root salad f24 RANT
Four fine fiddlers from Shetland and the Highlands in a 700 year old church. ‘Well, yes,’ says Tim Chipping.
J
ohn Peel believed that the next record he heard would be the best record he’d heard, despite persistent evidence to the contrary. Expectation of disappointment seems a better way to proceed, heightening the elation on hearing something that’s evidently better than everything else. The debut album from RANT is such a record. Four of our very best fiddle players (two from Shetland, two from the Highlands) playing the very best tunes (ancient and modern) in arrangements that leave no emotion un-tugged, performed to a standard that sets the bar so high it’s partially obscured by clouds. All recorded in Cromarty’s 700-year-old East Church, a building so richly contributory to the sound that it becomes a fifth instrument.
Bethany and Jenna Reid (they’re relat- ed) and Lauren MacColl (she isn’t) are slurp- ing soup around a table in Edinburgh when I meet them. Fourth member Sarah-Jane Summers is at home in Norway. They’ve not seen each other in months. With each musi- cian so busy, and renowned in their own right, what made you become RANT?
Jenna begins: “Bethany and I were at The Niel Gow Festival. We gave Sarah-Jane a lift back to the train station and we were talking about how we never get the opportunity to play tunes together; we’re always just passing each other.”
“It didn’t start off in a serious way,” Lauren continues. “It was just wanting to see what it sounded like playing as a unit. We didn’t have gigs or an album in mind. We were just enjoying the sound of it.”
You must’ve been aware of combining quite a considerable amount of talent, though?
“What you’re saying is quite extreme,” says Lauren. “But maybe there’s an under- lying thing of having like-minded aspira- tions for our music, and so we’d fit togeth- er. I had an admiration for the attention to detail and the serious nature of what they were doing. And that’s something I think we all share. We want to make the music we make, not necessarily for anyone to be entertained by or to put on a show…”
You’re really selling it!
“It’s about not putting any thought into it being some kind of product. It’s music we would make naturally.”
Four fiddle players and no one sings; it
doesn’t scream Cambridge Festival head- liner. Did you think it might only be of interest to other fiddle players?
“Maybe,” ponders Bethany. “You have to think differently and think a bit harder. And that’s a good thing. That’s why we’ve been doing it.”
When someone speaks, everyone else eats soup. Lauren puts down her spoon…
“I was very conscious that if we were going to make an album that stood up to albums with big production then it had to be really well thought out. That’s why we spent two years intensively rehearsing and finding our sound, and making sure every- thing had weight behind it.”
There’s a tendency for traditional musicians to view albums as simply some- thing to sell after gigs – little more than nicely recorded versions of their live reper- toire, but RANT is a serious and considered album.
“We didn’t want to just play anything,”
affirms Jenna, “and just shove reels and jigs together.”
“W Told you.
“East Church was special to us because it was our first ever gig; we had an emo- tional attachment to the place. We played in the space and the space gave us just as much back.”
How do you record space?
“The bulk of the album was done around just two microphones. But because we all have different projections of our own sound then we miked the fiddles indi- vidually just to boost little melody lines. But the bulk of the album is just the two.”
Given that you had no intention of entertaining people…
“Can we rephrase that? You know what I meant.”
…were you surprised by the finished recording?
“It was lovely to hear it played back in the church for the first time,” beams Bethany. “The engineer, Ian Hutchison, was in this tiny little room off the back and it was freezing cold…”
“Bringing Ian all the way up to Cro-
marty,” recalls Lauren, “we didn’t know if there might be problems. And then hearing the first track played back… I think that was a settling moment for everyone. Because then it was like, ‘He gets this. He gets the music.’ And it just felt like it was going to work. “If we were wanting to capture something then I think it was the dynamic possibilities of what we could do. And we could do that in East Church. I don’t think that would’ve come across in a studio.”
Jenna’s take on the success of RANT is slightly different…
“It’s such a compliment that people have enjoyed the album. But for me it was never about anything except trying to make it excellent.”
If only it were that easy, we’d never be disappointed again.
www.rantfiddles.com F
e’ve done that our whole lives in some form or other, you know?” nods her sister. “And there’s
nothing wrong with that. But it was just the opportunity to start from zero and make an album that’s different from anything we’ve done before.”
But it’s more than just the choice of
tunes. RANT has a sound, a presence almost. Was that a conscious decision?
“One of the main things about our sound is the resonance,” Lauren explains, “because we’re not competing with any chordal instrument. The resonance is like our fifth member.”
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