Alasdair Roberts by Alasdair Gray
Business and pleasure rarely mix as pleasingly as they did last Wednesday. I had a big wine delivery to make to the Murray Arms in the Hope, and, after unloading the van, had an hour to spare. Just time to enjoy partan pâté on oatcakes, and a butter-roasted rainbow trout from Rousay.
Kirkness & Gorie’s role as a wine supplier to the restaurants of Orkney started in the Hope over 20 years ago, when Joyce and Alan Craigie of The Creel asked whether our tiny retail operation might step up to wholesaling. We gave it a go, it worked for their customers and for us, and we’ve now enjoyed two decades working with a wide range of hotels, restaurants and less formal eateries across the county. It’s an honour to collaborate with many different individuals, all committed – in their different ways, and for different budgets – to serving good food and drink, and providing warm hospitality. So it was particularly pleasant to be back in the Murray Arms for the first time in several years, and back in the Hope, where it all began.
But that was only part of the pleasure, and part of the delving into the past. I was about to travel much further back in time. For just round the corner, the Cromarty Hall was playing host to two remarkable musicians, guitarist Alasdair Roberts and piper Donald WG Lindsay. I know Alasdair slightly via a mutual acquaintance but hadn’t seen him live. Despite the bagpipes being the first instrument I learned when I was a teenager, I’d never heard Donald play. All the more surprising given that he’s lived in South Ronaldsay for two years, following a long spell on Ascension Island.
Donald shared snippets of his biography inbetween numbers, not least explaining the origins of the smallpipes he plays. Like the Northumbrian and the Uillean pipes, the Scottish smallpipes are bellow operated, but Donald’s ‘Lindsay System’ involves an innovative chanter he developed with the use of 3-D printing, which allows for an increased octave range. So far so 21st century. But the music Donald and Alasdair made sounded 500 years older than that.
They began with a tale of love, abandonment and reunion, ‘Glenlogie’, the first of several ballads from Frances James Child’s collection, which came out in the 1880s. They also featured numbers from Allan Ramsay’s Tea Table Miscellany, published in 1724. Everything these books contain originated decades or even centuries before they were captured in print. Passing down through multiple generations of singers, usually through oral transmission, the ballads develop a stark simplicity. Superfluous detail got rubbed off, till all that was left was the elemental essentials: kings, queens, lords, ladies, horses, dogs, diamonds, daggers, sickbeds and deathbeds, love lost and love discovered. But that doesn’t mean the songs are simple. The way the elements are combined gives a thousand more possibilities than the dealing of a deck of cards. And of course the performance of them, in the right hands, can add enormous depth.
Alasdair and Donald are absolute masters of their art. Alasdair sang in a keening, often mournful tenor, playing six-string guitar with impressive dexterity and precision reminiscent sometimes of Dick Gaughan, who graced the same stage a few years ago. Donald switched between his smallpipes and 12-string guitar and sang in a darker baritone. The two guitars together producing a remarkable shimmer of notes, reminiscent of a clarsach. When the pipes joined the guitar, the jewel-like notes of the six-string – often capoed high up the fretboard for a lute-like tone – stood out beautifully against the warm, woody drones and gracenoted melody of the pipes. Not only the lyrics, them, but the performance too, took us back to earlier times. I found it easy to imagine music very like this being played in Tankerness or Skaill House, or even the palaces of the Stewart earls.
It was music to be listened to, and listened with attention, such was the wealth of subtlety in the words and the music. It struck me that this was unusual for Orkney. The wonderful flowering of folk music here at the moment is either for dancing, or based on instrumentation and forms originally developed for dancing. Fifteen years ago the Big Orkney Song Project did a lot to rediscover and restore Orkney’s heritage of songs. But Donald Findlay and Alasdair Roberts are way ahead of us – or centuries behind us, in the best possible sense.
One of the most atmospheric pieces of the evening was a set of slow airs, led by the pipes, including ‘Mrs Murray of Abercairny’. It’s unlikely that that Perthshire Mrs Murray had anything to do with the Murray of Murray Arms. But it was yet another pleasing happenstance in an evening full of them.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 12th September 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.