WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO

IAM vice-chairman of the Royal Scottish Pipe Band Association and am also involved in the World Pipe Band Championships, which are being held in Glasgow next month. I will have responsibility on the day for everything that goes on in the competition. The buck stops with me.

We will have 220 bands, 8000 pipers and drummers, including 57 overseas bands, and more than 300 performances. Plus 55,000 people will be coming to watch. I have to make sure each band is in the right place at the right time.

I enjoy it because I do it for the love of it – piping and the association is a hobby. My full-time job is as a business consultant for banks but I spend thousands of hours every year on piping.

I’m 61 now and have been playing the pipes for nearly 50 years and had 30 years of competing and playing. I started to get involved with the association in 2002 and run competitions all over Scotland.

I became involved in piping as a child growing up in Cambuslang but I was a dancer before I was a piper and was dancing from the age of five. I took up piping when I was 11 – there was some piping in my blood; I have two cousins who were pipers in the army and I learned from them.

Way back when I took up piping, in the late 1960s, kilts and all that sort of stuff wasn’t cool, but as we got into the 1990s, wearing a kilt became very fashionable and everyone was doing it and so you got young people beginning to accept the kilt. It became cooler and from the mid-1980s we have been teaching pipes and drums in schools. Now, out of our 10,000 membership, 4000 of those must be under 18.

There are two parallel streams in piping now – there are the traditionalists and then there are the guys who enjoy piping and drumming in any form. In the competition scene, we are still on a formal basis – the bands have to wear a uniform, but there is room for both.

Piping is very international and first spread around the world in the mid 1800s because of the British Empire. It is also popular in France, for example, from the Bretons who are Celtic – they had piping in their background even before we did in Scotland. It’s the same with Greece and Spain – there have been bagpipes

there for hundreds if not thousands of years. There are also 400 pipe bands in India, which is as many as Scotland.

The championships this year are quite open for the first time in a number of years and we have a mix of bands that are all chapping at the door. Not only that, we have some overseas bands we haven’t heard before. We still don’t know what they will bring to the party. The World Pipe Band Championships is at Glasgow Green on August 11 and 12. Visit theworlds.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPH: JAMIE SIMPSON