Universal Folk Club, Glasgow, 22 January 2008

Maeve Mackinnon

SONGS of fishermen and whalers, sea captains and wronged sailors, of deportation and the Fionn, rowing songs and wauking songs, that was Songs of the Sea, and, as Tom Spiers said, not a sea shanty in sight.

Not that there’s anything wrong with sailors’ work chants, but Griogair Labhruidh, Maeve Mackinnon and Tom Spiers gave us a splendid selection of songs from the differing traditions of the Gaidhealtachd and the North East coast. These three very fine singers went for old songs that both told good stories of life at sea and packed an emotional punch.

Griogair is one of the new wave of Gaelic singers currently breaking over our musical shores with a passion for his language and its preservation and revival in the Argyll heartlands of his family.

His mother’s people came from Loch Fyneside and his father’s from Ballachulish and he aptly drew on these roots when singing and playing guitar to George Campbell Hay’s ‘Suibhal a’ Choire’ in praise of fishermen and their boat, the Choire, sailing treacherous waters, which had us haoi-oing and horo-ing its chorus, and Donald McKinnon’s ‘Cairistiona’, about the burial of one of the MacIaens of Glencoe on Eileach Munda.

His explanation on one occasion to Irish schoolkids of this latter song that it was ‘about a woman getting rowed in a boat’ elicited the unintended hilarity you might expect.

Áirde Chuain, a beautiful lament from his rightly acclaimed debut album ‘Dail-riata’, powerfully sung in deeply mellifluous fashion, also displayed this rising young star of Gaelic song’s understanding of the significance of the Irish-Argyll sea routes for Scotland’s history and cultures.

Tom Spiers was next up with a whaling song out of Aberdeen, ‘The Bonny Ship The Diamond’, and Greg Duncan’s ‘The Deceived Sailor’ about the lass he left behind who married a merchant and ‘sold her soul for riches’ sake’.

Tom’s proud Aberdeenshire fishing heritage also featured in ‘Ogilvie’s Boat’, a ditty written by his grandfather and uncle which he learned from them at family sing-songs in the days when his grandmother carried her husband out to the boat on her back and humphed creels ten miles from Collieston to the Aberdeen fish market.

He’s no ‘blazin’ fiddler’ but his fiddle intro to the poignant ‘Farewell Tae Tarwathy’ and accompaniment to ‘Jimmy Raeburn’, a sad tale of the deportation in chains of a Glasgow man from “Clyde’s clear stream”, hit just the right note with an appreciative west coast audience. Here was an authentic rich-voiced tradition bearer in his prime.

Maeve Mackinnon took us back to Gaeldom with some fine unaccompanied songs extolling the isles of Barra, Lewis, Rona, Unst and Mull, and their seagoers. Her heroic ballad ‘Am Bròn Binn’ told the ancient tale of the warrior Fionn who, at the end of a sea-going odyssey, found the most beautiful woman in a glittering blue castle in the ocean who lulled him to sleep and chopped off his head.

No joy there, then. Nor for Gilleasbaig in her lilting wauking song ‘Gilleasbaig òg Heisgir’ which, with an engaging rowing song ‘Thoir mo shoraidh thar Gunnaidh’, had the crowd joining in the choruses and tapping on the Universal’s wooden floor.

Her first album ‘Don’t Sing Lovesongs’ has already been dubbed a classic, and her earlier Celtic Connections concert with Lauren MacColl received enthusiastic reviews, but here she wasn’t at her best, seeming a bit breathless at times and somewhat hesitant when explaining what the songs were about. As she said herself, ‘I’m very good at rambling, I need to get a grip of it’.

That said, there’s no doubt that in Maeve, Griogair and many others of their generation the future of Gaelic song is in very good hands. Here’s to hearing more of the thousand or so other Gaelic songs of the sea and those of the great oral tradition of the North East coast.

© Norman Bissell, 2008

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