Formerly a member of Scottish outfit The Skerries and 70s folktronica duo Tonight At Noon, Fire In The Snow is the Glaswegian-based singer-songwriter’s first completely solo album, all bar one of the songs, sung in an unabashed accent, being self-penned.
Again, it melds traditional and technology, opening with the circling melody line and drum beats, and dulcimer of ‘Lady Luck’, a song about either fate’s fickleness or serendipity depending on how you take his story of a lottery win that was just enough to replace his computer when it broke down the next day.
Based on an old Corries’ song and featuring synthesised classical pizzicato strings, ‘Dearest Nancy’ (from whence comes the album title) sounds like an old Irish traditional tune and, built upon a thumping drum pattern, is quite irresistibly lovely.
Returning to acoustic guitar, ‘A True Glaswegian’ again sounds traditional notes on a song inspired by a sign in park dedicated to ‘Rajesh Bagha – a true Glaswegian’, but, more than that, nods to the city’s welcoming multi-cultural nature and, by extension, a commentary on immigration as he sings “Home, you gather strangers round your door”.
Mention of parks leads to ‘The Grasscutter’, another infectious number which, opening with birdsong and the sound of starting up a petrol engine lawnmower, tromps along on accordion and clanking hammer on steel percussion, recalling his student summers working in the local parks department.
Changing musical tack, the five-minute ‘The Uniform’ takes on an Indian raga feel mingled with echoes of the ISB, a song inspired by a 1990 holiday in Bulgaria and meeting a couple proud of the country’s westernisation; this before the war that tore the country apart.
Ecology provides the theme for ‘This Desolate Future/The Wilderness’, a sparsely-structured eight-minute musing on the way mankind blindly depletes its resources “to cushion your lives” that shades into a windblown instrumental that conjures images of barren plains and horizons of desolation.
The solo non-original comes with a cover of ‘Don’t Sign Up For War’, a traditional styled strummed protest number written by the late Scottish songwriter-activist Alistair Hulett about Glasgow-born socialist and WWI protestor John Maclean and featured in a 2017 theatre production of Mrs Barbour’s Army (about another Scottish activist) for which Livingstone was musical director.
There’s more history on ‘The Waverley Line’, an instrumental number bookended by archived spoken samples from the Memory Bank in Galashiels and which he originally recorded under the alias of The Waverley Line Dance Band for a CD commissioned in 2001 to raise awareness of the need to reopen the line from Edinburgh to Galashiels.
The album ends on another walking beat drum rhythm and choppy guitar with ‘Waters On The Sand’ (with an acknowledged Pink Floyd influence), a song essentially about getting fed up of beating your head against a brick wall that has its roots in his working life as secondary school maths teacher “looking for sense in the midst of a daze”.
It’s unlikely to receive a huge amount of exposure beyond circles already familiar with his work, but, one of the best things I’ve heard this year, it really deserves to be sought out.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.gavinlivingstone.com
‘Don’t Sign Up For War’ – with Rory McLeod:
It has been my experience that any record with Naomi Bedford’s name on it is worth listening to and adding Paul Simmonds to the mix practically makes it mandatory. With Singing It All Back Home they turn their back on their customary songwriting and present a set of Appalachian songs with roots in English and Scottish traditional songs. Despite their southern English backgrounds, Naomi and Paul sound authentically American particularly when they hit their harmonies.
At first glance Ordinary Giants seems like a sequel to Robb Johnson’s wonderful Gentle Men but it isn’t. It’s more of a companion piece; there is no formal spoken narrative – Robb won’t spoon-feed us, although he helps us along here and there – and the album encompasses the last hundred years of British history interleaved with the story of his family and in particular his father, Ron Johnson. It’s rather like an audio advent calendar with each track displaying a snapshot of a moment in time. This is a triple-CD set with a book so it isn’t something you can rush through nor, I suspect, will anyone listen to it in a single sitting.
The Radio 2 Folk Awards are chosen and voted for by a panel of professionals (broadcasters, promoters, festival organisers and record companies) who all work in the world of folk, acoustic and roots music. These people (now in their hundreds) are asked to nominate and vote for the people that they consider to have produced and performed the most outstanding work during the past 12 months.
Willy Russell presented Ralph McTell, (in my view, one of the finest singer-song writer of all time), with the second of the night’s “Lifetime Achievement Award”. Jim Moir, the man that cared enough to put the money and passion behind the Folk Awards idea in the first place and the man that presided over the format and programming of Radio 2 at the turn of the century to make it the most listened to Radio Show in the country, awarded The Chieftains “Irelands Musical Ambassadors” with, the third of the night’s “Lifetime Achievement Award”. I clearly remember the first words Jim said when he came out on stage “What an evening”. It certainly was Jim!
For folking.com, this performance represented the beginning of this exciting new change in folk music, as it was the first time in years that a folk artist and a traditional folk song were taking pride of place on the Radio 2 playlist. Johnny Walker, who presented Cara with the award for “Best Traditional Track”, summed it up perfectly by saying that “Cara had the courage to resist corporate pressure to commercialise her music and change it to try and get it to a wider audience and instead the audience has come to her”. This was an important point which could be cited as one of the fundamental reasons why the music is so strong today. A certain pre-Mercury Music prize nominee, Seth Lakemen (now truly an ambassador in his own right), accompanied Cara on backing vocals. The whole piece was woven together beautifully by the piano arrangements written and performed by Seth’s brother, Sam Lakeman. Darren Beech – June 2011
Hadrian’s Wall for many conjures images of the Romans in Britain and to celebrate this iconic image, the Brampton Live festival commissioned this recording utilising a selection of some of the UK’s leading ‘folk’ singer-songwriters, poets and performers.