‘IT all started around the age of seven, when I was making too much noise in the house,” laughs Angus Smith.
“Father took me by the ear to the backdoor, and said I could do ‘fiddle, accordion or pipes?’, and for me, it was the latter.”
Today, almost half a centenary later and following a long spell in the Royal Highland Regiment’s Black Watch, Angus continues to play in a city some 3800 miles away from where he was raised in Crieff, Perthshire.
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Known for its spectacular sights of the Northern Lights, Fairbanks is located in the centre of Interior Alaska, and Angus, 56, arrived there in 2004 after many years of dedication to his craft.
“I spent all my schooling at Morrison’s Academy playing in their band and CCF, and at 16, I joined the Junior Army at IJLB (Infantry Junior Leaders Battalion) in Shorncliffe.”
He took the Colours at Black Watch in 1985, but after leaving in 1989, he changed direction, becoming a “pony man” on an estate in the Cairngorms.
The Red Hackle Pipe Band are celebrating their 50th anniversary (Image: NQ)
“The bothy I lived in was the highest inhabitable place in the UK, which, now I think of it, was good training for a future in Alaska!”
He worked in deer management as a stalker at Glen Etive, and then on the Isle of Jura, which is where Angus says he began looking for an escape.
“There was a piper and drumming website that had a list of every band throughout the world, and in the world of deer stalking one would always hear great tales of Alaska, so I put my thoughts together. And it was true – in Alaska, your mind is in overdrive, with a never-ending horizon. The solitude and scale of it is truly mighty.”
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He signed up with what he calls “Uncle Sammy’s Infantry” in 2009, and spent time in Afghanistan in 2012. After leaving their service in 2013, he became qualified to work as a mechanic for Everts Air, a family-owned business in Fairbanks that hauls fuel and cargo into the bush.
He landed on his feet musically in Fairbanks too.
“Luckily it wasn’t long before I found and happily connected with the Red Hackle Pipe Band, and they were home from home to an ex-Black Watch piper!”
(Image: Getty Images)
The band are celebrating their 50th anniversary, and are entering their busy summer period, when Fairbanks sees 24 hours of “midnight sun” for months, and barely any darkness until the end of August.
“We gather most weeks upon an evening, and we might be one of the few bands left, certainly in America, that have field dancers in band uniform,” he says, adding that they also encourage and foster Scots culture and educate the younger generation in the form of piping, drumming and dancing.
He met his wife Kimberly, who hails from Long Island, New York, when they were stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, but he has not come across many other Scots in Alaska, and says that he tries to return to Scotland every year to see his mother, who has dementia.
“I think I miss the characters that abounded in the Highlands – stalkers, shepherds, crofters and Islanders, they’re a colourful bunch – but I love it here!”
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