Hebridean Celtic Festival 2006

21 Jul 2006 in Festival, Music, Outer Hebrides

Isle of Lewis, 12-15 July 2006

Dòchas.

AFTER THE RAIN-DRENCHED but nonetheless heady triumph of last year’s tenth birthday celebrations, topped by the heavyweight pulling-power of Van Morrison and Runrig, the Hebridean Celtic Festival entered its second decade in mighty fine fettle.

The numbers may have been slightly down on 2005’s complete sellout, but 14,000-odd punters over the weekend, including a hefty international contingent, is still a commanding tally by anyone’s standards.

The sun shone, and the sweet music of ringing tills resounded through Stornoway and beyond for four straight days and nights: indisputably a sound for sore ears in these parts, and a fundamental plank of the festival’s success, especially in light of local Presbyterian sensibilities.

In Scotland’s most economically marginal community of its size, thousands of extra visitors are hard to oppose, especially when they spend as freely as festival-goers generally do, and when their presence is also helping to preserve and promote the island’s precious Gaelic heritage – another vital weapon in the Heb Celt’s armoury.

Though its organisers have always thought global as regards main headline acts, it’s been implicit in their agenda from the outset that Lewis is inviting the world to come and play from a position of cultural strength. While islanders benefit in multiple ways from the annual festival influx, it’s therefore a healthily mutual process.


An Lanntair (is) an emphatically contemporary, assertively stylish embodiment of the event’s far-reaching importance to its home community


Visitors may initially be lured by a top-quality international music programme, but it’s often the triple whammy of those rich Gaelic traditions, outstanding ancient monuments and breathtaking white-sand beaches that consummates the seduction.

Gaelic artists were more strongly to the fore than ever among this year’s line-up, right from the sellout opening concert featuring an array of local divas – Màiri Smith, Alyth McCormack, Anna Murray and the three Mackenzie sisters – at Stornoway’s splendidly swank new An Lanntair arts centre.

Neighbouring North Uist star Julie Fowlis captivated another capacity crowd at the same venue the next night, after a fine first-half set from Bodega, a scarily youthful Highland and Islands five-piece who are current holders of the prestigious Radio 2 Young Folk Award, fronted by the potent singing of Lewis native Norrie MacIver.

The vibrancy of the younger Gaelic generation was further underlined by Teine, an all-girl quartet also from Lewis, whose beautifully blended harmonies, original songwriting and imaginative arrangements won them a string of enthusiastic ovations during the festival, although their instrumental playing needs considerable work to match the vocals.

An Lanntair itself marks an important new chapter in the Heb Celt’s development, not only as a major addition to its physical infrastructure, further widening its appeal to both artists and audiences, but as an emphatically contemporary, assertively stylish embodiment of the event’s far-reaching importance to its home community.

Obviously, An Lanntair’s not just there for the festival, but it wouldn’t be here at all without it. And while a few folk waxed nostalgic about the old days in the British Legion, such voices were overwhelmingly drowned by the hundreds of happy revellers thronging the new building for the nightly post-gig Festival Club, which created a much more palpable, pulsing heart to the festival than was possible before.

A certain amount of tweaking is needed as to how the space is deployed for the club, but the fabric itself proved amply conducive.

The aforementioned Ms Fowlis had a busy weekend of it, with several solo gigs around the island, as the festival’s mix of main-house shows, community concerts and family events continues to expand outwith Stornoway. She then stepped up to the big marquee stage, in the leafy grounds of Lews Castle, for a sterling Saturday-night set with her bandmates in Dòchas, admirably warming up the crowd for the Afro Celt Sound System.

The latter band were one of several for whom the close cousinship between Scottish and Irish Gaels lent their encounter with Lewis an extra depth of resonance. The multi-national Afro Celts line-up nowadays includes the brilliant young uilleann piper and flute player Emer Mayock, as well as longtime anchorman Iarla Ó Lionáird, whose magisterial, sean nós-accented singing commanded the vast interior space of the “Big Blue” – as the main festival tent is nicknamed – with sublime authority.

These hypnotic slower vocal numbers were just one dimension in a truly electrifying set, rhythmically and visually centred on the fearsomely athletic interplay between dhol drummer Johnny Kalsi and Senegal’s Moussa Sissokho, on djembe and talking drum. Tunes-wise, Mayock’s playing laid a muscular, lyrical foundation, abetted by some blistering whistle solos from founder member James McNally.

The heights of mass delirium whipped up by the Afro Celts matched those achieved three years ago by the Hothouse Flowers, who returned to headline Friday night’s show after a superb opening set from Blazin’ Fiddles.

For Liam O Maonlai and his men, though, that last time on Lewis was one of those rare, magical, transcendent nights when everything comes together, and then some, and while that’s precisely why the band were avid to come back, it’s an experience impossible to recreate on demand.

While they certainly didn’t play a bad gig, Fiachra O Braonain’s over-earnest attempt at a slow Gaelic ballad, solely and jarringly accompanied by O Maonlai on didgeridoo, served as a somewhat painful emblem of their struggles to attain that same level of communion with the audience.

Among the weekend’s other highlights were the Orkney twosome Saltfishforty, who won themselves a whole heap of new friends with their raw-boned yet precision-honed mesh of traditional-style tunes and gritty Americana textures, further enlivened by the odd east European flourish.

Featuring Brian Cromarty on vocals, mandola and guitar, with fiddler Douglas Montgomery, their mostly self-penned music exemplified the ability of the very best duos to sound like more than the sum of their parts – as the pack of dancers giving it large when they played the club on Friday would readily attest.

Extending the programme’s transatlantic strand were current hot property the Crooked Jades, a San Francisco-based quintet (though all originally from the Appalachian heartland of Kentucky and North Carolina) who seek to recapture the ghostly spirit of pre-radio US folk music, and align it with the darkly postmodern sensibilities of Jacques Brel and Nick Cave.

It’s a beguiling, compelling, intriguingly understated mix, enhanced by subtle stagecraft, vintage-chic clothes and antique instruments. Enhanced, too, on this occasion, by the awareness that some of these very same songs and tunes probably began life pretty much right where we were sitting, several hundred years later.

© Sue Wilson, 2006

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