Day Twenty-Six - Edina

“never will I grow so old again”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is Edina written by Ross Wilson (the heart and soul of the band Blue Rose Code, hear this song here). I saw this Scottish band at Montrose Folk Club in November 2015 (details of who played that night further down the post) and then caught their online show last year at Celtic Connections. It has actually just been announced that the band will be playing Montrose Folk Club on 8 March this year and this will be the first gig at the club’s new venue of Cinema 3 at the lovely new Montrose Playhouse. It was quite the campaign to get a cinema for the town and when we lived there local film fans, including the town’s now Scottish BAFTA-winning director Anthony Baxter, put on films in an old church, in a hotel, even in the local high school (I certainly went to showings in every one of those). All this activity eventually led to a committee and a building (the town’s former swimming pool) and I am so pleased for everyone concerned that the new venue is up and running now. 

But back to music! Again, it was really hard to choose one song to focus on today as Ross and Blue Rose Code have released quite a lot of songs and I like pretty much all of them (other favourite tracks being Grateful, Pokesdown Waltz, Starlit, Skin and Bones, Step 11, Riverstown … really too many to mention). Whilst the band does play folk clubs (amongst other places) the sky really should be the limit for such beautiful, thoughtful songs and I think they could appeal to almost anyone who gave them a listen. At times Blue Rose Code music feels country, at others it brings in jazz, and this is reflected in the fact that record shops don’t agree on where to put it (“it’s folk” I was told in our local HMV, even though they didn’t have any, and then I found some in a ‘Made in Scotland’ section in an independent shop here in Dundee). The band’s online presence gives you a good idea of the sound by using a quote from a review: “Imagine John Martyn meets a young Van Morrison shipwrecked with a crate of Chet Baker records”. But it’s not just music as history, for me it’s also very contemporary. I’ve written about my love for soul music in some of the posts earlier this month and that might be another reason for my immediate connection with this artist (he has put on collaborative events called ‘This is Caledonian Soul’ and you can read a little about that here). 

Hearing this band in 2015 was another of the times where I just went along to the folk club knowing nothing about the guest act and then had my mind completely blown (as in why had I not heard anything about this band – they were phenomenal!). I say ‘band’ but you will see various players in a collective around Ross Wilson. This first time I saw Blue Rose Code (it being a small club) I’m pretty sure it was just Ross and a pianist. I wasn’t sure of the pianist’s name but my extensive research (messaging Gary Anderson, read his day back here) tells me it was John Lowrie (the band’s drummer at that time but pretty amazing on the keys too). Song after song just seemed to pour out into the room and we, the audience, sat there amazed, entranced, a good number of us enamoured. I’ve read that Ross calls the band’s fans ‘lovers’ and I can see lots of reasons for that. It is music that inspires a loving feeling – every perfectly played sound, every achy ‘sorrow’ or ‘darlin’ from his heartbreaker of a voice – and if you don’t know it I might suggest you head straight off to Bandcamp, make its acquaintance and maybe buy an album or two while you’re there. 

I’ve been listening to all the Blue Rose Code albums again whilst getting this piece together and my recommendation would be to start at the first studio album (2013’s North Ten) and work your way up to the most recent (2020’s With Healings of the Deepest Kind). Or you could ignore that completely and work in the other direction. Or you could start at one of the live albums (say, 2021’s Live at Celtic Connections) and then get to the studio ones. Basically, whichever way you play this game, you can’t lose. The albums all sound very much like Blue Rose Code but they are all very different too. One Xmas, when 2016’s ...And Lo! The Bird is on the Wing had just come out, I was in the new convert phase for this band and gave that album to lots of friends as a present. I would say that it is at the jazzier end of their output so it’s maybe not the place to start if jazz is not so much your thing (though saying that it does include the fantastic Pokesdown Waltz so, on the other hand, maybe it is a great place to start). A recent interview here has details about more Blue Rose Code albums and players with the band.

The album that I first really fell for was 2014’s The Ballads of Peckham Rye and today’s Edina is track 8 on that album. You can read a review of the album here and read about players and guests on the album. Today’s song, for example, features nothing but the best: Lau’s Aidan O’Rourke on fiddle, Dave Milligan on piano, Karine Polwart on vocals (with Ross) and Danny Thompson on double bass (some of those already brought into the mix this month on Days 19 and 21). Ross grew up in Leith and Edina is about Edinburgh. I have read articles that talk about his early life but in live shows he doesn’t share a lot of details so I won’t do that here either (background articles are easily found online if you want to look). All he gives you in the live shows is the idea that he has faced difficulties, battled demons and that, as far as we can hear from the songs, he has done some losing but, in more recent times, a good share of winning too. In one interview I read he used the word ‘authentic’ and you can feel the importance of that in the lyrics. They may not be as obviously political as some songs you’ll hear in a folk club but if we think men being open, honest and sensitive is important then maybe they are political songs, essential even. He sounds like Scotland, he sings about Scotland - in some ways he’s a next generation Proclaimer (if significantly gentler in his singing style - and in fact go here for a great live mash up of Edina and Sunshine on Leith). There are a few songs about place in this month’s series of posts (Day 2’s Mission Hall, Day 3’s Northumberland countryside, Day 4’s long distance love, Day 12’s Dundee, Day 16’s Glasgow chip shop) and there are a couple more to come (days 29 and 31). It’s something artists who play folk clubs do well perhaps – they are good at being specific, rather than generic. 

From Edina (and other Blue Rose Code songs about Edinburgh) you can feel Ross’s complicated relationship with his home city (and many of us can relate to that subject, I think). Although I’ve never lived in the city, I have Edinburgh links in my family too. My Mum was born and grew up there – her parents having eloped from the south coast of England in the 1920s. My Gran was most likely pregnant before they were married and, even worse, she was lower class (a ‘shop girl’) while my Grandad (someone I never knew) was more well-off and middle class. He died when my Mum was very nearly ten years old (1934), and his wife and three daughters were thrown out onto the street by his family. This meant my Mum had two very different Edinburghs in her memories – a happy early childhood and then a second era where my Gran worked in residential jobs elsewhere (as matron of a home for ‘disgraced’ young women, for example) and my Mum and her middle sister were sent to a merchant’s guild boarding house (kind of half boarding school, half orphanage). They went to a good day school, the same as Muriel Spark (1918-2006) in fact (and note that Blue Rose Code’s album The Ballads of Peckham Rye owes most of its title to Spark’s 1960 novel). You can see my Mum’s copy from the 1960s below, she was very proud of the connection, however slight, and had all her books. The charity outside of school hours though involved food, board and a lot of religion (with love and affection most definitely off the menu) and all of this meant that although my Mum always loved the idea of Edinburgh (“culture, dear”) she had some mixed feelings about it too. She couldn’t even bear the thought of Aberdeen (where their baby sister was sent to live with nuns when their father died) but we cured her of that affliction when she came to live up with us in Angus in 2010 via a multi-generational family and friends trip to a Singing Kettle show in the granite city. It was tough love, sure enough, but it did the job. Sometimes you have to replace crappy memories with something altogether more cheerful.

I think all this family history helped me choose this particular song in the end. I am interested, can’t help it, in the whole business of a person looking at their lot in life, the place they started and what it all did to make them who they are. Any of us who come from odd or tragic or just eventful families are drawn to hear each other’s stories and that helps us understand or come to terms with our own. In his song Nashville Blue (on 2017’s The Water of Leith album) Ross sings the line “I sure would like to be that family I never had” and many of us have our own version of feelings like this, I think. The difference with Ross is that he expresses it so beautifully and warms our hearts and souls as he goes. I know I’m a bit emotional in this post (I wrote the first draft in December, maybe blame Xmas). Most of all, I think, blame these bloody good songs.

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).