author: Rachel Morrell

It’s the perfect time to leave the news hellscape and focus on a quality we all possess: humanity. So treat this round-up as a reminder that, as Shakespeare put it, ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’. Aptly, this list begins with Allegra at Theatre Royal Glasgow (until Saturday 27 June), a surreal reflection on joy that follows a deliriously gleeful woman, played by Maureen Lipman, whose fantasy world causes chaos when she can’t stop bursting into song. 

Continuing with a peek at life’s endless possibilities, the arrival of Derren Brown’s Only Human (until Saturday 27 June) at Edinburgh’s Playhouse is sure to cause a stir, as he asks audiences the question: what do you want to be? 

If your answer includes seeing Pride month out with a smile, head to The Stand, Edinburgh, for Ca Caw! (Saturday 27 June),  Kristen Key’s guitar-fuelled comedy show which includes advice for baby gays, a riotous Q&A and an optimistic outlook. And if these don’t lift your spirits, they still beat doomscrolling.

SCREEN

Author: Kevin Fullerton

In film-adjacent news, Edinburgh’s Filmhouse will be having a birthday bash on Saturday 27 June to celebrate one successful year since its heroic resurrection. Expect a DJ, food, drink, film-related goody bags and at least a few people quivering and bleary-eyed at the bar after Bleak Week.

On the indie trail, Blue Heron is a family drama about eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family as they forge a new life in Vancouver. It’s being distributed by Scotland’s own Conic Films which recently scored big with Everybody To Kenmure Street (screening at Glasgow’s Springburn Auditorium on Sunday 28 June). If you’re free on Tuesday 30 June, a Q&A with Blue Heron director Sophy Romvari and actor Adam Tompa will take place at GFT.

Yet true denizens of culture will surely flock to Jackass: Best And Last, the final outing for Johnny Knoxville and his testicle-kicking band of idiots. For a certain type of disaffected millennial, watching the next instalment of Jackass has been like catching up with an old, incredibly stupid friend. Their final stunt won’t leave a dry eye in the house. 

EAT & DRINK

Author: Suzy Pope

If you haven’t already discovered Barry Bryson’s accolade-loaded restaurant, Barry Fish, in Leith, maybe the new summer menu will lure you in this weekend. The season calls for Berwick crab flan or whole lemon sole Veronique, and the first seating between 4.15 pm–6 pm is for walk-ins only. 

Further along the shoreline, The Pitt at Granton is hosting the Indie Beer Scotland Festival on Friday 26 & Saturday 27 June. Craft IPAs, porters, ales and pilsners poured across cask and keg can be soaked up with buttermilk chicken, Nepalese dumplings and Lebanese flatbread from the resident street food trucks. 

Finally, a series of masterclasses, distillery open days and a ceilidh mark the Isle Of Arran Whisky Festival from Friday 26–Sunday 28 June.

VISUAL ART

Author: Greg Thomas

Festivities around Glasgow International have mostly drawn to a close, with galleries wrapping things up over the sweaty solstice weekend. But a select few exhibitions run right through the summer. There’s Rae-Yen Song’s showstopper of a giant cephalopod installation at Tramway, •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• (until Sunday 16 August) and the gorgeous mark-making of husband-and-wife painter and printer team Lorna Robertson and Andrew Cranston, Painting, Our Mutual Friend (until Saturday 1 August), at Glasgow Print Studio. 

I’ll share some more gems of GI next week but if you’re across the way in Edinburgh then head to the City Art Centre on Saturday for the opening of Edinburgh-based, Jamaican-British photographer Sandra George’s new show, Start From The Level (from Saturday 27 June–Sunday 27 September), featuring several decades’ work capturing activism in the city and beyond. 

From beginnings to endings, Saturday 27 June is also the last day to catch Åsa Johannesson’s The Queering Of Photography at Stills, a fascinating exercise in unbinding gendered tropes in lens-based art. Happy hunting!

THE HOT SEAT

Entering this week’s hot seat of cultural recommendations is an up-and-coming comedian who’s been championed by The Stand, Christopher Macarthur-Boyd, and almost every other local comic we speak to. So, what’s Ifrah Qureshi up to this weekend? 

Scotland is on fire. To escape sunstroke, flaming football fever and heated race relations, follow me underground to the cool, dark basement of escape: comedy.

Thursday brings Bona Fide to the Edinburgh Stand: the BBC Live Lounge for comedy. Comedians are little cucks desperate to prove their mettle. When agonising over your prepared writing just isn’t enough, one graduates to Jay Lafferty’s Bona Fide. Club comedy at its best: jokes created and shared for just that night. The show that comedians actually pay to watch.

What are you doing for Pride? I’m listening to Cher, watching Bound and chest-bumping my lesbian friends so they feel more included. The gay agenda comes to a close this Sunday with the Glasgow Stand’s Pride Sunday Service. The line-up brings the finest array of lesbian haircuts and is a chance to watch brilliant queer comics mine their trauma for our entertainment, just as the Lord intended. Go Pride!

Ifrah Qureshi: 48 Flaws Of Power, The Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh, Thursday 6–Sunday 30 August.

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