Name: Donald WG Lindsay and Alasdair Roberts
Start: 2024-09-18T19:30:00+01:00
Location: 1 Summerhall , EH9 1PL Edinburgh, United Kingdom

🌾 Scottish musicians Donald WG Lindsay and Alasdair Roberts have been friends for thirty years, since their teenage days. In these three decades, their careers in music have taken them down differing yet similarly unorthodox paths, and they’ve continued to make a lot of music together, usually informally. They’ve only rarely appeared together in concert, but in autumn 2024 they will remedy this state of affairs with their first duo tour.
🍂 Donald WG Lindsay is best known as the creator of the ‘Lindsay System’ three-octave keyless chanter for the Scottish smallpipes, as played by him on the critically acclaimed album History of Sleep recorded in collaboration with Glasgow experimental legend Richard Youngs. In late 2020 he received airplay on BBC Radio 6 Music from Iggy Pop, who described his music as “…beautifully played… the whole record is really good.”
🌾 Alasdair Roberts is primarily known as a singer, guitarist, writer of songs and interpreter of traditional songs from Scotland and beyond. Since the nineties he has released several albums, mostly on the Drag City label, variously acclaimed both by aficionados of traditional song and experimental music.
🍂 For their duo tour, Donald and Alasdair will present a programme featuring a rich variety of pipe tunes with guitar accompaniment, as well as a broad selection of songs both traditional and original. The pipe tunes bring together a diverse range of influences, from Scots fiddle tunes, by way of Hungarian and Romanian pipe music, to classic and contemporary Highland piping and Lowland, Border and Northumbrian tunes.
🌾 The songs range from variants of traditional ballads or ‘muckle sangs’, to songs from the Scots lyrical tradition from the early modern period onwards, to contemporary songs written by both Alasdair and Donald.