Friday

Bagpipes Rock the 1970's

I've written about bagpipe bands that that rock, but I haven't written about specific rock bands that feature the bagpipes in their songs. It's actually pretty amazing to look at all of the rock bands over history that make use of the bagpipes.

Since there are a lot of bands, I'll have to do several blogs on them. I thought a good way to break them up would be cover them by decades. The earliest bands I could find were from the 1970's so that's where we're starting.

The first band is The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Alex Harvey was a Scottish rocker and toured all over the place in the 1970's. This is their song Anthem performed in 1974. The bagpipes come in quite dramatically at the end so wait for it!


Next up is Sir Paul McCartney himself with his band Wings performing Mull of Kintyre in 1977.



Finally, the ultimate bagpipe Rock 'n Roll song, AC/DC's It's a Long Way to the Top in an incredibly awesome 1976 promo.

A couple of members from my band played this song along with the CD last Saint Patrick's Day, the crowd went insane!

Pipe on! Or maybe I should say rock on!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Although they did not play the bagpipes and in fact used bagpipe music of the Royal Scots Dragoon Gaurds without permission - Eric Burdon and the animals incoporated bagpipe music into the song Sky Pilot in the 60s.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the comment, I have listened to Sky Pilot before but I didn't realize that they used the music without the permission of the Royal Scots Dragoon.

 
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