Seven’s Not A Crowd

The Arts Journal profiles BROLUM.

The Facts:
Brolum are a seven-piece band playing traditional and contemporary Scottish music, featuring both Scots and Gaelic songs. The band released their debut album with an earlier line–up in 2000, and are preparing their new disc for release this summer.

The players are:
Eilidh Campbell (fiddle)
Ali Hutton (pipes, whistle, guitar, bouzouki)
Kathleen Graham (voice, clarsach)
Duncan Lyall (double bass)
Martin O’Neill (bodhran)
Andy Webster (guitar, voice)
Sarah Wilson (fiddle)
 

THE ORIGINAL SEVEN members of Brolum were all students in Strathclyde University’s BA course in Applied Music when they got together with a target in mind – a gig at the Open Stage in the 2000 Celtic Connections festival.

The band promptly picked up a Danny Kyle Award for new bands at the Festival, and decided to keep things going. By the time the festival came around again in 2001, they had made their debut album, 7/11, and have forged on since then, picking up a couple of new members and a growing reputation along the way, including performing in Italy, Belgium, France and England.

Kathleen Graham and Ali Hutton broke the Strathclyde stranglehold when they joined the band. Both are graduates of the traditional music course at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, so both of the principal institutions in Glasgow currently teaching traditional music are now represented. The current line-up has been in place for about a year, and the group have been hard at work in recent months on their second album.

“It’ll be called The Fair Face I Never Saw,” Andy Webster explained, “and we hope to have it out in June. We haven’t paid ourselves any money for gigs over the past few months to help fund the album, and we had some money from the Princes Trust as a loan, because we wanted to have some cash to actually promote it.

“We’ve chosen a mix of traditional and contemporary tunes and songs,” he added. “There are a couple of sets that are all our own tunes, and there are tunes by people like Gordon Duncan and Rory Campbell. There are more songs on the album this time – I think it may even end up more songs than straight instrumentals this time. We only had three on the first one, and all of them Gaelic.”

Seven musicians is a bigger than usual line-up for a young folk band, and allows more leeway in the matter of arranging. For Andy, though, it is not so much a matter of too many cooks; if anything, he feels they are underweight at times.

“At times I feel we don’t have enough instruments,” he laughed. “To be honest, it just happened that way because of the particular group of people interested in being involved in it at the time, it wasn’t something we though much about. All the instruments get used, and that is just the way we have evolved it.

“Usually we have the fiddles playing in harmony, but they can kick into unison for a big sound when we want that, and with double bass we have a string section that works really well on the songs. Ali plays whistles and pipes, but also guitar and bouzouki, so we have those sounds as well. We like having that range. It does mean thinking more about arrangements at times, but we all pretty much know what we have to do and how it will work in the band.”

Brolum’s ‘The Bonnie Hoose O’ Airlie’ can be downloaded below, and is taken from the band’s forthcoming CD, The Fair Face I Never Saw.  It is used here with permission of the band.
 
© HI-Arts Journal 2004