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s well as working on this album, it’s been a busy cou- ple of years in other ways. 2012 has already seen the release of Urstan, an album of traditional Gaelic bal- lads in collaboration with Lewis singer Mairi Morri- son. While Mairi has Gaelic as her mother tongue, Alasdair speaks none. “I’ve always been really interested in the language, and it’s informed my music a lot,” he says, “but I didn’t, and I don’t, speak Gaelic. When I was in high school I really want- ed to learn but – in a rare case of my mother putting her foot down – I learnt German instead. My mother’s German, and she thought it would be more useful for me to learn that.” Instead, Alasdair discovered the language through the songs on Urstan, and via old recordings of other Gaelic traditionals. It chimed well with other influences, particularly his interest in Celtic Christiani- ty. “It’s the sort of thing that I come back to, and that I think about,” he says. “I find beauty in it. I’m not a Christian, but there’s something quite beautiful in it.”
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Urstan is just the latest in an ongoing commitment to tradition- al song that began in earnest with Alasdair’s first post-Appendix Out record, 2001’s The Crook Of My Arm. “I do think that I sometimes avoid writing by singing traditional songs,” he admits. “At the moment, I’m researching a bunch of ballads that I will maybe record in the next year or two.” He considers how he discovers a song’s depth. “I guess it’s like an actor, working on a script,” he says. “[Some] do take a lot of singing. I sung Long A-Growing tonight, which I started singing about eight or nine years ago, and I’ve start- ed singing again recently. I feel like I’m singing it much better now. It feels like I’m ready to sing it, in a way that I didn’t feel before. I’ve also been singing the ballad The Dun Broon Bride, which is a Scots version of Lord Thomas And Fair Eleanor. I learned that from the Glasgow singer Gordeanna McCulloch. I’ve been singing that at a few gigs, to break it in, but… there’s still a lot to explore.”
At the end of last year, Alasdair curated the album Whaur The Pig Gaed On The Spree, a collection of Alan Lomax’s Scottish record- ings, featuring the likes of Hamish Henderson, Jeannie Robertson and Davie Stewart. “I was approached by Nathan Salsburg,” says Alasdair of this project. “He works for the Alan Lomax archive, based in Louisville. It was really exciting for me. I consider old Scottish folk- song [to be] one of the bedrocks of my own work. So it was great to get the chance to just sit and listen to all those old recordings.”
Whaur The Pig Gaed On The Spree came out on Alasdair’s reg- ular label, the indie Drag City. I argue that it’s been quite a journey for Drag City. Eleven years ago, it didn’t want to put out The Crook Of My Arm; now it’s releasing hardcore archive field recordings. It seems that traditional music now has a far wider acceptability to younger people, in a way it didn’t back then.
“I think Drag City realise that I’m in it for the long term,” he laughs. “They saw [Whaur The Pig…] in the context of my own work. But what was kind of weird was that they didn’t really have any success in finding a Scottish label to put it out. It’s strange. That betrays to me a certain disregard Scots have for their own culture. Or maybe they just didn’t like the record.”
One of Alasdair’s more esoteric recent projects was a piece of puppet theatre. “I was working on it with my friend Shane Con- nolly, a drummer and a puppeteer. The School Of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh commissioned us, along with some other artists, to mark the 60th anniversary of the School. The original brief was to create some new musical work, drawing on the sound archive from the School. But it grew and grew.” Inspired by the Scottish Mummers’ play Galoshins, Alasdair explains that this is another example of the Carnivalesque. “There’s the binary thing,” he says, “the fight between good and evil. Galoshins is killed, and then brought back to life. Order is upside down and restored again.”
As we wrap up our interview, I relate to him that audience
member’s comment: that the Alasdair Roberts experience had become more intense in the last few years. He thinks. Intensely.
“Personally, a lot of things have changed in my life in the past three or four years,” he says. “I feel like I’ve grown up a lot and experienced a lot of different things. I don’t want to get too per- sonal about it, but I’m just a different person to how I was then.
“With regard to all my previous work, [the new songs] are probably similar to Spoils than anything else. But one thing that will be different [in this record] is the sleevenotes. Spoils had very minimal sleevenotes. I think that’s because I wasn’t feeling in a very good place at that time in my life, to be honest. So I was neglecting my work, in a way. But now… I feel more invulnerable.”
Alasdair Roberts will be one of the artists featured in our A Cellar Full Of Folkadelia afternoon concert series at Kennaway House during Sidmouth Folk Week 2012. See page 54 for details. F
www.alasdairroberts.com
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