Scotland - Day 15: The Hostiles

Saturday was spent being a groupy for The Hostiles, the Ska Punk band Ruaridh* plays trumpet with.

As part of the learning curve, I had to find out that the ‘ska’ part of Ska Punk is in the instrumentation, often the horn section.  And punk, of course, is punk.

Ruaridh and his trumpet with Josh

Saturday’s venue was an old warehouse of sorts that’s been divided into practice sound and recording rooms, so imagine several small venue areas through a maze-like series of corridors, decorated in the artwork, darkness and eclectic mix of paintings, rugs and such on the walls.

I’d forgotten what it’s like to sit in any kind of edgy music space – the decibel level left my hearing muted for a couple of days – but it wasn’t all that unwelcome, this feeling of my youth.

It was fun to watch the band’s high-energy dreadlocked leader Josh sing, jump and play with the audience with his mother looking protectively on, rushing off to get him tissues for his sweating forehead, stepping forward to adjust his mike only to stop at the last minute realizing that there was a sound crew at this gig. . . and Chris with his bass and Callum on drums doing the usual musician interaction, playing to each other as if no one else was in the room . . . the young folk standing before the band, singing lyrics I couldn’t decipher, head-bobbing to the relentless bass beats, shouting out requests . . .

Steve & his trombone (yes, it's a beanie baby rat
jammed in the curve - gift from a fan)

But I came to see Ruaridh, the young man I’ve known since he was 9 years old, play his horn.  And play he did.  Ruaridh on trumpet and Steve on trombone were fabulous.

I came away with a red sweatshirt signed by all the band members (a 56-year-old grandma groupie has no shame), a t-shirt, CD, and a great sense of the fun and community of music (check out the guys on their MySpace page, remembering that Josh and Chris’s mom is the van driver and general factotum for all their gigs -- like I said, it's a community).



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*Ruaridh is Liz & Idris’ oldest child and his Gaelic name is pronounced – well, I simply can’t do it – it’s something like roo-ah-ree –  but I call him Rudy – even with that nickname, there’s an ‘r’ in the middle being missed.  The important thing to remember about the Gaelic is that the ‘idh’ ending is pronounced ‘ee’.