SKERRYVORE • Scotland's Finest Musical Export Appears Feb. 24th at Midland Center

The eight-piece Scottish group known as Skerryvore are a homespun international musical phenomena.  Unlike anything you have heard, they are Epic of melody, Intimate of feeling and Plugged into the roots of Scotland as they blast out around the world with a richness as smooth as a shot of single malt scotch.

Three time winners of Scotland’s ‘Live Act of the Year’ award, Skerryvore evolved from their humble beginnings to become one of the country’s leading forces in a thriving live music scene.  At the forefront of a movement that has reinvented and reignited a traditional Scottish scene for a modern, multicultural audience, the band have brought their high energy performances to audiences across the globe.

From their early days in Scottish West Coast halls and bars, to festival crowds in the USA, Canada, Australia and throughout the UK and Europe, Skerryvore’s wide range of influences and talent produce a musically expansive, immersive yet intimate set that tends to excite and captivate  audiences.

With a mix of bagpipes, fiddles, accordions, and whistles, alongside guitar and vocals, underpinned by driving bass, drums and keys, Skerryvore represent the best in contemporary Scottish traditional music. Their 7 studio albums demonstrate the wide range of influences the individual musicians bring to the mix – a unique fusion of folk, trad, pop and rock.

Three singles from the latest album ‘Tempus’, released in April 2023, all featured on the BBC Radio 2 new music playlist, and the album went to number 1 in both the Official Scottish Album and UK Folk Albums charts, and entered the top 40 in the Official UK Charts. Skerryvore took their Tempus Tour to audiences across the UK, Europe and USA, with their unique fusion appealing to a wider mix of age groups and tastes.

They have earned a critical and popular reputation as an energetic, polished, and crowd-pleasing Scottish folk-rock band, praised for seamlessly blending traditional Celtic instruments (pipes, fiddle, accordion) with rock elements (electric guitar, drums) for a powerful, danceable sound. Reviewers love their dynamic live performances, passionate musicianship, strong singalongs, and ability to entertain diverse audiences with both jigs and ballads, calling them authentic, professional, and a standout act in the contemporary Celtic music.

Recently The REVIEW had an opportunity to speak with fiddle player and musical arranger Craig Espie in a long distance phone call to Scotland, who has been involved with the group for nearly 20 years.

REVIEW: What I find intriguing about your work is this amazing fusion between traditional Scottish music, Modern Pop, and Americana, which creatively is more than simply a synthesis of different styles, but more of a fresh and innovative approach that opens  a new genre of songwriting and performance - similar to what we have here in America with contemporary Bluegrass and Folk groups like Billy Strings and Trampled by Turtles.   Can you give me a bit of background about your role in the band and its evolution?

Craig Espie: I play the fiddle and when I joined the group there were only four members and now we have eight. I joined shortly after the band released their first album, so I’ve been with them for nearly 20-years; and yes, the music has evolved and changed quite a lot over the years since the band first started out as what we would call a ‘Kele’ band - designed for dancing.

There were no songs, it was just instrumental tunes, very much traditional west coast style Scottish bagpipe and accordion tunes.  There was never really a conscious decision to make it different, but more a case of the band evolving with the addition of each new member, who comes in with a different musical background and influences from different parts of the country that fortunately came together into this melting pot, which created this fusion of sound.

A few of the guys like myself, Daniel, and Martin - the accordion and bagpipe player - all come from more traditional backgrounds where we learned traditional melodies and that kind of thing, whereas the rest of the band members came from more rock, pop, and jazz backgrounds, which created this successful fusion sound we are all creating together.

REVIEW:   So when you're approaching the task of writing songs or working on arrangements is that a fairly collaborative process, or are there a couple of people who handle most of the writing and orchestrations?

Craig Espie: So, Alec (Dalglish) is our singer and also songwriter. He writes pretty much all of the songs, and then they also have instrumental melodies, which will be written by myself or one of the pipers, so there are kind of two arms involved.  Then when it comes to bringing the songs together, we try to be as collaborative as possible. We’ll all be together in the studio, and normally working most of the time on music for an album before it's for a live show. If Alec writes a song for example,  once it’s become a demo it can go many different ways - it could go down a Rock route, or it could sound Country, depending upon how it’s treated.

REVIEW: In terms of influences who are some of the artists that informed your own sensibilities about this type of music?

Craig Espie: For me personally I grew up listening to a lot of fiddle music.  Because I’m a fiddle player, I was influenced a lot by a lot of the great fiddle players from Scotland and Ireland and the Bluegrass players from America.

In terms of this style there are people who came before us and kind of led the way in terms of making Scottish music more accessible - bands like Runrig were a huge influence on the band - and they were a very big band in the 1970s and 1980s, right into the 1990’s. They did big stadium shows and were pushing the boundaries of traditional Irish music. I think we’re also influenced quite a lot by music from perhaps the 70s and 80s, you know bands like Fleetwood Mac and Dire Straits, and people like that who had kind of folky elements and used the  instruments in ways we enjoy.

REVIEW: How have you seen the group evolve over those twenty years and how many albums  have you released to date?

Craig Espie:  I think we've got 8 studio albums and a couple of live albums. Our latest release was back in 2023 and we’ve nearly finished our next release, which will be coming out at some point this year.  We were really delighted with our last release, which was called Tempest and was our first #1 album on the Scottish chart and our first official UK Top-40 and Number One in the Folk charts as well, so that was excellent.

REVIEW: What in your experience would you say distinguishes the group from similar artists performing in your particular genre?

Craig Espie: That’s a good question.   I think it's quite hard to explain, but I suppose a big part is that we’re quite an energetic live act.  I think we bring a lot of energy to the shows and that there's so much variety on stage, with quite a unique fusion of styles, makes it different to anyone else.

Touring the U.S.A. certainly there’s quite a lot of Irish bands doing a similar thing, but not a huge amount of Scottish acts that have the same thing going.

REVIEW:  There’s so much happening right now with all this synthetic A.I. generated crap that has no emotional weight to it, so at this juncture what do you feel is the most challenging thing for the band?

Craig Espie:  I think as you mentioned  they're making a rise of all this A.I. nonsense, which I think is  a challenge for every musician. Before you were competing with every other musician, but now you're potentially competing  with anybody who can sit at a computer and type a command, so I think the challenge is always just trying to get yourself heard.

We’re very lucky we’re well known in Scotland. We can tour in Scotland very easily. We played a weekend in Glasgow and we had 45,000 people there, so it's amazing to be at that level in your own country, but we want to tour internationally. We want to play to as many people as we can, so it's  quite challenging when you visit new places or you travel halfway across the world and parts of the world are trying to destroy one another.

But I think that's one of the best things about being a musician - when people talk to you and make a connection with your music - whether it's a specific line, a specific melody, you know it means something to them for personal reasons. I think that's one of the things we get so many fans. We like to create a party on the stage, we like to have lots of atmosphere, but there's also a lot of more intimate moments.

People resonate with the songs lyrically. They want more than party anthems and need songs that are about real life. It’s really nice when people talk to you and you realize your music actually has become a part of their own life.

The eclectic fusion of Scottish Folk, Rock, and Americana music of SKERRYVORE will be happening on Tuesday, February 24^th at 7:30 PM at Midland Center for the Arts, 1801 W. St Andrews.   Tickets start at only $21.50 plus processing fees and can be obtained by clicking this link or by phoning the box office at  989-631-8250.