Day Six - Gently Does It

“I hear they're building a highway to take you home”

You can hear an audio version of this post here (read by me, not a robot).

Today’s song is Gently Does It, written by Rab Noakes. I first saw Rab, a Scottish musician and songwriter, at Montrose Folk Club in February 2006 when he played there with harmonica maestro Fraser Speirs. Rab and Fraser were well-known to most of the audience but for Mark and me this was our first time hearing them. As I’ve mentioned in other posts this month, we were both big music fans but at that time we were pretty new to the folk genre (and still fairly new to Scotland). Noakes is from Fife and the Fife music we knew most about at this point was the Singing Kettle* as we had moved to Scotland in 2002 when our daughter was 2 years old (i.e., young enough to fully embrace the kettle with its mix of songs, dressing up and comedy – all things she still loves in fact). As for more grown-up Scottish music, we were still very much at the getting-to-know-you stage with that.

We arrived at the folk club for Rab’s show in 2006 expecting to hear lots of songs we didn’t know (this had been the pattern for our visits to the club so far). “You’ll all know this, sing along”, the acts would say and Mark and I would smile and think “nope, never heard this traditional song, or this Richard Thompson, or this Joan Baez or whatever”. Some of the Burns songs, I recognised – just about – but I wouldn’t say I really knew them at that point. And then came Rab Noakes. Noakes is something different in the folk scene (especially amongst artists of his … vintage) in that he has what I suppose you might call a strong rock’n’roll sensibility (I apologise to any others who feel this description could apply to them too, maybe I’ve just not met your sound yet). Rab has had a long and very varied career (his first solo album was back in 1970) and whilst he does play mainly folk clubs these days, he could just as easily play outside that circuit. My first impression in 2006 was that he didn’t really look like other folk singers I’d come across so far (everything about him was just that little bit sharper), his influences were so varied and his punk-meets-pure voice alternated between gravel and ambrosia with a perplexing kind of ease. Not knowing what to expect, we were blown away by Rab’s original work, his whole show in fact. 

Rab has many original songs (one corker after another) but this was a bit of a watershed folk club night for us because, in amongst his own brilliant compositions, this auld fella (I was still not quite 40 at this point) also played Radiohead’s High and Dry. This was a song we really did know, as my partner Mark is quite a fan of Radiohead and had even learned to play that song on guitar (with Singing Kettle daughter and I singing along, quite the alternative von Trapps). This was the first time someone had played a song we actually knew at Montrose Folk Club so we were quite excited, immediately felt less like outsiders and sang along with abandon. I’m not even that much of a Radiohead fan (in fact I have an old poem on the subject here) but still it was something we knew and that was key. His version of High and Dry is on a couple of his albums (Standing Up Again, 2010, and Live at the Reid Hall Edinburgh 2005, pictured below). We became instant Rab fans, bought several CDs, and saw him twice more at Montrose (solo in 2013 and with Kathleen MacInnes in 2014). At some point I became aware that Rab had also produced Karine Polwart’s first solo album Faultlines in 2004 (more on that, and her, later in the month) and that album was released on his label, Neon. I’ve loved all Karine’s solo work from this first album right up to all her new releases so Rab’s involvement in her career was another reason to be a fan. 

But back to Rab and today’s song (hear him sing it here). As I said he has written a lot of songs (and is still writing) and they are pretty much all great so picking one to focus on was quite a challenge. One of the albums we bought in 2006 was Standing Up (rereleased in 2004, originally recorded 10 years earlier) and I could have picked almost every song of his on that release. It features 7 Noakes songs (as well as songs by Michael Marra, Talking Heads, Blue Nile, Allen Toussaint and others) but in the end I went for Gently Does It because I think Rab does this kind of song so well. As far as the songwriting goes, he really can break your heart. 

I’m thrilled to say I have some answers from Rab about today’s song. He sent these through to me last month (December 2021).

When did you write this song?

I wrote the song in Denmark in 1985. I was invited to play Tønder Festival in the south of the country.  On Saturday 24th August there was a concert on the main stage in the afternoon which I was part of.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about the writing of this song?

The Saturday afternoon concert was a festival fixture and featured all the artists playing at the event who were up for participating in an ad hoc concert. The compere was the great Alex Campbell. Alex was a pioneer in the Folksong revival and had even busked the streets of Paris in the mid-’50s. There he hung out with beat poets and pre-beatnik bohemians. He was someone many of my generation admired and he was a born performer. We all learned a lot from him. He had always been popular in Denmark and had chosen to stay there. A couple of years prior to Tønder ’85 he had been diagnosed with throat cancer which robbed him of most of his voice. Throat cancer is a ghastly thing for anyone but was particularly acute in Alex’s case. His main purpose in life was to make a noise and draw attention to himself. To be robbed of that was to be robbed of a core of his existence.

Following the afternoon concert I repaired to the little room I was staying at and played guitar for a while. This song began to emerge and take shape. It unfolded quite quickly and was finished within an hour or so.

The first performance of it was backstage at a concert I was playing on the Saturday evening at which Alex was once more the compere. I sat him down in the dressing-room and sang it to him alone. I also opened the show with it that evening.

Who performed and/or recorded it first? What year was that?

First recording was by me in 1993, on an album I released called ‘Standing Up’.

 

Any other versions of it you know of? Any you particularly like?

There are a few recorded versions and it gets performed often. I can’t cite them all but Allan Taylor, an accomplished songwriter, putting his version an album, was a real compliment. I was most pleased to learn that it had been performed at a subsequent Tønder Festival by Allan, Ralph McTell and Tom Paxton together.

Is it a song you particularly like/have good feelings about?

I like to sing the song and never tire of it. I revisited it for an album I made in 2017, called ‘Welcome to Anniversaryville’.

 

Have your feelings about the song changed over the years?

If anything, I’ve grown more fond of it. I like the way that, although it’s about something and someone specific, it does seem to possess qualities that transcend any limitations. Most of the people who now tell me they really like it have no knowledge of Alex Campbell whatsoever.

 

What is the song you’ve written that you are most proud of? 

I’ll go for this one. I was diagnosed with Tonsillar cancer in 2015. My recovery was tortuous and I would never have got through it without the drop-everything-else support I got from my wife, Stephy. We worked on a few songs about it and released a half-dozen on a record, ‘The Treatment Tapes EP’ in 2016. I bought a new guitar, a Gibson L1 1928 Blues Special. It’s a 21st century Montana reproduction of the ’20s model. When I picked it up a tune emerged almost immediately. It became the love song on the EP, played on that particular instrument. It’s called ‘I always will’. Here’s a link to a photo-roll of Stephy over the song which we played at her funeral in May 2021. In a cruel justice she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s late in 2015. This turned out to be something called MSA - Multiple System Atrophy. It’s as ghastly as it sounds. She declined over the following 5+ years and died on May 1st 2021. 

Could you name me one song by someone else that you wish you’d written? 

As I’m writing this close to 2021’s festive season, I’ll go for ‘Winter Wonderland’ by Felix Bernard and lyricist Richard Bernhard Smith. It’s an engaging song which contains a charming verse ‘Later on we’ll conspire, as we dream by the fire. To face unafraid, the plans that we’ve made. Walking in a winter wonderland’. 

Another one would be ‘Allentown Jail’ by Irving Gordon. Jo Stafford’s 1951 recording of it is the first significant song I remember from the radio, when I was 4 or 5 years old.

Many thanks to Rab for those fascinating and moving replies. 

See you all tomorrow for the song number seven.

*Of course many of you will know that The Singing Kettle has its folk music connections too – Cilla and Artie who started the Kettle were folk singers and Cilla was part of the Fisher family. Cilla’s sister Ray was a singer and her brother Archie Fisher is a major figure in Scottish folk music – a singer, songwriter and radio presenter (I saw him twice in Montrose at the folk club – in 2005 and 2009). So the Singing Kettle was, arguably, a kind of folk club too – if a very rowdy one with a lot more dressing up. 

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022's Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).