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Since taking up the pipes I haven't written much fiddle music (apart from string quartet arrangements for pipe tunes), and looking over these again I find they're still pretty good.

The Corsair
The Tartar Frigate

These were written around 1985, quite soon after I had become immersed in traditional music. They are very Irish fiddle in style, reflecting my influences at the time. It was quite a compliment when they were both recorded by the excellent Irish band Nomos on their 1995 CD I Won't Be Afraid Any More. Before that, Kathryn Tickell had recorded The Tartar Frigate on Borderlands (my first bite of fame's apple - thanks Kathryn!), and again later on The Kathryn Tickell Band CD, and The Blackford Fiddle Group have recorded it more recently on Free Reeling. The recordings don't necessarily follow the dots note for note, but here are the composer's versions.

President Gorbachev's Hornpipe
The Perestroika Reel

This all seems a very long time ago now... in the depths of gloom of the Thatcher era one hopeful phenomenon was the humanising of the Soviet bloc in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev. Ironically I gather that many Russians thought as well of MG as many of us thought of MT, and vice versa, a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Whatever the reality, these two tunes were and are a little tribute to the man who had the vision to salvage Glasnost from the catastrophe of Chernobyl. They were both on the Blue Moon Band's 1992 cassette Barka's Yarka, now available as a limited edition CD, and the hornpipe was also recorded by Pete Clark on his Fiddlecase CD. The hornpipe is written with straight quavers but is played 'swung'.