Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: The Glasgow-based trad band Ímar were at King’s Place in London as part of the venue’s successful Scotland Unwrapped season. The audience loved them.

Ímar started their first set at high speed, and didn’t let up for a while. The audience was clapping along during the first set of tunes, and carried on during the second number, Tree of Life. It was a breathless start to a high-energy gig. 

The band is a well-balanced trad line up: Adam Brown on bodhrán and guitar; Tomas Callister on fiddle; Ryan Murphy on pipes and whistle; Mohsen Amini on concertina—a good old squeeze box—and Adam Rhodes on bouzouki.

(Photo: Ímar)

After that they said they were going to slow up a bit—“we’re not as young as we used to be”—but they didn’t, not really, and there were times when I imagined what a great ceilidh band they would be.

They’re all technically excellent musicians who have, between them, won a stack of prizes, and between them they create a tight and exhilarating sound. This is a trad folk band at the top of its game.

Early on, they did encourage people to come down to the front to dance, but only one member of the audience really took them up on this suggestion, carefully monitored by one of the King’s Place ushers.

The band members first met as teenagers, through the Irish music network Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, and have been playing together for the past eight years.

But they’re all also in other bands. The two Manx members, Tomas and Adam Rhodes, play together in Mec Lir while Ryan, Mohsen and Adam Brown play with Mànran, Talisk and Rura, respectively.

This is a long way of saying that they’re all steeped in trad music, and as you watch them playing at speed you realise that although they are all still fairly young, they have all spent years paying their dues in sessions.

They’re on their way home now after touring in Ireland and North America, with a few more dates in England and Scotland across the next week or so.

The first half continued in much the same vein as they started off, with tunes from across all of their three albums so far, including the recently released Awakening, which is the reason that they are touring at the moment.

My set notes mention that they played White Strand and Into The Light, and a tune (Eoghainn’s, I think) that Ryan had written to help a friend get better, which he promised would cure all and any ailments that we had. The friend had recovered.

The first set closed with Happy Clappy, also written by Ryan. It turned out that it was his birthday, and by this stage the audience was delighted to sing him Happy Birthday with only the tiniest encouragement from the band.

Between numbers, the stories are entertaining, mostly from Adam Brown and Tomas Callister. We learnt that when you play at Brigham Young, the Mormon university, it comes with a kind of ‘reverse rider’.

This lists the things you mustn’t do while you’re on campus (“mostly about not taking the Lord’s name in vain”). Also, they take their time to pay.

Before the interval, as they mentioned the merch stall, we also heard about their disastrous flight to North America for their tour, from Glasgow to Calgary via London and Dallas (“none of us looked at a map”). A huge storm over Dallas led to an emergency landing at Houston, missed connections to Calgary, and £5,000 worth of new tickets to Canada.

And to their credit, they were all out there in the interval, and afterwards, selling merch and doing photos with audience members.

A couple of highlights from the second half. The first was Adam Brown’s solo spot on the bodhrán, for which the other four band members left the stage. I hadn’t realised what a range you could get out of a bodhrán, but there was subtlety and nuance in this extended number, and even a little musical joke.

The other was a set of tunes called The Third Attempt, written by the concertina player Mohsen Amini to celebrate passing his driving test. At the third attempt, obviously. This came with an extended story, but, in brief, he failed the first one because he went through a red light and the second because he was speeding on the motorway, and you could hear both of these in the tunes he had written for the song.

They can also play slowly as well, as they demonstrated in playing the Irish air Slane, after a story (and a little audio joke) about Songs of Praise.

The gig was also a reminder that you feel trad music as much as you hear it. The patterns and the rhythms of the music demand a physical response.

Sure, you can listen on Spotify, and you get a sense of the technique and the speed, but it’s thin gruel.

Trad music is listened to with your whole body. It’s a visceral experience, and best heard live. As the King’s Place audience demonstrated, clapping along a lot, calling, even leaping to their feet from time to time.

You can see their remaining gigs on this tour here: over the next week they’re playing at Emsworth, Evesham, Nettlebed, Norwich, Kendal, Banchory (near Aberdeen) and Stirling. Their Nottingham gig is already sold out.

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