Shetland Folk Festival in the running for trad award: vote now!

The awards ceremony takes place at Dundee’s Caird Hall on Sunday 4 December, but voting closes this Sunday (20 November). Shetland’s premier music event is up against festivals including HebCelt in the ‘event of the year’ category, sponsored by VisitScotland, and you can give them your vote on the Trad Awards website.

Two successive cancellations due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant the fortieth helping of the festival, originally to have been in 2020, took place 24 months later than planned. And when the Omicron variant reared its unwanted head last winter, it was far from guaranteed that the event would take place this year either.

Main festival booker Mhari Pottinger recalls the uncertainty facing the committee when it took the gamble to become one of the first international events to resume normal service.

It was “amazing for our community to have this event, when thinking back to January we had no idea if we could actually do it”, and news of the Trad Award nomination a few weeks ago was a source of enormous pride for all the volunteers who make the event what it is.

Much has changed since the first iteration of Shetland Folk Festival way back in 1981, when the official programme of events issued the simple beckoning call: “Do must kum!”

But the overarching vision, which originated in a conversation between two stalwarts of Shetland’s cultural scene, the late Dr Tom Anderson and Charlie Simpson, remains very much intact: local and visiting acts sharing concert platforms at halls and venues throughout the islands.

Folk music is about bringing people together and, after two years of lockdowns and restrictions preventing most forms of communion, there was a palpable sense of relief and joy when musicians and music-lovers were able to reconvene this spring.

The bill featured everything from sprawling Finnish septet Frigg to boisterous Americana string band Della Mae, via festival favourites like J.P. Cormier and he-of-Caledonia fame Dougie MacLean, rubbing shoulders with high grade local acts including Haltadans, Herkja and Skelburn.

For the uninitiated, concerts take place all across Shetland, from Clickimin Leisure Complex and Mareel in Lerwick to the network of well-maintained village halls that act as a focal point for the communities they are based in.

And then, of course, there are the legendary late night sessions at the festival club in Islesburgh Community Centre, where musicians from all across the spectrum trade tunes and make merry until the (very) small hours.

There is a wonderfully egalitarian streak to the programming, with concerts featuring up to five visiting and local acts, and little regard given to the notion of “headliners”: the programme for 1988 had the chart-topping Elvis Costello nestling in the middle of the bill for gigs at public halls in Whiteness and Whalsay.

Mhari says: “It provides a platform for young musicians to go on and share the concert stage with their heroes, or amazing international musicians that they’ve maybe been following on social media channels.

“After Covid a lot of our musicians hadn’t seen each other for two years, so that was a main driving force: to get folk in the kitchen together again, putting together setlists, being proud of being Shetland musicians on the stage.”

Gary Smith, an experienced sound and lighting engineer and a highly proficient musician himself, first helped out at the festival aged 13. He describes it as “simply the highlight of the cultural calendar in Shetland for me”.

“Its diversity and its inclusivity are its main strength and because of this I’ve been able to be a part of the festival from a young age,” he says. “To be able to learn and play alongside world class musicians has made me a better musician today and further enhanced my appreciation of all forms of music.

“They’ve expanded the definition of what folk music is by making it a festival truly for the people. By bringing artists from all over the world to our small island, it expands our view of what it’s like to live and share our world together.”

Looking ahead to 2023, with the committee in the process of finalising the line-up as we speak, Mhari says there is a determination to keep the “incredible social impact” of the festival at the forefront amid a savage cost-of-living crisis.

“We’ll be doing whatever we can to make sure the festival is affordable for families, including reviewing the ticket price structure for under 18s and families,” she says.

The live music industry continues to face formidable challenges following the pandemic, in terms of finances, audience demand and increasingly complex visa issues, with Mhari recognising the need to be “careful and realistic, particularly about the type of ‘world music’ acts that we’re able to get here”.

The festival is “not massive”, but is in the fortunate position of having a local audience that “generally trust us – we can book 15 names that the vast majority of Shetlanders will never have heard of, and they’ll continue to buy their tickets. That’s a really good position to be in.”

The festival enters its fifth decade wisely cleaving to the tried-and-trusted formula of blending acts drawn from North America and Scandinavia with those hailing from closer to home.

“What I love about our festival is looking at North American musicians, who have often won Grammys or whatever, completely and utterly bowled over by the Shetland talent,” Mhari says.

“To see them standing at the back of the stage with their arms crossed just taking it all in, that makes every single person on the committee quite proud.”

Indigenous music will remain “very prominent” and, “perhaps even more than usual”, there will be opportunities for emerging Scottish talents, including recent award winners deprived of so many chances to perform live since March 2020.

“We would like to celebrate some of that real up-and-coming Scottish talent alongside some of our own musicians. It helps show our young folk that there is a career route into music should they wish to go down that path.”

Mhari adds: “Access to live music is so vitally important, and that’s something we want to keep being able to offer as widely as possible. With careful management we’ll still be able to put on a first-class event that will appeal to all ages, attract hundreds of visitors here again and really put Shetland on the map.”

• You can vote for Shetland Folk Festival in the ‘best event of the year’ category of the Scottish Trad Music Awards here. Fair Isle-raised musician Inge Thomson is also nominated for ‘music producer of the year’, while the Tartan Tunes podcast – featuring Shetland-based accordionist Peter Wood – is up for the ‘trad music in the media’ prize.