Gig review: Battlefield Band's Music Tryst

Published on Monday 20 September 2010 22:20

BATTLEFIELD BAND'S MUSIC TRYST NEWBATTLE ABBEY COLLEGE, DALKEITH ***

There's an old conundrum concerning a much-mended sock: once all the original fabric has been replaced by darning, is it still the same sock? After over 40 years, Scottish folk stalwarts the Battlefield Band have now reached that point, as their last founder member, keyboardist, accordionist, singer and songwriter Alan Reid, prepares to bow out. Though he's not actually leaving till the end of the year, Saturday's concert at the band's valedictory weekend gathering, attended by a sell-out crowd of devoted fans, was his Scottish swansong.

As to the sock analogy, the Battlefield Band's uniquely evolved modus operandi, with personnel departing and arriving every few years – usually one at a time, thereby balancing continuity and change – is now a key identifier in itself. Their newest recruit, temporarily overlapping with Reid, is the young multi-instrumentalist and Gaelic singer Ewen Henderson, of the famously musical Lochaber clan, on fiddle, bagpipes, whistles and piano.

The post-Reid quartet, therefore, certainly won't lack for choice of weapon, completed as it is by piper Mike Katz, who also plays whistles, cittern and bass, fiddler Alasdair White (also whistles and bouzouki) and singer/guitarist Sean O'Donnell. It will, however, necessitate substantial rearrangements of existing material, and the transitional five-piece sounded distinctly betwixt and between at times, also hampered by an over-amplified, harshly textured PA mix.

Katz, White and Henderson are already cooking up a formidable head of steam in the tunes, though, and Reid can rest assured that he's leaving the much-loved institution he helped create in highly promising shape.