A Very Scottish Festival

Tartan Heart, 2009

 

If you’re driving through the Scottish Highlands near Inverness to reach the annual Tartan Heart Music Festival, it comes as a surprise to actually find it. Without much warning sheep fields, cooperage yards full of whiskey barrels and stunning vistas of bare, brown and purple hills give way to what at first glance appears to be a musical refugee camp taking place in someone’s garden. Lines of cars crowd  cow fields, policemen on muddy farm quad bikes roar past a requisitioned walled garden and everywhere there are crowds and crowds of people setting up tents and waiting eagerly for something to happen. This is Tartan Heart, one of the Scottish music scenes best kept secrets.

Driving through sheep-fields 

 Piles of Whiskey Barrels

View of  Northern Countryside with Mountains in Background

Catering to just twelve thousand people Tartan Heart is far from a large festival but it has amazing energy stemming both from what I would term its “invite everyone who loves music and socializing” ethos and the chilled out location described above. People of all ages and socio-economic groups come to T.H, many in large family or friend groups. 

 Arriving at the Festival

As it takes place in the middle of a highland estate, T.H has space enough that there are really no unmanageable crowds, even for the popular acts, and there are enough trees around that there is a strange sense of peace contrasting heavily with the music. In many ways the festival is a loosely held bundle of contradictions, what with shady garden paths leading to huge strobe lit stages, quiet family camping sitting down the hill from a tipi V.I.P section and the sprawl of the general campsite. Posh teenagers in flat caps stand next to those from low income Glaswegian families, the police patrol in force but there is really no trouble. 

The performers that attended in the past have included a strange mixture of folk heroes, Scottish quasi-traditionalists, has-beens, wanna-be’s, start ups and some very, very good bands that have been favourites of mine, such  like Idlewild etc. This year, the line-up included Noah and the Whale, whose hit Five Years Time has been a really big tune of recent, the Saw Doctors who currently have a song at number 2 in Ireland and the Editors, a great band with a powerful stage presence and a long list of good tunes.

Noah and the Whale

The Saw Doctors

The Editors

As I was officially covering T.H for Student at Large I was able to conduct interviews with twoup-and-coming bands, The Lost Brothers and Washington Irving and obtain some good photographs of the headliners. To save overwhelming the reader by throwing a hundred page colossus of an article at you I’ve split up the festival into manageable, relevant sections and I hope this makes it easier to read.