Day 2 of Tartan Week for Whisky Kiss had a lot to live up to. Day 1 had seen us jamming with Keifer Sutherland (a surprisingly good guitarist and vocalist, pictured right, sneaking into the photo), mingling with the Trumps, and sharing the bill with Paolo Nutini at Dressed to Kilt.
Day 2 saw us do two gigs, one on Wall Street and the other a big expo event called Whisky Live! which takes place at Pier 60 in Chelsea. The event on Wall Street/Hanover Square was to commemorate Tartan Day, as the Declaration of Arbroath was signed on 6 April 1306. It's widely credited as an inspiration for the American Declaration of Independence, which itself was signed by an impressive number of Scots.
This being Wall Street, home of Gordon Gekko and the Masters of the Universe, we took along a load of our new CD Twisted Tartan to flog to the audience. One young mum, with her 2-month-old son, came forward and snapped up a copy as she said one of our tracks had helped him get to sleep and she wanted to keep this aural magic elixir which suddenly promised an end to sleepless nights. The track in question had seen us get creative by having the piper play ACDC’s 'thunderstruck', while the DJ threw a huge hiphop loop in, and we added live drums, percussion, bass and a sitar. If we were being completely honest, when we put that track together, we weren't setting out to put people to sleep with it. But hey, if it works it works. Mums and Dads, you can hear more of this on track 3 of our CD ...
We then high-tailed it up to Chelsea for Whisky Live!, which was a 1,400 sell-out event. We got mingling with Howie Nicolsby, of Thistle Street no less, splendid as ever in his 21st Century Kilts (pictured below, having just elbowed aside Kiefer Sutherland). We should probably declare an interest here, as the band have our outfits styled and sponsored by Howie and Broughton Street’s legendary creative force Joey-D. There was an impressive amount of the Water of Life on show, but being located on Chelsea Piers – a huge venue right on the Hudson River waterfront – it did help us to turn our thoughts to comparison points between our own Auld Reekie and Gotham.
Two things that New York appears to lack – which any local councillor could tell you are key aspects of any modern city looking to take itself seriously – are a tram and a world-class waterfront in the style of Western Harbour and Granton. There are, even more shockingly, no current plans to build a huge biomass plant on the Upper East Side (which we figured would be their equivalent of Leith). Would you believe, they haven’t even reached the important milestone of having a 'Stationary Tram', such as our own dear specimen on Princes Street? Good grief, they are a long way behind in the New World.
Tomorrow we'll be back down at Wall Street again during the day, this time for a concert to commemorate the victims of 9/11. Later on we're going to be raising the roof at Scotland on Stone Street, where basically the whole street has been taken over for Tartan Week.
More tomorrow!
Cheers, Iain
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