Various venues, Shetland, 28 April-1 May 2011

IT’S long been customary at folk gigs for the performers, approaching the end of their set, to thank those involved in staging the event – organisers, sound engineers, venue staff and so on. Perhaps only at the Shetland Folk Festival, though, will you hear gratitude particularly expressed to “the ladies who made the fish pie for our dinner”: the speaker being Irish banjo ace Gerry O’Connor, thanking those stalwarts of the local hall committee in Cunningsburgh, ten miles south of Lerwick, which hosted one of seven concerts on this year’s opening night.

The entire four-day festival comprised 28 main shows in total – almost all of them sold out, packed with a primarily local audience. Over a third took place outside Lerwick, covering Shetland from northernmost Unst to southernmost Fair Isle, plus two more of its outer islands, as well as the length and breadth of the archipelago’s mainland.

Braebach shone on the final night

With many of the featured artists having already travelled thousands of miles to reach Lerwick, off the overnight Aberdeen ferry on Thursday morning – from as far afield as Louisiana, Missouri and Quebec – these outlying gigs entailed further journeys, by road and sea, of up to five hours each way. All this is enabled by an organisational framework, honed over the festival’s 30-year lifespan, which would put many professionally managed events to shame (Shetland’s shindig being wholly volunteer-run), and which helped see it crowned as Event of the Year at last December’s Scots Trad Music Awards.

With the out-of-town gigs, the usual routine is that the PA van sets off to arrive around 2pm, for the crew to rig the hall before the musicians’ bus rolls up two hours later, carrying four or five acts per concert. Each of them soundchecks while the stalwart ladies do their stuff in the kitchen, then everyone sits down to eat at 6 o’clock, ahead of showtime at 7.30 sharp. These multiple logistical miracles were worked an extra couple of times this year, with the Unst and Fair Isle performances added as part of 2011’s Scotland’s Islands promotion – of which more later.

Back in the beautifully appointed Cunningsburgh Public Hall, meanwhile, a strong Irish presence on the bill, in the shape of The Oonagh Derby Band and O’Connor’s duo with bodhran player and singer Gino Lupari, proved even more pervasive than it first appeared. First to take the stage was Rothesay-born singer-songwriter Rosanna O’Byrne, now living in Shetland but self-evidently of Hibernian extraction, though she lent her affectingly raw yet honeyed vocals to a set of mainly country-folk material.

Armagh-born Derby herself, backed here by O’Connor, Lupari, guitarist Gerard Thompson, bassist Nicky Scott and Cormac O’Kane on keyboards, comes from a long line of traditional singers, a heritage acknowledged in her compellingly hushed, fragile opening rendition of “She Moved Through The Fair”. The ensuing punchy, bluesy “Sick, Sore and Tired”, however, proved more representative of her largely self-penned material, which also drew on jazz, Americana and pop influences, occasionally straying towards MOR, Mary Black-ish territory but showcasing a tremendous voice, variously reminiscent of Mary Chapin Carpenter and early Tina Turner. Derby won extra points, too, for the brave feat of pulling off a Sugababes cover at a folk festival, her huskily seductive version of “About You Now” also being surely the first to feature tremolo banjo accompaniment.

O’Connor and Lupari – both established Shetland favourites from previous visits with Four Men and a Dog – then reappeared, joined again by Thompson on guitar. With this line-up replicating the instrumentation of O’Connor’s regular trio, his extraordinary facility on tenor banjo formed the centrepiece of their set, holding the entire audience, from pre-schoolers to pensioners, utterly rapt with its synthesis of dazzling, multi-layered intricacy and formidable propulsive drive. Besides his similarly virtuosic bodhran work (and hilarious comic asides), Lupari contributed a fine vocal performance on “Pretty Fair Maid in the Garden”, as learned from Tim O’Brien, while O’Connor switched to fiddle for the dreamily graceful old-time waltz “Song for PJ”.

Extending the Irish connection into its American diaspora, the young Louisiana family quartet L’Angelus were not only fresh from touring the Emerald Isle, but also trace part of their lineage back there, a link commemorated in a bittersweet self-penned ballad, “The Waltz of St Cecilia” and a gorgeously harmonised old Irish hymn, “Be Thou My Vision”. The four elder Rees siblings (there are four more at home) who make up the band – Katie, Paige, Stephen and Johnny – between them play fiddle, accordion, guitar, bass, saxophone and drums, with the first three also sharing lead vocal duties.

Though still only in their 20s, they’ve been performing together for 15 years, their mother being a professional singer who took them on tour from an early age. The result was a jaw-dropping breadth and maturity of musicianship that made them one of the weekend’s biggest hits, from the sisters’ bewitchingly dulcet, Alison Krauss-like vocals to Stephen’s showstopper, “Genevieve”, a wilfully hammed-up “swamp pop” number in which he seemed to be channelling Elvis, Tom Jones and James Brown all at once. Their native cajun sounds were only one element of a repertoire encompassing country, pop, blues, folk and even ska flavours, delivered with a polish and pizzazz that mark them out for major success.

Even the festival’s first ever Polish visitors, the Silesian seven-piece Beltaine, included Irish elements in their intriguing Celtic/east European mix. Fiddle, whistle, bombarde, Galician bagpipes, accordion, bouzouki, tablas, bodhran, guitar and bass all featured among their dozen-plus instruments, plus vocals, liberally souped-up with pedal effects and electronic samples. An array of trancey groove-based soundscapes often brought Shooglenifty and the Peatbog Faeries to mind, albeit without quite the same multi-layered interactive finesse – though this is a significantly newer band – but with plenty of distinctive textures and juxtapositions, also revealing Breton, Turkish, gyspy and reggae influences.

Altogether a truly exemplary Shetland opening night: five high-quality acts, ranging up to exceptional, each very different from the others, each duly rewarded with both close audience attention and fervently sustained applause. For the performers – especially Shetland first-timers, and most of all for those sent off around the islands – Day 1 of this festival (having stumbled off the boat at 7am, following the previous night’s traditionally mammoth onboard session) can seem a very long day indeed, but then they have a gig like this and it’s immediately all worthwhile.

Eilidh Mackenzie (photo by Dougie Coulter, used with permission)

Undisputed winners of the weekend’s most-travelled prize, however, were the Scotland’s Islands posse, which first played in Lerwick on the Thursday, bringing together artists from the Western Isles (Gaelic singer-songwriter Eilidh Mackenzie, with her band), Orkney (Wrigley and the Reel) and Shetland itself (multi-instrumentalist whizzkid Ryan Couper, with visiting guitarist/accordionist Tim Edey).

After subsequent journeys spanning almost the longest distance it’s possible to go in Shetland, their odyssey culminated with them all merged into one band for Sunday’s Foy concerts back in town – these being three marathon shows, each featuring a quarter-hour slot slot by every visiting act (typically numbering around 15) and collectively representing another annual triumph of Swiss-watch organisation.

Long before that, though, it was off to Unst on Friday, a five-hour round trip to the topmost populated extreme of UK soil, including two inter-island ferry crossings both there and back. Not only, for many concerned, was this the ideal way and place to spend the day of a certain nuptial occasion, but weather-wise it was also a day of rare clemency – which, indeed, prevailed for the entire weekend: cloudlessly sunny, and minus the usual sharp-edged wind, so actually T-shirt warm.

In its burgeoning spring garb – daffodils only just past their peak up here, primroses and celandines in full bloom, marsh irises sprouting thickly – Shetland’s undulating, largely treeless landscape, continually encroached by glittering fjord-like fingers of ultramarine sea, was illumined in all its stark, understated beauty, complete with frolicking lambs and tiny Shetland foals.

As a soundtrack to the unfolding views, the tunes on the bus got started before we were halfway there – and later continued all the way back to Lerwick, by way of warm-up for the late-night melée of the Festival Club. On this particular trip, there was a particularly riotous 20-minute session on the car-deck of the second return ferry, when the Unst concert party converged with the one who’d been playing in Yell, the next island down.

Tunes included a suitably irreverent blast of “Here Comes the Bride”, segueing into “Marie’s Wedding”, after which piper Fred Morrison, one of the Yell squad, played his fellow passengers off the boat on foot, marching down the ramp past helplessly laughing crewmen, to be picked up at the roadside by their benignly tolerant coach-driver.

Between times, a gem of a concert at the 100-capacity North Unst Public Hall, in the township of Haroldswick, vividly highlighted the vitality of Scotland’s island cultures within its contemporary folk scene. As home ambassador, Couper was first up, not only exemplifying the rude health of Shetland’s famous fiddle tradition, but also parading his prodigious fingerpicking prowess on guitar, while Edey’s honorary-local status for the weekend – after several previous festival visits – and delighted high-wire sparring with his younger partner, underlined how and why these particular islands are such a magnet for the world’s top musicians.

In selecting material mainly from her two most recent Gaelic song-suites, Bel Canto and Saoghal Sona, Mackenzie – sensitively backed by Gordon Gunn on fiddle and mandolin, guitarist Christopher Marra and bassist Ged Grimes – delivered a vibrant demonstration of these compositions’ individual strengths. Their ambitious yet radiantly harmonious mingling of diverse musical styles enabled them easily to stand alone within a regular concert set, alongside such traditional fare as a spine-tingling a cappella 16th century lament.

Having recently released their first new album in a decade, Idiom, Orcadian twins Jennifer and Hazel Wrigley – who’ve had their hands somewhat full in the interim, building up their successful music school and session/performance space, The Reel, in Kirkwall – sounded ready and raring to be back on the live stage. The Reel in this latter context denoted their accompanists, guitarist Ian Mackay and accordionist Billy Peace, though as ever it was the sisters’ fiddle, guitar and piano work that supplied the performance’s central, scintillating dynamic, feinting and parrying and creatively goading one another to exquisite heights of artistry, in between playfully fuelling Orkney and Shetland’s traditional rivalry.

Findlay Napier and the Bar Room Mountaineers (photo by Dougie Coulter, used with permission)

The trip down to Fair Isle, where the same bill was scheduled the next night, involves a two- or three-hour sea journey that even locals often baulk at, traversing as it does a meeting of the North Sea and the Atlantic within a 25-mile channel. The beneficent weather continued, however, and with tunes once again resounding from bus and boat throughout both legs of the journey, to distract from the ever-present tidal swell, even the worst sailors in the line-up arrived back on Sunday aglow and inspired, after an unforgettable night’s craic and hospitality with Britain’s remotest island community.

With no room aboard for extra passengers – even the festival committee rep for the gig had to double as crew to squeeze on – I headed firstly for Saturday night’s big show at the Clickimin Centre in Lerwick, whose vast main sports hall, kitted out with a correspondingly heavyweight PA system, offers an impressive contrast to those cosy rural venues.

Kicking things off in simultaneously local and exotic fashion were the home-grown, colourfully costumed Afro/Latin troupe Aestaewast, who combined salsa and samba drumming, African chant and dance, in a display of tremendous verve and gusto. They were followed by another of this year’s most popular festival debutants, St Louis combo Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three. Cooking up a superbly slick, technically top-notch blend of early jazz, jug-band, ragtime, Western swing and jump-jive sounds, seasoned with plenty of vintage grit and effervescent showmanship, their line-up featured resonator guitars, harmonica, washboard, upright bass and vocals, topped off with LaFarge’s powerhouse vocals and his bandmates’ tight, breezy harmonies.

A hard act to follow, for most musicians, but the aforementioned Fred Morrison seemed blithely unfazed, settling in with Steve Byrne on bouzouki and Matheu Watson on guitar to deliver a set of awesome authority, himself switching between Highland pipes, uilleann pipes and low whistle; between high-speed flights of pyrotechnic improvisation and potently articulated slower tunes.

Back in the centre of town, there was more red-blooded piping to the fore as Breabach rounded off the bill amid the very different but equally buoyant Saturday-night ambience of the Lerwick British Legion. With their second album, The Desperate Battle of the Birds, now a good year under their belts, and fifth member James Lindsay, on double bass, likewise well bedded in, the band’s arrangements and stagecraft were both precisely honed and supremely relaxed, their sound by turns thrillingly fiery and silkily delicate.

As well as the chance to see your favourite festival acts once more, Sunday night’s Foys let you sample those you’ve otherwise missed. One particular highlight in the latter category was a terrifically ebullient turn from Findlay Napier and the Bar Room Mountaineers, showcasing tracks from their imminent new album File Under Fiction, with Napier’s magnificent voice and character-driven roots/pop songcraft complemented by taut, blues’n’boogie-tinged arrangements.

Others included two bands from this year’s Scandinavian contingent: the quartet led by Danish fiddle maestro Harald Haugaard, also featuring the luminous, bell-like vocals of his wife Helene Blum, and Swedish/Norwegian instrumental quintet Sver, making a considerable impression on their UK debut with a dense, surging, muscular mesh of fiddle, Hardanger fiddle, viola, mandolin, accordion, guitar and percussion.

Having made the most of the weekend’s punishing nocturnal schedule – sessions at the Festival Club for the first few small hours, continuing in local kitchens and living-rooms until well into the next day – Sver also took top honours for the pithiest summing-up of their experiences. “We’d like to play this first set as a tribute to the Shetland Folk Festival,” they began. “We call it ‘Total Carnage’.”

© Sue Wilson, 2011

Links

• Shetland Folk Festival
• Dougie Coulter’s Shetland Festival Photostream