Dumfries Music Collective

Dumfries Music Collective is undergoing transformation. Formally Dumfries Music Conference, the organisation has built upon its previous year’s success showcasing new local music talent as well as bringing some fantastic names to Dumfries. One of DMC’s leading lights is Hagen Patterson who took some time out to tell me about his career, how it all started and plans for the immediate future.

If you have never met Hagen, he is not hard to recognise. He’s the tall dude with the cowboy boots on. He’s friendly, and passionate about what he does. I had the pleasure of interviewing him recently and here’s what he had to say.

I’m Hagen, a creative without an artistic ability. Wait, does that make me an imposter? I fell into all of this by accident, it was never an intention of mine to build a career within the creative industries. Why, you ask? Because it never felt like an option!

It wasn’t until I was 25 years old that I found out what a creative career actually was. Michael Nicholson and Colin Tenant from Dumfries Music Collective (DMC) helped me get there. In 2018, I was granted a mentorship through the DMC Futures programme, and I have since been the Plaza Project Coordinator, Operations Manager and now, I am one of the Directors of the organisation.

In 2020, I started an artist management company, BIG RED. It’s a music management company for the purest artist that the mainstream can neither support nor handle. It’s an honest place for those creatives that use art for art’s sake. My focus is to harden the need to create and release truthful music to help liberate a rather beige and imprisoned musical landscape. I rostered my first artist in an instant - a local rock n’ roll band called YABBA. It’s the best thing I ever did! I recently began working with another artist, Scotland’s rawest people’s poet, Steven Thomas.

As an artist manager, I have relished the rise of YABBA, and watched it with pride. They are the purest and hard-working artists I know – working class of course! Definitely, the most exciting act to emerge from Dumfries in living memory. We have been busy building a team over the course of this year, which has allowed them to tour extensively across the national and international grid. YABBA prove that music isn’t dead – check them out!

As a Director at DMC, I am most looking forward to re-shaping the organisation in certain areas. This year it’s about taking a few steps back in order to go forward. This is one big fight to achieve our aims, it will be hard work, and we’ll need everyone to be a part of it. We couldn’t have achieved so much already without our team, and our collaborators and partners.

DMC has a long list of local collaborators – many established, others that are relatively new. This year we are repurposing our energy by parking Dumfries Music Conference, for the time being, and concerting our efforts with an extensive awareness and engagement campaign across Dumfries & Galloway. DMC will deliver activity in Dumfries, Stranraer, Langholm, New Galloway and Sanquhar this year alone. We are so grateful to be collaborating with these communities and excited to be working with the young people within them.

With this opportunity to be featured in DGU’s FOCUS magazine, allow me to stress how much DMC is about to lay a solid foundation for a brighter future for emerging musicians and creatives n D&G. Through our year long programme of talks, workshops, mentorships, live music, training sessions and development opportunities, we strive to educate, inspire, and empower Scotland’s next generation of creative rebel rousers. Watch this space! Read about DMC or follow them on Instagram here.