Sleeve Notes:
The Rockfield Hotel in Paisley near Glasgow is a sleek, streamlined modem building. Hamish
Imlach is by no means a sleek, streamlined modern singer. But the singer
and the setting on this occasion matched perfectly to produce the most
enjoyable live recording session in which I have participated. Almost as
soon as Hamish had completed his first LP for XTRA (XTRA1039) and it had
immediately become a best seller, Hamish and I started thinking about
doing a live LP. It was an obvious idea as there are few performers round
the British folk clubs better than Hamish at handling a club audience. His
rapport with them is immediate. They sing with him, laugh with him, cry
with him and he keeps the mood changing not through any conscious
professional slickness (though he is a professional to his finger tips),
but because each mood is part of his whole warm personality, because , he
responds on a very personal level to every nuance of audience reaction.
Well, Hamish and I decided he must do a live LP and so Alasdair McSwann of
the Paisley Folk Song Club was approached. He offered us his club night on
Friday, February 24th 1967. When I arrived in Glasgow on the day of the
recording I heard a series of amazing stories of how, when the tickets for
the evening's performance had gone on sale weeks and weeks before, fans
had queued from 2.30 till 8 pm to make sure of their seats and now as the
performance drew near, one heard tell of offers of 3O/- per ticket being
turned down by those who had queued to make sure they would hear 'the
biggest thing in Scottish folk music'.
Alasdair McSwann limited his audience to make sure that everyone was comfortably seated.
What's more, he issued invitations to many of Hamish's singing friends
from all over Scotland. In fact, other Scottish folk song clubs were
starved of artists that night, for many of Scotland's best known folk
performers gave up their own gigs to come and be in the audience.
Josh
Macrae, Danny Kyle, David Campbell, The Livingstones, The Skerries and
many, many others among them. What's more, Hamish brought with him three
talented and popular accompanists, Jimmy 'Whiskers' Greenan on whistle and
spoons, Rab Purves on fiddle and the mythical but remarkably well known
figure of Oscar St. Cyr on concertina and mandola. The session got off to
a start that would have left many performers completely thunderstruck.
Hamish bust a guitar string with his first note. It didn't put him off one
jot however and the evening turned into a splendid rumbustuous and
tremendously enjoyable performance, with the audience singing along
happily until finally the curtain came down somewhere around 3 in the
morning. So just imagine yourself in one of Scotland's best folk song
clubs with one of Britain's best folk club performers ready to go. And
settle down for an evening with a man who has often been called (and not
only on account of his size) Scotland's greatest all round entertainer.
