Shetland Folk Festival – celebrating music and community

Two years ago was to have been the fortieth birthday of the enduringly popular traditional music jamboree until the Covid-19 pandemic rudely intervened.

Happily this year sees the bulk of the intended 2020 line-up winging their way to the islands to enjoy four days of music and merry-making.

It is a music festival with a difference. Visiting artists come for the full duration and mingle constantly with local folk, enjoying the hospitality of staying with host families and sharing concert bills with the cream of the crop of Shetland musicians at rural village halls and larger venues in Lerwick alike.

In the late 1980s Elvis Costello, who has collaborated with Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash and Green Day, found himself fifth on the bill for a concert in the Whiteness Hall. In that sense the festival is a great leveller and all the richer for it.

This year’s dozen visiting acts hail from near and far. International names range from Grammy-nominated Americana string band Della Mae and Québécois quintet Le Vent du Nord to vibrant Danish eight-piece Habadekuk and classy Irish roots singer Heidi Talbot.

Closer to home a strong Scottish contingent includes a third festival outing, 36 years on from his first, for Caledonia singer Dougie MacLean. There are welcome homecomings for gifted Shetland fiddlers Ross Couper and Kevin Henderson, both professional touring musicians, too.

They will be joined by some 21 local acts including established bands like The Revellers, North Ness Boys, Haltadans and Herkja, and hugely promising young acts such as Skelburn, George Spence and Shetland’s 2021 young fiddler of the year Magnus Williamson.

Nineteen concerts will be staged in little over 72 hours at venues stretching from Cunningsburgh in the south mainland to Aith on the west side. A Friday night concert at a village hall in Yell, an outlying island a 20-minute sea voyage away from the Shetland mainland, may well culminate in an impromptu music session on the ferry’s open-air car deck.

As one of the first large-scale social events in Shetland since Covid-19, it will come as a tonic for musicians and fans of a genre that owes its very existence to folk meeting up. Strings will ring, songs will be sung, beers will be sunk and friendships will be made and renewed.

“It’s a celebration of the folk that are involved in making it what it is,” says Shetland Folk Festival committee member and musician Lewie Peterson. “That’s not just folk music: it’s a celebration of the community and coming together, something that people haven’t been able to do for a while, and once people come for the first time they tend to always want to return.”

Among those back for another helping in 2022 is Finnish violinist Esko Jarvela. He’s gigging with ground-breaking quintet Frigg, who last played the festival in 2009, and it will be his sixth visit in a variety of musical guises.

“I’ve been back four times with different bands,” he says. “This festival is so much fun. There is a real togetherness between the artists and the festival organisers and the people here in Lerwick and other places as well.”

Even as a touring musician familiar with many other artists on the scene, Esko says the committee does “really good work bringing in bands that I’ve never heard of – every single time I’ve been I’ve discovered new music”.

He says people have been “desperately waiting for the festival to happen again”, and it is an event he would recommend to music lovers the world over: “For the fun, the craic, the atmosphere. It’s a really social event.”

Enjoying that atmosphere for the first time will be Irish singer Heidi Talbot and her trio. Heidi says she’s heard “so many great stories” about the festival and its notorious “lack of sleep due to an abundance of fun and joy”.

“This will be my first festival in two and a half years,” she says. “So not only is it super exciting to get to play live again, I also get to visit this wonderful place I’ve heard so much about. I can’t wait!”

She adds: “I’m still in disbelief that there’s no trees. If I find one I’m taking photo proof!”

Also sampling the weekend for the first time will be Nova Scotian singer-songwriter Dave Gunning, who forms a duo with festival favourite J.P. Cormier

Having arrived off the ferry from Aberdeen on Thursday morning, Dave can’t wait to get stuck in and enjoy what the festival – and the Shetland community – has to offer.

“Any musician friends of mine that have been over here have raved about it,” he says. “J.P. has been a few times and he really wanted me to come over and experience it.

“My first impressions are it is a breathtakingly beautiful place. The landscape and the feel is really good at this point.”

Dave sometimes gets nervous before performing but “I feel more relaxed than normal here – maybe that’s a good sign”.

He and Cormier made one full length album together in 2018, but have played on each other’s records and worked together since the mid 1990s. He jokes that when his musical compadre is in full guitar-wielding force of nature mode on stage “I try and hang on the best I can!”

Dave mines a rich tradition of storytelling and song, leading him to appear regularly at the Celtic Colours festival in Cape Breton. It’s one of several communities around the world that Shetland Folk Festival enjoys an especially close affinity with.

The three-year interlude has felt like an eternity, not least for the organisers. The four-day weekend, a calendar highlight for hundreds of islanders, is all pulled together by an unpaid committee of tenacious, friendly and community-spirited volunteers.

After welcoming many of the musicians off the ferry on Thursday morning and despatching them to their local host families, the committee are brimming with enthusiasm as they finally get back to doing what they love.

Lewie, himself no slouch on the mandolin and banjo, will find time to fit in gigs with his bands Vair and The Revellers. He feels the first festival since the pandemic is bound to feel a little extra special.

“Local musicians haven’t had the chance to get together either so it will almost feel like a reunion of sorts locally,” he says. “It’s a bit like a holiday or time of year that conjures up a lot of memories, so I think it will be quite emotional for people as the weekend goes on.”

Friendship and cultural exchange – precious commodities we were deprived of from March 2020 – are at the very heart of Shetland Folk Festival, and Lewie attributes that to the unique way it brings artists and locals together.

Discover more about Shetland Folk Festival and planning your visit.