ROBYN ADA McKAY

After the gig? I’m joining the police and moving to the other side of the world

Robyn Ada McKay is proof that piping is a global attraction.

Four days after the Celtic Connections concert, she will move to Australia to begin a new job thanks to her piping credentials.

“Western Australia Police Pipe Band is one of the last to be financed by the government,” she explained.

“I’ll spend three days a week working with the pipe band – one day of practice and the other two will be community engagement projects, while on the other two days I’ll be working with the mounted sector with their horses. I’ll also be competing with the New Zealand Police Pipe Band.”

Robyn, from Inchinnan in Renfrewshire, got her first set of bagpipes for her sixth birthday.

“I grew up around pipe bands and for the past eight years I’ve played with the St Laurence O’Toole Pipe Band from Dublin,” said Robyn.

“It’s comforting knowing I can move to another country and there will be common ground in having all of these other pipers around.

“I lived in Cape Breton a couple of years ago and that was also thanks to the connections I made through piping. It’s such a close-knit community.”

In her 17 years playing the Highland pipes, Robyn has seen a change in the number of females playing the pipes – and the attitudes towards them.

“Sometimes when I turn up to a gig, they say, ‘Wow, a female piper, there’s not many of you guys about’,” she smiled.

“But there are a lot more coming through, especially in the past 15-20 years. When you look at the schools, it’s almost a 50-50 split as to who wants to learn the pipes.

“In pipe bands, 90-95% of pipe corps are made up of male pipers and, in the past couple of years, say there’s 75 pipers among the top three bands in the world, only three of them are female, so that puts things into perspective.”

Someoftheold attitudes to female pipers still linger, as Robyn has discovered.

“There’s such a fine line in grade one bands that judges walk around looking for whatever weakness or difference they can use to differentiate, and during my first couple of years with a grade one band, I always found them hovering behind me.

“That could have been by fluke or something else, but there’s the stereotype that females aren’t as strong as men, that they can’t blow or sustain a tone for as long as men can.”