Celtic Connections celebrates its thirty birthday this year in better health than ever. From its broadly Scots-Irish beginnings at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in 1994, the festival’s tentacles have spread throughout the city luring in artists and audiences from across the globe to make January one of the most vibrant months for music in the city.
With the likes of Benin superstar Angelique Kidjo and Ukrainian quartet DakhaBrakha among the draws, Celtic Connections is an international love affair but this year some of the highlights came from closer to home.
The Roaming Roots Revue eschewed their usual celebration of the sounds of US folk rock to celebrate the Songs of Modern Scotland with an all-Scottish line-up of guest artists across a two-night run in the soaring company of the Royal Conservatoire Symphony.
Their definition of the modern era reached back as far as Gerry Rafferty’s Night Owl, performed by Delgados frontwoman Emma Pollock, and Al Stewart’s mellow Year of the Cat, rendered by the Trashcan Sinatras. Roddy Woomble and Rod Jones of Idlewild and Del Amitri’s Justin Currie were on hand to perform their own modern classics while there was fist-pumping and sentimental swaying respectively for Hamish Hawk’s take on Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out and Admiral Fallow’s version of The Proclaimers’ Sunshine on Leith.
Roaming Roots guest Eddi Reader played her own headline show at the Pavilion Theatre, normally a bastion of panto and variety shows. Reader channelled that vaudeville history in her banter with the home crowd but the music was entirely graceful and moving, incorporating hits from across her career as well as her fragrant takes on the songs of Robert Burns.
Best of all, King Creosote soothed a capacity crowd in the atmospheric Old Fruitmarket, performing his new album I DES end to end with full band, oscillating between bare, acoustic introductions and expansive, mesmeric electronic mantras.
