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The Herald Scotland

Surprisingly funky Scots band introduced whole new audience to Gaelic

Neigh hooves nor nothing. Capercaillie started off right traditional and, while that remained in their backbone, and indeed their soul, they went on to incorporate funk, jazz and pop into a fusion that brought chart success and introduced a new audience to Gaelic. They've sold more than a million albums worldwide and performed in 30-odd countries. They produced the first Gaelic-language single to reach the top 40. Credited with helping the revival of Celtic music, they followed a trail blazed by the Chieftains and the splendidly named Silly Wizard. Billboard magazine described them as 'the most exciting and vibrant band in the field of Celtic music'. That Celtic music has been described as getting the 'Capercaillie Treatment', with modern electric guitars, synthesisers, drums, loops and samples added to traditional Gaelic songs or featuring in the band's own compositions. These even incorporate swing without losing their Celtic soul. Traditional instruments include fiddle, accordion and uilleann pipes. The deal is sealed with Karen Matheson's voice, variously described as 'transcendent', 'breathtaking', and 'ethereal'. Widely regarded as the finest Gaelic singer in the world, the late Sir Sean Connery once said she had 'a throat that is surely touched by God'. TALENTED FOLK THE band, initially without Matheson and indeed a name, was formed in Taynuilt, Argyll, in 1983 by school friends Donald Shaw on accordion and Marc Duff on bodhran and whistles. Read more Rab Shaw was a teenage prodigy, steeped in traditional folk, but winning the All-Britain Accordion Championship with a Paganini classical piece. Many of the band's Gaelic songs – they also sing in English – were sourced from Matheson's family repertoire, as well as old cassette field recordings, and the School of Scottish Studies archive. Shaw and Duff joined forces with like-minded musicians from Oban, including fiddler and vocalist Joanie MacLachlan, guitar and bouzouki player Shaun Craig, and bass and fiddle player Martin MacLeod. They performed at ceilidhs and were first spotted at the 1983 Mull Music Festival by legendary radio presenter Iain MacDonald, who immediately booked them for his next show, giving the hitherto informal outfit a week to come up with a name. They chose Capercaillie in part to symbolise fighting against extinction, as with Gaelic. After building a reputation with local performances, the band added the aforementioned Matheson, who'd learned songs on her Hebridean grandmother's knee and had performed in local ceilidhs as a child before winning the silver pendant for best singer at the MOD. Capercaillie's first album, Cascade, was recorded over three days in 1984 at Edinburgh's Palladium studios. This and their second, Crosswinds, featured few modern instruments but this was soon to change. After a successful US tour in 1988, David Rome of Survival Records invited the band to London, recording several songs. This led to a licensing deal with major label industry voices thought Rome 'completely crazy', he has recalled, 'because it was just very, very left-field. You know: 'This band doesn't even sing in English'" However, Capercaillie's major-label debut, 1991's Delirium, was a watershed release introducing – on Rome's suggestion – drums to their sound. The album included Coisich a Rùin (Come on, My Love), a funkellated, 400-year-old waulking song which became the UK's first Gaelic top 40 hit. CALL OF DESTINY THE band learned about this heady chart success while standing in and around the phone box of a Little Chef roadside diner near Stirling. 'Everyone was kind of jumping around this little phone box,' recalled Rome. 'That is something I'll never forget'. Much of Delirium's songlist still figures in the repertoire of live performances. Other albums over the years have included 1997's Beautiful Wasteland, with the single of that name a lament about longing for home. It was recorded in the Andalusian mountains of Spain. 'Spain is a big territory for us,' Shaw told The Herald in 1999. 'In Spain they have a lot of respect for artists involved in Celtic languages. Areas of the north of Spain and the Basque country have a lot of affinity with what the band is doing … They look to what we're doing as a really strong parallel in the renaissance of folk music.' A year before Beautiful Wasteland, Matheson released her first solo album, The Dreaming Sea, featuring songs by husband and band co-partner described the record as 'more melancholic' than Capercaillie's 'more vibey' output. Asked in an interview with The Herald's David Belcher in 1996 if she was melancholic, she replied: 'I am, yeah, ooh yes. I find going on stage very difficult, nerve-wracking. I've learnt to cope with it over the years … but then as a child, from the age of four onwards, I sang unaccompanied at Mods and ceilidhs, and my first memories are of being terrified and standing with tears running down my face.' Karen Matheson (Image: Agency) People assumed she'd been forced to do it. But: 'It wasn't that at all. In fact, my father, who was a terrible introvert, became an accordionist in the same way, performing music because music was the community, and everybody sang or played something.' KNOW THE SCORE Last year's album ReLoved marked the band's 40th anniversary and was their first studio release since 2013's At the Heart of It All. It contains new arrangements recorded with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, new territory for them apart from a brief encounter with the Irish Film Orchestra on their Gaelic lament Ailean Duinn, which featured on Carter Burwell's score for the film Rob Roy. Matheson, who was ordered into the British Empire (OBE) in 2006, told The Herald that year: 'As Celts, we shouldn't be precious about music either. It shouldn't be kept in a glass case. With each Capercaillie LP, we get braver and take more chances, more risks.' Yep, that's the key. Any performance, certainly at first, requires courage. As does messing with traditional music (one reviewer attributed their use of a synthesiser to the Devil). But risk has its rewards and these, say the band on their website, have 'taken us from the Brazilian rainforest to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, not to mention into the pop charts. [But] it is the ancient Gaelic culture that still inspires us most.'