Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: Salut! Live has form when it comes to standing in fields in Scotland to listen to music. Two years ago we were at the Northern Meeting Park in Inverness for the Dandelion Festival. This month, we were in the Pitlochry Recreation Ground for the town’s first Heartland Festival. It wasn’t a folk festival, but Skerryvore was one of the headline acts.

(Skerryvore. Photo courtesy of Skerryvore)

Skerryvore started out on the Hebridean Isle of Tiree as a trad band 19 years ago, and have won awards for their trad playing. The name is from a small Hebridean island that is even more remote than Tiree.

These days they still play trad instruments—pipes, whistles, accordions, fiddles—but with an electric core of bass, drums, guitar and keyboards. There’s eight of them on stage and they produce a big sound.

And the Heartland Festival had been a pretty demure affair until then: people sitting in folding chairs, polite applause after numbers, a quiet hum of chatter. Skerryvore certainly got the audience on their feet, pretty much immediately.

The thing is, there are two versions of Skerryvore. The first does stadium crowd pleasers, channelling their inner Simple Minds. These songs are mostly written by their guitarist, Alec Dalglish. And frankly, they’re pretty good at this. Songs like Happy to be Home, which they recorded with Sharon Shannon, or Take My Hand, from their 2018 record Evo, which they played here as part of their encore, would sit well in any band’s set.

The second Skerryvore is the trad band with a tight electric folk band sitting behind it, driving it along. This busts out and plays a set of tunes from time to time, all pipes and whistles and fiddle—there were two accordions in the line up at one point. They might be the loudest trad band in the world.

You can hear thousands of hours of sessions sitting in the sound. They know what they’re doing here. As they kicked in to their first set of tunes, they told us,

We’re going to get you warmed up now.

And almost everyone in Scotland tends to know at least some of the steps to the reels.

This isn’t exactly Jekyll and Hyde, since they do both of these well. And the audience, certainly, enjoyed every moment of this.

After a song that involved some participation, the audience carried on with chorus after Skerryvore had finished the song, and Alec Dalglish and brought the band back in: “Let’s keep this going then.”

When the pipers--Martin Gillespie and Scott Wood--are fronting up the band, the sound is sensational. Don’t think here about the tedious dirge-like martial skirl of the Edinburgh Tattoo and the Black Watch. This is as energetic and as exciting as any pipers you’ll hear, in any of the pipe traditions.

One song paired their fiddler, Craig Espie, with Fraser West on drums, in an extended duet, before the rest of the band kicked in. I’m not sure that anyone else playing in or around trad music sounds quite like this at the moment.

And even the more anthemic songs have trad lines and instrumentation threaded through them. Once they’d stood up, no one in the audience sat down again.

(Nessie joins the crowd for Skerryvore in Pitlochry. Photo: Andrew Curry CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

And do visit the Salut! Live Facebook group