Various venues, Shetland, 29-10 August 2009

FROM SELL-OUT gigs and throbbing dance floors to informal pub sessions and workshops, this year’s Shetland Blues Festival has been heralded as the best so far by audiences and organisers alike.

Bex Marshall

The original festival was started by Steven Mclean, John Anderson and Colin Fraser, and is now organised by a committee from all over Shetland. What began as a series of pub gigs and a night in the Lerwick Legion has grown into a three-day blues extravaganza. This festival, the sixth, saw gigs in Lerwick, Scalloway, Brae and Sandwick.

I gave Jimmy Carlyle (one of the festival organisers) a few days to recover then caught up with him to hear what he made of it all.

With the first twinges of Autumn in the air a hearty dose of up-beat music is probably good fodder for the soul. Jimmy explained the timing of the event “When the festival first started it was around midsummer but was moved to the current dates as it was felt more people would come out for the festival during August/September as there was less on”

A good strategy that seems to work and made for a blues stuffed late summer weekend. And given that it was still a busy one, with The Proclaimers and Shetland Youth Theatre’s Canterbury Tales also drawing people in, the festival’s success shows a healthy appetite for music and the arts.

Key to the atmosphere of the weekend is that the venues have dance-floors, these are not sit-down concerts. Blues makes you want to dance and it turns out that’s the whole point, as Jimmy explains. “Once you realise that blues music was originally played in Juke Joints at the weekend to make people dance to forget their ‘blues’ you’ll understand where we are coming from.”

Friday night in the Lerwick Legion made for a fine show of boogy and groove. Bex Marshall conjured up the sound of an entire guitar orchestra, wowing the audience with her classic blues voice and custom-build silver Dobro (a bottle-neck metal guitar) She has a unique, mud-slide style and the set combined her own compositions and with Blues standards.

Shetland’s own Norman and The Folding Deckchairs, led by fourteen year old, budding jazz saxophonist Noman Wilmore, continued the night with a mix of jazz blues standards and enthusiastic use of no less than three keyboards.

Soon the dance floor was full of limb-swinging, sultry strutting and shimmying moves. The King Bees hit it with some mean guitar, dirty blues harp and a gutbucket rhythm section. All enthusiastically lapped up by dancers and toe-tapping listeners.

The Leonard Jones Potential squeezed themselves onto the stage for some blasting rhythms set on a funky backbone with a feisty horn section and screaming Hammond Organ. Making for a knock-out end to a knock-out night.

Strangely the audience did thin out a little during this last act, although the dance floor was still packed. Maybe they scored too highly on the funky scale for some blues fans? One was overheard going out saying, “I’m not sure what style that last band was but it wasn’t blues”. OK, but personally I loved it – more funky blues please.

All the gigs had a good mix of home-grown talent and visiting acts. Shetland proved its blues credentials with take-to-the-dancefloor, jumping local bands such as The Rumshack Blues Band, Ramstams, and No Sweat and great sets by singers Sheila Henderson and Donald Anderson.

And what about the visiting acts? How does the committee find and chose them? Jimmy produces a weekly blues podcast that has an international listenership. He is always on the look out new British and European bands to play on his show and uses this contact to approach bands that might be interested in playing the festival.

The committee are also approached by bands through the Shetland Blues Festival website, often after hearing rave reviews from acts who have visited in the past. “We try and pick a diverse range of bands for the weekend so that the audience is exposed to all types of blues music as it is a diverse church, from acoustic solo blues right through to full on blues rock” Jimmy explains.
And diverse it was. This year’s other visiting acts included the extremely popular King King featuring Alan Nimmo, Gwyn Ashton’s Two-Man Blues Army (blues and indie/ alternative) and Kevin Brown (slide guitar and roots)

News of a good gig spreads quickly by word-of-mouth but also nowadays via the internet. There was much enthusiasm to be found on Facebook and personal blogs over the weekend, as one blogger said of Saturday night at the Lerwick Legion:

“I had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for – kick-ass music, the best bands we’ve seen for years!! We were gobsmacked – only way we can describe how we felt. Shetland rocked last night!”

The committee also organise workshops in the local schools in conjunction with Community Development in the week leading up to the festival. “Education on the history of the music and its relevance today is seen as an important part of our remit to keeping the blues alive”, explains Jimmy.

Afternoon sessions saw Gwyn Ashton in Da Wheel Bar, Kevin Brown in The Scalloway Hotel and The Offenders, an original style funk blues four-piece, in the Scalloway Kiln Bar. The committee are looking to expand on these sessions with the help of the local publicans.

Like Shetland’s other music festivals this one is born of the hard work of a group of passionate people who are really into a particular genre of music. So, why blues Jimmy?

“My interest in blues came from listening to John Peel and Tommy Vance on the radio in the early eighties and making the connection to the heavy rock music I was listening to at the time. Then along came the radio 2 show by Paul Jones. The blues is the root of all modern rock music and expresses emotion and feel that I can relate to.” He says

It takes months of organisation and a hearty dollop of local hospitality (visiting acts are put up by in people’s homes) to pull this off. How does it feel to see it all come together?

“The highlight for me is just seeing so many people enjoying the music that I love and knowing that the job has been done well for that to happen. Meeting the great artists that we take up after emailing most of them for about 9 months is a joy as well. I’ve made some great friends through the festival.”

And in this age of the instant, online opinion, the last word goes to a Facebook reviewer who is “no longer a Shetland Blues Festival virgin and now realises it isn’t just for depressed, owld saddos. Brilliant night at Brae – thanks to No Sweat, The King Bees and Leonard Jones Potential….oh and Stroma and Nicola for gettin’ everyone up on da dancefloor!”

© Karen Emslie, 2009

Links

• Shetland Blues Festival
• Jimmy’s Blues Podcast