Handmade Perfection

Over a month ago now my parents came across from France for a bit of a flying visit.  So I had three days to show off the best that Edinburgh could muster.  We were off to a pretty good start with a visit to the session at my local on the Thursday night.  There was much walking around town to be had and Mum took great delight in the charity shops, or opp shops as they’re known back home.  I think the local economy is definitely better off for Mum’s visit.

I had organised a hire car for the Saturday and we headed north to Pitlochry.  Just north-east of town is a little distillery called Edradour, also known as Scotland’s smallest distillery.  We were lucky enough to get on a guided tour around the establishment and had a very knowledgeable young lad guide us through the only remaining commercially available hand made single malt whisky in Scotland.  Thanks in advance to Dad for the photos in this post, haven’t managed to upload my own yet.

You are guided through the very hands on process, from the cask warehouse to the still house.  Everything is noticeably on a much smaller scale than other distillery’s that I have visited.  Our guide told us they produce in a year the same volume the larger distillery’s produce in 3 days.

It was such a pity I was driving! Still managed to leave with the wallet a little lighter after getting my hands on their slightly peated expression that had been matured in Bordeaux casks.  Quite a drop!! After this and some well deserved lunch we headed west to Kinloch Rannoch, which had been a Barker holiday spot back in the day.  I’d like to say that Dad shared some of his local knowledge with us, but he basically just told me to keep driving till he said stop!  We weren’t disappointed though with some truly beautiful, isolated Scottish views meeting us at every bend in the road.

Our final full day was to consist of a quick trip to the Botanics, a Father’s Day brunch at a local farm shop cafe and then tunes at the Black Cat in Rose St.  Tunes happen here every sunday from 4pm till 7pm run by our good friend Paul.  If you’re ever in Edinburgh on a Sunday afternoon it’s definitely worth a stop, even if just for the selection of over 200 single malts!  Phew, another weekend done and back to work with me!

Special Ops

Just up the road from Vidlin is the community of Lunna.  The infamous Shetland Bus was run out of Lunna House between 1941 and 1945.  The Shetland Bus provided a permanent link between Shetland and Nazi occupied Norway.  Treacherous journeys were made under the cover of darkness in winter across the North Sea in one of a fleet of small fishing boats.

The Norwegian Naval Independent Unit set up base in Lerwick, initially asking skippers of boats returning from Norway if they could deliver agents back to Norway and return others to Shetland.  Before long a group was formally established out of Lunna House whose purpose was to transfer agents in and out of Norway and supply them with weapons, radios and whatever else was necessary.  Needless to say not all of them made the journey and those who did were often caught and killed on the spot or tortured.  These were brave men indeed.

The isolated position of Lunna was ideal, with the added bonus of a sheltered harbour and its situation on the eastern side of Shetland.  Below is the pier from which the Shetland Bus operated.

We were blessed with both some phenomenal weather that resulted in some sun bathing Shetland style, and a performance of part of Jenna and Bethany Reid’s Shetland Bus suite of music titled ‘Escape’.  It is an absolutely brilliant bit of music and narration of the story of just one of the survivors and well worth tracking down and listening too.

After this we had a bit of an intrepid explorer moment of our own when there was no room for us on the return bus and we had to start walking back to Vidlin…. Luckily the weather brightened our spirits and some merrymaking was had on the way.

Vidlin Away

If you hadn’t already guessed I’ve just come back from another amazing holiday in Shetland 🙂  I was off for the same reason I went last year – Shetland Arts Fiddle Frenzy! It’s an annual week long celebration of Shetland music, art and culture that is centred around Lerwick the main city on the mainland.  We’d made lots of firm friends last year and were off to spend another manic week together! The girls were back in town…..

We started off in style, celebrating all of our 30th birthdays.  They were a few months ago but it was the first opportunity we’d had to celebrate together.  Never one to shy away from a political statement Gemma took us to a ‘disco’ supporting the local ‘Yes’ campaign.  When I informed the boyfriend of our plans for the evening he promptly told me to make sure I only ordered water!  Needless to say much merriment was had and there was some utterly ridiculous dancing.  So ridiculous that when I pulled out the chicken dance we actually scared away the only male in the room brave enough to dance with us!

After a slow start on Sunday we headed down to registration and then to our first class where we’d pulled a lovely straw and ended up with the beautiful Jenna Reid for the afternoon.  Needless to say I’ve got noooo idea what tunes she taught that afternoon as the whole week has become somewhat of a blur of tunes and whisky.  Either way the weather was good and we were in sunny Lerwick.

Later in the week we headed north to Vidlin for our first excursion of the week.  There’s not really a lot to say about Vidlin so here’s some photos instead.

Things are starting to heat up

Despite a horrid start to this morning we’ve been lucky enough to get some wonderful weather recently.  It even reached 18 degrees in the sun on Tuesday, enough to warrant eating lunch outdoors without a coat, taking in some breathtaking views of Edinburgh Castle.  I still can’t believe I’m lucky enough to live and work here.

One of the many upsides to living here is the access to so many incredible festivals.  They don’t call it the festival capital for nothing.  Today was a little difficult to get through at work, thanks to an evening spent with a multitude of drummers, fire twirlers, naked people painted red, the Green Man and the May Queen.

Beltane fire Festival is an ancient Gaelic festival that marks the start of summer every year.  And every year since 1988 it has been held on Edinburgh’s Carlton Hill with attendance growing since then.  I must admit that it’s probably at the stage now where there are too many people, and unless you get there quite early due to the nature of the ground at Carlton Hill it can be quiet difficult to see anything.  It is however an exciting, if a little cold, evening and definitely worth a look.  I have a tonne of photos to get through and I will post them as soon as practicable.  In the meantime, here’s someone’s to whet your appetite…

Beltane Fire Festival. Pictures: Gordon Terris

Nrn Irn Part II

After such a wonderful day in the sun I had almost forgotten about Northern Ireland’s rather turbulent past.  And it all came rushing back when we drove past this mural in a heavily Protestant area of eastern Belfast.

But I’m not here to dive in to an intense political debate about the future, and past, of Northern Ireland.  I was here for the music! The Ulster Scots were a group of people who migrated primarily from the Ayrshire, Galloway and Scottish Borders to land confiscated from the Irish nobility in the Province of Ulster.  The Ulster Scots then emigrated to places like America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  As these families and individuals migrated from Scotland they bought with the their culture, faith, language, music, sport; a whole myriad of traditions.  At it’s narrowest point the sea crossing from Scotland is only 13 miles, and in 1606 the sea crossing took only 3 hours.

So it’s really not surprising that there is such a healthy community of Scottish dancers and musicians in Ulster.  The Ulster Scots community network and the Belfast branch of the RSCDS had put together a weekend/day workshop and evening dance and I was participating in the musicians course.  They had secured quite a significant amount of funding and engaged a great dance band from Scotland to come across for the weekend, all with the aim of promoting Scottish music, primarily for dancing, within Ulster.

Friday night kicked off with a bang, with Iain Muir, Marie Fielding and band playing a couple of sets to set the mood.  We then played through a large amount of music we had been sent previously, with instruments starting to be packed away around 10pm.  Though all was not lost as we relocated to the bar and I had my first Irish Guinness in 6 months.  Happy days!  We then spent the next few hours playing the ‘which tunes do we all know’ game.  This game has been played many times over the past few months, and as usual the drunker we got the better at the game we were!! And by 3am we even had a drummer playing all the available pint glasses.  Until he broke too many…

The next day was more playing, though this time the end goal was playing for the Scottish dance that evening so it was strictly business.  I hadn’t realised until I sat down the previous evening that I had in fact joined the largest ceilidh band I’ve ever seen.  I counted no less than 12 accordions.  Twelve! Who needs that many?! Luckily there were 7 fiddles on hand to drown them out.  Or as a friend would say it was more of a mercy killing really.  We spent most of Saturday feeling like we had walked in to an accordion show room.  But by Saturday night we had all scrubbed up and were ready to play!

The dancers seemed to enjoy themselves, and they even needed to provide a second row of chairs at the back of the hall 😛

Playing for dancing is a completely different ball game to the session playing I have been doing a lot of recently, so it was nice to do something different with a lovely bunch of like minded people.  Marie Fielding, the fiddle tutor, is a truly phenomenal teacher and I learnt more from her in the day than I did during my entire week in Shetland last year.  So it was a very successful day all round, and I still had tunes running around in my head 3 days later!

How about a Tune?

No discussion of famous Scots who have contributed more than their fair share would be complete with out discussing Neil Gow.  There probably won’t be too many readers out there who know who I am talking about.  And if you search for Neil Gow in Wikipedia you come up with a British thoroughbred racehorse born in 1907.  Definitely not the Gow in question.  A second search on Wikipedia reveals that Neil Gow is in fact the most famous Scottish fiddlers and dancie (travelling dance instructor and bard) of the 18th century.  And there are some great pictures of him floating around the net in some stunning tartan trews.

A Perthshire fiddler, he was originally trained as a weaver despite being a bit of a musical prodigy.  He gave this all up however and thanks to the generous patronage of the Duke of Atholl, was able to make a bit of a go of being a musician.  Though it looks like that annuity was only the princely sum of five pounds.  It is as a performer, most notably for dancers, that he is known and loved, inspiring dancers and fellow musicians across the Highlands.

He was also a composer, which his compositions covering reels, jigs, and strathspeys, though he is probably most well known for his slow airs or laments.  His total number of compositions sits somewhere between 50 and 87, despite scarcely being able to read music.  I can’t quite work out how to embed a tune in the blog, so until I do your homework is to find ‘Neil Gow’s Lament for the Death of His Second Wife’, some would say his most famous slow air.  His son Nathaniel went on to publish a collection of tunes by Neil and Nathaniel.

On a slightly different topic, I have just read what is now my favourite line in a Wikipedia article ‘It also must be said that Celtic musicians are usually happy to share tunes and habitually lax about titles, with no intent to defraud other musicians’.  If there’s any Celtic muso’s reading this then I hope you’ve had a good chuckle as well.  I know I’m awful when it comes to names of tunes, though I have some friends who can name a tune after only a couple of bars.  I’m the sort of person who will happily play tunes in a session, wondering whilst playing them what this one is called and why I know it, and then completely forget that I was meant to be asking someone about it.

Neil Gow and his tunes are now known worldwide in traditional music circles, his impact felt even now so long after his death and his tunes still regularly pop up in sessions.

“Time and Gow are even now.  Gow beat Time, now Time’s beat Gow”

For more information on this topic, please refer to this blog.  I don’t claim to be an expert on the Scottish fiddle tradition or genealogy, I just enjoy playing a few tunes. http://scottishfiddlemusic.com/tag/neil-gow/ 

I luuuurve a bit o’ cake

After a well earned sleep in we headed to central Glasgow for cake! Yes, that’s right, cake for breakfast! We headed to a lovely little kitchen/bakehouse called Once Upon a Tart.  Quite a girly excursion for a Saturday morning, the bakehouse didn’t disappoint, with lovely white chandeliers, bird cages and glitter, and a lot of pink.  In a good way though, I promise.

On second thoughts, maybe a little too much pink.  But they do have a record cake stand… That makes up for all the pink and then some.  The cake was also amazing, and as it’s about time for desert while I write this I shall tease you all with lots of pictures of cake 🙂 I’m evil aren’t I?

Needless to say we couldn’t actually finish all the large slices of sponge between the three of us, which was slightly disappointing.  But we had eaten breakfast as well…  I don’t often do this, but if you’re ever in Glasgow you should pay this place a visit.

http://onceuponatart.co.uk/

After ‘breakfast’ we rolled along to St Andrews in the Square, which is a wonderful old church that is now used as a function and music venue.  It has an absolutely stunning interior, quite a setting for a wonderful trad group from Melbourne!

Tolka had come across for the festival and a couple of other gigs thanks to the National Celtic Festival and Feis Rois, one of the UKs leading traditional music education programs. The program sees groups of young musicians under 25 touring and performing traditional music across Scotland over the summer to improve both their musicianship, and to expose local schools and communities to traditional music.  A number of groups are set up according to geographical regions and song type (Scots or Gaelic), and four of them performed before the interval.  The musicians come from all corners of Scotland, including islands such as Uist and Orkney, though the young Orkney almost didn’t make it on stage as he’d forgotten his nice clothes and had to wait for his Dad to bring them.

After the interval Tolka took to the stage and performed a great 45 minute set.  It’s been over a year since I saw them play last and they did not disappoint.  Not that they did last time either.  It was kind of nice to hear an Australian voice singing again, that’s definitely been a while now.

And if they weren’t enough, all 35 or so artists took to the stage for an epic set of songs and tunes, that would be repeated later that evening in the SSE Hydro in front of the entire BBC Radio Symphony Orchestra!  What a day for the group of muso’s from Melbourne! They definitely did themselves proud.

Some Tenuous Connections

I think I’m actually getting worse at keeping this blog up to date, even after all these months of practice. Too busy being unemployed :s And accidentally playing the fiddle for 3 hours today…  As I intimated in a previous blog, at the end of January I headed back north for the 21st birthday of the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow.  According to the website, Celtic Connections is ‘the largest annual winter music festival of its kind and the UK’s premier celebration of Celtic music’.  It is spread across three weekends and two weeks, with a multitude of gigs to choose from every evening, and the Festival Club running into the wee hours over the weekend.  I was heading up for 10 days, and had saved my liver especially for the occasion.

It’s billed as Celtic Connections, and reading the program you could see a large smattering of Celtic bands during the 2 and a half weeks.  There were also a number of bands from around the world, including numerous bands from India and even a couple from Australia.  I quite rightly assumed that I wouldn’t be able to cope with 10 days of Celtic tunes, and had booked some Nordic fiddlers in to my first night in town.  The Nordic celtic connections aren’t too hard to imagine, especially when you look at a place like Shetland where both Nordic and Scottish cultures come together in an amazing geographically isolated mixing pot like Shetland.  The Nordic tradition is very much fiddle and song based, similar to the Celtic traditions.

Olav Luksengård Mjelva and Anders Hall performed with their band, or rather Swedish and Norweigan supergroup, Firil.  They filled the hall with brilliant tunes, amazing harmonies and the wonderful voice of Margit Myhr.  I will never be a music critic/reviewer, but Steph and I walked out of the hall with some very large smiles on our dials after an evening of some good clean Nordic fiddle fun.  There’s something so very clean about the music, with its perfect harmonies and often unique time signatures, key signatures and tune formats, that just makes you happy.  I cannot recommend them, and also their other band with Kevin Henderson The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc, enough if you like some good fiddle based folk music.  And the Hardanger fiddle looks pretty cool, and apparently pulls all the ladies, much to Anders dismay…

After this it was off to the Festival Club, a late night venue set up in the Walkabout of all places that gave a few of the acts who had played that day another 20 minute set in which to amuse an at times very drunk crowd.  It must be a different experience playing to a crowd of really drunk fellow musicians, and it was great to see other bands you may not have had an opportunity to see during the day.  This is a truly appalling photo of god knows who playing…

Anyway, much merriment was had.  Though not too much drinking as it was taking on average 45 minutes to get served at the bar and there was too much dancing to be done for that!  To give you an idea of the Friday merriment that goes on at the Festival Club, read the Celtic Connections blog http://www.celticconnections.com/blog/Pages/Porridge—the-perfect-end-to-the-night.aspx

More stories tomorrow…

Camden Town

This gallery contains 11 photos.

The Hangover Part IV

So apparently we had made it to New Years day?! And spent 45 minutes queuing for tickets to a free gig.  There will be a sternly worded letter written to the organizers of Edinburgh Hogmanay regarding this.  At least the wait was worth it, and we turned up just in time to see da Bid take the stage at Grefriars Bobby.

Fiddlers Bid, The Reid Sisters and Erik, Lewie and Johhnie, lit up the Shet:Lands stage before retiring to a quiet pub nearby for a pint.

Cider cider cider

5 hours later we were playing tunes with all of Fiddlers Bid!  Thanks to Shetland Arts, Amanda Shearer and Katherine Allcock for the photos below.

Whisky whisky blank

Sandy Bells?!

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<insert manic tea party back at our flat with mass biscuit carnage here>

Whisky wine roly poly blank…

And the moral of the story is…

I would like to say it is ‘don’t hang out with Shetlanders as it will lead to large gaps in your memory and a severe whisky habit’, but I would be lying.  That was hands down one of the best New Years Eve’s I have ever had.  It reasserted my love of, and need for, best mates, great tunes, dancing and a good dram.  We’ve pieced together the 5 days now, though we’re still having flashbacks that bring the most ridiculous smiles to our faces.  I wonder what the rest of the train is thinking as I type this with a smile that stretches from ear to ear…

And to be honest the memory gaps and flashbacks aren’t actually due to the whisky (that’s true and not just added to assuage my mothers fears), it was simply that too much happened in such a short space of time for us to possibly be able to process it all.  2013 was such an amazing year that I didn’t think it was possible to have even more fun ringing in 2014.  I feel blessed to have so many amazing people to share my life with, and I have a feeling that 2014 holds some great, life changing things in store for us all.