Scottish fusion music at Shoreham

They play the Ropetackle Arts centre on Saturday, October 13 among other UK dates – no small undertaking for so big a band, as Eamonn Coyne explains.

“We brought out an EP last year or maybe the end of the year before. You have got to feel your way in when you are a 12-piece. With a smaller band, you can just say ‘Let’s do this’ or whatever, but with a bigger band you have got to figure out how it might work, how an album might come together.”

The band released their debut album Origins on UK label Navigator Records earlier this year. It was recorded in several studios across Scotland and was the product of two years of hard work.

Since the release, Treacherous Orchestra have appeared across the UK and Europe including performances at Celtic Connections in Glasgow, Cambridge Folk Festival, Sidmouth Folk week, Belladrum, Lorient Celtic festival in Brittany and Reudelstadt World music festival in Germany.

Treacherous Orchestra’s array of instruments includes fiddles, bagpipes, accordion, banjo, flute, guitars, double bass and drums.

“The band is the product of lots of different bands and different people. Scotland is like that. I play in lots of different bands, and so you have to figure out how another band might function. You gauge it with an EP before doing the tour and then you can say yes to an album.

“But the band has started at the top festival-wise. Even if people don’t know the name, they can look at the pedigree. Now we are touring. From playing the festivals in England, you can see that the crowds are there for the band. By accident, we ended up finishing the Shrewsbury festival. K T Tunstall’s father died the day before and she couldn’t do the gig, so we were asked to finish off the festival and we did. We also closed the Friday night at the Cambridge festival. That’s the kind of spot that the band occupies on the festival scene, but to transfer that from the festivals to the smaller venues is a pretty difficult thing.”