Scottish Renaissance Man
The Brian McNeill Interview

Brian McNeill was and still is the first ever recipient of the Fatea Lifetime Achievement Award, not only for his considerable skills as a musician, but also for his services to education and the effort he puts in ensuring that folk music remains a vibrant, living, tradition. A genuine Scottish Renaissance Man
One of the highlights for many at Cambridge Folk Festival is the Session that carries Brian McNeill's name. A session that blends so many great sounds and musicians.
I caught up with Brian as the year was drawing to a close to catch up with the impact he's made on 2008 and vica versa.
#BM=Brian McNeill #NK=Neil King

#NK Firstly thanks for taking out time from your busy schedule to talk to me. Looking back it's been a busy year. How do you go about organising a year with so many demands on your time?

#BM I is really only in the last two or three weeks that it's quietened down a little bit. If you look at the year chronologically. I came out of the RSND job at the end of January. I wasn't entirely sure what was going to happen, but the phone just started to ring off the hook.
The first thing I did was to begin a production with two of my ex-students, Jeana Leslie and Siobhan Miller, which turned into an absolutely beautiful album, "In A Bleeze", which is Scottish dialect for on fire.I was working on that, off and on for the four months up until the end of May. We had a great time doing that
During the recording, I was getting my self in mind to do gigs. I did the Feast Of Fiddle Tour, which is a great gig. I don't know how many of us there are. There's six fiddlers in the front line and another five in the back. That was February/March, March/April. I can't really remember.
Nearly forgot Siobhan and Jeana picked up the Radio Two Young Folk Award…

#NK And played a great set at Cambridge wearing oversized bail bond t-shirts

#BM [laughs]Once in a while I play a wonderful highland games in California, a place called Campbell. One of the sponsors for the festival is a bail bonds firm. Their motto is 'cause your mama wants you home. The t-shirts became highly sought after mementoes for my students when I took them home. They were sized for me so the girls got lost in them. They've had an incredible year and I'm delighted the album's done so well. They're up for a local award in Scotland

#NK And also up for the Horizon Award at the main BBC Folk Awards.

#BM I'm pleased for them they've had a great year. It's great to be part of that. The Fatea Award was partly about recognising my work with young musicians and to have a hand in helping musicians like Jeana and Siobhan is great.

#NK And it's not just at the academic level. A Cambridge, you give some of your students a chance to get up on stage, in front of a large audience. Mixed it and matched it with older more established musicians.

#BM I think it's so important. My generation and the generation before me. We've got our stage presence, we've done our stage stuff. It's important for the continuity of the music as well as individual careers. It's important that the youngsters come through and show people this is an ongoing tradition. There's a basic traditional root that carries the music through, from one generation to the next. It's so important, I can never over emphasise that.

NK It's a chain you can follow down from the Battlefield Band, through Boys Of The Lough into the likes of the Paul McKenna Band, who are ready to run with the baton into the next stage.

#BM One of the guys in The Paul McKenna Band, is Ruairdh MacMillan, a fantastic fiddler, who has been one of my past guests at Cambridge. He's up for the Young Traditional Musician Of The Year award at Celtic Connections. The way it works at the moment is fantastic. There are all these awards and opportunities for young people and I'm there to help. The important thing is they're learning the business as well as the actual music.

NK What prompted you to take a more formal role in that. I know you stepped down at the start of the year, but it was a big step to do a formal education piece.

#BM I thought it was important that someone with a lot of experience of being a working musician should step into that role. It seemed important that the role of guiding the next generation should be influenced by the road musicians who had practical experience.
As we both know, it's not simply about learning the music. You've spent enough time backstage to know what else goes on. We can teach the music as much as we want, but we also need to teach people what it's like to be on the road and how to make a professional career out of it. Without that we're not going to end up with professionals we're going to end up with people who can play, but can't perform because they don't know how to make a living from it. That was my motivation for taking the job.
There aren't that many opportunities to do that sort of thing in my sort of music, it seemed like the right time to take that sort of challenge. It really worked, but at the same time, it was time to move on and get back to doing the gigs again as I'd started missing it.

#NK Is the next part of that getting back in the studio and recording the next Brian McNeill album?

#BM Yes indeed. In fact, about an hour before you phoned I was upstairs recording new material for the new Brian McNeill album. It's been in the works for such a long time, but I've been doing so many different things I haven't had the chance to get it finished. The album is called The Baltic Tae Byzantium and it's the sequel to an album I did over ten years ago called "The Back O' The North Wind." That was the story about Scots and their influence in America, this is about Scots in Europe. Just as fascinating and to me, just as important.

Continued

Photocredits 1&2 Neil King 3 promo