A Feast of Festivals

ON the closing day of the Edinburgh Festival, we were invited to contribute to a day of short performances at the Caledon Centre in Colinton, literally on the 'the fringe' of the Festival next to the city bypass. The Caledon Centre has links with Japanese universities, and has residential students from Japan, Scandinavia, and the USA who study language and culture.

The Centre provided a minibus to ship a traditional Scottish ensemble of mainly young players from the Small Hall Band, one of the Borders' best-known groups which provides a first class grounding in ceilidh, concert and session playing for new young musicians every year. Martin and Liz Maroni led the group first in sets of jigs, reels and Strathspeys and Liz then got the audience of students and local people involved in learning some dance steps.

Other 'acts' included a small pipe band, a Scottish storyteller, and two young comedians who were forced to rewrite their act after realising it was a Sunday afternoon and their audience was mainly children. An southern Indian dancer gave a fascinating short talk and demonstration, a Thai food-carver showed her work, and Japanese students performed a play in English. I contributed a sort of mixed 'lecture' and song set using Scottish folk songs from the last 7 centuries ­ Twa Corbies (14th c.), The Cruel Mither (16th c.), The Burning of Auchendown (17th-18th c), Rosie Anderson (very early 19th c), and Both Sides the Tweed (20th c from 18th and 19th c origins).

Final fling?

In the evening, Shirley and I hit the final night of the Edinburgh Festival. The gigs are typically one hour long, and cost around £6 ($10) each so it's not cheap. We found the cheapest comedians in town at £3 for an early slot. We ate after this at a restaurant which shall remain nameless ­ on the Royal Mile, name puns with Holyrood ­ because I was stupid enough to eat a chicken salad which didn't taste enouraging, and ended up with symptoms lasting over a week. However, they had a good guitarist and singer.

He had a Martin 000, style 28. "That's a beauty", I called to him. "Yeah, it is, isn't it!", he replied, rather oddly. "How long have you had it?", it said. "Three days", he said, even more oddly. "Did you get it locally?", I asked. "Yeah! Fell right down those stone steps ­ landed on both arms!"

He held up his forearms and both of them were dark blue, bruised to the bone from elbow to wrist! He thought I was talking about the injury. I went over and had a laugh with him about the misunderstanding, and he let me take a quick look at the Martin ­ very nice, lightly strung, but just the right sound for the Davy Graham style blues he was doing.

After that we paid good money for tickets to see Gordon Giltrap at the Famous Grouse House, having a quick beer and playing along with some Irish session musicians in the bar first. Now Giltrap is brilliant; he writes for the major British guitar mags, records stuff for TV, and has a set of unusual and wonderful guitars made by Rob Armstrong. These include a tiny short-scale job tuned to A and a baritone version of Armstrong's slim-body fingerstyle acoustic.

However, we left at the interval. Giltrap's insistence on extreme top-endy equalization and zithery reverb made the whole performance sound like soundbytes from an episode of Neighbours, and he seemed intent on building 'pieces' out of serendipitous virtuoso licks. Somewhere along the line melody, rythm, simplicity, beauty and harmony were pushed into the background and we got the fingerstyle equivalent of a fairground ride with a fireworks display. I said nothing, because I was supposed to be enjoying this and Shirley was supposed to live with it. But I could see she was finding it almost physically painful to listen to, and despite my own fascination with his remarkable techniques I was showing signs of stress, irritation and fatigue!

So we wandered down to The Royal Oak on Infirmary Street, where for an admission fee of zero we got to sit down with a beer and join Guy Heath in a few songs until it got so busy nothing but the Wild Rover could survive the underswell. Guy is a resident singer hosting sessions at the The Royal Oak and one of the best-known and well-liked singers (and songwriters) on the scene. Catch him on Sunday nights, around 9.30pm onwards - as well as other nights too.

We were due to see Guy again a week later, as he was (and is) on the organising committee for the Tinto Festival, held at Wiston in the Tinto Hills of South Lanarkshire. In its fourth year, Tinto had scooped Bert Jansch for a Saturday afternoon concert slot, and there was no way I was going to miss this one!

Take to the hills

A week passed, but not the ill-effects of that Royal Mile salad. When eating in Edinburgh at Festival time, go for hot food and go to recommended places. Shirley had hot food and it was fine, but not good (very dry fajitas) and too expensive. All the places we knew and trusted were busy with 'come back in an hour' as their best offer.

On Friday afternoon, September 3rd, we went to Glasgow to do some photographic work before driving south to Tinto. The temperature and humidity were unprecedented; lugging a heavy camera case, we both ended up soaking. Tinto was wonderful. We came early, as the marquees and stalls and bars were opening up. This is not just a folk festival, it's a green festival. The café was run from stored solar power and the open stage PA system from bicycle-powered generators. People much too young ever to have been hippies did a very good impression without chemical assistance. The outdoor bar sold heather ale, elderflower beer and (just to be up to date) the twin evils of Aftershock and newly available Absinthe.

It was warm. For the whole weekend, day and evening, we wore T-shirts. People were in shorts and barefoot. Children just went naked. There were New Age Picts with tartan anklets and feathers in their hair, painted faces and kids with tattoos. There was African drumming, fire-eating, chanting, aromtherapy and an immensely powerful old lady constantly moving in a shape-shifting blend of ballet, yoga and Native American dance. Wild lasses and finely-poised youths circled each other in dances snatched from 18th century woodcuts.

Tinto is a YMCA Youth Hostel with a social stance; shaven-headed, pierced festival staff turn out to be long-term employees (formerly long-term unemployed) and throughout the Festival a happy gaggle of young and old with Down's Syndrome dance, laugh and take great delight in company. Guy Heath is constantly on the move with his walkie-talkie, co-ordinating the open stage; the moment he's off duty, he's in the bar running the club stage as well.

The main concert marquee has an incredibly good sound system ­ 64 channel mixer, sixteen speakers each big enough for a two-man lifting job, first quality miking and monitoring. New young Scottish electric folk bands dominate, and this is no shallow pastiche; Malinky, for example, have singers to match the best we've heard in twenty years and their handling of a ballad like The Battle of Harlaw is word-perfect to the narrative story version. It's also a thumping good driving arrangement.

Bands like Malinky, Cantara, Annam, Orion and Old Blind Dogs showed at the Tinto Festival that it's possible to be totally modern and 100% in tradition. Only once was I disappointed, when one of the bands did the song Jamie Foyers and opted for the rather drab 20th-century revision, which moves Foyers from the Peninsula campaign of the Napoleonic Wars and his native Perthshire, and makes him a Glasgow dockyard worker in the Spanish Civil War. The old words work better and the tune's the same!

And then there was Bert Jansch. This was why I went. I knew in advance that Bert has had problems with arthritis in his hands, and I wrote a press release for the festival organisers all about Bert and his importance, to help them get people in. I can not be critical of Jansch; it's totally unfair, and you can't take away what he has done. However, he had a new-looking guitar; didn't bother to check what type, but it looked like a Yamaha logo with an L on the headstock - could that be a luthiery series Yamaha? My eyesight is so bad without specs that I had to wait for the photo to judge this - at the time, I thought it was a Fylde guitar or something like that. I could not imagine Jansch playing a Yamaha.

It didn't sound like Jansch. The guitar was slightly boxy and middy in tone, with not much presence and hardly any fret/string noise when played. It didn't have much separation. The PA and Bert's little reverb box did it no good, either. His vocal mike was too low in volume, but he kept asking for it to be turned down, and the guitar turned up. You couldn't hear his words properly ­ and this was from a PA system which had given consistently excellent results with six-piece bands.

Bert's playing was slow, careful and limited to his less complex pieces. Occasionally, he simplified the backing or breaks. He had written a new song, about Scotland's new freedom, but the bad PA balance meant we couldn't really hear his repeated chorus line clearly. I felt a little sad during parts of the performance, because I knew some of the stuff well enough to realise when he was defeated by his own earlier composition. You don't expect Bert to stumble over the instrumental 'verse' of Blackwater Side, but he did; just momentarily, and he knew he had as well, giving a sort of wry grin as he instantly recovered from fingers which just won't move as he intends them.

He played Davy Graham's Anji as his (traditional) final number, and this was the saddest bit of all ­ he missed out the single-note bass run bit, some of the higher variations, all the more percussive three-note chord variation and 'fast bit' he's done in the past. Anji was down to bare bones, rather careful and almost wooden in approach. It was great to hear Bert do this; I have many recordings but I have never seen him play live. It was sad to realise that I should have sought out Jansch ten or twenty years ago and gone to see him then. We have no guarantee that players will be able to perform into old age ­ not everyone is a Stefan Grapelli ­ but Bert has been hit by an illness which has little to with age and frequently affects those much younger. His swollen finger joints tell that story, and my guess is that he was actually playing to the limit. Most people would have given up.

I would go to see Bert again, though I really would hope for a guitar which sounded 'more like Jansch' and a PA which gave him the correct foldback sound, and the audience a better balance.

The autumn weather at Tinto remained wonderful. It did not rain, no-one got sunstroke (though some tried!), everyone had huge quantities to drink and no-one got drunk. We did not see a single policeman on the site, nor a single instance of trouble. Many friends arrived at different times ­ people from the Borders, from Edinburgh, from Glasgow. I joined in different sessions around the site, sometimes with complete strangers, other times with players I know well from different clubs. Despite the anarchic Pictish-Celtic New Age flavour of parts of the event, there was no evidence of drugs (apart from Indian herbs and strange beers) and people of all sexes and ages milled around in safety with a considerable degree of respect, politeness and conviviality.

The Tinto Hills site at Wiston is outstandingly beautiful; as we left on the Sunday, the air was filled with colourful hang-gliders which were being launched off a hillside further up the valley. We stayed at a bed and breakfast a few yards from the site, a lovely farmhouse setting where we shared breakfast table conversation with English and German visitors (not there for the Festival). In the mornings, where nothing formal happens at the festival, we visited Glasgow Zoo and Culzean Castle and managed a quick round of crazy golf on the seafront at Ayr.

Driving back the 70 miles home down the Clyde and Tweed valleys, Shirley said she wondered what Tinto Festival would have been like in the cold and wet. I thought perhaps the mainly empty marquees would have been full, the rooms in the YMCA centre would have been used, and the campsite would have been sheer hell ­ but we're going to book at Mrs McCaskie's b&b again in good time for next year!

David Kilpatrick