When college students Lynsey Rumbaut and Ramy Hanna arrived at The Cabot theater in Beverly for a live concert March 9, they discovered that an entirely different music experience awaited them than what they expected.
Rumbaut, a freshman at Wellesley College, and Hanna, a freshman at Dartmouth College, said they thought they had bought last-minute tickets to see the rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers. Instead, they purchased tickets to see Red Hot Chilli Pipers, a Scottish Celtic-rock bagpiping ensemble.
“Not the Red Hot Chili Peppers, still fresh though,” Hanna posted on his Snapchat story along with a video of the band’s performance.
Red Hot Chilli Pipers, the 2007 winners of the BBC talent show “When Will I Be Famous?” covered well-known songs at the concert including Coldplay’s “Fix You,” Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” and “This is Me” from The Greatest Showman soundtrack, putting a Celtic spin on contemporary pop.
Since their first higher-profile cameo performance in 2004, the band has released six albums, most notably the 2007 record “Bagrock to the Masses,” which went platinum in Scotland. The group also appears in the soundtrack of “How To Train Your Dragon 2.”
The Pipers have pioneered a new genre through their Scottish-pop rock fusion, which they’ve coined “bagrock.”
Two guitarists, three bagpipers, two drummers and one singer also performed Celtic-inspired choreography at The Cabot. The ensemble dressed in their traditional garb: black kilts, red knee-high socks and matching shirts with the band’s insignia, a bagpipe with a flame as its base, printed on the back.
This was the group’s second year in a row performing at The Cabot theater, according to attendee Nancy Josselin-Belanger. Many in the crowd were returning attendees, among them Josselin-Belanger and Lee Belanger, both Beverly natives.
During the intermission, Belanger said he looked forward to the upcoming drum solo, as it was his favorite part of last year’s performance.
“Your heart gets pumping, and it really gets into your soul,” said Josselin-Belanger, who added she grew up attending events at The Cabot for her whole life.
The drum solo, appearing in the second half of the ensemble’s performance, spotlighted the band’s percussionist Grant Cassidy, who is an eight-time world champion snare drummer.
Cassidy is not the ensemble’s only renowned Scottish musician. Pipers’ former frontman and founder Stuart Cassells was the first person to obtain a degree in bagpipes from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, one of the oldest and most prestigious performing arts schools in the United Kingdom. As a whole, the group attained a total of four degrees from the Conservatoire.
Cassidy engaged the audience by challenging them to clap to his drum beat, increasing the speed to match the claps until the audience couldn’t keep up with him.
The crowd danced and clapped during high-energy numbers, such as Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and lit up the theater with flashlights during more subdued numbers, such as Coldplay’s “Fix You.”
New Bedford resident Mike Hartley said he came to the concert because he was intrigued by the Pipers’ musical stylings.
“I think they’re really entertaining — I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Hartley said. “I like bagpipe music in parades, so I wanted to see what they would be like.”
Eric Riley, a security guard at The Cabot, clapped along to the music. Riley said listening to the music while working was a perk of his job.
“It’s a great start to the St. Patrick’s Day week,” he said during intermission.
The audience supported the group as they experienced a microphone malfunction at the start of “This Is Me.” According to Willie Armstrong, a bagpiper in the band, the Red Hot Chilli Pipers’ singer has “the voice of an angel” and was encouraged by the crowd’s cheers to restart the song after experiencing the technical difficulty.
His falsetto, featured in nearly every number, was followed by applause from the audience.
Armstrong said Beverly could expect another visit from the Red Hot Chilli Pipers.
“We definitely want to come back,” Armstrong said in an interview. “Boston has a lot of Celtic roots, so that’s why we come, and we love it.”
The crowd consisted mostly of older couples, and Hanna and Rumbaut were among the youngest audience members in attendance. The young couple said they were very impressed by the band’s performance.
“It was actually really good,” Hanna said. “We got T-shirts to commemorate the experience.”
