Jamesie Johnston of Albannach, looking healthy.
He’s baaack.
Jamesie Johnston, the popular, long-haired “baron of bass” for the Scottish percussive group, Albannach, literally wasn’t missing a beat on Saturday in Lansdale despite a three-month respite to recover from stab wounds he received after a Scottish festival in Kentucky last summer.
On June 5, an intoxicated fan stabbed Johnston in the mid-section and thigh, puncturing his lung. Johnston had been attempting to eject the man, who had become belligerent, from the cabin where the band was relaxing after their show.
“It took a good two or three months to recover from that,” Johnston said, as the band was setting up for the first of half a dozen sets they would play at the annual Molly O’Ween street festival at Wood and Main streets, outside Molly Maguire’s pub. “Three weeks out I was so out of breath I couldn’t do anything and with the wound in my thigh it was hard to walk. I like to jog and exercise most days, so it got depressing.”
The punctured lung kept Johnston from returning home to Glasgow, Scotland. “I was on a no-fly thing because I couldn’t be in a pressurized cabin,” he explained. Band mate Jacquie Holland stayed with Johnston for a time while he recuperated in the University of Louisville Hospital and later at the home of a friend.
He refused blood transfusions and rehab. “I ate healthy, took lots of vitamins and stayed as active as possible,” Johnston explained. “I just wanted to get on with it so I would get up and move about as much as I could.”
On Saturday, only his fifth gig since rejoining the band in September, he appeared none the worse for wear, rocking and jumping as he hammered out the heart-pounding rhythms that make Albannach (the Gaelic word for Scotland) one of the most popular bands on the Celtic circuit. They appear every year at the Mid-Winter Scottish and Irish Festival in Valley Forge, at Molly O’Ween, and occasionally at Brittingham’s Irish Pub. They’re managed in the US by Bill and Karen Reid of East of the Hebrides Entertainments in Plymouth Meeting.
Like many who’ve been through a life-threatening experience, Johnston considers himself lucky to be alive. “If I’d been stabbed an inch to either side, it could have been much worse,” he said. “I’m very lucky.”
