Celtic Connections: Tim Dalling

National Piping Centre - 20/01/24

For those who enjoyed the wonderful folk clown troupe, The New Rope String Band, Tim Dalling was a familiar figure in half-mast kilt and safari jacket. An accomplished theatre-maker as well as musician Dalling is also an eclectic song-writer as testified by his programme. Semi-accurately described as “the bastard love-child of Led Zeppelin and Ivor Cutler”, he took to the stage resplendent in garish checked trousers and his instrument of choice, the accordion.

Beginning with a bit of autobiography and a litany of his ancestors, he continued with a very Scottish take on Muddy Waters’ ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, re-imagined as ‘Hoochter Teuchter Man’, with the accordion a surprisingly effective vehicle for the blues. Mixing humour and occasionally downright silliness with a light leavening of spirituality, Dalling created an idiosyncratic space for an exploration of serious themes such as gratitude and death, sometimes in his own words, sometimes in the words of others such as poets Louis MacNeice and Sean O’Brien. His setting of MacNeice’s ‘Meeting Point’ was particularly mesmerising. Another poet to feature was the previously mentioned Ivor Cutler to whom Dalling bears a certain resemblance.

What he described as ‘the dystopian present’ is a recurrent theme, advancing the idea that, just as the transition from Weimar to the Third Reich was marked by cabaret, Music Hall might be appropriate for our current circumstances. In the guise of Music Hall character ‘Uncle Timmy’, Dalling had us singing along to a bleak - but upbeat – number about the one-way trajectory of human life.

This was that rare thing at Celtic Connections, a sparsely attended concert, but what it lacked in numbers it made up for in warmth, invention and wit. Support act Paul Tasker, a skeely guitarist, got the evening off to an enjoyable start with his own instrumentals drawing on the solo-guitar tradition of the likes of Leo Kottke, Bert Jansch, and Mike Chapman, with a set that showed an ear for a melody as well as an extended harmonic palette.