JK Mandolins,Ardnadam,Sandbank,Loch Eck Hills

JK Mandolins,The Old Bores, Sandbank Gala, Ardnadam,argyll

The Old Bores performing at the Annual Sandbank Gala in June 2008. The stage is our quick-exit vehicle from potential trouble!

The Old Bores are a group of veteran musicians, (Derek, two Johns, Guy and Phil) who play a variety of Scottish, Irish and other music, firstly for our own enjoyment and then for the pleasure of anyone who may wish to listen to or dance to our sound. We feature a variety of instruments including accordion, guitar, mandolin and mandola, concertina, harmonica, bodhran and auto harp and we also make quite tuneful singing noises when the mood takes us. Rhoda, our regular female vocalist, always sings very tunefully. When the occasion demands we draft in a bass player (see photo above) from one of our two friends.

We are based in the Cowal area of Dunoon on the Argyll coast of the Firth of Clyde and we originally come from Argyll, Inverness and Glasgow, so we are very much a Scottish band but with some Irish ancestry. To make us more cosmopolitan we have recently acquired a real live Liverpudlian who brings to the group an encyclopaedic knowledge of the music of the Mississippi Delta and in particular the late Mississippi John Hurt—not a figure immediately associated with the Celtic and ceilidh tradition.

We play in and around the Cowal area and have even been asked back to a few of the venues we have played. We have also been known to go further afield and in July 2008 four of us had a successful debut at the 4-day Cairncastle Ulster-Scots Folk Festival in Northern Ireland where we met and performed along with a great mix of talented Irish and Scottish musicians, some of whom were as old as we were! We have been invited back for July 2009.

Our name is the result of a mis-spelling which happened during one of our bookings. We had decided that The Wild Boars was a suitable name for the group as our bodhran (Celtic hand drum) had a painting of a wild boar’s head. Between being booked and then appearing on the programme we became the Wild Bores but almost immediately this became The Old Bores and has stuck. We like it. It sort of sums us up, we think!

We attend, as individuals and as the group, the regular monthly open folk nights held at the Whistlefield Inn on the shores of Loch Eck where a great atmosphere is always generated and a wide variety of music is performed. The monthly events are held from around 8 p.m. on the first Friday of each month throughout the year and everyone, performer or not, is made welcome.