f28


although I had this thing from my father I was kind of estranged from it, because by the time that I was grown up he wasn’t a professional musician anymore. I was grow- ing up in a small town in Scotland where there wasn’t really any music scene to speak of. Occasionally you might get a sort of Scottish folk band in the local pub but it would be quite touristy and didn’t repre- sent the real traditions. Maybe if I’d lived in Glasgow or Edinburgh I’d have been more involved in traditional music making. But I felt I was quite isolated when I started dis- covering those songs.”


“So I was mostly just listening to old records and remembering songs from my childhood and singing them quite apart from a scene. I didn’t know anyone else that was doing it but I think I had a sense of what I felt was the right way to approach it. Or what seemed to be an appropriate way to present the songs.”


Without anyone else around, what was informing that instinct?


“It was just through listening to older singers, whether those were field record- ings or singers of the revivalist generation who I found convincing. Just sensing that they were communicating the songs in a way which worked or captivated you. It felt like certain singers were capable of imbuing a song with truth.”


Who were you listening to? “When I started singing these songs the


internet wasn’t such a big deal. Nowadays you can go and listen to lots of archive recordings of singers, then it was more diffi- cult. So strangely I think it was a lot of English singers. It was also to do with things that were in my father’s record collection. Nic Jones was a big early influence. His effortless, beautiful singing and the symbio- sis of those things was really impressive to me when I was in my late teens. Names which are probably obvious to readers of fRoots like Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins, Anne Briggs – big figures in the English revival. Those four are all such distinctive voices and I think that’s what I learned from them – you have to find your own voice.”


“Another thing I learned from these people, Shirley Collins in particular, was the importance of exploring the Scottish tradi- tion that was around me. I’m not even that Scottish, I’m half Scottish, half German.”


You sound very Scottish.


“That’s because I’ve lived there most of my life. I’m 39 now and I’ve lived there since I was two and a half. But the Scottish- ness is much more important to me than the Germanness, even though sometimes I do think about Germanness and exploring that musically more. But I’ve not done that in much depth.”


“I grew up in Southern Perthshire, it’s not like the real heartland. When people think of Perthshire they probably think more of Blairgowrie where a lot of the great traveller singers were from, like Sheila Stewart. That tradition is important to me, although I’m a bit estranged from it because I’ve been living in Glasgow almost 22 years and even when I lived there I wasn’t part of that tradition. But I’m retrospectively exploring it and identifying with it even though I’m not a traveller either. But there’s something about the music of the Stewarts. And Lizzie Higgins the Aberdeen singer is another of my favourites. Lizzie Higgins’


style resonates with me more than her mother’s, though obviously they’re both amazing singers. I kind of viewed certain Scottish singers as exemplary to listen to and learn from, in terms of finding and locating your own voice in this continuum of tradition.”


Was there a moment of breakthrough where you thought this music could be the thing that you did?


“I


used to play with my father a lot when I was a teenager. He used to play tunes on dul- cimer or accordeon and I would bash away on guitar.


And he said, ‘I think you might like this song, it’s got some quite mysterious imagery.’ And it was his version of The False Bride. That was one of the first traditional songs that captivated me and one of the first I really sang; I think he learned it from Alex Campbell who was a family friend and someone he’d worked with a bit. And the mystery of that song got to me. From then on it was songs I thought had a similar atmosphere or magic to them. For a spell I was quite interested in night visiting songs and I’ve recorded quite a few of them. Especially shortly after my father died I got particularly interested in them, I was think- ing about them a lot.”


In his lecture The Secret Life Of The


Love Song, Nick Cave describes how the loss of his father created “a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose”, an impetus he relates to WH Auden’s idea of a child’s life becoming “a serious matter” following a traumatic event. Given the gravity of your work I won- der if you see any of that in yourself?


“Yeah. When my father died I feel like my singing improved literally overnight. I remember singing at the funeral and I felt a power in my voice that I just hadn’t had before, and a conviction I hadn’t had before. It did make me take things more seriously. I mean, I was always serious but this was a different level of it.”


Is that new sense of conviction where your own songs began to come from?


“I feel like I was writing before I was singing traditional songs really. When I was seventeen I bought a four-track tape recorder and spent most of the next couple of years in my bedroom with no friends, just experimenting. I wasn’t really thinking at all about tradition or my place in it.”


“When I started writing in my late teens I was still living in a tiny village in cen- tral Scotland. My milieu there was totally rural and I think that influenced me a lot and left its mark to this day. From the begin- ning of my writing there was always a sense of what you might call ‘nature mysticism’ to do with the trees and plants, birds, moun- tains, rivers and lochs around where I grew up. I sensed the things around me in the natural world as a numinous, mysterious presence and they conjured within me vari- ous ineffable moods. It was those moods which, first of all, I was attempting to cap- ture in song form. Perhaps these moods, this sense of the numinous in the natural world is a similar impulse behind certain ‘pagan’ belief systems or modes of being. I’ve read my writing being described as pagan before and I can definitely understand that charac- terisation. You can probably feel that throughout my work to this day.”


To me your songs are less pagan than they are literary. It’s a style that over the years has expanded into your own recognis- able and quite unique lyricism.


“As a teenager I was listening more to American bands and whatever John Peel beamed into my young brain. Not so much American singer-songwriters, most of whom I didn’t and still don’t really listen to, but to more abstract, usually pretty slow indie-rock bands such as Codeine and Slint. So a lot of my early songs were similarly slow and abstract and elliptical – a naïve combination of those influences, the folk music remem- bered from childhood and the natural world around me.”


“I’ve always been very interested in lan- guage, not necessarily in literature. I studied Literature in Glasgow so there was a variety of poetic and literary influences, maybe some of those early songs have a sort of imagist or symbolist influence in that regard. But I never read what you were sup- posed to be reading.”


“But before I got into music I was very interested in linguistics and etymology and the relations between languages. Maybe in a way it’s a quest for the underlying struc- ture of things. And there are similar under- lying structures in music. I try to be particu- lar about the use of words and the various nuances and charges and webs of meaning that they can have. It’s perhaps more nuanced than most people can cope with!”


“Later I turned my attention more towards oral traditional material, in particu- lar the ballads, at the same time as I began exploring more recordings of older singers from the British Isles. And so gradually I became a ballad singer. That’s something I consider myself to be to this day and some- thing which I think I will always be. But the ballads and old songs also had a huge influ- ence on my own songwriting. It became a bit less abstract maybe, as I thought more about narrative, and some attempted self- written narrative songs start to appear on albums like Farewell Sorrow and The Amber Gatherers. I became concerned that the songs should be rooted ‘here’, where I am, whether that’s Scotland or the British Isles or more widely still, Europe. Relatedly, I became concerned that American influ- ences in particular shouldn’t predominate. Perhaps that’s a major difference between my own songs and those of other songwrit- ers, since American influences are so pre- dominant and nigh inescapable throughout the world and within the British Isles. So I began to use elements of Scottish, English and Irish traditional song in my own songs, whether those were melodic or structural features, or lyrical and thematic tropes… trying to locate my own self-written work within a kind of continuum of tradition. So that meant lots of research, which at times is more rigorous than at others – listening to old recordings, reading old song books, try- ing to find new ways of putting the inherit- ed body of traditional material to good cre- ative use.”


Like a folk Womble. Was that research period the same process for your new album?


“On Pangs I use similar techniques. For example, tunes for older Scottish songs and Irish songs crop up, skewed or rewrit- ten or adapted to various extents. There are some lyrical and stylistic tropes of tradi- tional song which feature too. The natural


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84