Scots Trad Music Awards 2006

7 Dec 2005 in Music

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 3 December 2005

MUSICIANS, SINGERS, groups and projects from the HI~Arts area dominated the Scots Trad Music Awards, winning ten of the sixteen categories at the third annual awards ceremony held at The Queen’s Hall.

Blazin’ Fiddles took the Album of the Year award for their acclaimed ‘Magnificent Seven’ release, and there was another success for the band with their hugely popular Blazin’ in Beauly celebration of fiddle music winning the Event of the Year category.

Dingwall-based Julie Fowlis was voted Gaelic Singer of the Year thanks to a fine debut album and her work with the group Dochas. Fiddler Charlie McKerron of Caperaillie and Session A9, whose distinctive tunes have been adopted widely by artists including the Unusual Suspects, won the Composer of the Year title.

Skye’s trad-groovers Peatbog Faeries won Live Act of the Year, and the brilliant young Shetland fiddler Jenna Reid collected the Up and Coming Artist of the Year award.

There were further successes for Lochgoilhead Fiddle Workshop (Community Project), Gaelic music and song programme Aig Cridhe Ar Ciuil (Media Award), and Inverness music hostelry Hootananny (The McEwan’s Sessions Venue of the Year), while brothers Findlay and Hamish Napier from Speyside were delighted when their group Back of the Moon received the Scottish Folk Band of the Year prize.


The most striking performance came with Kirkwall City Pipe Band’s celebration of two famous Orcadians, Ivan Drever and Peter Maxwell Davies


Officially opened this year by culture minister Patricia Ferguson, this glitzy occasion is now well-established on the traditional music calendar as a chance to celebrate the Scottish tradition’s riches across its full range – including piping, Scottish country dancing, and accordion and fiddle clubs – with much music, song, mirth and merriment.

Scots Singer of the Year, the veteran Jim Reid, earned one of the biggest laughs of the evening with an acceptance speech that was as accurate as it was pithy: “It’s been a lang time comin’.” There was controversy, too, and even heckling from the floor when mine host of Hootananny, in collecting the McEwan’s Sessions Venue award, gleefully informed everyone that traditional musicians were dirt cheap but unfortunately added that he wouldn’t be increasing their earning potential.

Blazin’ Fiddles – in Magnificent Six mode due to an absent Allan Henderson – got the music off to an excellent start with a typically rousing tune set, and there were Gaelic songs from Maggie MacInnes and her mum, Flora MacNeil, and a couple of new songs from 2004’s Songwriter of the Year, Jim Malcolm, before the youngsters from the National Centre of Excellence at Plockton High School acquitted themselves admirably, helped in no small way by the splendid drumming of Tia Files.

The most striking performance, however, came with Kirkwall City Pipe Band’s celebration of two famous Orcadians, Ivan Drever and – by adoption at least – Peter Maxwell Davies, the former introducing the unusual concept of a pipe band drummer-cum-singer-guitarist and the latter in the shape of a beautifully undulating, impressionistic composition.

The newly instituted Hall of Fame welcomed the late master piper John D Burgess, the aforementioned Gaelic singing icon Flora MacNeil, Shetland guitar innovator Peerie Willie Johnson, broadcaster Archie Fisher, dance band leader Jim Johnstone, and, in the international category, the Chieftains’ Paddy Moloney, who fittingly produced a tin whistle to render an impromptu slow air.

In recognition – doubtless – of the Highlands and Islands’ success in these awards, next year the ceremony is to move to the Nevis Centre in Fort William, and in forcefully urging everyone to lobby their MSP’s and MP’s for more funding for traditional music, Ian Green of Greentrax Recordings, the winner of the Hamish Henderson Services to Traditional Music award, sent everyone off to prepare for that event with the image of the still-in-attendance culture minister scurrying off to collar her own parliamentary representatives.

© Rob Adams, 2005

Editor’s note: Our interviewee for December, Aidan O’Rourke, shared in Blazin’ Fiddles’ success, but lost out to Aaron Jones in the Instrumentalist of the Year award. See full results at
http://www.handsupfortrad.co.uk/press/tradmusicawards-results.htm