Iona Fyfe

The Edinburgh Folk Club

Edinburgh Folk Club has a tradition of helping young folk singers make professional careers by giving them a gig early in their career. Iona Fyfe was a visitor to Edinburgh early in her career, but now she is an established young singer, a winner of the Scots Singer of the Year in 2018, and is already taking Scottish traditional music round the world. So there was a good audience at the club tonight, including some visitors from other clubs keen to hear this fine young singer.

The first performer was a young American singer-songwriter, Maly Smith, who has a nice voice and good guitar technique, but her songs tend to be rather introspective and angst-ridden and tend to sound all the same. One of the folk club visitors, Caroline Kerr from Paisley, sang The Water is Wide  at the beginning of the second half and she had a lovely voice (as well as a very good name!)

Iona Fyfe comes from Aberdeenshire, is steeped in the traditions of the North East and is a singer of fine ballads. However her appearance in Edinburgh tonight shows that she is beginning to broaden her repertoire to contemporary songs and even her own songs. This is probably a healthy move, as long as she doesn't go too far down the singer-songwriter road and end up singing introspective songs of angst! She was accompanied by a very good young guitarist, Martin Wright, who although he hadn't had much time to rehearse did a very good job. She began with a fine traditional song The Banks of Inverurie, sung beautifully, and her first half set was a mix of traditional songs with some more unusual material, including a version of the Internationale, not something you hear often at folk clubs! Her second set began with Glenlogie, another fine traditional song, and then Baltic St, a setting of a wonderful poem by Violet Jacob.

She finished with Freedom Come All Ye, and encored with Take a Dram. She got a great reception at the end and sold a lot of CDs! Clearly Iona is already a star of the Scottish folk music scene and is a great tribute to how Scotland is producing young musicians who will carry the stream of Scottish culture in the world. She is a graduate of the Conservatoire in Glasgow, which was recently ranked at number 3 in the world. People have assumed this is because of its high standards in classical music and opera; however it's other courses in traditional music, jazz and of course drama are equally important. Scottish culture is a very important part of what marks out Scotland's contribution to the world, and what makes us a nation, and our traditional music is a very important part of that culture. In Iona Fyfe we are fortunate to have a fine representative of that culture, and yes her mammy named her Iona after the island.

Photo credit: Alan Macmillan