Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, 15-18 July 2009

La Bottine Souriante (photo - Leila Angus)

IN ITS 14th year, the Hebridean Celtic Festival weathered something approaching a perfect storm of adversity. The clouds that gathered weren’t least of the literal variety, starting with those that dropped a prodigious four-hour downpour over Stornoway on Thursday afternoon – just as the massive blue marquee in Lews Castle grounds was being readied, and the bands soundchecked, for that night’s first gig.

It kept on raining pretty much all weekend, apart from a day’s sunny respite on Friday – but even this was overcast after word came through mid-morning that the MV Isle of Lewis, bringing the first of that day’s three scheduled boatloads to the festival’s biggest night, had lost power in one engine en route from Ullapool, eventually limping in two hours late.

Both return crossings were duly cancelled, leaving hundreds marooned on either side of the Minch while engineers worked frantically to diagnose and repair the trouble, which took around 24 hours, and other boats were redeployed from Islay and Uist to tackle the backlog.

All of which, of course, only intensified the brouhaha over the same weekend’s launch of a Sunday ferry service for Lewis, in the teeth of implacable opposition from the staunchest of the island’s uniquely large and influential Free Presbyterian community, and amid interestingly mixed feelings among a surprising proportion of its other inhabitants.

The festival’s organisers had already had to gird themselves – at a day’s notice – to field umpteen media enquiries about an issue on which they’ve always stayed resolutely neutral. As they battled to rearrange travel for several headline performers (Friday’s main evening flight from Inverness was also cancelled, just to add to the chaos), meanwhile confronting the prospective non-arrival of several hundred ticket-holders; as the jokes about divine retaliation inevitably snowballed (along with conspiracy theories of Sabbatarian sabotage), director Caroline MacLennan and her team could certainly have been forgiven for failing to see the funny side.

And all the more so, too, given the festival’s biggest problem of all this year, namely a substantial downturn in ticket sales, reportedly most conspicuous among its bedrock local audience.

A number of obvious factors contributed – most obviously the recession, which has kiboshed so many of this summer’s festivals altogether, and also rather glaringly the simultaneous presence in Stornoway of Circus Berlin, in another massive tent just down the road, a programming clash for which whoever is responsible should be roundly pilloried. (And given that 14 years surely constitutes a reasonable prior claim on the weekend in question, it’s hardly the festival’s fault; some discern another instance of attempted sabotage.)

The prevailing local view as to why numbers were down, especially among its younger population, was easy to discover: this year’s line-up, and in particular Friday’s top headliner Sharon Shannon, simply wasn’t a big enough draw. Within the parameters of the folk or Celtic audience per se, the calibre of acts could hardly be faulted, but for those less directly or specifically engaged with this area of music, there was no-one providing that higher-profile lure of mainstream rock’n’pop kudos or glitter, as has capped previous bills in the shape of the Proclaimers, Van Morrison, Runrig and the Waterboys.

Shannon’s uncanny perennial youthfulness, personally as well as musically, may prompt Dorian Gray-esque suspicions, but in fact she’s been leading the field of contemporary Irish folk for a good 20 years now, while the mighty La Bottine Souriante, Thursday’s star turn, who had certainly attained Celtic-supergroup status in the legendary incarnation that first graced the Heb Celt back in 1997, are now into their fourth decade, albeit with a fair few personnel changes along the way.

Crucially, too, neither of them has ever had a hit single on these shores. Exacerbated by everyone’s emptier pockets – and with a little help from the circus – the 2009 programme just didn’t do the business,

It did, however, lay on a wealth of exceedingly fine music. With only one or two longtime members left, La Bottine’s set may not quite have attained the unforgettable magic of their 1990s glory days, but nonetheless thoroughly captivated the crowd with its tautly efficient musicianship, in their signature brass-laced arrangements of traditional-style Quebecois material, allied to lashings of extrovert showmanship.

They followed on from similarly sterling work by Missouri hoedown posse The Wilders, serving up their fiery moonshine blend of old-time Americana and 21st-century punk attitude, and the Blair Douglas Band, a specially-convened seven-piece which saw the much-loved Gaelic accordionist and composer joined by the likes of fiddler Gordon Gunn, guitarist Chaz Stewart and bassist Bobby Millar, plus Gaelic singer Kathleen MacInnes, who was in truly stunning voice.

Big, expansive arrangements of both tunes and songs vibrantly interwove rock, pop and country strands with Celtic colours and atmosphere, in one of the weekend’s standout performances.

In musical terms, too, Shannon certainly didn’t disappoint – other than in that her accompanying big-band line-up didn’t include any big-name singers, as it generally does, leaving it to guitarist Gareth Maher and one of the tech crew to step up into this role, rather less than adequately.

But with tunes predominating in the mix, and Shannon’s joyously magpie-minded playing complemented by such fellow instrumental virtuosos as banjo icon Gerry O’Connor and guitarist Tim Edey – who turned in a literally jaw-dropping extended duet as well as their ensemble contributions – this proved a minor shortcoming.

Australian folk-rock outfit The Ploughboys were a considerable disappointment, however, delivering little if anything to differentiate them from the lumpen ploddy mass of their genre – especially coming after the dazzling sophistication, technical ambition and genuine originality of Box Club, who opened the show.

What with one thing and another, though – not least those two missing boatloads on Friday – easily the best and busiest night was Saturday, despite the rain bucketing down once again. Young local heroes Face the West kicked things off in magnificent style, going down as many people’s highlight of the weekend, before Orkney octet The Chair, one of last year’s most popular acts, made it two in a row in brilliantly barnstorming style – even after having been booked on that cancelled Inverness flight, and subsequently rerouted all the way via Edinburgh over the next twelve hours or so.

As a show-closing singalong, with the Isle of Lewis even then being readied to meet its date with destiny the next day, their raucously gleeful encore with ‘Highway to Hell’ could scarcely have been bettered – but lucky for us, we still had the Michael McGoldrick Band to go.

Guest vocalist Karen Matheson also nodded slyly to the impending occasion with a Gaelic waulking song summarised as “rantings from the pulpit”, while McGoldrick’s superb seven-man crew bade a resplendent simultaneous farewell to the festival, and to the richly honed live material from his last album Wired, ahead of its successor Aurora’s eagerly-anticipated release later this year.

© Sue Wilson, 2009

• Hebridean Celtic Festival
• Leila Angus at the Hebridean Celtic Festival 2009