Unless you live in Glasgow, it’s unlikely that you’d know that Gartnavel is a mental hospital in the city’s West End. Sparsely arranged a la Joni Mitchell’s jazz phrases, with Duncan simultaneously singing while playing piano, guitar and double bass and Graeme Miller on electric guitar and synthesizer, the lyrics were all written by David Paton, partly from the hospital’s psychiatric ward, about his experiences with schizophrenia. As you might imagine, thematically it’s a largely downbeat and sober affair, though, having said that, album opener ‘Phantasmagoria’ is, her voice rising and falling, a lightly and almost breezy fingerpicked number, described by Paton as “a place where the lines between the real and the imaginary become blurred and where the dream state and the waking state intertwine. A greeting to everyone and a warning against investing in schemes that suggest a promised return”, where she sings “I write myself out of a hole/The abyss looks long into me/I’m torn between conflicting-poles/It’s been like this for years”, the lyrics mentioning Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ and Namaste the Sanskrit greeting or farewell.
Written while on the ward, the lyrically witty ‘I Feel A Bit Lightheaded’ is fairly self-descriptive of the experience of trance states and dizziness, a feeling of being hemmed in by invisible forces (“There’s a certain kind of spectral light/That hovers in the corridor/It turns to infra-red at night/And splays across the floor and walls… The shades make noises in the walls/Assailing me with bangs and rattles/The screeching as of caterwauls”) that deftly evokes that sense of a hospital ward in the wee hours.
Another with a sparse, circling fingerpicked and piano arrangement, ‘The Path Ahead (Crossroads)’ is about reaching of a point where everything in every direction seems to be doomed (“The path ahead leads back to hell/The path behind leads on to hell/The left hand path leads right to hell/The right hand path leads left to hell”) as the pressure builds (“I’m oozing paranoia/As the television talks to me/The witches stir their cauldron/Which way do I turn the key?”) and the highs and lows overlap (“sometimes feel elated/Relief can only cauterise/This feeling of damnation”) but how in the spaces between there are “fleeting beauties”.
Noodled on piano with traditional folk coloured vocals, ‘I Am Ashamed’ finds him exposed to the feeling that his moral failure in transparent to all and there is a need to accept responsibility (“My heart grew cold, I take the blame”) but again speaks to those moments of clarity (“Although I may never be healed/I’m sane enough, well, now and then/I lose myself in lucid dreams”).Interestingly, it’s the only track with a religious note in “Upon a hill there is a station/Of the cross”.
A circular piano motif guides the bluesy ‘Pleasant And Forgiving’, which, opening with the forthright “It isn’t easy being alive”, is a recognition that living is difficult for those of a kindly disposition and the belief that life is a process, adopting its life metaphors from a drive to Callendar (“The road says slow, reduce speed now/I’m basic and I’m balancing/I’m stupid and I’m cowering/I’m pleasant and forgiving/I am a work in progress”).
Another from the ward, the fragile ‘A Cautionary Undertow’ with its tentative repeated piano notes, again speaks to a state of hyper-vigilance and spooky visions (“The trees make scary faces/I pace around a trinity/This is the nature of disgrace/I contemplate infinity/Phantoms pass my window/They go floating-by, both fast and slow”), interspersed with occasional highs (“My senses at their most acute/It feels as though I am in a dream/Magic is afoot!”).
Again originating in hospital, at the start of 2023, on ward Mcnair where “a nurse is sitting cliently/Having her nails done”, the stark and initially unaccompanied ‘I Hope That I Can Be Redeemed’ is a prayer for salvation that dances between pessimism and optimism (“I hope I’m not completely bad/I hope that I can be redeemed/I hope I’m not a rotten apple/That I can bring forth new seeds”) amid the time lapse distortions of people appearing and disappearing, ending on an image of hope and healing with “The moon is full and one star brightly/Makes the sky look fresh and new”.
Watery, rippling Nick Drake-tinted guitar notes carry ‘Reconcile’ with its staccato lyrics of opposites and contrasts (“Up and down/Wax and wane/In and out/Mad and sane/On and off/Laugh and cry/Hard and soft/Live and die”), Paton noting that “the doorway into heaven is in the centre of hell (and vice versa)”.
Capturing the feeling of trying to cope (“I’ve made it through another day”) and being unable to face another day without hope, ‘Tomorrow Can’t Come Late Enough’ opens with a reference to his twin brother’s suicide (an event recorded on an earlier song, Wake’) as it continues “With quiet at a premium/My head requires sorting…I’ve lost all bodily control/I’m like a broken record”.
It heads to a close with the melodically feathery, introspective ‘I Can’t’, one of the most direct lyrics, facing the acceptance that time does not heal all wounds and the inability to alter the past (“The pain has got no sense of time/It feels as raw as it did back then/It happened in another life/A dread, a being suspended/I can’t control the things I said/I can’t switch off the sudden bleeps/I can’t coerce my desperate head/I can’t is catching up with me”) with the anguished cry “will there ever come a day/When my past mistakes can’t touch me anymore?”.
The weight of mental illness on one’s sense of self, the simultaneous experiencing of highs and lows and being unable to make sense of the world (“what is the measure of my worth?/Cleverness can lead to ruin/I’m exalted and humbled/I have seen the big sadness/I am disturbed by existence”) and the constant feeling of having to make amends but finding it hard to go when you know where the path leads is the heart of the penultimate slowly circling melodically ‘The Big Sadness’ with its echoes of Sandy Denny.
The line “I think it may be time to go” leads into the album closing with the prickly but vibrant piano notes of ‘The Diminution’ and the realisation and acceptance of death (“a salve unto my grieving heart/A solace for my troubled mind”), a brief spark in time, and how life (“miles and miles of sky”) will continue in your wake (“the sense of something moving/Just beyond my vision/An image stamped indelibly/Concentric chords and distances/The memory of many things/That haven’t happened yet”).
Often impressionistic, both in its lyrics and the music, this is one built to be contemplated and absorbed in the quiet hours when we’re all in-patients of our own personal Gartnavel.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.amyduncan.co.uk
‘Phantasmagoria’ – official video:
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