Tartan Heart Festival, Belladrum, near Inverness, 7-8 August 2009

WHEN a group is assembled and people continue conversations, you have to look for opportunities to keep it all going. You know it can’t be the same but you want to continue the dialogue. More than two years ago the MSP Rob Gibson developed a link with the Island Writers Festival held on the Island of Ouessant.

Peter Urpeth and Ian Stephen at The Read Bed (© Lorna J Waite)

A Scottish islands theme emerged, supported by HI~Arts, and before you knew it there was a proper wee academy of Highlands and Islands writers constituted at the end of a world. E-mails and a poetry reading in Leith kept it going, but this year’s Belladrum Festival seemed an unlikely choice for developing the group.

HI~Arts writing co-ordinator Peter Urpeth grabbed the chance to install a homely tent as part of the temporary city of 14,000 people. The carpet and sofas were a good choice. That and a quality PA allowed a selection of writers and musicians from the Highlands and Islands to develop or revive their work and seek a share of the roving audience.

I hardly moved from The Read Bed for two days. This was only partly from solidarity with the other performers of the literary world. A small haven developed. Sometimes visitors would indeed be drawn in, attracted by the tranquil concentration on words in the many voices of the Highlands. Other performers, particularly the Lewis guitarists, brought their own strong following and some of these folks lingered for other events.

It wasn’t all poetry and not every event had music. But most made the link.

Roger Hutchinson launched a book, not yet printed, with a personal and very moving summary of a family’s journey to and from America. You were engaged by the desperate search for the authentic in a family’s quest for a cure for a blind member. Startled by the stating of the fact that 30 percent of immigrant families of a large period of the States’ history returned home. And the veteran non-fiction man connected his iPod to the system to punctuate his summary with the move from English song to Cajun.

Pamela Beasant is from a Glasgow background but has lived for many years in Orkney. It’s showing in her poems – in a clean sharpness – if not yet fully in her voice. Pam’s reading was very simple, with no music and no gestures. It’s easy to pass over the quality of work like this, but I was moved to buy her new collection, Running With The Snow Leopard (Two Ravens Press).

I could hear her all the way back across the Minch. These are poems of family and people but the landscape, be it wilder Hoy or the farmed land, is an insistent presence.

That takes us to Shetland, or rather a linguistic rammy of a one-man debate, furthered in an exchange of Shetland dialect poems and English versions which make their own music. Robert Alan Jamieson often delivers his explorations of voice and voyage in an audio-visual presentation of fine quality. This time the technical side was just not possible to realise in the time and it was no bad thing.

His introductions were counterpoints to the poems and the rhythms of everything became flexible. It was at the jazz end of the vernacular spectrum, in the same way as the Peatbog Faeries later set gave the brass the space to bend the patterns of the jigs.

Maoilios Caimbeul and Mark O. Goodwin take another approach to the problems and opportunities presented by the need to translate. Caimbeul has said that he can only write poetry fluently in Gaelic simply because it’s his own first language. As that is the one which carries the music, it’s difficult for him to recreate that as well as sense in a translation. So Goodwin remakes the poem in English – the language he can flourish in. And in turn Caimbeul can make Gaelic music from Goodwin’s focused English. Their book (also by Two Ravens Press) is a map of a friendship that crosses more than a glen.

Kevin MacNeil, clad in the lycra garb of a literary cyclist (a project to cycle the Danube – or maybe just the banks) was clearly relishing a revisit to the collaboration with the singer/musician Willie Campbell – one which led to the hit single ‘Local Man Ruins Everything.’ The Lewis crowd spurred on a performance which juxtaposes a deadpan neo-depressive delivery with minimal but haunting repetitions of percussion and melody. And there are witty moments of relief and the superb singing voice of Campbell. It still works.

The example was followed by Dave Martin’s storytelling, offset by another Lewisman who combines spirited guitar with a haunting singing voice – Iain Morrison. Their own crowd hung on the new anthems which depend on an underlying narrative and the power of repetition. Their joint portrait of a meditative gatemaker was moving but for me excellent delivery could have sometimes done with sharper material.

For my own part it was a ball to return to a first love. I became fully committed to poetry and stories after being in a performing group at Uni in 1979. My first book, made with the photographer Sam Maynard, was launched at the then Third Eye Centre with a collaboration with two musicians.

I met alto saxophonist Raymond Macdonald the morning of the gig, and learned that he and Peter Urpeth (piano) had never played together. But that’s surely what a spot like this is about. You sketch some outlines and take some chances. I had to remember to come back in with the lyric poems, engaged in the interplay between two masters of jazz based improv. And of course, Raymond has come through the Third Eye/CCA track.

So I caught very little of the staged events, just floated in and out of an audience here and there. But as well as the on-form Peatbogs, I’ve another recommendation – maybe one for the Heb Celt to look out for. At first The Grousebeaters’ Sound System remind you of the early Bothy Culture days – especially with Peter Robertson’s hi-energy fiddle. But there’s something of their own developing in the swish of the decks and the electronic chutzpah.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

Links

• Tartan Heart Festival
• Ian Stephen