Craigmonie Centre, Drumnadrochit, Thursday 5 August 2004

Phil Cunningham and Aly Bain

ACTUALLY, PHIL CUNNINGHAM was responsible for all three of these afflictions. Just back from Oregon, it was he who looked a little spaced on time zone fever, and had the aching tooth and the broken accordion (41 years of resting his thumb on what was now a flapping clip, no easy thing to come to terms with, especially with jet lag). Aly was his usual unruffled self through all of this, and admitted it didn’t really matter what day it was when on tour anyway.

This pair have established themselves as a major draw since they first got together as a duo for one of Aly’s television specials in 1986, and continue to delight. The Sold Out signs were up on the handsome new Craigmonie Centre (Aly noted that it was identical to its counterpart over in Strontian, adding a further layer of potential ‘where are we?’ confusion to the rigours of touring), and the musicians delivered in their usual hyper-accomplished style.

They didn’t add much new to their familiar set, although they did play a tune by Phil which is recent enough to have no name as yet, another of his lovely, limpid slow airs and a first cousin to ‘The Gentle Light That Wakes Me’, which they played in the second set. I hadn’t heard them do Burns’s ‘A Man’s A Man” before either, although they did play it at Donald Dewar’s funeral. Mention of Burns set Phil off on a hilarious George Formby sings Burns impersonation, a concept they hatched up while driving to Glenuig the previous day, confirming the suspicion that these guys spend too much time on the road.

Otherwise, it was business as usual – fast and furious tune sets tossed off with apparently effortless virtuosity interspersed with lovely, gloriously expressive slow airs. Aly dipped into his Scandinavian bag, complete with dark alternative tunings and tales of Trolls and Trows, along with Cajun and French Canadian tunes, while Phil produced tunes from Estonia and Ireland to augment the core of Scottish material.

All of this, of course, was accompanied with the usual banter. The epic tale of Fergie MacDonald, the BBC Hogmanay Show and ‘Flett from Flotta’ never grows wearisome with repetition no matter how often Phil tells it (or they play the tune), and his love of what he politely describes as “lavatorial humour” grows no less with the passing years.

The pair have a number of Highlands and Islands dates scattered through August and September 2004.

A nice additional touch at Craigmonie was the music both before the gig and at the interval from Lochann, an accomplished local duo formed by teenagers Amy on accordion and Teya on guitar. The venue’s current Drumbeat 2004 programme carries on until mid-August, with concerts from MacUmba (7 August), An Avel (11 August) and McCulloch, Morran and Duff (13 August).

© Kenny Mathieson, 2004