During my second year at RSAMD I entered ‘BBC Radio Scotland’s Young Traditional Musician of the Year Award’.
I saw it as a way to push myself forward and test my confidence. Part of the prize was a record deal with Footstompin’ Records and a summer full of festival bookings.
Not once do I recall thinking that I’d actually win. I just focussed on each stage of the process so no-one was more surprised than me to hear my name read out as the winner at the final at Celtic Connections Festival in January 2002. Delighted as I was to have won the award, my shyness kicked in and I became a bit daunted by the prospect of recording an album, performing at festivals and coping with the spotlight of media attention that had suddenly focussed on me.
Looking back I do wish I had been a bit more media savvy at the time and had been better prepared on how to make the most of the opportunities that passed my way that year. I got the impression that people thought I knew more than I actually did about the folk scene – I was giving workshops in Scots song at festivals having never actually attended one before. People would talk to me about songs or singers
and say things like “oh you’ll know that one of course” when actually no, I didn’t.
During that year I was given varying pieces of advice on what I should or should not do, it was hard to make the right decisions and I was all too aware that come the following year someone else would win the award and things would move on.
I embraced
what came my way and simply did the best I could with what I knew.
It was in March that year that I met Jamie McClennan. I was playing one of my last gigs with KODA at an accordion festival in Prague. Our regular fiddle player couldn’t make the gig so Jamie had been drafted in as a dep. Jamie, originally from Hamilton, New Zealand, had recently moved to Scotland to play more folk music and develop his own career having gotten as far as he could within the NZ folk scene. I hadn’t planned on having a fiddle player in my band but we got on really well from the offset and he soon persuaded me there was a need for fiddle!
So the line up of my band in that first year (and until 2004) was myself, Jamie on fiddle and whistle, Ross Ainsley on pipes
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