Arts Extra Radio Ulster
Today Radio 4
The Chris Evans Breakfast Show Radio 2
They say that uilleann pipers can be socially awkward types... you need to like to spend time on your own if you have a set of pipes to master.
I imagine a beginner on the pipes sounds not unlike a large cow in the throes of labour.
But not so with the pipers featured on Arts Extra this week.
The music was so hauntingly beautiful that it was hard to move on to anything else.
The occasion was to talk about the launch of The Wheels of the World: 300 Years of Irish Uilleann Pipers – at the Duncairn Centre, Belfast, tomorrow (Sunday) and the music was of the live and of the recorded variety.
Presenter Marie-Louise Muir knows her pipes.
The good and the great were heard from Liam O’Flynn to Seamus Ennis.
The pipers in studio were so good you could have listened all day – the sound is sad and melodic. There was a time, they said, when, if a piper walked into a session, the other musicians would perhaps not jump up to welcome them.
But that, it seems, is no longer the case and the haunting blue-sy sound speaks for itself.
Today on Radio 4 reported on Volkswagen’s fall from grace in America when the firm was discovered to have used software in their cars to rig emissions tests.
But there was something refreshingly candid about that comment from Michael Horn, the boss of the manufacturer’s US business.
Speaking in the face of major disaster for the car company, he kept it brief. “We have totally screwed up,” he said.
Screwed up might also describe the scenario that drew Chris Evans’ attention on Radio 2. Apparently Coronation Street was having a live programme on the very night that Manchester Utd was playing Ipswich Town just down the road. If anyone scored, the cast could find themselves muted by the roars of 75,000 fans.
“The fans should hum the Eastenders theme tune,” joked Evans. It should add to the live drama at the Rovers Return.
