With the retirement of Richard Parkes from Field Marshal Montgomery on September 14th, 2024, we look back to a Piping Today magazine interview from the Grand Slam winning season of 2011. Alastair Dunn was pipe sergeant and Keith Orr was the leading drummer at that point.
Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band have a history stretching back to 1945 when they were established in a small townland called Drumalig on the outskirts of Belfast in Northern Ireland. Their meteoric rise to become one of the biggest successes in pipe band history has happened under the guiding hand of Richard Parkes MBE, who became pipe major in 1981.
There is little that needs to be said about Richard and the band’s achievements which has not been said elsewhere. Consider the fact that they have won the pipe band ‘Grand Slam’ of all five major championships in the 2011 season, a feat they also achieved in 1993, and the fact they have won more than 50 per cent of all the majors they have competed for since 2000 — then you know we are talking about the best of the best.
If you examine the stats of any competitive pursuit you will always find a top dog but it is consistency shown over the years which makes Field Marshal Montgomery not only top dog at the moment, but a pipe band phenomenon.
Someone once said to me that FMM are like a machine: no matter who joins the band they fit in with the style of playing and the band continues to produce a great sound and win prizes.
Richard Parkes is the constant driving force and creative spark inside the FMM machine and he attributes the success to a mix of quality players within the band, the strict routine and high standards he expects from the members at all times, and the way he and his team set the band up. The fact that they have two piping practice centres, one in Lisburn and one in Glasgow, actually helps with the unison in the pipe corps. “My pipe sergeant Alastair Dunn knows my style and what I want from the practices.
It would be more difficult if we had 26 pipers at practice every week,” said Richard. He believes that the ensemble sound he has set up in the band with leading drummer Keith Orr is key to their success and that “Keith’s musical style of drumming greatly enhances the overall ensemble of the band”.
So let’s examine the qualities of the pipers first. In a recent interview with Allan Hamilton on www.piperspersuasion.com, Richard said: “You can get away with someone who has good fingers, as opposed to brilliant fingers… but the blowing technique is most important.”
This really caught my attention as I would have assumed that by the time a piper got to Grade 1, their required blowing technique would be perfect and never a consideration. However, Richard is convinced improvements can be made, even to top-level performers.
“The instrument must sound good,” he explained. “You wouldn’t listen to any other type of instrument out of tune, so why should anyone be subjected to out-of-tune pipes? We are always working on blowing and it doesn’t matter how good the players are, there can still be a lapse in concentration from time to time and the blowing can go off. Alastair Dunn and myself will spend a lot of time playing one-on-one with players, primarily to ensure their blowing is up to the required standard. I also have trusted players around the band in certain positions and new players will be placed between them and I will ask these more experienced guys for their opinion.”
He revealed a few tricks of the trade on exactly how they work on blowing technique within the band. “Lots of people tend to back off on the bag pressure when they take a breath and there can also be certain areas in the performance where we encourage players not to take a breath, particularly on long notes, and that can help. We expect players to learn from our advice and go on to develop their own blowing technique after that but it can be very hard to teach someone good blowing if they don’t have it as a natural ability. Also, the better your sound is the more you will notice uneven blowing.”
Great blowing technique and good fingers are clearly vital parts of FMM’s recipe for success but, of course, they are also striving to get the edge over the rest of the top bands when it comes to competition performance.
Richard said: “What every band have to do on the day is try to produce the perfect sound and do everything correctly throughout their performance. I want to aim for our sound and technique to be as good as it can be and if we can achieve unison between the pipe corps and drum corps throughout the performance, that is all we can do and then it is up to the judges.
“When considering the medley, it needs to have the right balance of tunes, ie a mix of the old and the new which is going to suit most listeners on that particular day. It may come down to the adjudicator’s preference on the day. I’m sure there have been times in the past when we have put out a medley, which the judges have not liked, and we have been criticised, but it is hard for any band to produce a medley year after year that is going to suit all the judges.”
Richard starts preparing and tuning the band for a performance at least a week or two before going into the circle to compete.
“Producing a good sound is a building process for a few weeks before the actual competition. Someone once mentioned to me that when watching all the bands in the final tuning at the Worlds, most bands are all still frantically tuning chanters in the final tuning area,” he said. “Whereas, it appears that we are just blowing to get our drones tuned. I believe that our tuning has been a build-up process — our sound has been refined at every practice and we have less to do on the competition day.
“If we play the week before and get a rainy day, it can mess up all the work we have done so I’m always hoping for consistent weather. I also try to recreate the temperature that we are going to get on the day of the competition within the band hall. So, for the first major of the year I’ll be watching the weather forecast. You can’t always trust it but if it is going to be cold then we make sure the band hall is cold by opening all the windows and doors. I haven’t used it recently but at one point I did use a thermometer in the hall when we were trying get the temperature down. It is not easy to do but you can look at these things to ensure you are playing in similar conditions to the day of the competition.
“Having said that, if it isn’t going well on the day of a competition prior to playing, we have the team who can go around and tune all the chanters if needed. We did have to do that once this year and made a decision on the day that we had to re-set most of the chanters.
“The team is myself, Alastair Dunn and Mark Faloon, who will tune the chanters, and Frank Andrews and Scott Drummond, who tune the drones. These guys are giving me feedback all the time on how the band is sounding. It is a great team effort to get the band to sound as we do and with a band the size of ours you need feedback from guys you can trust.
“When tuning the drones, Frank and Scott will take a reading from myself, Alastair or Mark and start to tune the rest of the band. If they don’t hear the chanters and drones coming together, they know it is not working and will come back and tell me and we will start again. I have watched other bands go right around all their players tuning drones incorrectly, with the drones not fully in tune with the chanter, which can affect the quality of the sound, so we are very focused on ensuring that our guys are tuning to the right levels before they go right around the band.”
Once they are in the circle, Richard would like to be watching the other players in the band and taking in all the details of what is going on. Previously, this is what he did do but since he was ill in 2004, things have changed.
He explained: “Before I had the stroke I used to watch the pipers and the drum corps and even the adjudicators, and I conducted the band basically on automatic pilot. Since I’ve had the stroke I can’t do that and I need to concentrate exclusively on my own performance. Obviously I keep the band in time but a high level effect that I’ve had from the stroke is that I don’t have that same automatic pilot any more. I just have to deal with that and I’m very fortunate that I’m still able to play at all, never mind continue to play at such a high level.
“Of course, I still hear what is going on in the area around me, but in a band the size of ours you can only hear the area that you are in and it might not sound the same at the other side of the band. When I ask everybody what they thought about the performance afterwards, they generally don’t say the same thing, but if you do get the same feedback then you know that it has been really good, or really bad, depending on what they are saying.
“I have, on occasion, come off from a few performances thinking they were not great until I have heard recordings and many times they have sounded very good — that is what can happen in the larger band sizes these days.”
Consistently winning top prizes must be a fantastic experience, and I’m sure the winning never gets old, but it is testament to Richard’s drive to succeed that he is not content to be up there with the best and still has a burning desire to be No.1 every season.
“If we win everything and get second at the Worlds then we are not happy!” he admitted. “We have had that situation and were Champion of Champions, winning maybe three or four major championships — but were still not happy.
“It is not a nice place to be, yet it is where everyone wants to be. If you have to win the Worlds every year to be happy with your season, then you are not going to be happy most years. So when you do win the Worlds, it is the time for celebration.
“We did little wrong at the Worlds in 2008, 2009, and 2010, coming second three times and every year that passed in that time I thought, ‘Is it ever going to happen again?’ In 2008 we won the MSR and lost it on the medley, so it was a close contest, but in 2009 and 2010, we were well behind on points with Simon Fraser University and St Laurence O’Toole winning those competitions decisively and well done to them, both were deserved winners on the day.
“Listening back to the performances, we did all we could with no major errors and had a good sound on those days but the winning bands were also exceptional — the standard at the top is extremely high.”
When FMM won the Worlds in 2007, Richard remembers it being a wet year but one in which the band played very well. Since then the band has added or replaced six or seven pipers and quite a few drummers — all of an excellent standard.
“In 2007, we played with 23 pipers but we had 26 this season. When all the bands initially started getting bigger the tuning wasn’t as good, but now the bands are coping better with more pipers and they are developing systems that produce a great sound with the bigger band.”
He added: “I will always hear aspects within our performances that we can improve upon and we will be working on those. We are always looking for perfection but it is very difficult to achieve.
“I don’t think it will be easy for any band in the future to improve upon how the top bands are playing at the moment. The performances over the past number of years from a few bands are very difficult to fault technically, or to fault for musical expression or for sound. You can’t get any closer soundwise than to sound like one chanter or one set of drones — it is just the quality of sound to consider after that.
“I do think the standard of technical piping at the minute is as good as it has ever been and can’t really get much better.”
That surely begs the question that if there is little room for improving the standard, does the pipe band competition format itself need to take on a new form? Will the MSR and medley format remain for the next 50 years due to “tradition” or will a desire or a need for change arise?
“I think there is a possibility for change within the medley,” said Richard, “but I think the MSR should always be the tried and trusted standard of competition for pipe bands, especially at the World Championships. The MSR is the ultimate in pipe band performance but there is always room in the medley to do something else. There are a number of opinions out there about what could be done, such as the formation of the band or whether some players are allowed to stop with others carrying on. There are possibilities but the problem is how to standardise and adjudicate those changes.”
At the level FMM have been performing at, it would have been natural for them to start this season with a degree of confidence. Their early performances in 2011 certainly gave Richard grounds for optimism.
He said: “I think there is always an aspect of assessing the band’s form at the first major but we always play at a home competition the week before and we had a really good performance at Dungannon this year. I knew from that day that the band was sounding really good and although the weather at Dumbarton the following week was difficult for everybody, we managed to produce a good performance.
“Then, the priority was to get the medley going for the British Championships and the week before that we played at a local competition in Newcastle, County Down. It gave us the chance to play both our MSR and medley. We had a really good performance that day, probably one of the best of the season, and I was really happy with the band’s progress at that stage.
“The competition at the British Championships was close run between us and St Laurence O’Toole, but we put in another good performance that day, the first championship with the new medley.”
Even as the season progressed and the band continued to rack up the trophies, Richard didn’t look too far ahead and simply focused on the next competition.
“Almost every week we play in Northern Ireland against top class competition in St Laurence O’Toole so we need to be at the top of our game every time and there is no room for slacking. We take one competition at a time and we won every one we played in this year. St Laurence O’Toole did beat us in the medley at Newcastle and the All Ireland, and even though we won overall, they were close on our heels at that point and there was no room for relaxation,” he admitted.
“When it came to the European Championships at Belfast we had a really good performance which went down well with the crowd and the judges — it was a good day for the band!”
Surely by that point they must have had an inkling that this could be a Grand Slam season. However, Richard has had too much experience to let unbridled optimism carry him along.
“I’ve been around the mill a number of times where we have won the first two or three majors of a season only to be brought back down to earth, so I never get carried away. It was only after we had won the Worlds that we could think, ‘We’ve had a great season no matter what happens now’, but in the back of my mind, I really knew that I wanted to win at Cowal and try to get all five championships.
“We are not going to be in that position very often and I told the band that with a couple of practices to go before Cowal. I said to them, ‘Let’s go and do our best to try to win this, as a lot of us might never be in this position again. Let’s give it our all!’ We did that with another good performance at Cowal.”
With a glittering career as pipe major of Field Marshal Montgomery, Richard has been elevated to one of the most respected figures in the history of piping. The success he has achieved over time, and the 2011 season, would be almost impossible to improve upon. So what is it that keeps driving him on to squeeze even more quality out of his band?
“I do still get a kick out of pipe bands, and this band at the minute is the best I have ever had,” he said proudly.
“If we started to be not as competitive, or if I wasn’t capable of maintaining my level of performance, then I would consider my position.
“We won the Grand Slam 18 years ago and carried on, and in 2011 have done it all again — I may not have many years left in the band but I’m not going to walk away when it is going so well.”
Written by John Slavin and first published in Piping Today magazine in 2011. Piping Today was published by the National Piping Centre from 2002 to 2020 and released 101 issues. All back issues from Piping Today and many more piping publications can be read at https://archives.thepipingcentre.co.uk/