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Review by Tom Harland
A full crowd at Festival Folk in the Oak to see a touching,
entertaining and heart-felt performance by Edinburgh-based
folk singer-songwriter and Burns interpreter Gill Bowman.
Opening with Jim McLean's classic 'Smile in your Sleep",
her first half proceeded to be a light-hearted but extremely
informative exploration into the the love life of infamous
Scottish tryster and poet Robert Burns.
Gill Bowman also works with school children and alas that
I'd not had her in my classroom as a youth cursing the name
of Burns, bored to tears by the cheap text books we were
force fed. Bowman brought the sexier bits of Burns' love
rattery to life with sensual tales and songs written by
Burns ("My Lovely Nancy" and "The Gowden
Locks of Anna") and her own Burns inspired compositions
such as the beautifully crafted "Gin I were a Blackbird".
I further rue that she was not performing in full period
costume as is her wont in other shows! A particularly racy
anecdote about changing her dress in a restored chamber
room in which Burns had wooed a bar maid cranked the pulses
of the Folk Club worthies to the tempo of a wayward Bodhran,
and left me suspecting that Gill herself wouldn't have minded
becoming one of Burns' innumerable conquests!
Admittedly it was her first performance of a new song,
"If you believe in love", though for the reviewer
it was the weakest of the first half and a tad Disneyesque.
The second set was drawn from a more eclectic range of influences
and experiences, although I found myself craving more Burns-banter
and songs which is undoubtedly the most potent weapon in
Bowman's musical armoury. A highlight of the second half
was a heartfelt, passionate and well researched story and
song about rugged Orcadian Victorian explorer John Ray,
who missed out on a knighthood by disturbing Victorian sensibilities
with his discovery that the ill-fated voyage of Franklin
to seek the North West Passage had ended in cannibalism.
Altogether a thoroughly entertaining evening and I would
recommend Bowman's Festival Burns show, "In The
Footsteps of Clarinda" (Valvona and Corolla Venue 67)
to anyone wishing to brush up their Burns knowledge
and hear some sensual and delicate interpretations and compositions.
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