Breabach back on the road “re-energised” by the break
Fortunately Breabach, a band regarded among Scotland’s most skilled and imaginative contemporary folk acts, managed to pack an awful lot into the first couple of months of 2020 before lockdown locked us all down.
They are delighted now to be properly on the road again with a date coming up at Hambrook Village Hall on March 15, presented by Wemsfest (www.wegottickets.com/ Wemsfest).
Ewan Robertson (guitar, vocals, cajon) said: “This is going to be our first tour of the year. We have always traditionally toured in the spring and we did manage togetatourinin2020,a spring/winter tour and we did manage to complete it. We finished on about March 5 and then we went to France for a few concerts and that’s when the restrictions came in. We had to come back from France in quite a hurry.
“2020 was actually very busy... until then. We did our 15th anniversary concert in early January and then we went out to Australia to play for Burns Night in Sydney Opera House.
“We came back and managed to do the UK tour and then we went to France. The start of our year was just jam packed. And then that was that.
“We’ve always been a very busy band in terms of time on the road and when things initially stopped, in a way, apart from the stresses and the worry about income, there was a little bit of just taking a breath. It was the first time that we had actually stopped in quite a few years and in some ways that was good... before we knew just how long it was going to last.
“By April we sat down together and got our heads together and realised that we needed to try to create an opportunity from this rather than worry about what is happening.
“We applied to Creative Scotland to work with one of our friends (Cat Bruce) who is an animator. They gave us the funding.
“We worked through the rest of the year on a film with her. We wrote an original soundtrack. Each member of the band took a chapter of the story and developed the story with her.
“We had always wanted to work with her but because we’ve been so busy over the years on the road, we’ve never had the chance to do that until then, which was great.”
The film is called Dùsgadh which means Awakening:
“It is not actually generally available to view at the moment.
“It is going out to some film festivals but we did do a virtual tour of it. We promoted it online like we would a normal tour but we set it up as a streaming platform. We did 20 venues and we did a Q&A and just shared memories of those venues.
“We did that in the spring last year and it was really good fun. It was just like being on the road in a way. We did online a lot of our favourite places.
“And then last year we started doing some festivals. We did a more scaled-back tour in October last year which was brilliant. It just feels like we are trying to get back to normal like so many people.
“We are grateful for the people that come out despite maybe being a little bit apprehensive.
“But I do think we have now got a greater awareness of why we enjoy doing all this. It was not remotely like we were burnt out or anything like that, but I do think we have been re-energised by having to stop.”