Our walking preparation for Kiltwalk Dundee in August continues and this time with some wandering out west. The man and I stopped off in Dumfries and Galloway on our way back from friends and family time in Yorkshire and whilst he looked at boats (SkiffieWorlds - see here) I dragged myself along the coast a bit on Monday morning. It was just me as daughter was working back in Dundee. I didn't have any maps but you can see the endpoint clearly on the other side of the Loch so I quickly screenshotted some instructions just in case and set off after breakfast.
It was a very windy day - so windy that the boating was cancelled for the day, filling the cafés of Stranraer with a positive rainbow of sporty hoodies and people looking at weather forecasts (the event lasts a week and I'm pleased to report that the weather was more cooperative from Tuesday onwards). People of all ages enjoy coastal rowing in St Ayles skiffs (it's huge in Scotland - read about the type of boats here) and so it was a mixed crowd and a great selection of other events put on by the organisers. On the Sunday night we had already nipped down to see the music and bar (and the views):
View from the bar, Sun evening
View from Stranraer beach, Sun evening
But back to walking. On Monday morning I walked along the edge of Loch Ryan towards Cairnryan and could see (and feel) why there was no rowing that day. The winds were quite fierce and the waves were crashing against the end of the Loch.
It is a beautiful part of the world overall but like a lot of coastal places it has its share of empty buildings. A new Water Sports Hub is in development so maybe old sites like this one that I passed at the end of the Loch will get new life before too long:
A lot of the walk went along the beach:
Looking back towards Stranraer
And then, once you're past the caravan park, the signs send you off into very green fields:
I didn't see any other walkers the whole way but I did pass some scaredy sheep:
And a whole lotta swans (according to sources a group of swans on water can be a bevy, a bank, a herd or a flock). I'm not a fan of any bird up close that is pigeon-size or bigger so meeting them at this distance was more than enough:
The route I took is meant to be part of a path network (Loch Ryan Coastal Path, part of the Mull of Galloway Trail) but it's pretty unkempt in places and I did wish I'd brought a machete at times. I had also failed to spot the bright red warning about a damaged bridge on page 1 of the online guide:
They were not wrong - one of the little foot bridges is damaged but luckily someone had hooked some branches to climb along. I was very glad at this point that I had not dragged the daughter along this route. I have a bit of a history with the family of setting off on 'short walks' that end up being daylong adventures ("it's just round the corner", "not far now" etc.) so as I awkwardly clambered about, was scratched and stung by nettles and had a few investigations ("where is the path?", "will I have to climb over the ferry port fence?") I was glad it was just me on this little hike (about 5.5 miles).
Eventually I did get to the ferry port (luckily no high fence climbing involved) but I didn't fancy returning by the same route so what to do?
Cairnryan ferry port
Google said there wasn't a bus for 2 hours but luckily the 11.17 was about 10 mins late so I managed to catch it back. It's always slightly humiliating when the bus manages to do in the flash of an eye what took you most of the morning but there we go, the wonders of the modern world.
The next day the rowing finally got started (and it's still going, last race about teatime on Sat 12th July). We watched some races and enjoyed the Wimbledon-style screens on the hill and the great atmosphere. Teams were mainly from Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands and a few from England but some came from further afield too.
SkiffieWorlds on Day 1
Road up the coast from Stranraer to Ayr
After that we headed back up the road to Dundee. It has been very hot here the last few days and daughter and I did an afternoon walk in Dundee yesterday and baked (it was too hot for photos, we did 4.5 miles or so). We now have a bluetooth splitter so can listen to the same music without inflicting it on anyone else and incorporate jazzhands and elaborate dance moves into our walk. So if you see 2 women on a red-faced silent disco around town that's us. We are over halfway to our target of £1000 for our Kiltwalk now so if you want to sponsor us there is still time - link here. Just about a month to go till the big day...
It's been some time since I was active in this space. True to form, whilst some friends are starting to retire I am just about getting going with something like paid work (quite a lot of it, long hours, many night shifts). This means being indoors and/or asleep far too much so for this and other reasons the wonderful daughter and I are aiming to complete the Dundee Kiltwalk in mid August. Some of you outwith Scotland might be wondering what the hell a Kiltwalk is (Kiltwalks are a set of annual long fundraising walks at various Scottish locations, first one back in 2016). As you might imagine, lots of people do wear kilts to take part but I don't think I will be one of those (I might manage a tartan scarf). Last year we just happened to be in town when the Dundee one was finishing and it was a great atmosphere. This year we are taking part in the Mighty Stride part of the Dundee Kiltwalk which is 20 miles (there is also a Wee Wander which is 4 miles). We are raising money for the Turner Syndrome Support Society and our fundraising page is here. I have posted some of today's pics elsewhere already but I thought I'd stick them up here as a record as well.
Because I'm not as walking fit as I have been (no dog any more you see...) I have been getting some practice in. My first stretch was a version of the Wee Wander (Dundee to Broughty Ferry, the Wee Wander in reverse in fact). It was a boiling hot day earlier in June and I rediscovered the joy of a sweaty rucksack sticking to your back but it was beautiful all the same. I ended up at Broughty Ferry beach (see pic at top of post) and along the way I saw this view (I never get tired of the Tay):
Looking from Broughty Ferry towards Tayport
Then last weekend I decided it was time to push a bit harder. On another boiling hot day I got dropped at Dundee Sailing and Rowing Club by him outdoors and I walked part of the Dundee Green Circular (more usually a bike route). I walked this:
It took a good few hours and I did about 12 miles (I don't wear any kind of clever watch or anything that counts my steps and all that - quite enough technology in my life already). I've been meaning to do the trip along the Dighty Burn for years but finally managed to do this section. Some views along the way were:
Heading towards Broughty Ferry once again
Swans near Monifieth
The Seven Arches Viaduct, Balmossie/Monifieth
Heron mural near the old Michelin factory
Mosaics on bridge at Drumgeith Park
I got a bus home, a shower, a collapse and then back to the Ferry for some lovely music in the evening, courtesy of the band Outliers and local promoters Hypercoaster Music. The album Outliers is one of my favourites of the past year or so - a good one for late nights, can't-sleep-nights and early mornings. And I'll close this post out with one of their songs Salvage, written about artist Helen Denerley:
I’ve not written much this year, been gainfully employed for a change, but here’s a little something I’ve been fiddling about with for a month or two. I read it to the folks at Newtyle Music Session last week and people seemed to like it so let’s spread it a little wider.
Today’s disc (the last in this month’s series of 31 albums and 12-inch singles) is the 2023 album Onliness (songs of solitude & singularity) by Josienne Clarke. It is a grey vinyl album and the most recent record in this series. I barely buy vinyl now but I am a big fan of this musician/singer/songwriter so I made an exception. I bought my copy on Bandcamp, I think, and you can too (vinyl, CD or just digital – go here). Here is a taste of the album, her song The Birds, which appears both on Onliness and on an acoustic selection of six tracks released later in 2023 as only me onliness:
I have written about Clarke on this blog before. In 2021, for a series of pieces about individual songs, I interviewed her about her song Done (read that interview here). Done, which is a magnificent song, makes an appearance on Onliness too in a lovely new version that I now love even more than the earlier recording. Here is that new version:
Clarke is, for me, an artist in the fullest sense of the word – she has an individual voice and a really specific way with words and sounds that gets things just right. The album starts gently, builds to some heights and big tunes (country anthem, anyone? Try Homemade Heartache) and then winds back down to a delicate close. I could keep posting tracks all week because every song is a hit waiting to be found, each one holding nuggets of truth. Have a listen to Chicago on the album, for example, and hear what she did with a crap experience a few years back – made it into pure gold.
Clarke has devoted fans but I do wish more people appreciated this brilliant artist. She said in the interview in 2021 “I’m only ever doing ‘one person hears it and recommends it to someone else’, that’s just how my career goes. It’s a slow burn.” Well, I’m doing my bit, I’m recommending again, and again, and again. Support individual artists, support creativity, support talent. Here’s another lovely piece of work from Onliness (the last track on the album):
So that’s me (and us) at the end of another series of posts about life and music (intro post for this month’s series here). We started on 1 January with The Wombles and have taken in a good sprinkling of genres along the way. Will I keep all these records as long as I’m here on this earth? Or will I send one or two on their way to go and live with someone else? I’m no closer to that kind of decision but I have enjoyed working out why I’ve kept these particular discs and donated or sold others.
I don’t know about you but here it’s been another long January full of new years, birthdays, nightshifts and memories (am I obsessed with memories? Maybe...). Every January (on about 22nd) I say “I’m never doing this again” (a blog series). I mean, who’s reading, who cares? And then I think of something else I want to write about and off we go. Self-expression does help, somehow and in some way. It’s not everything but it’s worth a go.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I’ll leave you with a poem about life and music that I wrote a few years back that is in my wee book Turn.
A very quick one today. This disc is an album of my Mum’s – an Ella Fitzgerald live album from 1974, recorded live At Ronnie Scott’s in London, April 11, 1974. It’s not typical of my Mum’s very small record collection (mostly Andrew Lloyd Webber and big-name opera sopranos) so I would guess someone else gave her this as a present (maybe her sister, Kit, who was the fashionable one of the 3 sisters).
My Mum died in 2010 and I have kept some of her other albums, mostly for old time’s sake. For example, I’ve still got the Evita album, with Julie Covington as Eva, that got a lot of music-to-make-a-Sunday-roast-to play in our home for a few years after it came out in 1976. I probably still know the whole thing by heart – my Mum loved it. I was always fascinated by lines like, “Screw the middle classes! I will never accept them! My father’s other family were middle class and we were kept out of sight, hidden from view at his funeral”. And people think musicals are all froth.
This Ella Fitzgerald album though, I don’t think I ever heard Mum play it. I probably started to listen to it when visiting her years later (still ages before streaming) and trying to find something to play that wasn’t opera or a musical. I particularly gravitated towards one track – her version of You’ve Got a Friend (hear it here). I love what they do with the song in that version (particularly for some reason “Ella’s got a friend in London, London’s got a friend in Ella” and the clinking of glass in the background here and there, gotta love a cocktail atmosphere). Musicians on that live album are the Tommy Flanagan Quartet (Flanagan on piano, Joe Pass on guitar, Keter Betts on double bass, though the album notes say Keeter, and Bobby Durham on drums).
I’ve been a Carole King fan as long as I’ve known she exists and she wrote You’ve Got a Friend of course (it’s on Tapestry and she released a version of the song in 1971, as did James Taylor at around the same time). Now we have another musicals fan in the family it seems totally apt that we saw the Carole King musical Beautiful some years back and can report that it is amazing (daughter Heather wrote about it here). I think my Mum would have enjoyed the musical (lead song: “You’ve got to get up every morning, With a smile on your face, And show the world all the love in your heart”). The show is a tough tale but with a hard line in positivity, very much my Mum’s vibe. I would add, these days, that it’s actually OK to be miserable in the morning as well, because life is complicated, but we all know what CK was getting at. Here is a live version of the title song from King, in 1973:
Just one more post in this series. Lots of shifts this week, so it will be short and squeezed in. See you tomorrow for that.
Today’s disc is really a series of discs (vinyl and CDs) and it is, as promised yesterday, all homegrown. So, as we’ve established, in the mid 1990s I was living in Leeds and DJing as one half of Daisy & Havoc. We had quite a bit of DJ work in the city and some paid guest slots further afield. Everybody knew at this time that one of the best ways to get more work and moved up the bill was to have a record or a remix that made your name. So, like pretty much everyone else in the game, we did work on some music of our own. I did more of the DJing so Daisy took the lead on this side of things, working with producers and friends to see where it would go.
One of the best pieces of music we were involved in making was probably the one on this 1995 Horizon album. I can’t actually remember who was behind this Leeds music project but you can see that both Dream FM (the pirate radio station we played on) and The Herb Garden (a club fanzine based in Leeds) have their names on the back of the album. The whole album is on this clip (our track Call It Booty starts at 6m 26s):
Some names in the track listing have been mentioned already this month (Richard Brown turned up on Day 23, for example) and luckily I do have the sleeve notes to help me out (written by Nick Robinson, my then editor at Record Mirror). Bands like Black Star Liner were pretty well known at the time locally and lots of Leeds clubs were part of various tracks (the jazz club Dig! in Dig! Alliance, Back 2 Basics DJ Ralph Lawson in Spikey and another local DJ Rob Tissera in S Factor). In my early Leeds years Rob was one of the DJs I heard most often (when he was a king of Italian piano house) but like many others he went off into faster house and trance (and is still there from what I can see, doing pretty well). He has a book out this year too (The Smiler – A DJ’s Life). One part of Glamorous Hooligan is probably the person from this selection who has gone on to the most success, if not particularly in music (Dean Cavanagh is a screenwriter, novelist and playwright who works regularly with Irvine Welsh).
Our track was a collaboration with Lex Loofah (Huddersfield’s John Gilpin, he was here on Day 23 as well) and I still really like the sound of it. We did play it in clubs (as you can tell from the state of our promo copy, below). I don’t remember the album getting much coverage or play generally though – Madchester we were not.
A year earlier we had produced a single of our own called Sit on my Bass (on our label Tool records). We made it with friends down in London (producer Nick Woolfson, then involved in the label Jamm Records with his partner at the time Lisa Sanchez, now a singer and musician). Our record (hear it here, and that’s neither of us talking at the start) wasn’t quite what we wanted it to be but we did make a video to go with it that was much more our thing. I can’t share it here as (a) it’s quite rude (various breasts, including mine, at least one dildo, not mine, lots of things being licked, mainly food) and (b) I only have a VHS copy of it now. It is on YouTube somewhere (someone else put it up ages ago) but I don’t know where. It was played regularly in the club Vague where we worked (quite a few regulars featured in the video) and we did have a lot of fun making it.
We sampled You Suck by Consolidated featuring the Yeastie Girlz for Sit on my Bass, from this record:
Thanks, no doubt, to our best London music friend at the time Simon Plaskett (a producer and press/promotions person), we did another remix for a record label called Slate (below, artist: Mothballs, track: Instinct of Self Preservation) but nothing much happened with that. I think our heart wasn’t really in the 4/4 beats by that point but Simon was a great supporter of ours and he got us gigs, reviewing jobs and lots of other things I have forgotten by now. He is still making music it would seem (heard his name on the radio recently, something to do with The Clash?).
Better, perhaps, than some of our house music, is the track we did for another Leeds project, 1995’s Saturday Sessions.
This project was put together by Ricardo Barker, Howard Taylor and Andy Wood and our track was called Sold (hear it here, spot the movie sample). You can tell it was a lot more influenced by our taste for Tricky, trip hop, beats and such (see yesterday and Day 22), plus Ricardo, or Ricky as we knew him then, is a really good keyboard player. He went into film and teaching as a career, more here. I spot another name I know on track one too (calling Nigel Lister, currently appearing with Ian McKellen in something serious).
I’m not the only one in our house with vinyl and CDs with something like their name on of course. My partner of over 25 years was making music too back when we met. He was part of a techno duo called Turbulent Force and they even had an album in 1995. It looks like this:
They played at the huge Tribal Gathering, had records released, had music played on the radio (by John Peel, for example, see here). Their music was put out by Emissions Audio Output (an Andy Weatherall label) and Sabrettes, a sister label to Weatherall’s Sabres of Paradise, run by Nina Walsh. They used other band names too (Primordial Soup, Pom E Granite, Shadow Company) and their music was pretty full-on techno, try this for size:
In the last few years he has made some quite different music under the name MarKived (find some of that here, one track even has a bit of our daughter, Heather’s voice on it too). It’s a family affair.
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