DOES GAELIC MUSIC LIVE IN EXILE AT HOME?

HI-Arts Journal aims to provide a regular platform for figures in the arts world to have their say about a key issue of the day.  This month:  The Waulking Songs of Barra provided a life-changing epiphany for PETER URPETH, but why does the music of the Gael remain marginalised within the national context of folk and music events?
 

IT WAS SUMMER 1978, and it had been an ordinary enough day in Southend on Sea, Essex. We had walked the prom, taken the train down the pier, eaten cod and chips in a cafe beneath an old brick arch in which the tables cloths were as gingham-clad as the mock Swiss curtains. We would go on to Leigh-on-Sea for a punit of cockles and an underage pint in a pub on the seafront there.

Everywhere reeked of Thames mud and rotten seaweed. While Southend was a brash time-warp unable to see beyond its own greying DA, black clotted with old biker men who no matter how fast they rode would never catch up with their own fleeing youth and were nothing but refugees from the Wall of Death, Leigh was genteel, like an old fishing port, a little piece of Cornwall not far from home - and it had a second-hand record shop.

But, as I arrived in that small haven of maritime nostalgia, little did I know that something was about to happen that would leave its mark on my life for good. I strode into that record shop dressed in my woven box jacket, kicking my Kickers, and cast an eye over the pop vinyl. Nothing much to be had. David Sylvian, perhaps.

And then, in a small stack of folk records next to the end of the pop pile, I saw a record the like of which I had never seen before.

The cover was white with a grainy picture of some old women sitting around a table holding a piece of cloth and a man held a microphone toward them. Not perhaps the most promising of covers, but then, never judge a record by its cover.

Those women were, I thought, Native Americans, or Peruvians. The record said something about an island called Barra. Where that was, I did not know. When I paid the pound demand on the sticky label for this record, I did not know what that music would sound like. I think, in retrospect, I was drawn to the cover because one of the old women sitting at that table looked like my own grandmother.

I had the cockles and a pint and then went home to the record player - a small boxy Garrard with a built-in speaker.

Next Page | Previous Page                  Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4