Day Four - Geography

 

“All my stars are upside down …”

You can hear an audio version of this post here. I just record them in one take so please excuse the odd hesitation/fluffing of words etc. 

Today’s song is Geography, written by Boo Hewerdine. Boo is a very prolific songwriter as well as a musician and singer. You’re most likely these days to hear him playing with Scottish singer Eddi Reader but he plays and records with several other artists and does lots of solo shows too (well, in Scotland anyway, he’s always played here regularly but he moved here from England a couple of years ago). I first heard this song Geography performed by Scottish-based Irish singer Heidi Talbot at Montrose Folk Club in September 2006 and it is on her 2004 CD (that I probably bought that night) called Distant Future (you can hear that version of today’s song here). I played that CD a great deal and saw her again in Montrose in 2009 (with Boo and John McCusker). I also love her album In Love and Light (2008) as both of those albums have such a great mixture of songs (they are the albums of hers I know best but she has several more and a new one out this year). Heidi has the kind of whispery, pure voice that you might describe as the voice of an angel if you were that kind of writer (luckily for you, I’m not). She makes beautiful sounds though!

As for today’s songwriter, I have seen Boo Hewerdine perform many times in Montrose and Dundee. I’ve seen him solo, with Eddi Reader (at Montrose Music Festival in 2012), with Chris Difford (from Squeeze) in Clarks in Dundee in 2018, in the duo State of the Union (with Brooks Williams) in 2012 and 2013, and probably more times I can’t even remember – he turns up all over the place. He has many, many albums and EPs and singles (and as we will see from the interview, some he’s even forgotten he recorded). You can read his whole musical history and discography elsewhere but for now let’s just talk about that song, Geography. It is a wistful love song with a difference and I think that’s quite a hard thing to achieve. Boo wanted to chat on the phone and as he’s a funny guy who everyone seems to like I said ‘yes, please’ (his solo gigs are worth the ticket price for the gentle self-deprecating banter alone). Here’s an edited version of our conversation from October last year (he’s quite chatty, and so am I, so editing was essential).

(Phone rings)

RF: Is that Boo?

Boo: I hope so!

RF: I’ve seen you many times live …

Boo: And you keep thinking ‘perhaps he’ll be better this time …’

RF: Can you tell me about the song Geography?

Boo: It’s about … my wife … I met her in Australia so it’s about … when the person you care about is on the other side of the world. I wrote it in Sydney. 

Geography and Muddy Water are sort of about the situation I was in then. 

RF: When was it first recorded?

Boo: There’s an album which only came out recently (2015). It was in my garage for a very long time, forgotten about, and somebody reminded me of it. It’s an album called Open which I made and then I just forgot about it. Somebody asked ‘you know that song, blah, blah, blah’ and I went ‘I think there’s a thing in the garage … oh my god, there’s a whole album I’d forgotten about …’ So I gave that to the record company and he put it out. It got the best reviews I’ve ever had and it sold pretty well. I don’t have a garage any more but if I did …

I think that’s the first version of it (Geography). I tried to make a very simple acoustic record and then for some reason, I can’t remember, it didn’t come out … and I rerecorded it …

There’s also my version on God Bless the Pretty Things (2009, rereleased 2012). I can’t remember if Heidi recorded it before me or not. I’m seeing her tomorrow but she won’t remember either. I’m touring with her at the moment (October, 2021) to celebrate the fact that we’ve known each other for 20 years.

I met Heidi at Celtic Connections, it was when we were recording Eddi’s Burns album (Sings the Songs of Robert Burns, released 2003) and we lived at the Central Hotel which was also the main party place for Celtic Connections. It cured me of wanting to drink, I’ll tell you that, because it’s just so full on. I was at the bar and she came up to me and she said ‘I’ve recorded your song Patience of Angels on my album’ which she did on her first album (Heidi Talbot 2002) and then she said ‘would you write me some songs?’ so I did. That night, or shortly after that, I wrote a song and sent it to her … a song called Invisible (that song is on In Love and Light * 2008).

RF: I’ve been a bit confused about the lyrics to Geography because versions online differ from the lyrics on the sleeve notes for Heidi’s Distant Future. For example is it ‘Grace in Play’ or ‘Graceland play’? 

Boo: It’s ‘Graceland play’. Graceland (1986) was my first single with my band The Bible. One morning I was listening to the radio … Radio One … a long time ago when you used to do that kind of thing … I was in my 20s … and my song came on the radio …

When you start making records one of the things you learn is that sleeve notes are always wrong. I really try hard, for example, one of my friends Findlay Napier’s got a record out and he had proofread it four times, including getting a professional proofreader to read it, and he said can you just check it and I found 30 mistakes. Some of the mistakes it was just unbelievable that no one had spotted them, such enormous errors.

RF: And is it Comfort downtown motel (as on the sleeve notes) or Camperdown (online)?

Boo: It might be Camperdown actually … a really grotty chain … The playing card bit, that was true ... I was outside the place where I met Audrey, my wife.

The song is in a weird time signature (6/4) or something ... and I remember when I was recording it I had an amazing set of musicians playing on it but they were all completely baffled by it. I recorded it in Glasgow. There are many reasons I come to Glasgow but my favourite recording studio was one run by a man called Mark Freegard and amazingly he decided to give up being a recording engineer, he’s a mixing engineer now. I’ve taken over his space so that’s now a space that belongs to me, Kris Drever, Findlay Napier, a new guy I haven’t met yet and that’s our writing space.

RF: I’m going to be writing about the Kris Drever song I Haven’t Tried Hard Enough and the Findlay Napier song The Blue Lagoon (a song co-written with Boo Hewerdine, as it turns out so Boo will be reappearing here later in the month) partly because I like folk songs with modern subject matter.

Boo: It’s difficult with subject matter, I was thinking about that this morning, it’s like the whole point of folk is that it was contemporary recording of events or a reflection of events … and it feels to me like it’s in aspic sometimes. One of my favourite songs is Hollow Point (by Chris Wood), that’s what I think folk songs are about. It’s a particular skill to take modern or contemporary things and make it work. If it doesn’t work it’s so clunky. Hollow Point’s amazing.

RF: Are there any other covers of Geography?

Boo: I don’t know. Possibly. It’s not easy to play. If you write a song that’s easy to play it’s more likely that people will cover it. 

RF: I’m no musician but I feel like it sounds a bit Spanish…

Boo: Around that time I wrote nearly everything in a tuning called DADGAD … there’s a note in it that is an unlikely note that might make it sound … Spanishy.

RF: Do you have a good feeling about the song now?

Boo: Yes, that period … the songs that are on Open ... it’s a really honest ... it was a really special period of writing so, yes. I don’t do that song very often (I get asked to do it all the time). I don’t know why I don’t do it. I do like it. 

RF: Playing things again and again (in live shows), is that hard?

Boo: What you do is you explore it more, find things to love. Working with Eddi, one thing she does is we go on stage but we don’t have a set list and we have no idea what she’s going to ask us to play. She might want us to play something we haven’t played for 5 years or something and I thought this is fun so I do the same. I never play anything unless I want to.

RF: She can stay on stage all night…

Boo: Yes, we have a clock on stage. It’s not to stop her but she knows that’s possible (playing for hours). The spontaneity that she creates … most people have a set list but when you do you might think I don’t really want to play this but I have to now. She doesn’t do that. So when she says a song … it’s my gig in the band to remember how things go.

RF: In the recent Ricky Ross radio interview with Eddi she talked about you (and said very nice things about you). Did you hear it?

Boo: No. Did she talk about me?

She’s so funny. We’re incredibly close, we’ve known each other for nearly 30 years. She does funny things like I sometimes think, and I mean this in a really good way, I’m just part of her surroundings. She said to me about a year ago ‘you’ve got a beard!’ – I’ve had a beard the whole time I’ve known her. I like it, she relies on me and I like that. The tour we’ve just done, and I know people will say this often, and I must have done a hundred tours with her, but it was the best one we’ve ever done because of the sense of camaraderie and adventure on this tour, it was mind-blowing! We did the last one 2 nights ago. I feel very privileged to be part of that because most bands are rehearsed I guess.

RF: I can’t remember the exact words but I think she said you turned her life around or something …**

Boo: That’s one of the services I offer.

RF: Can you tell me about one of my other favourite song of yours, Slow Learner?

Boo: That’s a brilliant song for me because I was sent by my publisher twice to Nashville because they thought ‘you’ll be able to write Nashville songs’ but it was kind of like being in hell. I wrote it with a man called Tom Littlefield who I met in a bar. All the other songwriting things I did were by appointment. I got incredibly homesick and I ended up writing two albums. There was Baptist Hospital (1996) because all I could see out of my hotel window was a big sign that said ‘Baptist Hospital’. And the second time I went I went on Thanksgiving so I’ve got an album called Thanksgiving (1999) because of course nobody wants to write songs with a guy from England on Thanksgiving, they were all with their families. I experienced tremendous loneliness and I met Tom and we just wrote it and then the really thrilling thing was it (Slow Learner) was recorded by Nashville Bluegrass Band who are the best bluegrass players in the world and it was on their album American Beauty. It’s a fantastic version, absolutely fantastic. 

RF: What do you think can be helpful to a new songwriter?

Boo: I’ve led workshops and the thing with songwriting can be … people are like ‘finished!’ and that’s not it, it all happens in the second draft. The big idea’s in the first draft, the beauty is in the second draft. 

RF: Is there a song by someone else you wish you’d written?

Boo: There’s millions of them. The first one in my head is I’m still here by Tom Waits (written by Waits and Kathleen Brennan). It’s only about a minute long, like a whole life story in a minute. It breaks your heart. It’s on the album Alice (2002). I think the interesting thing about his later work, especially the ballads, is that his wife writes the lyrics and she’s, I think, one of the best lyricists ever. The song Alice is beautiful. It’s about this guy who’s missing a person and he goes out skating in the middle of the night and skates her name on the ice. Beautiful things. She creates amazing visual things, I like her very much.  

RF: I’ve got reams of stuff already so that’s enough for now, I think. 

Boo: I’ve only just got going. Is it over? 

Boo Hewerdine has a lot of music for you to enjoy but his most recent release is the mini album Singularities (2021).

*There is also a song called Invisible on Heidi’s debut album but it is not the same song and was not written by Boo. 

** I went back and found the interview on BBC Sounds. Eddi said of the early collaborative work with Boo in the 1990: “He sort of turns up very quietly, he sits in the corner, you don’t really get to know what’s on his mind a lot of the time. And that was probably good for me. He just sits there and everything that I came up with, good or bad, in my own head, he would think was the most amazing thing he’d ever heard. So he gave me such confidence. It’s almost making me cry because it was so needed, if you know what I mean. I was on a limb and I thought, I’m just gonna fall off this, go get another job in a knitwear factory and this has all been a big waste of time … It was just a really beautiful, supportive songwriter role.”

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).

Day Three - Fine Times

   “Remember when you took my hand”

You can hear an audio version of this whole post here (well, all except for a couple of last-minute 3am amends, mostly to the footnotes). 

Today’s song is called Fine Times and was written by Judy Dinning (listen to it here or a live version with her introduction here). I saw Judy three times at Montrose Folk Club in 2005, 2007 and 2009, twice playing and singing with the band Real Time and once just with Kenny Speirs. Real Time were popular guests at the club performing traditional songs, modern folk and their own compositions with verve, skill and heart. A Northumberland musician with a long and impressive career in various different bands, Judy formed Real Time with Scotsman Kenny Speirs in 2002 and they were partners in life too. Very sadly Judy died in 2013 at the age of 59. You can read about her life here. Also Kenny answers questions about Judy’s song later in this post. 

Judy had great taste in songs and it was through Real Time that I was introduced to gems like More Love (a song that was written by US folk/americana star Tim O’Brien and recorded, perhaps most famously, by The Chicks, formerly The Dixie Chicks). After hearing Judy sing More Love in 2005 I played it non-stop for weeks (it’s on Real Time’s 2004 album Hell & High Water). (As a side note, Tim O’Brien’s sister Mollie O'Brien played at Montrose Folk Club in January 2011 with Rich Moore – Mollie is less well-known than her brother but a huge talent and that was another night of marvellous high quality music.) Real Time also covered iconic artists like Joni Mitchell (because Judy was an accomplished vocalist and could take Joni’s songs on, no trouble). On their 2006 album Home Thoughts, they covered the Dana Robinson song Safe Home that is the song that started me off on this project last year (more on Dana later in the month). Playing back the Real Time albums recently I also enjoyed hearing her sing The Angel of the North (a song by Australian songwriter Enda Kenny about the Gateshead artwork) and Stay Young (a Gallagher and Lyle number from the 1970s).

Judy had a great touch on traditional songs – I didn’t know many of these when I started going to the folk club in 2004 so I associate old songs like The Water is Wide and The Trees They Do Grow High with Judy’s singing most of all (even though, according to the well-known online encyclopedia, the latter has been recorded by big folk names including Joan Baez, Martin Carthy, Pentangle, Steeleye Span, Altan, Donovan, and some wee fella called Bob Dylan). As I said in a post earlier this month none of these artists (no, not even Dylan) were ever played in our house when I was growing up in the North of England (and later London); for us it was like that second British folk revival (1945-69) had never happened. Of those mentioned I think I heard Steeleye Span on TV on Top of the Pops once (and didn’t like it one bit). Incidentally, according to the article I linked to earlier Judy once supported Joan Baez (“one of her all-time favourites”) at Edmonton Folk Festival in Canada (and looking at the festival site I would guess that was 1999 when Judy was in Jez Lowe and the Bad Pennies, a band that’s very much still on the go and who we saw at Montrose Folk Club in 2007). Other acts on the Edmonton bill that year included all the Wainwrights, the McGarrigles, Joan Armatrading, Nanci Griffith, Dick Gaughan, Iris DeMent, Ralph McTell, and many, many more. Before going to the folk club in 2004 the only ones I would have known on that list were Joan Armatrading (I had her 1983 compilation Track Record when it was new and played over and over) and Ralph McTell (Streets of London most definitely was on Top of the Pops, regularly, when it was in the pop charts in 1974 and I watched TOTP with religious devotion). 

But back to the song in hand. I almost picked Tim O’Brien’s More Love to write about but in the end I wanted to pick something that Judy wrote (Tim O’Brien is a fairly big cheese, Judy’s star somewhat fainter). I only saw her sing those few times but she struck me as a very genuine person, a real talent and a true music lover (and like at least one other person I’ll write about this month she had classical training but chose folk music for her life and career). I don’t remember her blowing her own trumpet (songwriting wise) at all but somewhere along the line I did hear that she had a solo album (2003’s Fine Times) and I bought a copy. (One of the musicians on the album – amazing slide guitarist Johnny Dickinson – will turn up in this project later in the month too.) Fine Times features songs about Judy’s beloved Northumberland (some traditional and several with words by “Tyneside Bard” Joe Wilson,1841-1875, and tunes by Pete Scott) but the title track was written by Judy and that’s the one that I’ve picked for today. It is a lovely, tender song about her family and memories. It is also, under the name Father’s Song, on an earlier album by Real Time (a live album from 2002 called Real Time that somehow I only heard for the first time this week – perhaps because when I heard them in the mid noughties the band had other albums to promote by then). The song Fine Times/Father’s Song has a deceptive simplicity that matches the subject matter perfectly and she sings it beautifully. I got in touch with Kenny Speirs and he very kindly agreed to answer questions about the song. Everything that follows came from Kenny. 

Fine Times (Father’s Song)

Judy wrote the song some time after the death of her father Artie Henderson. Judy was a proud member of the Henderson family, a well known Northumberland farming family that could trace its roots North of the Border.

The family had Ryehill farm Slaley about 5 miles south of Hexham. Her grandfather sold it to Courage the brewing family and her uncle had the farmhouse while her father had a house on the farm called Woodside. Judy was brought up in this house, which is now owned by her brother. It has 15 acres of land.

So the song is about her father and her relationship with him. Judy was the real deal - a true Hexhamshire Lass from old farming stock. She didn’t read about rural Border life in a book-she inherited it, she lived it. She married a farmer and their son has a large farm near Hexham Racecourse. Farmer’s daughter, Farmer’s wife, Farmer’s mother!

The song was written around 2002 and was released on Judy’s solo album Fine Times the following year. No other recordings by other artists have been made.

I think the song is a wonderful evocation of rural life and its rhythms determined by nature and the seasons. I’m surprised it hasn’t been covered and I’m sure if more people heard it if it was promoted properly it would become a modern classic.

It definitely has more poignancy since Judy died, especially when you consider this song is very much autobiographical, drawing on her own experiences and memories of her father.

We went down to Whitley Mill to dedicate a bench in Judy’s memory in 2015 on 13th December, her birthday. Her family were there, including her mother and her son, and I sang Fine Times or Father’s Song. Later that day her daughter gave birth to her third grandson!

She wrote many great songs, but I would maybe choose Best Kept Secret* as one of her best.

One song she didn’t write that became almost her signature song was I’m Looking For My Own Lone Ranger by Charlie Dore**. The words touched her, and she never did a concert without including it.

Thanks so much to Kenny for answering questions about Judy and Fine Times. I'll be back tomorrow talking about a different kind of geography. Hope to see you then.

*There’s a live version of this song here. It is also on the 2002 Real Time album called Real Time.

**This song was written by Charlie Dore and Ricky Ross (of Deacon Blue). It’s on Ricky’s solo album This is the Life (2002) and on Charlie’s album Cuckoo Hill (2006).

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).

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 40^th 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).

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).

A break for this message

I am taking a break from my Songs That Stick research and writing to let you know that Gary Anderson has recorded a new version of our Xmas song Xmas Number 1 (him music, me words). I wrote the poem back in 2016 (then called Straight In) and Gary gave it a tune in 2018. Now a new recording is on Bandcamp (under Gary's band name Kinnaber Junction) and you can listen and buy it here.

See you on January 1st 2022 for the first post of my FunADay project. I've got some great interviews and all kinds of snippets of info about songs.