‘Auld Reikie’ comes to Portobello
Portobello Town Hall, 20/9/2026
Billy Kay, presenter, Steve Byrne, guitar and voice, Sarah Hoy, fiddle, Jim Malcom, guitar and voice, Gary West, pipes, whistle and voice.
In the 1980’s Billy Kay, the great Ayrshire writer and defender of the Scots tongue (and like me a former pupil of Kilmarnock Academy), created a BBC Radio programme about the Scots poet Robert Fergusson. It was called ‘Fergusson’s Auld Reikie’ and combined passages from Fergusson’s poems, interspersed with 18th century Scots music and songs, performed by a talented group of Scots musicians, Rod Paterson, Derek Hoy, Tony Cuffe and Norman Chalmers. The programme was a great success and later Billy staged it during the Edinburgh Festival appropriately enough in the Bedlam Theatre where Robert Fergusson was committed and died tragically young aged 24. He is buried in Canongate Kirkyard, where Robert Burns raised a monument to his ‘elder brother in the muse’. People may recognise Fergusson from the splendid statue of him outside the Canongate Kirk marching down the Canongate!
Billy Kay presented a revised edition of ‘Fergusson’s Auld Reikie’ at the Reid Hall in the University of Edinburgh in November 2024 and you can read my review of the event in the Edinburgh Music Review, 16th of November 2024. That concert took a very different format from today’s concert in Portobello. Firstly it was a complete one and a half hour programme where the music was interspersed with the poetry of Fergusson and where no applause was permitted until the end when the audience roared its appreciation. I quoted the great Dolina MacLennan in my review where she said “It was beyond description. I felt saturated in the music. No applause till the end, song followed song, and fiddle and pipes, guitar and flute all blended, the sound perfectly balanced. Totally engaged from beginning to end and the poetical voice linking it all was mesmeric. Had to come straight home in case I ‘lost it’. Still with me!”
Well I didn’t see Dolina in Portobello on Sunday; I don’t know but I suspect she would have been disappointed if she had been there because of the different format of today’s concert. Three of the 2024 musicians took part: Steve Byrne, who sang and played guitar, Gary West, who signalled a splendid opening to the concert by playing the war pipes and later the whistle and the small pipes, and Sara Hoy on the fiddle. Sadly Karine Polwart wasn’t present but we had Jim Malcom who sang and played the guitar. The main difference was that the concert was split into two halves with a short interval in the middle. The first half was a series of songs and tunes from the musicians which didn’t seem to be connected to Fergusson, but did pay homage to the original 1980’s performers. These included Jim Malcom’s rendering of Rod Paterson’s ‘Auld Toon Shuffle’, and some of Derek Hoy’s fiddle compositions, played by his daughter Sarah. Each of the first half performances were punctuated by applause after each song.
After the interval Billy Kay presented a shortened form of his 2024 piece, reading some of Fergusson’s work, and including many of the Scot’s songs from the 1981recording, notably Fergusson’s personal favourite ‘The Birks of Invermay’, ‘Leith Races’, ‘The Daft Days’, ‘Auld Reikie’, ‘Elegy on the Death of Scots Music’ and Burns’ song ‘Such a parcel of rogues in a nation’. In this half Billy did ask for no applause till the end, which was highly effective, but I have to say the effect was spiked by the more conventional and unimaginative approach of the first half, and I didn’t experience the magic that Dolina MacLennan described so eloquently after the last concert. Still there was a very warm response from the full audience in Portobello Town Hall and indeed a standing ovation at the end. Perhaps I am suffering from the critics’ syndrome when you have seen a great performance of the same work previously you are often disappointed by a new version. Maybe I’m being too hard on ‘Auld Reikie’ in Portobello. Billy Kay is a great speaker and recited Fergusson’s works well; the musicians were all very skilled and the audience clearly enjoyed it. For those less jaded by prior experience than I was, the performance presented a decent taster of what I’m increasingly sure was in its earlier form a significant contribution to Scottish culture.
