“My heart would soar like a child’s lost balloon”
You can hear an audio version of this post here. Findlay’s audio answers are here.
Today’s song is The Blue Lagoon written by Findlay Napier and Boo Hewerdine*. This charming, ahem, tail of love among the suppers** is on Findlay’s brilliant 2017 album Glasgow which I bought when he played at Montrose Folk Club in 2018 (hear the song here). In fact his was one of the last shows I saw at the club before we moved to the deep south (Dundee) in September 2018.
I first saw Findlay play and sing some years earlier when he was in the Scottish folk band Back of the Moon and they guested at the Montrose club in 2006. I remember hugely enjoying their performance – great playing and singing and a really full sound (the band at this point was Findlay, Gillian Frame, Ali Hutton and Hamish Napier***). I was still not exactly a folk expert in 2006 but I had been coming to the club regularly for nearly 2 years by this point and was less shocked by pipes, more used to reels, and even starting to compile a mental list called ‘my favourite fiddlers’. A band just buzzing with talent, Back of the Moon had all of this plus lots of other, perhaps less obviously folky, things that I took to very easily (Hamish Napier’s lovely piano playing, for a start, I am a total sucker for a good piano player). I bought Back of the Moon’s album 2005’s Luminosity and enjoyed that too (you can still buy it here). It has a lot of impressive playing, some trad songs (including a beautiful version of Glenlogie which is, eek, a Child ballad, see Day 1), as well as an Archie Fisher song (The Final Trawl), and a smashing original song called Ship in a Bottle (written by Findlay Napier and Nick Turner) – all this wrapped up in pretty perfect production.
Quite a lot of time passed before I saw Findlay at the club again but I was aware in the meantime that he had had at least one other band, again with Gillian Frame, the less trad Findlay Napier and the Bar Room Mountaineers, followed by his own solo releases. He has collaborated in lots of other musical projects too and become, I might guess, somewhat addicted to songwriting (hanging around with Boo Hewerdine won’t help that – we saw on Day 4 that Boo’s written so many songs he has whole albums he’s forgotten about). Findlay also started to teach songwriting and I know this because Gary Anderson, MC and regular performer at our folk club for the past few years, mentioned him once or twice (or a few more times) and covered some of his songs. A particular favourite, that Gary put in a recent Songs that Stick set of his own, is Findlay’s Thou Shalt Not Kill, from a project called War and Peace with Bella Hardy and Greg Russell (and by the way there is a Bella song here on Day 18).
Findlay’s solo show at Montrose in 2018 was totally brilliant. I bought a few copies of the album he was touring at the time (Glasgow), kept one and gave the other as a Xmas present to my Glaswegian mother-out-law, Isabella (more often Isobel). Since writing the draft for this post, I’m sorry to write that Isobel has very recently passed away (just a few days ago in fact, she made it to 84). She lived most of her adult life in Leeds and was shocked when her ‘baby boy’ told her we were moving to Scotland, her home country, in 2002. Once we’d moved she always enjoyed coming up to visit, even if it did get harder and harder to cope with the long train journey. You might remember that she and Mark’s Dad Allan just happened to come to our very first Montrose Folk Club visit with us back in 2004 (see Day 1), and I’m sure she enjoyed it because she did love a night out (though her music taste was really for big singalongs – Sisters, with her younger sister, Morag, was her party piece and she liked a bit of Elvis Presley). The fourth of five siblings, Isobel left Glasgow to marry her Yorkshire submariner (Allan) in the 1960s and I thought she’d appreciate this collection of songs about her home city (there has been no direct family there for some years now, they all moved elsewhere long ago – to Canada, the USA, and Inverness). From Findlay (and sometimes Boo) this Glasgow album has a song about a dancehall (The Locarno), a song about shipbuilding, one about the Necropolis graveyard, one about Glasgow homeless people. The city’s current slogan is People Make Glasgow but I would add another, People Love Glasgow.
Currently Findlay has new solo material (his most recent album is 2021’s It Is What It Is). I bought that album just before Xmas and am enjoying getting to know it (try this song). He also releases excellent material just now with English musician Megan Henwood as The Story Song Scientists (and I enjoyed a Live to Your Living Room show from them last year – it had been a long day, I even listened to some of it in the bath but don’t tell anyone, my camera was off). For now, however, it’s still the 2017 album Glasgow that I know best. Glasgow is particularly a centre for music and musicians – it’s probably Scotland’s capital city for music – and this album is a long loving dedication to the city that Findlay calls home these days (he was born there but grew up in Grantown-on-Spey). Not all the songs on Glasgow are his compositions – there’s Marchtown by Emma Pollock, a Blue Nile cover, a Michael Marra**** song (more Michael content back here), the spectacular Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice (written by Ron Clark and Carl McDougall) and the particularly lovely Glasgow written by Julia Doogan. The rest, though, were written either by just Findlay or Findlay and Boo Hewerdine (and today’s choice The Blue Lagoon is one of the latter). I picked this song because I love its simplicity, the ease with crispy words, the setting of the scene, Findlay’s spot-on crooning and all the extra sounds and giggles. I also like its delicate treatment of a love in a chip shop. I love a good protest song and songs with huge significance but songs do a lot for us and I think we need the other end of the spectrum on the menu as well (like this crafted little jewel). Obviously Scotland has a lot of fancy restaurants too (it is so far from the old clichés of deep fried you-know-whats) but there is still something special about Scottish chip shops (‘chippers’, up here on the East Coast anyway). They are not quite like their English cousins – the menus here are endless with all kinds of things I’d never come across before we lived here (the mock chop, the pizza crunch…). Often the connections to the Italian families who set them up are still in evidence and they are loved and important places. On the whole the food is cooked to order (so allow a little time). The Blue Lagoon song has all this history and ambience for me with its old world charm and a new world setting – it is a crowd favourite.
Unsurprisingly, Findlay is a very engaging performer with a really versatile voice. He can do gravel and drive one track, soft and gentle the next, but the more I listen to some of his songs the more I can hear how much he is often in Scottish-Loudon-Wainwright territory (so it’s interesting that LW gets a mention in his answers, see below). It’s not so prevalent in The Blue Lagoon but in other songs I can hear that style of singing which is singing but is also talking to you like you’re two wise-cracking strangers at a bar (and yes, it has to be a bar). He is telling you a great story and he is telling you with such style and humour and love for the words and the telling and the happenings, that you really can’t help but listen and be drawn in. It is song as charm, and sound as story, and whatever it is, it works really well.
Anyway, here’s Findlay answering questions about The Blue Lagoon (and other things). He sent me an audio file of his answers (available here, complete with one fuck as they weren’t originally recorded with broadcast in mind). Here’s my transcription:
When did you write this song?
I wrote The Blue Lagoon at Boo Hewerdine’s house in Ely in Cambridgeshire the day before we went to the recording studio to record it for my Glasgow album so I think that’s like March 2017. The song came because I’d written down the line about the “heart soaring like a child’s lost balloon”, I can’t remember if I’d written down “to Central station that’s my destination” anyway, I knew about this story about Justin Bieber getting a haggis supper and a can of Irn Bru at The Blue Lagoon and I just thought it would be funny to write a song about that and it came together very, very quickly indeed. Boo played piano and I sang and I think we wrote it in 20 minutes or something. We recorded it pretty much the day after in a studio…The Mother Lode in Norfolk, only 20 minutes away from Boo’s house in Ely. There was a funny thing where we recorded it and then I was like “I think it would be better if it was higher” and we just kept moving it higher and higher and higher and there is a version of it where I sing like a young Aled Jones, I managed to get it so high. I just remember Chris, the sound engineer, just looking at me and Boo through the glass and going “What the fuck are you doing?” Eventually we went back and recorded it in the key that it’s in now which is the key of E but I think we managed to get it up to F or G or something like that.
Any other versions of it you know of? Any you particularly like?
I don’t know of any other versions but Boo really likes it and because it was a co-write he actually plays it quite a lot so it’s nice to hear him doing it. And I’ve got a really nice version that I do with Donna Maciocia and my wife Gillian Frame. We did film it and record it but something went wrong so it’s never ever been released. I don’t know why it’s not been released actually. It’s a song I absolutely love and it goes down really well at gigs, in fact I finish a lot of my gigs with it.
Have your feelings about the song changed since you wrote it?
I think my feelings on the song haven’t really changed.
What is the song you’ve written that you are most proud of?
That changes from day to day. I’ve got a new album out (It Is What It Is) and there’s loads of songs on that that I’m proud of. I really am proud of that song (The Blue Lagoon). One of the nice things about that one was the introduction to it on stage came together while I was performing it because somebody shouted something out in the crowd and I now use that at all my gigs, it was like a gift and it’s always a good laugh when I do the song so…
Could you name me one song by someone else that you wish you’d written?
Easy – Tonya’s Twirls by Loudon Wainwright III or Making Pies by Patty Griffin are two of my favourite songs that I use as examples in all my songwriting workshops.
Thanks to Findlay for his answers on this one. See you all tomorrow, for a song I first heard in Montrose on Brexit Referendum day …
*Yes, Boo Hewerdine makes another appearance! I agree it is totally unfair on everyone else but I realised too late that it was a co-write.
**For those of you outside Scotland, a fish supper is fish and chips (a haggis supper is haggis and chips etc.). And if you use the wrong terminology when ordering you will always be (very gently) reminded of the correct version (as in, customer: “fish and chips please”, server: “a fish supper?”).
*** I saw Findlay’s brother Hamish Napier again at the club in 2017 when he played with Adam Sutherland as the duo Nae Plans in 2017. They were brilliant!
****What a joy this week to hear a Michael Marra song on BBC 6 Music (I did a wee chat about the project on the breakfast show with Lauren Laverne on 12 January and his was one of the four songs from this month’s list of 31 that they played). I wish they could have played all 31! They played the songs from Days 10, 12, 17 and 18.
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).
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