“Should auld acquaintance be forgot?” Definitely not in Burns’ own Scotland
After performing at the Celtic Connections and travelling through the Gaelic heartland, Raghu Dixit writes about prepossessing experiences and a festival that makes fantastic use of its surroundings.
Three years ago, we were invited to play at Celtic Connections, the annual folk, roots and world music festival held during the winter months in Glasgow, Scotland. But, as luck would have it, our visas didn’t arrive on time and we couldn’t make it to the festival. Then, earlier this year, we were invited again, this time by the British Council as part of their Folk Nations series. They were taking five of India’s brightest folk talents to the 2014 edition of the festival, and wanted us to be one of them. This was pretty exciting for us, also because we were quite disappointed when we couldn’t make it the last time. To make it even more special, they wanted us to showcase our entire dance production, with Nritarutya, a contemporary dance company from Bangalore — a production that we believe has not enjoyed the exposure it deserves.
We arrived in Scotland on 23 December for our rather short trip of three days. Flying in from warm and sunny Bangalore, the first thing that hit us was the bitter cold. Scotland is cold all year round, but I think it was at the peak of its cold during our time there. With a schedule as packed as ours turned out to be, we had little time to do the sightseeing we would have liked to. But Glasgow itself is quite amazing — it’s a world city, in a sense, with apparent influences from everywhere. Most of Scotland also looks like it is right out of a Lord of the Rings set. A large part of it is 14th century architecture, and it’s amazing to see how it has been preserved.
Our first show in Glasgow as part of Celtic Connections was at Oran Mor, where we’d played before on a previous trip to Scotland. A music venue now, Oran Mor is a modified cathedral in the basement of what used to be a church, making it an incredibly beautiful location. That’s one of the great things about Celtic Connections, we thought — they put artists in places such as Oran Mor, making the trip very interesting for a visitor because you’re getting to see all of this and enjoy the music at the same time. The next day, we had two shows, the India reception during the day, and the very special Robert Burns night in the evening — a celebration of the Scottish poet’s birthday — made more special by the fact that we were the only Indian band in this showcase. The night in it- self was quite spectacular. There was a 60-80 piece orchestra — the Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra — that was backing each of the artists who performed, and it was amazing to see how all the acts had been arranged around this orchestra, so as to make it a part of the show. The venue only added to the grandness — the SSE Hydro is a stadium that can seat about 30,000 odd people.
We realised that Celtic Connections in general uses Glasgow very well and very interestingly. For instance, there was a show at a place called the Old Fruitmar- ket, which was once, as the name suggests, actually just a fruit market. If you can imagine a fruit market from Shakespearean times, with arches and a quadrangle with what would have been stalls selling fruits and vegetables, this was quite literally just that. From the outside, it looks like a fantastic, modern building, but when you enter, it’s still the beautiful, old fruit market. Retain- ing the architectural beauty of the place, they have now turned it into a scenic music venue, which made us wonder about the possibilities of doing this in India, too.
Aside from the three shows we played as part of Celtic Connections, we also did one at an Apple Store, as well as one for a BBC radio station, making it a grand total of five in two days, and the most hectic three days we have ever spent outside of India. At the Apple Store, we did a podcast that’s now live on the store. The one for the radio station, however, is something we’ve never done before. A programme called World on 3 on the channel BBC Radio 3 is a live radio show, where you’re playing or talking and it is broadcast live on the channel, so that was rather interesting. So there were a few things that we managed to do outside of the main gigs that we were in Scotland to play at Celtic Connections, and that always keeps things interesting for us.
On the whole, the entire trip was quite the experience, right from playing shows at Celtic Connections as varied as the Robert Burns night and the Indian reception, to the live radio show, to the podcast and, of course, the bitter cold. The Scottish people, too, it has to be said, are some of the friendliest, with their hospitality and warmth. And for some of us, this trip hit home even more. Our guitarist Bryden Stephen Lewis has returned with a new sense of purpose, he believes, having visited the country that is responsible for the origin of his first name. But this I, of course, do not understand.