root salad Inge Thomson
Accordeons, noises, quirky songs: what’s not to like about this Fair Isle native? Rose Skelton gets ferried.
T
here’s a furious debate going on around our table, as the ferry from the Shetland Islands pulls across an uncharacteristically flat sea. None of us know which island is Fair Isle. We know it’s a good way from the southern point of the Shetlands but when a shape looms in the distance, we’re not sure if this is it. Luckily accordeonist and Fair Isle native Inge Thomson happens to be passing our table and puts an end to our questioning. That, she says, pointing, is it. Population 68.
While the Shetland Islands, 100 miles north-east of the north coast of Scotland, are extremely removed from the main- land, they feel almost like a nation in themselves, with a busy capital, a good economy, a growing population, and rela- tively easy to get to and leave again. Fair Isle, just 3 square miles of it, is part of the Shetland group of islands but lies off to one side, 40 miles away. It’s remote from even the remotest part of Britain, a small island in a sea filled with legends of boats that went down and boats that were saved. It’s an island dominated by its sur- roundings – the sea.
“I suppose the sea being so important, a lot of my lyrics are flat-out things con- cerning it,” says Inge when we get to chat after my Fair Isle geography lesson on the Shetland ferry, “or concerning nature or concerning fishing boats. I like things which feel like they’re in stasis then have a stormy bit and have another bit, so you could apply that to the sea or to island sounds. But you could probably apply it to living in a jungle too.”
A founding member of Scottish band Harem Scarem and a member of the Karine Polwart band, Inge’s debut solo album, Shipwrecks And Static (Navigator; see fR322), was out in May 2010; a quirky set of songs mixing looped and distorted sounds, intriguing accordeon melodies and tales of life sung with her distinctive- ly sweet – but weighty – voice that will suddenly swing a key change and land in a delicious harmony. Husband and fellow box-player Martin Green appears on the album too, giving it extra melodic quirk. It’s one of those albums that grows on you the more you listen and find out about the character, and the tales, behind the songs.
“I’d heard stories of the Norseman’s Bride going down,” says Inge, telling me the tale of the trawler that sunk in 1975 off the coast of Fair Isle. “Everybody was saved on that which was quite amazing because it was so stormy that night. They were off a particularly hostile bit of the island where there’s no access to land.”
This particular event gave birth to a song by the same name which opens with the wheezing of her piano keyed accordeon doubled up with an ominous- sounding instrument that whistles like the wind. Some electronic ‘fizzes’ go off in the distance, punctuated by brief, airy vocals.
Inge’s father and uncle were light- house keepers and auxiliary lifeboat men, as well as musicians in a band based on Fair Isle. Inge and her brother grew up both a part of the rehearsals that went on at one or other of the houses, and a part of the dramatic sea rescues, visible from their vantage point at the lighthouse.
“I remember sitting watching and being amazed by these flares going off on another boat that went down in ’79 or ’80,” she says, remembering one such res- cue. “It was a fishing boat that was going down and I remember sitting with my brother out the front of the house watch- ing the flares and thinking, ‘Wow, isn’t that cool!’ while this boat was sinking!”
I t’s deeply
moving to hear these stories told with the intensity of
memory on stage, but there’s
humour in it too. There’s a range of well-timed noises involved in the tracks – Inge works with a sound- maker on stage who uses a Mac computer to bring bells, beeps and whistles in and out of the strong box melodies – and the album is equally filled with phonic quips.
“When I was
making the album I got quite proper- ly geeky with my laptop,” she says, adding that while her father gave her an introduc- tion to accordeon music as a child, she never stuck with lessons and preferred to sit alone with pop songs and try tunes out. She gets a lot of stac-
cato ‘noise’ out of her red bellows (“A lot of accordeon players do that and they think that they invented it; I thought that I’d invented it until I heard someone else doing it”), but she also uses what she calls “all manner of modern wrong things” – loops and key oscillators – to expand the landscape of her songs.
An impromptu visit to some caves in Armenia with the Karine Polwart band and some officials from the local branch of the British Council there, produced an eerie, resonating vocal recording that went into Scoundrel Clouds. It sounds like it might have been through Inge’s electronic sound system, so distorted it seems, but she claims it was an entirely natural process.
“I took a snippet of it and I looped it, but then I sat down and listened to the entire first part and thought, I don’t want to do anything to that, it’s truly beautiful. I love it when things like that occur naturally.”
www.ingethomson.com F 19 f
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