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he second series was made in 1998, and featured dobro player Jerry Douglas as Bain’s new foil, a role he retains to this day. It seems that they initially intended to have a different American musical co- director for each series. “That had been the idea,” Douglas Eadie explains to me, “but then Aly and Jerry comple- ment each other so well. Aly is very instinctive and Jerry very, very particular as a producer.” Over the years the TV show has devel- oped into a live show, first just at the Celtic Connections festival, and latterly as the touring entity I saw in London.
It’s now February and the musicians and crew are filming the sixth series of the television programme at the Lodge Hotel on Loch Lomond. I am delighted to be visiting for the weekend and talking to Eadie about why they tend to move location each series. “We should make it look a bit different each time. We did do [Series] 4 and 5 in the same place, and that may have been a little bit of a mistake. This time we’ve really made an effort to make the backdrop work, which is quite a tricky business, lighting wise.”
The musicians on set play in a space that backs onto a window looking out over the loch. It gives an atmospheric view, but neces- sitates the use of filters pasted onto the glass to create a better match between the indoor and outdoor light levels. The guest musicians this year include Andy Irvine, Donal Lunny, Cara Dillon, Julie Fowlis, Karen Matheson, Teddy Thompson, Tim O’Brien, Aoife O’Donovan, Maura O’Connell and Mary Chapin Carpenter.
“Mary Chapin Carpenter is our major American star this time around,” Eadie considers. “She’s taken to it like a duck to water. I actually tried very hard to get her way back for the second series. I met up with her manager in Nashville. She knew nothing about this! The manager never said.”
By way of ‘research’ I have spent many happy hours leading up to this assignment in front of my laptop watching DVDs of the Transatlantic Sessions. As much as I’ve loved the music, I’ve equally come to admire the convivial atmosphere of the backstage footage. Can it really match up to my expectations? Well, inevitably the show is run rather more professionally than I had imagined, with no late-night tunes and drinking sessions (while I was there at least). But the amiable vibe is genuine, with most of the musicians and production crew treating this nosy journalist with as much respect as anyone else on the team doing their job. I’m given a comfortable hotel room for the night, some posh meals and access-all-areas, be it the set, the green room or the hair and make-up space where they provide added glamour for the women and ensure the many bald heads amongst the male musi- cians don’t reflect the stage lights.
Now eighteen years old, the Trans atlantic Sessions have become an institution. Watching through the DVDs, I noted a lot of continuity as well as some change. I ask Bain and Eadie what is different now. “I think the music’s changed quite a lot,” says Bain. “The first series I loved, because it was really a session. There was no rehearsal of any kind. Of course things change as you go on. When Jerry joined us we took it a little more seriously. We now have an hour to rehearse. Through Jerry and his contacts we could also bring a lot of famous Americans here. We probably couldn’t have done that [otherwise]. From Ricky Scaggs to Emmylou to James Taylor, they all came – not because of financial rewards, they came because they wanted to come.”
“The other thing,” notes Eadie, “is that the house band hasn’t changed much in the last three or four Sessions, plus they’re now touring so they’re a genuine band and that makes a difference. And behind the cameras it’s pretty much the same team, so it’s kind of a reunion. It’s just getting tighter and tighter.”
I note that there is more use of the full drum kit (by percus- sionist James MacKintosh) and Douglas’s lurid lime-green electric slide. “That’s right,” Bain concedes, “that’s changed. The Scottish and Irish players have learned from these Nashville guys. Now they’ll all listen to the tune and sit down and write out the chords, and they’ll write out everything, the bass, the guitars, the basic chords of the tune. And we didn’t do that in the earlier pro- grammes, we just played!”
It isn’t just about the star guests though. Each house musician gets to lead a tune of his or her choosing, often in a small, inti- mate, even solo setting. “They’re always the ones that are the hit,”
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