This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #103 (December 2002 / January 2003). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Battling On

Another Decade with the Battlefield Band

by Steve Winick

The last time Dirty Linen published a feature on Scottish folk group the Battlefield Band was issue #36, way back in 1991. At that time, the big story was the departure of singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Brian McNeill and piper Dougie Pincock, and their replacement by a teenage whiz kid named John McCusker and a lovable curmudgeon named Iain MacDonald.

A lot has changed since then. Already known in the early nineties for a history of many lineup changes involving such names as Jamie McMenamy (Kornog), Ged Foley (The House Band) and Jim and Sylvia Barnes (Kentigern), Battlefield has lost and gained members at an equally brisk pace since then. Consider this: After their 1991 lineup change, the only original member of Battlefield left was singer/songwriter/keyboardist Alan Reid. Today, the only remaining member of the 1991 lineup is... singer/songwriter/keyboardist Alan Reid. McCusker, MacDonald and singer/guitarist Alistair Russell have all left the band, as have singer/guitarists Davy Steele and Karine Polwart, who had joined up since those days. They've been replaced by fiddler Alasdair White, piper Mike Katz, and singer/guitarist/bouzouki player Pat Kilbride. I caught up with Reid, White, Katz, and Kilbride after a concert at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in July 2002.

Reid set the stage, describing the band's prehistory. The Battlefield Band, he said, had its roots in a group that McNeill founded with Jimmy Thomson and Sandra Laing in 1969. "They were all at the same university together," he remembered, "and that's where I met them." The trio had a Friday residency at a Glasgow pub called the Iron Horse. One day, fate opened the door for Reid to join. Typically, Reid explained, the members would bring their instruments to the university with them and lock them up in a little room until it was time for their gig. "On this particular day," he remembered, "they were a bit slow in getting to the room, and when they got there it was locked, and the guy that had the key had gone home. So they had to go down to this bar and say, 'We're very sorry but we can't do the gig tonight, we don't have our instruments.' The guy that owned the place wasn't impressed at all, so he said, 'You're fired!' And that was the end of that lineup. I joined the band from then."

The new group was called Harvest, and eventually had its name changed to the Battlefield Band. "We rehearsed once a week for about a year before we actually got a gig," Reid recounted. "And we got a gig in a football club. We played to — I would say it was at least seven people! This was the kind of place where they wanted country music, so four hairy guys dressed in t-shirts and jeans playing this weird half-Irish stuff was not their cup of tea."

The reaction of early audiences like this had a formative effect on the group. "In our first couple of years, the only gigs that we could get were in bars," Reid recounted. "The audiences were very tough, and we found that the only way to grab their attention was not only by playing music, but by telling jokes. So we got into a way of talking to the audience and trying to get their attention. That kind of talking, involving the audience, was established in the very early part of our career, and I think it's been a hallmark of our group."

The band didn't do a Scottish folk repertoire until a few years after its founding. "We played acoustic music, so we'd do any music that we liked, from anywhere," Reid said. The whole idea of a Scottish folk band was a novelty at the time, he explained. While there were vocal groups like the Corries, adapting the Clancy Brothers' sound to Scottish songs, there were very few bands doing instrumental music. It wasn't until their early experiences on the road, when English audiences expected a Scottish band to play Scottish music, that McNeill, Reid, and friends began to focus. Taking inspiration from the 1970s experiments of Planxty and the Bothy Band in Irish music, they set out to do similar arrangements of Scottish music.

About that time, Battlefield started recording. With a vengeance. "We went recording crazy," Reid admitted. "We did four albums in 23 months, with no repeats. It was like 50 tracks." Their first album, for the Breton label Arfolk, was as a trio made up of McNeill, Reid, and string player Ricky Starr. Titled Scottish Folk (and re-titled for CD release as Farewell to Nova Scotia), it came out in 1976. Most of the music was Scottish, but there were still Irish, Canadian, English, and Australian influences. Starr was soon replaced by singer/bouzouki player Jamie McMenamy and whistle player John Gahagan, making Battlefield a quartet.

This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #103 (Dec. '02/Jan. '03). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.