The return of the real guitar heroes

�Another boy band reforms,� says Malcolm MacFarlane of the concerts that take the Scottish Guitar Quartet back on the road this weekend. He�s jesting, of course.

"Another boy band reforms," says Malcolm MacFarlane of the concerts that take the Scottish Guitar Quartet back on the road this weekend. He's jesting, of course. Not about the boy band bit - they're boys, they're in a band ... But they haven't got back together again because SGQ never actually split up. They just went quiet for a while.

After six years, during which they recorded three albums and built up an international following, with rave reviews in the US and Europe, the foursome ran out of momentum.

"We released our third album, Landmarks, in 2005 and were playing concerts to promote it into the summer of 2006," says MacFarlane. "But a couple of things happened. At that time the internet downloading thing hadn't settled into the pattern it has now, where people seem quite happy to pay to add something to their iPods.

"Almost as soon as we released Landmarks, it was available free and there just seemed to be no way for us to recover our costs, which was a blow."

The other factor was, as MacFarlane concedes, that the quartet lost sight of its original intentions. Featuring Nigel Clark, Ged Brockie and Kevin Mackenzie alongside MacFarlane, it formed in the spring of 2000 after much thought and looking around for fellow travellers on MacFarlane's part. He'd actually been involved in something similar, a guitar quintet, while studying at Leeds College of Music and felt the idea had much more to offer - the group was essentially a jazz band.

All four had other interests. The incessantly busy Mackenzie, for instance, is just as likely to be found accompanying Scotland's leading young traditional musicians as playing jazz, and SGQ's music from the start had folk, world music, classical and sophisticated rock influences.

"That's true but part of the reason the four of us got together was that we're all improvisers and that's how we knew each other," says MacFarlane. "When we first tried it, we had a few fairly straightforward tunes that we'd work up and then take solos on, and that's where the excitement lay. Although we're obviously compatible, we're all quite different as players, so the contrast between the improvising styles and the heat of the moment creativity, if you like, were a big part of the attraction. Then we started getting into serious composition."

Having quickly established a recognisable group sound - a sound that German luthier Frank Krocker was so taken with he presented SGQ with four of his eye-catching skeletal guitars - the quartet began to inspire grander aims among its members. MacFarlane holds his hand up here, acknowledging that one particular piece of his, which lasted 10 minutes and had to be sight-read from start to finish, perhaps wasn't his greatest idea.

"If we'd been a classical group, that would have been fine, because that's what classical musicians do," he says. "But at a certain point, without someone chasing work full-time, gigs began to dry up. So, latterly, we'd be faced with the prospect of having to rehearse really hard to keep these very involved pieces up to scratch for one gig every now and then. Which was silly, really, because if we'd stuck to playing a bunch of be-bop tunes, we could have rehearsed them in the sound-check and they probably would have been great fun for everyone, audience and band."

No decision was ever taken not to play again and, true to form, when SGQ went quiet, enquiries as to their availability started to come in. By this time, however, the core members had developed other lines of work. Clark would be off somewhere with singer Carol Kidd, jazz violinist Tim Kliphuis or the popular gypsy swing group Koshka. Brockie keeps busy with film soundtrack work and running the Circular Records company. Mackenzie turns up everywhere, as already mentioned, and MacFarlane has been heard in the interim with Jamie Cullum and Tam White, among others. Other players have deputised when one of the quartet has been unavailable - Ross Milligan, brother of pianist David, being a notable contributor to band and repertoire - but good guitarists though they are and have to be to do the job, promoters understandably prefer the "first team".

Interest in the group having sustained over the past three years and having watched the rise of attractions such as the ultra-popular duo Rodrigo Y Gabriela during the same time, MacFarlane feels that there is still much mileage in guitar groups.

"It reached a stage when we were going to have to say it's over or get back and attack the business properly, and when I spoke to the others, they were all still as enthusiastic as ever about playing together and happy to map out periods of work," he says. "There's absolutely no waning of interest in the guitar. Quite the reverse, in fact, when you see all the guitar festivals out there. And I don't think there's any problem about getting the Scottish Guitar Quartet back to the kind of spontaneity allied to the quality of sound that drew people in the first place. Because, after all, we're jazzers. Spontaneity is what we do."