Review: World Pipe Band Championships

GLASGOW Green is traditionally associated with festive frolics and radical political gatherings but, once a year, the World Pipe Band Championships see the park engulfed by a very particular form of sonic mayhem as ever-expanding ripples of massed reed sound intersect each other, laced with the snarl of snares and the dull whump of bass drums.

For the pipe band fraternity, "the World's", as it is known, is the day of days, as some 8,000 pipers and drummers from 16 countries, not to mention around 40,000 spectators, converge on the Green.

It was the seemingly unstoppable Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band from Northern Ireland that took the 2011 World Pipe Band Championship on Saturday – the seventh time it has done so.

Its winning medley was a highly musical, well-balanced, yet consistently driven shift through time signatures concluding with a nicely harmonised hornpipe, The Train Journey North.

Earlier the band, led by Pipe Major Richard Parkes MBE, also gave a fine account of itself in the march, strathspey and reel, taking the field with the confidence one might expect from a band that had already won all this year's major UK and European championships

Another several times winner, Simon Fraser University of Canada, took second place, Scottish Power took third, while the fast-rising Inveraray and District came fourth.

Last year's world champions, St Laurence O'Toole from the Irish Republic, slipped back to fifth, while Boghall and Bathgate Caledonia came sixth.

The overall best drum corps was House of Edgar Shotts and Dykehead, under lead drummer Jim Kilpatrick MBE.

Some of the 230 bands competing had come huge distances, and at no small cost – notably Canterbury Caledonia Society from Christchurch, New Zealand, who lost their headquarters and many of their instruments in February's earthquake.