Farr Hall, Strathnairn, 31 August 2007

Caledonian Canal Ceilidh Trail.

BY COMMON consent, one of Gaelic music’s greatest current strengths is the quantity and quality of young talent it has nurtured over recent years, a flowering now annually showcased through the numerous “Cèilidh Trail” concerts, featuring such budding performers, which are staged around the Highlands each summer.

As well as those promoted by the Fèis movement itself, this year’s programme has again included the Caledonian Canal Cèilidh Trail, sponsored by British Waterways, whose six participants – all aged under 20 – opened this sellout show on the first night of Blas with terrific gusto and verve.

Among a line-up that also included fiddlers Anne Nicol and Rachel Campbell, singer and piper Rachel MacDonald, Alasdair Taylor on guitar/mandolin and accordionist Cameron Kellow, perhaps their key secret weapon was percussionist Ross Anderson, sitting on a customised cajon, or Cuban percussion box, complete with built-in snare.

The emphatic force and booming resonance of his snappy, deftly-patterned grooves, ranging in style from funk to reggae, lent exhilarating extra muscle to his bandmates’ fiery attack in the dance sets, while forming a richly textured rhythm-section partnership with Taylor’s guitar.

The sextet’s wealth of youthful energy built up a splendid head of steam through the set, which also featured ample dynamic contrast, as with MacDonald’s opening solo rendition on the pipes and her vibrantly assured Gaelic singing, the latter adorned with delicate backing harmonies by Nicol and Campbell.

Despite having started life when most of their support band were barely out of nappies, Shooglenifty can still show the youngsters a thing or several when it comes to keeping it fresh. Rarely happier than when playing a rural Highland hall, the veteran creators of “acid croft” steered their characteristically wayward yet unerring course between intricately meshed precision and free-ranging adventure, sublime melodic sweetness and bare-knuckle aural assault.

Much of the set-list comprised tracks from their latest album, Troots, among them a brilliantly out-there rampage through ‘The Eccentric’, complete with otherworldly sampled vocals from Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq.

The similarly genre-melting ‘Trim Controller’ progressed from mellow, moody opening chords, beneath a wistfully lilting jig, via a nimble African-hued guitar solo from Malcolm Crosbie, before finishing with the crunching central riff from the Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, sawed from the strings of fiddler Angus Grant.

As ever, though, the band’s distinguished back-catalogue also featured prominently, including the haunting twists and turns of ‘Two Fifty to Vigo’, all the way from their first album, Venus in Tweeds, and still as lovely as ever, and the eponymously cosmopolitan ‘A Fistful of Euro’, introduced by Grant as “a Highland/Tasmanian bellydancing crossbreed”: a sound, as with virtually all of Shooglenifty’s oeuvre, you’re unlikely to hear from any other band.

© Sue Wilson, 2007

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