by James Dixon
A record is literally that, a record of a moment in time, people coming together to capture something that will never quite happen the same way again. That’s how Donald Shaw puts it, and if anything can be said to define his career to date, then perhaps it’s that sense of coming together. He is, after all, the Artistic Director of Celtic Connections, the biggest music festival of its kind in Europe. And as he puts it, he is increasingly focussing more on ‘connections’ than narrowly on ‘Celtic’. Jazz, orchestral music, Americana and global roots traditions now sit alongside Gaelic song.
‘If music is a language,’ Donald tells me, ‘then we all have different accents.’
The common thread is lineage and shared musical DNA. Raised in Taynuilt, Argyll, in a Gaelic-speaking musical culture, Donald learned to play the accordion from his father (as he puts it, there was always music around – always a Ceilidh going on at home), before studying under All Britain champion Sylvia Wilson and, ultimately, winning the All-Britain accordion championship at 16-years-old. A year later, he co-founded his band, Capercaillie, with his future wife Karen Matheson, whilst still at school in Oban.
‘Celtic’
Capercaillie have gone on to sell over a million albums and managed to carry a Gaelic song into the UK charts, with Coisich A Ruin making number 39 in 1992 and a slew of subsequent albums and singles placing much the same.
Donald founded Vertical Records in 2000, initially as a practical solution. The 90s saw major labels push traditional acts towards mainstream expectations, and not everything fitted. Donald didn’t want to be on what he called ‘the treadmill’, the cycle of releasing albums every year or two. Vertical began as a home for Capercaillie’s output but quickly became a wider platform.
At the heart of Vertical is a refusal to over-define ‘Celtic’. Thirty years ago, traditional music could feel guarded, with no synthesisers, no electronic interference. That line has long since blurred (I mean, it’s been a while now since Dylan went electric).
For Shaw, ‘there are only two types of music: what you like and what you don’t’. A Gaelic song might sit comfortably in its pure voice form, or over an African percussion groove. The tradition, he argues, has always evolved across geography and changed generation on generation. Protection without growth becomes stagnation.
Night Flight ’75
Donald’s most recent album manages this perfectly. Night Flight ’75 is inspired by the unsolved disappearance over Mull of pilot Peter Gibbs, a character for the ages if ever there was one. Peter Gibbs was a former WWII Spitfire pilot and accomplished first violinist with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Known for his flair and eccentricity, he was said to fly himself to concerts and once flour-bombed the orchestra bus below, a high-flying musician in every sense. Strangely enough, Donald spent a decade or more living in the same Glasgow flat block as Gibbs, a strange synchronicity that deepened the project’s pull.
Donald wrote and recorded the album in situ in Tobermory with violinist Greg Lawson, where they ‘tapped into the ghosts’, letting place guide composition. The island itself is almost a fourth musician, here. You get a sense of the wind, the sea-mist in the harmonies, the empty spaces between the notes holding something very bleakly Hebridean.
For me, what makes Night Flight ’75 particularly striking is its restraint. It doesn’t seek to dramatise Peter Gibbs’ disappearance, as you might expect. Rather, Donald and Greg lean heavily into atmosphere and sense of place. Ascent and descent echo both flight and fate within it, whilst standout pieces like Tango November hold a quiet tension, as though circling the unanswered questions involved in Gibbs’ case. The whole thing becomes far more of a meditation than exploration, an attempt to honour the pilot and his final moments rather than to ask what, in reality, happened to him. Perfect, in short, for a story which hovers somewhere in that liminal space between history and folklore.
