Paul Brandon penned this review.
It’s Midwinter here in Brisbane, which means in reality, it’s still generally a good deal warmer than in Britain. I’m sitting here, my Winnie the Pooh cup full to spilling with steaming coffee (Mandehling single origin from the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the north of here, from a fey local roaster called Celistica. That’s her real name too, but I digress). I’m so so late. With everything. Web site updates, a new novel, learning new tunes for a festival this weekend, feeding my daughter, even this review is late, and Cat, our esteemed and merciful Editor is one email away from loosing his cete of special attack badgers on me…
So, onward!
Live albums are a funny old bag of cats, and everyone seems to have an opinion as to their worth. For some, they’re lazy, cheap ways of releasing material, poorly recorded with often very mixed results, whilst for others they are snapshots of a band at their best, which is to say live. The versions recorded are often different from what was on the original album. Personally, I love them. Mostly. Thinking back, some of my favourite albums are live ones, Alchemy by Dire Straits and Live in Seattle by Hayes and Cahill are a perfect examples of how to capture the power and passion of a band on stage, without having to compromise sound or production. Celtic is an interesting topic for a live album, as I think the very ‘acoustic’ nature of the performances means that there does have to be a bit more time spent looking after the quality, as opposed to say a rock concert. It’s been done very well in the past (Bothy Band, Live in Concert) and not so well (Clannad In Concert). Luckily for us, the Tannahill Weavers, have done a great job here. Live and in Session is a really nice idea; a single CD divided into two. The first half is a live set taken from their 2005 tour of the US, and the second is a studio set from Scotland a year or so later. It makes for a really interesting contrast.
I was stunned to discovour that the Tannies have been around for 30 years, and for those of you that have only a passing familiarity with them, they’re a Scottish traditional band that were one of the first to use the highland bagpipes in a band environment. Past members have included such Scottish luminaries as Gordon Duncan and Dougie McLean, and I think this is their seventeenth album. The boys are way up there with the likes of the Battlefield Band, Silly Wizard and Capercaillie for legendary status, but they resemble the formers in style, which is to say despite a smattering of keyboards, they’re mainly a tradition mix of the usual stringed instruments, voices, flutes whistles and pipes. Oh, and some bodhran too.
The album is a 50/50 mix of tunes and songs, with the songs nicely mixed up into ballads and more feisty numbers. The interesting thing is there’s not a huge amount of difference between the two sets, and in fact while I was listening, I often forgot when the live ended, and the studio began. I think this is mainly down to the boys’ ability to pretty much play flawlessly live! With the bagpipes being such a powerful instrument, there’s always the threat of them dominating everything else, but thankfully this isn’t the case here, and they sit alongside the guitar and bouzouki quite nicely. The live set features Tannies classics like ‘The Geese in the Bog/The Jig of Slurs’ and ‘When the Kye Come Hame’, and for me the standouts from the studio session were the Archie Fisher-penned ‘Dark-Eyed Molly’ and the lovely slow set, ‘Leaving Ireland’.
(Compass 2007)
