Folk review: Shetland Folk Festival

IT’S fair to say that Admiral Fallow are one of the hottest (and/or coolest) bands in Scotland right now.

Already this year they’ve opened for Snow Patrol at the SECC and sold out their own Celtic Connections show; their feverishly anticipated second album is released this month, promoted by a seven-week UK tour, plus festival dates including the Great Escape and Rock Ness.

Just this past weekend, they played a London showcase at the Camden Crawl, curated by hip indie e-zine Drowned in Sound. Which must have felt a very long way indeed from the 32nd Shetland Folk Festival, where they took the stage a couple of nights previously.

Even leaving aside the geographical distance, it seems singularly unlikely that the quality of audience attention at the Black Cap bar in Camden High Street will have been a patch on the intently focused, intensely appreciative ambience in Lerwick. The near-silent avidity with which Shetlanders listen, even in an 800-strong capacity crowd, can be somewhat disconcerting for first-time performers, until they realise the musical appetite and expertise it signifies.

Admiral Fallow’s frontman, Louis Abbott, was totally loving it, having tagged along last year with a pal’s band just for the craic, hence this triumphant return visit, funded by the Year of Creative Scotland. It was a hugely happy coming together all round, with the Glasgow quintet’s ingenious interplay of heart-lifting hooks, sensuously arrayed instrumentation and ambitious musical craft resounding powerfully through new and old songs alike, as the festival successfully expanded its reach in the indie-pop/nu-folk direction.

Other contrasting snapshots from Shetland 2012 ranged from the unconventional but enthusiastic audience participation incited by the superb Nordic/northern English quintet Baltic Crossing – lots of manic arm-pumping and mass shouting – in among their exuberantly virtuosic tunes, to local favourites First Foot Soldiers, who comprehensively regaled Saturday’s late-night Festival Club crowd with wickedly cheeky covers of the Beach Boys, Motörhead, Johnny Cash and Stevie Wonder.

Not exactly your average folk festival experience – but then that’s Shetland all over. Besides its more notorious quirks, however – like weather that switchbacked between sunshine and horizontal snow, or after-hours revelry that saw three members of the Treacherous Orchestra navigating Lerwick’s high street in a wheelie bin – it’s the programmers’ as well as audiences’ attention to the music that ultimately sets the event apart.

That’s what enables them to attract artists like progressive banjo doyenne Alison Brown, here making her fourth Shetland visit all the way from Nashville, in a mouth-watering quartet with the extraordinary US fiddle maestro Casey Driessen and Irish guitar wizard John Doyle, plus her bassist husband, Garry West, all firing off one another in truly inspirational style.

Other luminary highlights included the wild yet precision-honed brilliance of instrumental quartet Kan, the winningly inventive folk-rock dynamism of Canadian fiddle-led outfit Sprag Session, and two utterly dazzling duos: Scottish/Irish pipers Ross Ainslie and Jarlath Henderson, and the guitar/accordion/harmonica partnership of Tim Edey and Brendan Power.