Brian McNeill

Born in Falkirk, Scotland, in 1950, Brian McNeill began his musical training with formal violin lessons when he was in his early teens. He soon forsook the violin in favor of the electric guitar. A comprehensive musical education and a mildly misspent youth were the result, until his student years brought him in contact with Celtic music. He knew immediately that this was a style of music he had to play, and, in 1969, he picked up his fiddle again and formed the Battlefield Band, which has become one of Scotland's best known ensembles.

Brian plays fiddle, viola, mandolin, cittern, bouzouki, guitar, concertina, bass and hurdy-gurdy, and the importance of his songwriting-about both Scotland's history and its present-day circumstances-has long been recognized. "The Yew Tree," "The Lads O' The Fair," "Montrose" and "The Snows of France and Holland" were among the best-loved of the Battlefield Band's repertoire, and "The Devil's Only Daughter" won Britain's prestigious National Songsearch competition in 1987. McNeill's contribution has also been recognized in the U.S., with the 1990 Texas Celtic Music Award for "The Rovin' Dies Hard."

1989 saw the publication of Brian's first novel, The Busker, and in 1990 he left the Battlefield Band to concentrate more on writing and solo projects. In the last few years, he has toured extensively with an audiovisual show about Scottish emigration to America called The Back O' The North Wind, and he has just started work on the sequel show about the Scots in Europe, called The Arch of Muscovy.