Band Profile – Dòchas

7 Feb 2004 in Music

High flyers on the traditional music scene

The Arts Journal profiles DÒCHAS, one of the top young bands on the Scottish folk scene

The Facts:

Dòchas are a five-piece all-girl outfit with roots in Scotland, Shetland and Ireland. The band released their debut album, Dòchas (SKYECD 23), on the Macmeanmna label in 2002.

The players are:

Kathleen Boyle (piano and accordion)
Julie Fowlis (Gaelic song, pipes, whistles)
Carol-Anne MacKay (bagpipes, accordion and Scottish small pipes)
Eilidh MacLeod (clàrsach)
Jenna Reid (fiddle)

Kathleen is from Donegal, Julie Fowlis from North Uist, Carol-Anne from Strathy, Eilidh from Skye, and Jenna is from Shetland. The band originally formed in Glasgow, where they were all studying traditional music at the RSAMD or, in the case of Julie Fowlis, Strathclyde University. According to Carol-Anne, the fact that the band is all female is partly an accident – the original line-up wasn’t!

Dòchas

“We had [piper] Findlay MacDonald in the band on our first gig, but he was busy with lots of other things, and we invited Julie to join us, and later Jenna. So we became a girl band, and that’s the way it developed. There was never any real question about whether we would carry on after we finished out courses. We were all quite ambitious to try to make the band do well.”

The girls all have strong roots in traditional music at a family level, as Carol-Anne explained.

“I started on pipes when I was nine. My big sister played pipes, so naturally I wanted to play pipes too. My mum’s brother and her father were pipers as well, so that was always around. I think something similar was true for all us. Eilidh’s father and brothers play pipes and accordions, there are singers in Julie’s family, and Kathleen has a big Irish tradition behind her in Donegal — all her family play, and it’s the same for Jenna, too. Her mum plays, and she performs with her sister in Filska.”

The band have won many friends in their live appearances, and picked up a nomination in the Best Newcomers section of the Scottish Traditional Music Awards in 2003, while Jenna Reid was a finalist in the BBC Radio Scotland Young Scots Traditional Musician of the Year 2004 competition. The band are currently at the planning stage on their second album, which they hope to make sometime this year.

“It’s quite difficult to get us all together for long enough,” Carol-Anne laughed, “but we are talking about it seriously! For the last one we had sets that we had been playing for quite a while and really liked, and we also spent a couple of weekends putting some new music together specifically for the recording. I think the next one will probably be similar — we have six or seven sets that we are using now, and we’ll look for some new material as well.”