CELTIC Connections started the 2017 festival with a statement of intent. It’s only been 12 months since the three-week celebration of world, roots and folk music last took over Glasgow, but the world has changed considerably.
The UK has shrunk in on itself and Brexited, and, on the back of an angry and insular campaign, Donald Trump has become the leader of the free world.
The planet feels a little more hostile and a little more terrifying.
It was The Donald’s very own Celtic connection that provided inspiration for the first song of the festival. Karine Polwart’s I Burn But I Am Not Consumed was a message from the rocks of Lewis to the son of Mary MacLeod, them man who yesterday became the 45th President of the United States of America.
“Your mother was a wee girl once, who played upon my rocky back,” Polwart sang. “And you, you are a broken boy, you build a tower, you build a wall, and live in fear that they might fall, you, who see nothing but your own face in the sheen of the Hudson River.”
It was a hugely political declaration from the festival. Risky, too ,given the public money that makes nights like this possible.
A mixture so heady it would make Ukip or the Daily Express go tonto.
But that would miss that this was a song about time, about tradition, internationalism and love. The perfect opener for Celtic Connections.
Although the sell-out crowd in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall had likely come to hear Laura Marling, they were treated to an incredible six warm-up acts, highlighting the breadth of festival director Donald Shaw’s programme. Notable in that line-up was the breathtaking Aziza Brahim, born in an Algerian refugee camp, who, along with an incredible band, brought the music of Western Sahara to Buchanan Street.
Two years ago when Marling, right, played the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, she had parted ways with her band, and even her roadie. It was just the singer on stage, with one guitar, by herself all night. Thursday night’s concert was the polar opposite.
The singer stood front and centre before the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, playing songs from her recent back-catalogue.
Arranger and composer Kate St John did an incredible job transforming those Marling tunes, making more of Take The Night Off and giving Goodbye, England an almost Vaughan Williams bent.
It was a brief but stunning set, with Marling coming on for a sort of encore, something the young folk singer never does.
The talk in the crowd squeezing out of the door at the end of the night was that it would be hard for any of the other concerts in the three-week winter festival to match that opening spectacular. There is, however, plenty in the programme to suggest that they might just do that.
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