Mar 16 2011

Maggie Reilly at the Limelight Festival

Hello folks,

As many of you know I spent last week up in Glasgow with the Maggie Reilly band. We played two shows at the Tron Theatre on Friday and Saturday as part of the first ever Limelight Festival.

Limelight is Scotland’s first professional music production company run by people with impairments and the UK’s leading producer of high quality inclusive music. The company specialises in raising the profile of disabled artists in the mainstream music and theatre industries. It was set up originally in 1989 as Sounds of Progress by Gordon Dougal (who plays keyboards and guitar with Maggie) with the main aim to bring professional musicians with impairments into the mainstream. Gordon stated in an interview with the Herald Scotland

“part of that challenge is to do with getting the mainstream to look beyond their prejudices and preconceptions about performers with disabilities. That’s why, when we changed the name to Limelight and decided to have a music festival as a launch event, we wanted our artists playing alongside mainstream names, proving to audiences – and to themselves – that they have the talent, the professionalism, the high performance standards to be out there.”

We spent Wednesday and Thursday rehearsing in Glasgow and then played on the Friday and Saturday. This time we had Tony Soave from The Silencers on drums alongside the usual lineup of myself, Davie Dunsmuir, Stuart MacKillop and Gordon. We also had a couple of special guests from previous lineups; on Friday we were joined by guitarist Morph and Saturday featured Brian McNeill.

These were to be the first UK shows Maggie has played for almost twenty years. Mainly she tours around Europe; more recently concentrating on Germany and Scandinavia. We added a few of the old Cado Belle songs to the set including Airport Shutdown, Got To Love and Stone’s Throw From Nowhere. Both nights were recorded and Saturday’s show was filmed so hopefully I’ll have some footage to show you sometime in the near future when it’s been edited. There is talk of a possible live album but I guess it all depends on what the recordings came out like…

Hopefully these shows will be the beginning of Maggie’s return to UK touring. I’m hoping we’ll actually play in London so people I know will actually see me play with Maggie!! Both nights at the Tron were a resounding success and I’m looking forward to getting back on the road..

Incidentally, the one place I have to go whenever in Glasgow is the fantastic Trans-Europe Cafe behind the Tron. They do the best breakfast anywhere and I highly recommend you check it out next time you’re in the general vicinity… I went there three days on the trot and it kept me going through the long days of hanging about 🙂

Until next time…