The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Runrig’s farewell served ‘community of the soul’
“Music is the community of the soul,” tweeted MP and former Runrig keyboard player Pete Wishart, Cameron Mcneish, climber and friend of many years, tweeted that he was “greetin’ on the sofa”. As a non-tweeter, it takes something special for me to be reading tweets about anything at all, so what brought this on? Something special, that’s what.
Runrig’s final concert, filmed at Stirling in 2018 with the castle for a backdrop, and about a mile from where I live, was screened on Sky Arts on Saturday night.
I have been a fan since the first album, Play Gaelic, which came out in 1978. One reviewer described it a touch disparagingly as “Calum Kennedy meets the Shadows”, and as a Shadows fan for even longer than I have been a Runrig fan, I couldn’t see much wrong with that. One of the defining elements of Runrig’s music from first to last was Malcolm Jones’s guitar of choice, a Fender Stratocaster, which was also Hank Marvin’s guitar of choice. Here was a phenomenon in my life: a band whose music was rooted in my landscape of choice – Skye and the island west – and contrived to blend a wholly original, poetically rich lyricism with the guitar sound that I have coveted all my life.
I never did acquire a Strat, for my own playing (which never scratched the surface of the kind of achievements we’re talking about here) was happily derailed into a jazz world in my 20s, and there it still lurks, but those original Strat-wielding loyalties have remained. That first Runrig album is beside me right now, on the table where I write. Not only is it a vinyl LP, but it’s signed, not by the original cast admittedly, but by the band as they were constituted sometime in the 1990s. Along with a postcard from Hank Marvin in 1964 and a photograph I took of Benny Goodman during a soundcheck for a concert in Manchester in about 1975, these constitute my entire music archive.
I remember thinking the first time I listened to the album that there had simply never been anything like it. And last Saturday night, it occurred to me that nothing has changed, for at the end of the final concert, marvelling at the wonder of what Runrig had become over 45 years of making music, and yes Pete, sustaining the community of the soul.
By that time I was wiping my eyes, for I too was greetin’ on the sofa, along with almost the entire audience in the lee of Stirling Castle, and most of the band. Malcolm Jones just lost it during the final song. The camera caught him with his hand across his face, trying to hide that for
which there was no hiding place. After the inevitable raucous conclusion of Loch Lomond, the band stepped forward to the apron of the stage to sing an a cappella version of Every River with the crowd succumbing to all manner of emotions as they sang the chorus:
“Every river I try to cross
Every hill I try to climb
Every ocean I try to swim
Every road I try to find
All the ways of my life
I’d rather be with you
There’s no way
Without you.”
This was the band’s message to the audience. This was the audience’s message to the band. It was also the message of the sofa-sitters of the land.
I sat up for a long time afterwards, thinking about it all. A dram lubricated the hour. I was startled by a sudden memory.
A great friend of many years was Pat Sandeman, father of Gaelic singer Mary, and a man whose passions were threefold: birds, piping and Gaelic. When he died in 2006 aged 93 he was buried in Balquhidder Glen where I was living at the time.
At his funeral, one song was going round and round in my head, Runrig’s The Old Boys, which begins, “The old boys are all leaving, leaving one by one…” The thought occurred to me on Saturday night, somewhere about midnight: at how many Highland and Hebridean old boys’ funerals has that same thought occurred among how many mourners? It was the next day that I read Pete Wishart’s comment, and that was perfect for the situation.
My response to the occasion was emotionally complex. But finally, I decided it distilled down to a single simplicity, one which our wretched prime minister with his visit across the border last week will
never comprehend; nor will he comprehend the enthusiasm of a majority of the natives for a new independence referendum.
Listening to the glory of the music, the flood of memories that it unfurled, watching the audience respond with tidal waves of gratitude and tears, I thought: This is what it means to be Scottish.
The community of the soul is well served.
I was wiping my eyes, for I too was greetin’ on the sofa