27 f The Afro-Celtic Connection
From Skye to Sarawak, the Peatbog Faeries are the ultimate festival band. Colin Irwin talked the talk in Glasgow while Judith Burrows got the seaside snaps.
the frankly inhospitable northern ele- ments, various strange characters drift in an out in varying degrees of excitement, exhaustion and headwear, wielding sus- piciously shaped cases, leading amused observers (ie me) to speculate whether they contain lethal weapons or some bizarre musical instrument (and if it’s a shruti box, whether it’s dead!)
W
Celtic Connections festival is in full flight and the city is in party mode, but this is the morning after the night before and, for some, it’s adrenalin alone and for others some inbuilt survival instinct sus- taining consciousness, if not energy levels.
Peter Morrison and Innes Hutton are propped up in the café area trying to piece together the blurry details of the previous evening. The earlier stuff is clear enough… a ferociously upbeat gig drenched in blaz- ing brass, flailing fiddle, pulsating pipes, rousing rhythms and unexpected twists of funky beats and African influences at a rammed O2 ABC theatre with the audi- ence inventing ever crazier dances in the land of Crazy. It’s Glasgow. It’s Celtic Con- nections. It’s Peatbog Faeries. That’s what happens here.
Having dumped their audience in a hopelessly frenzied state, the Faeries then reappeared at the late-night Walkabout club to immerse themselves in the festival’s more informal joyousness, playing deep into the night and at one point forming a monster supergroup with another of Scot- land’s rampaging Celtic big bands, the Treacherous Orchestra (as featured in last issue’s pages).
“Oh I dunno, about 5.30am,” groans Innes Hutton when you ask him what time he got to bed. “Woke up at 8.30 and couldn’t get back to sleep again. But it’s Celtic Connections…” He shrugs and laughs silently.
The coffee arrives. Peter Morrison is all over it immediately. Innes hesitates. He doesn’t drink coffee, see. The last time he had a coffee it was at the Scottish Tradi- tional Music awards and he wound up in A&E. It’s the only time he’s ever missed a Peatbog Faeries gig. “I was having œsophageal spasms from the vagus nerve which meant my heart was slowing down and I was passing out. So I stopped drink- ing coffee and eating hot food and changed my diet. It worked…”
e’re in Scotland. Glasgow, apparently. And, at this precise moment, the Novotel Hotel in Pitt Street. Bundled up against
That was four years ago and he has-
n’t drunk coffee since. But hey, needs must and after several minutes contem- plating his cup and staring longingly at the coffee, he remembers how tired he is, sighs deeply and with the look of an errant schoolboy nicking a packet of Love Hearts from the sweet counter, pours guiltily and takes a generous glug. The Novotel holds its breath.
If this was a film now, the screen would go silent and the action would switch to slow motion as a waitress dropped a tray, spilling blancmange over some uptight businessman. We await the effects. The emergency services are on standby. One small glug for man, one big glug for mankind.
But Innes just nods approvingly and reaches for the biscuits as he addresses the vagaries of chance and fate that have led him here, playing bass and percussion with the Faeries. It’s been quite an adventure since he formed the band with fiddle play- er Morrison on Skye over 20 years ago. Neither had a clue then about the type of beast they were unwittingly unleashing.
“Growing up in Fife, the only tradi- tional music I heard was Jimmy Shand. Or stuff on Thingummyjig on telly,” says Innes. “I used to pull my hair out. I was in the middle band of Scotland. All I was sub- jected to was mainstream culture and I was under the impression that traditional music wasn’t very challenging. And then I moved to the Highlands and got intro- duced to people like Silly Wizard and Dick Gaughan and the Battlefield Band. They used to come and play in Skye and you suddenly realized… jeezus, these people can really play. Now, of course, it’s all very different and trad music has real credibili- ty. Young folks look up to people like Kris Drever because they see these brilliant musicians travelling all over the world… it was very different then.”
The Peatbog story, full of unforeseen diversions into previously alien territories, cultures and musical divides, has been con- sistently exhilarating – not just for them- selves and those who’ve followed them along the way, but the music itself. It’s a whole different musical environment out there now – and Peatbog Faeries are part of the reason.
Devoted to the sanctity of tunes from the Scottish tradition which they use as the root of their own tune-mak- ing, they frequently take left-field paths. Not as a self-consciously artificial strate- gy to exact change and open doors, but
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