Breaking Down the Barriers

BRUCE MACGREGOR explains just how Blazin’ Fiddles came to work with singers Colin MacIntyre, Eddi Reader and Justin Currie in their new With Strings Attached project

THERE’S BEEN a wealth of fine music born of a misspent youth, a tradition now honourably maintained by a new Scottish musical collaboration to be premiered at Celtic Connections 2005. With Strings Attached features Scottish singer-songwriters Colin MacIntyre (Mull Historical Society), Justin Currie (Del Amitri) and Eddi Reader, together with the award-winning folk band Blazin’ Fiddles.

“Marc Clement and myself used to go to parties in the late 1980s where we’d play a few trad tunes, and folk would love it, and then someone else would grab a guitar and blast out a song that was current in the charts at the time,” explains Blazin’ Fiddles’ founder Bruce MacGregor, recalling how he dreamed up this latest project.

“Songs by everyone from Del Amitri to AC/DC got covered, and most of them just sounded great with a bit of fiddle or whistle playing along. Folk at the party would always seem surprised that trad musicians even knew these songs – it was as if they believed we lived in our own wee Brigadoon world and weren’t exposed to other forms of music.”

Anyone who’s ever attended a Blazin’ Fiddles gig will know that to be nonsense, but there was a further motive behind MacGregor’s determination to bring together his and his bandmates’ Highland and Island traditions with the finest contemporary pop songwriting.

“We wanted to really orchestrate some numbers, create a really rich string sound, whilst on others we wanted to have the wildness that’s part of Blazin’ Fiddles sound.”

“We wanted to show the adaptability of traditional music, but I also wanted to raise the question of just what is a folk song?” he says. “Does it have to be about an 18th century battle, or a poor soul lamenting the fact he’s thousands of miles away from his homeland?

“Justin, for instance, has written a great new song which will be premiered on this tour called ‘No Surrender’, which is a brilliant piece of social commentary, and as far as I’m concerned that’s as much a folk song as anything written 200 years ago.”

The three singers were given largely free rein in choosing their material, with MacIntyre, for instance, opting for a mixture of his previous singles with B-sides he’s never before performed live, while Currie will unveil new solo compositions alongside reworked Del Amitri favourites.

With a line-up of five fiddles, piano and guitar, Blazin’ Fiddles bring a hefty instrumental armoury to the stage. Under the musical direction of renowned trombonist Rick Taylor, who has worked as an arranger with everyone from Elton John to the Spice Girls, this has been expanded to take in cello, double bass, percussion and brass.

“It is going to be quite large-scale,” MacGregor explains. “We didn’t want to just stick a traditional tune in every song – we wanted to really orchestrate some numbers, create a really rich string sound, whilst on others we wanted to have the wildness that’s part of Blazin’ Fiddles sound. That is where Rick has been such a star. He’s been able to arrange the orchestration on some of the songs and then helping us to focus the ideas we have. The result is that each song has ended up with a completely different feel.”

While Eddi Reader and Colin MacIntyre were already both familiar with Scotland’s folk music scene – Reader most recently for her acclaimed ‘Songs of Robert Burns’ project, MacIntyre via early recollections of the Mull Music Festival, and more recently through working with accordionist Phil Cunningham – With Strings Attached represented a more novel encounter for Jason Currie.

“The nearest I ever got to listening to a folk album is probably the Roches’ first LP, which I was very fond of in the 80s,” he admits. “Del Amitri used accordions and fiddles over the years, but our manager banned them because they started to make him sick. Other than that, I sometimes watch music on those awful late-night Gaelic TV shows, but it always seems to be the same wan girl dressed like a born-again Christian, singing three notes, very slowly, in front of what looks for all the world to me like four escapees from a twelve-step programme for recovering Valium addicts.”

“It’s reinforced my views that the best musicians are versatile – everyone has been really receptive and open – and it’s also been a laugh so far: I’m sure the shows will be the same.”

As a veteran himself of suchlike “Brigadoon” perceptions, MacGregor, describes the current Scottish folk scene as “probably the most experimental in the world”, a dynamic that Currie now readily acknowledges. “The chance to work like this with a whole mess of traditional players and a wonderful musical director would be a joy for any writer or performer, from any genre of music,” he says. “Quite a few of the sets we’ve done are far superior to the old Dels versions, which really refreshes me when singing songs I wrote well over a decade ago. I guess the thing that’s struck me most has just been working with this amount of players in the room, but with the instruments all coming in and out of these really dynamic arrangements, whereas in a rock band everything is usually going full pelt the whole time.”
 
For MacIntyre, the novelty has been more one of format than overall style.

“Since I was a kid demo-ing songs – and now that I make records – I’ve always written my music on my own, so this is my first ever collaboration,” he says. “It’s been refreshing for me to loosen the reins a bit, see what other musicians make of the musical parts that I’ve written and recorded myself.

It’s reinforced my views that the best musicians are versatile – everyone has been really receptive and open – and it’s also been a laugh so far: I’m sure the shows will be the same.”

“I suppose it is a bit of an odd one, in a way,” MacGregor says. “A song-based project – instigated by a bunch of people who don’t sing. We all love accompanying singing, though, it’s a really different challenge from playing tunes – but I think it’s really brave of these singers to let us at their material, given how their usual fan-base might well wonder what on earth they’re doing with a bunch of teuchters on fiddles.

“But I think we’ve all appreciated the time to sit down and just try out a few ideas with some new people: In this business it’s not often you get the time to develop a creative process with other folk. Other collaborations we’ve been involved with have  been scored by one person and everyone else just follows that score – this is more organic and that is down to the funding supplied by the Scottish Arts Council for which we are very grateful.

“That’s really the ultimate aim of With Strings Attached: to make the most of this time working together, and to make folk aware that Scotland has a really magnificent resource of songwriters, singers and musicians, who – given half a chance – can produce something that’s fresh, exciting and relevant for today, while losing none of the uniquely Scottish elements that define all our work.”

With Strings Attached will play the following concert dates:
Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow, Thursday 20 January 2005
Usher Hall, Edinburgh, Thrusday 3 February 2005
Music Hall, Aberdeen, Friday 4 February 2005
Eden Court, Inverness, Saturday 5 February 2005

© Bruce MacGregor, 2005