King Creosote should abdicate from the Scottish pop throne and become a salesman. “I’m the weakest link on this record,” says the cosmic DIY swashbuckler of his new LP, Astronaut Meets Appleman. The follow-up to 2014’s “peculiarly beautiful and affecting” ‘From Scotland With Love’, it’s an exquisite album from one of our best-loved voices, replete with a chamber-rock rabble and then some: harps and bagpipes come as standard, as does silence.
“Sometimes it doesn’t sound like a KC record at all,” continues the man also known as Fife’s Kenny Anderson, coining another promotional slogan. “It sounds far too good.”
Returning after the stellar success of his heavenly soundtrack, From Scotland With Love – not to mention KC and Jon Hopkins’ 2011 Mercury-shortlisted Diamond Mine – might seem a daunting mission to some. But the East Neuk (via space) cowboy touches down with accordions blazing, freewheeling stealth curveballs, and a wry commercial disregard.
Astronaut Meets Appleman Album
The logical follow on from 2014’s FSWL would be to record an album of even greater acoustic grandeur than its predecessor whilst retaining much of the stripped back gnarly type of performance that King Creosote takes out on tour. Unless one is an avid follower of KC’s fence output, “bats in the attic” written in 2009 is the most up-to-date glimpse into this middle aged songwriter’s life, and so the songs on Astronaut should sound at least 7 years newer, futuristic even.
We took the recording process on tour, beginning in County Down, Ireland, in July 2015 with Julie McLarnon at the helm of her 2″ tape reel-to-reel machine and a whole bank of analogue equipment, then onto the island of Mull for a week in each of September and October to record with Gordon Maclean at An Tobar, and finally in February of this year to the haven that is Chem19 in Blantyre with Paul Savage.
Just to be on the safe side a cast of a dozen immensely talented musicians worked on 2 albums simultaneously, the names of whom can be found in glorious print in the album liner notes.
You Just Want
In the lead up to the release of FSWL I found myself tuning the car radio dial to find choral music that would assist my daughter in drifting off to sleep of an afternoon, and this in turn inspired a plaintive hymn-like lament of frustration and self debasement atop a cyclic 9 bar phrase that utilises a minor/major chord ratio of 6:3
On our first morning at Analogue Catalogue with stunning views across to the misty Mountains of Mourne the trio of djembe, cello, and acoustic guitar/voice struck up You Just Want, and the second live take and both of only 2 vocal passes made it all the way to the finishing line. Along the way the song was digitised and lengthened to make room for incoming double bass, violin, electric guitar, drums, keyboards, harp and backing vocals, resulting in this brooding drone that sets out the stall for the entire album.
Melin Wynt
In early September last year en route to Festival No.6 our 8 piece band enjoyed an overnight stop in North Wales. I woke early and took myself on a hike uphill following signs for Melin Wynt (Windmill) in the hope that I’d chance upon some sort of wooden beehive structure with creaking cloth sails and a new noise for my dictaphone. Instead I was rewarded with a general’s eye view of the impending invasion of the Wirral by a legion of much despised wind turbines marching in off the Irish Sea.
The song therefore cried out for repetitive rhythms and the iconic Scottish wind instrument, the bagpipes, as well as a sample of an actual wind turbine to set the scene, and to further assist the sonic “misting up” of my eyes we added huge reverbs and delay to the chorus vocal.
Wake Up To This
If you’ve ever had the misfortune to be led by the nose up and down Edinburgh’s Broughton Street and regaled with recent tales of Festival debauchery whilst hobbling along on crutches and anti-depressants then you’ll no doubt have penned a lyric like this one in your time. After all, “the girl from France dances on the tip of your tongue” can only refer to a, um, fully functioning biped.
This is in fact the second recorded version of WUTT, the first being an acoustic picked affair, but once an 8 piece band gets their teeth into such a song it’s hard enough to contain the propensity for ska/disco rhythms without taking it to Tobermory, Scotland’s “home of dub reggae”, to record.
In my songbook I drew a hand with the middle finger extended as the parting shot for this lyric, and this is the reaction I ask from our audiences instead of applause, although I’m somewhat taken aback by the enthusiasm with which they take part.
Faux Call
Regarding the state of the music industry in 2016 it speaks volumes when the B side of a flopped single from 2006 can be dusted off, reworked and presented as a potential A side a decade later, but that’s what seems to have occurred. This song is but a feeble apology to my long suffering partner-in-crime HMS Ginafore, and the cracked vocal performance you hear is in fact a masterclass of digital editing to match up the only 2 vocal performances captured at Analogue Catalogue.
I’m not sure forgiveness is on the cards, but the glittering harp and sweeping cello atop analogue synths as the song builds towards the close offers some hope at least.
Betelgeuse
Betelgeuse encapsulates best the overarching message contained within the album title I reckon, and in this recording I can hear Appleman actually meeting Astronaut and not the other way around. A lot of my songs in the writing stage end up on my phone or dictaphone, and so the first performance of Betelguese, buried below sterling baroque cello at first, slowly ebbs to make way for a band whose brief was simply to reach up for the stars. To coin a Scottish phrase, the timing of my original recording is totally hee-haw, making the drums-on-last approach doubly difficult. Sorry all!
[The line “my boat has sailed to Bolivia” is a nod towards Martin Stephenson and the Daintees, pop pickers.]
Love Life
Dan Willson aka Withered Hand is the illustrator of the astronaut on the album cover, and in 2014 he invited me to sing on his utterly brilliant “New Gods” album, and as a thank you for his dedication to kc on “King of Hollywood” I have doffed my own musical cap to him. He’ll most definitely hear it.
Up until the time I was ensconced in studio headphones the song had but one punchline, that of the opening line really, and had it not been for my attempts to introduce my drummer and cellist to the delights of the “Under the Skin” soundtrack on our drive over to Oban a few days before, I doubt I’d have ad-libbed the Scarlett Johansson line. Still, that SJ namecheck only served to further qualify this song as a single, for although we added the tuned percussive kitchen sink to the chorus only to then cut out 100 seconds or so during the final mix, the song already had some of my favourite performances of the entire record within its clutches.
Peter Rabbit Tea
One morning I heard this little mantra from the kitchen, snuck a recording onto my dictaphone, then went in search of my accordion. When the players with a more classical leaning were offered up the Astronaut songs to contribute to, it was the one conducted by a 20 month old that was instantly seized upon.
During our first session at An Tobar a photo was sent over of my daughter at her high chair engrossed by two figures, the one a hi-tech and painstakingly designed astronaut figure, the other a deformed apple on cocktail sticks with what looked like a head, with the title “astronaut meets appleman” … And so with some relief we quickly had our album working title.
Surface
Although budgets are tight you’d be surprised to learn just how much waiting around there is during the recording process, and so to cut down on expensive non productive studio time, on the 4th day Gordon Maclean made the “surely you have something else we can start on” remark. “Well actually no” should have been my reply but instead we piled into this at a time when I had few chords and fewer words.
Verse 2 was written as verse 1 was being double tracked, but despite this last minute lyrical throw of the dice, I had a full hand of word for word precision backing vocals, an epic E-bow guitar and fiddle combo, bagpipes as electric guitar, organ majesty and a synth bass playing the octaving thing I most love about kraut rock. The very day after the album was mixed Spring arrived and I had to drive from Fife across to Helensburgh, so what better time to play it loudly in the car. Somewhere beyond Stirling [Buchlyvie] the bagpipes kicked in and I whooped with sheer joy.
Rules of Engagement
Even after we’d completed all of the aforementioned I felt that we were lacking a full stop to the album, so I nabbed this from the second set of songs with the working title “The Librarian, Miss Crail”. I’ve long compared relationships to trench warfare, and the instrumentation started out as that of a 1950s Scottish dance band with drums, double bass, accordion and fiddle.
Short and bitter a closer it may be, so why not have the Astronaut and Appleman fade into the distance under a closing canopy of harp and utterly mangled Welsh male voice choir?
