30th Shetland Folk Festival
30th Shetland Folk Festival
29th April - 2nd May
Multiple Venues
Shetland
Picture the long daylight hours of the boreal summer, 15 top class bands from around the world and as many local outfits. Then picture host of venues across Britain’s most northerly land, closer culturally and physically to the Faroes and Bergen than to Edinburgh or London, and you start to understand what gives the annual Shetland Folk Festival its own unique and very special atmosphere.
This year’s festival, the thirtieth, followed its well tested format. Evening shows are held in three venues in Lerwick (the main town) and in several smaller village venues around the islands. Each evening, the bill features two local acts and three or four visiting acts, giving many of the islands’ fine traditional musicians the opportunity to share the stage with the visiting acts. Workshops and shorter concerts take place each afternoon, and all the acts are showcased in first night ‘tasters’ and last night ‘Foys’.
But it is the day-and-night-long informal sessions in the Festival club at the Isleburgh Community Centre that have given the Shetland festival its formidable reputation for requiring fast sleep, and it is in this setting that so many visiting musicians have expressed astonishment at the quality and quantity of superb players that this tiny group of islands produces.
Royal British Legion, Friday 30 April 2010
The Royal British Legion in Lerwick is one of the anchor venues for the festival. In a town imbued in its Norse heritage, the visitor in this slightly tatty 1970s low roofed room could be forgiven for seeing in its lengthwise tables an echo of the great longhouse parties of Viking times.
First on stage for this five act bill were the Northmavine Accordian and Fiddle Club from the north west side of the Shetland mainland. A solid line up with at least eight fiddles, boxes, guitar, piano and bass, the swinging dance rhythms set feet tapping, the many tunes penned by band member Peter Sinclair showed that composition is still very much a live art. A subset of the Club trading as Fradern Gamla appeared later in the bill and performed a set made up largely of Scandinavian tunes. Though nerves led to a lack of precision at times, they finished with a rousing rendition of the Helsingborg Polka.
Eva Hren and Sladcore were next on the bill. A Slovenian outfit on their UK debut, their music presents a contemporary take on their traditional folk heritage. Marco Gregoric on bass and Blaz Grim on drums provided a dependable structure for Eva’s superb voice and glamorous delivery, and the one occasion she picked up a guitar possibly harked back to her roots. The quartet is completed by the energetic Marco Boh. A capable jazz keyboard player who shows influence from Kraftwerk to Donald Fagen, his cha cha rhythm on Dekle je po Vodo Slo was one of the highlights of the evening, but at other points his occasional off piste excursions detracted from the integrity of the whole.
The Unwanted purvey ‘music from the Atlantic fringe’, plainly safe ground at the Shetland Folk Festival, but Cathy Jordan (bouzouki, bodhran), Séamus O’Dowd (fiddle, guitar) and Rick Epping (harmonica, concertina) like to live dangerously. From the first strains of Leadbelly’s Out on the Western Plains through sets of Sligo jigs to the apposite self-penned Morning Blues, The Unwanted demonstrated mastery of the musical nuances of their chosen geographic range. In a brief excursion south of the equator O’Dowd delivered a fine rendition of Redgum’s bush song The Diamantina Drover. With harmonica set to the banjo tuning of the same name leading the way, the dark shuffling gait of Epping’s Sawmill Backslide echoed Ry Cooder with Jordan’s bodhran haunting the bottom end and O’Dowd’s bottleneck taking us to the badlands of the mid West. Although in some of the wilder moments O’Dowd’s guitar picking sacrificed accuracy for speed, the performance showed these three to be of the highest standard and the response from the packed house suggested that their name is entirely incorrect.
Lau, the fifth and final band of the evening, are intractable, impenetrable, inexplicable and often just downright dischordant. So why, live, are they absorbing, captivating, foot-stomping and downright unputdownable? It starts with energy: perpetuum mobile that would have left Rimsky-Korsakov’s Prince Gvidon gasping for royal jelly. Then it’s the fearless genre-bending unpigeonholeability (not folk, nor jazz, nor celtic-cross). Next it’s the easy banter the three (four including the sound engineer they always bring) that lightens each breath-catching intro. Then it’s the telepathic interplay between Martin Green's accordion, Aidan O'Rourke's fiddle and Kris Drever's guitar, born of long hours in the practice room (with apologies to Gary Player, the more they practice the more telepathic they get). But mostly it’s their sheer attention to detail – despite the vast complexity of Lau’s music there is simply not a note in the wrong place, not temporally, not harmonically, not tonally, not dynamically.