Folk Features

Caoimhin O Raghallaigh      Karan Casey      Angus Lyon & Ruaridh Campbell      

Jenna Reid        Lauren MacColl       Paddy Glackin

 

Caoimhin O Raghallaigh - A diddly dee-free zone

Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms will be thronged from Friday to Sunday this weekend as fiddle players and listeners alike gather to celebrate the continuing popularity of the instrument and its music in the capital’s annual fiddle festival. It was at a gathering similar to this that a young musician had his enthusiasm re-fired by a group of players his own age, a re-firing that has led to Caoimhin O Raghallaigh emerging as arguably the most fascinating Irish musician of his generation.
 
There’s a tendency for those who don’t care for traditional fiddle music – and some who do but with a more ironic inflection – to refer to it as “diddly dee” music. O Raghallaigh doesn’t do “diddly dee”. He can and loves to play all the traditional tune types with great skill but his mission goes beyond the tradition. His belief is that people without any interest or background in traditional music can be drawn into fiddle music and his approach is more that of a poet with sound. There’s a bit of the poet with words in the thirty-year-old Mr O Raghallaigh, too.
 
“Making music is like painting sound onto a canvas of time,” he says in a quote that, if he hasn’t already done so, he should copyright pronto.
 
O Raghallaigh was once almost lost to making music. Growing up in Dublin with parents who didn’t play instruments but had spent much of their courtship driving for miles around County Clare to see concertinist Noel Hill and fiddler Tony Linnane and bands like Planxty, the Chieftains and the Bothy Band, he was accustomed to hearing Irish traditional music through the many LPs there were at home. One particular musician, however, captured his imagination. Hearing a young John Kelly playing The Marino Waltz, a tune composed by The Dubliners’ John Sheahan, on a TV commercial, O Raghallaigh decided that he, too, should play the fiddle.
 
After much pleading for fiddle lessons, his mother took him to the classes that traditional music advocates Comhaltas ran nearby but, at eight, he was considered too young at the time and was told to come back in two years. The pleading continued, so his mother tried a classical violin teacher.
 
“I arrived for my first lesson full of enthusiasm, with a manuscript copy of The Marino Waltz in my hand,” says O Raghallaigh. “The teacher was horrified by this piece of music. Instead of nurturing my enthusiasm, she turned it to stone in double
quick time, I'm afraid. Inspiring she was not. Her final comment to my mother was:
‘You're wasting your money and my time. He'll never be a musician.’”

And that might have been that but for his parents, two years later, taking him to a festival in Gormanstown, where he heard a bunch of young fiddlers sounding – he thought – great and having a lot of fun. Another teacher was found who, this time, opened the door to the world of Irish music, including sessions where the youngster would sit with a group of much older, wiser heads, playing as quietly as possible with his ear to his instrument, trying to fit into the rhythms of jigs, reels, hornpipes, polkas and slides.
 
In his mid teens O Raghallaigh began to feel, much as he loved playing the fiddle and by this time, the tin whistle and flute, too (he later added the uilleann pipes), that the music he was playing was lifeless.
 
“I realised that nobody was going to teach me how to change that,” he says. “It was up to me to figure it out for myself. So I went in search of music that really excited me. I tried to immerse myself totally in it and try to grasp some fundamental difference between it and the music I was making.”
 
His quest took him, after leaving school, to a transition year work experience post in the Irish Traditional Music Archives in Dublin where, while working as an archivist, he was able to listen over and over to old recordings, especially of fiddle players from the Sliabh Luachra district on the Cork-Kerry border, County Clare musicians including fiddler Patrick Kelly and piper Willie Clancy, and sean-nos - or old style – singers.
 
All through his student years at Trinity College, where he graduated in theoretical physics, O Raghallaigh continued working in the archives during the holidays and continued to immerse himself in the tradition.
 
“The thing that really interested me about truly great traditional music was not the notes I heard, but how it made me feel and the state of mind it created in you as a listener,” he says. 
 
Not for him, then, the pursuit of speed as a means of making traditional music more exciting.
 
“Well, if the thing that interests you about traditional music is the notes, then it makes perfect sense that you'd want to play as many of them as possible, as fast as possible,” he says. “But if the thing that interests you is the state of mind created, I think it makes sense to create the kind of music I'm creating now. There are many other aspects of the tradition that are integral to the music I make, aspects which many other people have not chosen to keep, such as a particular sense of time and space, an idiosyncratic and internally coherent sense of intonation, and an unsterilised idea of what constitutes acceptable tone. I think of music much more in terms of sound than in terms of notes.” 

In this he shares an approach with Norwegian fiddler Nils Okland, whose tour earlier this year for the Scottish Arts Council’s Tune-up programme proved a revelation. O Raghallaigh and Okland also share a common instrument, the Norwegian hardanger fiddle, to which O Raghallaigh was introduced while working on a particle accelerator project in America in 2000. With its wide tonal range and the effect of its sympathetic strings, which allow O Raghallaigh to incorporate the drones of the uilleann pipes into his fiddle playing, the hardanger might have been invented for the new music, albeit music that comes from deep in the tradition, that he is creating.
 
“Nils and me are not the only ones doing this,” he says. “All over the world, in other folk music traditions, there are people writing really interesting contemporary music which is very obviously directly related to folk music but isn’t necessarily folk music. My album Where the One-Eyed Man Is King opened up a whole new listenership. They don't need a background in traditional music to get it. So I'm trying to communicate to people who might have switched off."

 

Karan Casey - Finding a new way with tradition

Twenty minutes into her set onstage at the ABC in Glasgow, Karan Casey is about to send shivers down her audience’s collective spine.
 
The singer from Ballyduff, just outside Waterford, has done this before - often. There was the time when, bunged up with the flu, she dragged herself out of her hotel bed to play a Celtic Connections concert and sang as if her life depended on it. That was special. This time is different.
 
With a trilogy of songs that date back to the Irish rebellion of 1798 and with no preamble, Casey presents a clear, heartfelt reminder of the human cost of war. The message, that this is still going on, is unspoken but palpable. It’s brilliant theatre, like something from a Brecht-Weill cabaret, and elevates traditional music from its clichéd “here’s a wee song” style of presentation, even if its political point is one that Casey feels no-one should have to be making any more.
 
“For a long time I’ve felt that we have to bring traditional songs into the twenty-first century,” she says down the line from her home in Cork. “The way they’re presented hasn’t really changed in forty years and for me, we need a new way to approach them. A lot of them are big songs, they’re addressing serious subjects that have as much relevance, if not more, today as they did when they were written, and there’s a dramatic element to them that we could bring out more. I don’t mean doing them with big light shows and stuff, but by creating a mood with different instrumentation and keeping it going to give more impact.”
 
At one point as she was working on the trilogy idea, Casey suggested to her band that they might run the whole first set into one long piece. This was met with looks of horror and she decided not to pursue the matter. But as someone who holds strong political beliefs but isn’t about to go onstage and talk about them (that’s not the way she was brought up, she says), the 1798 trilogy has become a pivotal part of her concerts, the bit she lives for, she concedes.
 
 Casey has been singing for as long as she can remember. At school, at parties and at church she was always put forward for a song, which would mostly be the parlour variety that she learned from her grandmothers. Traditional music came later, through a woman she describes as an inspiration, a teacher, mother of ten and self-sufficient gardener who lived up the road and encouraged Casey’s interest in singing by playing her ballads and old love songs.
 
At college in Dublin a friend gave her Ella Fitzgerald’s Cole Porter Songbook album as a birthday present and for the next few years Casey, mesmerised by Fitzgerald’s adventurous approach to songs, devoured the female jazz singer catalogue. For a while she sang jazz in Dublin cafes and bars but while singing jazz taught her about putting herself into a song and making songs her own, she shies away from any notion that she might be a jazz singer these days.
 
It was while living in New York, in the mid 1990s, having gone there to escape unemployment back home and to study at Long Island University, that Casey the traditional singer really began to flourish. In one of Manhattan’s many Irish bars she met Seamus Egan, an American-born Irish musician who, unbeknownst to Casey, had already established quite a reputation, and Winnie Horan, who had played fiddle with Irish-American favourites Cherish the Ladies, and they started to play gigs together. Egan’s name, plus the small detail that he’d been All-Ireland champion on whistle, flute, banjo and mandolin and making albums since his teens, seemed to open doors and soon, Solas, as the band they formed was named, were touring all over the US.
 
“I got absolutely everything from Solas,” says Casey. “Before I met these people, who it turned out lived in the same street as me, I knew nothing about stagecraft or how to approach recording sessions. It was like having a crash course in being a professional musician and just the most valuable experience I could have asked for.”
 
By the time she left in 1999, Solas were the major draw on the Irish-American music scene and Casey had a burgeoning solo career, with a voice that can be delicate as well as tough and a choice of material that, although she’s not a songwriter herself, speaks on her own behalf. Her recording of Joni Mitchell’s late 1960s folksong The Fiddle and the Drum, for example, on her latest album, Ships in the Forest, is a classic case of an interpretative singer finding a song that expresses exactly what she’s thinking.
 
“The Fiddle and the Drum is another one of those songs that, although it’s brilliant, we shouldn’t have to be singing these days,” she says. “But sometimes we can only sing certain songs when we’ve reached a level of maturity. It takes a depth of experience to do justice to them and have people believe what you’re singing.”
 
From The Herald, April 16, 2009
 

Angus Lyon & Ruaridh Campbell - 'We want to see where we can take tunes'

Album credits can forge strange liaisons. What, for example, might bring Mull Building Supplies and Astor Piazzolla, the late Argentinean genius of new tango, into the same orbit?

The answer is 18 Months Later by Angus Lyon and Ruaridh Campbell, which is currently grabbing both the traditional music and world music scenes by the ears.

It’s an album full of invention, energy, musicality, subtlety, great ideas and the sheer joy of making music, and sings out ‘stunning music alert’ from the first track.

Mary Ann Kennedy, presenter of BBC Radio Scotland’s Global Gathering and a singer and musician herself, has made it a personal cause celebre, chivvying colleagues in London to check it out and play it.

Promoter and festival programmer Billy Kelly, who introduced the sensational Cuban pianist Omar Sosa and French double bass phenomenon Renaud Garcia-Fons to Scottish audiences, gave 18 Months Later one listen and immediately booked Lyon & Campbell for Glasgow’s world music extravaganza, Big Big World in October.

In this writer’s humble opinion, it’s the album that Astor Piazzolla might have made had he been Scottish.

Piazzolla doesn’t actually get mentioned on the 18 Months Later cover; his enterprising spirit is tacit, though, on the brilliantly realised, epic variations on the traditional tune Drowsy Maggie that forms the album’s centrepiece, and in conversation, Lyon and Campbell concede that his influence has been "massive."

As for Mull Building Supplies, without them 18 Months Later might never have happened because this is a story about music borne of an old tradition being brought to listeners by means of twenty-first century technology. If only James Scott Skinner, whose lovely Bovaglie’s Plaid closes the album with a trumpet and flugelhorn chorale, had had a laptop.

Lyon and Campbell are slightly bemused by the response they’ve had to the album.

"My parents are the acid test for whether things are any good or not," says Lyon, an accordionist and pianist from Lamington, near Biggar, who came up through the Scottish country dance band scene. "And my dad wasn’t all that keen. He’d have a preferred it if we’d just stuck to playing jigs and reels, but that was exactly what we didn’t want to do. There’s any number of bands doing that, and doing it so well that we can’t possibly improve on it. So we wanted to take tunes and develop them, see where we could take them."

The genesis for a wealth of different arrangements – from the languid, jazzy Fender Rhodes feel of The Trains (Live from NYC) to the bodhran as tablas romp that is Connor’s Reel – was the pair’s meeting in dance band The Picts in 1999.

"I think I was still at school or had just left," says Aberfoyle-born Campbell, fiddler, violist and graduate of Strathclyde University’s BA Music course. "And we were playing at weekends to make some money. Then Angus put a band together to promote his Long Road CD in 2001 and we were touring Germany when we found that the bit that really excited us most was our duo spot. We just seemed to have a natural rapport. So we started working on that. I’d bring in things I’d written at uni and …"

Lyon finishes the sentence for him by joking that they were impossible to play. "But that kind of thinking," Lyon continues, "where you’re forced to play in a completely different way, has been really important to the way this music’s developed. There are no rules and we take ideas from wherever we find them."

Their first album, Simple Tricks, released by Scottish folk label KRL in 2003 was musically to their liking but didn’t exactly fly from the racks. So they decided to go DIY for 18 Months Later.

"We knew that if we tried to do it in Glasgow, we’d play something, have a beer and wind up having about half an hour’s work to show for the whole day," says Lyon. "So we booked the room at An Tobar Arts Centre on Mull for three days because we like the sound you get there and the people at the arts centre are so helpful."

Armed with their laptops and all the microphones, cables and instruments they needed, and with the incentive of having to justify paying for self-catering accommodation too, they arrived in Tobermory and set to work. Only for the soundcard, the crucial piece of technology for computer recording and the one item for which they had no back-up, to develop a click.

"It turned out it was knackered," explains Campbell in suitable layman’s terms. Mull doesn’t run to a shop that stocks state of the art recording equipment. So phone calls were made. Lots of them.

Sound Control in Glasgow agreed to supply a replacement soundcard if they could find someone to get it to Mull. Colin Train, whose brother Alan later added guitar parts, was located in Edinburgh with a car, half a tank of petrol and absolutely no means of funding the return trip. Money was then wired to his bank account so that he could pick up the soundcard in Glasgow and drive to the ferry terminal, whereupon Mull Building Supplies’ van driver agreed to deliver the soundcard to a frazzled Lyon, Campbell and bass player Duncan Lyall.

The recording went ahead with spectacular results, but their technological troubles weren’t over. Just after Lyon pressed "save" to consign the finished album to his hard drive, artwork by Campbell included, his laptop crashed. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of the external hard drive, they were able to rescue the whole package.

"To lose it after all we’d been through with the soundcard, wouldn’t bear thinking about," says Lyon. "But I listen to the album now and I don’t think we could have improved on it sound-wise if we’d recorded it conventionally in a studio. After Mull, we went round to various people’s living rooms and added the guitar, tin whistle, bodhran and horns. You know, we arrive at Alan Train’s, have spaghetti hoops on toast and he’s put down exactly what we want within forty minutes. Then Duncan [Lyall, bassist] mixed it in his living room. The only time we went to a studio was to have the album mastered."

The next step now is to take the music from 18 Months Later out on the road. A band has been formed, with Lyall on bass and Colin Train, the hero of the replacement soundcard sharing the accordion and piano parts with Lyon, and rehearsals are under way.

Marketing themselves, both in terms of the album and as a live attraction, as they’ve found, is a steep learning curve, however. There’s also the small matter of keeping enough money to live on coming in while they run up phone bills calling venues, promoters and the like.

"We’re fortunate in that we do quite a lot of work for Yehudi Menuhin’s Live Music Now! Scheme," says Campbell, who could have gone into orchestral work after Strathclyde but preferred to follow his original passion for traditional music which saw him compete successfully in Mods and win the prestigious Glenfiddich Fiddle Championship in 2002.

Live Music Now! takes them into the community to play to people with learning difficulties and into hospices and hospitals.

"It’s very much one to one with the audience and it really helps you to learn how to communicate with people, explaining where your music comes from and the stories behind it. That’s really valuable training," says Campbell. "Although sometimes you might not get the reaction you hoped for."

The pair go on, with typical self-deprecation, to describe an incident where one patient was trying to get them to give up their chairs so that she could use them as crutches to help her make her escape from their concert.

The former Cat Stevens, Yusuf Islam has been more appreciative, inviting Lyon to play on his new album and occasional concerts on double bassist Danny Thompson’s recommendation.

If Lyon’s father has still to be won over by 18 Months Later, his mother has at least stopped asking when he’s going to get a proper job since Angus phoned her from a rehearsal with Yusuf Islam.

"We were doing an Adopt A Landmine concert and Paul McCartney was going to be there, too, so Yusuf Islam said he’d sing Let It Be. Except, he didn’t know all the words."

Lyon phoned home, got his mother to Google Let It Be and recite the words off the computer screen, after which she was treated to the man she knew as Cat Stevens singing the song down the line to her personally. So now she thinks Angus is doing okay?

"Actually, it might have backfired," says Lyon. "She thinks, because I’m hanging out with big stars, that suddenly I’m loaded. And nothing could be further from the truth."

18 Months Later by Angus Lyon & Ruaridh Campbell is available on Mirrlees Records, from record shops or direct from www.anguslyon.co.uk

From The Herald, July 24, 2006

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Jenna Reid – The sound of Shetland’s bow belle

Jenna Reid has been shopping. But we’re not retail therapy or even a splurge on some new clothes to wear on stage, although the Shetland fiddler has definite views about the importance of musicians looking their best for an audience.

The latest object of her affection is a brand new fiddle, which she encountered on the first leg of the Three Countries of Folk tour that sees her representing Scotland, alongside London-based singer and fiddler Lisa Knapp and Welsh harper and singer Gwenan Gibard, across the UK.

As we speak, money hasn’t actually changed hands yet. There may be bank managers involved and financial projections to organise. But the instrument has clearly made a big impression.

"It’s the first time that something’s come close to giving me the same feeling I get from playing my old one," she says. "So, yeah, I’m doing my sums."

Given that her old fiddle was made in 1813 and has been in her possession since she was ten – she’s now twenty-five – this new arrival, which Reid tried out in its maker’s workshop in Lincoln, has quite a history to compete with.

Reid, who many commentators rate as the finest fiddler in Scotland of her generation, was given her first fiddle at the age of nine – the 1813 model was found in her granny’s attic and restored a year later. Willie Hunter, a Shetland fiddling legend, was coming to the primary school at Quarff to give lessons, and Reid needed little encouragement. There would be no playground teasing for anyone carrying a violin case in this village on the south of the Shetland mainland, because the non-fiddlers would have been in a tiny minority.

"Quarff only had about two or three hundred people living in it then – there are more people there now because, being rural but with beautiful beaches and only ten minutes drive from Lerwick, it’s become quite popular – and there were only twelve or fifteen pupils in my primary school class. And they all played. My mum played piano, so we’d all congregate in our house after school and play tunes. Then my sister, Bethany, started when she was five and my brother, Tom, took it up too and we formed the Quarff Fiddlers."

This small orchestra of primary school kids became a familiar sight and sound, playing local charity dos and Sunday teas. The serious gigging years were a little way off – but only a little way.

One of Reid’s most admired talents is her command of the slow air and the way she infuses these melodies with gracefulness, precision and a deep emotional connection. This she puts down to the influence of Willie Hunter, who although he died when she was just into secondary school, guided her through her formative years as a player.

"Some people have been kind enough to say that they can actually hear Willie’s style in my playing," she says. "I’d never claim that and I know I’ll never get even within touching distance of him as a musician. But I hope that whatever is there came from him because he was such an inspiration and an amazing character. Just to be around him and talk to him about music was special. Funnily enough, I don’t really remember him ever saying, You need to do this here or you should to do that there. The way of playing a tune just kind of seeped in by osmosis through years of listening to him.

"I’m so lucky to have had him as a teacher, not just because he could pull a slow air out of any old fiddle and make it sing, but because he made you look forward to lessons. I was getting private lessons from him as well as the lessons at school, so I’d see him twice a week and he was always so enthusiastic. You always knew that he’d have something great for you to learn, although lessons weren’t exactly organised. He’d play a few tunes and then open up a book of music and say, Play this one, and he’d sit and vamp along on the piano. I never had to be forced into practising because just being around him was all the motivation I needed."

When she was fourteen Reid won the Shetland Young Fiddler competition, an achievement she plays down, not least because sister Bethany later became, at twelve, the youngest ever winner. Besides, around the same time, a more universal marker of musical progress hoved into view: a CD with Filska, the band she’d formed with Bethany and their mum.

"The competition was more of a social thing, something to work towards without taking it too seriously, but when we got the chance to make an album, we couldn’t believe it. We’d been playing a lot. In fact, looking back, that’s all we ever seemed to be doing. So we were quite seasoned musicians even then, I suppose. But making an album; we were like, Wow."

Despite tours that took Filska away from Shetland and introduced them to the professional music world at large, Reid didn’t consider that playing the fiddle might be something she could do as a job. Her career ambitions lay in – she’ll probably thump me for sharing this – the police or in a helicopter crew, something full-on and adventurous.

"It was only when I discovered that you could study traditional music at the RSAMD in Glasgow that I thought, well, I could do this for a few years and see what happens," she says.

By the time she’d graduated from the RSAMD’s Scottish music course, she’d built up enough contacts through playing with bands, including Dochas, Deaf Shepherd and guitarist Kevin Mackenzie’s folk/jazz ensemble, Vital Signs, to turn professional. The folks back home worry about this precarious life, she says, but by supplementing playing work with a manageable number of private fiddle pupils, she’s even been able to buy a flat in Glasgow.

Here, when not on the road, she gets stuck into serious practising, although not, she concedes, as much as she should be doing.

"I play more fiddle than I’ve ever done before but there are other things like organising work that, if you’re not careful, can get in the way," she says. "When I can, I’ll play for hours and hours, just getting lost in old tunes and coming up with ideas for new ones. I think it’s important for a traditional musician to compose because as well as drawing on all the work that’s gone into that shared resource, you should leave behind something of your own."

While she and Kevin Mackenzie, who’s worked as her accompanist for some time now, travel the English motorways and visit Wales for the first time before bringing the Three Countries of Folk tour to Scotland, she’s trying out material for a new album to be recorded in September. She’s also picking up return bookings along the way from receptive promoters.

"The idea of the tour was to introduce each of the musicians to the other two’s home audiences and expand the market a bit," she says. "And it seems to be working. What I love about this tour and the work I’m doing generally is, every day’s different. You never know what’s going to happen or where something will lead. The other week, I was filming one of the Transatlantic Sessions for television and that came about just because I happened to get chatting to Aly Bain at a St Andrew’s Night concert in Edinburgh and he asked me if I fancied doing it. Although just playing this music is a thrill in itself, these sorts of things make it even more exciting."

From The Herald, May 8, 2008

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Lauren MacColl – Young fiddler with an old soul

Lauren MacColl considers the implications of the Classic Album status that Celtic Connections 2008 has attached to her debut CD, When Leaves Fall, and decides that as a marketing tool, it’s okay. As a statement of fact? Well, that’s another matter.

"I don’t think it means classic album in the same way that the Paul Brady & Andy Irvine album, which is in the same concert series, is a classic that’s stood the test of time," says the young fiddler from the Black Isle. "I’ve read articles where Donald Shaw has been asked to justify the description and it’s more a case of Maeve [singer Maeve Mackinnon who shares a Celtic Connections double bill with MacColl] and me being chosen as a representation of what’s been happening in traditional music this past year."

Outstanding though When Leaves Fall is – if The Herald had a Folk Album of the Year and this writer was allowed to chose it, its blend of timeless tradition and effortless modernity would have won – MacColl won’t be letting the classic album tag go to her head. Having won the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award in 2005, she’s aware of the lift such titles can give to a career but level-headed enough not to place too much importance on them.

"It’s definitely easier to promote yourself when you have something like the Young Folk Award attached to your name and that acted as a real spur for me," she says. "It made me work really hard at expanding my repertoire because I couldn’t have listened to more than ten minutes of myself at the time. And because you get gigs as part of the prize, suddenly you can phone people up and ask them to work with you, instead of saying, D’you fancy getting together for a tune? But I was also very aware that, within a year, somebody else would have the title and be getting all the attention I’d been getting."

MacColl was also very resistant to the pressure to release an album to cash in on her Young Folk success. She didn’t feel ready at the time and she’s glad that she waited, allowing time for the musicians she recorded When Leaves Fall with to really gel and for her playing to mature further, particularly with regard to the slow airs which are her passion and were part of the fiddle’s initial attraction.

She began classical violin lessons at the age of ten but she’d been pestering her parents for a fiddle ever since her grandparents started taking her to see Phil Cunningham and Aly Bain at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness every year from the age of six.

"I can remember going to these concerts and just loving it," she says. "At six, you might be expected to be restless but I would sit there mesmerised. I didn’t know the difference between classical violin and fiddle when I started but about a year after I began lessons, I went to Feis Ross and that really opened my eyes. I discovered that it was okay to learn tunes by ear and that put me on a different path."

She continued playing classical music with the schools orchestra and learning fiddle on trips to Skye and Stirling University, where Shetland fiddler Catriona Macdonald took a course. As she marked the calendar waiting for Feis Ross to come round again ("that’s how sad I was"), weekends were spent alternately searching for fiddle lessons and participating in highland dancing competitions. Something had to give. First it was the orchestra, who decided MacColl’s absences betrayed a lack of interest. Then it was a knee, which meant she had to retire from competitive dancing.

"At Feis Ross the tutors would be people like Iain MacFarlane and Allan Henderson, who were experienced players by then but still not all that far ahead of me in terms of age, and I found that inspiring," she says. "I suppose if I’d applied myself, I might have done Celtic Studies or something else academic but all I really wanted to do was play the fiddle."

The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow’s Scottish Music course beckoned and she cites her final year’s studies with the great Perthshire fiddler Pete Clark as invaluable experience. Clark, a real champion of slow airs, would work on MacColl’s phrasing with her in painstaking detail, spending a whole hour’s lesson on one bar of music.

"That’s what I needed to do," she says. "I really wanted to work on my tone and expression. Because although I love groups like Lau, who are really exciting, different every time and manage that feat of being both deep and playful, and I’m happy to dance myself silly to the Peatbog Faeries, that’s not necessarily what I feel at home with on the instrument. When I put a bow on a string I want to communicate rather than entertain."

Singers are a big influence, particularly Gaelic singers Kathleen MacInnes, Calum Alex MacMillan and James Graham, and she finds that she identifies more with their interpretation, ornamentation and the instrument-like tone of their voices than she does other fiddlers.

She’s also keen to delve deeper into the music of her native Ross-shire – an album drawn from The Highland Collection book of tunes with paintings and/or photographs of the places that the tunes inspired would, she says, be the ideal follow-up to When Leaves Fall.

"I think it’s important to feel a connection with where you come from through music," she says. "There were two fiddlers in my family before me, my great grandfather and my great uncle and there are tapes somewhere of my great uncle playing. So I’m always asking people to clear out their lofts."

Not so much Cash in the Attic as Cassettes in the Attic, perhaps, but a potential treasure hunt all the same.

From The Herald, January 7, 2008

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Paddy Glackin - Upholding the true fiddling tradition

Don't give up the day job is the time-honoured put-down for performers who don't cut the mustard. It would, however, be a brave heckler - not to mention a foolhardy and, yes, a deaf one - who uttered these words in the direction of Paddy Glackin.

Any such advice would also be pointless since, despite being one of the great upholders of the Irish fiddling tradition and a man spoken of in awe struck terms by fiddlers across the Celtic music spectrum, Paddy has no intention of giving up his day job. The original fiddler with the Bothy Band is currently weekend editor with RTE Radio 1 in Dublin and gets out to play as often as he wants for as long as he wants.

Truth to tell, unlike most of his peers in the 'Bothies' and the musicians who followed in the wake of the 1970s revival who have mostly gone on to careers where tours of here, there and everywhere are routine, Paddy was never enamoured of being a full-time musician.

"It just wasn't for me and I certainly never wanted to do the album, tour, album, tour thing," he says. "I can see the need for doing it, but I always found it a little false. When I go out to play, it's on my own terms. I look forward to it and I really enjoy doing it. But if I had to do it X times a year, I'd become a lot more cynical - and I'm cynical enough as it is."

For Paddy, there's more to playing traditional music than playing it as a professional performer. Careful lest he be seen to regard himself as a musical historian, he remains passionate about the idea of communication in music.

"It's not just about the notes or the words of a song, which are hugely important, of course," he says. "Giving people a context is also very important. Knowing where a tune is actually from, as well as the story behind it, can define its tempo, the embellishments you might add, the rhythm you play it in."

Paddy's love of fiddling and of the Irish tradition was instilled early. His father, Tom, a Dublin policeman originally from Dungloe in Donegal, played fiddle and Paddy and his brothers, Kevin and Seamus, followed suit, Paddy from the age of six.

"In those days in Dublin you didn't tell people you played the fiddle and you certainly didn't tell them you played reels and jigs because there was no social context," he says.

While classical violin lessons gave him an important technical grounding during his primary school years, the classes that gave him real insight into the styles he would later pursue happened more informally at home. Tom Glackin was friends with many musicians, including Seamus Carroll, Larry Redigan and Frank O'Higgins, who used to visit the Glackin household on Wednesday afternoons for a session.

A native of Cork, Carroll had also visited the United States and played with many outstanding fiddlers over there and he was particularly encouraging and helpful, showing the young Paddy the techniques and approaches involved in Sligo-style fiddling. Another fiddler, John Doherty, made a lasting impression on Paddy, reinforcing the Donegal style that Paddy learned from his father and would later "hoover up" on field trips, and through listening to fiddlers such as the great Sean Maguire and Clare-born John Kelly, he began to master a variety of Irish styles and amass a large repertoire.

If all this study and mixing with older players paints a picture of some musical equivalent of a bookworm, it shouldn't because at the same time Paddy was discovering a love of sport, Gaelic football and hurling in particular, which remains with him today. He still wouldn't talk about playing Irish music to the kids where he was growing up but as he grew older and began to mix with people his own age from other parts of the city, he realised he wasn't alone.

By the time he left school for college, Dublin's traditional music scene was vibrant, with sessions happening all over town and gigs there for the taking. Paddy fell in with accordionist Tony MacMahon, flautist Matt Molloy, uilleann piper Paddy Keenan, brother and sister Micheal O Domhnaill and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill, and the great alchemist of Irish music, Donal Lunny. Their group, Seachtar, became better known as the Bothy Band, one of the leading triumvirate of bands, alongside Planxty and De Dannan, which energised Irish music in the 1970s .

Paddy spent an enjoyable eighteen months with the Bothies before opting out along with MacMahon, who moved into broadcasting. After working as an archivist and as Traditional Music Officer for the Irish Arts Council, Paddy moved into broadcasting, too, joining RTE initially as a sports producer and presenter. That's the day job. At night and on leave, in the years since leaving the Bothy Band, he has continued to be regarded as one of the greatest fiddlers in Ireland and has become one of the few people who can list work with Van Morrison, Paul Brady, Kate Bush and American composer John Cage (Paddy toured Europe and America with Cage's Roaratorio) on their CVs.

He's never regretted leaving the Bothy Band. Indeed, when his replacement, the legendary Tommy Peoples, broke his hand, Paddy stepped back in and has continued to be friends with and play with his old colleagues. Although not what you'd call over-recorded, he went on to make one of the outstanding albums of its time, Doublin', with Bothies piper Paddy Keenan. Donal Lunny produced and played on Paddy's superb In Full Spate CD. And since guitarist Micheal O Domhnaill returned to Ireland in 1997 after many years living in America, he and Paddy have become musical partners, recording the appropriately named Athchuairt (it's Irish Gaelic for Reprise) album and touring as widely as America and Israel - in small doses.

"The thing about Micheal and myself is that, besides playing in the Bothy band together and not wanting to tour endlessly, we have so much in common," he says. "Our fathers came from the same, Gaelic speaking area of Donegal, and our mothers from the same part of Dublin. When Micheal was running around collecting songs in Donegal, I was running around hoovering up tunes there. He sang Scots Gaelic songs; I played Scots tunes. He was the first presenter of the television programme The Long Note, I was the third. And we're both absolutely passionate about sport. When we go out on a gig, it helps if there's a good golf course nearby, and if there's a football or hurling match on in the afternoon, so much the better."

They also have similar views on music. For Paddy, Irish - and Scottish - music has become too much concerned with ensemble performances of high octane tunes for a music that is essentially, he believes, a soloist's tradition.

"It's even spread into informal situations," he says. "You go to a session these days and it's a case of let's get in and play at two hundred miles an hour. There'll be twenty-five fiddlers and you can't hear yourself, let alone anyone else. It's wonderful that all these people have come into the music, and they genuinely love it, but that sort of thing's not much of an attraction for me.

"I don't have a problem with groups. Technically, the standard of musicianship you hear there is phenomenal, they've broadened the music's appeal and it's great that, these days, there's a lot more musicians able to earn a living playing this music. But I do passionately believe that the music we play in Ireland, and Scotland too, is a solo instrument tradition and, certainly in Ireland, there are just not the same opportunities to perform as a soloist. When I play, I'm not only remembering where the tune came from, I'm very conscious of pipers such as Seamus Ennis and their phrasing, or if it's a song air I'll be thinking about the words, and I don't happen to think that you can convey all that within an ensemble."

It's the emotional content that he fears for particularly as he regards traditional music as in danger of becoming a commodity, and with the passing of people such Jimmy McHugh, the patriarch of Irish music in Glasgow whom Paddy regarded as a beacon for traditional musicians, younger players are missing out on the personal links to the music's roots.

"It's a different age. People come to the music in a different way now," he says. "Our generation went to musicians and learned from them - and you could go to a player like John Kelly in Dublin, spend all night talking, never play a tune and yet learn so much from his stories. Nowadays there are CDs, the internet, people don't say, Here's a tune I learned from so and so; they say, Here's a tune I wrote. That's just the way it's evolving - and people have always written tunes, I know - otherwise we wouldn't have them, but I do miss the contact with musicians.

"I'm fascinated with the whole musical tradition. It's not all about the performance of the music on a stage. For me, that personal contact is very important. When I meet musicians I'm just as interested in speaking with them as listening to them play. It's about getting to know them and what shapes their music, what they're communicating. It's not about technique, its about where the music comes from and the social aspect, spending time together - that's where the real buzz comes from."

From The Living Tradition, January-February 2003

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