Broadford Airfield, Isle of Skye, 23-24 March 2012

EVEN after 19 years of its parent festival in Glasgow, now securely ranked among the world’s top music events, the Celtic Connections Big Top on Skye still represented a considerable leap in the dark.

WHILE the idea of an outdoor satellite event beyond the city has been mooted for some time, this first fruition came about thanks to additional backing from EventScotland, who partnered the proceedings both to round off the Scotland’s Islands promotion that began last spring, and to segue it into 2012’s Year of Creative Scotland.

The Civil Wars provided the weekend highlight

The former stipulation, despite the chosen weekend’s marking the official start of British Summer Time, made it perilously early in the year for a tented festival this far north – as was brutally underlined on the preceding Monday, when the production crew’s attempts to start marking out the site were repeatedly washed away by horizontal rain.

Not that they hadn’t made provision for adverse weather, with a sturdy square-framed marquee – more reliably watertight if less picturesque than a traditional big top – pitched on the tarmac runway at Broadford Airfield (the same site as the late lamented Skye Music Festival), prettily arrayed inside with strings of lights, and rendered positively cosy by powerful hot-air blowers.

Nonetheless, the beautifully still, balmy weather that prevailed felt authentically like a blessing, substantially boosting both the mellow festival ambience and the audience turnout. Advance ticket sales had been healthy enough, especially for a brand-new, unknown-quantity event, but there’d surely never have been such a sizeable walk-up over both days had it still been lashing with rain, with the total attendance guess-timated at around 1700.

The calibre of acts on the bill was well up to Celtic Connections’ famously high standards – this being, after all, the primary factor in drawing a crowd – dividing 50:50 between the Celtic and Americana camps. The Boston-based singer Aoife O’Donovan is the perfect poster-girl for bridging these two genres, her Irish heritage self-evident in her name, and her previous reputation derived from working with renowned contemporary stringband Crooked Still, though she’s soon to release her first solo album.

Given the combined pressures of making her UK headline debut in Friday’s opening slot, flanked only by a double bassist rather than her usual band, she’d have been forgiven for displaying a degree of nerves, but instead seemed – and sounded – delightedly in her element, ranging thrillingly from crystalline Appalachian heartbreak to gutsy, squally, blues/gospel fervour in an array of excellent self-penned material.

When O’Donovan invited alternative bluegrass combo The Deadly Gentlemen – who featured later the same night – to join her at the end of her set, she also set the tone for a string of such impromptu overlaps between acts, very much in the Celtic Connections spirit. Mavericks frontman Raul Malo – a late addition to the line-up, having had himself a blast on this year’s Transatlantic Sessions tour – performed most of his material in duo format with accordion virtuoso Michael Guerra, with these stripped-down arrangements showcasing his voluptuously splendid, incandescently emotive voice to full advantage.

But Malo then went the extra mile to make it a one-off occasion, summoning most of the Michael McGoldrick Band to beef up a brilliantly exuberant, country-meets-Latin-meets-Celtic version of the Mavericks’ best-known hit, Dance the Night Away. O’Donovan and The Deadly Gentlemen’s banjo ringleader, Greg Liszt, subsequently reappeared to cap a tremendous closing performance by McGoldrick et al – their first big-band gig for a couple of years, and all the fresher and tastier for the hiatus – with a superbly edgy, taut yet lush rendition of Gillian Welch’s classic Orphan Girl.

Also on Friday’s bill, Highlands and Islands powerhouse Mànran delivered a characteristically polished, powerful performance, with singer Norrie MacIver in stirringly fine voice. The absence of Ewen Henderson and Calum Stewart’s dual talents, however – on fiddle/Highland pipes and flute/uilleann pipes respectively, substituted here simply by a fiddler and a Scottish piper – noticeably diminished the distinctive breadth and diversity of their instrumental palette.

The Deadly Gentlemen’s set was also a slight disappointment – mainly because, in contrast to every other performance on both nights, their PA sound left much to be desired, so that while their instrumental prowess was abundantly apparent, the rap/talking-blues vocals which are their other key trademark were blurrily indistinct.

The Scottish contribution to the second night’s line-up was book-ended by the young generation, with six senior stars from Fèis Rois opening the show in sparkling style, joined for a couple of numbers by an equal number from the local Fèis an Earraich. Then closing out the festival later on in suitably pyrotechnic style were the firebrand quartet Niteworks, also originally from Skye though now based in Glasgow, and deservedly making waves with their heavyweight, high-energy blend of electronic dance music with Celtic instrumentation and vocals.

Between times, Dàimh also flew the Highland and Gaelic flag in richly assured style, expanding their six-piece line-up not only with pre-announced guest Karen Matheson, but Eilidh Shaw on an extra fiddle and Signy Jakobsdottir on percussion, plus two remaining members of McGoldrick’s band, namely bassist Ewen Vernal and Celtic Connections director Donald Shaw on keyboards.

Saturday’s Stateside contingent included Rosanne Cash, whose immaculately modulated singing seemed fractionally but tellingly short on spirit or animation – but perhaps that was simply in comparison to a truly revelatory performance earlier on by her double Grammy-winning compatriots The Civil Wars, aka Joy Williams and John Paul White, whose ecstatically twinned voices and spellbinding country-folk songcraft, backed only by White’s guitar, were the unforgettable highlight of an all-round memorable weekend.

© Sue Wilson, 2012

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