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…
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