Halfway through its 1991 American Tour, the Battlefield Band stopped in at the Dell in Columbus, Ohio, on November 10, 1991. They played many tunes from their latest release, NEW SPRING, along with some of their older material, a few cover tunes like “Six Days on the Road” and their own original, traditional, Highland heavy metal tune for fun. You have not heard a ‘trucking’ song until you’ve heard Iain MacDonald soloing on his pipes on “Six Days”.
Jim Davenport of U.S. Scots was able to speak with Alistair Russell for a few minutes before their part of the show began. Alistair is being quoted by prior permission.
ALISTAIR: “Yea, that’s really what it is. We older ones among us have been in this music long enough to see that it is a pendulum going back and forward. We just happen to have stuck with acoustic music all. Well, by some people’s standards we’re a rock band, but by a rock band’s standards we’re acoustic musicians, and we’ve stuck with it just by chance, really. The celtic tradition, especially in Europe, has always been one that has flourished independent of Top 40 trends, but every now and again when the Top 40 needs new ideas, they’ll plunder the traditional music. I mean the whole World Beat thing that almost happened a couple of years ago was an attempt to commercialize something that refused to be commercialized. In other words, there’s always going to be people who want to listen to that kind of music but they’re not going to be shanghaied into buying something that they’ve been conned into just because some record company decides that they have to have an Afro-pop band now, you know. And it has been that way with Celtic music as well. There are a lot of new bands using traditional instruments and there are a lot of bands in Scotland and Ireland who are based firmly based in a folk tradition who have become rock bands. For instance, one of Scotland’s most popular bands is called Runrig. They are even more popular than Simple Minds, back in Scotland. And although they are a rock band with electric guitars and drums and what have you, when you listen to them, you can hear folk music. You know, I am not cynical about it, I think it’s great, I’m just a little amused by the way that the music business almost tries to exploit stuff like this at times when nobody’s coming up with good music. And yet this music’s been there all the time. It’s probably better to be amused about it than to be annoyed about it, because it would be easy to get annoyed about it. Here we are, we’ve been making this music on an amateur and a professional basis for 20 years, we’re doing very well with it, especially back in Europe. Not so much over here where things are getting better but much more slowly. But compared with the meteoric rise that some record company-financed rock bands enjoy, we have to do it very very steadily. So if we weren’t careful we could get bitter about that, but I tend more to think that it’s quite healthy to be firmly based on real music rather than on a marketing tactic which may go wrong.”
ALISTAIR: “Yea, yea. Well, you can even extrapolate that on quite a lot of rock bands have done their ‘folk thing’ you know. Like Status Quo, for example, and Rod Stewart have both had records out lately with bagpipes and fiddles and accordions on them. And they’ve worked OK as a piece of music but in the end it’s a bit of an insult really to a form of music that has always been there. Just to kind of plunder it for the sake of one hit record, and then the video tells you it all. In the video, they’ve got everyone dressed in kilts and what have you, so it perfectly obvious that its an exploitation thing. And all you can do is shrug your shoulders and say well, that’s totally irrelevant to what we’re doing which is playing the music we love to. I don’t want anyone to get the idea that this is in any way non-populist music. Back in Scotland, we and other bands like us are well received on a popular basis throughout the age group and class spectrum. To that extent, we don’t need people like Rod Stewart to come in and do our music for us.”
ALISTAIR: “Well, yes, they are absolutely A1 as far as I’m concerned. They’ve always used excellent musicians and always used good taste in how they incorporate our kind of music into their sort of comp-rock setup and it really works in my opinion. I’m not a fan, but I really do admire what they do. I think there is an integrity in Ian Anderson’s treatment of traditional music which goes above exploitation.”
ALISTAIR: “Uh-huh, with three and a half weeks to go...”
ALISTAIR: “Yea (laughing) Worst day of the tour so far.”
ALISTAIR: “No, that will be all for the U.S.A. and Canada. On a regular basis, we tour in Scotland, England, and Wales, Germany, to a lesser extent other European countries maybe just for festivals and short visits, and Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the USA. That fills up our time. We have a job squeezing five weeks out for the USA, because things are going so well for this music back in Europe that we feel we ought to concentrate on the audiences which are clearly, deeply involved in our stuff, and obviously we are still going to come to the US. Our audiences are slowly but surely getting larger and more widespread in the US, but it is taking longer for us to break through to a wide audience here than it has done back home.”
ALISTAIR: “Oh yea, everything helps, especially things like your effort which is not categorized ‘folk publications’.
ALISTAIR: “Yea, We had a chance to go to South America, and we couldn’t do it, because just it wouldn’t fit in. Similarly, in Japan, we’ve got people there waiting, but we’re just waiting for the right deal. We’ve got time to go to Japan, but once you’ve become established in quite a lot of countries its very hard to go into a new place and start from rock bottom. I mean its hard on the ego. And it’s also hard from a financial point of view.”
ALISTAIR: “Exactly, and we’re saying this in a very small place. I mean there is always the exception proves the rule. This is a different kind of place from what we would normally play in in the U.S., but we’ll play anywhere.”
ALISTAIR: “We all used to lay in Ireland a lot when we were, let’s say, less popular. That’s a case in point. There isn’t a tour promoter who is prepared to put the tour together that we would need to do ourselves justice, and so reluctantly, we don’t tour in Ireland, although if someone came up with a good tour, we’d be straight on the boat. It is one of our favorite places to play music.”
ALISTAIR: “Oh yea. We play at folk festivals all over the world, but we also play at what you might loosely call rock festivals. In fact, we played an Anarchist/Punk festival in Germany this year which was stupendous. It was right on the border with Czechoslovakia and for the first time ever a lot of Eastern Europeans could come to this thing and there was really an exciting atmosphere. We put on our own festival as well up in the Highlands of Scotland where we try to introduce different kinds of music into a festival format. Not just folk music, not just dance music but anything that we like and that our audience would like and that’s been very successful.”
ALISTAIR: “Well, that was like a mini. We do this in the summer, the one I’ve just talked about. The idea, it caught on so well that now what we do, in the winter time, we go in the village communities in the highlands of Scotland. We get funding for this because it is impossible in a village hall to make it work if you don’t have exterior funding. We’ll go into a village hall for a weekend and put on a concert and a dance but we’ll also put on classes for the kids and workshops and things like that. We try to involve everybody in this music which is where it comes from anyway. That’s been a heart- warming experience. It’s a luxury for us to be able to go into a place like that and indulge ourselves by playing in such a really nice homely atmosphere.”
ALISTAIR: “No, its everywhere. Its everywhere. Especially now there’s a lot of the young kids. I mean we’ve got an 18 year old [John McCusker] in our band now. This music, first and foremost, is social music for playing in the pubs. What we’ve done is try and take that out onto the concert stage. And other bands, too. But you can still go into a pub and hear this music being played on an informal basis and a lot of players are very young these days. Sometimes I go and sit in Edinburgh and I’m old enough to be everyone’s father. (laughter)”
ALISTAIR: “Right, yea, I can see it.”
ALISTAIR: “We’re touring about six months of the year, and about three months of the year we’re working, either rehearsing or recording. The other three months we get off in lumps of maybe two or three weeks at a time. So its possible to have a home life although its not as steady as someone who works five days out of seven.”
ALISTAIR: “We haven’t played in any Highland Games, but we’ve done special concerts for quite a few Highland Games Committees who are enterprising enough to put on a year round program of concerts. And that springs to mind in Arlington in Texas and one in Denver and so on and so forth. So it’s slowly happening but most Highland Games are set up in a way where it would be quite hard for us to go in and play because we’ve got quite complicated technical requirements and so. For the Games to provide all that for one show with all the other organizational hassles they have to deal with would be impractical. So if there is anyone who’s reading this who is thinking of using Scottish music along with a Highland Games, don’t be put off by that, just book more than one act to make it work for the whole weekend, you know.”
ALISTAIR: “Yes, well, with Battlefield Band that is quite difficult because we’ve really been the innovators in Scottish music in the sense that you’ve got to remember that this music always has been there and always will be there independent of any performer. But in terms of updating the music and using modern instruments and also writing our own material which is in a traditional vein, really Battlefield Band were the first to do that in Scotland. There are other Irish and Scottish bands who are doing that kind of thing nowadays, people like Stockton’s Wing from Ireland, Capa’ Ceilidh (SP) from Scotland. But in terms of the performance of Scottish music we’ve really not been influenced by anybody.”
ALISTAIR: “That’s right, yea.”
ALISTAIR: “Well, we’ve tried. For instance, we’ve put the occasional brass thing on albums, but to do that live would be very, very difficult. We’ve got a compact touring unit that plays a lot of instruments for four people. And to add more instruments would mean adding more people and that would just be a practical impossibility. So we’ve dabbled a bit in brass but that’s about it, really. We’ve got everything else, what more do you want? Have we done it?”
ALISTAIR: “Good, I’ll go tune up then.”
ALISTAIR: “You’re quite welcome.”