I can pinpoint the exact afternoon that my life was disrupted from its 18 year old axis and redirected towards an obsessive quest of reactivating the all but forgotten anthems of old Albion….
While doing my weekly trawl through the local charity shops a mile or two from my house I chanced upon an intriguing looking L.P. with a deep blue border haloing an antique looking sailor and his young son and the words 'Sea Songs and Sea Shanties' printed on the top. The record kind of stood out against the compulsory drek of thrift store shellac (South Pacific soundtracks, Abba anthologies, Beach Boys 'Best Ofs' at best). So I took a risk, reluctantly coughed up the 30p asking price and cruised home, unaware of the seismic ruption that was about to split my teenaged world in two.
From the first time I heard The Watersons sing 'Plains of Mexico' or A.L. Lloyd sing 'Coast of Peru', I was utterly enthralled. I had no precedent for this music whatsoever, but it seemed to be a direct mainline to certain psychic atmospheres I liked to inhabit that were both romantic and barbaric. I was always into tunes like Beef heart's 'Orange Claw Hammer,' The Birthday Party's 'Mutiny in Heaven' or Bonnie Billy's 'Madeleine Mary.' There was always something that smacked of salt water about these songs. I responded profoundly to the desperate vitality and intuitive salutary gruff of the performances, but had never heard anything like the sandpaper bray of Burt Lloyd singing 'Blood Red Roses' …
"Well its growl you may but go you must
If you growl too hard your head may burst
Go down, you blood red roses
Goo ddooowwwnnn"
or the really fucking peculiar nasal cadences of Mike Waterson's lead vocal on 'Boston Harbour'
"Well, there's one thing that we have to crave
That the Captain meets with a watery grave
Go and throw him down into some dark hole
Where the sharks will have his body and the devil have his soul."
Imbedded in the fabric of the music, themes, melodies, delivery and language, seemed to be everything I held precious; the eternal call of the lonesome vocalist. The universality of the characters and the death defying situations they are condemned to play out eternally. The songs almost seemed to act as alchemical agents where you start with the base matter of the language and the very basic scenarios that reflect very basic human concerns (fidelity, obsessive love, death fantasy, incest, infanticide, submitting yourself to something other, abandoning your True Love to go and fight some remote foe across the barbarous blue) and the realisation that transcendence can be achieved by inhabiting the characters and internalising and playing out the predicaments with sincerity with acceptance of the possible fatal consequences. Eternity awaits. The glory chord can be struck and sustained.
In these respects the music has always felt to have a strong relationship to improvisation; starting with the base elements of the instruments, supreme focus and the sheer force of conception. Making yourself highly vulnerable and open as a vessel for turbulence and change. Indeed, these two musical forms have been the twin pillars of my musical interest ever since that crossroads moment on the eve of adulthood in a Barnados in Leeds…
…Fast forward four years and 205 miles northwest…
Scatter had just finished recording their second album in a beautiful organic farmhouse in rural Aberdeenshire. I had visited the place earlier that year with Alasdair Roberts to record an album of traditional death ballads. This experience had strengthened my resolve to take possession of the music I was involved in and exclusively investigate the relationship between traditional British folk songs, a heavy drone aesthetic and improvisation. This was achieved with some success with that incarnation of Scatter and I was keen to carry the momentum forward, so over the very next month I invited a handful of the band round to my flat, including Stephanie Hladowski who was the main singer on the first Scatter album.
I had a shortlist of about 10 songs I had learned, thought about vague arrangements for and thought could be illuminated by this cast of people. The songs were sourced from an assortment of recordings mostly from the 50s and 60s. 'Henry Martin' was from the repertoire of one of the only Welsh singers I know (and Mike Waterson's favourite), Phil Tanner. 'My Son David' was from one of my very favourite singers, Jeanie Robertson. 'Come Write Me Down, Ye Powers Above' was from the Copper Family. 'Lowlands' and 'The Cruel Mother' were from Shirley Collins. These are songs that never made it onto this record. The ones that did are the ones that Stephanie and her brother Chris had a large part in realising.
It was Richard Youngs who passed on the very precious and unexpected present of the Muckle Sangs Collection on the always mind blowing Scottish Tradition label. He indicated me to the last song where he delighted in the idea that after four sides of heavily accented a cappella singing, Jane Turriff performed a version of Andrew Lambie accompanying herself on harmonium. This was revelatory to me. This seemed to make flesh certain sonic possibilities that the music had always strongly implied but I had seldom heard realised; a high, keening vocal gliding over a dense drone texture, the dissolution of metric rhythm, an impression of eternity made manifest by a sustained glazed organ tone. This felt like some kind of massive breakthrough and a tangible (at least in my mind) aesthetic connection to certain formative influences that I got similar senses of forever by listening to; La Monte Young, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Sun Ra, Velvet Underground etc etc etc
For our reading of Andrew Lambie, Chris laid down a blanket drone on an old Victorian pedal harmonium with occasional notes ghosting out to hug Stephanie's vocal. He then added a second layer of oscillating horizontal fuzz by blowing a clarinet through the body of an amplified bouzouki. This, combined with other angelic debris, provided the perfect cloud tissue to help carry the lament over the graveyard wall (I remember sitting in a graveyard in Aberdeenshire shortly after recording the second Scatter CD and trying to find Tiftie's Annie's grave as I had heard that it resided somewhere in that vast north easterly land mass -I didn't know if this was usual behaviour for a 22 year old but the activity seemed very relevant to me at the time).
An Irish singer I greatly admire is Sarah Makem. It has been very difficult for me to track down a whole collection of her singing, but occasionally the odd track pops up like a ripe pluke on some compilation or other, such as her version of 'In the month of January', on the Lark in the Morning comp. (also featuring titanic larynx's belonging to Paddy Tunny and Peg Power). The first time I heard that ssssllllllooooowwww death rattle drawl I was completely enraptured. That characteristically Irish ornamentation -that endless labyrinthine lilt was tremendously exciting to me as it felt very difficult to predict where the lines would resolve (if at all) and each word felt like this shapeless sensual delicacy that could be rolled around the mouth and delivered onto the unsuspecting air in an ancient, serpentine cascade that suggested so many alternative possibilities.
Stephanie sings this song with the naked grace of someone who has really confided the unspeakable utterances of their true heart to somebody and been rebuked. When she sings the lines
'Cruel was my father who barred the door on me
And cruel was my mother that dreadful sight to see
And cruel was my own true love who changed his mind for gold
And cruel was that winters night that pierced my heart with cold'
It seems like all the elements, internal and external, corporeal and cosmic, are conspiring against her.
What initially attracted me to 'MacCrimmond's Lament' was the refrain in the chorus:
'No more, no more, no more forever
In war or peace shall return, MacCrimmond.
No more, no more, no more forever
Nor love or gold shall bring back MacCrimmond.'
The way that Jeanie Robertson invested these words with such weary resignation and pathetic beauty was very seductive to me. Stephanie sings this one fearlessly and with much sensitivity and Isobel Campbell's almost subliminally low cello line seems to be a residual echo of the banshee's ominous croon to herald the death of MacCrimmond to his family on Skye.
Our setting of the 'Seven Virgins' (the leaves of life) owes much to my first loves in English folk music, the Yorkshire based quartet, The Watersons. Norma Waterson sings this one solo on their 1965 record Frost and Fire (a Calendar of Ritual and Magical Song) and that was our springboard. The strange Eastern inflections in the melody and the rhythm inherent in Norma's delivery are vitalised by the inclusion of bouzouki, clarinet, jews harp and hand drums.
Willie O'Winsbury was lifted from the singing of Anne Briggs on her Complete Topic Recordings collection. I heard an interesting anecdote about this recording, that Anne had chosen the song and asked Johnny Moynahan to accompany her on bouzouki. He went about learning the song in preparation for the recording, but when it came to the day of the session it turned out that he had learned a different song altogether, but they combined the two and it worked incredibly well. It is a beautiful tune with a wonderfully exhilarating sense of propulsion which was accentuated on this recording by Chris' bouzouki and Isobel's cello. When Stephanie sings the lines,
'I have not had any soul sickness
Not yet been sleeping with a man
It is for you my father dear for biding so long in Spain'
it always sends a rush of melancholy electricity right through my nipples.
So there is some background to the thought and sources of the songs you will hear on this 10" originally conceived as the third Scatter album in 2004 now brought out lovingly as Stephanie Hladowski, by Jon and Fiona on Singing Knives in 2007.
Subsequently each of the members of the aborted project are working from similar seeds of inspiration to the ones first scattered at the early part of this millennium and continue to work fruitfully in a variety of guises in the Glasgow area and beyond.
Alex Neilson, Summer 2007