Wireless for New SoundsJim's Just ChampionHibernating is for Bears and BadgersFeature Archive |
Stuart Cassells |
Hogwarts and all for Stuart Cassells
2005 was an eventful year for Stuart Cassells. In January, this twenty-six year old bagpiper from Falkirk won the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year competition. And later in the year he followed this up by performing on the new Darkness album and on the film soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In this world blockbuster film, a computer generated giant piper ‘syncs’ to Cassells who is playing alongside Pulp's Jarvis Cocker and Radiohead's Phil Selway and Jonny Greenwood. A star studded year indeed.
Hard rock and Hollywood are places where Cassells would be happy to work more often, but the more work he takes on as a kind of ‘bagpiping everyman’ - he keeps busy with corporate entertainment gigs - the more he finds himself in a quandary about what to wear.
“I've just come back from a function,” he says, “and this morning when I was getting ready, I was thinking, “Should I wear the kilt?”
“Some people say if you're playing the pipes you have to go with the established order of dress. Then other people say that you're perpetuating an outdated tartan and haggis image, and the truth is: I don't know myself.”
Entertainer
His normal way of getting round the problem is to compromise, with a kilt and a daft sporran say. But presentation is an important consideration for a musician who sees himself first and foremost as an entertainer.
“You can entertain people with exemplary piping,” he says. “I look at Gordon Duncan and Fred Morrison, for example, who are both virtuoso musicians and have done amazing things for the pipes in terms of composition and technique. There are guys like Angus MacColl on the competitive piping scene too who are phenomenal players.
“I think I'm a good piper but I'm not in that class, so I have to add my personality to the music and basically, if I'm enjoying myself, there's a good chance that the audience will enjoy themselves too.”
Cassells grew up within the piping establishment. He started playing the pipes at the age of seven and by his early teens he was playing in Grade One bands, including the prestigious McNaughton's Vale Of Atholl band. He also won innumerable junior prizes as a soloist, including two Mod gold medals, and appeared on the Young Pipers of Scotland showcase album on the leading traditional music label, Greentrax.
From the age of twelve he also worked as a tour guide in Stirling and became the first piper to play at the refurbished Great Hall in Stirling Castle when it reopened in 1997. He actually intended to study for a tourism and marketing degree - he's since shown that he didn't really need to learn the marketing part - when he left school, but he was so busy playing functions that he started his own business instead, supplying pipers, dancers and dance bands for weddings and other events. “I took a year out before going to college and it turned into three years,” he says.
Red hot
When he did eventually decide to study for a degree, he took the RSAMD's piping degree course and graduated this summer. His experience in playing to large parties of tourists and business people - and at gigs such as T in the Park with his band, the Red Hot Chilli Pipers - stood him in good stead when he won the Young Traditional Musician of the Year title in January.
“I never expected to win, I just really entered it because it was my last chance, being at the top end of the age range,” he says. “But I think I had a definite advantage over the other competitors in the final in that I was used to playing to audiences of that size every week. The others were a bit nervous but I was able to view it as just another gig, a performance opportunity really where I could go out in front of five hundred or so people and entertain them.”
He certainly did that, working the audience like the true professional he is, and putting himself in line for jobs such as MC at events and festivals. Don’t be too surprised if, in time, Cassells, with his confident line in patter, becomes a fixture as the piping personality on television programmes such as the Hogmanay Show.
Permission to land
A more immediate concern, though, is the album he is making for Footstompin' Records as part of his Young Traditional Musician of the Year prize. It won't be a traditional bagpipe album. The Darkness's Dan Hawkins has agreed to play a guitar solo on one track, a souped up version of the pipe march The Hills of Argyll, in return for Cassells' services on the band's new album. Cassells describes the other material as “quite rocky.”
“I'm not making an album for other pipers, because the piping market is a tiny percentage of the market as a whole,” he says. “If pipers don't like it or it's too way out, that won't bother me. I'm not going to stick on a token pibroch or a march, strathspey and reel set because I've proved that I can do that.
“I'm playing the music that I want to play and that's what makes me different. I still respect the instrument and its history, of course, but people like the lateMartyn Bennett, another brilliant, brilliant musician, have shown that there's no right and wrong in where you can take piping - there's just good and bad. It's good to have people from outside the piping scene – like The Darkness - recognise the pipes as a musical instrument, not some novelty or figure of fun.”