Our new Album of the Week is Line Up, the forthcoming CD from Battlefield Band.
Ewen Henderson popped in for a gab with Ross. Listen in from 12 noon and 12 minight on Saturday 25th June and from 6pm on Monday 27th June.
Line Up, released on 18th July, is the superb new album from the award winning Battlefield Band, one of the great institutions of the Scottish music scene.
A bedrock of music and talent for over four decades, they continue to lead the way with their inspired fusion of ancient and modern traditional music and song. This is essential listening for all lovers of traditional music. Battlefield Band’s aptitude for instrumental colour, nuance, expression and internal dynamics is, if anything, sharper than ever and these recordings showcase Scotland s great flagship band in peak form. Fiery instrumentals, plaintive ballads and songs of social history find them fresh, invigorated, and illustrate yet again that they are among the most relevant contemporary composers and interpreters of Celtic music today, capable even of adding a Scottish twist to an Otis Redding soul classic.
Always evolving, the new group line-up, which has been received with great acclaim on their US, Canadian & UK tours, finds Battlefield Band yet again moving on to a new, exciting period in their musical development, while building on the solid foundations that have always been key to their success.
The latest recruit to the group, multi-instrumentalist Ewen Henderson, hails from the Highlands of Scotland. A superb talent, schooled by some of the masters of the genre, Ewan has quickly established himself as a strong force within a band of supremely capable musicians who look forward to introducing him to their worldwide audience.
Inspired by their rich heritage of Celtic music and fired by the strength and vibrancy of today’s Scottish cultural scene, which indeed they have done much to create and fuel, they have led and been at the forefront of a great revival in Scottish music. Refusing to be limited musically by suffocating antiquarianism, or musical fashions, they have mixed the old songs and music with a new self-penned repertoire, all played on a fusion of ancient and modern instruments – bagpipes, fiddle, synthesiser, guitar, flutes, bodhran and accordion.
Named after the Glasgow suburb of Battlefield, where the group was formed by four student friends in 1969, they have now been on the world’s roads for over 40 years, distilling their own unique form of the Scottish spirit and bottling it in concert and onto disc. They’ve performed in Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Holland, Syria, Jordan, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, U.S.A., Canada, Uzbekistan, China and the U.K; breaking down barriers and pioneering many new directions which others have followed. Angry, joyful, raucous, contemplative, their music is most importantly – accessible to all.
During the years there have obviously been line-up changes and indeed the band are remarkable for the smooth and organic way in which these changes have taken place. Their continued creativity, freshness and enthusiasm is due to the positive way they have viewed, and used, these changes – and of course the new musicians themselves have been of prime importance. Musical evidence of these changes can be heard on their many albums made over the years.
Ewen Henderson popped in for a gab with Ross. Listen in from 12 noon and 12 minight on Saturday 25th June and from 6pm on Monday 27th June.
Line Up is released on 18th July. Pre-order your copy from Amazon by clicking this link.