Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 16 January 2008

Karan Casey (photo - www.karancasey.com)

COMMON GROUND was a belter of an opener which, with its Scottish/Irish/American/English mix of marvellous playing and illustrious songs, really caught the spirit of Celtic Connections in this its fifteenth year. It more than lived up to its billing, in the words of Musical Director John McCusker, as ‘a huge big glorious session’.

However, this was no thrown together kind of night. At its pounding heart was a twelve strong house band with the tried and tested flair of past and present Capercaillie stalwarts, Michael McGoldrick, Donald Shaw, Ewen Vernal and James Mackintosh, and a brilliant fiddle front three in Aidan O’Rourke, Lauren MacColl and McCusker himself.

They had rehearsed their sweet slow airs and driving reels at a Schools Concert that morning that had 2000 youngsters going daft making Mexican waves and dancing in the aisles.

The honour of first song of this year’s Festival went to North Uist’s Julie Fowlis who gave us a lovely Gaelic song followed by a strathspey and reels puirt about potatoes and manure (a grand pairing). The voice is one of the main Celtic strands this year, and it featured strongly all evening with tragic love songs in the shape of Karine Polwart’s moving Border ballad ‘The Dowie Dens of Yarrow’, Heidi Talbot’s ‘Time’ by Tom Waits, Kate Rusby’s ‘John Barleycorn’ and Karan Casey’s unaccompanied ‘Distant Shore’, which had the full house breathless at its beauty.

On the other hand, the singing of Luka Bloom, Kris Drever, Damian Dempsey and Waterboy Mike Scott was altogether of a more upbeat and humorous nature. Luka Bloom mischievously introduced his ‘You Couldn’t Have Come at a Better Time’ from the ground-breaking ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ album/film with ‘as the actress said to the bishop’, and Mike Scott gave us a hilarious song about a wild wedding in which the best man was killed by the bride’s father, she finished up bald, and her sister became a nun.

The American influence was present throughout in the exquisite mandolin playing of former Nickel Creek front man Chris Thile, whose own tune to Burns’s ‘Flow Gently Sweet Afton’ was even more beautiful than the original. His new band, Punch Brothers, and another American group, Kaplin, Kane and Welsh, who turned up unannounced, showcased a couple of numbers which must have done wonders for ticket sales for their own Festival shows.

In the second half the Irish contingent led by Sharon Shannon, Dezi Donnelly and Jim Murray cranked up the playing, while John Joe Kelly almost made the bodrhan sing with his solo ‘Buckfast 5′, and green giant Damian Dempsey impressed with the heart-felt passion of his voice and guitar picking.

Towards the end the cheerful anarchy which typifies this kind of session shone through when one or two of the band forgot to come back on and flamboyant fiddler Dezi Donnelly eventually showed up with a white towel trailing from the back of his jeans.

Mike Scott told me later ‘Backstage, people were rehearsing in dressing rooms and there was a kind of workshop atmosphere while the show was going on; it was a good working cacophony,’ which might account for some of the fun and games on stage.

It is the sharing and borrowing of tunes and the new combinations of players and singers that musicians love about these get-togethers and this was nowhere more evident than in the two uplifting encores where Luka Bloom sang ‘Sunny Sailor Boy’, which he first heard from Mike Scott at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin back in 1991 and has been singing ever since, and Scott in turn borrowed the Irish Aisling tune ‘Mo Gile Mear’ (my bright hero) to lead all 25 performers and most of the audience in a spirited rendition of ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again’.

When Julie Fowlis and Karan Casey sang the final verse in Gaelic we knew that the night had come full circle and that there could be no better way than this to kick off the biggest Celtic Music Festival in the world.

Asked afterwards ‘How are you going to top this?’ John McCusker replied ‘Go to the pub!’

© Norman Bissell, 2008

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