Highlights

I was so delighted to be asked to go to Mexico in October for a British Council collaboration between Celtic Connections and the El Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato. We collaborated with the most amazing musicians and it was such a treat to play their music and have them join us on the Scottish repertoire as well. It wasn't a one-off either because Celtic Connections were able to host our new friends the following January and we played to an incredible crowd in the Fruitmarket!

On a personal note, it was such a coincidence for this opportunity to just land on my lap at this time in my life because I had been learning Mexican Spanish for over a year at that point! It was the most satisfying trip because for once I could talk to folk without resorting to English, spurring me on to keep up the Duolingo!

I'm so grateful to Dave Milligan for putting me forward for this opportunity. I was part of the advance team, working on the demos for the brand new musical with Mark Knopfler and his go-to players at the amazing British Grove studio, down in London. Writing my own parts for the show was a total dream and I even have footage of myself and Mark singing a duet together from the studio!

Duncan Lyall and I went on to perform in person for the 5 week run at Edinburgh's Lyceum Theatre, which was another really fun experience. Sometimes this job can involve quite a lot of task switching between modes and projects but having only one 'job' for such a stretch of time was actually a real holiday, despite doing 8 shows a week!

I was lucky enough to be part of Ustad Zakir Hussain's Pulse of the World, which was the opening concert of Celtic Connections back in 2011. The show went down a storm and because Zakir loved the project so much, we went on to perform at the London Olympics in 2012, followed by gigs in Dubai and Mumbai in 2015.

We followed this with a 4 week American tour (plus Vancouver) and I have to say, this experience was the most memorable and enjoyable of my performing career to date. I've still only been to New York that one time, and it was to play to a sold out Carnegie Hall, which makes me chuckle! To top it all off, we closed the tour with two shows at the iconic SFJAZZ Center, that were recorded and released as Distant Kin.

This was the biggest audience I've played for, by a country mile! 40,000 packed out Hampden Park and 6.8 million viewers watched the closing ceremony on BBC 1. A fun fact is that the music was all pre-recorded and so we were all miming (bar the singers), which I have to say was actually quite stressful - it would have been much easier to just play live than to have to play a certain predetermined part from memory!

We closed the closing ceremony with Dougie Maclean's Caledonia and then Kylie Minogue, Karen Matheson and Lulu took a verse each on Auld Lang Syne and that was that! It was quite an overwhelming experience - the sheer size and roar from the audience was nothing I'd heard before, or since, unsurprisingly! A proper pinch me moment, and I'm very grateful to Donald Shaw for putting me forward and to the musical director (and now my neebor) Stuart Nesbit.

I know, there's so much name-dropping going on and Kathryn Tickell is another household name (of folk) and I wanted to feature her here because touring with Kathryn and the Northumbrian Voices gang was seriously another career highlight. I may have mentioned before somewhere that touring is hard work and as you know, people can be, well, annoying, but working and touring with Kathryn was a pure joy.

She has a knack for choosing good people and we all had a similar attitude towards prioritising a good lunch on tour (possibly the odd wee glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc as well)! As for the music - with Kathryn, it's always brilliant and she is an amazing musician. I will always be pleased that her equally talented fiddle playing brother, Peter, was asked to tour with Sting because it meant there was a vacancy in Kathryn's band.

I couldn't not highlight Breabach here because I owe so much to the band and we really did have a wonderful time in those 10 years or so. The original lineup was pipers, Calum MacCrimmon and Donal Brown, guitarist Ewan Robertson and myself and we were all studying in Glasgow. After winning the coveted Danny Kyle Award, Lisa Whytock booked us hundreds of gigs - some amazing, others not so great!

My highlights were the 20-date tour of Quebec with Le Vent du Nord, supporting Runrig at Heb Celt and simply playing Cambridge Folk Festival, The Fairport Convention and the Edmonton & Winnipeg Folk Festivals in Canada! It was a difficult choice to move on from the band but I genuinely have no regrets - the band continue to go from strength to strength and we had a super night at their 20th anniversary gig at Celtic Connections 2020.