All is well
ALL WILL BE WELL: THE LIFE AND SONGS OF MICHAEL MARRA, GLASGOW ROYAL CONCERT HALL
TRIBUTES were paid to the Scottish singer and songwriter Michael Marra, who died last year aged 60, at a special Celtic Connections memorial concert celebrating his life and music.
His daughter Alice, pictured, took to the stage at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall for the show, titled All Will be Well, alongside special guests that included Eddi Reader, Dougie MacLean, The Mackenzie Sisters and Pat and Greg Kane from Hue and Cry. Proceeds from the event will go towards the Marra family’s appeal to start one of Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise Orchestras in Michael’s home town of Dundee. Picture: Colin Mearns
THE songs were the stars in this celebration of the Bard of Lochee; the songs and his children, and that’s as it should be for someone whose art – visual, spoken, written and sung – and family were his life.
As the opening recitation from Martyn Bennett’s Liberation rang out, there among the assembled cast were Alice and Mathew with their band the Hazey Janes, ready to, in time, bookend their dad’s career with the title track from his first album, The Midas Touch, and the Caribbean-rhythmed Mrs Gorrie from his final recording, Houseroom.
Throughout the concert, which highlighted Michael Marra’s huge frame of musical, social and cultural reference with voices including Eddi Reader, Kris Drever and the Mackenzie sisters, Alice was on hand to lend harmonies and repaid the pride her father talked of her with by singing beautifully his own favourite song, the Lewis Grassic Gibbon-inspired Monkey Hair.
Called on for the second Celtic Connections in succession to honour an old friend, Rab Noakes did a splendid job as director and host.
He shared anecdotes that shed light on Marra’s unique songwriting talent, pawky wit and ability to span genres from the classic pop style of Like Another Rolling Stone to the pure Scots of The Bawbee Birlin’, sung superbly by Pat Kane and Rod Paterson respectfully, and on into rock, jazz and chanson.
An excellent band, featuring Steve Kettley on saxophones and Duncan Chisholm on impressively multi-styled fiddling, gave the songs the idiosyncratic understanding touch required to complete an evening that was emotional but, as was Marra’s way, saw plenty of the humorous side too.
MAGGIE REILLY, NO offence meant to my fellow punters on Sunday evening, but Maggie Reilly and Stuart MacKillop, of Glasgow’s fine funk outfit Cado Belle, have worn better than many of their fans. Joined by former Silencers drummer Tony Soave and two younger players, guitarist David Dunsmuir and bassist Ross Hamilton, who are happy in both the jazz and trad arenas, the singer and keyboard player treated a packed theatre to a survey of almost 40 years of musicmaking while suggesting their best may be yet to come.
With lyricist Alasdair Robertson in the audience to hear it, the closing track from the 1970s band’s sole album, Stone’s Throw From Nowhere, was enough to satisfy those who still cherish the disc.
Her biggest solo hit, Eveytime We Touch, also got an airing, as did two songs from her 1980s partnership with Mike Oldfield, To France and – of course – Moonlight Shadow.
While there was nothing perfunctory about any of this, it was the newer songs that stood out. Heaven Sent, a favourite of the younger segment of the group, is as fine a slice of pop-soul as the Average White Band came up with in their heyday, and Reilly and MacKillop’s excursion into musical theatre should be worth seeing if the sample song played here, Not My Father’s Son, is any guide. Other new songs added Herald Angel-winning fiddler Duncan Chisholm to the lineup and suggested the forthcoming album will be a progression on 2006’s Rowan in its amalgam of trad ingredients with contemporary soulinfected songwriting – helped by the fact this line-up may be the best to serve the Reilly tonsils since 1976.