Does Gaelic Music live in Exile at Home?

Northings aims to provide a regular platform for figures in the arts world to have their say about a key issue of the day.  This month: The Waulking Songs of Barra provided a life-changing epiphany for PETER URPETH, but why does the music of the Gael remain marginalised within the national context of folk and music events?

IT WAS SUMMER 1978, and it had been an ordinary enough day in Southend on Sea, Essex. We had walked the prom, taken the train down the pier, eaten cod and chips in a cafe beneath an old brick arch in which the tables cloths were as gingham-clad as the mock Swiss curtains. We would go on to Leigh-on-Sea for a punit of cockles and an underage pint in a pub on the seafront there.

Everywhere reeked of Thames mud and rotten seaweed. While Southend was a brash time-warp unable to see beyond its own greying DA, black clotted with old biker men who no matter how fast they rode would never catch up with their own fleeing youth and were nothing but refugees from the Wall of Death, Leigh was genteel, like an old fishing port, a little piece of Cornwall not far from home – and it had a second-hand record shop.

But, as I arrived in that small haven of maritime nostalgia, little did I know that something was about to happen that would leave its mark on my life for good. I strode into that record shop dressed in my woven box jacket, kicking my Kickers, and cast an eye over the pop vinyl. Nothing much to be had. David Sylvian, perhaps.

And then, in a small stack of folk records next to the end of the pop pile, I saw a record the like of which I had never seen before.

The cover was white with a grainy picture of some old women sitting around a table holding a piece of cloth and a man held a microphone toward them. Not perhaps the most promising of covers, but then, never judge a record by its cover.

Those women were, I thought, Native Americans, or Peruvians. The record said something about an island called Barra. Where that was, I did not know. When I paid the pound demand on the sticky label for this record, I did not know what that music would sound like. I think, in retrospect, I was drawn to the cover because one of the old women sitting at that table looked like my own grandmother.

I had the cockles and a pint and then went home to the record player – a small boxy Garrard with a built-in speaker.

The record started with a little talk and then a slow rhythmic thumping.  One woman started to sing with a kind of sweet-toned determination. A chorus joined in, and then she sang a verse again on her own and they joined again. The music was rugged with rhythm but the melodies were melancholic in the most part and quite without compare with anything I had heard before.

This was the melody of  gulls and skylarks, melodies with a storyline; piercing and intense with emotion. The words were in a language I did not know, and had not heard before. Yes, surely, this Barra was a place somewhere else on the globe and far removed from us in time and culture and intention.

Then I read the sleeve notes. This Barra was not in America, or beyond the Andes. It was in Scotland, and the language was a language spoken here in the British Isles. This was, supposedly, music that I had a national connection with but it had never appeared in the media, that I knew of, or had it been introduced to me in music classes or elsewhere. It was part of my own nation’s heritage, albeit from the furthest corner removed from where I sat in that bedroom listening transfixed and overwhelmed.

I had left school with nothing in the way of qualifications, a couple of CSEs and a love of football. I was working as a clerk, the lowest of the low, in a shipping insurance firm in the City of London, and drank pints of Youngs in a pub in the Leadenhall Market every lunchtime. We wore suits because we had to. But I also had an entitlement to paid leave, and within six weeks of purchasing that record, I was on the coach from London heading for Glasgow and then on, via that magical railway to the ferry at Oban.

I went in search of that music. With a tent and a pair of boots. I would go to the place where those women sat around that table. I wanted to find and hear that music first-hand. My world had been expanded by that recording – I could stay within the limits of  the British Isles and yet be in another place entirely.

Now, I realise, that the London-centric nature of the media would starve all traditional culture to death if it meant an opportunity to cover American commercial culture instead.

The truth is  that while boats and trains have come and gone, and me on some of them taking my leave of the islands and then returning, I have never left the islands since that first visit. I now live and work in Lewis, and yes, I still own and listen to that record: ‘The Waulking Songs of Barra’.

But what survives also, is the sense that this music was from some other place within a familiar spectrum, and that feeling has grown the more that I have come in contact with Gaelic music and with other traditional musics from the British Isles. And that fact remains that even among festival promoters, public arts organisations et al., there is both wide-spread ignorance, fear and small-minded conservatism toward Gaelic music.

Living in a Gaelic-speaking community, I find that traditional music is everywhere. No other part of these Isles has the same unbroken connection to its musical heritage. No other part of this fragmented nation has the same living relationship with this music as the Gaelic-speaking areas. No other community has the same in-depth knowledge of the song tradition in its own area.

Every other house locally, it seems at ceilidh times, has a singer living in it who will close her eyes and sing a ballad at the drop of a hat. That depth of knowledge and love of tradition is without parallel elsewhere in the UK. Yet, the music of the Gael remains marginalised within the national context of ‘folk’ and music events, little heard, little explored and completely misunderstood outside of its own realm.

It remains almost beyond the ken of most English events and their planners, and yet there is a well-spring of knowledge in the suburbs of South East England on the traditional music of Mali, or some other place. And what this fake globalism says is not ‘I like traditional music’, it says ‘I do not like traditional music. I don’t want the tradition on my doorstep.

The great Gaelic traditional singer Flora Macneil, was asked to sing at a ceilidh once in Glasgow. It was the 1960s and before she could start she was asked to not sing anything too traditional. And what has changed? Gaelic is okay with a drumbox and laced with weak dance-floor credibility, but the music that lives and flows is not allowed anywhere away from here. It lives in exile at home.

The cynical exploitation and commercialism of World Music has thankfully passed us by, but the real journey of music must begin at home. Sadly, music divides us as a nation.

The programmes of most folk festivals in the British Isles never have a Scottish Gaelic singer in their ranks. Some of the bigger ones do have token representation, but this is often half-hearted. This beautiful music remains confined to barracks due to the ignorance of the mainstream folk music industry in the UK. The purveyors of folk music, clad in their left trendy uniforms and living on art budget salaries, used to sing with a finger in their ear, now they organise festivals with a finger up their arse.

The fact is that the rest of the nation has a deep-seated jealousy of the Gaelic tradition because it lives and resonates within its community in a way the contemporary urban folky from elsewhere has no access to.

While the Gaelic language may be dying, the culture is loved at home and in the villages of these islands. It is a venerated part of our lives, always welcome at the hearth side or the kitchen table. Our radio stations play traditional song at peak times on a Friday and Saturday night, all night, and people request our traditional songs on the phone-in programmes. Locals make CDs of their singing and sell them for a few pounds over the counter of the local petrol station.

So that record bought far away in remote Essex remains the doorway to a world where music still matters, where people love traditional song and where many will sing as freely as birds in the croft. And the nation to which we are supposed to belong remains surly and oblivious towards us.

The music lives in exile at home and our public arts bodies, if they are to support traditional music festival, should ensure that Gaelic has its fair share of that public money. Some kind of quota system would work well as it is time that festivals organised by globe-trotting English organisers started to look closer to home for their performers and gave their audiences a real treat.

Peter Urpeth is a Contributing Editor to Northings.