BAGPIPER WITH AN EDGE IS KNOWN TO MAKE NOISE
The Notre-Dame-de-Grâce man ticketed for wearing a traditional Scottish blade is also the musician known as Supersonic Tartan Death Machine
“Every man needs a hobby,” Jeff McCarthy said, as we shared a couple cans of Guinness at his home in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce a few weeks back.
The bagpiper made headlines in November when he ended up at the centre of a dim-witted scandal over a sgian-dubh (traditional Scottish knife). He was given a ticket by police for wearing the knife in the traditional sock of his traditional garb — the full kilt and caboodle, if you will — while on break from performing at a McGill University convocation ceremony. He has contested the ticket and the case is pending.
Anyone with any inkling of Scottish or Celtic culture knows McCarthy to be one of the hardest working bagpipers in Montreal, with a steady gig at the Ogilvy department store; a sideline playing as a member of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada; and countless contracts, from weddings to funerals and everything in between.
(Full disclosure: He performed at my wedding in 2011.)
“I’m an industrious individual,” he said. “I don’t turn down too many gigs. When people want me to be there, I try to be there whenever possible. I know it means something to anybody that calls me. I’m not saying it’s a vanishing culture, but the people that know really know, and they really want me to do it. It’s unfair to say they’re all Scottish or Irish; a lot of people out there just like the sound of the pipes.”
So that’s his day job. His hobby? That would again be piping, or I should say, piping out.
While McCarthy has no ambitions of global pop chart domination, he has been quietly — as quietly as can be, for someone playing bagpipes — building up a catalogue of crazy prog-piping-electro-rock insanity under the moniker Supersonic Tartan Death Machine.
His 10th album in five years, Decimus, was released in December via iTunes, Spotify and other digital platforms. It includes the heavy metal-tinged (My Baby
Came From) Planet X; traditional-minded pipe tune Juno; the superbly titled, sample-laden Donald Trump dis track The 20th Century Tiny Fingered, Cheeto-Faced, Ferret Wearing Man; noisy neighbour lament Twin Chainsaws at Dawn; Pixies-esque Seven Days of Monday; and bright-eyed torch song Theme For a Great Day.
It all started in 2011 when McCarthy got an iPad and began exploring the numerous, user-friendly music-making apps available for iOS.
“Before that, all I was doing was composing my own pipe tunes,” he said. “Then I started dabbling. Now, I’m up to 90 tunes I’ve composed, from all different inspirations.”
His sideline has put him in touch with an entire iOS community of like-minded bedroom noodlers, experimenting without the pressure of trying to break into the music industry.
“There are a lot of dads out there, wishing they could rock out in a more public fashion, probably due to where they are in life,” said the 48-year-old father of two kids, ages 13 and 11.
“There are some really good musicians in the crowd.”
The ability to create all the sounds on his own has freed McCarthy from the problems of trying to be a bagpiper in a conventional rock band — bagpipes are loud and tend to turn off your average rock musicians used to a drums-bass-guitar (and maybe keyboard) setup.
He also discovered he likes to sing. And he has a way with words. His hefty baritone carries weight, offset by a healthy dose of humour.
“It’s got to be fun,” he said. “If it’s not fun, why do it? I like to write songs about geeky things — UFOs and warrior heroes. One of my inspirations is They Might Be Giants. But it doesn’t have to be (funny). Music can be about anything. I usually like to tell a story and make people laugh by being sarcastic. Music is an outlet for me. It allows me to get my opinions out.”
He can also be serious, when inspiration strikes. On Monochrome, from the new album, he opines: “Too many see the world in terms of black and white / They cannot see the full spectrum / It’s really just not right / Am I both or am I neither? / I run in both worlds and I’m often not seen as either / To me it is irrelevant.”
Written before his recent run-in with the police, the song strikes a personal chord. McCarthy’s father is of Irish and French descent, while his mother is Jamaican. His grandmother is Scottish.
When the sgian-dubh question inevitably came up, he spoke at length and with understandable frustration about the absurdity of the situation.
“It obviously sticks in my craw, as they say in Scotland,” he said. “And it should stick in the craw of anybody who is proud of any Scottish heritage they have.”
He followed with an informative explanation of the storied history of the sgian-dubh, along with a detailed account of his strange and not particularly productive conversation with the police on the day he received the ticket. Despite his best efforts to be civil and open, he explained, the officers would not budge in their view that he was breaking the law.
“In a way, I’m glad it happened to me and not someone new to (the bagpipes),” he said.
“I’ve been at this a long time. When I used to work at the (Stewart) museum (on Île- Ste-Hélène), I used to have to explain and talk about the military uniform the Fraser Highlanders wore in the 18th century.”
And while confiding the whole affair was “disheartening,” McCarthy said he’ll be happy if a judge recognizes the sgian-dubh to be an integral part of traditional Scottish garb.
In the interim, he’s already working on his next album, inspired by the whole ordeal. The title? McCarthy smiled: “Pas coupable.”