Mànran’s touring tales: Ewen Henderson

I’m Ewen Henderson, one-sixth of the band Mànran, and over the next while I’ll be sharing some of our adventures as we wander the globe on our musical travels.

We’re currently one week into a tour of Germany and, as you might expect, we’re having a blast.

The tour started last Wednesday in what has become an all too familiar fashion for our European excursions: a 3am start before hopping on the ‘red- eye’ flight to Amsterdam.

After a stopover brief enough to prevent anyone going missing in action in ‘the Dam’, we continued onwards to Frankfurt, where we were scheduled to team up with the rest of the touring party.

We’re on a tour known as the ‘Irish Heartbeat Tour’ and, now in its 21st year, the tour has gained a glowing reputation for bringing the very best in Irish musical entertainment to Germany every March with the aim of celebrating St Patrick’s Day over the course of a few weeks of protracted Hibernian revelry.

So what on earth is a Scottish band doing here?

Well, the close musical and cultural ties between Scotland and Ireland would be reason enough but we’re also fortunate enough to count among our ranks a trump card in the form of Mànran’s uilleann pipe and flute maestro, Ryan Murphy, from Cork, Ireland.

Though his efforts to hone our dodgy Irish accents have largely failed (mine and Gary Innes’s are floating about somewhere between Jamaica and Bangalore at the time of writing), the German audiences seem to have no qualms accepting the relevance of a few Scottish boys sharing the stage with their Celtic cousins, swapping tunes and songs across ‘Sruth na Maoile’.

Indeed, they seem to love the Scottish influence on this particular St Paddy’s party – especially the Highland pipes.

Also on the tour are two top acts from Ireland, the Armagh Rhymers and Bernie Pháid.

Bernie is a lovely traditional singer hailing from Dingle, Co Kerry, and is joined on this tour by fiddler Jeremy Spencer and guitarist David Clancy. The Armagh Rhymers are really quite unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed on stage.

Keeping alive the ancient Irish mumming traditions, this theatrical quartet perform a variety of traditional songs, tunes, poems and rhymes over the course of a 45-minute play featuring a number of Irish folk heroes including St Patrick himself.

Nothing too unusual there but when the whole thing is performed in the outlandish garb of the mummer (mountains of garish tweeds and enormous wicker headmasks in the forms of goats, ghouls and goblins), things take a turn for the surreal.

Think The Wicker Man meets The Dubliners and you’re maybe halfway to picturing the scene. The Rhymers assure me that this is all deeply traditional and has been has been enjoyed continuously in Armagh for centuries, leaving me in no doubt that the Monty Python crew had more than a passing acquaintance with mumming.

Needless to say, the locals in each town so far have been absolutely bowled over by what both these acts bring to the show.

Up to this point, we’ve been mostly travelling through the former East Germany where, due to the legacy of Soviet education, most people over a certain age speak Russian as a second language rather than English. This affords us ample opportunity to try out our fairly rusty German in a range of challenging and often farcical situations. I say rusty – if it was a car you’d be paying to get it scrapped.

There have been a couple of beauties so far including me repeatedly referring to guitarist Craig as a female on stage, Mark the drummer asking for a packet of pigs in a petrol station and the baffled expression on the receptionist’s face as Ross Saunders asked for a shoe to help him get back into his locked room. While on the subject of linguistics, I must note how impressed I’ve been by the number of people at gigs so far who have been learning Gaelic here in Germany, some to a very high level of fluency. Mo bhuan bheannachd orra!

Though the days can be long and the travel a bit arduous, touring in a land where the average backstage rider consists of at least one crate of excellent local beer each is never going to be all work and no play. On a couple of nights we’ve taken the opportunity to get to know the crew and the other bands a little better over a kleine pils and a couple of tunes. One such night saw us revisit one of our favourite German bars ever in a town called Torgau. It’s a very old- style affair: all dark wooden beams, foaming beer glasses and thick clouds of cigarette smoke (I’m not entirely sure how they’re getting round that bit of regulation) but the bar’s main quirk is the ankle- deep layer of peanut shells covering the ground. It transpires that in the two years since our last visit, the bar (unsurprisingly) burned down and has subsequently been faithfully restored to its dubious former glory. The combination of cigarette-butts and a floor literally coated in bone- dry tinder presumably ensured the place went up quicker than a fireworks display in Oban.

We’re now heading north-west for the next leg of the tour and looking forward to all that may bring. Tune in next week for tales of ham and cheese roll overdoses, unsuspecting German landlords subjected to impromptu bagpipe sessions and a shocking revelation about St Patrick’s Lochaber roots.