Got a nice surprise today. My friends, and sometimes musical collaborators, the Cylinders (in particular Darren, the bass player thereof) has sent me the long lost video of their performance at the Dalmally music festival in 2001. This festival was great. I was only there twice, but had a great time each time. They should have twinned Dalmally with Craggy Island. The music festival reminded me of the first Father Ted episode where they are improvising a whole fun fair, Dalmally had this great improvised feel to it too. Dalmally is a little village in Argyle (north west of Scotland). These guys inherited this run down house with a huge amount of land too - presumably land is cheap up there. Anyway, I think the best use they made of the land was to run a music festival every year. I remember there were some really dismal cover version bands that used to play the festival, but some nice original stuff there too.
The first time I was there (2001, the year this video was made) it pissed it down with rain for hours - it does that in the highands. They built this huge fire next to where we were standing, so we were warm, but drunk guys kept trying to jump over it. I was sure someone was going to fall in and we were going to have a whole highland person alive burning horror story type incident (a bit like the Wicker Man, only by mistake), but everyone seemed able to jump over the fire without getting killed. I can hear popping sounds between songs and I think that must be the fire.
I was also horribly drunk when the Cylinders finally got to play (my memory was that this was around 2am), so I was shouting all sorts of nonsense at the band. Happily I can't hear much of this on the DVD. I was partially dreading hearing this again for this reason, but I am not listening for myself too hard.....
Long live the Cylinders, please get back together again, you are a lot better together that you are apart. Makes me want to go to this festival again - but I hear, due to some new laws in the UK, they have had to re-locate and scale down the thing now. Shame - it's not as if anyone ever did anything dangerous there in the old days, right?
The Yahoo spell checker wants to change "Dalmally" into "Dismally", is that a computer type joke on the bands, or the weather?
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