Band Profile: The Eel Grinders

This edition is from our archives, so it is presented as scanned pages rather than text.

File under essential purchase.
This record is available from Collatt’s or if not by mail order (along with all other Galician and other Spanish records) from ARPAFOLK,
S.O.

IN SEARCH OF THE 100 BAGPIPERS
by Paul Miller

Most of you will have received a circular a month or two back inviting you to join the British-Bulgarian Friendship society on their trip to the Rozen folkore festival in Bulgaria for something less than a bargain price (23688+extras? must be a joke). Being a seasoned traveller of the Balkans but having made only one trip to Bulgaria, which was somewhat limited due to having acquired a plastered leg on the way, I decided to make my own way there. So armed with a cheap charter ticket to Yugoslavia, a visa for Bulgaria (£20?) must have been another joke) and against the advice of Bulgoraphil friends who warned that events like this have a habit of getting cancelled at the last minute, I set off for Rozen.

Looks like I should have heeded their advice, Because when I got there all the posters had been overprinted with a new date - the festival had been postponed for a week!

So what happened? Were the promised 100 bagpipers too busy like I was, queuing for bread? Was it because long-standing party leader Todor Zhivkov was being ousted from power because he doesn’t get on with Gorbacev (The order to take his portraits down came while I was there.) Local officials were not to be found and those not in authority were as clueless as any Bulgarian is about what is happening in the country.

Anyway, your intrepid Bagpipe Society member had to miss the festival as my charter flight left from Yugoslavia while the festival was on… I wasn’t too sorry to miss the 100 bagpipers, except for the fact that they would have been playing the local instrument, the Kaba Gaida which has a beautiful deep tone distinct from most other bagpipes. The idea of playing 100 together is probably not traditional but more probably the idea of some official or committee; still, I was curious to know what they would have sounded like. In certain villages in Macedonia there is a tradition of playing large numbers of Gajdas (or Gajdi in the plural) together and in the village of Dolneni they can still manage an ensemble of 10 players and pretty amazing they sound too, but Pece Atanasovski, Macedonia’s most famous Gajda player who comes from that village tells me that it once was able to muster 100 players. So it looks like the Bulgarians stole the idea from the Macedonians!

Anyway this was supposed to have been a report on the festival. Instead I have to ask if any members did actually make it to the festival on the presumably rescheduled BBFS trip? Or did they turn up the wrong weekend as well?

P.M.

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LORIENT THROUGH THE DRINKING GLASS by Simon Owen

For the bagpiper, the Lorient Interceltic festival in Brittany is like a course of aversion therapy. If nine days of continuous bagpipes can’t cure you of being involved with them, nothing will! For most people, of course, nothing will. Imagine some four thousand participants, a large percentage of whom play bagpipes (generally Highland or Galias), playing virtually continuously from afternoon till dawn; music of the spheres to some, souls in torment to others.

Each Celtic nation sends a delegation to the Lorient Festival, and it is easy to lose track of who is currently claiming to be Celtic. It took several years for Galicia to be accepted in to the Celtic fold, and now their neighbours and fellow Gaelters, Asturias, are claiming Celtic nationhood. Although neither has been accepted into the League of Celtic Nations, such distinctions count for very little when you have such exuberant people and wonderful music.

The Welsh contingent was a massive ten musicians (seven of PENCERDD and three of CROMLECH), although we did manage a good showing on the bagpipe front, with myself and Richard Brown from Pencerdd and Peter Davies of Cromlech using various beasts of burden. Welsh music has never had the highest of reputations in the past, being either unbearably polite and bland Elsftedfa-type parlour music or choral singing excerpts from Gilbert and Sullivan (as I heard when I was on the festival a few years previously) We were determined, therefore, to keep a high profile and continue the trend started in the last few years of the more progressive Welsh groups such as Aberjaber.

On arrival at two in the afternoon, we passed the main marquee which had a sign saying that Pencerdd would be playing at four o’clock. This left very little time for any apprehension and no time at all to gauge the standard of the other groups or the mood of the audience! I wondered how, in such a short time, they could manage to do sound checks, but in the field of chackling and settling up, I feel that the Lorient organization has hit on an excellent arrangement. Each group is given an hour-long slot in which to set up and perform. If they tinker with microphones for most of that hour and play for only a few minutes, that is up to them. To my mind, nothing is more frustrating than endless and often self-indulgent sound checks which can last longer than the actual performance. In addition, the sound crews were excellent and really understood what the groups were doing, following the music and mixing accordingly.

Our first performance went tolerably well, and we finished with a set of Welsh tunes played by myself and Richard on two pipes, having hung a large Welsh flag from the drone of mine to indicate that it was a Welsh bagpipe (gaita gallega?). We were closely questioned afterwards by a newspaper reporter on why we used gaitas, and what had happened to Welsh bagpipes. The result of this conversation was the following newspaper paragraph which demonstrates that he took my answers for less than gospel truth!

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