Town Hall, Stornoway, Wednesday 14 July 2004

THE HEBRIDEAN CELTIC FESTIVAL opened its doors this year to the sound of Teine, a young quartet of singers and multi-instrumentalists from Lewis whose presence on this hallowed stage is not only justified by the quality of their music, but is also totally symptomatic of the vitality, self-confidence and optimism that this Festival brings to the island.

The band played a very varied set of songs ranging from traditional waulking songs to pieces by the Rankin Family and Runrig, and their sound is hallmarked by fine close harmony singing, percussive clarsach playing and some cracking fiddling. Chief among equals in the band is the voice of Catriona Watt, who is establishing a reputation as a fine traditional Gaelic singer for the surety and depth of emotion that she conveys.

This opening gig of the festival is a very tough stage to conquer and on this account it is clear that as Teine’s music develops, as they grow in their respective talents, and the elusive qualities of space and simplicity that confidence brings to this music will be allowed to take root in their arrangements, they will become regulars on that stage, and established favorites on their home turf. Teine are soon off to Ireland for a similar spin of gigs and its even-money that they will win many friends in a nation that has rightly championed its young music makers. Their set was a joy to witness.

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“A great opening night in which your writer did not know whether to laugh, cry or clap, but that’s what great music does to you.”

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The main act of the evening was Maggie Macinnes and her band. Maggie is one of only very few singers working in Gaelic traditional music today who can sing these songs in the ‘first person’ and can make the listener feel as though he or she is being addressed as an individual with similar clarity and with the full force of the same reality. Such singers remind us that the voice and song are central to what makes us human beings, and songs are the impulsive consequences of our most profound emotional needs and our need for community.

Maggie’s songs, many learned from her mother, the great traditional singer Flora MacNeil, are principle expressions of that reality and Maggie delivers them with a powerfully enveloping intimacy. The performance served also to reinforce the importance of subtle arrangement and subtle accompaniment. Too many singers and bands take songs from the tradition and then hammer them with depersonalizing clutter in the name of the new tradition. Maggie and her band are an object lesson as to how arrangement and accompaniment can provide access to the tradition as opposed to an apology for its nature.

This music is as contemporary as it comes. In the band was guitarist Kevin MacKenzie, a fluid and inventive soloist more usually found in the jazz cellar, and it is from there that he acquired the taste for a fresh range of nuances in his acoustic playing – at times Reinhardt, and at others Frisell and Metheny, but always MacKenzie. With Brian McAlpine on keyboards, Charlie McKerron on fiddle and Findlay MacDonald on pipes all on hand, the evening was not going to pass without a riot of reels, and that is what we got.

A great opening night in which your writer did not know whether to laugh, cry or clap, but that’s what great music does to you. Shame that both bands had to fight the rotten acoustics of the Victorian pile that houses the town hall venue and a PA system that similarly struggled with the acoustics and was at times so bass-y that it sounded like a fully loaded juggernaut rolling on to a CalMac ferry, but such things are mere asides.

Now, as ever, people make festivals, and if only I had the time and space to tell you about the American visitor to this Festival whose one time day job was as Harvey Keitel’s Elvis voice coach. Maybe tomorrow…

(Peter Urpeth claims to be the Gold Medal winner in the Best Photo on a Festival Press Card Competition)

© Peter Urpeth, 2004

Related Links:

• Hebridean Celtic Festival website