‘Welcome to The List Hot 100 Party 2022!’ I shouted to the packed crowd at Edinburgh’s Virgin Hotel. That night, we celebrated the dynamic face of Scottish culture with performances from Jay Lafferty, Marjolein Robertson, Alan Bissett, Bee Asha and Rebecca Vasmant. For my part, I introduced the evening (which took a bit of dutch courage), approached my comedy hero Rab Florence (which took a little more dutch courage), and blitzed the free bar for as much of the courageous stuff as I could stomach. It was the kind of rammy that would have seemed almost unthinkable a year before, when it looked like the magazine itself was about to be sent ungraciously to the big printing press in the sky. 

I joined The List during the pandemic’s height: an arts and culture addict writing for an arts and culture magazine when there was very little arts and culture to be found in Scotland. Shuttered shops had plunged a knife into the print edition. The List had become an online-only proposition. As I logged into meetings (having never met any of my co-workers face-to-face), an existential malaise hung in the air. Was a magazine that had endured through thick and thin about to become another covid casualty? 

Then came the crowdfunding, a wellspring of support and the formation of a new company. By March 2022, we were back in print with future rap royalty Bemz gracing our cover and we were one of the few print magazines thriving. We’ve since found ourselves managing the expectations of a publication that both looks to the future of art and culture in Scotland while being a standard bearer for the past four decades of this country’s cultural past. We’re both a wellspring of information about the here-and-now and a legacy publication: striking that balance is a constant reminder that Scotland is home to an almost infinite number of creative niches thriving in their own delightful way. 

The indie fanboy in me has revelled in meeting some genuine heroes from Scottish music, from Aidan Moffat to Siobhan Wilson, and James Graham of The Twilight Sad to Young Fathers’ Alloysious Massaquoi. And the past four years has been a process of cutting my teeth on the precise art of writing for print. I had grown accustomed to the sprawling word counts of online media, penning essays and thinkpieces uncorralled by the sturdy judiciousness of an expert editor. I found myself trimming words surgically, straining to meet a word count and learning the valuable lesson of ‘always kill your darlings’. This is a mag that’s existed in my life in some form or another since I was born, and now sits firmly at its centre. 

We’ve made radical changes since the relaunch (ditching listings from the print edition, making the design sleeker and less crowded), but there’s one thing that we’ll maintain for the next 40 years of this publication’s life: a full-throated, unabashed love of Scottish arts, from the smallest exhibition to the largest stadium act. 

Follow The List’s timeline for more reminiscences from magazine’s past:
< The List at 40: What our writers did next
> The List at 40: A timeline charting four decades of arts and culture coverage