‘For too long it’s been about tartan and shortbread!’ How Brìghde Chaimbeul makes piping hot

At a packed, sweaty gig at London’s Eventim Apollo back in February, a shy 24-year-old from Skye had a surprising moment in the spotlight – playing the Scottish smallpipes at Caroline Polachek’s headline show. “It was pretty overwhelming, to be honest,” says Brìghde Chaimbeul (pronounced Breetch-er Hime-bowl), speaking from her home in Northern Ireland, a shy presence on the video link in a green sweatshirt and chunky headphones.

There to play her middle-eight solo from Polachek’s recent track Blood and Butter, her melody and drones provided an extra level of bewitching euphoria. “Superfans were crying at the front … and I’d only met Caroline three days before, on the same day we had to record a Radio 1 session.” Polachek had discovered her music on Spotify and the part was recorded remotely. The gig, Chaimbeul says, “was a crazy adrenaline rush, over in a moment, but Caroline is so open-minded, with such a strong sense of her musicianship – and my pipes were there for me.”

Such giddy pop heights aren’t typical for musicians as grounded in their traditional roots as Chaimbeul, whose childhood was so steeped in Gaelic music and language that she had “no idea about the pop music of the day into my teens, which is quite funny, really.” On her new album, Carry Them With Us, however, she is crossing genres again, collaborating this time with a titan of avant-garde composition, Colin Stetson – known for scores for Hereditary and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as work with Arcade Fire – who initially got in touch with her about a documentary soundtrack. “I was in the process of thinking about what my next album would be like, and listening to his music … it was just that kind of big sound that I was envisioning.”

Stetson’s saxophone comes together on six of thealbum’s nine tracks with her smallpipes, which are not operated not by breath, but by bellows under the arm, its notes played on the fingerholes of a chanter (the front part of the pipes that looks like a recorder). This usually creates a mellower sound than the better-known bagpipes, but these are intense, astringent compositions, some bolstered further by Chaimbeul’s deep singing.

Their inspirations are rooted in dark Highlands folklore, including seductive men who transform into creatures that drown women (Òran an Eich-Uisge/Song of the Waterhorse) and humans desperate to communicate with birds (Pìobaireachd Nan Eun/The Birds), a regular subject in Gaelic song. The School of Scottish Studies Archive recordings online, accessible in the public domain, broadened her research: “They’re an endless treasure trove.”

Chaimbeul’s progression as an artist has been rapid. At 17, she won the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award. A year later, she was the first artist to sign to Rough Trade’s folk imprint, River Lea, and her exhilarating 2019 debut The Reeling attracted fans of alternative and electronic music as much as those of traditional tunes.

“It’s funny: the first time I heard a solo pipe CD when I was a kid, I wondered if it could be electronic,” she says. “It’s because the instrument’s sound can be so precise, and there’s not necessarily a change in dynamic [in volume] or articulation [how notes begin and end].”

She loves how the precision of that sound comes from natural, organic sources – the pipes made of wood, her reeds made from cane – then there’s the intimacy of being enveloped by its continuous double-note drones. “Even if I’m anxious, I just hold [my instrument], and it’s comforting, and comfortable to play. It feels like part of me. Then you have its sound right in your ear, and you’re not just hearing one note, but a whole range of the frequencies, so you really get enveloped in the frequencies. It’s like a physical thing, a whole world of sound and vibrations.”

South Uist bagpiper and singer Rona Lightfoot, now 87, has also been a lifelong inspiration. One of the first women to break into competitive piping, she was shut out of competitions in the 1970s for spurious reasons such as not having the right element of a costume. She persisted, and it meant a lot to Chaimbeul that she contributed canntaireachd – a style of phonetic chanting used to teach pipe tunes – on The Reeling. They remain friends. “She’s really strong-minded,” Chaimbeul smiles. “She doesn’t take any crap from anyone.”

Chaimbeul is also a trailblazer in her own way, exploring different piping traditions from Nova Scotia, Bulgaria, Spain and France in her work, most recently in LAS, her beautiful 2022 collaborative album with piper Ross Ainslie and guitarist Steven Byrnes. She also got properly out of her “comfort zone” playing with Stetson, she says.

Nevertheless, her focus is on making her instrument and Gaelic music the centres of attention. “For too long it’s been about the tartan and shortbread kind of stuff, but the smallpipes are here, and, hey, they’re still pretty fresh!” As someone who can get 3,000 pop fans cheering at a minute-long solo, she would know.