Caledon's success is music to the ears

Ihave just returned from Germany where on two successive nights I witnessed 550 Berliners giving a standing ovation to three kilted Scotsmen who had been singing a cross-section of those wonderful and traditional Scottish songs which many Scots here in Scotland tend to dismiss as obsolete.

Having been brought up with the tradition of Harry Lauder, Will Fyfe and Kenneth McKellar, I would disagree intensely with these people, but I have to admit that back in the early 1970s, I laughed as loudly as anyone else when the United Kingdom television series Monty Python's Flying Circus ran a sketch about Scotsmen being locked up and forced to listen to Moira Anderson records. That sketch did Scotland no favours.

I have been following the fortunes of Caledon – The Scots Tenors (Die Schottischen Tenöre), for more than five years now, performing in front of a 55,000-strong soccer crowd at Hampden Football Stadium, for United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan at the UN Headquarters in New York, as well as Whisky Live in Tokyo, and closing T-in the Park, Scotland's largest rock and pop festival, but I never expected to see anything like this.

One of the many consequences of the Second World War was that Germany was stripped of its folkloristic traditions. Stirring songs about patriotism and homeland were too closely associated with the Nazi Regime, and although most Germans affectionately remember those songs in the way that we cherish the ballads of Robert Burns and Lady Nairne, ...

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• By : Roddy Martine
• In : Roddy Martine's World
• Issue : 26
• Page : 7
• Words : 757