Red Note Ensemble

A DRUNK MAN LOOKS AT THE THISTLE

Poem by Hugh MacDiarmid
Music by Bill Sweeney
Conducted by Jessica Cottis

Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem, with its infamously thrawn narrator, is set to music of huge imagination and vibrancy by Glasgow composer Bill Sweeney and performed by one of Scotland’s finest contemporary music ensembles, Red Note.

This is a night of humour, inebriation, beauty, politically charged comment and wild musical and literary invention.

The nervous thistle’s shiverin like
A horse’s skin aneth a cleg,
Or Northern Lichts or lustres o
A soul that Daith has fastened on,
Or mornin eftir the night afore
Shudderin thistle gie owre,
gie owre.

Hugh MacDiarmid
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle