Orkney Folk Festival 2009

28 May 2009 in Festival, Music, Orkney

Various venues, Orkney, 21-24 May 2009

Jeana Leslie and Siobhan Miller

Jeana Leslie and Siobhan Miller

IT CAN BE easy to forget, as a visiting audience member, the massive jigsaw of human resources and organisational logistics – slotted together entirely by volunteer effort – that underpins an event like the Orkney Folk Festival. This year’s programme comprised around 25 concerts over four days, featuring a total of over 40 acts – shipped and flown in from mainland Scotland, Shetland, Ireland, England, Canada and the US – staged in 12 venues across four different islands, running most days from noon until well after midnight.

Making that little lot happen requires a small army of sound crew, drivers, stewards, stagehands, box office staff, raffle-ticket sellers, compères and general helpers (not to mention the small matters of programming, booking and marketing beforehand), almost all recruited locally.

Further levels of concerted community effort become apparent when you consider what’s involved in catering for hordes of hungry and thirsty folkies round the clock in a small island town, an undertaking heroically shouldered between the three main hotels in the festival’s base of Stromness, plus a couple of cafés and a chip shop.

Then there’s the fact that the event’s primary audience is also local, a degree of home-grown support that once again saw almost every gig packed to capacity, and which relies in turn on island-wide, military-style planning regarding childcare and time off work.

Along with Orkney’s stunningly beautiful setting, it’s this sense of shared hedonistic purpose, the buoyant unanimity with which Stromness becomes a town en fête – as riotous jam-sessions ring out continually from every bar, alongside the wealth of programmed music – that lends the festival much of its uniquely convivial character. (Some of the sessions themselves spilled outside on Friday afternoon, the better to enjoy the mirror-like harbour views amid cloudless sunshine.)

It’s also things like the impromptu singaround that took place when a group of performers visited the Italian Chapel, delighting a busload of Antipodean tourists who chanced by at the same time. Or like the annual Orkney vs The Rest of the World football match on Sunday afternoon, a fiercely-fought, gloriously muddy farce that ended in a 10-9 victory for the home team, after a sudden-death finish and some outrageous cheating by the opposition.

Or the very bizarre but equally beautiful session that unfolded at the Festival Club late on Saturday night, beginning with a bodhran and a tuba (I kid you not), and subsequently joined by a dozen-strong international array of top singers and instrumentalists, making amazing new music together.

None of the above delights, of course, would be possible without the consistently discerning calibre and variety of the festival’s core programme. A succession of exceptional vocal performances encompassed many of the weekend’s highlights, among them being several mesmerising turns by Karine Polwart (who was man of the match at the football, incidentally), in trio format with her guitarist brother Stephen and Inge Thomson on accordion and percussion.

Deftly varying her set-list each time, she paid tribute to her host location with an arresting a capella rendition of ‘The Dreadful End of Marianna For Sorcery’, based on a George Mackay Brown story; delivered well-aimed digs at politicians and bankers with ‘Sorry’ and ‘House of Cards'; wrenched the heartstrings with ‘The Sun’s Coming Over the Hill’ and ‘We’re All Leaving’, and orchestrated a blissful four-part audience chorale in her reworking of an old seafaring hymn, ‘While the Billows Roll’.

Her singing’s intensely expressive blend of sweetness and piquancy, together with her poet’s wordcraft and haunting gift for melody, were further enriched by her accompanists’ radiant backing harmonies as well as artful instrumentation.

Kicking off Friday’s late-night gig at Stromness Academy, before a crowd primarily bent on bouncing around to local dancefloor heroes The Chair later on, might have seemed a short-straw slot for the traditional song duo of Jeana Leslie (also on fiddle and piano, and also from Orkney) and Siobhan Miller, but the former BBC Young Folk Award-winners soon had the room eating out of their hands.

Despite their youth, they’ve already developed by leaps and bounds during their short professional career to date, here aligning and intertwining their voices with uncanny attunement and immense technical sophistication, reinventing such classic fare as ‘Bedlam Boys’, ‘Auchindoon’ and ‘The Banks of Newfoundland’ with tremendous vitality and finesse.

Earlier on at the Town Hall, Ireland’s Karan Casey was in similarly sublime form, her lusciously honeyed yet nakedly emotive delivery giving the impression, as she does on such occasions, almost of channelling some higher power, especially in the spellbinding medley – beginning with the poignant rebel ballad ‘Dunlavin Green’, leading through an Irish Gaelic lament to ‘I Once Loved a Lass’ – which formed the centrepiece of her set.

There were also some splendid male voices in evidence, including the ruggedly muscular yet precision-honed three-part harmonies of Quebec’s Genticorum, in amongst the irrepressible joie de vivre of their instrumental playing. English duo John Spiers and Jon Boden likewise took no prisoners in their rousingly red-blooded treatment of traditional ballads, sea-shanties and Morris tunes, with Boden’s compellingly wayward lead vocal reminiscent at times of the Associates’ late lamented Billy Mackenzie. And from Stateside, old-timey one-man-band Bruce Molsky gave equally eloquent voice to the raw-boned, high-lonesome idioms of Appalachian music.

Also on the song front, a rainy Saturday afternoon offered the chance to drop in not only on an absorbing exhibition of drawings by St Ives Group artist Wilhemina Barns-Graham at the award-winning Pier Arts Centre, but to the festival open day held by the Big Orkney Song Project.

This is a lively ongoing initiative both to collect old Orkney songs and encourage the writing of new ones, be they based on existing stories and poems or wholly original, meanwhile promoting their performance via the vocal trio and choir that have evolved from the project, and which also featured in the festival programme.

Not that there were any shortcomings in the instrumental department – not with acts like Irish trio Buille, led by the extraordinary concertina playing of Niall Vallely, and the mighty Shetland seven-piece Fiddlers’ Bid on the bill.

Performing with his brother Caoimhín on piano and Highland guitarist Ross Martin, Vallely’s heavily improvised virtuosity took his instrument by turns deep into blues harmonica territory, up to transcendent heights of lyricism, and into the thick of fiery, funked-up dance tunes. Fiddlers’ Bid, meanwhile, playing their first gig together in some months, were palpably raring to go, mixing up the familiar full-throttle pyrotechnics with some excellent new material from their forthcoming fifth album.

Spicing up proceedings with an eclectic blend of musical flavours was the Jani Lang Band, fronted by an expat Hungarian fiddler, now based in Aberdeen, and also featuring Scotland’s Fraser Fifield on soprano sax alongside members from England, Ireland and Egypt. Ranging from crazily asymmetric, warp-speed gypsy workouts to a sinuous amalgam of Arabic and reggae styles, their high-octane set saw musicians and dancers alike working up a serious muck sweat.

Honourable mention must also go to local twin-sister act Jennifer and Hazel Wrigley, on fiddle and guitar/piano, whose Festival Club gig with their band The Reel included a fabulous extended duet showcasing both their rare musical telepathy and their mutual love of mischief.

All too soon, it was time to board the homeward ferry after another outstanding Orkney stramash – but consoled until next time by another panoply of magical memories.

© Sue Wilson, 2009

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