Local Talent: The Badpiper!

There is a busker well known in these parts called The Badpiper. I’ve only been lucky enough to catch his show once or twice and then not even a whole set. But I’ve loved what I saw. Picture this: a dude with a mohawk, a leather kilt, huge (and AWESOME) goth boots, tattoos all up his arms and an electric bagpipe. You can’t get any better than that, right? 😀 Well, he did …

Today I had to duck into Fremantle to pick something up at the markets. I waited until Cub went down for his nap and then bribed Bug with icecream to get him to come with me. I quite like taking Bug to Freo by ourselves … its our one on one time. We got to the markets, got what we wanted, got Bug’s icecream and headed out to the courtyard outside the markets to have a look at the buskers. Bug loves buskers, he loves music of any sort and a chance to actually watch it being made appears to be his idea of heaven. The band playing was one of those mood music type of bands … you know, the type with a bongo drum, dulcimers and a bunch of electronic sounding whale song-esque stuff in the background. Not too bad but not anything to be excited about. Then I noticed the board with the names of the performers and times that they will play. The Badpiper was on it and he was next! I got ridiculously excited. I hadn’t seen him around in years and I had begun to think that he was off the busking circuit. So we hung around to see him, which turned our quick trip to Freo to an hours long outing. But it was worth it. He’d added FLAMES to his show! I shit you not. He’s got some sort of rig on his pipes so that he can shoot flames off the ends of three of the pipes while he plays. Thankfully my phone is pretty handy and I took a video:

How awesome is he? He does this professionally so you can hire him for weddings, parties, etc. I wish I’d known about him when we got married. We would have hired him in a heartbeat. I wish I could come up with an excuse to have a function that would require a musician …