IT was the whisky line that served many of Scotland’s world-famous distilleries and it was a blow to Speyside when it was axed as part of the notorious Beeching cuts.
Now, 50 years later, it is being celebrated as part of a new tourist attraction and cultural centre due to open in November in Grantown-on-Spey.
To mark its opening, traditional music inspired by the railway has been composed by one of the country’s finest trad music instrumentalists, Hamish Napier, who will launch the new album in Glasgow at Piping Live this week.
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It is his second solo album and all of it will be played at the gig at The National Piping Centre at 10pm on Saturday night, August 18.
“It’s really exciting and a great privilege to be one of the big acts at Piping Live because I’m not actually a piper, I’m a whistle and piano player and I write pipe tunes,” Napier told the National.
“The show will feature all-new music which is quite unusual for a trad music show and for the festival to showcase all that new music is brilliant,” said Napier.
He’s playing a show alongside Assynt, an exciting new trio featuring pipes, who will be launching their debut album.
HOW DID NAPIER GET TO THIS POINT?
ORIGINALLY from Strathspey, Napier gained degrees in astronomy and music when he first arrived in Glasgow, then won a year’s scholarship to study jazz piano and composition at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston.
For the past 16 years he has been an integral part of Glasgow’s vibrant folk music scene, while also touring in Europe and North America with Scottish folk quartet Back of the Moon – Folk Band of the Year in 2005 at the MG Alba Scots Trad Music Awards.
He now teaches composition and music theory at Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and at music schools and festivals worldwide. His first solo album, The River, celebrated the mighty Spey and was nominated for Album of the Year at the Scots Trad Music Awards. Its artwork was created by Somhairle MacDonald from Inverness, whose beautiful drawings also adorn Napier’s The Railway.
WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION?
IN order to write the music for the new album, Napier decided to interview some of the retired train drivers who worked on the line.
“I didn’t realise they would be so much fun and have such good craic during the interviews,” he said. “And they had so many amazing stories to tell. That has been really interesting. It was such a shame the line closed as it connected the whole area.”
The CD contains a small booklet full of the stories and each tune ties in with them.
“There’s a story about Jocky the Mole, a cheery wee man but a speedster – some of the drivers were real speed demons. When he had no passengers on board he would hit bends at 80mph and the fireman would be getting thrown around in the cab, thinking he was going to die, but Jocky would just be grinning with a fag in his mouth.
“A lot of them started as very young lads during the Second World War as all the older men were away fighting or made to work down south for the war effort. They were just loons tearing around the countryside in these huge trains at 60 miles an hour.
“There were two railway lines, the Highland Line and the Great North of Scotland Railway, and there was a bit where the tracks ran alongside each other. Driver Jimmy Gray told me that kids would be reaching out of the windows to high-five the kids in the other train!”
HOW HAS HE CAPTURED THIS?
NAPIER has recreated the sounds of the railway on the new album.
“I sampled some of the noises on the restored Strathspey Steam Railway at Aviemore and used them although I had to be careful not to overdo it. Hopefully I found a balance. We also asked drummer Fraser Stone to mimic many of the railway sounds on his drum kit.
“It was a big work – it took me over a year to create. It’s also a bit biographical, as I was travelling between Glasgow and the Highlands when I was writing it so I wrote quite a lot while travelling up and down on the train.”
There are 17 new songs on the album, with two written by Napier’s brother Findlay.
When Napier plays it at the opening of the new Grantown East: Highland Heritage and Cultural Centre on November 2 it will be a poignant moment.
“It will be 50 years to the day that the very last train came down the track,” said Napier. “Weeks later they were tearing up the tracks and now the line forms part of the Speyside Way walk. Some of it is completely overgrown with birch trees and wild rose, left untouched since the late 60s. This is mentioned in the lyrics of Findlay’s song The World Came In By Rail.
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“It’s really sad that they did not decide to electrify the railways like they did in the rest of Europe. If they had modernised them perhaps we would still have them.”
IS THE ALBUM RELEASED YET?
IT had its Edinburgh launch on August 3 at the live concert for Radio Scotland’s Travelling Folk.
Napier was nominated for Community Composer of the Year in the Hand Up For Trad Community Music Awards for his work on the album. He hopes the tunes will work their way into the folk tradition as many of them are suited to folk sessions.
“I’ve written a few pipe tunes and it is great to be playing at Piping Live,” he said. “It’s really exciting as Scottish piping is more popular than ever before with more and more people learning the pipes. There are so many fantastic pipe bands out there and great tune writers who are writing in the traditional style but still pushing boundaries.
“It is a huge music scene and it’s amazing that the World Pipe Championships are right at the heart of Glasgow with the Piping Live festival showcasing bands and pipers from all over the world. It’s a really cool, exciting time and it’s a great honour for me to be one of the headline acts at the greatest piping festival in the world.”
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