2020 is go.

Following on from a year which was, on balance, a moderate success, 2020 began in Royal Deeside. Having brought in the bells in Ballater at a gig with the inimitable Josie Duncan, our first move of the new calendar year was to visit a cafe in Braemar which offered a brilliant spread tailored towards just about every conceivable ethical or digestive dietary concern. Fair play to Gordon’s Tearoom for being equally well-equipped for vegans and gluttons alike. Unquestionably, 2020 was off to a roaring start. 

The village of Braemar…

and the road leading to it.

The next week crept by in a festive, booze-addled haze, a bit like Fear and Loathing except less productive, because Hunter Thompson at least managed to document the race. Fortunately, this reverie was interrupted by the need to head into GloWorm Recording with Andrea Gobbi and produce some new work with INYAL. It was a brilliant day in the studio, and I’m pretty confident it’s some of the best work the band have done to date. The single and accompanying video will be released in the coming months and should lead to a blizzard of facebook likes which I’m looking forward to enormously. To help support this aggressive social media campaign we got some photos done with the outrageously skilled photographer, Father of Schmo. Unsurprisingly, the work he’s turned out is as brilliant as it is unique, in keeping with his MO. 

Andrea fixing the guitar, probably.

Josie not needing her vocals fixed.

Next on the agenda was to shoot a music video for Linlithgow legend and lynchpin of the Dennistoun piping scene, Ross Miller. Ross arrived with a good original concept already in place, and it was a great experience building on this collaboratively to deliver something which was polished but retained an entertaining level of self-awareness and humour. His album will be available for pre-order on the 17th of February, and I can’t recommend it enough. 

Finishing production on this led neatly into what was to be a busy Celtic Connections. The first engagement of the festival was as part of Josie’s Ferry Tales band, a group built around her original songs composed for an upcoming National Theatre of Scotland production, also called Ferry Tales. Also in the band were Chloe Bryce and Signy Jakobsdottir, and it was a real treat watching them bring the songs to life. Keeping up with their unstoppable musicality reminded me of certain moments of my misspent youth, desperately clinging to the back of a quad bike while a local Skye lunatic pelted round a croft doing donuts.

Josie Duncan and the Ferry Tales band at the Royal Concert Hall. Photo by Gaelle Beri.

The band’s first outing was as part of the Coasts and Waterways ‘festival within a festival’ at the Concert Hall, and proved to be a fantastic gig. Or at least, it was from where I was sitting. We would later revisit the material, albeit without Signy, opening for the tremendous Lu Vent du Nord at the main auditorium of the concert hall. With an audience of over 1500, the gig presented me with one of the biggest audiences I’d ever played to, and it was an amazing experience. So amazing that even throwing a cup of water down my shirt ten minutes before stage couldn’t sully it. 

In amongst some of the most enjoyable Celtic Connections gigs I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing in, there was time enough to shoot a couple of gigs and produce some visual work for Mhairi Hall’s Airs album launch, based on the stunning paintings done by Beth Robertson Fiddes in support of the album. Mhairi is an expert pianist and it was a treat to sit at the back of the room and watch her deliver the album in full. At this point, two weeks into the festival, a break was feeling overdue and so a flying visit to Skye was undertaken. A quick trail run, which presented a welcome change of scenery, a Big Tasty from MacDonald’s in Fort William and then back to the grind. 

Projection piece to accompany Mhairi Hall’s ‘Airs’.

Running has becoming an increasingly important part of my week. It has been a great way to offset the standard work schedule associated with freelancing, one which manages to be intense while also being difficult to predict. I was a very occasional runner throughout my teenage years and as such, refused on principle to go out in anything more technical than a Metallica t-shirt. I would scoff at passing runners who seemed outfitted for active combat, ready to attack the evil forces of plantar fasciitis at a moment’s notice. As such, I am astonished to find myself becoming one of the ground troops, covered head to toe in military-grade technology. My clothes wick sweat so effectively that wearing them for extended periods of time leaves me completely dehydrated, while my watch beeps and whirrs at regular intervals, relaying the details of my performance back to mission control. I find that if I don’t get out every other day, the tasks at hand begin to seem enormous and I start freaking out that I haven’t emailed anyone back. Go for a run however, and I am completely at peace with ignoring emails. 

Escaping the vicious clutches of Final Cut Pro at Leitir Fura.

The rest of January was largely devoted to video post-production. This, following on from a few months of non-stop editing have left my laptop with the performance ability of an 80 year old smoker. Increasingly, refreshing facebook devastates the CPU load, with smooth 4K editing being completely out of the question. As I type this, it coughs and splutters and I fear the time is approaching to upgrade to a big sexy desktop, cementing my critical reliance on Tim Cook and his cronies. 

Having spent last week holed up in Carrier Waves writing music for my solo release of undetermined length, quality and genre, I’m now gearing up for a tour with Josie that will last the rest of the month. My hope is that we will spend all our days off roaming the pennines, but it is possible we’ll spend them asleep in Travelodges, surfacing only to visit Greggs. Time will tell. 

Writing new music at Carrier Waves. Making use of the MS10, Polysix and Juno-106 that are available there.