Valtos and the opening ceremony
Valtos at the Glasgow 2026 commonwealth games Opening Ceremony
Valtos performed at the Opening Ceremony of the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games on 23 July. We wanted to write about how it all came together and the incredible people who were involved.
The brief
The first conversations happened during Celtic Connections. The brief was for Valtos to do what they do best while giving a nod to the different nations taking part.
The difficulty sits in the second half of that. The athletes of 74 nations walk in over roughly forty minutes. There are no fixed timings. An announcer introduces each nation as they appear, over the top of the music.
Acknowledging 74 countries inside that window without it becoming tokenistic is not straightforward.
On the Games themselves
We should be honest about the discomfort here - these Games began as the British Empire Games. The Commonwealth is the empire under a gentler name, and many of the nations walking in were taken, occupied and stripped by the country hosting them. The Bothy Society holds a public justice, solidarity and boycott policy, and we take complicity seriously enough to change our suppliers, our banking and our platforms over it. Taking part in something with this history is not a comfortable fit and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Our policy targets institutional complicity rather than identity, and it commits us to context-sensitivity: weighing ethics against effectiveness and against the material realities of artists and workers. Applied here, that pointed towards taking the platform rather than leaving it. Sport and culture at this scale bring young people into music and into sport, and this is one of the few stages where Scottish athletes compete as Scotland rather than as part of Great Britain. That matters, and it belongs to the athletes and the public rather than to the institution's history.
It also gave us somewhere to put the discomfort. Rather than decline, we built a piece around musical traditions and languages that were suppressed under colonisation and survived anyway, brought in by the people who hold them.
What we did
There are two layers to it.
On stage, Valtos perform with musicians based in Scotland who have ties to different parts of the world through their own heritage.
Underneath, woven through the backing track, are recorded sections from musical traditions and languages connected to the nations represented at these Games.
Those choices came from something close to home. Valtos build so much of their music on Gaelic, so a language that came close to disappearing and is now being carried forward is not an abstract idea to them.
Gaelic went through a long decline in Scotland, discouraged in schools and in public life until it held on mainly in the Western Isles. It is being carried forward now by a generation going through Gaelic Medium Education across Scotland and a legal status.
That story is not unique to us. Welsh, Manx, te reo Māori and many other languages and musical traditions went through something similar, and in each case people have brought them back through teaching, performance and daily use. Working with musicians from those traditions felt less like commemorating a loss than recognising a shared experience, and hearing what each of them has done with it.
There is a longer list we explored that did not make the final piece. Inuit throat singing, Métis fiddle, Garifuna drumming from Belize, Irish language song, West African drumming and Aboriginal Australian languages were all part of the conversation at some stage. In some cases the timings did not work, in others the budget or the recording logistics. This was probably the bit of the whole process we enjoyed the most, getting to explore different musical and broader cultural traditions and speaking with so many incredible and interesting people. Although some of these never came to fruition in the end, but some have already turned into plans for other things.
We were asking artists to trust us with material that in some cases carries real cultural and spiritual weight, on a tight timeline, under NDA, for a broadcast we could not describe until they had signed. People were generous with their time and their knowledge. More than once an artist told us something about their tradition that changed what we had planned to do with it.
We held one principle throughout - where a tradition belongs to a community, the person who holds it leads on what is appropriate to record and share.
On stage
Bemz is a Glasgow rapper and one of several artists establishing Scotland as a serious home for Black music. He came to rap through art and poetry, and his strength is honesty rather than cliché. He has written a rap specifically for the ceremony and performs it live on the night.
Dara Dubh is an Irish alternative-folk artist and harpist, originally from Ballycastle and now based in Edinburgh, known for taking the harp well beyond its traditional expectations. She composed a piece on the harp to play live, and recites a verse from the poem Mo Chraoibhín Cnó.
Shereen Cutkelvin is a Scottish singer, actor, presenter and radio host, whose credits run from Neon Jungle to Irvine Welsh's Crime and BBC Scotland. Her dad's family are from Belize. She performs the track The Night live with the band.
On the recording
From Aotearoa, Komako Silver (Ngāti Pakahi, Ngā Puhi) played taonga pūoro. Komako is a devotee of the art, running sound therapy sessions in Kirikiriroa and working with her whānau collective Oro Mauri, and she plays taonga pūoro less as musical instruments than as tools for transformation.
Kimo Moko brought haka vocalisations. Kimo was raised in Whāingaroa and is Pou 6 in Te Whare Tū Taua o Aotearoa, the Māori martial art, and is working to grow a new generation of kairākau at home.
Both sections were recorded and produced in Aotearoa by Gareth Bellamy, a Welsh producer living in Whāingaroa whose practice is built on place-based recording. Gareth is a pointblank music school graduate, where Jen (Valtos’ manager) also works as a senior lecturer and module leader, which is where they first met. It felt like serendipity to finally work on something together after keeping in touch across the world and after being so impressed and inspired by his work and ideas.
Gwen Màiri sang the Welsh language section. Gwen was brought up in a Welsh-speaking household in north-east Fife, with a father singing in Scots and a mother in Welsh, and has spent her career researching, arranging and performing the music of Wales and Scotland.
ZOLATEC played the steel pans on the Caribbean section. Raised in Leicester to South Asian and Caribbean parents, she has played steelpan most of her life and now builds it into self-produced work drawing on trip hop, breakbeats and experimental sound design.
Tristan Tappin played the guitar parts across that section. Tristan is a multidisciplinary artist from Barbados, now part of the musical community in Glasgow, who performs as obia sound and works with Caribbean resistance as a theme through both sound and image.
Sodhi, the Glasgow-based tabla player, composer and performance artist, played across the Asian section. Classically trained in tabla, vocals and composition, Sodhi has toured the USA, Canada, India and Europe, co-produces the Glasgow Mela, and founded the Talking Tabla Academy and the Scottish Creative Asian Network.
There is an Isle of Man thread in there too, with a Manx tune arranged for Euan to play on the fiddle on the night.
Alongside them are Valtos' own musicians, Lana Pheutan on vocals, Euan McLaughlin on fiddle and Finn MacPherson on whistles and pipes.
All of the above is an idea until someone makes it work live in a stadium with no fixed timings. Lewis Davie handled playback. He rebuilt the Ableton session from scratch for this show, arranged a new set, built panic tracks for the band and for all the additional instrumentation, and took the transitions and made them loopable and jumpable so the music can hold, stretch and move depending on how quickly the teams are walking. None of that is visible from the outside, and it is the reason the concept works rather than falling apart when the first nation walks out late.
The wider show
None of this happened in isolation, and it is worth saying that Valtos' forty minutes sat inside a very large production with an enormous number of moving parts, all of which the team at Spectaculars had to hold together at once. What struck us throughout was how open they were to ideas, and how willing they were to listen to the intricacies of Scottish culture rather than pushing on ahead with a wider view of it, which is not a given on a show of this scale and with this much international attention on it. There were challenges along the way, as there always are when timings cannot be confirmed until late and the running order depends on things nobody can control, but the conversations were always genuinely collaborative, and the flexibility we built into the music came directly out of that back and forth rather than being imposed on us.
Particular credit is due to composer Dom Jones, who took what we were doing and wove it into the larger musical ideas and themes running through the whole ceremony, so that our section sits as part of a coherent whole rather than as a set dropped into the middle of something else. Holding a single musical thread across a ceremony of this size while giving each element room to be itself is a difficult thing to do well, and he did it.
The show
Inside forty minutes of a sporting ceremony there will be taonga pūoro and haka vocalisations, Welsh language singing, steel pan, tabla, a Manx tune on the fiddle, an Irish harp composition, a rap written for the night, and a Gaelic band from Skye. All of it put there by the people those traditions belong to.
That was the aim, and it exists because a lot of artists were willing to take an idea on trust.
Thank you to all of them.