Scottish Renaissance Man
The Brian McNeill Interview
#NK It's been said of Scotland and Shetland in particular. 'If the fiddle was a weapon of war Scotland would be a world superpower' If you look at the influence the Scottish fiddle style has had…
#BM [laughs]Absolutely. I think if you look at the talent that has come out of Scotland. I think we were lucky that in the mid-seventies we had this big explosion of people that wanted to play music based on traditional music of Scotland. That solidified into that fantastic generation of bands, of which The Battlefield Band was only one. Boys Of The Lough, Five Hand Reel, Tannahill Weavers, you put all that together, there's certainly a element that whilst we may not have actually saved the tradition, we certainly ensured it's future in an imaginative way.
I thin that really started the ball rolling and brought us to where we are now. It's incredibly important.
#NK Do you think with the European side of the music, there's more Celts out there anyway, but also more of a sense of tribe, Norse, Basque etc? Does it make mainland Europe more receptive to traditional music than some parts of the UK?
#BM I'm not entirely sure about that… in one sense yes. There is a sense of national identity that people like in Celtic music. I think that's an important thing. There's an incredible well of pride, in Scotland, about it's traditional music, but twenty/thirty years ago we needed to refind that pride.
I think it is going on in all parts of the UK if you look a Spiers & Boden, Eliza Carthy, Bellowhead, it's definitely happening in England now.
We've just been to a think in Wales, part of a teaching weekend for the The Big Experiment. Their tradition is coming up roses. I think to a certain extent, the positive thing I'm seeing out of the whole thing at the moment is that there is a will to learn, a will to perpetuate, a realisation across the British Isles and across great swathes of Europe that what's going on at the moment is important in terms of everybody's cultural heritage.
People are waking up to the idea that folk music is shorthand for cultural heritage. Long may it continue like that, Long, long may it continue like that.
#NK Earlier on you mention the Celtic festival in California and you regularly play out in the States, where they adopt part of what you do and you pick up on changes they've made. Cross pollination if you like.
#BM There's a lot of that goes on. There a Scottish ex-pat community in The States and for a long time, particularly in the Highland Games Community. I won't say they were patronised, but certainly seen as a part of the less scrupulous part of the tradition.
It's something that's really changed they want to know about their heritage, not just the myth of their heritage. They are desperate to find authentic stuff and are a very fertile audience for those of us that are essentially Celtic musicians.
It's a great thing top do, go to The States and Canada, where I also play regularly, to go there and see the depth of commitment these people have.
#NK Which sort of prompts the question, how much of your year do you spend on the road? And does it make it difficult to really feel at home in any one place?
#BM Home is Scotland and home is County Durham, where we've lived for many years. How muc time on the road? Depends on how you want to think about that. I'm pretty much on the road from the beginning of March to the beginning of November.
I really wouldn't want it any other way. I don't think I would be fulfilling my promise as a musician if I wasn't out there doing that. A lot of the dates for me is teaching gigs. I mentioned the The Big Experiment thing in Wales, but I also teach a couple of week a year in Missouri, including teaching school orchestras to play Scottish music. It's a great partnership run my the Scottish Partnership in Arts and Education in St. Louis. It was something that came out of the highland games movement and was about people taking part in Scottish music, not just listening to Scottish music. That's going to expand next year and there are some big initiatives that are going to come out of that.
I'm a very active teacher and a very active performer and I'll pretty much go anywhere where people want to learn about Scottish music and hear my take on Scottish history, which, you know, is important to me.
#NK It's also something that you can pick up from your novels. Which I believe are now both out on audio CD.
#BM Most recently, "To Answer The Peacock" Which was the second one in that series and I'm about half way through the third one, "No Easy Eden" which I'm hoping to finish next year(2009).
#NK It is though another way you reach out. I can't think of many other folkies that are also authors. What took you from story telling in songs into a full novel?
#BM I've always wanted to write novels. I see myself as a storyteller. If you want to be any kind of a serious storyteller, what you need to do is work out what the right medium is for the story you want to tell. Sometimes for me it's something as simple as a tune, if I'm trying to convey a mood or commemorate an event.
Sometimes it will be song if I'm trying to make a more complicated point, but if you're trying to tell a really complex story, the novel is pretty much the way to go.
It was an itch I'd always wanted to scratch. The novel writing started on an American tour. I'd been thinking about it for a long time and quite frankly I was going crazy. The American tours that we used to do with the Battlefield Band, they were two months at a time, two flights a day and then a gig. You'ld have these fly it or die it tickets on one of the internal carriers.
It was pretty much the same seat twice a day for two months, eating the same meal, staring at the same movie. By the time you'ld done it for two weeks you were a basket case. So I decided to scratch the itch and use the flight time. I remember when I started writing the first novel it was on a flight from Seattle to Anchorage, Alaska, in the middle of the night. I was hooked immediately, absolutely hooked. I knew I wanted to do it.
Of course it then became interesting for me to tie it up. My hero's a busker who got out of prison for murdering his wife. The only thing he can handle is being on the street. I wasn't content with just writing his story, I started writing his music. He whole thing just sort of grew from there. I intend to keep it going. I love the idea.
Apart from anything else, you really have to want to do it, it's not the obvious career move. It was something I wanted to do and quite frankly there isn't anything I do that I don't want to. I've never done anything simply for the money, it's got to be something that I want to do because it interests me.
Photocredits 1&3 Jacqueline France 2 Neil King