Sunday 2 January 2022

Day Two - The Mission Hall


“Think on back…”


Welcome back for song number 2 in this January list of songs that for me are mostly linked to my visits to Montrose Folk Club between 2004 and 2018. 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. 

Today’s song is The Mission Hall written by Pete Livingstone. This song was written in the 1980s but I first heard it at Montrose Folk Club in 2005 (performed by Scottish folk trio The Anna Massie Band, vocals by Jenn Butterworth). You can hear the early version here and the one I knew first here. I liked this song from the first listen and always wondered what it was about. I saw the name of the writer on the sleeve notes for the Massie band’s first album but I didn’t know much about him till I started looking into the song for this project. Pete, as you’ll see, has been out of Scotland for some years now and that probably explains the mystery. Pete is also one of the songwriters who responded to my set of questions (the same ones sent to everyone I could reach) and I’m going to start with his input. He sent his answers back via email and they are so interesting that I’m just going to post them neat, no editing or fiddling about. 



When did you write this song?


PL: As I remember, it was written quite shortly before we recorded it, so probably around 1987. But my memory for that sort of stuff is pretty hit and miss, so I could be utterly mistaken.  


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


PL: I remember being at a singing session at an English folk festival and hearing the song “London River”, by Rod Sherman*. There was a kind of musicality about that phrase that I liked. That became “…When you’re walking the London River”. I also had teenage memories of going to dances in various “halls” in my hometown of Airdrie, Lanarkshire, although whether any of them were “Mission Halls” I can’t quite recall. I liked the notion of writing a classic melancholic, melodramatic folk ballad in which someone is abandoned by a lover who runs off to the big city leaving a child behind. With that in mind, I somehow got the idea to invert the usual convention by having a woman doing the running, leaving the man holding the baby. It’s not a true story, though many people have assumed it was.


Who performed and/or recorded it first? 


PL: It was first recorded in 1988 in Riverside Studios, East Kilbride on an album called “Down to the Devils” by the band Tonight at Noon, which had been formed by my brother Gavin and myself together with keyboard player Mike Doyle. The song was recorded with an instrumental prelude – a slow air I had written called “Nae Trust”. So if you search in Spotify, the title of the song is actually “Nae Trust/The Mission Hall”. 


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


PL: Mick West; Anna Massie; North Sea Gas; Kevin Gore. All good in their own ways. I once heard a “country” version with pedal steel, the works which was refreshing in a slightly bizarre way. 


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


PL: I’m very happy that it seems to have been absorbed into the Scottish folk tradition. There have been several situations in which I’ve been present when it was sung, without anyone realising that I wrote it, which is, I suppose, one of the highest accolades a folk song can have.   


Have your feelings about the song changed over the years?


PL: I wrote it over 30 years ago, so not surprisingly I feel as though I’ve moved on a bit as a composer and writer. It often feels odd to sing it, as though I’m pretending to be a person I’m not anymore. It’s still great to sing it together with others though. 


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


PL: That’s tricky. Together with my wife Nina, I’m co artistic director of an experimental music theatre company in Copenhagen, called Livingstones Kabinet. We make work and perform in Denmark and elsewhere. We’ve also recorded some albums of which one, called “Dead of the Night”, has some stuff on it of which I’m quite proud. I might recommend a track called “Monika Dances” about a Russian stripper. 


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


PL: In general I wish I’d written “God’s Song” by Randy Newman**. A beautiful, economic, bitter little polemic which I suppose only he could get away with. 

In the folk milieu “The Freedom Come All-Ye” by Hamish Henderson – an iconic piece of work that will survive for a long time.




Huge thanks to Pete for those answers– I had always wondered where the song’s Mission Hall was. I don’t remember Mission Halls in England growing up (we were more a Friends Meeting House family) but I encountered one on a holiday to Scotland in 1997 (in Lochinver – the visit involved a pool table and a microwave lasagne). Because of this I imagined the song’s Mission Hall in Lochinver when I heard it (and I suppose others imagined other places). Certainly, Lochinver makes a great contrast with Central London and I remember really feeling that contrast when I heard the song (we moved from very built-up West Yorkshire to calm, much emptier Angus in 2002 so contrasts featured largely in my mind). It was great timing I suppose (and a great version by the Anna Massie Band, also on their album Glad Company, 2003). Also we were, and still are, quite in love with most things Scottish.





When we saw the Anna Massie Band at Montrose Folk Club in March 2005 we had been to the club a few times by then and were starting to get into the swing of it, feeling less shocked by accordions, that sort of thing. Folk clubs are all individual of course and this one, around that time, featured a mostly quiet but knowledgeable crowd, a few demon crisp eaters (watch out tender ballads – the cheese and onion are coming!), a resident group of older guys who played in the “floor spots” in the middle part of the night, and a few less regular floor-spotters who squeezed in when they could (fierce territorial battles at times…). The Anna Massie band (Anna Massie, Jenn Butterworth and Mairearad Green) were probably our first encounter with what you might call the new folk generation of the noughties. All three were (and still are) multi-instrumentalists and multitalented. They were all young, brilliant and (certainly to us onlookers) seemed incredibly relaxed and confident. All three are still key figures in the Scottish folk scene and since seeing them as a trio in 2005 (and then again in 2006) they have fairly spread their wings. I’ve seen Anna with Bella Hardy in Montrose, noted she has toured with many other bands and artists (Kate Rusby***, for example), seen her on posters for fiddle supergroups like Blazin’ Fiddles and heard her presenting on Radio Scotland too. She still plays in a duo with Mairearad who has an equally long and varied list of appearances and accomplishments and whose 2016 album Summer Isles (that somehow I completely missed when it came out) is so fantastic that I recently bought not one but two copies (one as a Xmas present for someone). It’s a genre-bending epic that is really worth a listen if you don’t already know it (guest vocals from King Creosote if that helps move any of you towards a purchase…).




Jenn Butterworth was the vocalist when the three of them played and recorded but is a hugely in demand guitarist for the most part. I’ve seen her in Montrose with Laura-Beth Salter (2018) and Claire Hastings (2017) and on Scottish Hogmanay TV on the BBC. She has been part of many musical projects including The Songs of Separation and she teaches too (at the Conservatoire in Glasgow). She is the one whose work I have followed the most over the years because I am a singer fan most of all and I really like her voice (even though she plays a lot more often than she sings). It isn’t a listen-to-my-fancy-work kind of a voice perhaps but I love it all the more because of that. It sounds like a voice you or I might be able to manage, like a friend singing, like someone who’s just got up for a floor spot (and the ultimate trick – it makes you feel like you could sing like her … and I’ve tried …  and I definitely can’t …). It was her interpretation of The Mission Hall (and Spoon River, the other song on that first Anna Massie Band album) that made me buy the CD. Like many of us, I have always been a song collector of a sort, I suppose (not exactly Francis James Child, see Day One) but I do love a good song, well sung. I have Jenn’s solo 6-track EP too from years back (and I think that might be a collector’s item).




So, that was song 2. Tomorrow, a trip to Northumberland…




*I don’t know anything about this songwriter that Pete mentions (Rod Sherman) and all I could find online was this. Maybe some of you know more ... feel free to share if you do.


**Randy Newman’s name will come up a few times this month. Doing my research I listened to a quite a few of the Mastertapes radio shows (some quite old now but still on BBC Sounds). Randy Newman was on the programme in 2017 and I recommend listening to his (and many other episodes). His is here.


***In my getting to know folk music days (the mid noughties) I listened to quite a bit of Kate Rusby, partly thanks to a copy of her CD 10 that I borrowed from the Montrose library around this time. One of the best known figures in the English folk scene, Kate is most well known as a singer but she has written some lovely songs too (Underneath the Stars perhaps my favourite). I saw her live at Celtic Connections in 2007 (for my 40th birthday) and though I didn’t pick one of her songs for this project I easily could have done. All the time I lived in Yorkshire (1989-2002) I was unaware of her (I was listening to some very different Yorkshire sounds – electronic music from Nightmares on Wax, Unique 3, Ital Rockers…) but in Scotland, from a distance, I got to know her music pretty well. Her latest album is a covers project and features lots more great songwriters (for example, Kirsty MacColl). 




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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