Jack Archer’s gentle film follows the immensely likable Rob MacNeacail as he journeys across Scotland and Ireland in a bid to save these traditional songs of people and place
T
here’s no word in Scottish Gaelic for “moreish” – or if there is, it slips Rob MacNeacail’s mind as he reaches for another biscuit in a church hall. MacNeacail is a Gaelic psalm singer and the eccentric star of this gentle and rather lovely film from Jack Archer that follows him on a mission to meet other singers keeping the tradition alive. Not that you’ll learn an awful lot about the history of psalm singing from this film; it is essentially an observational portrait of MacNeacail, at his home on the Scottish borders then out on the road to the Outer Hebrides, Skye, Belfast and County Cork.
But no knowledge is necessary to enjoy the extraordinarily rich and textured sound of psalm singing, once practised at Free Presbyterian churches all over Scotland. It’s a community activity: one person – the precentor – sings a line of a psalm from the bible, and everyone else sings it back slowly, each with their own interpretation, at their own tempo. No instruments, just voices; like the sea, the sound comes in great swells and then retreats. It’s haunting; shut your eyes and you might be in a stone chapel in the 1800s.
