Day One - Another Train

 

“The beginning is now”

Please note - if you would rather listen to an audio version of this post (read by me, not a robot) you can do that here.

Hello and welcome to my Fun A Day Dundee project for this year, Songs That Stick. Every day this month I’ll be writing about a song – how I met it for the first time, something about its writer/s and maybe also about its performers. For many of the songs (about half just now, though there may be some last-minute entries) I have responses from the songwriters about their work and those responses will form part of the post. I hope you enjoy reading it all, listening to the music and if anything grabs you (and I think it will) please support the musicians if you can by buying their music (via their websites, Bandcamp etc. and not the giants). The full list of my Songs That Stick for this month is here. If you want to have a go at singing or playing any of them please share your efforts if you feel the urge. The Fun A Day Dundee hashtag this year is #FADD2022.

Today’s song is Another Train written by Pete Morton (the quote at the top is from this song – listen to it here). Pete is an English musician and songwriter and I first heard this song in 2004. As I said last year, many of the songs I’m going to write about this month are songs I came across at the local folk club in Montrose that I attended when we lived in that town in Angus, Scotland from 2004 to 2018 (and this is one of those songs). Because I keep a diary of some detail, I can tell you that I first went to that folk club on Tuesday 26 October 2004. I was 37, had been in Scotland for two years (with man and bairn) and in September 2004 we moved to Montrose from the village of Auchmithie, a few miles down the coast. My (part Scottish) Mum had just come up from England to live with us so we had a resident babysitter for our pre-school daughter for the first time in about two years and for this and other reasons we were keen to try any entertainment the wee town had to offer. Mid-week there wasn’t a huge amount going on but there was a fortnightly folk club at The Links Hotel in the middle of town. We thought we’d give it a go.

Unless my memory deceives me I hadn’t been to a folk club before 2004 so I had no idea what it would be like. I hadn’t heard of the guest act that night and that wasn’t really surprising as up till then I hadn’t listened to much that you would find in a folk section of a music shop (at least not on purpose). I didn’t even know the basics – I’d heard of Fairground Attraction, but not Fairport Convention, I didn’t know a jig from a reel, I knew Kate Bush (but not Rusby) and I barely knew what a bothy was (never mind a bothy ballad). There was very little folk music in any of my homes growing up. We were a single parent family for the most part and my Mum (born 1924) had enjoyed a quickstep in wartime but hadn’t had a lot of music in her life beyond that. She would say she liked classical and opera but what she actually played at home was Radio 2 (Terry Wogan) and a few of the earlier Lloyd Webber albums (though I’m glad to say she drew the line at Cats). Both of my older brothers were pretty rock heavy (though there were folky moments – one of them played some James Taylor and Yusuf/Cat Stevens and one of my even older half-sisters sang me Puff the Magic Dragon a couple of times). Mostly, growing up and staying largely in the North of England, I had listened to a mix of pop, soul, disco, heavy metal, rock, more disco, more soul, and then later lots of house and techno (with a drum machine for my heartbeat for most of the ’90s). Looking back I had loved a few folkie singer/songwriters in amongst everything else (Neil Young, Joan Armatrading, Silvio Rodriguez, Billy Bragg), plus there had been random later obsessions with albums like Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony and, in the late ’90s, a leaning towards Beth Orton (particularly her first solo album Trailer Park). Still, a folk club has more than just singer/songwriters so I had no idea how many different instruments I was going to hear over the next few years, how many Bob Dylan covers there were in the world, and how many songs about murder you can hear on a quiet Tuesday in a function suite on the edge of the world. I was also not aware how amazing so many of the professional musicians on the folk circuit are (they are super, duper talented). Maybe you all know that already – I learned it in Montrose.

Then there’s the more recent songs. As I said last year, I’m not going to write about the traditional songs that I heard at folk club (there are people far better suited to that project) but I do want to look at songs written, for the most part, in the last few decades, and also quite a few songs that you probably won’t know unless you’ve been to a folk club or two some time in the last 30 years. Despite all the listening options available these days, we do sometimes seem to hear the same rock and pop songs over and over wherever we go (on certain radio stations, on TV, in shops) and there are undoubtedly some great songs slipping through the cracks that could appeal to a wider audience. This month I’m going to look at a few of the songs the folk club introduced to me (and a few other songs I love). I hope you enjoy the collection.

Another Train is perhaps one of the older songs I’ll be looking at this month as I see online that it was on an album of Pete Morton’s in 1988 called One Big Joke. I encountered it on my very first trip to Montrose Folk Club when it was sung by a Canadian folk singer called Eileen McGann (this is a fairly typical story in transatlantic folk – a mostly English person learning about an English songwriter via a Canadian singer in a Scottish folk club). Eileen was performing at the club with David K and the two of them put on a great show of traditional and modern folk songs (including some of her own, such as a political number called Too Stupid for Democracy). To be honest I’ve not come across Eileen much since (online or off) but my hardcore folk music education started with vigour at this event because I seem to remember she was also very keen on the Child Ballads. As folk newbies Mark and I had no idea what on earth these were but I think I supposed at that point that they were all about different children (they’re not, they are ballads collected in the nineteenth century by a man called Francis James Child and a Wikipedia page lists 305 of them). I can’t say I know a lot more about the Child Ballads now (even after some 14 years of regular attendance at the folk club) but I think you are either drawn to really long traditional songs or you aren’t … and don’t hate me but I’m not hugely (though I find them oddly relaxing considering some of the content). 

My partner Mark’s parents were visiting from Leeds in October 2004 and came to this first folk club outing with us (they were never a pair to turn down an event with a bar attached). His Dad (now departed but Yorkshire through and through, in the navy from 16, a taste for jazz, cigs and the good times) leaned over to us at one point halfway through a lengthy ballad (Child or otherwise) and stage-whispered, “Does this lass not know any ’appy songs?” This phrase has entered our family collection of legendary comments and is still used on a fairly regular basis (Allan died in 2014 but I find our elders, once departed, live on in their snappy one-liners).

The misery in a good chunk of Eileen’s set didn’t put me off one bit as it turned out and I went back to the folk club at The Links Hotel fortnight after fortnight (for years). I’m not sure exactly what happened but maybe it was just the right time for me to go down that particular road – I think if I’d gone into that room in my teens or 20s I would have stepped straight back out again. It was an odd* crowd in some ways (it’s never been one of those very sociable folk clubs, people keep to themselves a fair bit) but there was still something about it that really appealed to me at that point in life. I could get to the bar, I could hear what they were saying and singing, I could sit down, there were rarely queues for the loo and best of all, as I mentioned earlier, the musical guests at the club were almost always totally brilliant musicians and really engaging entertainers. I was tired and a bit frazzled after frequenting and working in really busy nightclubs in Leeds and elsewhere for most of the nineties and I was so ready to hear some interesting stories and crisper sounds. Eileen sang Pete Morton’s song Another Train at the club in 2004 and I think it was that song that persuaded me most of all to buy her 1995 CD Journeys (I still have it – it features old songs that I’ve since heard by many others like Jock O’Hazeldean and Braw Sailin’ on the Sea). We came to know Another Train particularly well (probably Pete’s version most of all). Mark took the train into work in Dundee for the 16 years we lived in Angus and it was something we would often sing a line or two of if he was running late (“There’s another train, there always is….”). We still sing it now (when appropriate). 

We knew the songwriter’s version because not long after this first visit to the club, Pete Morton was the guest artist there in early 2005. It was a great night – a small audience, as often was the case in a small town on a cold Tuesday in January – but a great big box of songs. His website uses the phrase “old time troubadour” and that seems about right. He didn’t respond to messages for this project (which is fair enough) but from what I can see he still seems to be treading that path – performing and recording but no big social media presence, no soundtrack for a BBC series, maybe a tad overtaken by the huge and very busy next generation of English folk singers and musicians (but maybe not too fussed about that, the rebel road being what it is). His most recent album is 2020’s A Golden Thread (a review here) and you could start at one of the tracks called Yemeni Moon. Certainly in 2005 Pete spanned the ages with his songs and sang about the poet Emily Dickinson (a song revisited on his latest album), family roots, the NHS, and yes, I’m pretty sure he did Another Train too. Apparently, the song had been covered by a fairly well-known folk band called The Poozies** in the ’90s (though again, knowing almost nothing of the folk world in 2005, I’d never heard of them at that point) and it had obviously become a song Pete was known for. He was selling a compilation CD that night - Another Train 2002 – and I bought that and still have it (though the song also seems to be on a more recent album called Game of Life, available from his website). I know being known for a particular song can be a mixed blessing (and people going on about that same song still years later perhaps not what every songwriter wants) but I just had to start the project with this one. This song is probably a large part of what drew me in to the folk club and made me want to go back. I don’t think I would have kept going if it had been only Child Ballads, in fact I know I wouldn’t. Another Train wasn’t about history – quite the opposite – it was about new chances, new directions, not being beaten down and giving up. I had had a pretty challenging time in the late ’90s and had been looking for NEW with a big part of my heart. Some of that new was moving and changing lifestyle but a lot of it was attitude and music too. This song (and Eileen and Pete) opened a lot of doors for me, I think, doors I’m glad I went through.

So, with that in mind, see you all tomorrow … at the Mission Hall.

*I say this as a good thing – most of the best things are odd.

**Another Train is on The Poozies’ 1993 album Chantoozies. 

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).