By STUART MILNE
Ask any pipe band follower to name three piping CDs, and one of them will likely be the 78th Fraser Highlanders’ Live in Ireland. Recorded at Ballymena County Hall on August 12, 1987, the album is not only hailed as a game-changer that redefined the pipe band concert and competition medley, but also as an important historical document of the band that a few days later became the first to take the Grade 1 World Championship outside of Scotland.
It’s often the case for such landmark concerts that the number of people claiming to have been there far exceeds the capacity of the venue, but on January 30, 2016, the Celtic Connections festival and the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall provided the platform for more than 2,000 people to experience the entire show on stage for the first time in 29 years with Live in Ireland 87 in Scotland.
Bill Livingstone and J Reid Maxwell reprised their roles as pipe major and leading drummer at the helm of a unique group of musicians, including a dozen-odd members of the original 78th, several of whom still compete at the highest level in the pipe band and solo worlds. They were joined by an illustrious array of current and former band leaders from around the world, including Richard Parkes MBE, Stuart Liddell, Terry Tully, Steven McWhirter and Paul Turner to name just a few.
The 78th Fraser Highlanders formed in Toronto in 1981 out of the General Motors Pipe Band, which changed its name for sponsorship reasons. Throughout the 1980s the 78th would become famous for playing a then-unorthodox Irish style of music, which had already been established by pipe major Bill Livingstone and piper Gerry Quigg.
Bill said: “Gerry was a big influence on me right from the GM days to the creation of the Frasers. Gerry was born in Philadelphia, raised for a large part of his youth in Northern Ireland, and came away with a wicked accent of N.I. brogue overlaid with Pennsylvania twang. When we were still GM Gerry brought The Mason’s Apron to the table. The arrangement we played was a direct lift from an Irish folk band called Horslips, right down to the slow start.”
The Mason’s Apron opens the penultimate track on the Live in Ireland album, a medley finishing with a heavily-arranged rounded version of GS McLennan’s reel The Little Cascade, normally played in a pointed MSR style.
Bill said: “Gerry again figures in The Little Cascade treatment. He was fond of the playing of a Celtic harpist from Brittany and turned me on to him as well. He played Cascade in a slow, dreamy style and I had to find a way to capture some of that, so the slow bridge graduating in tempo came about. We’d done graduations in GM before so we felt we could pull it off. The big dramatic finish of Cascade just seemed to scream out to be played, with the band reversing the graduation by going more and more slowly, with the intention of “milking” that beautiful passage for all the emotion we could find in it. The whole of Cascade was underpinned by the drum section (big Luke Allen on bass included) all playing in a bossa nova rhythm.
“I credit Gerry with opening my eyes to new ways in pipe bands. We were all pretty young and adventurous, and if something seemed like musical fun, we just ran with it, without a whole lot of thought about how it might be received. And no-one should forget the tremendous influence of pipe sergeant John Walsh, whose playing style and repertoire were strongly influenced by Allan MacDonald, a guy I admire a lot.”
The band’s distinctive style would also be shaped by the composing talents of new members. These included Bill’s pupil Michael Grey, who joined General Motors just before the rebrand and many years later served as the organiser of Live in Ireland 87.
Michael said: “I was always for some reason very interested in composition, even as a teenager. At that time people weren’t really writing tunes except for the so-called greats at the top of the game. Kids like me weren’t writing tunes, or if they were, no one knew about them. So I was in a place where I was writing tunes and would bring them to the band, where they would be receptive. Bruce was doing that as he came to the band later, and the style ended up developing as we grew.”
While the Irish influence is very much part of the modern style of pipe band music, in the 1980s it was a radical departure from the conventions of competition repertoire.
“Everyone who played in the band was there because of the music, it wasn’t to win,” said Michael. “The band knew what the group was doing was fresh, new, exciting and relevant. It had a closer embrace with the tradition than was the case at the time. What I mean by that is pipe bands had somehow evolved this crazy, pointed, uncomfortable style of reel playing. This group played rounder reels, which was probably more in line with what you would hear in the folk tradition of Scottish or Irish music. That alone was very different.
“When you go to play for a judge in a competition, you really do hang yourself out because those judges have a pipe band bias rooted in a certain clipped style of playing. This group was playing a much rounder, flowing, I dare say rhythmic, style, which was largely foreign to them unless they played folk records.
“The band placed well in competitions because they were different musically, not because they had necessarily the greatest sound. They won because of the music, and I don’t see that so much now where bands take risks in order to assert themselves.”
By 1987, the 78th Fraser Highlanders’ innovative approach to pipe band music had attracted a lot of attention, leading to an invitation by the Graham Memorial Pipe Band to follow in the footsteps of Dysart & Dundonald and Shotts & Dykehead Caledonia and perform a concert at Ballymena County Hall. Word soon reached Ronnie Simpson, managing director of Lismor Recordings, and one of the most popular piping albums of all time was born.
Bill said: “We were certainly on a roll at the time, having placed second and third at the Worlds, and I can’t say we wanted to make a statement. Our statement, if any, was in the music we played, and all we really hoped for was to put on a good show and play well. There could have been great challenges with the Troubles at their peak but our hosts insulated us completely from them. We only learned after we left Northern Ireland the extremes they had to go to protect us.”
The phenomenon of a Canadian pipe band playing in an Irish style was certainly popular with the home crowd in Ballymena. Sitting in the audience that night was Richard Parkes MBE, whose Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band were just beginning to establish themselves in Grade 1.
Richard said: “We as musicians thought it was brilliant that Irish music was being used, as it added a new, exciting dimension to what was recognised as established bagpipe music. This style of round playing also made its way into traditional Scottish tunes (eg The Little Cascade), something that was almost unheard of prior to the 1980s. We all enjoyed what was happening and the Frasers seemed to take it to another level in pipe bands in their various recordings, especially with the Live in Ireland concert and subsequent recording.”
While the newest generation of pipers and drummers would nowadays expect videos from such a concert to appear magically on YouTube within hours, back in the 1980s pipe music was transferred by the sharing of cassette tapes, often shipped lovingly across oceans to friends and family. It was through this medium that a teenage Stuart Liddell, now pipe major of Inveraray & District Pipe Band, discovered the music of the 78th.
“I used to buy every single piping tape there was available,” he said. “As time went on my cassette collection grew and along came the 78th Fraser Highlanders’ Live in Ireland. I also had their original one from a few years before that, the one with all the faces on the cover. That one was a great album too, but I was completely immersed in Live in Ireland and I couldn’t stop listening to this album. I can still play it to you to the finish with all the chokes and missed gracenotes and everything, I’ve got it absolutely memorised. I think I wore away two cassette tapes over the years and the CD as well. It was just such a huge influence on my piping development – it was a unique, ground-breaking and innovative style of music, I believe.”
Stuart cites Bruce Gandy’s solo, ending with a version of The Galtee Rangers often imitated at major piping concerts, as a particular favourite.
He said: “I seem to remember taking months and months listening to that and memorising it in small blocks, a part at a time. I used to sit and listen with my tape recorder and press play and forward at the same time, and it used to play the thing at half speed. I built it up note by note and memorised it, and since then it’s always been with me.”
Bruce is also a respected composer, and alongside Michael co-wrote the 12/8 march Up to the Line, which opened the medley that helped the 78th win the Worlds three days after the Live in Ireland concert. The energy created by the rounded reel playing and unorthodox use of waltz time in the climax did not go unnoticed by the band’s competitors.
Richard said: “There is no doubt that Live in Ireland was ahead of its time and it was the blueprint for how the pipe band concert has developed since 1987. It certainly influenced me in the late 80s and early 90s in terms of medley construction and in how to structure a concert.
“If you listen to the FMM 1990 Worlds medley, there are shades of the harmony structure and percussion rests within the closing passages that were influenced by The Foxhunter’s finish in the Up to the Line medley.”
The selection is also where Stuart discovered the slow air The Water is Wide, which has become a signature tune of his Inveraray & District band. He cites Live in Ireland, full of pipe band competition staples alongside some of the more talked-about concert sets, as a model of how a pipe major should approach such a project.
He said: “Being conscious of what people might want to hear is important – not going too far the opposite way, and trying to vary the concert programme so you’re covering as much of the audience as you possibly can. Not everybody likes modern ground-breaking music, they like to maybe sit and listen to a nice set of 6/8s for example. I think I’ve learned from listening to these recordings that a concert repertoire is like building a medley – you’ve got a variety of tunes but you have them in a certain order. You’re keeping the flow of the concert going but hopefully pleasing those that are listening to you.”
Perhaps the most-discussed item on the Live in Ireland programme has been the six-minute suite Journey to Skye, written not by a piper, but by Canadian jazz composer Don Thompson. While such suites have since become a common part of pipe band concert repertoire, in 1987 this was a radical departure.
Bill said: “When I met Don Thompson in 1986, I went to his home where he played me Journey to Skye on the piano. I was stunned. This was a jazz musician (yes, married to a piper and a piobaireachd player) who could capture the tonality and the mystique of our instrument in a way that I’d never heard from anyone else. He came to a band practice with the music, scored out as it would be for more classically trained musicians, and we were at a loss.
“We had no idea how to read stuff that was written on multiple staves with melody and harmony sliding up and down everywhere. John Walsh and Michael Grey found it so silly they were suppressing giggles. But Bruce Gandy was my ally in this and recognised that something special was going on here. So with his assistance we persevered with Don Thompson going round the table singing the bits we couldn’t read until some semblance of shape appeared. It eventually became clear that this was a game-changer.”
Although Michael has latterly become famous for introducing the suite format to the competition circle through his work with Toronto Police Pipe Band, his initial reaction to Journey to Skye was anything but positive.
“If truth be told, there were not many in the band that thought it was worth anything,” he said. “We did persevere, to the credit of the naysayers, of whom I was one, and very quickly grew to love the thing. It was a lot of fun to play – we loved the harmonies.
“It was an education in being more accepting of new music even if you don’t love it at first. In a more mechanical way, it was a lesson in the theory of musical structure for me and I’m sure for everybody else. Don Thompson did not invent that form, he simply put it on a bagpipe. That’s the way classical music and piobaireachd are based – you’ve got your coda, your opening, and it builds on that. For pipe band people as we all are, and in the context of that group at the time, it was just a huge eye-opener.”
As the audience reaction to the final few sets on the Live in Ireland recording testifies, the experiment paid off.
Michael said: “We were elated – the response was beyond anything we had imagined. I think we felt like rock stars, the crowd was that enthusiastic – people were swarming around us with their programmes asking for autographs. As a young guy I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is unbelievable! And all I am is a piper!’ It was just crazy. The Northern Irish people are the most passionate and knowledgeable pipe band people on the planet to this day, they’re just pipe band crazy, and we felt that in 1987.”
Richard said: “You could feel the excitement in the hall as the band created a show which built to a crescendo with the great final three sets of Journey to Skye, the Mason’s Apron medley and the iconic encore set finishing with The Clumsy Lover, which brought the house down. The atmosphere was electric – I will never forget it, the hall was buzzing. If you had told me on that night that 29 years later I would be playing on stage with that group of people, I would never have believed you.”
That unique opportunity to recreate the concert originated through a conversation Michael had with J Reid Maxwell, now leading drummer of Simon Fraser University Pipe Band, while judging at the Canmore Highland Games in Alberta a couple of years ago.
Michael said: “He was just talking about how great it would be to play that music again. I had never thought of that, and so that planted a seed. I sent a note to Celtic Connections Artistic Director Donald Shaw and pitched the idea of this tribute concert – a celebration of the music kind of event, and he was really receptive.
“We wanted to do this last year, but just couldn’t pull it together in time for January 2015. A project like this, even with Celtic Connections’ support, is massively expensive. With Celtic Connections you’ve got a foundation – the venue, the PR support, the ticket sales and all the things that bands and artists struggle with to stage their music are already in place.”
Perhaps more important than any of those considerations was the challenge of getting a group of musicians together who could play the material, since not all the surviving original members were still competing, and in any case, the group had not been in the same band hall together for many years.
Michael said: “As the project manager of this thing, this has been really difficult for me. It was never conceived as a reunion, it was simply to get some people together who could play. We certainly needed to have the likes of Bill and Bruce participate, but it was never a reunion. We wanted to get people together who liked the music and could play it on a stage.”
Once a core of the original members still able to play at the required level was found, the next step was bulking out the numbers. Bill Livingstone’s Toronto Police bandmates Sean McKeown and Ian K MacDonald, current and former pipe major of that band, made obvious choices to help form a group of around 10 or so players in the Toronto area around whom a larger band could be built, with the aid of recorded practices and Skype.
Michael said: “It was never a Grade 1 pipe major thing, it just happened. We knew Richard Parkes loved the band of that vintage and so we started sending emails to see if people wanted to be part of it. People that we knew had some interest or influence in the concert, or who were even there, were all excited about playing that music. Because the music and the recording is there, it made it much, much easier, but this is one of the hardest things to do I’ve ever been involved in.”
Despite all the assistance of modern technology in compensating for distance, the realities of only having a few days with most of the group in the same room still presented major challenges.
Bill said: “We had our first rehearsal on the Monday morning before the concert on chanters and pads. That evening we did two hours on pipes. It was catastrophic and I was in despair. Duncan Nicholson, the former pipe major of Greater Glasgow Police Scotland, set to work on our brand-new McCallum chanters and Chesney and Megarity reeds. Richard Parkes joined us mid-week, he created and took control of the tuning team. Get this for a tuning team – Richard, Duncan, Ross Walker, Alen Tully and Stuart Liddell. Every time we played it got better and better, and these great players came with the music learned, memorised and ready to fly.”
Judging by the immediate reaction in the Concert Hall bar and on social media, the effort seems to have been well worth it for both audience and performers.
Bill said: “Master players, all submerging the competitive instinct on which we normally thrive, generating more excitement and camaraderie with every outing: it was joyful and actually very moving. I’ve had some highlights over my strangely long career, but nothing quite equals this.”
Richard said: “It was a special feeling to play with Bill and that talented group recreating the 1987 concert. We all loved the music and recognised the influence of the concert on the pipe band scene, and that is what brought us all together. I will certainly remember it as one of the highlights of my piping career. I would just like to take this opportunity to thank Michael Grey for his invitation to take part in this historic concert. From a personal perspective, playing on stage was a different experience for me due to the fact that I was not pipe major, so I was able to relax and just enjoy playing the music with this special group of talented players.”
It was an especially poignant experience for Stuart Liddell, so heavily influenced by the 78th in his early years.
“I went to see them in Edinburgh in 1988 when I was 15,” he said. “I think I was four rows away from the front and I was just star-struck. I couldn’t believe this band were right there as I was sitting listening to them. Going from that to being asked to be involved is a huge honour.
“I was one of the harmony guys, so I have the music for the original harmonies. That’s something I tried to work out by ear as well. Now that I’ve got the music there I can see where I got it right and where I was maybe out a wee bit.”
For Michael, a youngster back in 1987 with no real responsibilities for managing the original concert, being the organiser was a very different experience 29 years later.
He said: “I was fairly anxious in the hours leading up to show, with so many things so easily slipping the wrong way of good, and aside from my own performance, all now outside of my control. It had been a long road to this moment and as Bill opened up with his solo of Lord Lovat’s Lament I could feel a little bleary-eyed emotion. You could feel the shared moment, enjoyed by everyone on the stage and in the room, a feeling that this was something special unfolding, something that would never again happen.
“Twenty-nine years ago I sensed none of that. Then it was a lot of: ‘Hold on tight and don’t make a blasted mistake!’ I think then we had no big idea of what we were doing. We just played, and that is the way it should be. It’s hard to make great music if you are continually reflecting and marvelling at each gracenote. Still, there was a little of that on January 30, I think. The passage of nearly three decades makes it almost unavoidable.”
For the many people who would have loved to have attended the concert, there is welcome news that it was also recorded and a film is planned for download release in March. But Live in Ireland 87 was about much more than the chance to produce a “remastered” version for sale. It gave over 2,000 people, many of whom were not even alive in 1987, to listen back to the original Live in Ireland album and say with a wry smile: “I was there”.
Concert Review
Such a gathering of well-kent faces in the pipe band world in January was almost without precedent – and that was just the audience. It is a sign of just how many pipers and drummers have grown up with the original album that more than 2,000 people flocked to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall for Live in Ireland 87 in Scotland, a tribute to arguably the most influential pipe band concert of all time.
As the all-star cast of original members of the 78th Fraser Highlanders and band leaders from both sides of the Atlantic filed onto the stage, the answer to what the diverse group would wear was finally revealed: 1980s retro was the theme, and what could be more full-blown retro than diced Balmorals?
After adjusting to the unusual spectacle of a “Scottish” pipe band clad in bagad-style black trousers, personalised pipe banners and the aforementioned headgear, it was thankfully easy to become immersed in the all-too-familiar music, which after all was why everyone had come. Once pipe major Bill Livingstone and then the full band struck up for the opening rendition of Lord Lovat’s Lament, it was immediately noticeable how much the pitch of both pipes and drums has risen since the 1980s, the pipe corps sounding like a wonderfully bright and rich blend of several Grade 1 bands whose pipe majors just happened to be in the ranks.
Indeed, this modern sound really helped showcase just how innovative the music of Live in Ireland was at the time. It was possible to close one’s eyes during any one of the three competition medleys on the programme and picture any contemporary Grade 1 band standing on the stage.
Guiding the audience through the programme were John Wilson and Bob Worrall, whose spot-on blend of encyclopaedic piping knowledge and good humour made them a perfect double-act – Wilson jokingly trying to supplant Worrall as Jackie Bird’s presenting partner on the BBC’s Worlds coverage, with the Canadian taking every opportunity to torture the former Strathclyde Police pipe sergeant with the painful memory of watching the 78th Fraser Highlanders carry off the World Championship trophy his band had won for the six years prior to 1987.
While the vast majority of the music was well-known to everyone in the audience, there were a number of additions to add some welcome variety and more than a little poignancy. While hopes of livestreaming the concert did not come to fruition, the filming still went ahead, with the feed projected on a large screen to make the games of spot-the-pipe-major-under-the-Balmoral that much easier.
Although Bruce Gandy and Michael Grey reprised their solo spots from the original concert, with Ian K MacDonald taking over from the 78th’s then-pipe sergeant John Walsh who was unable to make it, they varied their selections to give the audience something they hadn’t heard before on the album. Gandy did however finish off his set with his celebrated version of The Galtee Rangers, this time accompanied by Stuart Liddell, who had worn out his Live in Ireland cassette painstakingly learning the track himself as a teenager.
It was especially gratifying to see several children of the original band members involved in prominent roles, including Sean Allen taking the place of his late father Luke on bass drum and Grant Maxwell joining in his father Reid’s drum solo (also fittingly accompanied by Terry and Alen Tully). The most welcome surprise of the afternoon came from Canadian soprano Susan Brown, born to former 78th members Ross Brown and Maggie McIver just a few days after the original concert, who sang a haunting prelude to the slow airs Laggan Love Song and The Fair Maid of Barra.
While the concert was thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, the sets everyone was waiting to hear came right at the end. The audience chuckled knowingly at the faithful recreation of the early “D” at the end of Journey to Skye, howled their appreciation for the masterclass in tension-and-release that is the 78th’s famous Mason’s Apron medley, and, knowing full well what was coming, went suitably bananas for The Fair Maid of Barra/The Gold Ring/The Clumsy Lover encore, just as barnstorming a closer now as it was back in 1987.
Perhaps more than most pipe band concerts in recent memory, the prevailing mood in the auditorium and in the bar immediately afterwards was one of triumph. Speaking to a number of prominent pipe band people throughout the afternoon, there were many stories of just how much the 78th band of the 1980s has come to mean to people – be it discovering previously unthinkable approaches to pipe music, shaking Bill Livingstone’s hand as the band marched off Bellahouston Park with the RSPBA Jubilee Banner hanging from his bass drone, and even reversing decisions to walk away from the hobby altogether after becoming mesmerised by hearing the band in the run-up to their historic victory.
Live in Ireland 87 will not change pipe band music as the original concert did, but that is not what it was supposed to do. It will however be remembered as a celebration of how an evening in Ballymena County Hall on August 12, 1987, forever changed people’s lives. • By Stuart Milne