Scottish Arts Council Young Scot Action Fund Films: Curfally

Curfally, Moray Kathryn Milne(15) received funding towards mentoring and rehearsals for ceilidh band, Curfally.

Hi we’re Curfally.  We’re from Fochabers and the average age of the group is 16.  Well we’re all from the same school.  We’re friends at school.  All part of the Fochaber Fiddlers.  We’ve all grown up around the Celtic music scene because there’s a festival in Fochabers which is where most of us are from and we’ve all been going to that since we were really tiny and saw how much fun everyone else had performing and getting together in bands and just jamming away and we wanted to be part of that.

Working with Scottish Arts Council Young Scot Action Fund

We’d been together as a band for quite a while.  We were starting to get stuck in a rut and we needed a bit of help and guidance.  We didn’t really want to apply for the usual money for equipment because we knew that wasn’t going to stand out so we applied and said that we were going to do more unusual things.  We were going to get help with our musical performance working together as a group.  When we got the Scottish Arts Council Young Scot Action Fund Grant, it got a lot of promotion from local newspapers and we got articles written about us.  It gave us an aim to work towards having the grant so it was good. 

Impact of Scottish Arts Council Young Scot Action Fund

I think the main thing to come out of it was that we had always wanted to do our own stuff.  But making a song was actually a very scary idea to us and we couldn’t imagine making our own song and we thought we would probably cover other peoples but we got a mentor and she also gave us the confidence and help we needed.  It was just like a big boost.  It gave us the push to actually do what we wanted to do but we were always too scared to attempt to do. 

Next Steps

Well l definitely think its going to be a really good future cause although it will be really hard in the future because John is leaving this year for University so it will be hard to find another drummer unless he comes back or whatever, you know.  I think it’ll be a good future for us when we come back to Speyfest or whatever.  See what happens when we get back from Uni.  I suppose because we’ve really improved our musical ability l think that we’ll always have that and its good to know we can all come together as a band and we’ll just take it as it comes and see what happens and if we stay together great and if we don’t I’m sure we’ll all carry on our musical careers in some way or form. 

Young Scot gratefully acknowledges the support of the Scottish Arts Council and all the young people that helped make this film.