Blog

First off today, the news item that Savourna Stevenson’s 50th birthday concert tomorrow night, for various logistical reasons, has been moved from the City Halls to the Piping Centre, doubling up on the bill with Litha – who might seem an unfamiliar name but were formerly known as 2Duos, featuring the wonderful Aaron Jones and Claire Mann with German fellow singers/multi-instrumentalists Gudrun Walther and Jürgen Treyz. They’ll be launching their second album, Dancing of the Light, at the show.
 
When we made mention in yesterday’s bulletin of Admiral Fallow’s stonking Saturday night Festival Club set, we weren’t then aware that earlier on they’d also performed to a capacity crowd at the SECC, opening as local support for Snow Patrol. Following their sellout headline Celtic show at the ABC on Friday, that surely adds up to pretty much the ultimate weekend triple for any Glasgow band.
 
A chat with much-missed Scottish guitarist Tony McManus, now resident in Canada, and back this at Celtic for the first time in a while, elicited a recollection of his first visit to a very different type of heavyweight musical gathering, namely the NAMM – North American Music Makers – convention in LA, a showcase for the latest worldwide developments in instrument-building and related mechanical matters, and thus overwhelmingly populated by muso techy-heads. Unsurprisingly, therefore, attendance is also approximately 98 percent male – but McManus had noticed that the few women who were around seemed unusually friendly, when it came to striking up conversations in hotel bars. He mentioned this to a high-powered US music-biz friend, who looked at him with the pity reserved for hicks from the outermost sticks, as he broke the news, “Tony - those are hookers.”
 
After coming perilously close to inciting an actual riot in the Main Auditorium last night, what with a stage invasion by about 25 dancing audience members – plus a good 100-odd more extravagantly strutting their stuff along the side aisles – a couple of round-the-stalls conga lines and something of an altercation between the stage and the beleaguered security staff, anarchic Serbian circus-masters Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra continued to escalate their musical and theatrical outlawry for the rest of their set. It finished up with a second stage invasion, several of the band in dresses, and one of them wielding a ZZ Top-style spinning guitar emblazoned with flashing LED lights. Although it’s Romanian gypsies Taraf de Haïdouks whose name translates as “Band of Brigands”, they have nothing on this lot in that respect – and yet, while many in the audience were complaining that the gig should have been on in the Fruitmarket, given all the uproar, it transpires that the choice of a seated venue was ultimately the band’s, apparently on the grounds that their standing shows just get too wild.
 
We bade farewell today to the last of this year’s Showcase Scotland delegates, most of whom have stumbled homeward somewhat broken, but very happy indeed. The latter mood being rather in contrast to that of the event’s production-team member who was rudely awakned at 7.30 yesterday morning by one departing delegate, calling because his airport pick-up (for a 9.30am internal UK flight) was all of ten minutes late - and in fact turned up while he was on the phone. Gonnae no do that…