“I can’t remember how I managed to persuade STV, who normally spend absolutely nothing, to fund a film on Shooglenifty,” veteran Scottish filmmaker Don Coutts tells BDE of the circumstances which first led him to start filming the Scottish “acid croft” band some time nearly three decades ago.
Shooglenifty had been formed in 1990. After a slow start, they very quickly established a strong following.
The documentary recounts how Shooglenifty’s early gigs in an unheated basement in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket attracted an audience of only five or six paying customers. The following week, there were eight people. And then “it doubled every week” as word got out that there was a hot new band in town. Soon, the place was heaving.
Shooglenifty was driven by its fiddler and front man, Angus R Grant, a charismatic and mischievous figure. The band was known for combining traditional folk music with stirring dance grooves. Band members like Conrad Ivitsky, the bass player, and Iain Macleod, the mandolin player, were fiery personalities and sometimes the sparks flew.
“There was huge tension within the band but the anger made them really fantastic,” Coutts recalls. “It really gave them an edge.” Quickly becoming a fan himself, Coutts would see the band whenever he could.
Some of the STV material has found its way into Heading West: A Story about a Band called Shooglenifty, Coutts’ new film which screens this weekend in Edinburgh Film Festival’s Night Moves section.
The film was conceived in a roundabout way. Several years ago Jane-Ann Purdy, the band’s then manager who has produced the documentary, applied to Creative Scotland for money for a film about the band making an album in India. By then, though, Angus had terminal cancer (he died in 2016) and so the trip didn’t happen. However, Creative Scotland agreed to allow the money for the project to be used instead for a film record of a memorial concert for Angus staged in early 2017 – and which 2000 people attended.
“We used the money from that – and everything else we just did for nothing,” Coutts says of how Heading West was eventually put together.
The band has now been in existence for over 30 years, albeit with various changes of personnel. “They [the band members] are all very individual…I would certainly say they have survived and they’re still Shooglenifty, but they are not the band that they were,” Coutts reflects. “I don’t really mean that critically. It’s just when you take out somebody so vibrant, something changes…I personally don’t think they are as edgy as they were. Maybe that’s because they’re getting older and I am getting older too.”
Coutts is quick to add, though, that the band is “still good.”
Eilidh Shaw was eventually announced as the new fiddler. She is charismatic in her own right and shares her predecessor’s humour and musical drive.
In their early years, Shooglenifty were hugely influential. They were taking a form of music that had previous been regarded as earnest and esoteric and making it “cool and hip,” as Coutts puts it.
Other bands, for example Elephant Sessions, have picked up the Shooglenifty baton. The Scottish folk scene is far richer and more diverse than it once was.
The title of the film is “Heading West” but Coutts and the band did eventually head east too. They fulfilled the old dream of travelling to India, working with musicians there. “It was brilliant,” the director enthuses about the trip. “I’ve never wanted to go to India on holiday. I’ve never understood the idea of going somewhere where there is such a vast difference in poverty and wealth. But it was fantastic.”
A mutual respect quickly sprang up between the Scottish musicians and their Indian colleagues. They shared a similar sense of humour. The Indian music may have been “more flowery and complex” than its Scottish equivalent but they all enjoyed each other’s company. It helped, too, that the Indian musicians had experienced the loss of a band member too.
Coutts is a hugely experienced director who has ventured into almost every kind of filmmaking. He has made dramatic feature films, for example romantic comedy American Cousins (2003). He has made children’s stories, notably his TV adaptation of the Katie Morag stories. In the 1980s, he was one of the producers of the groundbreaking Channel 4 later night talkshow ‘After Dark,’ which Mancunian music impresario and BBC journalist Tony Wilson used to present. This was the show on which guests like Oliver Reed would drink too much and behave very badly and on which you never knew what would happen next. Spies, politicians, famous authors and actors would sit around the studio and have very heated discussions, live on air.
“Jack of all trades and master of none! I tend to do things that I like and I am not very good at selling himself,” is the very modest way in which Coutts sums up a varied and very colourful career which has brought him many awards – and has seen him make documentaries on huge ranges of subjects. “I just drift from one thing to the next,” he says.
His passion for Shooglenifty, though, is very long-lasting. After filming the band for many years, the death of Angus R Grant led extra urgency to the film. “One of the things I felt putting it together was what the balance between grief, death and music would be,” he reflects. He conducted over 30 interviews, most of them around the time of the memorial concert for Angus, and followed the band everywhere from Scotland, Spain, India and beyond.
“There’s a load of stuff I haven’t used. It was just the tension of not wanting it to be about death and grief. Patently, that grief is still there. People always say, oh, you’ll get better. I don’t think you do. I think grief just changes its clothes and hits you in a different way,” the director reflects on what has been one of his most personal projects.
