Graeme Mitchell
By Karyn McCulloch
The name Graeme Mitchell is ‘weel-kent’ in the Scottish Music and Dance circuit, from ceilidhs and dances to Accordion and Fiddle Clubs. However, perhaps not many people know when and how his musical life began.
Graeme started playing the accordion when he was ten years old. His first teacher was Jean MacConnachie, the same lady who now stays in Dumfries and has her own successful band. Graeme’s sister Sandra also went to Jean foe lessons and he remembers her trying to persuade him to “go first” because she wanted to see ‘Top of the Pops’. Jean gave up her private pupils to teach music in the secondary school, Sandra gave up the box for ‘Top of the Pops’, so Graeme inherited the ‘big box’. He then had a variety of different tutors, namely Sam Thompson from Keith and Jimmy Martin came up to Elgin from Perth to provide lessons in the Bishopsmill Hall. Graeme’s father (who played the fiddle and gave him great encouragement) then read an article in a newspaper about pupils being taught by Peter Farnan from Bucksburn. He made enquiries and undertook to drive the young lad through to Bucksburn from Cairnie on a weekly basis to receive lessons from Peter – who was a very strict disciplinarian and settled for nothing less than total commitment. He had a unique teaching style and Graeme learnt a lot.
Bill Shearer, an uncle of Graeme’s father, was always keen to support what he was doing on the accordion and he took him to the North East Accordion and Fiddle Club, which was held in the Seafield Hotel, Keith. Graeme would have been about twelve or thirteen and he seems to remember it being a special members night. He didn’t play that night – Bill wanted him to see what was involved and hoped that he might consider joining – and play his 48 bass Sorrento accordion at the Club on a regular basis. The guest artiste for the evening was Jim Johnstone and his Band. Graeme remembers sitting with Bill in the front row and he can honestly say that he was enthralled with the sound created by two accordions, piano, bass and drums. Randal Webster, amateur archivist and recording enthusiast (and the same gentleman Graeme later composed the very successful Randal’s Reel for), has a recording of that evening. It displays very well the unmistakable Johnstone swing that Graeme later came to admire so much. He admits that Jim Johnstone is his favourite player, “the complete all-rounder – a very talented man indeed”.
After this, he started going to the A&F Club with his parents (Sandy and Aileen) and there were plenty of other young players doing their bit each month, people like Maureen Rutherford, Eric Bell and Stuart Anderson from Bucksburn, who used to attend the Club regularly (incidentally the Stuart Anderson mentioned here is, in fact, the first person I ever saw playing an accordion – and he just happens to be the reason I play the ‘box’ today!)
Graeme continued to attend lessons with Peter Farnan and he competed in competitions up and down the country, both as a soloist and also in trios with Maureen Rutherford and Billy Raeburn from Huntly on fiddle. He had “a fair degree of success”, which culminated in 1977 when he won the All Scotland Accordion Championship in Perth, at the age of seventeen. In fact, Graeme was the first person to play the two tunes that Peter composed – which have become standard competition pieces today – namely the strathspey, Rita Duncan and the reel, Jim Money.
Today the Accordion & Fiddle Club scene seems to be generally quite good, but Graeme would like to see more of the younger players back attending the Clubs regularly. There seems to be far too much emphasis placed on “who is better than who”. The players – and their parents – tend to live almost competitively ALL THE TIME. Parents should, of course, encourage their kids to do well, but these young kids should also be able to encourage each other. /there is a time and a place for being competitive – but it is not at an Accordion and Fiddle Club. A feeling that is probably echoed all over the country.
In more recent years, Graeme has been at the other side of the competition stage – adjudicating at various Festivals and Competitions, although he admits that he doesn’t particularly enjoy adjudicating. He prefers to hear people playing more “earthy” music – the competition pieces tend to be really technical. On a personal note, Graeme’s own preference is playing 6/8 marches on his Hohner Gola accordion, which is the same age as him (that’s a secret!).
At seventeen, Graeme started working as a Trainee Technician in Aberdeen. He had a driving licence and was given the opportunity to join a Showband, which he declined; however a short time later, he started to play with Bill Black. He remembers “running up and down the road” from Aberdeen to Perth at weekends, in an assortment of vehicles and with an assortment of different mechanical problems! He traveled all over the country with Bill – and the unofficial ceilidhs they had together were just as good as the more formal ones (although the Box and Fiddle magazine would need to become a lot more liberal a publication to tolerate the stories Graeme could tell about the next five years!)
In the middle of all this, he left his job in Aberdeen and decided to study full time at the Aberdeen College of Education, as it was known then. He was also given the opportunity by Freeland Barbour and Sandy Coghill to record Cairnie’s Canter. He knew Sandy from the competition circuit and used to attend the dances at the Lion Hotel, Auldearn where the Wallochmore Ceilidh Band, and indeed Bill Black, played regularly. He still played with Bill up to the last year of his teaching course. Graeme graduated in 1982 and was offered a job back home, teaching in the Gordon Schools, Huntly. He took the job and unfortunately had to leave the band.
Also, when he was about seventeen, Graeme met (through Ian Duncan from Keith) a gent he came to admire to much. His name was Ronnie Cooper from Shetland. Ronnie used to attend the Keith TMSA Festival and they used to have endless tunes together. He would drag Graeme to a piano and they would sit and play for hours. Graeme never considered himself a soloist but he found that what Ronnie did on piano, he really thrived on. It was melodic, rhythmical and above all very complimentary. Next thing he knew, he had been invited to Shetland for the first time to play at the Shetland A&F Club – and Ronnie played along with him. Graeme didn’t go to Shetland thinking that he would show then something new. He knew fine that there was an assortment of musicians there who had forgotten more than he ever knew. He enjoyed the “marathons” with Ronnie though. “What a man!!”
Again, through the competition circuit and the Lion Hotel, Graeme met Neil McMillan from Loch Lomond and spent “many a few days” at Neil and Fiona’s, when he had only been invited there to play for one night – such was the hospitality. Neil introduced him to people like Colin Finlayson, Rikki Franci, Gus Millar and Dochie McCallum. The Mull Festivals also started around this time and he was able to hear Bobby MacLeod playing the accordion. “Wonderful”.
In the early eighties in the North East of Scotland there wasn’t much work available for a Scottish Dance Band. There was work to be found for a Box Player in a Band, but it wasn’t what Graeme wanted to play. So this was when he decided to form his own band. Freeland Barbour was then producer of ‘Take the Floor’ and he suggested that the band should do a broadcast. However, Graeme decided to wait and see if he could formulate a sound rather than just pick a few musicians and sit down and play.
So Graeme – along with Brian Cruickshank (who had developed an interest in the bass fiddle), Gordon Duguid (second accordion) and Billy Brown (drums) practiced on a weekly basis for quite some time. Graeme wanted to use the experience he had gained while playing with Ronnie Cooper. He wanted the sound to be simple and he wanted it to be unobtrusive. These are qualities he still believes in. This wasn’t totally achieved in the early stages but the broadcast went ahead anyway. The band enlisted the help of the vastly more experienced David Bowen on piano and an amazingly talented young fiddler by the name of Judi Davidson from Banchory. There was a positive response from the broadcast and so they recorded the LP Fine Fettle. The band ‘gigged’ around but were never really busy. Various circumstances made Graeme feel like giving up the idea of having a band and perhaps moving to an area where he could get more opportunity to play. He had to remember that this strange hobby wasn’t his living and perhaps he was placing too much emphasis on it.
The resurgence of ‘old time dancing’ certainly changed the overall attitude to dancing in the North East. Graeme believes that somehow, culturally, it is now quite acceptable for youngsters to be involved in ceilidh dancing. In the North East now it is very popular to have, as part of your wedding, a ceilidh band providing the music. The company perhaps require to be talked through the dances but, as long as they are willing to participate, he is happy with that. Graeme feels that things have changed drastically – for the better.
Graeme and his band have done some foreign trips but because he is a teacher (and yes, he’s heard all the jokes about the amount of holidays teachers get!!) he can’t get away at St Andrew’s time to play abroad. He did, however, manage a trip to Poland in 1998. More recently, the band went to Switzerland {in the summer of 2001) and got stranded in Amsterdam with no luggage – dressed only in shorts and T-shirts. Graeme says he’s saving the story of that “saga tour” for a rainy day!! Graeme often gets asked about his composing. Generally, he says, he can’t sit down and compose a tune “like somebody would bake a cake” Although he has managed to pen somewhere between forty and fifty tunes – which is not bad going – he has only ever “written on request” once and he was probably motivated by the fact that he really wanted to do it for the person. That person was Robbie Shepherd M.B.E. and the BBC asked him to do it. Robbie had a huge influence on Graeme when he was in Aberdeen. He totally respects his advice at all times. On numerous occasions he was on the receiving end of Mr Shepherd and his wife Esma’s immense hospitality.
The rest of the tunes in the book published of Graeme’s original compositions are for a variety of characters and places that mean something to him personally. His own favourite is ‘Donnie the Post’. This tune was written for the late Donnie MacDonald from Spean Bridge, who made Graeme laugh so much when he “had a dram”. “He looked like Penfold from ‘Dangermouse’ and he drank Haig whisky and ate soup – AT THE SAME TIME!! Life needs characters like that”. In Graeme’s opinion “the ultimate test for any composition is how many people play the tune”.
Personnel within the band had not changed since the first five or six years and they continued to broadcast and play quite consistently – and they certainly weren’t short of requests by enthusiasts to do a CD. Graeme and his band hadn’t made a commercially available recording for quite some time, as he never seemed to be able to get round to it. Stuart Forbes of Shielburn Associates was very keen to do something with the band and so they recorded the Lasting Impression CD. Long before this, Duncan Christie had joined Messrs Cruickshank and Duguid as the boys Graeme could rely on to do all the gig work. For broadcasts, Neil McMillan was brought in to take the piano role, mainly because Neil knows Graeme and the band really well and he knows the sound Graeme likes. The same, of course, can be said for Brian, Gordon and Duncan. People often ask Graeme how he gets the tight sound. His response is simple – he is working with the same personnel all the time. They know what he likes and it is a mark of their professionalism that they strive for that same “buzz” when it’s all clicking along good-style. Susan MacIntosh, on fiddle, has an immense slot to fill within the band – and she does that admirably. Susan is also a tremendous solo player and the quality of music created with fiancé Scott Gordon on piano is up there amongst the very best.
As well as being a Technical Teacher in his ‘day job’, Graeme also teaches accordion one day a month in Inverness, as well as having his own private pupils in Huntly and surrounding areas. His advice to youngsters learning to play the accordion is to listen to ‘the greats’ – and try not to think about rock music while playing traditional music!
Due to his geographic location, it is virtually impossible for Graeme and his Band to visit some of the Accordion and Fiddle Clubs. Because of this he didn’t expect an award in this year’s BAFFI’s. It was a great surprise to Graeme – and shock – when he won the award for Guest Artiste of the Year.
Graeme’s work with his band takes up a huge amount of his time, although he enjoys it “most of the time” and the craic with the lads is grand. However, he feels that the way that he likes to play and how he likes his band to sound seems “a bit dated” compared to some other bands of today. Given that it was the traditional music loving public who voted in the BAFFI’s, it would seem that they do not agree with that thought!
So, here we are twenty-one years on and as stated on the sleeve notes of the new CD, In Full Swing, it has been the band’s intention, for some time now, to record an evening’s dancing. They invited some of the people who had consistently given them work over the years to come and celebrate. The rest of the company was made up of experienced dancers and young members of the Banchory Strathspey and Reel Society, whom again the band has had a long association with. Jennifer Forrest and Doug Maskew managed to produce a recording that represents very much the type of night Graeme Mitchell and his Scottish Dance Band really enjoy playing for. It is a new venture for Brian, Gordon, Duncan and Graeme himself, and they hope people will enjoy listening to it.
So, after twenty-one years of playing to thousands and thousands of people, both at home and abroad – does Graeme still get nervous before gigs? His answer – Yes, Yes and a thousand more Yes’s!!!!”
There is, however, one musical ambition that remains unfulfilled for Graeme. He tells me he would love to learn to play the pipes and be able to play a set of jigs for a Strip the Willow – with piano, bass, drums and second accordion backing him. This would be ‘Epic’.
In conclusion, may I take this opportunity in offering my own congratulations to Graeme – and the rest of the band – in winning the first ever BAFFI Award for Best Guest Artiste.
Also, I must thank Graeme for his huge input to this article, both with the writing and the supply of photographs – this was a massive help to me, since it was a wee bit of a “rushed job”. All the best Graeme. Here’s to the next twenty-one years!
Box and Fiddle
September 2003
Graeme started playing the accordion when he was ten years old. His first teacher was Jean MacConnachie, the same lady who now stays in Dumfries and has her own successful band. Graeme’s sister Sandra also went to Jean foe lessons and he remembers her trying to persuade him to “go first” because she wanted to see ‘Top of the Pops’. Jean gave up her private pupils to teach music in the secondary school, Sandra gave up the box for ‘Top of the Pops’, so Graeme inherited the ‘big box’. He then had a variety of different tutors, namely Sam Thompson from Keith and Jimmy Martin came up to Elgin from Perth to provide lessons in the Bishopsmill Hall. Graeme’s father (who played the fiddle and gave him great encouragement) then read an article in a newspaper about pupils being taught by Peter Farnan from Bucksburn. He made enquiries and undertook to drive the young lad through to Bucksburn from Cairnie on a weekly basis to receive lessons from Peter – who was a very strict disciplinarian and settled for nothing less than total commitment. He had a unique teaching style and Graeme learnt a lot.
Bill Shearer, an uncle of Graeme’s father, was always keen to support what he was doing on the accordion and he took him to the North East Accordion and Fiddle Club, which was held in the Seafield Hotel, Keith. Graeme would have been about twelve or thirteen and he seems to remember it being a special members night. He didn’t play that night – Bill wanted him to see what was involved and hoped that he might consider joining – and play his 48 bass Sorrento accordion at the Club on a regular basis. The guest artiste for the evening was Jim Johnstone and his Band. Graeme remembers sitting with Bill in the front row and he can honestly say that he was enthralled with the sound created by two accordions, piano, bass and drums. Randal Webster, amateur archivist and recording enthusiast (and the same gentleman Graeme later composed the very successful Randal’s Reel for), has a recording of that evening. It displays very well the unmistakable Johnstone swing that Graeme later came to admire so much. He admits that Jim Johnstone is his favourite player, “the complete all-rounder – a very talented man indeed”.
After this, he started going to the A&F Club with his parents (Sandy and Aileen) and there were plenty of other young players doing their bit each month, people like Maureen Rutherford, Eric Bell and Stuart Anderson from Bucksburn, who used to attend the Club regularly (incidentally the Stuart Anderson mentioned here is, in fact, the first person I ever saw playing an accordion – and he just happens to be the reason I play the ‘box’ today!)
Graeme continued to attend lessons with Peter Farnan and he competed in competitions up and down the country, both as a soloist and also in trios with Maureen Rutherford and Billy Raeburn from Huntly on fiddle. He had “a fair degree of success”, which culminated in 1977 when he won the All Scotland Accordion Championship in Perth, at the age of seventeen. In fact, Graeme was the first person to play the two tunes that Peter composed – which have become standard competition pieces today – namely the strathspey, Rita Duncan and the reel, Jim Money.
Today the Accordion & Fiddle Club scene seems to be generally quite good, but Graeme would like to see more of the younger players back attending the Clubs regularly. There seems to be far too much emphasis placed on “who is better than who”. The players – and their parents – tend to live almost competitively ALL THE TIME. Parents should, of course, encourage their kids to do well, but these young kids should also be able to encourage each other. /there is a time and a place for being competitive – but it is not at an Accordion and Fiddle Club. A feeling that is probably echoed all over the country.
In more recent years, Graeme has been at the other side of the competition stage – adjudicating at various Festivals and Competitions, although he admits that he doesn’t particularly enjoy adjudicating. He prefers to hear people playing more “earthy” music – the competition pieces tend to be really technical. On a personal note, Graeme’s own preference is playing 6/8 marches on his Hohner Gola accordion, which is the same age as him (that’s a secret!).
At seventeen, Graeme started working as a Trainee Technician in Aberdeen. He had a driving licence and was given the opportunity to join a Showband, which he declined; however a short time later, he started to play with Bill Black. He remembers “running up and down the road” from Aberdeen to Perth at weekends, in an assortment of vehicles and with an assortment of different mechanical problems! He traveled all over the country with Bill – and the unofficial ceilidhs they had together were just as good as the more formal ones (although the Box and Fiddle magazine would need to become a lot more liberal a publication to tolerate the stories Graeme could tell about the next five years!)
In the middle of all this, he left his job in Aberdeen and decided to study full time at the Aberdeen College of Education, as it was known then. He was also given the opportunity by Freeland Barbour and Sandy Coghill to record Cairnie’s Canter. He knew Sandy from the competition circuit and used to attend the dances at the Lion Hotel, Auldearn where the Wallochmore Ceilidh Band, and indeed Bill Black, played regularly. He still played with Bill up to the last year of his teaching course. Graeme graduated in 1982 and was offered a job back home, teaching in the Gordon Schools, Huntly. He took the job and unfortunately had to leave the band.
Also, when he was about seventeen, Graeme met (through Ian Duncan from Keith) a gent he came to admire to much. His name was Ronnie Cooper from Shetland. Ronnie used to attend the Keith TMSA Festival and they used to have endless tunes together. He would drag Graeme to a piano and they would sit and play for hours. Graeme never considered himself a soloist but he found that what Ronnie did on piano, he really thrived on. It was melodic, rhythmical and above all very complimentary. Next thing he knew, he had been invited to Shetland for the first time to play at the Shetland A&F Club – and Ronnie played along with him. Graeme didn’t go to Shetland thinking that he would show then something new. He knew fine that there was an assortment of musicians there who had forgotten more than he ever knew. He enjoyed the “marathons” with Ronnie though. “What a man!!”
Again, through the competition circuit and the Lion Hotel, Graeme met Neil McMillan from Loch Lomond and spent “many a few days” at Neil and Fiona’s, when he had only been invited there to play for one night – such was the hospitality. Neil introduced him to people like Colin Finlayson, Rikki Franci, Gus Millar and Dochie McCallum. The Mull Festivals also started around this time and he was able to hear Bobby MacLeod playing the accordion. “Wonderful”.
In the early eighties in the North East of Scotland there wasn’t much work available for a Scottish Dance Band. There was work to be found for a Box Player in a Band, but it wasn’t what Graeme wanted to play. So this was when he decided to form his own band. Freeland Barbour was then producer of ‘Take the Floor’ and he suggested that the band should do a broadcast. However, Graeme decided to wait and see if he could formulate a sound rather than just pick a few musicians and sit down and play.
So Graeme – along with Brian Cruickshank (who had developed an interest in the bass fiddle), Gordon Duguid (second accordion) and Billy Brown (drums) practiced on a weekly basis for quite some time. Graeme wanted to use the experience he had gained while playing with Ronnie Cooper. He wanted the sound to be simple and he wanted it to be unobtrusive. These are qualities he still believes in. This wasn’t totally achieved in the early stages but the broadcast went ahead anyway. The band enlisted the help of the vastly more experienced David Bowen on piano and an amazingly talented young fiddler by the name of Judi Davidson from Banchory. There was a positive response from the broadcast and so they recorded the LP Fine Fettle. The band ‘gigged’ around but were never really busy. Various circumstances made Graeme feel like giving up the idea of having a band and perhaps moving to an area where he could get more opportunity to play. He had to remember that this strange hobby wasn’t his living and perhaps he was placing too much emphasis on it.
The resurgence of ‘old time dancing’ certainly changed the overall attitude to dancing in the North East. Graeme believes that somehow, culturally, it is now quite acceptable for youngsters to be involved in ceilidh dancing. In the North East now it is very popular to have, as part of your wedding, a ceilidh band providing the music. The company perhaps require to be talked through the dances but, as long as they are willing to participate, he is happy with that. Graeme feels that things have changed drastically – for the better.
Graeme and his band have done some foreign trips but because he is a teacher (and yes, he’s heard all the jokes about the amount of holidays teachers get!!) he can’t get away at St Andrew’s time to play abroad. He did, however, manage a trip to Poland in 1998. More recently, the band went to Switzerland {in the summer of 2001) and got stranded in Amsterdam with no luggage – dressed only in shorts and T-shirts. Graeme says he’s saving the story of that “saga tour” for a rainy day!! Graeme often gets asked about his composing. Generally, he says, he can’t sit down and compose a tune “like somebody would bake a cake” Although he has managed to pen somewhere between forty and fifty tunes – which is not bad going – he has only ever “written on request” once and he was probably motivated by the fact that he really wanted to do it for the person. That person was Robbie Shepherd M.B.E. and the BBC asked him to do it. Robbie had a huge influence on Graeme when he was in Aberdeen. He totally respects his advice at all times. On numerous occasions he was on the receiving end of Mr Shepherd and his wife Esma’s immense hospitality.
The rest of the tunes in the book published of Graeme’s original compositions are for a variety of characters and places that mean something to him personally. His own favourite is ‘Donnie the Post’. This tune was written for the late Donnie MacDonald from Spean Bridge, who made Graeme laugh so much when he “had a dram”. “He looked like Penfold from ‘Dangermouse’ and he drank Haig whisky and ate soup – AT THE SAME TIME!! Life needs characters like that”. In Graeme’s opinion “the ultimate test for any composition is how many people play the tune”.
Personnel within the band had not changed since the first five or six years and they continued to broadcast and play quite consistently – and they certainly weren’t short of requests by enthusiasts to do a CD. Graeme and his band hadn’t made a commercially available recording for quite some time, as he never seemed to be able to get round to it. Stuart Forbes of Shielburn Associates was very keen to do something with the band and so they recorded the Lasting Impression CD. Long before this, Duncan Christie had joined Messrs Cruickshank and Duguid as the boys Graeme could rely on to do all the gig work. For broadcasts, Neil McMillan was brought in to take the piano role, mainly because Neil knows Graeme and the band really well and he knows the sound Graeme likes. The same, of course, can be said for Brian, Gordon and Duncan. People often ask Graeme how he gets the tight sound. His response is simple – he is working with the same personnel all the time. They know what he likes and it is a mark of their professionalism that they strive for that same “buzz” when it’s all clicking along good-style. Susan MacIntosh, on fiddle, has an immense slot to fill within the band – and she does that admirably. Susan is also a tremendous solo player and the quality of music created with fiancé Scott Gordon on piano is up there amongst the very best.
As well as being a Technical Teacher in his ‘day job’, Graeme also teaches accordion one day a month in Inverness, as well as having his own private pupils in Huntly and surrounding areas. His advice to youngsters learning to play the accordion is to listen to ‘the greats’ – and try not to think about rock music while playing traditional music!
Due to his geographic location, it is virtually impossible for Graeme and his Band to visit some of the Accordion and Fiddle Clubs. Because of this he didn’t expect an award in this year’s BAFFI’s. It was a great surprise to Graeme – and shock – when he won the award for Guest Artiste of the Year.
Graeme’s work with his band takes up a huge amount of his time, although he enjoys it “most of the time” and the craic with the lads is grand. However, he feels that the way that he likes to play and how he likes his band to sound seems “a bit dated” compared to some other bands of today. Given that it was the traditional music loving public who voted in the BAFFI’s, it would seem that they do not agree with that thought!
So, here we are twenty-one years on and as stated on the sleeve notes of the new CD, In Full Swing, it has been the band’s intention, for some time now, to record an evening’s dancing. They invited some of the people who had consistently given them work over the years to come and celebrate. The rest of the company was made up of experienced dancers and young members of the Banchory Strathspey and Reel Society, whom again the band has had a long association with. Jennifer Forrest and Doug Maskew managed to produce a recording that represents very much the type of night Graeme Mitchell and his Scottish Dance Band really enjoy playing for. It is a new venture for Brian, Gordon, Duncan and Graeme himself, and they hope people will enjoy listening to it.
So, after twenty-one years of playing to thousands and thousands of people, both at home and abroad – does Graeme still get nervous before gigs? His answer – Yes, Yes and a thousand more Yes’s!!!!”
There is, however, one musical ambition that remains unfulfilled for Graeme. He tells me he would love to learn to play the pipes and be able to play a set of jigs for a Strip the Willow – with piano, bass, drums and second accordion backing him. This would be ‘Epic’.
In conclusion, may I take this opportunity in offering my own congratulations to Graeme – and the rest of the band – in winning the first ever BAFFI Award for Best Guest Artiste.
Also, I must thank Graeme for his huge input to this article, both with the writing and the supply of photographs – this was a massive help to me, since it was a wee bit of a “rushed job”. All the best Graeme. Here’s to the next twenty-one years!
Box and Fiddle
September 2003
