f26 What Scotland’s Got
An under-appreciated folk genius, that’s what! Alasdair Roberts has a work rate that would put a hive of bees to shame, and it’s invariably good stuff. Tim Chipping wonders how he does it. Judith Burrows buzzes around taking pictures.
because they don’t go on as long. Don’t be thinking that. And then there are all the collaborations. So many collaborations. Most of us don’t even know as many peo- ple as Alasdair Roberts has made records with. Maybe it’s harder for Alasdair Roberts to not make music than to make it. His slight frame is no match for the force created by all the songs that have to come out. That’s what I think’s going on.
F Alasdair Robert’s fourteenth album is
called Pangs. It will be released shortly after or just before you read this. But more on that later. It’s been thirteen years since Alas- dair last appeared on the cover of fRoots; he’s grown a beard since then. What else has changed?
“Looking back on it now I feel I was too young. I was quite a different person than I am now. I’ve grown a lot and matured a lot. I feel like I understand life and music and my place in those things much more than I did then. I think that first time was pretty premature. I was probably quite arrogant.”
Alasdair tells me this in the Cecil Sharp House café over the clatter of Morris prac- tice in the next room. Transcribing the recording some days later it sounds at times as if he’s made a spoken word album over a 90-minute loop of Shepherd’s Hey.
Was that arrogance a mask or did you think you knew best?
“It’s not that I thought I knew better; I thought I knew what was the right way for me. But I’ve come to realise that other peo- ple’s ways of being are just as valid and that they can coexist with mine. It’s good to try and find common ground rather than define yourself against them. I feel like I’ve become more accommodating as I’ve got older and more willing to take on board other people’s ideas that I might’ve before- hand dismissed.”
Is that the reason behind the many col- laborations in your career? A kind of cogni- tive therapy to assist the accommodation of others?
“Maybe it’s partly because I spent a lot of my musical development alone as a teenager and I don’t really wanna be alone anymore!”
ourteen albums. Fourteen. That’s a lot of albums. And there are EPs too. Lots of EPs, which are almost albums. There’s no reason to think of them as inferior just
Alasdair’s early isolation from not just the folk scene but any scene at all is key to understanding how someone so steeped in ancient balladry and the craft of storytelling in song has been, and to some extent still is an outsider.
Having been born in Germany he was raised in Kilmahog, a Scottish hamlet whose Wikipedia entry reads: “The village today consists of a few houses and two woollen mill retail facilities.” At least he never went short of jumpers.
“I grew up watching Culture Club on
Top Of The Pops but at the same time there was an influence from my father [Alan Roberts] and his background in the folk scene. Probably some of the earliest music I heard was that ’70s revival folk music. Scot- tish bands like the Tannahill Weavers and Silly Wizard and The Battlefield Band.”
So it isn’t inevitable you would follow the folk path; you could’ve been the next Boy George. Why do you think your father’s music left its mark?
“I imagine it’s because I had similar interests to my father. He died in 2001 so I’ve not been able to talk to him about it for fifteen years but I imagine it’s that.”
A psychoanalyst might suggest you were doing it to get his attention or to earn his approval.
“Well I think the thing with him, he was a great instrumentalist – banjo, accordeon but mostly guitar. He had a great sense of timing, his accompaniments to songs and tunes were just immaculate I think. He wasn’t so much a singer though and I feel I’ve concentrated a lot more on singing than he ever did. To me singing is a big thing, to him it was incidental. So maybe it was me listening to my father sing and thinking ‘I can do better than that!’”
“I made this record called The Crook Of
My Arm that was all traditional songs, when he was still alive. And I think he thought I was gonna upset or offend traditional music fans with what I’d done to the songs. They didn’t sound very radical to me.”
That notion that what you do with tra- ditional music is radical has followed you around a bit, perhaps unhelpfully and inex- plicably. Did you think you were just doing what everyone else was doing?
“Not really. When I started singing tra- ditional songs I was in my early 20s and I didn’t have much context for it, because
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