Bring me sunshine

I recently acquired Finlay MacDonald's eponymous album. On the face of it this is a straightforward piper's album: piper plays pipe tunes, old and new. The new tunes include many by Finlay, but also Allan MacDonald (the fabulous Plagiarist and The Road to Loch Nam Bearnish). The old includes the wonderfully named The Night We Had the Goats, and, one of the fan's favourites, I Would Have Preferred Thee at First, But Not Now Sir. A lot of it is fast and furious.

As with many pipe albums there is the odd track with whistles, a song (which I am afraid I listened to once and skipped thereafter). There is a track or two with border pipes. There are also some other instrumentalists, including Chris Stout on fiddle. Sadly, Simon Thourmire restricts himself to producing and arranging, rather than playing.

But there is a bit twist. The other instrumentalists are on drums (that's a full kit, not a snare), piano, soprano sax. I think if it had been a full on jazz/lounge sound with pipes running through it that would have been truly experimental, quite possibly not to my taste, but something to admire.

As it is the piping is reasonably standard and the drums and sax just trundle through bits of some of the tracks. It works for me inasmuch as it's enough to make the sound different without creating something I'd prefer not to listen to, and in the end I can just about block it out, which I am sure wasn't what Finlay had in mind, but it feels a bit half-hearted, accidental.

What it brings to mind to me is two images. The first is A A Milne's introduction to Now We Are Six where he says 'Pooh wants to say that he thought it was a different book; and he hopes you won't mind, but he walked through it one day, looking for his friend Piglet, and sat down on some of the pages by mistake.'

The other is Morcambe and Wise. I imagine Ernie in something suitably louche - a red smoking jacket perhaps - doing some gentle boom-sh-sh with brushes on drums and cymbals, when Eric walks across the back of the stage, with bagpipes.

"What are you doing?"
"What?"
"With those bagpipes. What are you doing?"
"These are my bagpipes. I was just going to..."
"Yes, but can't you see. We were sharing a moment of hip coolness. For real jazz cats. Not bagpipes."
"Oh, yes. Sorry. Sorry..."

And off Eric shuffles, but you know there will be a sudden cacophony, which might be pipes or someone falling over pipes or the cue for a joke about a haggis. And the worst of it is that I'm not sure if this way round or whether Eric and his sax is interrupting Ernie's mini lecture on the history of the noble pipe in battle...

Still, underneath, it's a decent album. I don't expect it to make its way on to my most-played list any time soon although I will be tempted, when the current crop of new tunes is settled, to consider I Would Have Preferred Thee and The Plagiarist, if I can get it.

The naming of names

Fiddling (or piping) around this evening, trying out possible sets. I wondered about Magersfontein and Dargai. I think they go nicely but it might just be that my fingers love Dargai and play it - or Loch Bee - with pretty much everything.

I'm better at thinking up the names of sets than actually putting tunes together. I want several Highland Brigade tunes so I can have a set called "Postcards from the Highland Brigade". It's a shame that Braemar and Troy wouldn't suit as I rather fancy them together as "Dearly Beloved".

A kind relative has just rung to point out a programme on BBC2 on pipers in the trenches during World War one, the Great War.