Piping Hot!

While the World Pipe Band Championships (or simply 'The Worlds', as they are affectionately known among the piping cognoscenti) have been held in Glasgow since the 1940's, the Piping Live! Festival has only grown around it in recent years. Beginning in 2004 as The Glasgow International Piping Festival the first year of the event featured some 600 pipers and attracted around 10,000 visitors. The following year the Festival was renamed Piping Live! and has grown impressively since: 2006 was a fantastic success, with over 5000 pipers entertaining the 30,000 people who attended throughout the week. The event brought over £800,000 into Glasgow's economy, and festival organisers hope this figure will grow each year.

Festival director Roddy McLeod says, 'Piping Live! will ensure that Glasgow is at the very centre of global piping once again'.

As Glasgow gears itself up for a celebration of all things bagpipe-related, it's interesting to reflect that the pipes were not a Scottish invention to begin with. . . .

The actual origins of the bagpipes are unclear, but the instrument probably originated in the Middle East, or Central Asia and their use certainly goes back thousands of years. The earliest recorded reference to the pipes is by Aristophanes in 400 BC, when the Athenian poet mocked the Athenians archenemies the Thebans by saying that they blew 'pipes made of dog-skin and chanters made of bone'!

A few hundred years later the Roman scholar Suetonius records that the Emperor Nero played a tibia utricularis – an instrument similar to the bagpipes – and coins depicting Nero playing a bagpipe-style instrument have been found in archaeological digs. Perhaps Nero wasn't famously 'fiddling while Rome burnt' after all, but was busily playing the bagpipes! Indeed, it was very likely to have been the Romans who introduced the bagpipes to the British Isles: statuettes of figures playing the pipes have also been discovered at Roman excavation sites.

The Scots seem to have taken to the pipes somewhere around the 12th Century, when the instrument enjoyed an explosion in popularity. Being portable and capable of producing high volume, the bagpipes became part of the 'travelling minstrel' tradition, acting as a means of carrying news, gossip and music around the country. By 1314 Robert the Bruce's army was marching to Bannockburn to the strains of the pipes playing 'Hey tutti tatti', the same melody that centuries later would be used by another Robert when Burns adopted it for 'Scots Wha Ha'.

During the 16th century, pipers began to replace harpers as the chief Celtic musicians of the Highlands and in 1760 Joseph MacDonald's 'Complete Theory' appeared; the first book to seriously study the Highland Bagpipes and their music. However, around the same time, western classical music began to develop in sophistication and technology and soon the pipes began to fall into a decline in popularity that would continue until the late nineteenth century.

For an instrument so uniquely associated with Scotland the revival of the bagpipes fortunes would come from a most unlikely source – an English monarch!

Queen Victoria's love of all things connected with Scotland – which she called 'the dearest place in all the world' – has been well documented. By the time the British Empire was at its height, the War Office – in a decision designed to please the Queen – decreed that every regiment was to be allowed five pipers and a pipe major. (A tradition that continues to this day.) Consequently, as the empire spread across the globe, its arrival was often spearheaded by Highland Regiments of the British Army, with their massed bagpipes skirling! The Great Highland bagpipes rise to world domination had begun!

Pipers who were demobbed after both World Wars, scattered themselves in places as far-flung as New Zealand, Africa and South America, where they started up bands of their own; sowing the seeds for the thriving pipe band culture that exists around the world today and which will descend on Glasgow in August.

The pipes have also started to make interesting inroads into the pop charts. One of the first usages of the pipes on a modern rock record was by the Australian hard rock band AC/DC, who used bagpipes on their 1976 hit 'It's a Long Way to the Top', a song recently featured in the hit movie 'School of Rock' starring Jack Black. The pipes on the track were played by AC/DC's lead singer Bon Scott, who learned to play in the Fremantle Western Australia Scots Pipe Band – his father's pipe band!

The following year, 1977, saw perhaps the most famous use of bagpipes on a pop record when Paul McCartney enlisted the help of the Campbeltown Pipe Band to lend a Scottish feel to his 'Mull of Kintyre' single. It worked: the track went on to sell over two million copies, entering the Guinness Book of Records in the process as the biggest-selling British single of all time, a record it would hold until Band Aid's 'Do They Know it's Christmas?' nearly a decade later.

More recently, the bagpipes are once again enjoying an injection of credibility thanks to The White Stripes, who decided to use the instrument prominently on the track 'Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn' on their new album 'Icky Thump'. Singer/songwriter/guitarist Jack White said that the song was about 'the thistle, which is Scotland's national flower, and that lent itself to a lot of Scottish themes in the song. I was playing pump organ on the demo and I thought "this sounds like bagpipes to me now'. So one thing led to another. . . ."

Tracking down the right piper in the American south where the band were recording proved a little trickier. 'Yeah,' White said, 'we found him through a musicians union in Nashville. He played in a Highland Pipe and Marching band. He was the only one we could find who had bagpipes in the key of D. Apparently Highland pipes are usually in the key of B flat. . . .' The Nashville Pipe Band's loss was rock music's gain as the new White Stripes album looks set to be their biggest seller yet!

Today the pipes are more popular than ever as pipe band membership everywhere continues to increase. One Scottish firm is producing around 40 sets of pipes a week to keep up with international demand! This August, Glasgow will be the best place in the world to witness the fruits of their labours in action. . . .