On the Right Road

SUE WILSON skims the waves to check out the launch of Skerryvore’s new album on Tiree

Hand-over-fist hardly covers the way the Skerryvore CDs were selling, as the last bottles of free fizz did the rounds, topping up the glasses of the heaving throng gathered at An Talla, Tiree’s community hall, to launch the band’s second album, On the Road.

That night alone, between the launch party itself and the sold-out ceilidh that followed – with Skerryvore playing their socks off over a total of four or five hours – they shifted some 300 copies, in a 300-capacity venue, a tally which was reportedly climbing towards 2000 by the week’s end.

If we were talking about almost any other type of outfit than a Scottish folk band, these kinds of numbers would soon be pricking up A&R ears. As it is, though, Skerryvore are a young country-dance band fast evolving – as highlighted by On the Road, as well as their sterling performance here – into a concert act to be reckoned with, however commercially unfashionable the genre they inhabit.

The Tiree connection is that two of their core members, brothers Daniel and Martin Gillespie, are native to the island, the remainder being drawn from elsewhere in the Highlands, and that both their albums to date – the first being 2005’s West Coast Life – have been released by local label Skipinnish Records.

A proper homecoming send-off for On the Road was thus firmly in order, the band doing things in style by chartering a plane up from Glasgow, after playing a festival in Italy the night before. On the earlier flight back to Scotland, British Airways did their best to chuck a spanner in the works by losing all their instruments, but with replacements somehow rustled up in the nick of time, the show went on with true Highland indefatigability.

A good many Skerryvore fans, friends and family members had also travelled from far and wide for the occasion, but your lucky correspondent surely enjoyed the best journey of anyone in attendance, having been collected from Mull by Skipinnish Records go-getting young boss Angus MacPhail – also co-proprietor of Skipinnish Sea Tours, another Tiree enterprise – in his very fast and powerful rib motorboat.

If there’s a better way to arrive anywhere than by an hour’s zoom over the water at up to 30 knots, flying off the tops of a restive swell past the Treshnish Islands of Staffa, Lunga and Bac Mor, on a sunlit summer’s evening, I’d very much like to know what it is.

Leaving the music aside for a further moment, there’s some exceptionally good eating to be had on Tiree. A welcoming dinner at the Scarinish Hotel, featuring locally-caught prawns and island-reared beef, more than sated an appetite sharpened by all that intensive sea air on route, while lunch next day chez MacPhail comprised crab and lobster that had been scuttling about the seabed not 24 hours earlier. With lobster catches in the area apparently more plentiful than they have been since the 1970s, seafood lovers take note.

While broadening their horizons beyond the stricter confines of ceilidh music, Skerryvore kept the dancefloor busy with their driving instrumental attack, led by the massed melodic firepower of the Gillespies’ accordion and pipes, plus Craig Espie’s fiddle, with guitarist Alec Dalglish, bassist Barry Caulfield and drummer Fraser West supplying hefty rhythmic backup.

As on the album, the show also featured numerous guest contributions on a range of instruments, with one particularly spectacular set of tunes involving about ten people onstage, among them two sets of pipes duelling with trumpet and trombone.

Songs, too, are an increasingly potent weapon in the band’s armoury, a strong mix of originals and covers fronted by Dalglish’s warm, emotive yet gutsy vocals, as in the new album’s ultra-catchy title track, and an excellent arrangement of Ewan MacColl’s classic “Dirty Old Town”.

One quibble about their sound overall would be the rhythm section’s slight default tendency towards four-square ploddiness – in contrast to their adroitly patterned grooves and syncopations elsewhere. With their boy-band looks and snappy stage gear, however, in addition to the calibre and fervour of their music, Skerryvore have the air of an act who are going places.

“This is the most excited I’ve been about any of the albums we’ve put out – including my own,” agrees MacPhail, who – completing his tripartite Skipinnish identity – also plays accordion in a duo of that name.

The record label, set up in 2003, may still be a youngish, small-scale operation, but with an artist roster now approaching double figures (also including fiddler Archie MacAllister and Gaelic singer Rachel Walker), and a catalogue of over a dozen releases, this is no small praise.

On the Road is indeed an album brimming with talent and promise, and to judge by its launch gig, Skerryvore certainly have the live goods to match.

© Sue Wilson, 2007

Links

• Skippinish Records
• Skerryvore