Silly Wizard

Silly Wizard - some memories from Brian Bannatyne- Scott

After a hiatus of many months, I am delighted to announce the return of the BBS Blog on the Edinburgh Music Review. After the excitement of the Edinburgh Festival, and the delights of the Lammermuir Festival, it occurred to me that, since my book, ‘A Singer’s Life’ was published at the beginning of the year, a tome itself originating from the EMR Blog around Covid, I hadn’t written anything other than reviews for ages.

This was partially because I was now contributing reviews every few days (something that, for obvious reasons, could not happen during Lockdown), and also because I had covered so many musical subjects back in the day that I was struggling to find suitable subjects for further Blogs.

However, browsing through my CD collection (remember CDs?), I listened to a slightly obscure disc, ‘The Best of Silly Wizard’, and was blown away by the freshness of the playing and also the consummate musicianship of the performers.

Now, a little historical context needs to be brought in here, both from my point of view and that of the genre of Folk/Rock. As we moved into the 1970s, I was just 15 years old, a shy Senior 4 pupil at George Watson’s Boy’s College, beginning to come under the spell of Wagner, Mahler and Bruckner, and Opera in general. My voice had recently broken from a weedy treble into an absolutely astonishing (to me) rich bass, and this transformation powered my whole life from then on. My subjugation to dramatic Classical music came, to a large extent, at the expense of the world-shattering musical revolution of the 1960s. I had followed the rise of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones (much favouring the less scary Beatles at this time) during the decade just finishing, but the great schisms created by the break-up of The Beatles, and the rise of Progressive Rock had passed me by, and it was only many decades later that I began to appreciate the era I had lived through as a child and youth.

However, with the advance in years, the awareness of music as an adjunct to social life, particularly in Scotland’s pubs, became clearer, and I became interested in the phenomenon which we heard in those pubs - Folk Music. Now, as readers in Scotland will know, folk music here was different from that south of the border, dealing less with the change from a rural to an industrial society, and more with an understanding of a sort of woolly nationalism, the feeling that we had something here in Scotland which differentiated us from the English and which made us unique in many ways. The history of Rebellion and Loss, the old traditions, the fact that education and law were quite different here, spilled into the music that we heard around us. Even the slightly twee heather and whisky world of the White Heather Club on TV, with Andy Stewart, Kenneth McKellar, Moira Anderson, Robin Hall and Jimmy Macgregor, all contributed to a sense of identity which appealed to teenagers of the time like me, and I suppose the fact that this sort of music was often heard in the dark, adult world of pubs contributed to the excitement that gripped us as we ventured into this almost forbidden world (well, I suppose it was actually forbidden by law, but tall boys of my age were easily assimilated into the world of pubs – no ID cards then!).

It was only a short step from the folk music of the pubs to the new world of Folk/Rock, which we heard on the radio and on the records we bought in the record shops. My generation missed out on the huge stramash resulting from Bob Dylan’s transition from folk to rock, with Folkies screaming “Judas” and “Traitor” at him, but we enjoyed the aftermath and we were thrilled by the likes of Pentangle, Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention. Truth be told, I was only an onlooker around this time, as my gods were middle European giants of symphonic music and the twin deities of Wagner and Verdi, but I was aware of the new trend, and sang along over several pints with Wild Rover, Wild Mountain Thyme and Flower of Scotland.

Emerging from all this was a group called Silly Wizard, and it’s their story that I want to focus on today. I was dimly aware of the group at the time, as one of my chums from school, Alastair Donaldson, played the flute in the band, as well as bass guitar, after leaving school, but I only got to know and love Silly Wizard later on, because Alastair’s replacement on Bass was Martin Hadden, who now runs Birnam CD, and who has put out my two recent CDs, ‘Songs of Stevenson’ and ‘Songs of Edinburgh’. Through conversations with him, I started to listen to their back catalogue, and was immensely impressed. They had a unique style and sound, and some of their playing is quite phenomenal.

To be fair, Silly Wizard was really a folk group with electronic features, rather than a full-blown Folk/Rock band and perhaps I am doing them a disservice by lumping them in with the big guns of the era. Their roots seem very much based around traditional instruments, like accordion, fiddle, bodhran, flute, banjo, mandolin, tin whistle and so on, and the lack of a drummer with a drum kit is a clear pointer to a more traditional sound. Nonetheless, their success and international repute, although fleeting, marked them out as more than just a pub folk band.

Truth be told, their membership and line-up was ever-changing, and they went through an enormous number of band members in the relatively short time they were around.

Formed originally in 1970 in Edinburgh by two Edinburgh University students, Gordon Jones and Bob Thomas, they became a trio with the addition of Bill Watkins, and when Bill left, they took on Chris Pritchard on vocals, and in 1972, they played their first paid gig at a hotel in Brig o’ Doon (not the mysterious town of legend but a place in Ayrshire), using the name Silly Wizard for the first time too, apparently taken from a flatmate who was writing children’s books. The name stood ever after.

Their optimal line-up, as far as I am concerned, was the Cunningham brothers – Phil on accordion and Johnny, primarily on violin – Bob Thomas and Gordon Jones (the two original members), Martin Hadden (bass) and the definitive voice of Andy M Stewart. The M was very important to distinguish him from the hugely successful but commercial and tartanised Andy Stewart, he of ‘Donald, whaur’s your troosers’ and the White Heather Club. Andy M was a scion of a Traveller family from Alyth, his great aunt being Belle Stewart, and his aunt, I think, was Sheila Stewart, who was invited by President Gerald Ford to sing at the Bicentenary celebrations of the United States in the White House. The tradition of Traveller songs was very much part of the Silly Wizard sound, due in large part to Andy M, and his extraordinary voice and accent lent gravitas to an already highly polished ensemble. Phil Cunningham, of course, has gone on to being a ‘National Treasure’, most recently in his duo with Aly Bain, and, listening to the Silly Wizard albums, his competitions at high speed with his brother on violin were the staple of many tracks, whipping up excitement in their audiences.

I would encourage any of our readers who have an interest in Scottish folk music, and music in general, to look out for Silly Wizard albums on Amazon, or better still, from Birnam CD, where of course, you will also find my two recent albums