Things to see at Celtic Connections 2013.

Finally got round to booking some of my annual Celtic Connections gigs.  The line up is larger than ever – but, to be honest, nothing absolutely jumped out at me.  However, I’m sure I’ll have fun.

Carminho

First up is Vicente Amigo,  the Spanish flamenco artist and composer described by Pat Metheny as the greatest guitarist alive.  This, for example, is fabulous.  Should be good, especially as he’s supported by yet another fadista to go gaga at:  Carminho is 27 and the latest big thing in fado.  I have her breakthrough album, and she’s excellent – though I don’t respond to her music the way I do to Ana Moura or Deolinda or Misza.  It feels just a little too trad for me – but it’s another to tick off, my first fadista of the year, and there’s no doubting she has oodles of charisma when she sings something like “A Bia Da Mouraria“.  To be honest, I’d love to go on holiday to Lisbon some time this year and trawl the fado bars: perhaps I’ll try to time it to coincide with Deolinda’s new album and get to hear them showcase it in their home town.

After that, I’m hitting The Roaming Roots Review, largely because it’s packed with lots of goodies I’ve seen over the last couple of years:  the barnstorming Lau; the Fabulous Beth Orton; the drop dead beautiful Gemma Hayes.  They’ll be some other goodies too: Roddie Hart produces some nice folk pop, and Amy Helm sounds good fun.

Then, if I can get the booking sorted, I want to see the sultry Cowboy Junkies.  The online booking system seems a mess this year: it didn’t automatically deduct my 15% member’s discount, then gave me one wheelchair ticket for the Junkies and didn’t tell me I could have had two standing tickets.  They’ll phone me back.  I hope I get to see them: Margo Timmins is one of the most effortlessly sexy singers, and they produce gorgeous, tight music, including one of the best Elvis covers ever in their version of “Blue Moon“. It’ll be a blast from the past.

Then a night of Sahara Soul, especially to see Bassekou Kouyate with N’Goni Ba.  I saw them in 2009, and it was my joint gig of the year.  The n’goni is a fantastic instrument, looking like a four-stringed cricket bat you’d make in the garden shed; in the hands of these guys, it produces some of the most exciting music I’ve ever heard.  Check this out. I’ve deliberately chosen the standing section at the Royal Concert Hall because dancing will be obligatory.

John Fullbright

Finally, for now, every Celtic Connections must have a bit of Americana, so I’m off to see Otis Gibbs and John Fullbright at the Glasgow Art Club.  Gibbs is a grizzled Steve Earle type, while Fullbright looks even more interesting.  In his early twenties, he looks a great musician and songwriter, and may well be my find of the Festival.

So all in all, there’s plenty to keep me occupied.  Unfortunately, some of the biggies are already booked out: I’d have loved to see Bellowhead, and the Transatlantic session with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Eric Bibb and Aoife O’Donovan would have been excellent, but I wasn’t quick enough off the mark.  I’m also a little disappointed at the number of concerts in the seated venues:  The Old Fruitmarket is one of my favourite venues because you can get a good jig on, but there’s nothing on there I really want to see.

However, it’s a good start to 2013, and, if I’d made it to Kazakhstan, I wouldn’t be seeing any of it…

Are The Civil Wars breaking up?

Happier Times for The Civil Wars

Well, perhaps the lack of sparkle I noted at The Civil Wars gig last Friday was understandable.  Joy Williams and John Paul White have just announced on Facebook that their tour – which began only on the 24th October and was supposed to last two months – is over, and it sounds as if the end may be nigh…

“We sincerely apologize for the canceling of all of our tour dates. It is something we deeply regret. However, due to internal discord and irreconcilable differences of ambition we are unable to continue as a touring entity at this time. We thank each and every one of you for your amazing love & support. Our sincere hope is to have new music for you in 2013.

- Joy Williams & John Paul White.

PS – We understand that there are many of you stuck with service charges and travel reservations due to our abrupt cancelations. Please email us at info@thecivilwars.com if there are costs incurred that you would like to be reimbursed for, include a scan or attachment to your receipt(s) of the costs, and we will do our best to reimburse you for non-refundable charges.”

That’s a real shame, because in their short time together, White and Williams have created some stunning music that captivated the public imagination by being melodic and heartfelt and way off the beaten track.  In their video tour diaries, over and over again they speak of wanting to sing  together for years and years – but things have obviously not been right.  Whatever has happened, it seems to have been recent and sudden. Who knows?  The pressure of touring, Williams’ pregnancy… it has all been intense for them, constantly in the public eye as their popularity grew exponentially.  It’s sweet of them to acknowledge that devotion they’ve inspired by offering to pay booking fees and additional costs; how may bands would do that?

One thing that always irritated me was the prurience of the fan base who saw in their closeness something that they have always said wasn’t there, and speculated to high heaven about their relationship.  Both married to other people, one wonders if that barely concealed pressure added to the differences.  I hope not.

Anyway, if they plan to release a new album in 2013, I reckon it’ll be a miracle; do any bands ever survive “internal discord and irreconcilable differences of ambition”?  However, “Barton Hollow” will become a little classic, and I can thoroughly recommend that you download their free live album, “Live at Eddie’s Attic” – that is, if their website comes back online.

It’ll be a pity if we lose them and their lovely music.

WOMAD 2012: supporting face painters for 30 years…

The Soul Rebels

Well, that was my first WOMAD festival, and a grand time I had too.  Loved it.  The crowd was relatively cultivated: I’d heard all about the T in the Park piss bombers the previous week. For some reason, the idea of being drenched in someone’s else’s urine kinda puts me off a bit;  especially a stranger’s urine, but that’s another far stranger  story…

Of course, the place was awash with some weird and wonderful New Age shit, with more Tchai and Reiki than you could throw a seven chakra crystal healing stick at.  Just what the fuck is Gong Therapy anyway?  One of my Facebook pals accused me of visiting a Thai massage parlour;  chance would be a fine thing…

I’ve no idea why WOMAD has become so enmeshed with all this stuff.  Of course, I am an almost total skeptic (though I may tell you about my NLP squirrel experience sometime) but am happy to leave folk to do and believe whatever turns them on – unless they want to damn me to eternal hellfire for not believing what they do, that is.  However, just what relevance has this stuff to the dispossessed of the favelas, or the starving of East Africa, or the war ravaged of sub-Saharan Africa?  None, I reckon.  To me, it should be about those cultures, those people and their music, not the idiosyncracies of western folk with too much time on their hands.

I do like this festival thingy, jumping about from band to band like a real life skip button.  I see and hear a lot, bit and pieces here and there.  I arrive in enough time to catch The Soul Rebels from New Orleans, a big brass band sound that is funky and tight.  They do a fantastic version of “Sweet Dreams“, and remind me a lot of a band I was really into years ago, the Rebirth Brass Band.  Cool.

I catch most of The Wilderness of Manitoba, a Canadian band that eschew the tradition of a lead singer for close harmonies.  The result reminds me a bit of Chatham County Line or Crooked Still: mannered, interesting, sweet Americana that kind of washes over me.  Not really a visceral experience, but worth a listen to.  Hollie Cook is young and sweet and wriggling out of her dress with sheer vivacity, but I’ve never been a ska or reggae fan, so it’s another that I bail early on.

I manage about three minutes of Maga Bo, a Brazilian / American DJ.  The crowd is too young for me, and the bass is up so high I’m convinced my kidneys will explode.  However, more than that, it’s just that a guy behind a laptop just doesn’t inspire me to get involved in the show, which is the problem I also have with The Portico Quartet.  I have their latest album, and the track “Ruins” is a thing of real ambient beauty.  But four guys who end up playing with their knobs onstage, so to speak, doesn’t really do it for me.  Pretentious?  Les?

The Correspondents

The Correspondents, despite having a laptop knob twiddler called Chucks, are a different matter.  I’m tired and only manage half of their show, but their über-camp glam-swing is so infectious it draws a massive crowd around the smallest stage on site, largely due to the Mael-like vocals and irrepressible whirlygig dancing of  lead singer Mr Bruce.  Infectious, danceable, watchable and I’d love to see more.  Vadoinmessico are a multi-continental psychedelic folk band who I had on my list but who kind of disappoint, perhaps because I saw them after Raghu Dixit (more of him in a later post).  They set up some interesting and energetic percussive rhythms which then dissipate during quiet and fairly understated vocals.

I catch a bit of Jimmy Cliff and Robert Plant.  Yes, gods, I know, and what they do is slick and tight.  However, quite frankly, it feels just a little tired and traditional to me.  Khaled is interesting, but again, there’s a slickness about it that just knocks the edges off, and I like my edges a lot of the time.

I’ll do individual entries for the main acts I saw over the next few days.  Many were good, some were great and a few were outstanding.  So, yes, I’m off next year, all things willing…

Sacred Music: the Story of Allegri’s Miserere, BBC 4, 18/5/12

Elin Manhan Thomas, The Sixteen choir

I’ve just watched a lovely BBC4 documentary on Allegri’s “Miserere”, that most mysterious piece of devotional music that was held like a state secret by the Vatican for so long.  Simon Russell Beale tells its story, and then The Sixteen, a cool choir led by Harry Christophers I’ve never come across before, deliver a spellbinding performance.

Like magnificent cathedrals and devotional masterpieces on the walls of luxurious religious palaces, I baulk at the idea of such beauty being owned by the corrupt bureaucrats of organised, brutalised religions: I can’t think of anyone who deserves access to this wonder less than a privileged, self-serving clergy who fatten themselves on the patronage of the rich while failing to give a shit about the poor; to claim this genius as your own is as perverse as the notion of land ownership or the disappearance of masterpieces of art into the private collections of billionaire criminal oligarchs or the corporate patenting of DNA.  And let’s not forget that they were happy to castrate boys to sing this,  and that  if it hadn’t been for the sneakiness of Mozart and Mendelssohn,  this would still be locked in the Sistine Chapel.

But that is what the world is, damn it.  Plebeians like me can only drop our jaws in wonder at what the rich take for granted as their entitlement.  And this is jaw dropping, and those four bars containing the high C – so wondrously sung by  Elin Manhan Thomas   – are the most jaw dropping of all.  I don’t believe in God – cannot believe in God – but I envy the music and art and architecture men have created and have had created in His praise.

I wonder how beautiful the world would be if all that ingenuity had been devoted to man instead of myth.

Berlioz: “Te Deum” & Symanowski: “Stabat Mater” / Paisley Abbey, 21/4/12

Paisley Abbey

Despite being a  raving atheist – occasionally, literally – I have a great fondness for Paisley Abbey.  At about five, I was taken to see the Queen plant a tree in its grounds, then  grew up going to music lessons in Paisley on a Saturday morning, went out on the town with my pals as a teenager and then finally  worked and moved there in the early 90′s.  Paisley has changed enormously in that time.  I have vague recollections of the magnificent old prison that stood on the site of a now almost redundant shopping mall; I saw the monstrous, brutalist council offices go up, one of the blocks now demolished for yuppy homes and the other softened with 21st century ash floors and atriums; I’ve seen the centre pedestrianised and de-pedestrianised and pedestrianised again.  None of the changes, it seems to me, have done anything to improve Paisley, a town blighted by unemployment and social disadvantage that can’t sustain a good bookshop or top class restaurant but has empty civic aspirations to be a “city”; and yet it has some beautiful architecture, including churches like The Coates Memorial that would grace any nation’s capital.  Throughout all those changes, the Abbey seemed as permanent as a geological structure, even as the area around it was tinkered with granite paving and the ancient graveyard was made respectable.

I also have good memories of playing there, in my younger days as a flute player and then as a teacher and woodwind instructor for Renfrewshire Schools Orchestras (I was neither a very good player nor teacher, to be honest).  It’s the scene, too, of my one and only Christmas midnight Mass, when my ex-partner and I took her children along for us all to try to get some sense of what it was really all about, and I confess that in some darker moments over the last thirty years, I’ve slipped in there, not for the religion but for the peace and quiet to think.

But tonight is a pal’s nicht oot to see the City of Glasgow Chorus (including our friend Michael Inglis) and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera do their thing with a couple of heavyweight religious compositions.

The Szymanowski, despite being “modern”, works well; there’s a muscularity about it, especially Quis et homo which thunders out from the nave.  It’s sung in Latin rather than the original Polish, which is probably a good idea, and the soloists are all fine singers.  It may be the long, narrow acoustics (the back of the chorus must be a good fifty or sixty feet away from the conductor) or my less-than-ideal seating position, but the mezzo-soprano, Úna McMahon, and the baritone, Benjamin Weaver, tend to get a little overpowered at times, while the soprano, Maria Kozlova, has the register to counteract that effect.  In addition, the sound seems to come at the audience in great, dramatic lumps.  It is, however, totally accessible and, in some places, infused with an austere Eastern European beauty.

The Berlioz is typically romantic, with reflective, occasionally gloomy prayers counterpointed with sparkling hymns.  When it’s huge, it’s very, very huge, particularly in the celebratory glory of Christe Rex gloriae.  The soloist, fine tenor Jonathan Cooke, does his one moment in the spotlight, Te ergo quaesumus, appropriate justice.  The final hymn, Judex crederis, is typical Berlioz, with a big finish immediately followed by a “let’s do it all again” moment.

I’m not a classical aficionado by any means – I lost my ear for it many years ago – but this is a very pleasant evening of excellent musicians playing lovely music in a beautiful setting.   I hear an audience member say, “The tedium will last about an hour, I take it?”; thankfully, it was nothing like that at all.

The Christmas Cracker, GRCH, 18/12/11

The City of Glasgow Chorus

Awww.  Just spent a lovely evening at the Christmas performance of the City of Glasgow Chorus (my friend Michael Inglis is a member), accompanied by the Orchestra of Scottish Opera.

Is there anything more evocative than beautiful sopranos soaring their harmonies on the “Fa-la-la-la-la” of “Deck the Halls”?  Choirs are lovely – I don’t see enough of them.

A really fun time.  Even an old cynic like me was singing along to the Mamma Mia medley, and old favourites like “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” evoked quite a few goosebumps.  Many thanks and Merry Christmas to them all!

The end of 2011: best music.

Okay, end of year and nothing planned between now and January, so it’s time for a bit of reflection.  Let’s start with music which, I’m sure you have gathered, is like food and drink to me.

Best concerts?  Well, of course, Mayra Andrade at Ronnie Scott’s would win the top five places in my top five list, but that’s a bit unfair on the others.  Seeing one of the world’s great new stars in such an intimate setting and with such a fabulous band was a highlight of this or any year.  Along with Paul Simon’s “Born at the Right Time” tour  at the SECC in 1991 – a very different proposition – it’s definitely an all time favourite.

So if I am giving other places out, second goes to Ane Brun at King Tut’s, one of my discoveries of the year.  A fantastic night of gorgeous songs and transcendent sounds, it was gob-smacking in its emotional power.  Third is Love and Money at the Queen’s Hall, purely for nostalgic reasons.  Impeccable funk and charisma personified from James Grant, it was a wonderful reminder of a band I constantly return to on the CD player.  Fourth – Yasmin Levy at the GRCH in January: a  fantastic voice, beautiful Sephardic songs and a warmth of spirit that was captivating.

So many others: Lau’s set at the O2 ABC in January; Grethcen Parlato’s cool at the Tron; Imelda May’s raucous sexiness at the O2 Academy. But fifth spot in the top five goes to Catfish Keith at The Ferry in October.  A brilliant, brilliant guitarist, a growling voice and a genuinely nice guy; a perfect  blues night.

As for the albums that I’ve been playing a lot, I’ve been part of the so-called “vinyl revival” that never really went away.   On a good deck LPs still sound as good as any digital source, and on top of that, there’s the aesthetic of watching a record spin.  I’ve always felt turntables are as much musical instruments as anything else.  Mine, a thirty year old Alphason Sonata with MC-100s pure copper rewired tonearm, Atlas power supply, Dynavector Karat cartridge and Trichord Dino and Dino+ headamp,  is my pride and joy.

So what’s been spinning? Ane Brun’s “It All Starts With One” has been almost worn out.  “Undertow” fills the room, the flat, the whole fucking building with its huge sound (really, it does – ask my neighbours), and the last three “bonus” tracks – “One Last Try”, “Du gråter så store tåra”, “I Would Hurt a Fly” – are astonishing.  Album of the year for me…

Except I love Paul Simon’s “So Beautiful or So What”.  Simon’s inventiveness at 70 is incredible.  He’s always reinvented himself, done something new, refused to trade on past glories.  His latest is a huge return to form (I wasn’t too impressed with “Surprise” or “You’re The One” when compared with his legendary albums like “Graceland” or “Still Crazy…”) and is outstandingly produced.  His voice sounds just as gorgeous as it did when he was twenty.  Incredible.

Bought late in 2010 but worked hard this year was James McMurtry’s “Live in Europe”, an artist who may well be, after Simon, the greatest living US songwriter.  Recorded on the tour I saw him on, it contains some classic protest songs of blue collar America, including “Hurricane Party”.  It also contains one of the saddest, angriest, most beautiful love stories ever recorded: “Ruby and Carlos”.  If it doesn’t make you weep, you’re a robot.

Sevara Nazarkhan’s “Tortadur” is only available digitally, unfortunately, but it’s beautiful.  Her 2007 album “Sen” was phenomenal in it’s cool, Uzbek take on trip-hop – I heartily recommend the cool, cool, cool live recording of “Erkalab” on You Tube – and she then diverted into cheesy pop for a while.  “Tortadur” is a return to Uzbek folk roots, and its slow-burning gorgeousness is fantastic.  I’m hoping for a tour on the back of the album, though it’ll probably mean a trip to London.  Damn…

The Civil Wars “Barton Hollow” made a big impression too. Grounded in folk rock of the Sixties and a traditional bluegrass aesthetic, the duo of Joy Williams and John Paul White produce some of the most convincing harmonies since Simon and Garfunkel.  It may be gentle music – perhaps even at times twee – but it’s never less than utterly listenable because of the perfection of its pitch.

Other ear-grabbers included Vintage Trouble’s “The Bomb Shelter Sessions”, the seriously deranged My Brightest Diamond’s “All Things Will Unwind” and, a personal favourite and a lovely discovery from Poland, Mikromusic’s “Sova”.

I’ve missed out so much, but next year starts in just a fortnight.  Six gigs booked in January – methinks I’ll be busy!

Ane Brun, King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, 9/11/11

Ane Brun

Oh my goodness, that was a surprise.

I expected to be mildly entertained by another idiosyncratic Norwegian singer, ticking off a bit more Scandinavian wonky-pop.  What I got instead was one of the highlight concerts of the year and a live introduction to a singer I’m going to be listening to pretty much constantly for the forseeable future.

Ane Brun and her band are just wonderful.  There’s little mainstream about her, though, like Susanne Sundfør, she’s capable of some damned fine tunes.  Forget that – utterly mesmerising tunes.  She relies on that Scandinavian thing of setting up a rhythm section (three drum kits on a stage the size of a postage stamp) that is quite capable of rearranging an audience’s internal organs, and lays wash after wash of transcendent ambience over it, and then piles on top of that a voice that is pure, pitch perfect and astonishingly engaging.  The result is the biggest, widest, deepest, broadest soundstage I think I’ve ever heard in a venue this intimate and in many that are much bigger.

And it’s gorgeous.  I don’t know enough of the songs to rhyme them off – I will soon – but one after another has me muttering “Jesus” at the end of yet another wringing out of the senses and emotions.  The new album – “It All Starts With One” – features heavily.  The single “Do You Remember” is a thundering drum-driven pagan thrashing: if you don’t dance your bollocks off to it, you are clearly in need of urgent hospitalisation.  And she ends with “Undertow” which just soars and soars and soars and when you think it can’t soar any higher – up it fucking well goes.

Brun herself is lovely.  She’s very beautiful – those eyes! – but much more attractive is her enigmatic charisma, warmth and obvious delight at the roaring reception she gets.  I dunno – I reckon she would be perfect in the part of a Norwegian Resistance agent in a World War 2 movie.  I haven’t a clue where that came from, but it’s stuck there now.

I don’t know where this will come in my end of year top five gig list, but it will be in there somewhere.   Easily.   Ane Brun is a singer I must have more of.  Must, must, must, must.  Definitely.  Must.

Do you think I liked this a wee bit?

Footnote:  Support is supplied by a member of her band, Linnea Olsson, who is excellent.  A solo cellist and vocalist, she loops, samples, overdubs to produce a quite lovely sound.  Definitely worth checking out on You Tube, bearing in mind that the compression ruins the hugeness of her sound.

Songs that make you go “wow”: “Imagine: The Harmony Game”, BBC1, 8/11/11

You don't need a caption for these guys...

Oooh, thank you BBC for a second brilliant documentary in a week.  The making of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” album from Alan Yentob’s “Imagine” series was an absolute treat.  Of course, I’m a fan: despite being too young to have fully embraced the Sixties, my eldest brother was into Simon and Garfunkel, and I caught on to them through him.  Paul Simon is, surely, the greatest songwriter of the modern era, reinventing himself over and over again, and, unlike Madonna, in a good way.  Not only that, he has embraced politics in the most subtle of manners: never bombastic, never sensational, he has also never sold out, never become the corporate tax dodging entrepreneur so many of the more strident names of that decade have become.  And yet, with one album called “Graceland”, he can quite legitimately be counted as one of the architects of the downfall of apartheid – not that he would ever, ever make such a claim on his own behalf.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water” must be one of the greatest ever “last albums”: can you think of a better?  And what this documentary does is to trace some of the reasons why it had to be the last album:  the way in which Paul and Artie were growing apart in their interests, their influences, was reflected in the simple act of finally separating their voices, taking “turns” at the songs, which was  unthinkable on previous albums on which their genius producer, Roy Halee, insisted on miking their voices through a single source.

The technical details are fascinating:  how the closeness of their harmony was augmented with synchronous overdubbing of their voices; the use of echo, and of corridors in the Columbia building to find just the right spot for that thumping drum on “The Boxer”; moving recording studios to cathedrals for the right sound; the laying down of the backing track of “Cecilia” at a presumably rather boozy boys’ night in; the development of the defining piano score on “Bridge…” by the wonderful Larry Knechtel, and the now famous story of that almost missed last verse, with Garfunkel and Halee insisting Simon write it because they knew, just knew, it was meant to be.  Most of all, though, there’s a sense of two young men inspiring other young men around them to the very top of their game to produce… perfection.

It’s  a long time since I’ve listened to “Bridge Over Troubled Water”.  I remember it so fondly.  “Baby Driver” seemed to an 11-year old me to be the horniest song I’d ever heard, partly because of the lyrics (the glee expressed in “There’s no-one home, we’re all alone, aw come into my room and play, yes we can play” and the lasciviousness of “I wonder how your engine feels”) but mainly because of that horny horn section blasting out one of the most riotous sax solos ever.  I remember I played it on a wee GEC cassette tape.  At first, out wailed the alto sax: then as the tape head deteriorated, what I presume was the tenor part came to the fore, and all of a sudden I was listening to a brand new song.

I always loved “Only Living Boy in New York” – explained in the programme as Paul’s goodbye to Artie (“Tom”) as he flew to Mexico to film “Catch-22″, which was the beginning of the end of their collaboration.  Like Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”, it tells the story of musicians whose personal relationship is going pear-shaped.  That transcendent choral refrain at the end of the track, washing away to a single plaintive guitar, gives me goosebumps every time.  And “Song for the Asking” is the most gentle, poignant coda to a record you could ever imagine.  And then there’s “Bridge…” itself, one of the most exceptional – and daringly different – songs ever written.

Looking at them now – two 70-year olds, one of them still remarkably inventive musically – there is a temptation to think about what might have been.  I suspect the time was just right, and whatever might have been, it was never going to match that glorious achievement.

I’ve looked out “Bridge…” to listen in the car over the next few days: it’ll be up loud.  However, I’ve also set aside Garfunkel’s first album, “Angel Clare” (produced by Halee, I think it’s absolutely beautiful) and Simon’s second (“There Goes Rhymin’ Simon”, with the stupendous, bitter  anthem “American Tune”) just to hear again the very different paths they took so soon after that one last hurrah.  Wonderful stuff.

Footnote: it tells you something about the cultural impact the duo had when “Garfunkel” is in the spellchecker dictionary…

Celtic Connections 2012

Will Oldham / Bonnie Prince Billy

Whoo hoo!  My favourite festival, Celtic Connections, has just announced its (partial) lineup for 2012.  It’s not quite complete and I think a few big names will be added, but there’s enough to keep me interested.

I’ve already booked Bonnie Prince Billy at The Fruitmarket:  Will Oldham is a bit of an cult oddball, but he produces some of the finest Americana around and makes some gorgeous sounds.  Anyone with a hankering for Bon Iver or Ray Lamontaigne or Wilco should get themselves down there.

There’s a wide variety of folky stuff from around the world, such as Madison Violet (USA), Russian Red (Spain) and the terrific Kathryn Tickell and The Unthanks (England): I’ll try one of them, but haven’t decided which.

Ana Moura

Two Scottish bands make a welcome return:  Colin MacIntyre’s The Mull Historical Society are back after a few years and, most satisfyingly, Stephen Lindsay’s The Big Dish reform after – oohh – yonks.  I love Lindsay’s voice: his solo albums – especially “Exit Music” – are utterly beautiful.  However, the huge problem is that their gig clashes with Portuguese fado star Ana Moura’s concert.  Moura is one of those fadistas I want to see before I pop my clogs (I’ve racked up Mariza – twice – and Deolinda, which isn’t nearly enough); this may be a once in a decade chance to see her in cabaret at the Fruitmarket.  I reckon I might have to rely on The Big Dish touring like Love and Money did after last year’s festival.  Oh, decisions, decisions!  Moura and Mull – probably go for that.

Other possibilities: Lau are back, as are The Paul McKenna Band.  Thea Gilmore is doing a night with Kris Drever (the guitarist from Lau) and his band – that might be a two birds with one stone opportunity. Luka Bloom might be worth a go – I love his “The Acoustic Motorbike” album from years ago and saw him at the Fleadh on Glasgow Green in 1991 – and the beautiful Julie Fowlis is a possibility.  New performers like the excellent cellist Natalie Haas might be interesting too.  And I’ll try to catch a couple of late night sessions.

Oooh, I’m so excited!