Due to some fairly lean university years, and general indifference, it wasn't until well into GBS's career that I ever owned a new car. Once or twice a year I would buy some shit heap, get it fixed to a level approaching ‘not really dangerous', and drive it until it literally fell apart.

One of those cars was a white Acadian (Chevette, for our American readers), which I was rather fond of. I had that car for almost two years, which was my personal record. Like anyone who makes a habit of driving bombs, I had to get used to working around some serious eccentricities. For example, in winter I had to start the car by lighting a cup or so of gas, which I threw into the top of the engine to loosen the starting motor. The brakes never worked right first or last, and my non-existent mechanical skills could do nothing about the serious rust problems that allowed slush & rain to seep into the floor.

One of the more minor problems was the stereo. While the radio never worked, the tape player functioned. Kind of. The first time I tried it, I popped in a new tape I had just bought, Tannahill Weavers IV. I had first heard the Weavers via my friend John Wiles, who had the Sunday morning folk show on OZ-FM. He played a lot of the stuff put out by Green Linnett records, the eclectic US traditional music record company. He also introduced me, and lots of others, to bands like Altan, Silly Wizard, and tons of stuff I never would have encountered elsewhere.

The Tannahill Weavers originally came from Paisley, Scotland. They have had countless membership changes, and lots of ups and downs, but they are still going today, a mainstay of the Scottish folk scene.

Right away I loved the Weavers. Besides U2, it is the only band from whom I own every single album. Weavers IV came out in 1981, when the band was already 13 years into their career. It perfectly captured their aesthetic - guitars and bouzuki that mesh like glue, incredibly tight harmonies, spirited singing, and a fierce attachment to their local roots. Plowing through it all were the bagpipes, or as pipers might say, the Great Highland Bagpipes. The Weavers were one of the first folk bands to really use the big pipes. And they used them with the power and force of a electric guitar.

The album opens with the classic Johnny Cope, a Scots war song. The arrangement starts with a quick pipe march, played way faster than any pipe band. Half way through, the tempo shifts up several notches, as the band kicks into the song. It ends with another pipe march, even more aggressively played than the first one.

Thanks to my shit Acadian, I must have listened to that album a thousand times, as it was stuck in the player for our whole time together. For me, it cemented a lot of ideas about how folk music could contain the energy and power I loved in punk bands, while still remaining true to the intent of the tradition. In the early days of GBS, we often talked a lot about ‘aggressive folk', about the idea of marrying rock power to acoustic instruments. The Tannahill Weavers wrote the book about this long before we did.

They have made a dozen albums since then, and all of them are pretty consistent. On their most recent album, The Arnish Light, they sound as excited as they did on IV. For a band that started when I was a baby, they are incredible. If I can sound as good 35 years into my career, I will have achieved something indeed.