Dougie Maclean is a musician Scotland can be very proud of. Blessing the world with his multi-instrumental talents for over thirty five years now, he is celebrated and hailed by folk and fiddle fans from around the globe. Dougie is preparing himself for the fifth edition of his annual dream-come-true: the Perthshire Amber. The festival, headlined and organised by the singer-songwriter himself, hosts a fascinating array of Dougie’s musically gifted friends from all over to play alongside one another during the stunning autumn of Perthshire. Dougie has seen his favourite week of the year transform from a great festival to a truly unforgettable experience for it’s artists and visitors since 2005. An in-depth interview with one of Perthshire’s greatest heroes.

SF: The fifth edition of the Perthshire Amber festival is coming up. What are you expecting of this year’s festival?

DMcL: Well, it has been growing slowly over the years. It started off as a weekend festival and now we have a ten day event. Every year we add new and interesting things to it. We take the show all around Perthshire. It’s based in the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, but we’re doing shows out in places like Blair Castle, Menzies Castle and Blairgowrie Town Hall, just wonderful places throughout Perthshire. We’re trying to introduce people to the beautiful county of Perthshire, and the diverse culture and landscape of the place.

That’s one of the things making the festival so unique, its choice of venues. Why not stick to one place?

I have been a professional musician for 35 years. I’ve played in America a lot and throughout the whole of Europe. But this particular festival is to encourage my fans to come to the area that I wrote all my songs about. I want them to get an insight to the music that I’ve been making for the last 35 years. It’s a lovely way of introducing people to Perthshire. We have some fantastic and unique venues around here. We do concerts in the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, a beautiful drama theatre which sits about 550 people. It’s comfortable and perfect for playing music in. We have the shows there at the weekends. During the week we go out to different venues, like Blairgowrie Town Hall. That’s one of the new venues this year. I went to school in Blairgowrie, so there’s a kind of relevance to that, as well. The Dunkeld Cathedral is a beautiful medieval building. People buy tickets for lots of the shows in different venues, and that creates a certain atmosphere for lots of the shows. It’s about trying to give it that personal feel as well, introducing the people to MY Perthshire [laughs]. And it’s great, we have walks, talks and all kinds of interesting things going on. We just keep adding to it every year. We get another little idea and somebody else might come and say to us: “we could do this or that”. So it’s definitely involving a lot of different people now.

Do you select the venues yourself?

Yes. We look around for certain places that people would enjoy. Since I’m a local boy, I can get access to a lot of these venues as well. The festival has a different line up of artists every year. Tell us something about the musicians of the Perthshire Amber. We have a full program of musicians, mainly friends of mine. They’re all people I have a certain relationship with or that I’ve met over the years. That helps keep a sense of a community feeling about the whole thing. It’s not just another festival with big acts that have no connection to the place or no connection to me. During the weekends, at the theatre, we even have open mics for people who just want to come in and sing a couple of songs. We have little sessions of people just playing music for fun. During the week, there’s the Cabaret Amber, for some of the actors who wouldn’t be able to appear on the bigger stages. They come and do a small show for about a 150 people, in the early evening. It’s very popular, because it’s where people get to hear up-and-coming acts.

You’ve described the Perthshire Amber of being the perfect way of showcasing a larger body of your work, instead of the usual few hours you get at a concert.

There’s only so much you can do at a two-hour show, but at a 10-day festival there’s so much more stuff you can bring to the table. I play songs that I haven’t sung for years, and I play them with different combinations of musicians. It keeps it really interesting for my fans and people who are interested in what I do. It’s a challenge for me, but I really enjoy it, doing songs that I haven’t done in ages. I have about twenty CD’s of songs that I’ve written over the years, so at the festival I have a very loose, no-song-repeated thing going on. I try to do different songs at different shows, so it’s a great way for a lot of my fans to hear stuff they might not have heard live before. I tend to be involved in lots of the other shows at the Amber, too. I see myself as a kind of host. So I might do the first half of an act that we have lined up, then have them come in and do the second half.

The festival is in its fifth year now. I can imagine it’s great doing it for the first time, but does is still give the same level of satisfaction today?

It is a huge thing to do every year.. Well, we keep changing the musicians and the ideas for the shows. Every year it’s quite different to the last year, or at least we try and make it as different as possible. So every time we do it, the shows are new. It’s not just repeating the same old thing. We do different musicians and different line-ups, so it always feels very fresh.

Has the festival changed a lot since it’s first one in 2005?

Yes, it has a fan base now! People are coming back every year, some people book for the whole ten days every year. I see a lot of familiar faces of people who look forward to this festival. We’ve definitely made a lot of friends. I think with every event or festival like this, it takes four or five years for people to realize that it’s something they will enjoy. It has a reputation now. Last year we broadcasted the whole thing, we had three camera’s doing a video shoot at all the live shows of the Pitlochry theatre. Rather than it just being based in Perthshire, I feel like we had a more global audience for last year’s festival. We had a computer set up besides the stage, and people could tune in from their homes. So we would have ‘Joe Smith from Florida’ watching, and I’d look into the audience and say ‘welcome Joe Smith’, it was great [laughs]. We had people from America and Australia watching, and the quality of the video is brilliant. So although we were in this small theatre in Perthshire in Scotland, people were watching it from all around the world. People who couldn’t make it to Perthshire at that time of year were gathered together in a fence house on a computer, surrounded by a few cans of beer, and it was like being at the concert! So we’re developing that side of it, making it accessible for a much wider audience. That’s definitely changed since 2005.

Have you ever thought about doing a DVD covering festival?

Yes, we did a DVD of one of the shows of an earlier year. But that was mainly just a show of my own band. Doing a DVD of the whole festival is definitely something that’s in the pipelines. I’m very interested in things we can do and things we can develop with the new technologies. The festival is getting physically bigger, so we can develop it in lots of different ways. It’s something I’m keeping my eye on though, because you see a lot of these things getting too big and they lose their personality. I’m trying to keep it in a controlled size, so that people who come to visit and enjoy it really feel like they’re part of it.

But it is growing every year. Last years visitors totalled over 6,000.

Yes, but we are limited to the size of the venues. That’s one of the things keeping us from getting too big. We do one show in the Perth Concert Hall for 1,200 people. That’s the big concert, and I think it’s big enough for us. All we actually do is more things in the ten days. We have a concert in a crannog, which is an old Iron Age building on Loch Tay, holding only 35 people. These are the kind of tickets that are gone after they’ve been on sale for ten minutes. Everybody loves sitting in an Iron Age house, with the fire in the middle of the floor and music playing. It’s very special. So we go from these sizes of venue to the big concert halls. We’re just developing that as time goes on. But I can’t say I regret bringing in more and more people, because it’s a great thing for Perthshire. It’s brings in lots of money for the economy of the area, at a time of year when it’s fairly quiet in Scotland. I can safely say we have lots of fans amongst the guesthouse and hotel owners! [laughs] They obviously think we’re doing a great thing!

You have a lot of experience in this area yourself, playing for very large crowds as well as the small venues. Which do you prefer?

For me personally it doesn’t really matter what size an audience is. I just think the small shows are very special for the public. The show in Menzies Castle holds about 150 people, and it’s very personal. Everybody in the audience feels like they’re an important part of the show. It’s in this great, majestic, medieval castle which is quite atmospheric. You can’t find that in a theatre. When you arrive at the castle, it feels like walking into a movie set. It’s not the same as going to your usual concert.

This feeling of intimacy, do you only feel it in venues in Scotland?

Well, there’s venues like that all over the world. I think more and more people are getting aware of the power of an intimate show. You see more shows happening in interesting venues, and not just in theatres. Theatres can be nice, but they can also be very bland in terms of atmosphere. Particularly the newer theatres can lack in atmosphere, because of their architecture. One of the things you realize as a musician is that the success of a concert is heavily depending on the atmosphere in the room. I recently did a concert in Dunfermline Abbey, and the atmosphere was absolutely amazing. I got the whole audience to sing, and these old abbeys are made for people to sing in. You could hear the singing of the audience roaring around the high ceilings of the abbey. You won’t get that in a theatre! [laughs]

You’re still touring pretty extensively. Do you still enjoy being on the road as much as when you did your first show?

Touring is very hard. It’s not as easy travelling around as it was 25 years ago, with all the security at the airports. It’s not quite as fun as it was, it’s much harder. There’s a lot of time just going into travelling. We always joke about it, saying we don’t get paid for doing the concert, we get paid for the travelling. We’ll do the concert for free! But it’s part of the job, it’s part of what I do. It’s nice to go out and share your music with the people. More and more I’m playing at home, in the U.K. I’m trying to concentrate on being at home a bit more and I’m really enjoying that.

Can we expect the Perthshire Amber to go on for another five years?

Oh yes. It’s become an institution over the last years, really. A year wouldn’t feel correct without it. My wife and daughter are the main organisers of the festival, and they really enjoy organising it. It’s a great wee family thing and it’s a great excuse for me to get all my musician friends together for ten days. Who knows where we’ll take it in the future?The reason we do this is quite different to why ‘normal’ festivals are probably organised. We’re not just promoters who are promoting a festival. This is what our life is anyway. We have our recording studio here and we’re involved in music all year round. One of the reason we started the Perthshire Amber, was because I played at festivals all over the place. At a certain point we just said: “why don’t we have our own festival, instead of keep going to others people festivals?” We know how to do it, we have a certain skill of really looking after the musicians. We try and make it a truly comfortable and enjoyable experience for the musicians as well as the visitors. That’s what I always like myself when I’m playing at another festival. You realize the musicians work hard and they’re touring. I think the musicians love coming here because we look after them really well. Festivals tend to forget about that. It’s our priority to make it a nice thing for everybody. It’s not about growing, it’s about making it better. It works for the public too, because they feel that and eventually go away having a better experience.

It sounds fantastic, I would love to see you perform back home one day, in Amsterdam.

I played in Amsterdam quite a lot, used to spend a lot of time in Holland. I had some great times over there. Every now and then I go back and do two or three concerts in Holland. I’ve got lots of good friends over there, and the country has plenty of lovely venues as well. I love the mill theatres. You should organise an Amsterdam Amber! I will come over to headline it [laughs].

The Perthshire Amber runs from October 29th until November 7th. For more information on Dougie and the festival, visit www.perthshireamber.com