Inside Arts
Music tributes show we don’t know what we’ve got ’till it’s gone, says Brian Ferguson
Its thousands of followers will have to wait for just over a fortnight before they can dust off their 2018 diaries and start planning in earnest.
But the Celtic Connections festival, which will launch its 25th programme later this month, started the countdown to the celebrations at the end of August.
It may have got a bit lost in the immediate aftermath of Edinburgh’s marathon festivals season, but the announcement of what appears to be by far the most ambitious show in the festival’s history was a clear declaration of intent.
Two years on from the remarkable reimagining of the late Martyn Bennett’s final album, Grit, violinist and composer Greg Lawson is bringing his specially-formed orchestra back to the festival.
Now Lawson and his vast ensemble are to attempt to emulate the live recreation of Grit by attempting the same again with another Bennett album, Bothy Culture, but on a much bigger scale.
Not only will they will be taking over the Hydro arena on the middle Saturday of the festival, traditionally its busiest night, but they will be joined by stunt cyclist Danny Macaskill. He deployed Bennett’s music for his best-known film showing him tackling the Black Cuillin ridge on his native Isle of Skye, which has been watched 53 million times on Youtube.
What Bennett, who died in 2005 at the age of just 33, would make of it all is anyone’s guess. But his ongoing legacy, which is inspiring a new generation of young musicians, must be a source of huge pride to his family and friends.
With the exception of Robert Burns, it is hard to recall a bigger tribute to the work of a Scottish singer or musician being staged in their home country than the forthcoming Hydro gig.
It is the latest in a series of hugely ambitious Celtic Connections tributes, which have created some of the most memorable moments in the festival’s history, particularly in recent years. The most recent tribute was prompted by the death just over a year ago of the fiddler Angus Grant, frontman of Shooglenifty.
The success of “A Night For Angus” has surely played a big part in Grant’s band-mates deciding to keep going in his absence and make new music together, a fitting legacy for the maverick musician, who – like Bennett – helped bridge the substantial gap between folk music and club culture in Scotland.
Two other Celtic Connections tributes fresh in the memory featured the remarkable musical legacies of two contemporaries whose work is back in the limelight.
Gerry Rafferty, who was honoured at Celtic Connections in 2012, a year after this death, has rightly been cited as one of the most influential figures in Paisley’s musical history as part of its bid to become UK City of Culture.
Celtic Connections would pay tribute the following year to Michael Marra, who died just months before a festival he had performed in virtually every year since its inception.
Many of those who took part in that concert have contributed to a new biography of Marra, by the author James Robertson, which draws comparisons between the Dundonian singersongwriter and Bob Dylan and Robert Burns. I’m sure that the book and its glowing recollections of Marra will prompt a fresh attempt to reimagine his work for the live arena.
But it should also provoke thoughts on why artists like Marra and Rafferty are much more cherished in the industry once they are gone.