Campbell and co-creator Kath Burlinson have created three solo multi-disciplinary theatre shows, Living Stone (premieres in August 2024), Auld Lang Syne (2018) and Pulse (2015), as part of a trilogy.
Campbell is one half of the duo The Cast, whose version of the Robert Burns poem "Auld Lang Syne" featured in the movie Sex and the City.
Campbell is also a member of the ceilidh band The Occasionals,[1] and is a guest musician with the baroque ensemble Concerto Caledonia.
She was brought up alongside her three sisters by their mother, the artist Marjorie Campbell and their father Archie, an academic at Napier University.
She went on to study with Csaba Erelyi at Guildhall School of Music in London where she was penalised for playing her own composition in her final exam.
[citation needed] The accordion player and multi-instrumentalist Freeland Barbour took her under his wing and she joined the Scottish dance band the Occasionals, in 1992.
[citation needed] Campbell initially gained prominence as one half of the folk band The Cast, alongside her husband David Francis, with whom she has had a long collaboration.
In 1999, Campbell and Francis were invited to perform their version of Auld Lang Syne for Sean Connery at the Presidential Awards in Washington, D.C., with President Bill Clinton in the audience.
Red Earth is the story of her grandmother's life as the wife of Campbell's grandfather, a young doctor who died in China in 1938 during the Sino-Japanese War.
Mairi Campbell features the songs Portobello Sands which tells of a mother keenly awaiting the return of her child.
[11] Pulse is co-devised and directed by Kath Burlinson, who worked on the 2012 Fringe show Wolf[12] and is founder and director of the Authentic Artist Collective.
[citation needed] So, in the here and now, on a stage bare but for a rough-hewn pendulum – its flat stone culled from her family's croft – Campbell opens her throat in a spirit of belonging that is ancient and modern, and life affirming for all of usA mesmerising performer with such a gift for accents and physical comedy that it's easy to forget her main job is folk musicianIn 2017, Pulse had a second run at the Fringe and Campbell took the show on tour around Scotland.
[17] From 2007 to 2017, Campbell ran music retreats on the Isle of Lismore in the Southern Hebrides in Argyll where she has ancestral links and a cottage and studio.