Almanac Music: Skerryvore: Scots, surf and serendipity

 

Bagpiping can take you many places, and open plenty of doors when you get there.

 

Like being a 13- and 14-year-old and getting into the Sergeants Mess at Duntroon on New Year’s Eve, and clubs various for balls and parties – and everywhere being offered a beer regardless of age.

 

Like the steps of the Opera House for a school speech day. Or before HM the Queen at NSW Government House – and, of course, to the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, where my band has been lucky enough to play five times.

 

Then there are the rowdier gigs, the birthday parties where everyone wants ‘The Voice’, or the theme from Outlander (‘The Skye Boat Song’) or ‘Long Way to the Top’, which only really works when you’ve got the rock band to go with it (which one of my mates had for a milestone birthday).

 

I’m just home from an unforgettable five nights of playing with the eight-piece Skerryvore, thrice voted Scotland’s best live act.

 

Eight more generous and talented blokes you’ll not find.

 

When Jen, our band’s lead agitator for all experiences that involve 1. making music and 2. having fun, wrote to Skerryvore, we thought we might get lucky enough to meet them. But back came the answer that, yes, they would welcome a local band in traditional clobber to come on stage and join them for a few numbers. We’d seen them with a Scottish school band on YouTube but I never really imagined we’d be getting up on stage with them.

 

But there we were – in Sydney, Wollongong and Cobargo – playing three of their most popular tunes with the stars themselves.

 

For me, it turned into a rock ‘n’ roll roadtrip dream: surfing and catching up with mates by day, piping with the champs in the evenings, and then being put up overnight by the mates.

 

First up was The Crowbar (formerly the Bald-Faced Stag) in Leichhardt, where a special mate, Skip, a tenor drummer from that school of the Opera House speech days (yes, OK, it was Scots College), and partner Kate were in the crowd, as was my best mate’s widow, Sharon, and her new partner, Russell, who just happens to run the Sydney Glasgow Rangers Club. Also there was Janelle, a former colleague of less than half my years, showing the band’s exceedingly wide appeal.

 

So, no pressure first up …

 

While us guesties in the Australian Federal Police Pipes and Drums might have been packing bricks, the men of Skerryvore seemed as calm in managing everything as they were magnificent in concert. For example, Scott Wood not only had to do his bit on stage (piper, tin whistle and vocals) but had to be the sound engineer as well. He raced around, ever-smiling, finding the necessary bits of gear, adjusting levels between tunes and then hopping back up to play, notwithstanding a metal cast on one finger! (It’s the left little finger, the only one not needed to cover a hole on the pipe chanter, but the cast helped the next-door E-finger move enough to do its job, and do it with just a little less pain.

 

The following morning was a surf at Freshwater (still the best beach in Sydney) with son Joel, a sometime piper himself but unable to make the show through work.

 

Off down the track to the ‘Gong, where former Masters captain-coach Chopper put us up and came out for a few near-dumpers on low tide at North Beach before the show. (Body surfing may be the only sport in which I have an edge on Chop, but I digress).

 

Chopper was, I think, a little surprised by just how much he enjoyed the show. These blokes really do go off like the proverbial frog in a sock.

 

After a morning North Beach dip, on a bigger swell and a better tide, it was down the coast to our family camp at Batemans Bay, for another surf, striking out from there each day to Cobargo for three shows at the town’s booming annual folk festival.

 

The perfect long weekend. Morning waves with another Masters captain-coach, Paddy, and an old teammate from under-19s days, Chrisso. These blokes are the backbone of the year-round daily dippers who constitute the Surf Beach Blue Ball Surf Club. Others of us float in and out of the group but Paddy (Collingwood) and Chrisso (Carlton) are the yin and yang of the turnout. Then it’s an afternoon drive through the dairy country and tall trees of the south-east to the easy-going rolling party that is the festival at the Cobargo showground.

 

 

 

 

“Are you with the hot band?” asked the lady, quite loudly in the presence of her hubby while I hung about in kilt out the back of the Skerryvore marquee. I could only answer in the affirmative, of course not on one’s own behalf: check out piper Martin Gillespie in the poster for the show. Enough said, eh? And his brother Daniel (accordion) is similarly structured.

 

Pipers Martin and Scott flank songwriter, lead singer and guitarist Alec Dalglish who is the most unassuming frontman you’ll meet – but with a set of pipes of his own to rival Scott and Martin’s. He’s that rarity: a singer who we all reckon sounds even better live than he does on the band’s six albums. (Tempus is the new one: do yourself a favour).

 

Behind it all is Fraser West on drums. He and Alec (both from Livingston in West Lothian) and the Gillespies (from Tiree in the Inner Hebrides) are the nucleus, a traditional ceilidh (party) band which grew.

 

As Alec told The Scottish Banner, “Our music’s kind of a fusion of a few things. We obviously have the traditional Scottish element that’s kind of there in the sense that we do some sets which are completely instrumental with bagpipes, fiddles, accordions and whistles and stuff like that, which is fused with a more contemporary pop/rock sound. At the same time, our songs are essentially a kind of pop or rock sound which incorporate an element of the Scottish sound through them as well.”

 

Rounding out the group are a trio of thorough-going gents: Craig Espie on fiddle, Jodie Bremaneson on bass and Alan Scobie on keyboards. Each of them at different points had a quiet word to give yours truly a little confidence before going on.

 

At the Tattoo last year, we played in front of 8500 every night for 26 shows but, on the Edinburgh Castle esplanade, you’re one of more than 100 pipers. On two nights at Cobargo, I was the lone guestie (having had five of us in Sydney and Wollongong) and when I come up the stairs and the lights and cheers hit me, the nerves went berserk.

 

The greatest blast. Still hard to believe it all happened.

 

Thanks heaps, lads. Lang may yer lums reek!

 

 

The author, having the time of his life.

 

 

More from Andrew can be read Here

 

 

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