Review: Famous Grouse Festival

Famous Grouse FestivalFamous Grouse Experience, Crieff

AS SCOTTISH summer snapshots go, Friday night at the inaugural Famous Grouse Festival offered up a gem. With the rain tipping down, a small but determined crowd of al fresco revellers, many sporting salmon-pink polythene ponchos (handed out free at the gate), bopped merrily away beneath their brollies to a cover of Beyonc's Crazy in Love - faithfully rendered by a ten-piece Glaswegian gospel choir - while some unseen individual in a giant grouse costume bounced around in their midst.

The observant among you will have twigged that Friday also inaugurated this year's grouse-shooting season, with the same date more than a century ago having marked the launch of Matthew Gloag's best-selling whisky under its present name. This birthday pretext for the festival was further boosted by the brand's current celebrations of 30 years as Scotland's official favourite.

Siting the event in the car park of the Famous Grouse Experience, the visitor centre at the venerable Glenturret distillery, might have precluded the customary green-field festival vibe - but thankfully it also precluded mud, and for surrounding bucolic beauty the location certainly scored high. The inclusion of three drams in each day's admission price (with an extra one served to the queue that briefly formed when the gate opened late on Saturday) also added to the conviviality.

That said, and while the weather and audience numbers likewise improved significantly come the second day, overall attendance was decidedly on the thin side - perhaps a thousand in total at a generous guesstimate. Many, too, were invited guests enjoying the organisers' hospitality, while ticket sales looked to have suffered primarily though a dearth of publicity: the word overheard on the free shuttle bus from Crieff was that few even there knew the festival was happening, and awareness in the Central Belt seemed practically non-existent.

The line up, in addition, was not only something of a curate's egg quality-wise, but rather haphazard in terms of audience targeting. Securing platinum-sellers Glasvegas as Saturday's headliner was undoubtedly a coup, but they were only announced three weeks ago, and would have appealed to quite a different constituency from the folk and pop acts previously named on the bill.

That Dundonian national treasure Michael Marra, of course, has the gift of making himself welcome in practically any company, as well as seeming positively to relish playing in the rain.The wry, gravel-voiced vigour and vividness of his mordantly-crafted narratives, ranging in subject from the underbelly of personal-columns dating to a character getting expelled from the Dundee Racing Pigeon Society, for feeding her birds methadone ("they never win, but they always come back"), palpably warmed the crowd, despite the temperature making his breath visible as he sang.

There could scarcely have been a greater contrast than with the Gospel Truth Choir, who followed Marra onstage, and whose Beyonc cover featured amid a somewhat bizarre mix of pop and Scottish hits, also including Labi Siffre's Something Inside So Strong and Prince's Purple Rain, Caledonia and I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles), plus Amazing Grace to cover the "gospel" bit.

With the singers backed by power-pop-style instrumentation - electric guitar and bass, drums and two keyboards - the performance displayed an abundance of vocal talent and committed showmanship, but also a Glee-esque absence of personality, enthusiastically received as it was.

It was also, however, vastly more entertaining than Friday's final act (perhaps another reason, besides the weather, for that night's meagre turnout), ex-Runrig frontman Donnie Munro, who compounded his dreary, facile, mechanically-delivered folk-rock-lite by prefacing virtually every number with some earnestly self-important pronouncement as to its "inspiration".

A double lesson in how folk-rock ought to sound in the 21st century was supplied the following day by Mnran and Skerryvore, although given their broadly shared genre territory neither was best served by back-to-back scheduling, while Mnran also suffered from half their instruments being largely inaudible, even when the PA wasn't feeding back.

Former Speedway frontwoman Jill Jackson's rich, bluesy mezzo and pop/country songwriting deftly balanced adult-contemporary accessibility with gutsy edge in the night's penultimate slot, after which Glasvegas couldn't help but please - if only by dint of appearing in such a relatively intimate setting.

It must be said they came across very much as a band at the fag-end of a busy festival season, delivering a somewhat perfunctory and distinctly brief set, although roused to some moments of suitably euphoric heartbreak - as per title of this year's second album - by the crowd's effusive reception.