Blog

A promising early gush of entries for our band name/new genre competition has since slowed to a rather disappointing trickle – but it’s not quite too late: get your thinking caps on, let your imagination run riot, and email your best efforts and your contact details to us by midnight tonight, and you too could win two tickets to this Sunday’s Hazy Recollections gig at the O2 ABC – featuring Dead Man’s Waltz, Captain and the Kings, The Seventeenth Century, Gabby Young and the Hidden Lane Choir – and other possible as-yet unspecified goodies. We reproduce the rules below.
 
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with a new name for a band, and a new name for the genre of music they play – both band and genre being wholly imaginary, of course. The genre must consist of no more than three words. Hyphens, slashes, full stops and pretty much any other punctuation you like are allowed, as are composite words within reason, but no more than three words in total. As for the band’s name – do your worst.
 
A bumper-bargain ticket that may have escaped your attention amid the general melée is the mere £6 admission to the BBC Radio 3 World on 3 Live sessions, hosted by Mary Ann Kennedy, taking place in the Exhibition Hall nightly until Friday. Line-ups are announced day by day (check Celtic Connections on Facebook or Twitter for details) - tonight’s features festival favourites Breabach, Genticorum and The Outside Track, plus the specially-convened trio of Kristan Harvey, Tina Rees and Alistair Ogilvy, with performances interspersed by brief artist interviews.
 
Given the quantity of daytime hours’ labour required to keep Celtic Connections’ mammoth nightlife swinging, we must extend our deepest sympathies to those who’ve been grappling with the switch from night-shift to day-shift at the start of the working week – like the festival staffer who yesterday bemoaned, in heartfelt tones, having “one of those days where I had to get up about two hours earlier than I’d gone to bed the morning before: my body just doesn’t know what’s happening.”
 
As well as dealing with the influx of Transatlantic Sessions performers, the imperturbable staff at the Holiday Inn were today also hosting the London 2012 Transport Department Assessment Centre, with dozens of hopeful prospective Olympic employees shuttling in and out to be interviewed. One slightly puzzling impression, from seeing them arrive and leave throughout the day, was the number of young women who evidently thought that their prospects of landing transport jobs were improved by wearing skyscraper heels – but then maybe that’s just Glasgow for you.
 
One of the Transatlantic Sessions cast, double bass deity Danny Thompson, also performed at last night’s 50th birthday concert by seminal Scottish harpist Savourna Stevenson, who when introducing him, underlined his legendary status by referring to the time he toured the US in Roy Orbison’s band, with the Beatles as support. Thompson graciously elaborated on the story: he’d just come out of the army and was broke, someone tipped him off that Orbison – who Thompson, being a jazzer, had never heard of – was looking for a bassist; he learned the electric bass specifically for that tour, and hasn’t played it again since. Somewhat puncturing the coolness, though, was the punter who then piped up from the audience, “And you played with Cliff Richard, too.”
 
In recent years, when Showcase Scotland has been on the last weekend of Celtic Connections, there’s been much hilarity at the expense of the Shetland delegation, arriving as they have done fresh – though that’s certainly not the word – from the islands’ iconic Up Helly Aa festivities. What with Showcase 2012 taking place last weekend, the Shetlanders took the opportunity instead for some intensive pre-match training ahead of last night’s galley-burning and associated wild shenanigans – which in turn should see them nicely (though that’s probably not the word either) warmed up to welcome the Transatlantic Sessioneers when they play Lerwick on Friday. You know that old Viking term berserking. . . ?