“Aye we’ve 5 seasons in East Belfast” I explained to a tourist who’d come here for the Hearth session: “Summer, winter, autumn, spring…and the Marching Season.” And, right enough, in June and July the streets here are choc-a-block with marching bands - mostly flute, fife, accordion, pipes…and drums galore!

I’ve no personal history with these bands at all. And I ‘get’ that, on both sides of the divide in this little part of the world, they can stimulate a lot of emotion, positive and negative. I’d rather not go into the whys and wherefores of this here. Suffice it to say that, although I don’t think it’s widely appreciated, some of the tunes the bands play are fantastic session tunes. So much so that we’ve been making a point recently of starting to play them in Hearth!

In the trad sessions I join in and around Belfast city centre I reckon the tunes are mostly pacy jigs (in 6/8 time) and reels (in 4/4 time). But marches (in 2/4 and 4/4 time) are magic and, obviously, all of the marching bands from around here have an extensive repertoire of them. So in our Hearth session we’ve started playing, for example, the Boyne Water march and the Shanghai march, both played regularly, I believe, by the marching bands from this side of town. And we play plenty of others too that are popular in other communities and in other parts of Belfast. For us, they’re all just great tunes, and it’s all just great music.

The video is of a few of us - including my good friend Gary Duffy, trad flute maestro, who's introduced me to a lot of the marches - blattering away at a march called ‘Song of the Chanter’; we did in a set with two other marches, the aforementioned ‘Boyne Water’ and ‘Bottom of the Punch Bowl’.

I’ve always refused to get into the big P politics of all of this, and I’m determined that no one uses what we’re doing in the session for any sort of big P political gain, for whatever side. None of that interests me. This is all about the music. And it’s everyone’s music.

Join us at The Hearth session each Thursday evening 8pm - 10pm for a tune or sit back and enjoy - it's everyone's music

Everyone’s music #7 - The Marching Season