Is it Status Quo at Ayrshire Burns Festival?

I have just realised that it has been over a month since my last post here - how time flies ! My only excuse is that I have been really very busy with other things over recent weeks. There is indeed a life outside of blogging.

What prompted me to post just now was a local issue on this occasion. It's an episode that shows just how parochial some people are in their thinking - and just how prone some folk in Ayrshire are to this.

We had the news this week that Status Quo are to headline this years Burns Festival in Ayrshire. Now of course all the old rockers like myself will be delighted at this news. The Quo are of course real veterans of the British rock scene and masters of the three chord blues boogie.

You would think that the reaction to this news would have been very positive given that the organisers had managed to attract a good headline act. After all what better way to raise the profile of the event and attract a wider range of visitors to Ayrshire.

Instead the reaction from the Burns aficionados would appear to have been entirely negative with quotes like " What do they have to do with Robert Burns?".

This kind of short sightedness and small county small town mentality is exactly what often appears to hold Ayrshire back and hopefully the organisers will ignore it as they shake up the festival a little.

Think about the Edinburgh festival for example - what historical connection do a Japanese Drum group have with Edinburgh? Precious little. But the success of the Edinburgh festival has been it's ability to attract interesting entertainers from around the world.

We could do with some of that attitude in Ayrshire frankly. Of course there is a slightly darker possible interpretation of the reaction of the Ayrshire Fogies and Burns aficionados.

Status Quo are of course an English group whose roots lie in London.

The current event organisers are I understand an English firm and there was some reaction here when an English firm was given the responsibility for the event. Now we see further reaction to an English rock band headlining the event.

Excuse my cynicism but we wouldn't be getting a whiff of anti-English racism here would we? The suspicion would be that had the announcement been about a headline band from for example Scotland or elsewhere there would have been little of this " What's that got to do with Burns" reaction.

Small town/county parochialism and nasty minded petty racism seem to so often go hand in hand but we could do without this in Ayrshire particularly when celebrating the poet who told us "A man's a man for a' that".