2019 Quarterly Review

Shooting the Bell Rock Ceilidh Band Video

Hello! I’ve started a website to help make my own work and that of the amazing people I get to work with more visible, and also to comment on Pitchfork articles I don’t agree with. To kick things off, here’s a recap of the year so far. 

In the early minutes of 2019, INYAL were halfway through a performance at Ardgay Hall which was loads of fun despite numerous power outages. Sutherland Sessions do brilliant work bringing great concerts to rural areas, and by inviting Heisk and ourselves to the highlands on Hogmanay, they put on a night of weird and adventurous music that can be a difficult sell when there are ceilidhs happening in every bus stop, village hall and corner shop. Hats off to them for taking risks.

INYAL performing at Celtic Connections

Once we returned from the frozen yet extremely hospitable north we began preparations for our Celtic Connections headline at the QMU. For this, we enlisted the services of an extended line up, with Signy Jakobsdottir, Laura Wilkie and Charlie Stewart helping us make the show the disco triumph we had always dreamed of. We will miss the big band when we head out to Australia in a few months time, but the sunnier climate and abundance of pelicans should see us forget about it all pretty quickly as we descend into an antipodean bliss that will only be dispelled when our visas expire and we’re forcibly ejected from the country. 

Other musical endeavours included a spot of filming for BBC Alba with Skye song encyclopaedia Catherine Tinney, a few Live Music Now gigs with fiddle ornament dispenser Robbie Greig and preparations for Gaeltictronica 2019. More on that in the coming weeks. 

The last few months have also seen videos I produced for Rura, Mike Vass and the Traditional Music Forum go live online. They were all brilliant projects to work on, and all three featured incredibly talented musicians.

The rest of the year has mostly been filled with using a new ultra-rugged, waterproof and indestructible GoPro to film extremely pedestrian trips around town on a bicycle. It’s not Geraint Thomas tearing apart the Tour de France, but I’m sure it’ll find a use somewhere. Get in touch if you want a music video that places Glasgow city centre traffic front and centre. 

There’s some cool gigs on the horizon which I’ll try and write about, and hopefully March will include an escape from the city to high-rise behemoths of Assynt, in which case I’ll be making sure everyone sees that it happened and understands how wholesome and spiritually rewarding the experience was. In the meantime, check out and support the work of the people mentioned above if you can, as they’re all totally wizard.