The Red Hot Chilli Pipers, true to its name, have spiced up the Scottish bagpipe tradition with a dose of classic-rock anthems.
The band that features pipers and marching snare, backed by a guitarist, drummer and bassist, will take audiences away from the daily grind when it performs Friday through Sunday at the Egyptian Theatre, said co-founder and piper Kevin MacDonald.
“It’s family entertainment and you’ll smile from the time you enter the hall until you leave,” he said. “With the amount of nonsense that’s going on in the world to go and lock yourself away for two-and-a-half hours to smile and have fun, encapsules what my vision of the Chilli Pipers is.”
The band developed its high energy over time.
“Evolution is the best way to describe it,” he said. “The foundation for the band was back in 1989 with myself and a young chap called Stuart Cassells. We met in bagpiping summer school and got to be really great friends.”
In 1999 and 2000 Cassell provided bagpiping at weddings, bar mitzvahs, anything that needed a solo piper, and he and MacDonald always told each other that it would be a blast to do something together.
“At that time there was a band called the Guttie Slippers, and they were basically five pipers and drummers playing rock music,” MacDonald remembered. “At the same time a young piper named Gordon Duncan was hugely inspirational for a lot of us musicians, not just bagpipes, but with fiddles, accordions, flutes. He had this innate ability to write a track that transcends not only time, but different musicians and musicianship. It was he who pioneered a bagpipe-rock version of AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck.’”
Cassell had played with Duncan, who died in 2005, and took in a lot of inspiration, according to MacDonald.
“So, when the opportunity came up for Stuart and me to do something, I thought we could play with three pipers, two drummers,” he said. “We knew a lot of promoters who had been booking us as solo pipers, so we approached them with this concept of the two of us to play some rock covers and traditional music.”
After the first gig in November 2002, the duo felt the “snowball effect,” MacDonald said.
“Four people would tell eight people and eight people would tell 16, and at the end of the month, somebody wrote us a check, and we went, ‘Oh!’” he said with a laugh. “In those days we didn’t get a lot of money, but it was more a chance for us to meet friends and a chance to have a bit of fun.”
The band kept playing gigs until they got booked to play 20 party nights in Glasgow.
“So we were playing four nights a week in the five weeks leading up to Christmas,” MacDonald said. “That’s when we came up with this idea to record an album to sell it so we can make more money.”
The band spent $5,000 and recorded the album in three days and cut 1,000 CDs.
“The first night of those gigs, me and Stuart tried to sell the albums, and it was the most degrading time of my life,” MacDonald said with a laugh. “I think over the course of the 20 party nights we sold about five albums.”
But one of those consumers was a gentleman from a company called Pernod Ricard that owned Chivas Regal Whisky and Ballantine’s Whisky, according to MacDonald.
“They listened to the album and wanted us to play at a show,” he said. “We were l like, ‘Oh, dear goodness, now we need to hire a drumkit player, a guitarist and a bass guitarist.’”
The gig succeeded, and Pernod Ricard continued to book the band to play corporate shows for contingents from other countries.
“From there we spent the next three or four years building up our business playing for whiskey companies or others who wanted some entertainment,” MacDonald said.
The band’s name, Red Hot Chilli Pipers, came about when Cassell’s girlfriend had to “tidy up” his flat.
“Stuart wasn’t the tidiest person I’ve met in my life,” MacDonald said with another laugh. “And her job was to organize the CD collection.”
Cassell had divided his CDs up in different categories — bagpipes, jazz, rock. When he saw how his girlfriend filed them, he asked her why she put a Red Hot Chili Peppers CD among the bagpipe collection.
“She said, ‘I thought it said Red Hot Chilli Pipers,’ and that’s how our name was born,” MacDonald said.
The newly christened Red Hot Chilli Pipers continued playing corporate gigs and landed on the
BBC show, “When Will I Be Famous,” which is kind of like “America’s Got Talent,” in 2007.
“We actually won the show,” MacDonald said. “And coming back to the album, we still had 995 copies, and we gave most away to friends and family to make it look like we sold something. But the day after we won the television show, we got an order from a record label for 5,000 copies. So, we ended up selling 30,000 copies.”
After that, the band played corporate events in New York, London, Paris and Rome.
“At the same time, there was a demand for us to appear in public shows,” MacDonald said.
In early 2008 the Red Hot Chilli Pipers released a live DVD, which sold out.
So there was a great momentum about the band, until the global recession hit a few weeks later, according to MacDonald.
“The corporate shows totally died, but the demand for festivals started to grow,” he said. “As part of that we were able to do gigs in America, gigs in Australia and gigs in New Zealand, Japan, China and other parts of Europe.”
The band developed a new dynamic while it was on a tour of Germany in 2010.
“Our manager asked if we could play a night in Edinburgh and asked if there was anyone who could play the gig,” MacDonald said. So, what we ended up doing was (creating) a training program where we had two bands running at the same time — kind of like the Blue Man Group of bagpipes.”
That concept continues today, which is good for band members who need some time off, MacDonald said.
“If someone wants to spend time with their family or go on a trip, we bring in another piper or another guitarist,” he said. “It works for us because you never know when playing opportunities will come along. When we have guys who take some time off, it opens up a good opportunity for other younger players to come through and experience touring the world and playing bagpipes on stage. ”
Some of the new players were fans of the band when they were younger, MacDonald said.
“Some actually bought the DVD in 1998 and aspired to be in the band,” he said.
Last autumn, the Red Hot Chilli Pipers recorded and released its 10th album, “Back to Roots,” which is titled deliberately, MacDonald said.
“We’ve kind of been stuck with this heavy emphasis on rock music, and I really wanted to come back to what was important to us — where bagpipes were the central part of things,” he said. “I wanted to do a bagpipe-led album. So I put some tracks together that were well thought out with bagpipes being the focal part.”
Still, MacDonald won’t forsake the band’s rendition of rock songs such as Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin,’” which has become like a trademark.
“We’re at an interesting crossroad where people coming to see us expect songs like that, and we’re not going to let them down,” he said.
Red Hot Chilli Pipers
- When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 5 p.m. Sunday
- Where: Egyptian Theatre, 328 Main St.
- Phone: 855-745-SHOW
- Web: parkcityshows.com and redhotchillipipers.com