Fiddler AIDAN O’ROURKE is best known for his work with bands like Blazin’ Fiddles and The Unusual Suspects, as well as his own ambitious projects. He is one of four players nominated for instrumentalist of the year award at this year’s Scots Trad Music Awards.

NORTHINGS: Aidan, you have been nominated in the instrumentalist of the year category in this year’s Scots Trad Music Awards, and also for album of the year with Blazin’ Fiddles. How seriously do the musicians take such awards?

AIDAN O’ROURKE: Probably not all that seriously, but it is a great opportunity to advertise the wealth of talent in the country, and it’s always a good get-together. I sometimes feel it might be better if the awards were judged by a panel of experts rather than by public voting – that can come down to who has the best mailing lists! Simon is doing a great job, though, and I fully support what they are trying to do.

N: How competitive is it in the hall?

AO: On the night I’ll be pleased if I win and I’ll be pleased if one of my pals wins. I’ve been at the BBC2 Awards in London a couple of times as well, and it is much the same atmosphere – I doesn’t feel as if people are up against each other, it’s more a friendly gathering and at the end some people go home with a trophy – if they remember to take them! I know some people on the folk scene don’t really approve of the awards as being in the spirit of the music, but I don’t really go along with that.

N: Many people will know you best as a member of Blazin’ Fiddles – did you guys think the band would last as long as it has?

AO: Not at all. It was put together initially as a showcase for a night of fiddle music at the Highland Festival seven years ago, rather than as a band, and I don’t think anyone really expected it to carry on, but more offers came in and it carried on from there.

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Blazin’ Fiddles … have a range of different styles coming into the band from both east and west coast, and Shetland as well.

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N: Did it start to feel more like a band?

AO: We could feel it starting to progress that way – I can remember it starting to move from feeling like a showcase to feeling like a band. The solo things became less central, and the rammie at the end became a bit more refined, and it gradually started to become a real band rather than a night of fiddle music. But nobody thought we would be together seven years on, and with only Duncan Chisholm leaving in that time.

N: And he has been back for the odd dep appearance.

AO: He has, yes. We haven’t really used deps very often – Duncan has come in a few times, or we have done it with a member short, but we are trying to work in such a way that we reduce or eliminate that situation, because it’s always best with the full band.

N: You are not the only multi-fiddle band out there, but you guys always seem to have a wider variety of styles in the line-up than some of the other fiddle bands.

AO: Absolutely, and I think that makes the sound very dynamic, and that’s also where we sound different from a band like Fiddlers Bid. They are great, of course, but if you listen to them, they play more in a particular style with that Shetland feel – the bows all go pretty much the same way and it is focused on that approach. We have a range of different styles coming into the band from both east and west coast, and Shetland as well. It’s just a different thing.

N: In a sense you are really up for a third award, since Blazin’ in Beauly has also been nominated for event of the year – that has really taken off over the five years the band have been running it, hasn’t it?

AO: It is a proper festival now, rather than just a fiddle school. It’s really Bruce, along with Gordon Webber and Lara MacDonald, who do the majority of the work in preparing for that, and the rest of us come in for the event itself. It’s a pretty intensive week of hard work, but we all enjoy it.

N: Do you like teaching?

AO: I do, yes. I started when I was about 16, I think, with Tom McConville. I don’t really have time to do private one-to-one teaching, but I do like teaching groups. I have done a lot of it now, and I’ve developed a way of approaching it that people seem to enjoy.

N: What is your preferred approach?

AO: I like to work on more advanced things like phrasing and bowing. I haven’t done a lot of teaching of beginners, which is an art in itself, and I feel others are more qualified to do that. My own playing style is a bit unorthodox, and kids probably shouldn’t be copying me to begin with! I started out in a more orthodox way, but I’ve moved in other directions.

N: In what way?

AO: It’s to do with the way I hold the bow, and also from absorbing a lot of different kinds of styles as well, from Irish fiddling or jazz or whatever. I haven’t stood in the mirror and looked at posture, it’s more something that has evolved over time for me. I don’t really think much about right and wrong ways of playing, and I don’t really think there is such a thing, to be honest.

N: It might be valid in relation to particular well-defined styles of playing.

AO: Yes, that’s true, but I don’t really go in for that much. If people want to learn a specific style that’s fine, but I don’t play that way myself.

N: How did you get started?

AO: I was born and brought up in Oban, and there was an old fellow called George McHardie who lived close to us and played fiddle. My dad was quite keen to get me started – he plays a bit on a few instruments, and is very into Scottish and Irish folk music, so that is what I remember hearing at home from the very beginning. I think if there had been a good box player or pipe player or whatever he would have sent me to that, but he is keen on the fiddle, and George was the best teacher around. He had a very good reputation, although he was quite old when he taught me and suffered from arthritis, so he didn’t play that much then, but he could still get his message across.

N: When was that?

AO: That would be 1983 – I was eight at the time.

N: How far back does the Irish line go in the family?

AO: My mother is Irish, from Donegal. My father was born here – his grandfather was Irish, also from Donegal.

N: I had it in my mind that you were from Seil island rather than Oban?

AO: My parents moved to Seil when I was 14, but I only lived there for my last couple of years at school. It has been the family home since then, though.

N: Capercaillie were emerging in Oban in the 1980s – did you have connections with Donald Shaw and the others?

AO: I thought Capercaillie were fantastic, but they were a bit older than me. I was closer in age to Donald’s sister, Eildih, and we competed against each other a bit, but she was a couple of years older than me, and outside of that we didn’t really know each other at that time.

N: What were you doing musically as a teenager?

AO: It was really focussed on the Mod and the fiddle competitions at that time, and my dad used to take me around the Highlands to compete in various events. The standard was pretty high in these events, and they tended to be eye-openers! It was a funny old scene, actually – it wasn’t all that friendly amongst the kids, I think largely down to the fact that it was really nerve-wracking. It was great for practising and developing, though, but in terms of listening, I was more into bands like De Danaan and Silly Wizard, bands that had emerged a little bit earlier in the 1970s.

N: When did you start playing in gigs?

AO: When I was 14 going on 15. I went to a charity ceilidh in Fort William – Allan and Ingrid Henderson were on the bill, and so was Belle Stewart and Ian MacGregor, the son of Sheila Stewart. Ian and his wife, Kate, who is American, heard me playing and thought it was pretty good, and would suit the band they were putting together in Perthshire. They had a chat with my parents that night, and I started travelling up to Blairgowrie most weekends playing in their band, the Caledonia Ramblers. We toured in England and in the USA – in fact, I celebrated my 16th birthday in Baltimore.

N: So you started out playing with an older generation of musicians?

AO: Yes, and I didn’t really start playing with people my own age until I was 19 or so, when I met Claire Mann and we formed Tabache. The Ramblers gave me a chance to travel round the folk festivals, though, and I met players my age that way as well.

N: Was that how you met up with Claire?

AO: That’s right. I met her at a festival down in the north of England – I think it may have been Whitby. I was doing a degree in Civil Engineering at Strathclyde University at the time – I had wanted to do sound engineering, but there wasn’t really a suitable course. So I would travel down to Newcastle and Claire would come up to Glasgow. I love Claire’s playing, and we usually had a guitarist on board as well as the two fiddles, usually Ross Martin, Malcolm Stitt or Tony McManus. We did expand it to a five-piece for a while, but it was too difficult to sustain. We did a couple of records which I’m still pleased with. Eventually we both just moved on to other things, but we were talking quite recently about maybe doing something again.

N: I’d have thought it might be tricky to fit in, what with Blazin’ Fiddles, The Unusual Suspects, and your new band with Kris Drever and Martin Green, not to mention all the one-offs you do. In fact, how do you juggle that lot?

AO: The Blazers are pretty well organised, and it leaves a lot of time to do other projects as well – maybe too many at times!

N: Apart from Blazin’ Fiddles, obviously, was Sunhoney your next band?

AO: Yes. I finished university when I was 22 and moved to Edinburgh in 1997, playing tunes in sessions and depping quite a lot for one or other of the girls in Deaf Shepherd, and also working with Tannas. That meant Malcolm Stitt and I were playing quite a lot of music together anyway, and I got embroiled in the Edinburgh scene. Through that I met up with Fergus MacKenzie, Kevin MacKenzie’s brother, and he drove us around for a wee while and played us some dance music and his own groove stuff. I wrote some music that would go with that feel, and we tried a few things on the computer to see how it worked out. We then got a band together to rehearse it – it was originally purely instrumental, but Fergus was writing some songs, so Alyth McCormack came in as our singer.

N: And you made an album – did the band get a chance to gig much?

AO: We did a few tours, but it was another project where availability was often very difficult – everybody in the band was very busy. I saw it from early on as a project rather than a regular band. Again, I’m proud of the album, and it was a really good experience and development for me. It was all original material. Real World Records released the album and had great hopes for it, but it never really came to anything.

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Sirius … was the first piece of extended music I had really written, so it was a bit scary as well.

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N: Which brings us smartly forward to ‘Sirius’, your new CD set for release shortly on Vertical Records. This is the recording of a project you did a couple of years ago for Celtic Connections with a 12-piece band – tell us how that came about.

AO: The starting point was being asked to do a New Voices commission for Celtic Connections. The New Voices commissions allow you quite a bit of freedom within the set budget, and I put the project to Colin Hynd as a 12-piece band, and he said go for it. It was the first piece of extended music I had really written, so it was a bit scary as well. I had been working with Kevin MacKenzie’s Vital Signs and various other jazzers, and I had a sound in my mind – I really liked the improvising side of that, and the freedom available through improvising, and also the different sounds that you could use from both the jazz and folk side of things.

N: And you went for a multi-fiddle line-up again?

AO: Yes, I wanted that, and I had the players in mind from the start – it was Harald Haugaard from Denmark, Charlie McKerron and Gordon Gunn, and myself, plus the jazz horn players and a great rhythm section. It was a great opportunity, and I spent a lot of time on it. I’m a bit of a perfectionist in some ways, and I worked over it a lot.

N: Was composing on that scale a stiff challenge?

AO: I’ve never found it very difficult to write melodies, sometimes quite unorthodox ones, but working in this way with harmonies and textures and time signatures was all new to me. I’ve never studied music formally, so it was a bit of a steep learning curve, but I knew the sounds I was after. I did it all on the computer using Sibelius initially, and it wasn’t until the first rehearsal that I heard it played by musicians.

N: Did you have to change much at that stage?

AO: Not really. I knew the jazz horn players – Phil Bancroft, Colin Steele and Fraser Fifield – very well, and I knew they would have no problem with the folky melodies. There were a couple of things that weren’t quite possible on trumpet or soprano saxophone or whatever, so there were a few tweaks, but mostly it worked. The gig went down really well, too – everybody played a blinder.

N: How did the process of recording it work out?

AO: It was the first time I had been in the studio as producer and writer and arranger, and that was also a steep learning curve. I’m quite happy with my abilities in the studio in terms of ears as well as playing, but it was a lot to take on to be responsible for everything. There was a lot of mixing and editing at the end of the recording process as well, just trying to get it exactly the way I had envisaged it, and I’m very happy with it now. I think maybe with this experience behind me I would go about the process a little differently next time, just on the basis of what I learned in doing it.

N: You have recently formed another band with Kris Drever (guitar) and Martin Green (accordion) – tell us about that.

AO: The band is called Lau. Kris Drever and I had been spending some time putting a set together and thinking of making a go of it, and Martin Green and Kris had been doing something similar. In February at the BBC2 Folk Awards, Martin asked if I fancied doing a guest spot with him at the Cambridge Folk Club, and it really worked well. We said why not put the two things together and join forces, and it’s been great. We’ve spent a lot of time in the kitchen drinking tea and putting music together, and the set is expanding now. The way we write together seems to fit very well, and I haven’t really worked in that way before.

N: Have you played much?

AO: We’ve only done a handful of gigs so far, but we are quite excited about it, and we’re looking at a tour in March and April. Everything I’ve been doing recently was quite large scale – Sirius, Blazin’ Fiddles, the Blazin’ Fiddles With Strings Attached project, The Unusual Suspects – they were all big groups and big projects, so it was great to go back to working with just a trio again.

N: What else are you up to?

AO: Well, I’m musician in residence for two years, or actually 19 months, at the Tolbooth in Stirling. It involves an element of community music in the Raploch, which is a scheme with a bad reputation that is being regenerated, and I’m working in schools and with teenage support groups and so on. I also have to produce a commission each March for the Blend festival at the venue, but I’m not sure yet what the first one is going to be.

N: And another folk-meets-jazz project is in the offing?

AO: I’ve put in for PRS (Performing Rights Society) funding for a project called Parallelogram, which is myself, Kris Drever, Martin Green, Brian Finnegan, plus Pete Wareham and Seb Rochford from Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland, and a bass player as well. The funding requires that the projects be cross-genre and cross-border. We are down to the last seven, and they will chose four from that, so we’re expecting to hear in the next few weeks.

N: Aidan, good to talk with you, and good luck at the Awards.

AO: Pleasure.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2005

The Scots Trad Music Awards 2005 take place at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, on 3 December 2005

Links

•Scots Trad Music Awards website

•Blazin’ Fiddles website