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orrison: “We thought ‘they’re here, we should get them involved’ so we sent them four tracks and they came back with their stuff
and we thought ‘wow, that’s big!’ so we ended up doing the whole album with big brass parts. We all loved it. So on the next album (What Men Deserve To Lose) we did the same thing.”
It was fun… but travelling all over the place with an entourage of fourteen – ten band members, four in the crew – meant a logistical and practical nightmare and they decided to prune things down.
Hutton: “After a few months we thought it was all getting a bit formulaic and realised we couldn’t do a third album with that same line-up. You have to be seen to be moving on, especially with instrumental music. You can get away with it playing songs because the lyric thing means there are always differ- ent stories, but it’s different with instru- mentals. So, with our next album (Dust) we changed it and went back closer to the early days.”
“But we still love playing with brass. They’re an asset that any band would love to have. Next album we’ll definitely be using brass on some of the tracks although we aren’t making too many plans at the moment. We don’t go in for visions. We just do our best and do what we think is right on individual tracks.”
So… Peatbog Faeries have had four drummers, two guitarists, four or five keyboard players and countless fiddle players… but never a singer. Anomaly? Oversight? Circumstance? Or sheer, perverse, dogged defiance?
None of the above apparently…
Morrison: “We’ve talked about it a lot and occasionally we’ll think of get- ting in a singer but then again we never want to be contrived about any- thing we do. The funky Gaelic thing has been done a few times and do we really want to sound like other people? Unless it happens naturally it will just feel contrived to us. We’re not averse to the idea of a singer but until the right person or the right situation aris- es we’ll just plough on.”
Hutton: “I think this way gives us more of a separate identity. People know what we do. We do what it says on the tin. We get you jumping up and down, that’s what we’re for. A lot of club music doesn’t have any vocals or if it does, the vocals are used just as another instrument. We see ourselves in a similar way. If something comes along naturally then great, but we don’t want to get a singer in just to increase our income or try and get a hit. How many people have done that and how’s that worked out for them?”
The looming vote for Scottish inde- pendence is a hot topic at Celtic Connec- tions this year (and a straw poll of all those random late night conversations in dodgy pubs conducted by this correspondent among assorted musicians, tramps and bar philosophers would be music to the ears of Mr Salmond). It also perhaps currently adds extra significance to any band play- ing Scottish music, especially one with the sort of fervour conjured by the Peatbogs.
As a band they’ve never aligned them- selves with politics in any way and while independence is hotly debated between themselves, finding a consensus of opinion
Peter is itching to explain about the kilt: “A lot of countries we’ve visited have certain views of what traditional music is in Scotland, Ireland or the rest of the UK. I always play in a kilt not because it’s a prop but because I always have done since I was a wee boy and it just feels natural. In fact it feels unnatural playing in trousers. But kilts have an image around the world, the same as bagpipes do, the same as traditional fid- dles do – people have a certain impression of what they expect when they see them.”
“But when they see us they often say
‘well, that’s not what I was expecting!’ They say they’ve never heard bagpipes or fiddle played in that way before and it’s nice to confound expectations. We know there are lots of people playing those instruments in this way but many people don’t and we can be naïve sometimes about the way others see us, so it’s nice to show them what we do.”
Their mad, thrilling expedition hasn’t merely opened up eyes around the world about the true nature of Scots music, it’s created a fund of anecdotes to enliven any pub gathering or indeed a sober cof- fee morning.
is so loaded they prefer not to get publicly involved in this, or indeed any other mat- ters of state (though it doesn’t stop us spending the second cup of coffee mulling over the whys and wherefores).
It does, however, open wider questions about how they perceive themselves in nationalistic terms as they fly out to con- quer new territories with the express inten- tion of getting the world dancing to Scot- tish music. Are they – consciously or not – on a crusade to promote and popularise Scots music and culture? Peter Morrison wears a kilt every time he sets foot on stage so there it is before he plays a single note – the most potent single emblem of Scottish national identity right in front of you…
“Subliminally maybe we are on a cru- sade for the music,” says Innes. “The older you get the more you realise you are an ambassador for your country and it’s important to us when we play abroad that we leave a good impression and people say things like we are a breath of fresh air.”
T
he Cambridge Folk Festival headliner a couple of years ago, for example, when they went on stage to close the event on Sunday night and started play- ing, only to be met with initial silence and then a low rumble of discontent. As angry chants got louder they departed the scene after playing just one tune. Fiddle player Peter Tickell was virtually in tears, incon- solable in the belief that, for the first time in their career, they’d been booed off. “I can’t understand it,” he kept saying, “they loved us last night!”
At the front of the stage, though, Peter Morrison was close enough to clearly hear the exact nature of the chant… ”Turn it up! Turn it up!” and realised instantly what had happened. While their stage monitors were working perfectly and they could therefore hear themselves, nothing was getting through to the audience, who couldn’t hear a thing.
“We went off while the sound was sort- ed and when we came back the audi- ence erupted and it turned out to be one of the best gigs we’ve ever done.”
There was also the power cut dur- ing their set at Shrewsbury Festival when, undeterred, Morrison and Peter Tickell started playing tunes until Tick- ell broke an E-string. He ran offstage, fitted another one, returned and – pop – that went too. Completely out of strings, he dashed into the crowd ask- ing people if they had a spare E-string and was joined in his search by the gui- tarist, at which point the drummer’s hi- hat disintegrated. Amidst all the car- nage Morrison and Hutton soldiered on to wow the audience with a novel but apparently effective pipes/ bass duet.
There was also a bit of a disaster in front of their biggest audience – 50,000 at Womad in Cáceres, Spain – when Innes launched into a bodhrán solo. Unfortunately his mic hadn’t been switched on and while Innes was going at it full tilt, the audience lis- tened to the silence in baffled wonder. It was, he reflects, the longest couple of minutes of his life.
There have been plenty of highs, too, along the way. Winning the Com- monwealth Games for Scotland in Sri Lanka, obviously; various African adven- tures; promoting Scotland in New York; any Canadian festival; performing with the Scottish Ballet; ecstatically received tours of Australia; a dozen or so appear- ances at Celtic Connections; headlining their ‘local’ Heb Celt festival on the isle of Lewis; playing with an 84-piece orchestra at Proms In The Park…
“Ah, that was quite funny,” says Innes. “This orchestra assumed they’d just turn up and play whatever we put in front of them but Rick [Taylor] wrote out all these complicated parts and they’re looking at it going ‘oh no’. There was this poor piccolo player just staring at the music and some- body else just gave up…”
Have you ever seriously considered throwing in the towel?
Innes: “Not really, no.We’ve all gone through moments but it’s very rare for me. It’s my life. It’s something I’d always hoped would happen and I love it.”
Peter: “And there’s always more to do. New tunes keep popping out that need to be played. It’s a never-ending project.”
www.peatbogfaeries.com F
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