Biography
-
Years Active
1969 – present (55 years)
-
Members
- Alan Reid (1969 – 2010)
- Alasdair White (2002 – present)
- Alistair Russell (1984 – 1997)
- Brian McNeill (1969 – 1990)
- Davy Steele (1997 – 2001)
The Battlefield Band is a Scottish band playing traditional music and their own compositions, with occasional forays into other traditions as well as covers of contemporay popular songs.
The band's current brand of music was developed when Brian McNeill and Alan Reid were joined by Jenny Clark (vocals, guitar, cittern, dulcimer) and Duncan MacGillivray (pipes and whistle). Stand Easy, the album they recorded in 1979, still stands up as one of the band's finest. The next line-up included Dougie Pincock (bagpipes) and Jim and Sylvia Barnes, Alan Reid (vocals and electric keyboards) and Brian MacNeill (fiddle). Alan has been a constant member ever since. Every line-up has had a bagpiper, and sometimes two.
For a mainly instrumental and traditional band, the presence of electric keyboards is unusual but even more unusual is the absence of percussion. Every album revives some well-researched, long-dead Scottish songs and tunes as well as modern compositions (often original ones). The music ranges from the usual drinking, friendship, and hard times to history, geography, and politics. As one the most well-travelled folk bands of the past twenty years or more it is no surprise that there have been some exhausted members.
The present line-up consist of Alan Reid (Keyboards/Guitar/Vocals), Mike Katz (Highland Bagpipes/Small Pipes/Whistles/Guitar), Alasdair White (Fiddle/Whistle/Banjo/Bazouki/Highland and Small Pipes/Bodhran) and Sean O' Donnell (Vocals/Guitar).
Artist descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
