David Belcher charts the rise of Shooglenifty

SHOOGLENIFTY is an apt name for a band who shake things up in a sharp,

spruce, pretty, and agile fashion. Shooglenifty's physical roots are

all-encompassing, stretching from Orkney, Inverness, and Edinburgh to

Spanish hillsides. Similarly wide-ranging, their musical inputs boast a

multiplicity of arcane labels -- ethno-ambient trance-dance, dub,

hardbag -- as well as Scottish traditional music in its many and varied

forms.

And Shooglenifty have blended this variety into a splendid pulsing,

lilting whole, one that is thoroughly contemporary and completely

timeless, too. That can simultaneously charm the hand-knitted wholemeal

beards of the folk traditionalist as well as rouse the sophisticated

young metropolitan clubber whose perceptions have been formed by Chicago

house and the mechanistic blare of techno.

How else can you explain why in 1995, the busiest year in

Shooglenifty's two-year existence, the band are likely to be undertaking

diverse gigs in far-flung lands and disparate settings. Hip London

niteries. The Shetland Folk Festival. Glastonbury Festival. Austria.

Poland. Bracknell Festival, supporting Jah Wobble. Sidmouth Festival in

Devon, supporting Ali Farka Toure. Plus shows in Britain and Spain

during WOMAD, that annual touring celebration of global culture.

But to find out where they're going, you have to know where

Shooglenifty are coming from and where they're at.

Malcolm Crosbie, Garry Finlayson, James Mackintosh and Conrad Ivitsky

share a single Edinburgh origin in Swamptrash. ''As Swamptrash, we

pretended to be Louisiana cajun cotton-pickers,'' says Orcadian Garry.

''I think we're happier now being our Scottish selves.''

Elsewhere in Scottish music circles, Inverness-born Mackintosh

regularly thumps his tubs with trademark gusto for Capercaillie and

Mouth Music. Angus Grant's CV takes in Chou Pahrot, an early Glaswegian

Beefheartian ensemble. Songwriting mandolin-man Iain Macleod was once a

Little Red Duffle Coat and a Clumsy Lover.

Following Swamptrash's demise in 1990, informal mix'n' match sessions

in Edinburgh pubs kept everyone together until Shooglenifty was adopted

as a collective monicker during a Spanish busking holiday in mountain

villages outside Madrid. Edinburgh residencies followed, the most

crucial one being at a somewhat malodorous nightclub.

''The way you play is changed by the environment you play in, and our

six months in a place that smelt like the inside of an old training-shoe

definitely gave our music a raw cutting-edge,'' opines Garry Finlayson,

whose humble acoustic banjo has mutated, courtesy of digital electronic

technology, into a mighty banjax.

Similarly startling transformations were effected when Shooglenifty

entered the recording studio at the behest of mainstream traditional

label Greentrax, and with renowned folkie Jim Sutherland as their

producer. ''We were known for being a high-energy live dance act rather

than a recording act, and it was a real gamble for Ian Green to take us

on.

''We had to do a lot of talking about our music for the first time,

and take a major jump in sophistication in terms of arrangements, which

had always been fluid and flexible, something that simply happened on

stage. Yet in the same way, our music's shape has been due to our never

having rejected any style, rather than our deliberately having adopted

one.

''But Jim Sutherland was an excellent ideas man in the studio, and in

the way that Walt Disney seemed to, he'll allow an idea to take a

physical form before he wheels out his critic's heavy artillery.''

Venus In Tweeds was the album which resulted from this process, and

following Shooglenifty's two triumphant Celtic Connections' performances

last month, it was voted LP of the year by Radio Scotland's folk-roots

fraternity. Moving their music out into the wider world, Shooglenifty

supported Runrig in Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens at Hogmanay, and

then played in a happening London danceteria, the SW1 Club.

Additionally, they have a new, club-oriented single in the pipeline,

while Garry and his banjax have been invited to play live in the mix

alongside the DJs who run the Clockwork club-night at Glasgow's Arches

on the last Saturday of every month.

''Ah yes, the banjax,'' Garry says with a messianic glint in his eye.

''I can get a longer sustain, a longer ring on the notes now. I can

drive into some strange new places.''

Aye, when it comes to sustained and wondrous new strangeness,

Shooglenifty's the only word.