SUE WILSON rounds up the onstage action in the 15th festival

RARELY CAN a festival's high spirits have been less dampened by adverse weather than throughout the Heb Celt's milestone 15th outing. After the tribulations of last year's drop in attendance, compounded by the main Ullapool ferry breaking down, a cannily configured celebratory line-up this time generated record ticket sales of over 17,000, while the demand for headliners Runrig, in particular, resulted in a large and lucrative resale trade. (There was even a rumour of a press pass being flogged for £100 – though certainly not one of Northings.)

Once all of Runrig's Saturday-night concert tickets were snapped up, too, their disciples' only legitimate way in was a weekend pass, which had the mutually beneficial spin-off of swelling the crowd for the rest of the main-stage acts – not that Thursday's or Friday's shows in there weren't busy enough to start with, thanks to their adroit alignment of established Heb Celt favourites with revelatory first-timers.

The continuous grey clouds and mostly continuous rain certainly didn't join in the festivities, rendering conditions decidedly boggy around the 5500-capacity tent, but somehow almost nobody was complaining, despite the high proportion of the audience who were camping for the weekend, what with every last indoor bed-space in Stornoway and environs being long since bagged. In true Hebridean/Highland style, everyone just pulled on the wellies or put up with wet feet, bundled on the layers or kept dancing to keep warm, and cracked on with the party regardless.

Fifteen isn't that old by some festivals' standards – Cambridge, Tönder, Vancouver – but it's veteran international events like these alongside which the Heb Celt has established itself in that time. It's also been a long time on the Scottish folk scene, and a pretty transformatory one, if you cast your mind back to 1996.

Celtic Connections was only two years old; the likes of Shooglenifty, Salsa Celtica and the Peatbog Faeries were still hot new properties, and it was an exceptionally bold move to launch a new festival in the Outer Hebrides on such a grand scale, based from the outset on an outdoor (albeit sensibly covered), all-standing, large-capacity arena, and big crowd-pulling acts to match. Bolder still when you consider the singular challenges of keeping the local community on-side: a community where a large and powerful body of local opinion essentially frowns on fun.

It's also a community, however, that sorely needs jobs and visitors - especially visitors who spend as freely as your typical folkie en fête, with the 2010 crowd having mainlined at least £1.5 million into the local economy. We're talking much more than a single weekend's bonanza, too: the festival has also been directly or indirectly instrumental in subsequent year-round developments like the superb An Lanntair arts centre, soon to celebrate its own 5th birthday in its new premises, and the advent of Sunday flights and ferries, all of which have considerably brightened Lewis's economic and cultural horizons.

Conspicuous revellers still get the odd ferociously gimlet glare from the godly along Stornoway high street, but the town and the island as a whole have proudly taken the Heb Celt to their hearts.

If Runrig were this year's money in the bank, then the wild card that brought the house down was the remarkable Irish singer Imelda May, whose only apparent Celtic connection may be her nationality, but whose recent Cambridge and Glasgow festival appearances demonstrate her readiness to pitch another kind of roots music, blending rockabilly, blues, jazz, country and soul, at today's folk audience – and who was easily the weekend's most popular discovery.

Her scorching, thrilling, utterly committed and splendidly extravagant performance (midway through Friday's artfully contrasting triple bill), was a classic example of an artist at the top of their game responding in kind to the uniquely wholehearted delight of a Heb Celt crowd at full throttle.

And if Runrig, in broad cultural terms, were the homecoming heroes (though it was widely noted how little they now sing in Gaelic), then the festival's North Uist neighbour Julie Fowlis, preceding May onstage with her delectably accomplished Scottish/Irish band – fiddler Duncan Chisholm, double bassist Duncan Lyle, Éamon Doorley on bouzouki and guitarist Tony Byrne - was certainly the homecoming heroine. Not only was her singing as limpidly sweet, expressively tangy and rhythmically lithe as ever, but she capitalised fully on her line-up's rich instrumental resources, including her own quicksilver whistle playing, with as many excellent tune medleys as vocal numbers.

Very few acts could have followed May's pyrotechnic set as undauntedly as the Treacherous Orchestra, whose dozen-strong line-up are, after all, peculiarly well equipped to take on a crowd who've been lifted that high, and whip them up even further. And thus it duly transpired, with Scotland's new favourite supergroup once again forging its magical mesh of traditional melodies with heavy rock and bare-knuckle funk attack, anarchic wildness with audacious ensemble virtuosity. Who would ever have dreamed, back in 1996, of massed under-25s punching the air and headbanging to a set of strathspeys?

Talking of strathspeys, in a different but no less enthralling context, pianist Mhairi Hall is from that very Scottish tune form's native region, in honour of which she hauled a grand piano up the relevant mountain to launch her brilliant 2009 debut album Cairngorm, a mix of traditional and original material lovingly steeped in local landscapes and lore.

Beautifully complemented here by her regular trio cohorts, guitarist Mike Bryan and percussionist Fraser Stone, she served up an hour of joyously exhilarating music at An Lanntair on Friday afternoon, balancing jubilant, upwardly cascading crescendos with passages of lyrical reflection and scintillating jazzy playfulness.

The Heb Celt's foregrounding of its home-grown traditions since the outset has naturally encompassed their New World kindred, the diasporan offspring of those emigration ballads which loom so large in the Gaelic repertoire. This year's Americana cousins were West Virginian foursome The Fox Hunt, who won a well-deserved warm welcome from Thursday's An Lanntair crowd. Three of them sang lead, all four sang backup, meanwhile swapping about on fiddle, guitar, banjo, mandolin and double bass, all shifting restively around one big vintage-style mike in the middle.

None of the instruments were even plugged in, so that the vividly nuanced ebb and flow of solos and voices, the exact, radiant layering of textures and harmonies, was achieved by a kind of improvised choreography, lending their sound and performance a compelling, three-dimensional immediacy.

Even amidst a scene increasingly awash with babyfaced old-time wannabes, this match of slick insouciant style with devoted traditional substance would set The Fox Hunt apart, but add in two equally gifted yet radically different songwriters as John R Miller and Matt Kline, with their darkly subversive wordcraft and haunting contemporary balladry, and you surely have the makings of a Next Big Thing.

© Sue Wlson, 2010

Links

• Hebridean Celtic Festival
• Sue Wilson