SCOTLAND’S biggest music festival has been and gone, and left those of us who attended asking some pretty key questions. Not least: who on earth was that all for?

You won’t have needed to actually go to TRNSMT over the weekend to get a feel for who would be there. The city centre was full of teenagers in bikinis, bucket hats, and board shorts all zeroing in on Glasgow Green – and making some of us ask whether we’ve become our own parents with questions like “should she really be wearing that out”.

But despite the teenage crowds, TRNSMT was headlined by a group of guys their dads probably listen to. And while of course the lack of female representation is disappointing (the only woman to ever even get close to headlining TRNSMT was Pulp’s keyboardist in 2023) it goes far beyond that.

In fact, the TRNSMT headliners just smack of laziness. Take Liam Gallagher, the former Oasis frontman who headlined on the Friday night.

No one who has seen Gallagher live can deny he has an electrifying stage presence, drawing eyes in a way that no man standing still with his hands behind his back realistically should.

Liam Gallagher at TRNSMT just weeks after shows at the Hydro (Image: Catching Light Photography)

But the TRNSMT set was the third time Gallagher had played Glasgow in less than a month – he played the Ovo Hydro twice in late June.

The organisers can hardly plead ignorance. DF Concerts had hands in arranging both the Hydro gigs and the TRNSMT appearance – and Gallagher played essentially the same set all three times.

Sure, Gallagher’s a show. But he is not Billy Joel and Glasgow is not New York. He doesn’t need a monthly residency.

It is hard to conclude anything other than laziness on the organisers’ part. They had Gallagher’s team on the phone to book the June gigs, so why not ask them to chuck in a TRNSMT slot as well. Maybe it even came with a discount.

But bulk-buy sets aren’t what the biggest music festival in Scotland deserves. A comparison to the biggest in England – Glastonbury – reveals how lacking TRNSMT really is.

Glastonbury teems with artistic expression, bespoke shows, painstakingly designed stages and settings. Musicians take to the stage to extoll on how they’ve waited their whole lives to play there.

TRNSMT is a big park with barriers in it. Apparently no effort at all was put into any aspect of creating an atmosphere. Organisers seem to have decided to leave that all up to the punters. And they did create some sort of atmosphere. I’ve never seen a festival with so much discarded stuff everywhere. Literally everywhere. A sea of rubbish, half-eaten cheese-y chips and takeaway pizza, and not an unnoticeable amount of vomit. You don’t even want to know about the portaloos.

Not everyone in the TRNSMT crowd seemed bothered about being there (Image: PA)

OK, Glastonbury has some advantages that TRNSMT, being held in the city, does not. But then, there are plenty of other festivals around the world held within city boundaries that also blow TRNSMT out of the water. Take Primavera, held in Barcelona and Porto, as one example of what the Scottish festival could be.

Unlike TRNSMT, Primavera takes pride in putting women to the fore. Its line up announcement stated: “A line up that screams ‘girls to the front!’ Just because the exceptional has become the norm at Primavera Sound doesn't mean that we shouldn’t keep highlighting something that on a global level is an anomaly. Although few festivals in the world have female artists as headliners, the real world says otherwise.”

Quite the difference from what now seems to be an annual apology from TRNSMT after its headliners once again all fit into the “white male aged 35-55” bracket.

This is not to say there were no great moments across the weekend. The Sugababes, Royel Otis, and the ascendant Last Dinner Party all played great sets. As did the headliners (Gallagher, Calvin Harris, and Gerry Cinnamon) themselves.

But ultimately, a poor understanding of their own festival leads TRNSMT organisers to offer poor experiences for people who do get tickets.

Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson at TRNSMT (Image: Catching Light Photography)

For example, take Garbage, who played the main stage in a slot that clashed with Example on the King Tut’s.

Staff were forced to close the secondary stage as thousands of young people thronged to see the Watch the Sun Come Up hitmaker, leaving Garbage to even comment during their set about how quiet their crowd seemed.

Glasgow Times editor Stacey Mullen also noticed.

“I have been reviewing shows for 15-plus years. I’ve seen hundreds of singers and bands across different Glasgow venues. But at TRNSMT this year I really witnessed a lot of people who did not seem interested in the acts,” she wrote on social media.

“Standing down the front chatting to pals the whole way through a set, not looking at the act. On their mobile phones. No interest in the music, not even dancing to a beat. I get the feeling it’s more about going to TRNSMT.”

That surely is the crux of it. TRNSMT is not a destination for its cultural offering or its curated line-ups, but purely because it is TRNSMT.

If the brand cannot be reimagined into something that is actually worth holding on to, organisers may find their already waning reputation fade out entirely.