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Unexpected encounters of the Celtic kind
celtic2012As its name attests, this festival is all about the connections – celebrating them, creating them, discovering them, reviving them – but sometimes they can be found in and lead back to the least expected places. Such was the experience of a certain esteemed radio producer yesterday, after he'd he bumped into singer Alyth McCormack for the first time this year. Once they’d greeted one another, she introduced him to playwright Hamish MacDonald, author of The Captain’s Collection, in which she’d been performing at the Tron. MacDonald and he got chatting, both being long time Glasgow West End denizens, and eventually realised that they’d once been neighbours in the same block of bedsits on Doune Gardens, about 27 years ago. As MacDonald remembered, said producer was then a blue-Mohican-ed punk, sharing the bedsit with his girlfriend, up to eight rabbits (they started out with one, got another without checking its sex; the two then did like rabbits do...), and a guinea pig. In fact, our broadcaster friend concluded, he probably owes his life to MacDonald’s quick thinking, on that infamous night when a bonfire of T-shirts was lit in the stairwell...purely in devotion to the true punk cause, of course.
There's been more KT Tunstall/Celtic Twitter action, as the Scottish star continued her visit to the festival at Julie Fowlis’s magical film-with-live-soundtrack show Heisgeir last night, subsequently raving about it to her 41,000-odd followers, with Duncan Chisholm’s peerless fiddle playing singled out for special mention – as were the festival’s long-suffering but impressively cheerful bar-staff, before Tunstall signed off with “Thank you Glasgow – see you next weekend.”
Among the longest-suffering of the lot are those at the Holiday Inn, who not only had to manage late last night when all 150-odd people packed into its main public bar were being aggressively and repeatedly ordered to shoosh by a couple of Hibernian veterans who wanted to sing a slow quiet song, but come Saturday night were also hosting a ruby wedding dinner-party for 50, complete with over-excited small children charging around the service area – and were continuing to exemplify grace under pressure.
Although the pressure had obviously got to the punter discovered by the hotel’s night manager around 4.30 this morning, fast asleep in the lift cuddled up to his accordion. As we headed for the other lift, a somewhat rude awakening was in progress – albeit administered with the utmost professional courtesy.
