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Dougie Pincock and Chris |
Dougie Pincock freely admits to being a classic example of how taking a chance can get you places.
From playing with one of Scotland’s leading folk groups, Battlefield Band, to his current role as Director of the Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music at Plockton High School, Pincock’s life in music (he laughs at the term ‘career’) has been a matter of being serially in the right place at the right time.
Even getting started in piping was an accident. With a story that puts the prestige of Scotland’s national instrument in the early 1970s into stark perspective, Pincock recalls the reaction of his class at Barrhead Primary School in Glasgow to their head teacher’s suggestion that they might want to take up the pipes.
"We all thought it was something to do with plumbing and none of us fancied that," says Pincock. "Of course, once we discovered that it meant that you got time off classes and it was the bagpipes, not the water pipes, we said, Aye, let’s have a go at that."
In those days there was no official provision for learning the pipes within the Scottish education system.
Pincock’s head teacher, however, was John MacFadyen, a well-known figure in piping, whose brother, Iain, in a neat piece of symmetry, is now the piping instructor with Pincock at Plockton. MacFadyen brought in John Garroway, who had played with the much-respected Glasgow Police Pipe Band of the 1950s, to teach the Barrhead youngsters – and so began a solid grounding and involvement with a rich panoply of Scottish piping for Pincock.
"Until I got my first set of pipes, there were three of us who used to share a set, week about," he recalls. "You wouldn’t get away with that now. But at that time - 1972 - you couldn’t buy bagpipes because Amazing Grace had become a big hit for the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and Americans were snapping up all the pipes to put on their walls. Eventually, my dad found a set in an antique shop for £42.50. I still have them, they’re tuned down to A now, but I remember that price ticket because it was just after decimal currency came in and it was still a novelty to see prices in new money."
With his own pipes and now at secondary school Pincock began attending evening classes at the College of Piping with Angus McLellan of the Strathclyde Police Pipe Band.
"John Garroway had introduced me to pibroch but it was Angus MacLellan who really got me into it and competition piping. I won a few prizes, including a Junior World Championship, which wasn’t as grand as it sounds, and although I would never have gone to be a big champion or anything like that, I was of a good standard because of the training I had. In fact, I still learn the Pibroch Society’s set pieces every year just to keep my hand in and my repertoire up, but towards the end of secondary school I began to lose interest in competing."
This was, to a large extent, Iain MacDonald’s fault – not that Pincock is complaining. Now habitually referred to as Finlay MacDonald’s dad, Iain had just become pipe major of Neilston & District Pipe Band when Pincock joined in his early teens.
"I owe Iain a tremendous debt of gratitude for what’s happened to me since then," says Pincock. "He introduced me to folk music: the Chieftains, Planxty and the band who made the biggest impact on me, the Bothy Band. Iain was one of the first pipers to play in folk bands when he guested on Battlefield Band’s second album. Jimmy Anderson had been the first when he played with Clutha and there was Allan MacLeod, with Alba, who was the first piper I ever heard bending a note, on the Cook in the Kitchen, and Iain got me into all this stuff."
It was Iain MacDonald who also got Pincock into Glasgow folk group Kentigern, aged seventeen and still at school. At this point the idea of being a professional piper would have been laughed out of court. Pincock went on to university to study Civil Engineering but his heart wasn’t really in it and in his third year he experienced a defining moment. Maybe this professional piper idea wasn’t such a joke after all.
"Hector MacMillan, who wrote The Sash, wrote a play called Capital Offence that ran at the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh and Robin Morton, Battlefield Band’s manager, put the band together for it. By this time I’d met John Geaghan, who’d introduced me to the whistle, and I’d started playing flute and saxophone too. Malcolm Jones, who was just beginning to have some success with Runrig, was in the band too and one night during a break he asked me why I didn’t play full-time. I told him I didn’t think there was any money in playing music, but he said, Well, you can obviously play, so why not? I really looked up to Malcolm, still do, and I started thinking, if a bloke like him thinks I can be a pro, maybe I can make something of this."
Soon afterwards, Duncan McGillivray, whose playing on Battlefield Band’s Stand Easy had made a big impression on Pincock, left the band. Pincock reckons it was a combination of factors that led to him replacing McGillivray: the Robin Morton connection at the Lyceum, his own connections through Kentigern with Sylvia Barnes, who had joined Battlefield Band briefly around this time and introduced him to them, and the floor spots he had played with Battlefield’s Brian McNeill in the Burns Bar in Falkirk.
Whatever, in June 1983, Pincock joined the Batties and began seven years of madness and mayhem.
"These really were crazy times," he says. "We’d do three tours of America and two tours of Germany every year – and these were serious tours, thirty-three gigs in thirty-one days, with a TV show in the afternoon and a gig at night, that sort of thing. On top of that we’d tour Australia every second year, as well as touring in the UK, and release an album a year."
For Pincock this was when he was at his peak.
"People in piping would say, All this folkie stuff can’t be good for your playing," he says. "But nothing could be further from the truth. I was playing the whole time and when I wasn’t playing gigs, I would be playing my way though the pibroch books in the back of the van. So I was able to keep both sides of my playing up. I also got to hear lots of other music at festivals and had to come up with ideas all the time. When we introduced Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising, for instance, that was a bit of a novelty number but it was the first time I’d had to come up with a tune over a chord sequence. Before that, it’d be a matter of saying, Here’s four reels or whatever, you guys follow me. I learned so much. It was a fantastic experience."
Fantastic experience or no, when Pincock’s wife announced that she was expecting their first child, it was the end of the road. Besides, after seven years with a settled line-up Battlefield Band needed freshening up, so Pincock launched himself into … the great unknown.
"I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do," he says. "But I was lucky because a lot new of new things started in the 1990s and although I had no teaching experience I was able to get involved with the Feisean Movement, which was a great way to learn about teaching. Then the RSAMD course started up and they needed teachers for that, and then the Piping Centre opened and I really enjoyed working there. It was real on-the-job training and with guys like the late Pipe Major Angus MacDonald passing things on, I was able to absorb so much and apply it. Angus was a great character and very humble for someone who was so important on the piping scene. He’d play you his latest tune and ask, Is it original? – because he was paranoid about copying another melody. It was never like he was handing down the next great creation, he wanted to hear how he might improve what he’d written."
When not teaching, Pincock might be out playing with the ceilidh band Robbie Shepherd’s Nightmare, where he learned to call dances, working on his next broadcast for Archie Fisher’s Travelling Folk on BBC Radio Scotland, or doing session work. By his reckoning he has played on eighty-five albums to date – and on one mad mental radio play.
"Don Paterson, the poet and guitarist, wrote this play whose basic premise was that jazz had been invented in Scotland and that the accordion – and not the tenor sax – was the main jazz instrument. He called me up and said, I hear you can play bendy notes on the pipes. Next thing I knew I was in the studio with Brian Kellock, the brilliant Scottish jazz piano player, and his trio. There were no rehearsals, we just had these eight bar sections to play and – unbeknownst to me – we had to improvise on them. Improvise? Oh, okay. The jazz guys were very nice about having this improvising novice with them. Then Don told me that my character, who was a drug dealer, had to answer his mobile phone – and keep playing the pipes – which meant I had five notes left. Make it sound mad, Don said. So I thought, I can do that. It was nuts. But not many people could have done that gig. I don’t mean because I’m brilliant or anything, just that it was my varied background that allowed me to cope with it."
Not many people were in the frame for Pincock’s position at Plockton, either. When the job spec was produced, the adviser to the committee responsible for appointing the course Director opined that the person they were looking for didn’t exist.
"They were looking for someone with experience of teaching on residential courses. Well, that’s the Feisean Movement. They wanted someone with connections with traditional musicians. I had those. Staff relations? That’s like running a band and I’d done that. The only area I hadn’t really covered was budgetary control, but that’s counting and if you make sure you don’t overspend, you’ll have control of your budget. It’s an admin job rather than a music job but I love it all - planning the annual tours, making a CD every year, and seeing young talent coming through."
Having Iain MacFadyen on hand means that piping students get solid training in both the competition style - from MacFadyen - and folk group work from Pincock. Other than that, though, Pincock’s piping experience doesn’t really impact on the course.
"I’m an administrator really," he says.
He does, however, still take an active interest in the piping scene and likes what he hears these days – with a few reservations.
"The scene as a whole is very healthy. The standard in both pipe band and solo piping is very, very good. Grade 4 bands today are achieving the equivalent of Grade 2 bands in my day and I don’t know how it can get much better at the top end."
One gripe he has is pitching. "It’s gone too high for me and the character of the instrument has changed, not for the better. I think you lose a lot of power because, outdoors, the lower pitched instruments carry the biggest distance."
He’s also not enamoured of excessive speed, although he concedes that this is a general trend throughout traditional music, not just piping.
"This is something we watch very carefully at Plockton. We record pupils regularly so that we have an audible diary of their progress, and the speed thing comes up all the time. I tell them, Just because you can play something fast, it doesn’t mean it sounds good. It’s part of maturing, I think, and if they’d just put the brakes on a bit, they’d let us hear what they’re doing and play with more depth. I always say, if you take 10% off the speed, the enjoyment of what your doing will improve by 70%."