Julie Fowlis, “Heisgeir”, The Mitchell Library, 27/1/11

Julie Fowlis

The evening kicks off with Fernhill, a Welsh quartet consisting of a lead vocalist, a guitar, a fiddle and – a little bizarrely – a muted trumpet.   It works well, largely due to Julie Murphy’s lovely voice, and there is one exceptional song, Glyn Tawe, in which fiddle player Christine Cooper recites a section of prose poetry that is beautifully evocative of summers in a rural idyll now lost: it’s the kind of stuff Kathryn Tickell does so wonderfully.  This is a good band, but they’re not helped by the quality of the sound system, which is barely adequate for a school show.

Julie Fowlis is a charming, warm host, a mean player of the penny whistle and the owner of perhaps the purest and sweetest voice in Scottish music.  She warms up with a few numbers, complete with cheeky interplay between her and her band.  I’ve never seen her before, but she feels like an old friend, and that’s a very special charisma to be able to convey on stage.

“Heisgeir” is the main event.  A film project she’s been working on for the last year, it’s a wonderful and vitally important cultural artefact, chronicling as it does the lives linked to the tiny deserted Hebridean island.  The people interviewed – including the last person born on the island – are fascinating and heartwarming, and what is clear from them is just how much Gaelic culture has retained that we have lost.  Their names – so, so long – are almost a catalogue of lineage, and their daily names, like Black Haired Iain of the Blizzard or McCordum of the Seals, are testament to stories passed down from generation to generation like the Epic of Gilgamesh.  And what stories:  the sole survivor of a drowned boat eking out his existence until his rescue by eating the ground tongue of the one cow that swam away from the same wreck; the horse that could tell the future, refusing to pass a point on the track until the day they found the body of a drowned lighthouse keeper there.  Age, lineage, family, history – all are vital to these people. They wrap themselves up in the lessons of their past while we grub about looking only to the future, and that is a horrible, dark place where only work and debt and death await us.  Oh, to know you’re part of something much, much greater.

That’s why one old man, speaking of the many versions of the song he has just sung, says that he learned it from his father, who learned it from someone older, “and,” he says, “I am happy with that.”  That’s why the youngest person in the film, a middle-aged fisherman son of a fisherman, speaks of reciting the old place names so that they are not forgotten; names that identified a bay, a skerry, a cliff, a single rock;  names that held significance because in them they told story upon story of the people who coined them.

Fowlis and her band, backlit behind the sailcloth used as a screen, interject some beautiful songs: she herself admits that the whole project started off as a film to support a musical project, but became a film with music because of the importance of the people in it.  Appearing ethereally from time to time, they seem like the ghosts of the many men drowned at sea, or lonely spirits wandering the broken down community, or sprites amongst the machair.  It is quite enchanting.

I sometimes hear people moaning about tax payers’ money going to support Gaelic.  Let it die, they say, why should I pay to keep alive a language that I don’t speak and isn’t any use in the modern world?  Well, this film gives us reason enough.   I don’t want to live in a world so arid that we can’t look back on the people of only four or so generations ago, can’t watch films of them, study their photographs, and not know what they sounded like.  Every language lost – and dozens disappear every year – means the loss of a history, of stories, of music, of meaning.  Every language lost is like another endangered species tipping into extinction.  The few quid it might cost me in taxes is worth keeping that alive, and I’d much rather spend it on this kind of beauty than hand it over in some banker’s bonus, or have it used to send young men to Afghanistan to kill and be killed.

I don’t understand Gaelic, but I care enough about humanity to know that to let it die, to lose all the beauty that “Heisgeir” shows us, to lose all that has gone before that these people have strived so hard to preserve, would be a crime of cultural vandalism as bad as any book burning dictatorship the world has ever known: perhaps worse, because it would have happened not because of ideology, but because of short-sightedness, selfishness and complacency.

If there is a God, he should bless this film and the lovely music it has inspired.

Advertisement