Northern Roots Festival Finishes in Fine Style
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Northern Roots Festival Sunday Concert
Bogbain Farm
4 stars
HOW do you make an English — as opposed to Scottish — folk song?
According to Calendonian folk doyen Archie Fisher, there are certain key characteristics. Take a shepherdess, a knight and a dewy bank and you have an English folk song.
Except the last time he met a shepherdess while out riding, she was on a Yamaha quad bike and he could not catch her.
"Times have changed," he mused.
That was the only concession to the English folk tradition in a firmly Celtic climax to Bruce MacGregor’s Northern Roots Festival.
Though it may have been lacking in cross-border appeal, the final night of Northern Roots certainly made up for it in cross-generational music, opening with Mainline North, young graduates of the Caledonian Canal Ceilidh Trail who had a knowledgeable audience enthusing about their skills and lightness of touch late into the night.
Then, in a link to the Inverness Folk Festival of old to which Northern Roots is a conscious heir, it was the turn of Archie Fisher, one of the founding fathers of the Scottish folk revival.
Despite his laid back personna, he captivated the attention with his songs and stories, a link too to the tradition bearers who kept the old songs and tales alive for Fisher’s generation to take on to a new an wider audience. When the Bogbain audience joined in gently but faultlessly with the Child ballad "Broom of the Cowdenknowes", it was a moment to set the hairs standing on the back of the neck.
Irishman Kieran Goss has a different approach to stage craft, almost manipulating his audience into wildly cheering him, but done with such good humour that no-one could have minded. Singing his own songs and some covers, including a version of Tom Paxton’s "The Last Thing on My Mind" with his own hilarious last verse addition, Goss was a natural entertainer. Though, as the 10th of 15 children, he probably has plenty of experience of trying to get himself noticed.
There were some fine songs in his set to be sure, the most touching written for his sister and all those other Irish emigrants who had left the island, but the audience might find it easier to recall his stories. Like the one about how pleased he was when his first single made number 97 on the Irish charts, something that could be achieved with the sale of just 15 records. Then years later, when he went to clear out his late mother’s house, he opened a cupboard and found... yes, the Bogbain audience was ahead of him too.
The evening closed with a rousing set from another young group, The Paul McKenna Band, now two albums into their career and steadily growing as performers. Featuring Nairn’s own Ruaridh MacMillan on fiddle, this was a tightly played set of songs and tunes that ended the night, and the festival, on an energetic note proving that the tradition Fisher has played such a major part in maintaining, is still in good hands for the future.
CM
