Finally, it’s time to see your favourite bands. The artists you’ve looked forward to all afternoon. The reason you travelled 5 hours from your warm, comfortable home and camped in a tent alongside people with whom you would move to the other side of your local pub to avoid. Your heroes take the stage. You stand in awe as their personalities shine out over the massed sea of the undead and as the first guitar is attacked, as the first drum is pounded… Nothing. The wind catches the sound a mere 100 feet from your ears, and it is forcibly abducted, never to be heard from again. Of course you scream and shout anyway; your heroes are up there.

We Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way

And the reason we’re wrong? The reason the human race is in trouble? The reason zombies win? We wouldn’t have it any other way! Music festivals are here to stay!

Yes, despite how miserable this experience might seem, we music fans flock to it like moths to a flame. It is hard to pinpoint what is uniquely enjoyable in this very specific shared experience. And yet. In my early festival-going days – the early days of Scotland’s T in the Park festival – I wasn’t a drinker, and I hadn’t yet begun my occasional flirtations with illicit substances. I wandered around the fields of Balado in Fife in a sober haze. I was in the minority, of course, as almost every other festival-goer in the vicinity was somewhere in that delicate spectrum of intoxication. And when the sun shines, as it rarely does in Scotland but did – oh how it did – in 1999, the experience is glorious.

Outdoors

T in the Park was my first real festival memory, and some of the music found there in the late 90s, in the Britpop heyday, was magnificent. Bands enjoyed at the Scottish festival included Mogwai, Muse, the Flaming Lips, the Cardigans, Iggy Pop, Biffy Clyro, Idlewild, James, Bernard Butler, Garbage, The Beastie Boys and R.E.M., among many, many others. That said, I was forced to stand through almost all of Blur’s mid-Britpop headline set – a musical atrocity of such credibility-destroying magnitude that I’ve still not fully forgiven the ex-girlfriend that visited it upon me. That I was wearing my Mogwai Blur: Are Shite t-shirt allowed me a little solace.

Some music festivals from my younger days have almost entirely dropped out of my mind. I have a ticket stub for Glasgow’s Gig on the Green with Travis headlining the event in Glasgow’s main city centre park, but I have almost no memory of it at all. Thankfully, I do remember the intriguing one-day festival that welcomed the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Garbage as headliners and Idlewild and the Delgados as support. All very Scottish indeed.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

As I got older and less tolerant of Scotland’s penchant for rain during any outdoor gathering of a number of people in excess of 26, I started to look elsewhere for my festival experience, and the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival held in Camber Sands holiday park near Kent in England was as antithetical to the out-in-the-field adventure as it was possible to be. For a kick-off, you found your bed in chalets, and the main stage was in the holiday camp’s main hall. This was a boutique festival, and it was undeniably cool. That 2005’s ATP was curated by the seminal post-rock band, Slint; that they had reformed to play at the festival and that the audience was far from the wasted, anonymous collection at T in the Park was an indication of what an experience this was.

Iceland Airwaves

Sadly, this was my only experience of an All Tomorrow’s Parties event, but it wasn’t long before I discovered something even more revolutionary. Even more exciting and enjoyable. Iceland Airwaves. Airwaves had been going for some time before I finally made the decision to travel to Reykjavík in October 2008 and see what all the fuss was about. For one week, Iceland’s capital itself, the beautiful city of Reykjavík, becomes the festival. The music venues bustle with activity and the city streets teem with festival-goers morning, noon and night.

Without any shadow of a doubt, for me at least, Airwaves is the greatest festival in the world. I’ve never felt quite a shared experience like I have there. The evenings are for running across town catching band after band, and the daytime? Well, most bars and record stores host “off-venue” shows, so there’s never a dull moment, and if you’re lucky enough, you can end the festival at the closing pool party in the tourist trap, the Blue Lagoon.

Partying in a Park

In 2013, on a trip home to Glasgow, I made a brief return to the outdoor experience when I travelled to Glasgow Green to see the reformed Stone Roses play. With the band’s guitarist, John Squire, being something of a guitar hero to me, I was excited to see him play with the Roses, something, given the acrimony within the band, even a couple of years ago seemed unthinkable. Nostalgia was high, and for a band well known for being part of the late 80s drug scene, so were most of the audience.

Post-COVID lockdowns and despite the climate-crisis-induced heatwave horror, the festivals are returning, and despite the bleak dystopia imagined, music fans a lot longer than me will flock to them. And all power to them. I hope they have a blast.

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My first experience of Spiderland was in late winter, early in 1998; a natural consequence of my blooming love for Glasgow’s Mogwai and Falkirk’s Arab Strap. I found the music to be astonishing, and this seminal album by Louisville band Slint is still unlike anything I have heard before or since. From the delicate guitar and opaque spoken word of Breadcrumb Trail to the pained exclamations of loss in Brian McMahon’s cries at the end of Good Morning, Captain; listening to this album was a key moment in the formative years of musical discovery that shape my listening, later my composing and ultimately, my life. Had I not heard Spiderland in my late teenhood, I may not have become so enthralled with the scene, and may not have found other such bands like Rodan, June of ’44, Rachel’s, Bonnie Prince Billy, and even maybe Canadians, Godspeed you! black emperor.

For the next decade, I would write, record, play, promote, release, and enthuse this music. I would attend hundreds of gigs and write about so many bands. Of course, given their split towards the end of 1990, it was a fanciful daydream to ever see Slint take to the stage to play live. In 2005, much to the surprise of many, that’s exactly what they did.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

How I found that Slint was to curate 2005’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival at Camber Sands holiday camp in Kent is lost to time and anybody’s guess. I do remember, though, there was no question that I would be there. And on Friday 25th February, I was Pontins-bound.

All Tomorrow’s Parties was a festival like none I had experienced before or indeed since. It had grown out of Belle and Sebastian’s Bowlie Weekender, so had a twee, indie atmosphere. The holiday camp chalets housed all attendees, bands, and audience alike, with the main stage located in the entertainment hall.

Memories of the festival are many. A particular favourite was seeing múm live for the first time, though inexplicably I was the only member of our party who wasn’t bored by the performance. Then, hearing Mogwai live for the umpteenth time, then later seeing them, like star-struck teenagers, enjoying Slint from the side of the stage – Martin in particular, air drumming along to Britt Walford’s fills. Wonderful stuff. Mark Kozelek, King Kong, Deerhoof, Spoon, and the Melvins. Incredible music. Some great DJ sets topped the nights off – Mogwai vs Arab Strap, then Stereolab.

It was only a couple of years later before Slint were in front of a Glasgow audience, at the ABC and performing Spiderland in its entirety. Greeted like the post-rock heroes they are, it was an experience to hear the album performed from start to finish; however, I will always remember the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival more fondly. That first time is often the most memorable.

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It starts early, at school. Back in the dark days of the mid-eighties, when teachers were less – let’s say – enlightened than they are today. Those were the days of jumpers for goalposts, chalk on blackboards, and right to write. Being left-handed, even then, was a source of considerable trouble.

Left-handed – sinistral, southpaw, cack-handed, dolly-pawed, mańkut, corrie-fisted – a sinister affliction that affects approximately 11% of the world’s population, and one that is often attributed as correlating with higher creativity or intelligence, though I’m possibly not an efficacious example of this.

True, we left-handed folk feel that we are special – and, let’s be honest here, we are. It was only after picking the guitar as my musical instrument of choice, however, that I realised rather than a blessing, it may have been a curse. Though those days are, largely, behind me, here are a few reasons why being a left-handed guitarist can be, well, troublesome.

Enough Wonderwall, how about some Velvets

Ever been to a party in some flat in some student centre of some city? There’s an acoustic guitar. There’s always an acoustic guitar. The front room you’ve invaded is being involuntarily serenaded with the 7th rendition of an Oasis dirge and you think, right, enough is enough… time for some Velvet Underground. A crack of the knuckles, and you’re on your way except… well, of course, the guitar is right handed. The guitar is always right handed. The guitar is never left-handed. Sure, you can have a crack at an upside-down play-through of Nirvana’s About a Girl, but no-one’s leaving the party tonight hailing you as the next great guitar hero. Foiled.

Is the customer always right?

A new music store is opening on the high street. Signage has been up for weeks. Billboards proclaim an opening-day sale. There’s a buzz among the kids in town – patiently, if excitedly, waiting for the grand opening to get their hands on a new Fender Tele, or a Gibson 335, and start unerringly riffing ad nauseam Seven Nation Army. The day arrives. The doors are thrown open. It’s beautiful. Guitars of all shapes, sizes, and colours are hanging from the walls, or nestling on stands. There’s something missing, of course. Not a lefty among them. Sure, you can have a crack at an upside-down version of Nirvana’s About a Girl, but no one’s leaving the shop today hailing you as the next great guitar hero. Foiled again.

Availability: Discontinued

With no opportunity to try before you buy, you’ve decided to take the leap and find a guitar online. There’s no shortage of great places to search through – Thomann, Guitar Guitar, Reverb, and many others. You want a Rickenbacker 360. No wait, a Player series Fender Jaguar. No no no, a Gretsch Country Gent. All popular guitars; it shouldn’t be difficult to find one at a reasonable price, right? Ah, but lefties, even popular lefties, are often short-run productions. The only way you’re getting your hands on that Gretsch is by waiting weeks, months, years, until a lefty appears on the market.

Cost of doing business

In the meantime, you’ve decided to opt for a classic; a Mexican-built Fender Telecaster – a lefty. At least they’re out there. Ever present. Ever dependable. You hit up your local price-comparison website. You do a search. And do it again. And again. It must be a bug. Surely. Yesterday, you noticed a righty for a fraction of the price. The guitars can’t possibly be this expensive! Ah, but they can. And when that lefty Gretsch finally rears its head in amongst the bargains and right-handed gems to be found on Reverb, you can be sure you’ll pay a premium for that too. It’s going to be painful in the wallet.

Heading in the same direction

Your prize Tele arrives by courier and the excitement is palpable. You open up the box, ceremoniously unclasp and open the hard-case. You take the guitar in your hands like a newborn baby. Success. It sounds lovely through your practice amplifier. Your righty songwriting partner comes over to hang out and play together and he discovers a rare advantage in your left-handedness. Just as McCartney and Lennon discovered back in Forthlin Road in Liverpool, there’s some benefit to sitting opposite your partner, your guitars mirroring one another. All the better for picking out those riffs together in harmony.

Mind your head!

Alas, that good cheer doesn’t last past your very first live performance. Tonight, you’ve left the womb-like comfort of your rehearsal room to perform to 10 people at the Nobody Inn. It’s only after load-in and set-up that you realise you and your righty partner may have chosen poorly. You are positioned stage-left with your lovely new Tele pointing to the centre of the stage. Righty? We’ll he’s stage-right with his Gibson Les Paul pointing right back at you. Except the stage is the size of a table-tennis table. Drums, amps, musicians, microphones, monitors, all scrunched up together; and you and Righty are going to be smashing headstocks all night long.

I often wonder if that tyrant of a primary school teacher, demanding that I focus on writing in my exercise books with my right hand, knew something I didn’t. I suspect she probably did.

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I was fascinated by silence as a wee boy. That is not to say the times in which I was quiet were plentiful; even when I was a child, it was difficult to shut me up, much to the eternal frustration of my long-suffering mum. Still, despite a propensity for singing and chatting, at times even with myself, I was fascinated by the idea of silence.

Church-based Memories

I have an early memory of a sponsored silence held at Sunday School. Possibly long-forgotten but a sponsored silence was a torturous event, an opportunity for children to fundraise for charity by simply sitting quietly for a set period of time – not an easy task for some. A blessing, though, for those beleaguered teachers, group leaders, or parents that had the – albeit temporary – gift of a roomful of quiet kids. Children would tour aunties, uncles, parents and grandparents, and if they were really enterprising, teachers and family friends too, asking for a pledge of £1 here, £2 there, a jackpot if someone pledged a fiver! All for sitting in a room with your pals and keeping your mouth shut for a pre-determined measure of time. It’s harder than it looks.

Oddly enough, another memory is based in church. Each year, from the earliest memory through to leaving the Boy’s Brigade at 15 years old, I would parade at church on Remembrance Sunday. After marching in the flags, 11 am would arrive, and with the congregation, we would sit in contemplative, commemorative silence for 2 minutes before the service would begin.

The Sound of silence

In the sponsored silence, as I sat in a room full of other 7 year olds reading books, solving puzzles, playing games, all without speaking, I would listen for sound. With a smug feeling of victory, I believed I had discovered a flaw in the system. Mark isn’t being silent, his jacket is crinkly. Amanda isn’t silent, her colouring pencils are scratching the page. Only I am silent, truly silent, I think. Insufferable.

Taking the concept of remembrance too literally, I would sit in church, struggling to remember anyone of whom I knew had died in the wars, and my mind would wander. I would listen to the coughs, sniffs, and movement from across the pews. There would be the creaks of wood, the hiss or clunk of the heating system, the sneaky crinkling of a sweetie wrapper, or the distant sound of roadworks or a car horn.

I remember the feeling, at that age, of feeling I had discovered something profound. Nothing was ever truly silent. With a pomposity that I’m sure has never really left me, I questioned whether I was the only one to understand this. As I grew older, I was gently, if emphatically, disabused of this, and realised just how integral silence is when used creatively, particularly within music.

Play What’s not There

Miles Davis once said one shouldn’t play what’s there; play what’s not there. A sublime statement on the importance of those short moments of rest, or indeed silence, in composition. It was avant-garde composer John Cage, however, who opened my eyes to how silence – or the lack of true silence – could be used.

In each of the three movements of his 1952 piece 4’33, Cage instructs his musician with a single word: Tacit. While often misinterpreted as four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, the piece invites the listener to consider the sounds of the immediate, and sometimes distant, environment in which the performance takes place. Cage’s love of serendipity and chance occurrence is inherent in such a concept. For me, as if being transported back in time to the small rooms or the nave of Jackson Church, listening to the small environmental sounds invading the silence.

While working on a solo post-rock record a few years ago, I took to using interviews and other spoken word artefacts in the music. One such was this insightful interview with Cage in which he muses on the idea of silence, and the activity of sound. It’s a beautiful sentiment and one that I think about often; particularly in moments of silence.

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Names. To a band so titled, or indeed to their audience, a name can mean everything, or it can mean nothing. Names can be serious, political, witty, pithy, nonsensical, knowing, ironic, or just ever so simple. After the first few years, some artists must regret the choice as the weight of their decision dawns. Others catch the zeitgeist and may come to represent their era or genre. Some names lose any relevance to the reference that produced it – when you think of The Rolling Stones, do you think that they gather no moss?, or when you think of Joy Division do you think of the Nazis and sex slavery? R.E.M. or Talking Heads have become so synonymous with the bands that chose them, we forget those names represent other things.

Recurring trends come and go. There may be a spate of bands using the definite article to prefix anything from a banal noun, to a kinetic verb. Around 2012/13, there was a spate of misgendered naming of bands, privileged cis white boys claiming irony as they name themselves anything from The Girls, to Girl Band (now named Gilla Band – fair play to them), to Cheap Girls. Another example of a trend to come and thankfully go, was the clumsy pun on another celebrity or band name; examples spanned from the sublime to the ridiculous – Dananananaykroyd, to Chet Faker or Eltron John.

Won’t You Please Welcome To The Stage…

Back in the early 2000s, on their XFM radio show, now professional bellend Ricky Gervais and cohort Stephen Merchant often discussed band names, devising what they believed a sure-fire way to tell if an artist had a great name. Now play along at home, won’t you? Imagine yourself a stage-announcer, at Wembley stadium, something like Live Aid, maybe. You’re announcing the next artists to take the stage: Ladies and gentlemen, won’t you please welcome to the stage… Radiohead, or Nirvana, or AC/DC, or …Led Zeppelin. It’s less easy to hear: Ladies and gentlemen listening around the world, won’t you please welcome to the stage… Gay Dad, or …Menswear, or …Rumpleforeskin.

Thinking back to my own musical endeavours over the years, I can think of some tremendous and some terrible names I’ve chosen for projects over the years. When Iain, Paul, and I first played together, for a short time we decided upon the moniker Metronomic, for a band that was anything but; it was an ironic choice. After that, and somewhat incomprehensibly, we considered Fourteen Minutes to be a stronger choice. Thankfully, Andy came along and suggested the enigmatic Troika. Not long after, I joined another band with a fantastic, already chosen name, Skappah-flo, loosely named after Scapa Flow, a body of water in the Orkney Islands.

Nuns Are People Too

On a visit to Glasgow in 2005, Sarah and Dave of Valentine Records joined me in an evening of drinking and recording. More than a little drunk, and with some friends, we wrote songs with the spectacularly stupid titles Tweemo, FC Cunto, and Kicking Bishop Brennan Up The Arse, the latter a Father Ted reference that spawned the name of the project, Nuns are people too.

As I tried my hand at solo artistry, I did everything I could to avoid using my own name; the reasons for why, long since evaded my understanding. I tried A Crowd of One, Cinematica, Microcassette, twentysecondsbeforesleep, and eventually settled on beneath us, the waves. Boredom set in, and before long I’d begun writing and performing under my own name. At last.

Still, it wasn’t the end of my battle with the band name. When I was fortunate to find myself as the final member of a classically-infused Varsovian post-rock sextet, we had a mythical struggle to decide upon a name. We each brought lists upon lists to rehearsal, and every suggestion had to win unanimous support. Not one of them did. One evening, after an enjoyable early rehearsal, I mentioned an upcoming trip home to Scotland, to which one of the band, I forget who – though I suspect Dave – commented on my trip hope to the Frozen North. As one, all 6 of us had an epiphany. That’s the name.

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I have many lovely memories of R.E.M. Not least, of course, my 2012 visit to Athens, Georgia and the self-led R.E.M. walking tour of the band’s home town, to such places as the 40 Watt Club, Weaver D’s and Wuxtry Records. 16 years before that, (and 27 years ago now!), I had another memorable R.E.M. experience. I went to the world premiere of the band’s film, Road Movie at the ABC Cinema in Edinburgh.

The Green world tour had exhausted the band, and after albums Out of Time and Automatic for the People, R.E.M. disappeared for a few years. There were no tours. There was no extended press or publicity, and in those pre-internet times, fans held out hope for any gossip they could get their mitts on. When the band finally returned in 1994 with the single What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? and the album Monster, their world had changed. Friends of the band River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain had both died, and far from following a trio of albums considered lush and instrumentally layered with production similar, they stripped everything back and produced the most garage rock record in their catalogue.

The Monster World Tour

The subsequent world tour in ’95 was fraught with incident, the most harrowing of which was drummer Bill Berry’s brain haemorrhage in Switzerland. The band cancelled several shows, including the Glasgow SECC concert for which I had tickets. Far from convalescing, Bill was back on the drum stool six weeks later, and concerts were rearranged. Replacement tickets were hastily acquired for the Scottish show announced for Murrayfield in Edinburgh, later in the year – but that’s another story.

R.E.M. closed the tour at the Omni in Atlanta, Georgia over three successive nights, filming each for a film. The resulting footage became Road Movie; a companion piece to Tourfilm, the documentary of the Green tour. The ABC Theatre on Lothian Road was the Premiere venue and the film was part of the programme of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Michael Stipe was due to introduce the screening that evening.

The Road Movie Premiere

Arriving to a note pinned to the door of the cinema announcing Stipe’s cancellation as stuck in transit dampened spirits a little, however undeterred we took our seats in the theatre packed to the gills with R.E.M. fans, soon to be rocked to its foundations.

The film itself, remains one of my favourite concert films. Entirely ‘glam’ in its approach, with eye-popping projections by James Herbert and Lance Bangs, among others. The set-list is a mixture of tracks from Monster and growling versions of live favourites such as The One I Love and Losing My Religion. For a group with an early-90s reputation for being serious and po-faced, the film shows a band having fun and with a clear renewed love for live music. I remember watching the VHS time and time again, getting Peter Buck’s moves down just right. There exists a terrifying picture of me in rehearsal with the band that preceded Troika; mid-air in a Peter Buck-style jump in a terrible shirt and terrible hair. Blimey.

Like a hyperactive toddler on Fanta and Fruit Pastilles, I walked back to the car excited and desperate to see R.E.M. live once again. Little did I know it would be another 3 years before they’d appear in Scotland, this time at Stirling Castle. Still, I had my trusty VHS of Road Movie to tide me over until then.

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Though largely forgotten now – even by members of the group themselves – my first band in Poland, the post-rock effort, the Frozen North had an exciting first year. Recording, radio, TV, wee festivals, TEDxWarsaw, and other bits and pieces.

An Art Gallery on Mars

In late 2014, before a malaise and eventual collapse the next year, we were invited by an organisation to create music for a project that planned to send an art gallery to Mars. The further in time I travel from that meeting, the more I think I may have hallucinated the whole thing.

To some degree, I took the creative lead, and heavily influenced by Krzysztof Penderecki, I took an avant-garde approach. Over time, the piece took shape, with the violins of the band providing the cacophonous spine, surrounded by scraped cymbals, bowed bass, and MAX MSP-processed guitar. We invited a choir of our friends to join us in our rehearsal room, and we recorded them reciting random and different pages of the Saturn V technical manual as I conducted – a first for me.

For reasons that are plentiful, the band suffered a crippling slow-down over the next year, and we largely disappeared, losing the momentum and good feeling we’d gained in our first. By the time we split, the piece was a distant memory and lay on my hard-drive for several years.

Foundations Festival

In late 2018, I traveled with a Rickenbacker, a laptop, and, for the first time, a singing voice, to perform at a small festival in Manchester in England. The organisers asked me to provide a video installation, and I fell upon the idea of something of a retrospective of the music I’d made so far. An hour of music featuring everything from Troika, through my solo modern-classical and ambient stuff, through the Frozen North, and the remixes I’d done for bands like VLMV and Worriedaboutsatan, and finishing with music from my solo power-pop, and (what would be come) Pop-up Books, indie-pop.

As I scoured through hard drives and folders, I came across the unmixed Logic Pro session of this avant-garde thing. Alongside Tomek Walczak, who gave me a couple of pointers, I spent some weeks dipping into it. I added some sounds, and I removed others (one member of the band doesn’t appear at all – other than in the “choir”, for no other reason than the audio just didn’t quite fit), and eventually I finished and mixed it down. Once done, I added some strange glitchy video created on my iPhone, named it Marain as an allusion to Iain M. Banks and the sci-fi origins of the piece, then I added it to the film, not expecting anyone other than the festival attendees to see it.

Marain: A Tribute of Sorts

When I heard that Penderecki had died, I decided to bring it back, as he was quite an influence on me. While the composition and mix are clearly derivative in their influence, they are deliberately so. I put it up on my Instagram, and people seemed to really enjoy it. It became a tribute of sorts. Since then, I’ve forgotten about Marain to some degree until last night I stumbled upon it and thought I should write a little about it.

Thank you to Aga, Kasia, Tomek, Filip, and Dave for the time spent in the Frozen North, and their work on this.

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