47 f Two Twelfths
Scottish/Orcadian duo Twelfth Day, purveyors of folk and classically-influenced slightly-weirdness of their own devising, talk it to Tim Chipping.
cian, what you don’t see are the forms and funding applications, the licences, the logistics, the lists of numbers to call, invoices to send and tickets to book. Your dreams never warn you about those.
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“Sometimes you get to the point where taking the fiddle or the harp out of the box feels like a treat. And you’re like, ‘I thought this was my job?’” That’s the daily reality of Catriona Price, one half of Orca- dian/Scottish duo Twelfth Day who’ve so far self-released three albums and an EP, and self-managed numerous tours and a hugely ambitious project taking them to four corners of the Earth. Handling all that themselves means making music is just one of the things they do.
hen you stand in front of your bedroom mirror, hair- brush or tennis racket in hand, and imagine the life you could have as a musi-
“We always try to start the day with some playing or writing,” says other half Esther Swift, “even if we find ourselves doing it standing at the foot of an admin mountain!” Although they admit they’ve reached a point where they’re so busy playing gigs that they’ve no time to book more gigs (prospective agents take note).
The result of that playing and writing (and admin) is Twelfth Day’s startlingly original and beautifully strange new album The Devil Makes Three. I’ve been staring at the space where this sentence is for ten minutes trying to think of a way to categorise it. I’ve got nothing.
“We’re trying to bring together every- thing that we’ve heard over the years and make something almost out of a genre,” Esther explains, not particularly helpfully.
“We don’t like genres,” adds Catriona, “I think it’s quite limiting. It’s fine that peo-
ple label us ‘folk’, because we’ve grown up in the Scottish scene so obviously it will sound a little like that. But we also don’t want that to limit who else might listen to it. And having studied at classical music institutions as well, that term ‘classical’ is awful. It’s a word that describes what, 80 years of music history? And it’s now applied to everything. That’s an example of where a genre stereotype can be really bad.
“I went to see the RSNO playing Messi-
aen’s Turangalîla-symphonie. I hadn’t been to an orchestral concert maybe since I left college. And it was totally psychedelic. You want to be dancing, and obviously you can’t do that. But why should it be any dif- ferent to going to hear a band you love?”
Thoughts turn to the Bristol Universi- ty academic recently ejected from a per- formance of Handel’s Messiah for attempting to crowd surf. That revolu- tion may take time.
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