Unbeknownst to myself at the time, James Yorkston was the first Fence Collective artist I ever really, seriously fell for.

Back when he first released Moving Up Country I was pretty damn impressed, but when he then followed it up with the outstandingly beautiful Just Beyond the River a couple of years later I was entirely smitten.

For all that, however, it’s now been a good few years since I’ve seen him play, despite both he and I being at pretty much every Homegame festival for the last few years.  As with a lot of locally based artists (in particular the Fence Collective heroes, who tend to pack venues out) I’ve tended to skip his performances in favour of bands I knew less well and who might offer something a little new in a slightly less suffocatingly busy room.

Eventually, I ended up saying ‘yeah, but I can see James Yorkston anytime’ so often that I got to the stage where, almost accidentally, I hadn’t seen him play live in about three years.  Foolish boy!

I got to the venue a little late, and only caught the last few songs of The Pictish Trail’s support set.  He sounded really good with a full band. I saw Fence compatriot King Creosote play with a full band the other week at the Liquid Room, and to be honest, it didn’t really do it for me.

KC’s songs are a little more edgy, and the full band seems to smooth off those edges a little too much.  I’d say about ninety percent of his stuff is at its best with absolutely minimal instrumentation, so with a couple of exceptions the full band just added an unnecessary and fairly undistinguished pop rock sound to songs which are at their most captivating when they seem on the verge of either falling apart or just evaporating into the ether altogether.

The Pictish Trail’s stuff, on the other hand, is a little more robust and, little as I have to confess to having seen, seemed to rise to the full band treatment rather than be swallowed by it.

I have actually seen James Yorkston with a full band – a small drumkit, a piano and upright bass – but on this occasion he kicked things off solo and when he did add instrumentation it was fiddle, clarinet and harp, rather than a typical ‘band’.

His songs seem to have the countryside in them, with a gentle rise and fall, rolling fluctuations which recall either the swell of a calm sea or the modest yet lovely Fife landscape.

A friend of mine who was less entranced found that the set failed to hold his attention for the entirety of the evening, and with similar, soothing oscillations at the heart of most of the songs I can understand how that might happen.  In that respect a drummer and bass player to make an appearance here and there might perhaps have been able to break up what was a relatively uniform pace, and give the odd song a little more bombast or sense of urgency.

For my part, however, I thought it was fucking lovely.  Yorkston himself is an accomplished enough performer to easily hold the attention of the Queen’s Hall by himself and, in the accompanying hush, the surroundings lent even more gravitas to the emotional heft of his songs.

He can punctuate them with humour at times – in fact that seems to almost compulsory for miserable music in Scotland, lest you are accused of taking yourself just a bit too seriously – but for the most part his songs are weighty and serious.

This is the kind of thing X-Factor devotees might write off as depressing or boring, but as you will know all too well by now, it is the kind of music I find more rewarding than almost any other.  There is something indulgent and enriching about listening to slow, lovely morose songs and letting them wash over you.

Maybe it’s the luxury of being able to appreciate the intensity of the feelings without the burden of having to bear the damage.  Maybe that is a significant part of the appeal of sad music in general. The makeup of his band add a little to this, giving the songs a slightly more elaborate, intricate feel, reinforcing the impression that even the most intense of feelings are there to be welcomed and embraced, be they happy or sad.

Were I listening to James Yorkston’s albums I would do it late at night, when it’s cold, there are candles lit and no-one else around.  Despite a full Queen’s Hall, that is exactly what this gig felt like, somehow.  Bloody lovely.

James Yorkston & the Athletes – St. Patrick

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James Yorkston – Tortoise Regrets Hare

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I don’t mean to irk the purists in the first sentence, but I am not quite the slavering Daniel Johnston acolyte I might be.  I went because I find his stuff intriguing, because loads of bands I love hold him in such high regard, but largely because I was curious about how someone quite so halting, awkward and, lets face it, weird ended up being such a cult hero for so many people.

I arrived late, due to radio commitments, so I missed pretty much everything up until Laura Marling’s support slot which was… decent.  Whenever I see someone like her who is, if not actually famous at least indie famous, I find myself wondering ‘If I didn’t know who she was and this was the first time I saw her in some ropey club or other, would I be falling over myself to release her records?’  In this case the answer is definitely no.  She seemed nice, she can certainly write a tune, but I am left pretty much entirely unmoved by her music I am afraid, and the solo acoustic setting did nothing much to improve on my impression of the album, which was equally indifferent.

Johnston on the other hand is a different prospect entirely.  He seems comfortable enough in the presence of the crowd, even reassured by it, which is slightly contrary to the (admittedly arbitrary) picture I’d managed to build in my head of him.  The first few songs are just him and an electric ukulele, and I don’t know enough to say for certain, but it seemed very much like he could barely play it.  I don’t know if this is simply a skill he has been unable to acquire despite what must be tons of hours of practise, or whether he’s actually really good and just plays in fumbling style, which I suppose is possible.  It seemed a lot like the former to me though, I have to confess.

These songs, despite the playing, and maybe because of the more basic sound, are the ones I like the most.  There’s something captivating about his stumbling musicianship and uncertain delivery which resonates so perfectly with his lyrics that it makes the songs seem all the more true in this format, something which the more polished band numbers can’t ever quite achieve.

When the Wave Pictures come on to play as Johnston’s backing band the results are a little patchy.  It’s not the fault of the band at all, but I personally just felt that some songs worked better than others, and there were defintely times when the plain vanilla bass and drums simply eroded the individualism of Johnston’s songwriting.  It could be a little smothering, basically.

Then again, maybe that’s how he sees himself.  For someone who seems to utterly disregard most basic songwriting axioms when he sits down to write, the three Beatles covers in this set seem to imply that he does harbour more straighforward pop instincts in there somewhere.  Even with their weird structures, his own songs are often successful because they do still contain a lyric simple yet so honestly, obviously true that it has the same impact as a memorable rhyming couplet.  And for all he can barely play them, he can certainly write guitar hooks.

Maybe that’s why the Beatles covers get such a cheer – maybe that kind of sudden statement of unselfconscious joy is at the heart of his popularity.  It’s a weird kind of shotgun marriage: the awkward, uncomfortable, vulnerability which is broken here and there with the musical equivalent of a sunny smile.  He has the shakes something rotten, and his lyrics are raw and unflinching, and he sounds like his voice will crack at any moment, and yet when he decides to hold a note he obviously can do, and he seems genuinely cheered by the love coming from the crowd.

So for all I don’t know his music that well, I can see from this gig how people get so engrossed in Daniel Johnston.  It really is all just out there for you to see: there seem to be no barriers at all between him and his audience.  And despite the age of Johnston himself, all the awkward but nevertheless very hip teenagers in the Queen’s Hall seem to be beside themselves in rapture.   But I think by the end of the night, that I just about get it. It was an odd gig though – really good, but almost more of a social experience than a musical one in many ways.  For me anyway.  For a good proportion of the people there it was as damn near a religious experience as they are likely to get.

Daniel Johnston – Life in Vain

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Daniel Johnston – True Love Will Find You in the End (His only encore – now that was a privilege!)

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These are the videos we got from Meursault’s live performance at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, when they supported Frightened Rabbit on the 18th August.

New Ruin and Crank Resolutions are new songs, which will both be on their second album, and this is pretty much the first airing for the former.  Enjoy.

The Willard Grant Conspiracy are one of my favourite bands and I have now seen them play as a rock band, I’ve seen Robert Fisher perform solo and now I can add the Pilgrim Orchestra to the list.

Pilgrim Road, the new Willard Grant Conspiracy album, is the first to make heavy use of orchestration and, when I talked to him about it after the show, Robert said he felt that the tour needed to make a statement. His attitude is that if you’re going to do something really different it would be a waste just do a standard tour and I think he’s right. The impact of the new material would be, if not lost, diluted somehow by just doing a straightforward band tour.

It’s just a shame that, having heard older material in both the other two formats, that there wasn’t time to give more old songs the Pilgrim Orchestra treatment. Again, Robert has a response that makes perfect sense: that when an album is conceived as a whole and the songs live together they might lose something by being broken up and sprinkled across a Greatest Hits setlist. So other than Distant Shore, the truly gorgeous Fare Thee Well and Soft Hand all of which appear at the end of the set, there’s barely anything from the older albums. Distant Shore is an interesting one actually. It’s from Pilgrim Road’s incendiary predecessor and is presumably rather directly related to the US invasion of Iraq, but it’s actually quite an old song these days. Have we really been stuck in that humiliating debacle that long? Christ.

You sense that Robert Fisher has real pride in the new songs. The bold, risky step to tour with such a large band is one obvious result. Beyond a couple of big, shiny exceptions bands do not make money touring, contrary to popular myth, and setting off on a national tour with this many people is taking a risk that shows great dedication to giving the music the respect it deserves. Choosing the Queen’s Hall is another. Apparently the ageing, functional grandeur of the building has been in the minds of Fisher and his co-conspirator Malcolm Lindsay since they dragged this record out of gestation and into the workshop four years ago.

On the night, without knowing much about the financial success of the show, the muscial side is a triumph. The gentle lilt to a lot of the music makes a disarming juxtaposition to the anger in the lyrics. Musically it’s sadder than it is angry, and seems to comfort rather than twist you. Regard the End was grief-stricken, Let it Roll was raging, and this seems more resigned. For what was essentially a skeleton orchestra they managed to re-create the rounder, fuller sound of the album incredibly well, although given half of them actually play on the recordings that should not be a surprise.

But really, the core of any Willard Grant Conspiracy album is of course Robert Fisher’s amazing voice. If anything, irrespective of the arrangement of the music, what communicates the emotional core of the songs is his voice, and that is the reason I will always go and see them when they play here. Bloody marvellous.

Willard Grant Conspiracy – The Pugilist
Willard Grant Conspiracy – Soft Hand
Willard Grant Conspiracy – Distant Shore

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