Tuesday is my official day off and I really enjoyed this last one with a long walk with the dog in the morning (good for him and good for me) and a return to The Stables n Milton Keynes, this time to see Julie Fowlis live. I had a front row seat and really enjoyed the excellent double set, as did the 300 or so also there. With Julie the band consisted, as usual, of Eamon Dooley and Tony Byrne (on guitars) and Duncan Chisholm (on fiddle) with Patsy Reid othis time on viola. Julie not only sang but played various instruments including various whistles, a ukulele adn three different whistles.
The prgram was a masterful blend of the pretty obscure with the more immediately accessible. So we started with a Gaelic song, Oran an Roin, about seals but that soon merged with the now well known Puirt a beul track Hug air a bhonaid mhoir. Just when it got rather Gaelic we had first Anne Briggs' achingly beautiful Go your way and later Paul McCartney's Blackbird (in Gaelic). In the second half there was plenty more obscurity including a Galician/Gaelic song Camariñas but with a few more instrumentals too. SOmehow she even had us sing along to the chorus of Smeorach Chlann Domhnaill.
All too soon the time had one but we were able to get them back on for an encore. Up until that point, with no bozouki or bodhran, I thought all insturments beginning with the letter B had been banned but then at the very end doing something I had not seen on the two previous occassions of hearing them - Julie on the bagpipes. What an encore! Patsy Reid kindly let me have her playlist at the end and I collected Julie and Eamon's autographs again before heading off and being home by 11 pm.
