Alan Lane on reinventing the Edinburgh Military Tattoo — SkimNews
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- Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo played to 230,000 people last year and raised £1.5m for charity, with the organisation triggering a crisis meeting if attendance drops below 96% of its 8,800-capacity esplanade show.
- Alan Lane, a Royal Engineers reservist who trained at Sandhurst and founding artistic director of Leeds-based Slung Low, was appointed creative director in April 2024 and brought in his community-event background.
- This year's show, 'A Call to Gather,' is inspired by The Call 1914 memorial to American expats who fought in WWI and places the US army Field Band back-to-back with the Qatar Police Academy Band and Drill Team.
- The 2026 programme marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence while the US is 'firing missiles at Iran'; Lane counters critics by insisting the Tattoo 'doesn't celebrate the military.'
- Two-thirds of each year's show is built anew by 133 dancers and musicians — one of the largest amateur companies in the country — with traditions like the lone piper on the ramparts kept intact.
- Lane says every military leader he sits with, mapping plans three to four years out, tells him 'at that point, we are at war,' making the show's cultural-sharing mission, in his view, urgently timed.
- Susan from Aberdeen and Francesca from New Zealand were among attendees returning for repeat visits, with Francesca calling the show 'a bucket-list item' she was told she had to see in Edinburgh rather than on tour in Auckland.
Why it matters: Lane is a self-described 'obnoxiously leftwing' food-bank coordinator in pink shorts now steering a £1.5m charity-raiser that sells out 8,800 seats nightly, and he is betting that a 75-year-old Scottish pageant can model 'talk more, not less' by seating a US army band beside a Qatari police drill team while generals tell him war is coming.
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