Here’s an interesting wee film about an Edinburgh institution. All the voices have their own merits but the one that’s really hit me having just watched it is “Mog”. Everyone in it has a passion about them or they wouldn’t be in the film in the first place, but the song by “Mog”, it has something more.

It’s like the song has strode straight off a scheme into the Royal Oak​ to just remind everyone that, “hey that folk music you’re all singing, it’s a living thing you know, and in a 100 years half the songs they’ll be singing will be sounding like this one”.

The song has a pain and an integrity that seems to be rooted in real experience that gives it that “ouch!” quality that will stay with you as well as the “wow!” it slaps you with at the end. Of all the performers shown here, “Mog” is the one who, more than any of the others, you’d pick out as not fitting into the “Oak” because he doesn’t fit the stereotype. But appearances are often deceptive.

No one in this film deserves to be in it more than him. I’m not saying anything original when I say all folk tunes were once new and contemporary. And “Mog” is showing us one of folk musics sounds of the future. But we’re the lucky ones who get to hear this for the first time and to marvel at it’s newness.

(c) Jim Laing 2015.