Our class acts are a jet-setting lot
Last updated 21:48, Wednesday, 19 March 2008
I’VE commented before on the class acts we’ve been privileged to see and hear at our own Buccleuch Centre, performers who are appreciated by a nationwide audience.
And just last week I noticed another four instances. Just over a month ago Barbara Dickson sang for a Langholm audience. Last week she appeared on our TV screen in the daytime soap Doctors as a reformed alcoholic singer.
The episode opened with Barbara seated before a dressing-room mirror applying the lippy and in the background I could hear a record of her singing The First Time Ever I saw Your Face.
She was making a guest appearance as the friend of Julia, the practice administrator. She was in town to give a performance and look for an estranged daughter. She had retained her Scottish accent for this role and she came out with a right Scottish saying, “Ah could eat a scabby horse and go back for the saddle”.
At the end of the episode she was reunited with her daughter and together they sang a duet Here Comes the Sun.
Another singer, seen only last year in Langholm, was Julie Fowlis, the Gaelic folk singer who performed with her band Dochas. And now she’s on a CD of 40 songs performed by popular singers like Elvis Presley, who sings Amazing Grace and Aled Jones singing You Lift Me Up. Also on the CD is American artist Beth Nielsen-Chapman, whose songs the late great John Wright often sang.
On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended hostilities in Northern Ireland, Irish Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney was interviewed on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday morning.
He was introduced to viewers as the best-selling poet in Britain, whose works outsell all contemporary poets. The quotation in his Nobel citation reads “for lyrical beauty and ethical depth”.
We were so fortunate to have him as speaker at Langholm’s inaugural MacDiarmid lecture almost six years ago. He readily accepted the invitation because he was a great admirer of MacDiarmid. When speaking to Andrew Marr, he admitted that Robert Burns had been an inspiration to him when he was very young. He quoted the opening line of To A Mouse “wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie”, saying he was immediately at home with this language and reading it inspired him. As I perused the holiday brochures which start coming in as soon as the Christmas ones cease, I noticed a familiar name.
It was that of the Rae Brothers, whose New Orleans Jazz Band we so enjoyed at the final session of the Sunday afternoon jazz concerts in the Buccleuch Centre.
They are now due to appear on one of Saga’s Jazz holidays at the Salobreña Hotel in the south of Spain.
I think it strange that within the space of one week I’ve noticed four celebrity acts I’d seen at the Buccleuch Centre making appearances in other prestigious places.
