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Paul Anderson was born in Torphins in 1970 and was brought up in Tarland. His family go back a long way in this area of North-East Scotland. He started having lessons on the fiddle when he was nine, but his interest in the instrument began when he was five, when he found a fiddle in the spare room at his grandparents' home. He said: "So, I found this and thought this was a great novelty, this musical instrument. So they [his grandparents] … seemed to think that I might hae an interest in learning to play. So they said that if I learnt to play it I could keep the fiddle." Paul explained that his grandparents did not play themselves, but they wanted to keep a fiddle at home for visitors who would provide entertainment. Paul still plays this instrument and really likes its tone. He can trace his teaching lineage directly to Niel Gow, through his tutor Douglas Lawrence, the most acclaimed pupil of Hector MacAndrew. Hector was taught by his grandfather who was taught by the last pupil of Gow.
Paul’s experience includes leadership of the Banchory Strathspey and Reel Society and playing fiddle with Shetland folk rock band, ‘Rock, Salt and Nails’. He was also appointed to the post of Huntly Toon Fiddler in 2003. His main interest, however, is solo performance and composition of fiddle music in the Scottish traditional music style. Paul has won most of the fiddle championships in Scotland, his crowning glory was winning the Glenfiddich Scottish Fiddle Championship at Blair Castle in 1993. A regular on Scottish television and radio, Paul has toured extensively and has recorded 7 solo albums. Although only in his early thirty’s, Paul is already something of an icon in Scotland, a fact duly recognised by two specially commissioned portraits of him, a life size one in Aberdeen Art Gallery and a study that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. In the tradition of many of Scotland’s great fiddlers, Paul is also a composer of some repute, having written around 200 pieces in the traditional style.
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