PETER URPETH teases out the tale of Scotland’s most indestructible folk band with their longest serving member, ALAN REID, and their newest recruit, ALASDAIR WHITE

‘This band’ says Battlefield Band keyboardist Allan Reid, ‘started in 1969, so we’re into our fifth decade now. That’s scary, seriously scary…’

Battlefield Band

It’s a summer evening in Edinburgh and your writer is on the hunt for some music. I’ve never even tried to cross Edinburgh without passing a pub but tonight it’s a lonely wander as the bars are full of football. Inside, TVs hung high on precarious shelves raucously extol the virtues of teams and players.

Managers bemuse pundits; cameramen pan the crowd for the painted faces of foreign beauties. Assistant coaches in track suits leap from dug-outs, their arms flaying as they romp past the sedate, suited figure of the chief coach. With the sound down it’s like watching Merce Cunningham: fixation, chance, and chaos, not much likelihood this evening of finding The Music or The Craic.

But it’s also Bloomsday and serendipity leads me to find a bar where the stately buck, Alasdair White, loaded with his fiddle, props a bar with his elbows, and we chat beneath the benignly smiling face of a papier-mâché Hamish Henderson. Ali’s just off the plane from America, another date of the Battlefield Band tour is finished, and with him is the startlingly friendly Battlefield piper,

Mike Katz.The last time I saw Ali was in Stornoway. The Battlefield’s longest serving member, Alan Reid, had been playing with Rob Van Sante at An Lanntair, and the opportunity to grab an interview with the newest and the longest serving members of the band before the Batties head out on a tour to celebrate their 35 years in business, is too good to miss. The tour, starting in July, takes the band back toward its roots and some of the gigs they used to play in the Highland tours, the small venues, the village halls, the places where people get closest to the music and where above all else, it seems to belong.

‘…I didn’t join at the very beginning. The band was started by Brian McNeil and at that time they called themselves ‘Harvest’
but they changed their name to Battlefield Band after the district of Glasgow. They were students at Strathclyde University, as I was, but I didn’t meet them until my second year because I switched from one discipline to another.

‘They had a residency at that time on a Friday night at a pub called The Iron Horse on West Nile Street and they would take their instruments with them in the morning to the college, put them in a room, go to their lectures and then go and collect them and be ready to play.

‘Well this Friday they were running a bit late and the room was locked and the janitor had gone home and they couldn’t find anybody to open up for them so they went down to The Iron Horse and said, we’ve got a wee bit of a problem here we don’t have our instruments and we can’t do the gig tonight. So the guy says, okay you’re fired, and that was the end of that residency – and, coincidentally, that was the end of that line-up. I joined soon after.

‘After I joined we used to rehearse every week but we didn’t do any gigs for over a year. It was very much a hobby and a fun thing at that time. It wasn’t until 72 or 73 that we actively went out and  started looking for gigs and we started out playing in pubs and bars in Glasgow and that was desperate, a very tough training ground.

‘All they really wanted to hear was country music, country and western  music, which we wouldn’t do and we would go to certain bars and the they’d say you sound a bit Irish, what you playing that Catholic stuff for? And we thought, this is crap and in the end we stumbled into a folk club, just as a desperate way of finding some place that we could play, and we were astounded to find out that people were actually quiet and wanted to listen.

‘So, that was an Open Sesame Moment, quite an experience and that is how we ended up being a folk group because we weren’t really a folk group before, we were just an acoustic band but we discovered these places where people kind of listened and so we changed our direction and became an out-and-out traditional folk band, and that was 73, 74…’

Alan Reid

Sandy’s bar is filling up. Ali’s tightening his bow; a few other musicians have assembled around the small table reserved for the players. A woman in her 80s takes a bodhran from a box and rolls her wrist in a few breaks of rhythm. Her eyes light up as fiddles unbind the opening lines of a tune. The music unfurls in one unbroken trajectory. Many years ago, perhaps, a man on a gig
would have called it good driving music. The faces may change, but people don’t.

What people wanted back then is the same as what people want and need today, and that is why good music endures and good bands step over the decades.

‘…I remember the first time we went over the M8 to Edinburgh and that was a big, big adventure, traveling over
to the other side of the country, to the Lothian Folk Club and people not knowing who we were, just these guys coming out of the west. That was the same time as the Tannahill Weavers had started up and Silly Wizard were just about to get going. In our case we were very much inspired by hearing the first Planxty album and then the Bothy Band. We could hear that these were really good musicians they had an interest in an assortment of music and they were using the Uillean pipes with mandolin and bazouki type instruments, and they were singing and were playing tune sets.

‘We had been playing a couple of Dubliners tune sets and really enjoyed them but Planxty and Bothy Band were like a new generation, taking the music further. Their music was much more sophisticated and the playing was tighter and they were doing arrangements and that really got the ball rolling for us. Also, we were long-haired we were disheveled and we wanted
to get away from that Corries-type  image of people dressing in exactly the same way and coming out immaculately dressed  in matching uniforms, that kind of TV presentation of folk people back then. We were a bit rebellious at that time and found that what those guys in Ireland were doing was much more interesting…’

As Ali plays, so Mike and your writer fall into chat about music. It’s crass, I know but I comment on Mike’s beard saying that’s it’s
second only to that worn by the great drummer (on Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street’, among many other things), Liam Genocky. The comment is taken well; the beard is a trade mark. But in the chat it’s soon clear that Mike has covered it all when it comes to music and from most angles with a typical New Yorker’s hunger for the new, the bold, and the cutting edge. American magpies are as
unsentimental as our own, it seems: they go straight for what glistens.

Folk music, as we talk, is defined within the widest possible margins and meanwhile we traverse Coltrane, Frisell, Ornette, John
Zorn. I struggle to differentiate between traditional folk as we know it in Europe and the Fields music of that Angel of the South, clarinetist John Carter.

Alasdair White

The lines are blurred, all is less distinct but more has been taken in and understood. Mike, the piper, is close, I think, to the founding spirit of Battlefield Band, proud of change and innovation, but tough and enduring. Ali plays on; he is in his element, exuding that unstoppable generosity of spirit that makes a person want to play.

‘…There was a folk revival in America at that time that spread to different countries, I mean we had the Skiffle boom in the 50s which was like a copy of what people were doing in America, and then I think people in Ireland, Scotland and England started to
look at their own folk culture and think, gosh there are old guys and women out there who are singing these songs and when they die the songs will die with them, so lets get this, this is an important part of our culture.

‘The folk revival was a phenomenon that swept initially from America and affected everybody, and I think that was important to the Irish and effected their own self identity and confidence. At that time there was no such thing as the Celtic Tiger economy, Ireland was a poor, rural country. But the difference between them and us over here is that folk music has always been really popular amongst everybody, and even today it’s on the radio and the television. You can walk into almost any pub in a village and someone will be playing an instrument in a corner. And they have had this support from the media which the folk movement
here really hasn’t had…’

Mike gets his pipes out. The Highland pipes. The wild roar nearly takes Hamish from his perch and the blistering pace of the notes and
the needle sharp precision of the playing brings the other players to a stop. In a strange way, even though the tune is as traditional and familiar as they come, the playing is infused with all those other reference points, those other points
of contact with which all musics now live.

‘…We decided in the late 70s that we needed a manager and teamed up with Robin Morton. We had been passing the buck around in the band as to who goes and gets the work and so long as it is someone in the band who is getting the work you’ve always got someone to moan about – why are we doing this long drive today, why are we playing here at this
time of year – and that has always been the recipe for disaster and so we thought the only we can work as a band is if we have someone who oversees all of that and makes the hard decisions…’

And around that table, Ali with his fiddle and Mike with his pipes, is the great strength of Battlefield Band’s music – it’s never
been too far away from the session, never cut itself from the life blood of the intimate and spontaneous. It’s free – and always has been – of the pretentious, the contrived and forced. They’ve got this fat because they’ve always played to
the strengths and the innate drama of the music.

‘…There have always been one or two people who have always been there. Robin Morton, our manager, and me, we’ve always been there and every time there has been a change or someone has left, or there has been a break up we’ve always sat down together and thought do we want to carry on with this and I’ve always thought, yes. I want to carry on. I want to carry on  partly because when someone leaves you want to prove to yourself that you can carry on, so there’s an element of pride there, but also because of  the fact that as a group we’ve always felt there’s still a lot of music to play, there’s still a lot to explore.

‘I think we found our archetypal sound round about 1980 when we got the bagpipes, and the electric keyboards and the sounds that gave us a really identifiable sound, but there is still an awful lot of music to be played and it will carry on just as long as there is that desire. But the other thing is that we have always been a working band, a touring band and that is the essence of what we are about.

‘We’ve always tried to make the music direct, exciting and not too sophisticated, but there’s not too many different ways to vary this music. We make recordings and we make them the best we can and they are sophisticated and so on, but to see the band, to experience Battlefield Band at their best,  you have to see them live…’

As though the last word should go to the newest member of this legendary band Alasdair adds: ‘…it seems to me that the band has always put on a good show, there have been a lot of different line ups of the band but every line up has always put on a good show. Every line up has always added their own thing to that show. I’m very proud to be part of that and I like being part of that and it’s nice hearing the stories from before and you do hear stories from the guys from a time when things were really buzzing, from the time when the Tannahills were starting off and Silly Wizard were starting off. It’s kind of like that in a different way now. It is good being a part of that and it’s good being a part of a great institution but it’s not a museum piece, it’s always evolving and is very dynamic…’

Battlefield Band play at the following venues on their Highlands & Islands tour:
The Marshall Centre, Edinbane, Isle of Skye, Friday 2 July 2004
Farr Hall, Strathnairn, Saturday 3 July 2004
Ardross Hall, Ardross, Thursday 8 July 2004
MacPhail Centre, Ullapool, Friday 9 July 2004
Village Hall, Lochinver, Thursday 15 July 2004
Sunart Centre, Strontian, Friday 16 July 2004
Village Hall, Iona, Saturday 17 July 2004

© Peter Urpeth, 2004

Related Link

• Battlefield Band website