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Divide and conquer
By SUSAN MANSFIELD, THE SCOTSMAN
JAN 24th 2008

Three of Celtic Connections' bright stars started out in the same band. They tell SUSAN MANSFIELD about how Fine Friday helped shape their music.

ABOUT seven years ago, a promising trio of young musicians met at the Friday-night folk sessions in Sandy Bell's Bar in Edinburgh. They became Fine Friday, a vibrant young traditional band with a special, foot-tapping sound. They produced two acclaimed albums, Gone Dancing and Mowing the Machair, and toured in Europe and Australia, before they took the decision to go their separate ways in late 2005. Now, all three musicians – Nuala Kennedy, Kris Drever and Anna-Wendy Stevenson – are making waves on the folk scene and beyond.

ANNA-WENDY STEVENSON, 35, FIDDLE

STEVENSON's eponymous solo album came out in 2006, to widespread acclaim. The same year she premiered a New Voices commission for Celtic Connections, which was described as "a resounding success in its expansive compass and artful arrangements". She juggles composing and teaching with performing with veteran folk band Jock Tamson's Bairns, with whom she will be performing at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 1 February.

"There's a lot of music in my family (her grandfather is the composer Ronald Stevenson; harpist Savourna Stevenson is her aunt]. I'm classically trained, so when I got the traditional music bug, it was really important to feel that I could play traditional music in an authentic way. I used to play in the Edinburgh Youth Orchestra with Martyn Bennett. We would have an intense rehearsal schedule, but at break he would pull out his whistles and start playing. I wanted to be able to play like that, where there is no barrier between the music and the soul.

"So, when I was studying for a postgraduate degree in anthropology at Edinburgh University, looking at traditional music, I decided that I needed to be an active participant – in the pub! I was a regular at the Tron Ceilidh House and Sandy Bell's, where Nuala and I started playing together. We wanted to take it further and started looking around for a guitarist. When we met Kris, we knew he was the man for the job.

"Fine Friday was our own canvas, we could all throw blobs of paint in and have a go at mixing the colours. It was a very creative environment for all of us. I realised how much you could achieve using three people and I've brought that into my own compositions.

"I wanted to do something I hadn't done before, so I suggested we should go to Australia. I still the remember the day I said that to the others, sitting in Cafe Favorit. I was the one with the computer, so I organised the two-month tour. We were very well received.

"When Fine Friday disbanded I was working on my New Voices commission for Celtic Connections, and making an album with my grandfather (Gowd and Silver]. Shortly after that I started playing in a duo with (pianist] James Ross. We did a concert at the Lochgoil Fiddle Workshop and they immediately said we should record together, that led to my album. Now I've decided to concentrate on composing. I've got a job teaching part-time at Lews Castle College on Benbecula. I love teaching and have the rest of time to compose and perform, and I'm absolutely loving this place, it's such an inspiring place to work. My New Voices commission was about Edinburgh, and now I'd like to write a companion piece about Uist."

NUALA KENNEDY, 30, FLUTE, VOCALS

KENNEDY'S first album, The New Shoes, came out in Spring 2007, was named Album of the Week in the Irish Times. Her New Voices commission for last year's Celtic Connections, Astar:Journey, featured a host of well-known Scottish musicians and American indie-poet Will Oldham. As well as working on collaborations with other musicians, she will record her second album later this year. She plays the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, tonight with Fanfare Ciocarlia.

"Before Fine Friday, I had no intention of being a professional musician. I come from a traditional music background in Ireland, and played in a ceilidh band, but I moved to Edinburgh to go to art college to do a degree in ceramics. Then I started playing in sessions on Friday nights at Sandy Bell's.

"It all came about in an organic way. We were just playing for fun, and we enjoyed it so much that we started meeting up outside of the pub. Then we started finding that other people wanted to hear us, and we got quite busy.

"Kris was full-time at music and so was Anna-Wendy. They really inspired me to keep going at the music and take it a bit more seriously. I still remember the first gig we did, it was at Fèis an Eilean on Skye and we got paid £100 each, I thought this was amazing. I went straight to Ragamuffin and bought a hat – I still have it.

"Fine Friday was where I got interested in writing. The first tunes I recorded of my own were on the band's first album, Gone Dancing. It also helped me develop the skill of playing in front of an audience. We built up a lot of experience. Things came to a natural end because we were all involved in other projects. I've spent the past two years mainly writing new stuff and working on collaborations.

"I did the Burnsong Song House, which got me into songwriting, and a residency in New York where I worked with Philippe Guidat, a flamenco jazz guitarist. We're working on a world-music project together. I'm also working on a duo album of original material with (Canadian fiddler and composer] Oliver Schroer.

"My style is evolving. Even though I will always be a traditional musician, I'm not afraid to experiment. I feel a debt to Fine Friday because, if it wasn't for the band, I wouldn't be a musician now. I'd be in a ceramics studio somewhere making pots!"

KRIS DREVER, 29, GUITAR, VOCALS

EDDI Reader, Kate Rusby, Idlewild's Roddy Woomble and Celtic Connections director Donald Shaw were among those who appeared on Drever's debut solo album, Black Water, which was released in February 2007. It was greeted with rave reviews, and he went on win the Horizon Award at the BBC Folk Awards last year.

Drever is up for four awards this year as part of trio Lau, and Before the Ruins, a collaborative album with Woomble and John McCusker, will be out later this spring. He performs Black Water in full at the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, tomorrow night.

"Fine Friday was the first band I've been involved in on a permanent basis. I'd been in Edinburgh for two or three years picking up jobs as a session music playing double bass. I met Nuala and Anna-Wendy through the sessions in Sandy Bell's. They wanted to be a duo and asked me to play the guitar for them, but I refused, unless it was a band, so that's how it started.

"I'm self-taught, but my family were all musicians (his father is former Wolfstone lead Ivan Drever]. I played a lot of teenage guitar rock, and a lot of sessions in Orkney. I've always had relatively eclectic tastes.

"Fine Friday was an introduction to being on stage as a professional, doing our own arrangements, finding tunes that were interesting enough to play again and again without getting terribly bored. We made a couple of good albums, I'm proud of those records.

"I've always written music for my own pleasure, but with Fine Friday I started to sing some of my own songs. After the band split up, I was doing a tour with Kate Rusby, who gave me a solo spot in her concert, just one song.

"Tom Reveal, from Reveal Records, heard it and phoned me up a few months later to offer me a record contract. It took me a little while to learn about being a solo artist, it's a pretty lonely existence, but it's a great skill to cultivate, learning how to do a show without having anyone to bounce off onstage.

"I started playing in Lau (with Aidan O'Rourke and Martin Green] while I was still with Fine Friday. We spent about a year just writing and rehearsing. Lau is based on traditional music but it has elements of jazz and to some degree classical composition. We've taken ideas and concepts from other forms of music and applied it to traditional instruments. We've toured a lot, in Japan last month and Canada a couple of months before that."

All concerts mentioned above are part of Celtic Connections. For a full festival programme, visit www.celticconnections.com