PERHAPS fearing the wrath of trad purists, young Martyn Bennett evidently felt the need to justify himself last night. ``It's all me, but like a glorified karaoke,'' he said, explaining the self-made Celtic-hoose backing-tapes over which he fiddled his plangent fiddle, bagpiped his funky bagpipes, and jigged his penny-whistle.
One minute Martyn had us atop the Skye Cuillins, the next we were experiencing rhythmic Turkish delights and dancing a new kind of fling, the dashing off-white pogo. There were Afro-French rap exhortations; Sir Harry Lauder's couthy tones ushered in a slinky hip-hop mix. Jacobite Be-Bop, from Martyn's forthcoming album, was delivered at a sufficient rate of beats-per-minute to induce nosebleeds in the unwary.
``I don't know where I'm going to with this kind of thing,'' Martyn confessed, shaking his blonde dreadlocks ruefully and with a note of bemused sorrow in his voice. This much was evident, but he had no need to apologise. When his eclecticism eventually delivers Martyn Bennett to wherever he's trying to go, be sure to be there.
Shooglenifty have, of course, already arrived at a twenty-second-century space-ceilidh of their own devising. The organic allure of Shooglenifty's music is embodied by the pithily surreal song-introductions delivered by the band's wild-whiskered fiddler and frontman, Angus R Grant.
One Shooglenifty song, Angus reveals, is about getting stuck in a phone box in Taynuilt and there undergoing a chance meeting with a cat called Horace. Angus addresses the following song to folk from Finland, folk from Finland Street in Leith, and anybody who knows the Finnish for Horace. Or who doesn't.
In other words, Shooglenifty are illogically, funnily wonderful. A room full of folk coalesced into a single, multi-headed dance-organism and had their nifties shoogled. Everyone left feeling happy.
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