Day Nine - If You Ask Me

 

“Now I’m just an ordinary day”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is If You Ask Me written by Patsy Matheson. This time we’re back to a song that I did hear at Montrose Folk Club and I think I must have first heard it in February 2012 because that’s when I heard Patsy performing with Becky Mills at the club (hear them do the song here). The song is on Patsy’s 2012 album Stories of Angels & Guitars and she has very kindly put together a set of answers about the song which will follow after this introduction. 

Patsy’s songs are gentle and haunting (and I guess that explains the graveyard in the album photos). She performs them in that way that just makes you want to stay in something like the bar all night, whiling away all your sorrows (remember that, anyone?). She does play folk clubs but her music has elements of jazz and blues just as high in the mix and is somehow modern with a lovely old-fashioned feel. It’s no surprise she’s enough of an Amy Winehouse fan to have written a song about her (see below). There are a couple of songs on Stories of Angels & Guitars that I considered choosing for this project – her song about her Mum, Sylvia Jean, that closes the album, for example, is another really special number – but in the end If You Ask Me won the day. It is a song that hints at love, rather than throwing it in your face. It’s not like any other song about love that I can think of.

I first heard Patsy’s name back when I lived in Leeds in the early 1990s and edited the What’s On section of the alternative magazine Northern Star (formerly Leeds Other Paper). At the time I was deep (deep!) in clubland but our very earnest and devoted ‘Roots’ music reviewer often brought in listings and articles that mentioned the young singer/songwriter Patsy Matheson (that reviewer didn’t like the word ‘folk’ and was a big Levellers fan, he wore enormous stompy boots but was a real sweetheart). My memories are a bit vague in places but there’s an interview with her online here from 2012 that that does cover this period in Leeds. According to that piece she was in Leeds from 1982, ran the Uni folk club, was involved in setting up the venue The Duchess and much more.

Cut to March 2008 when I next came across Patsy’s name when she was in the band Waking the Witch (spot the song title in that band name pop pickers!) and they headlined at the Dundee music club Out of the Woods. Four women (with four guitars and assorted other stringed instruments), Waking the Witch were a great live band (Patsy, Rachel Goodwin, Jools Parker and Becky Mills) and all four women wrote songs. The night they played in Dundee a friend and I were even on the bill as the opening act doing a mix of songs and poems. It’s not something I’ve done for a while but it was fun while it lasted, my friend Verona played guitar and sang, I mumbled along with the songs, read poems, made largely unintentional jokes. Like Montrose Folk Club, Out of the Woods was another club that used a Best Western hotel* as a venue (in this case The Woodlands on the edge of Dundee/Broughty Ferry/Barnhill). This was quite the era of padded chairs, inoffensive carpet and expensive drinks in my going-out life. 

It would be a crime not to mention at this point the marvellous host and organiser of Out of the Woods – the divine Pauline Meikleham (she also used the name Pauline M. Hynd). Pauline was a fantastic singer and a striking performer, a dedicated lover of music and creativity, and a very encouraging figure to other less experienced artists. She was maybe best known for performing others’ songs but she did write songs too (some of them hilarious – she could be very dramatic but very funny too). She stole many a show and when I put on a poetry and music event in Edinburgh in 2008 the poet Hugh McMillan, who hadn’t encountered Pauline before, just said to me in awe “Who IS that?” after her part of the night**. She was dazzling and for any of us who knew her at all, her recent death (in 2021) was a terrible shock. In most recent years she performed with pianist Stephen Lee as The Onion Club and together they put on shows that were very purely artistic (whilst still a little filthy). I reviewed one of their shows here. Pauline was (and is) a Dundee legend. 

Pauline with The Onion Club in Edinburgh, 2018

But now, back to the song in hand. Patsy sent me back typed up answers to my pesky questions and I paste them here for your reading pleasure.

When did you write this song?

I wrote this song twice. The first version popped out sometime probably about 11 or 12 years ago. I’m not sure exactly which year, but I performed it at a gig in Leeds back to back with a song called ‘Lamb to Slaughter’ which I wrote about Amy Winehouse not too long before she died, so I can gauge from that roughly when it was. The first version had the same words, but the chords weren’t so jazzy, and it just didn’t sit right, so I rewrote the current tune - which is the version that appeared on the album. I’d been trying to work out how to play a song by Boo Hewerdine*** called  ‘Bell, Book and Candle’ using a DADGAD tuning. It sounded nothing like it, but I did like the chords, so I pinched them, changed the order of them and added a few more of my own. I do that a lot. I’ve been teaching myself how to play Beethoven on the piano during lockdown and I’ve nicked loads of his. 

 

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

My songs are a mixture of both my own personal experiences and those of my friends. I mix them all up together to tell stories about emotions that I think most of us all feel at some point or another. This one is about meeting someone who you instantly connect with. A potential soulmate I suppose. And thinking this really could be it. 

 

Who performed and/or recorded it first? 

I write my songs for me to perform, and as far as I’m aware, no one else has recorded this one. I’ve either played it solo, or as a duo with my dear friend Becky Mills. Or as a duo with Jon Short who played double bass on it. Becky and Jon are super talented musicians and add something really special, although both very different. 

 

Is it a song you particularly like/have good feelings about (or the opposite)? 

I have to admit that once I’d settled on this version of the song, I was pretty pleased with it. There’s been a few times when I’ve played it and people have asked who wrote it and then not believed me when I said I did! I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not! It’s jazzier than a lot of my songs. 

 

Have your feelings about the song changed since you wrote it? 

It feels further away from me now and less familiar, which makes it more interesting. When I was playing live all of the time, I played it a lot and got bored with it. I start to lose touch with the feeling of a song if I overplay it, which is not good really. When you know that you’re just going through the motions, and thinking about what you’re going to cook for dinner for your kids when you are playing a particular song, you need to stop playing it and replace it with a new one. You can always bring it back to life later. I never understood how people could sing the same songs for years. 

 

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

I’m always the most proud of the latest song I’ve written I think. I really try to improve all the time, even now. I wrote a song last year called ‘Lockdown Hair’ which was the first time I’d put a song on the piano out in the public domain, and I was proud of that because of the piano. Starting to learn the piano in my fifties and teaching myself has been a great joy. I always wanted to and can’t believe I left it so long. I find it far more intuitive than the guitar, and in a way more soulful. 

 

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

That’s a really hard question. I love so many songs from so many different genres and times. I love John Martyn, the Beatles, Neil Young, James Taylor, Paul Brady (huge fan) so anything by them really. Also Kate Bush, Karine Polwart, KT Tunstall, Amy of course. And I’m dear friends with some super talented writers who never cease to amaze me - Jason Feddy, Becky Mills, Clive Gregson. I heard Jason play just this week, as he was visiting from the US and he played a new song called ‘Man on a String’ which was just so beautiful. I wished I’d written it, even though I’m not a man. From the mainstream, I’m listening to John Mayer a lot right now and he comes up with some lovely melodies and lyrics that I’m very envious of. I love him. 

Thanks so much to Patsy for these answers. I hope to see you all tomorrow for the first bird-related song ...

*Montrose Folk Club used The Links Hotel for all of my time visiting club (though earlier in its history it had been at The George and then Corner House hotels in the town).

**Others who graced the stage that night in Edinburgh in 2008 were musicians Kim Edgar, Andy Spiller, Charlie Williamson, Kevin O’Donnell and poet Claire Askew. A song of Kim’s is coming up in this series later in the month.

***Boo Hewerdine’s name has already appeared in an earlier post and here it is again. I think he will be a running theme for this series of articles so maybe there should be a prize for whoever can collect the most ‘boo’s! The post about a song that he wrote is here.

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).