Sixties Scottish band continues its winning formula with bagpies at the Southport Arts Centre

May 21 2008 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

THE Highland Bagpipes are not usually associated with driving guitar rhythms and flutes.

But for the Scottish group The Tannahill Weavers it turned out to be a winning combination which is why, 40 years after its inception, it is still going strong. On Satur- day, the band finally makes it to the Southport Arts Centre, much to the delight of its performing arts programme manager John Sprackland.

“I have had a long standing affection for the band ever since seeing them at the Cambridge Folk Festival in the 1970s,” he says.

“Then, with bands like Five Hand Reel and Silly Wizard, they were in the vanguard of an exciting new wave of Scottish traditional music.”

The band was created in Paisley, Scotland, in 1968 and two of the founding members – singer/guitarist Roy Gullane and flautist Phil Smillie – are still in the five-piece group.

The band released its first record in 1976 and has since gathered a worldwide fan club and are particularly big in Canada, a country to which many Scots decided to emigrate.

It is that use of the Great Highland Bagpipe in the line-up which marked them out as rather different.

It is really a solo instrument but used in the group setting of The Tanna- hill Weavers blends in remar- kably well. They were the first professional Scottish folk group to include the pipes.

But the band enjoys using unlikely instruments for a folk group, among them a viola, cello, bouzouki, and flute.

* THE Tannahill Weavers are at the Southport Arts Centre, Saturday, 8pm. Tickets £10. 01704 540011.