The Reds
The spirits of chaos and disorder, the Reds and their musicians, the Red Beastie Drummers, try to disrupt the procession with their lewd and lascivious behaviour.
The Reds are the Lords and Ladies of Misrule. Beltane is their night of mischief – the World Turn’d Upside Down – the one night of the year where fools become kings. The Red Men represent the archetypes of the mischief makers, Pan-like figures who live for the moment without a care in the world or any inhibitions to censor them.
Our charming friends have this single night each year to make merry, tempt, seduce, carry out acts of foolishness and wantoness and inspire the revellers to cast aside their thoughts of the next day and abandon themselves to the excesses of the night.
At Samhuinn, having endured a summer of debauchery and merry making, the red men appear with deformations, walking sticks, blindness and clumsiness. Their ‘ageing’ is in step with that of the other court characters. Their whole lives are squeezed into just a year in our own world.
The Red are often, wrongly, interpreted as being demons or devils. Far from being this they are a personification of the need in all of us to let loose and go wild just once in our lives. Their very reason for existence is simply to ‘throw a spanner in the works’, to divert the path of fate. But despite their best efforts, these random agents are always thwarted, often with comical results.
The Red Beastie Drummers (or just The Beasties) are the musical breath of the Red Men. With their strong, flowing, earthy rhythms they amplify the Red spirit of playful chaos and seduction to the whole Hill. The Red Beastie drummer prefers organic drums such as djembes, surdus, dharbukas and shakers, contrasting and complementing the snares, toms and kick drums of the more orderly and serious Processional Drummers.