FIRST up is Roddy Woomble, the softly-spoken and scraggy-haired frontman of Idlewild. Beside him is AL Kennedy, the razor-sharp writer from Dundee, also known to dabble in stand-up. Across the table is Rodge Glass, author of 2005's No Fireworks and assistant to Alasdair Gray. Next to him is Emma Pollock of the now defunct Glasgow band The Delgados, who is also one of the founding members of seminal Glasgow label, Chemikal Underground.
What has brought this disparate bunch of Scottish artists together to drink coffee in Glasgow's West End and talk about The Pogues and Edwin Morgan?
The answer is Ballads Of The Book, already a top contender for Scottish album of 2007 and one of the country's most intriguing artistic projects in years. The idea behind the compilation is simple: take the cream of Scotland's novelists and poets, get them to write some new prose or verse, then have leading bands and musicians write songs around them. The result is a beguiling collection of folk and indie-pop melodies on subjects as varied as ageing, domesticity, war, love, and alcoholism, that has the feel of a richly intimate song-cycle despite the multitude of voices and tales.
The list of contributors, which includes the foursome I'm with today, reads like a roll call of some of the finest talent in Scotland. On the literary side is Alasdair Gray, Edwin Morgan, Ali Smith, Louise Welsh, John Burnside, Michel Faber, Rody Gorman and Laura Hird among others. Musical contributors include Karine Polwart, King Creosote, Sons and Daughters, James Yorkston, Trashcan Sinatras, Norman Blake, Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band, and Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton of Arab Strap. "It's like a reverse Hollywood," Kennedy says looking at the list on the promo of the album.
With label backing from Chemikal Underground, funding from the Scottish Arts Council, album artwork designed by Alasdair Gray ("a record amount of Saltires, even for Alasdair," observes Glass) and sleeve notes by Don Paterson, as well as an upcoming documentary and a Celtic Connections showcase, the credentials couldn't be better. Unless, pipes up Woomble who had the original idea, they had managed to get Alan Warner. Or Kate Rusby. Or Kathleen Jamie.
The consensus around the table is that Ballads Of The Book is a ground-breaking success that has provided a rare opportunity for musicians and writers to dip their toes into each other's work. "It transcends worlds in the arts that never normally overlap," says Pollock, who collaborated with Louise Welsh on the haunting folk song 'Jesus on the Cross'. "It has forced a lot more interaction between the two worlds."
"It all started when Edwin Morgan sent me a whole pile of lyrics," Woomble explains, after we've got through the bashful introductions (though they all know one another individually, this is the first time the four have been in a room together). "We started working them into songs for no other reason than it was fun. Edwin liked what we had done and I got a couple of my friends, Karine Polwart and the band Foxface, involved and they tried out a few songs too."
WOOMBLE WAS KEEN to get more writers on board and contacted his old English teacher, the author Bill Duncan. He ended up writing some of the best lyrics on the album. The booze-addled and brilliantly titled 'A Calvinist Narrowly Avoids Pleasure', realised by James Yorkston, features lyrics like "Then you touch me and my back straightens / Like a cat stroked the wrong way".
But it was when Duncan put Woomble in touch with Gaelic poet Rody Gorman that things started to speed up. "He was really keen," Woomble recalls. "He did 17 sets of lyrics within a couple of weeks." Gorman, who collaborated with the two unsigned bands on the album, Foxface and Strike The Colours, has since been sending Woomble Bob Dylan songs translated into Gaelic. "He wants to do a whole record of them," he laughs. "He's sent me all 13 verses of 'Visions Of Joanna' in Gaelic!"
|
|
When a handful of tracks had been completed Woomble went to the Scottish Arts Council armed with a scruffy hand-written proposal, doubtful that they would go for it. But fund it they did. "I was amazed the Scottish Arts Council went for it because it's such a good idea," Kennedy deadpans, provoking a collective whoop of laughter.
Most of the pairings were decided intuitively with writers' verses doing the rounds until they found a suitable musical home. Ali Smith's offering, a pared down and poignant poem about love lost, called 'Half An Apple', was originally written for Kate Rusby. But when the folk singer had to pull out, Smith's poetry changed hands a number of times before it fell into the lap of Trashcan Sinatras who just "clicked" with it and ended up producing one of the most tender songs on the album.
Similarly, John Burnside is a huge fan of The Incredible String Band and had even written to them years ago asking if he could work with them. When Mike Heron came on board and was leafing through various writers' poems, it was Burnside's 'Song for Irena' that caught his eye. Then there is the poet Robin Robertson who stipulated that he would only work with Will Oldham or Alasdair Roberts. Oldham may have been out of reach in Kentucky, but Robertson ended up writing 'The Leaving' for Roberts.
"[Glasgow author] Alan Bisset did a song with Malcolm Middleton, who he knew from growing up in Falkirk," adds Glass. "Alan always tells the story of being in Arab Strap for five minutes when he was 15 and getting kicked out because he wanted to sing like Bono."
Contributing to Ballads Of The Book has been a particularly exciting experience for Glass. He met Woomble in a café and was offered the chance to work with Vashti Bunyan, the Sixties psych-folk singer who recently made a comeback 35 years after the release of her only album.
"I didn't know who she was," confesses Glass, "but Vashti was so welcoming. I ended up going to her studio in Edinburgh to sing backing vocals, and play a couple of guitar lines as well."
"That was you?" asks Woomble, looking pleased. Glass, who had been in a band for seven years before his writing career took off, has since recorded some tracks in Chemikal Underground's studios and says that he is "tentatively starting out again" in music.
There are countless stories like this, of friendships forged, rekindled and new collaborations. Most touching is Alasdair Gray's gift to Edwin Morgan of the original artwork for the album. The final track on Ballads Of The Book is Morgan's resonant poem on the ageing of the body, with Woomble plaintively singing the lines "We are all born to lose life / Like we lose our youth".
Talk turns to how isolating writing and making music can be and how great it is to work with other people. I mention that when I asked Louise Welsh what it was like listening to Pollock's musical incarnation of her words, her response was it made her feel "like seeing yourself on TV for the first time, a really strange experience".
"All the songs sound really like the writers, which is lovely," says Kennedy, who wrote the intense David Lynch-esque track 'The War On Love Song' performed by Sons and Daughters. "Alasdair Gray is such a nice, loving person and his song is so lovely, so complicated, so Alasdair. It's quite strange."
Ballads Of The Book also provides a snapshot of a nation in a time when music and literature are evidently thriving. "Don Paterson was saying Scotland is so rich in literary and musical talent that he just couldn't believe something like this hadn't been done before," says Woomble. "So the fact that we tried it and managed to do something great with it is enough for me."
|
