Doubt and about.
That was some year, eh?
I realise that I’ve not posted a blog on here in a while, or on this new revamped site at all, but I have spent a lot of the year staring into the digital void as I’ve had a new record out.
I had the good intentions to move all of my old blogs over here before writing any new ones, but other things got in the way. It’s one of the pitfalls of our modern ephemeral culture - anything not saved will be lost (Nintendo Wii Controller Settings, 2006). A real argument for physical media of all sorts. Maybe this could’ve dropped through your door?
Another reason that none of my old blogs are here is that I moved my web-hosting from Wix earlier this year due to the fact that they are actively supporting the IDF, and are therefore complicit in genocide. Had I known they were an Israeli company enthusiastically maintaining Apartheid, I would never had parted with any of my cash to them. Thankfully BDS brought my attention to this via an update.
The following takes a fairly convoluted route through my 2024 and contains a fair amount of ranting. I don’t want to write a blog that is a total downer though, as challenging as the world may seem right now. I am going to write about the positives of 2024, as well reflections on the unfathomably bad shite.
So, kicking off with a positive: I released my third album as Broken Chanter, Chorus Of Doubt, in April on Chemikal Underground. That was quite something - a label 15-year-old me idly (and if I was being honest with myself then, fancifully) dreamed about being on. That was class.
I’ll be spending the last bit of this year and the first bit of the next one with my feet up (apart from the First Footin’ Festival), relaxing and starting to clear my head so I can begin to think of what’s next come springtime. That’s not to be mysterious, what’s next is another BC album, but what will it be like? I need time to breathe after feeling like a hamster on a wheel for almost all of this year, apart from a very restorative few days earlier this month visiting family in France.
Anyway…
Dialling back from April, my year started with an unexpected move to Oban in the last weekend of January. Those of you who follow my scribbles will know that my private life is something which I keep closely guarded. I’m not one who believes that social media should offer an insight into every aspect of a musician’s (or anyone’s) life - if you give the smallest shit about what I ate for dinner, then maybe spend some time away from your phone/computer. Maybe do that anyway, once you’ve finished reading this.
I digress. As you’ll know if you follow me on Instagram, my father-in-law passed away in March this year. That move north and west was to be closer to him, moved to the Lorn and Islands Hospital from Kilchoan, as he was. The NHS staff provided care, humour, and above all, compassion, until the end, at the start of March. I won’t cynically link you to instagram but will simply recreate what I wrote there below, as I am feeling a touch fragile writing even the above. We’d just made it to the end of the Scottish leg of the full band tour for Chorus Of Doubt and those first five shows felt like an Herculean effort. The energy of the crowd in Glasgow felt transformative; like they had really taken the songs to their hearts and were rapturous in their response to our performance. The length and enthusiasm of their appreciation that night will stay with me.
thank you glasgow, that genuinely was really something special last night. probably my favourite ever bc gig.
now that the first part of the tour is done…
i don’t post personal things on here because i value as much of my life as possible being away from the internet, hence the absolutely zero personal social media, but i will make a slight exception today because i don’t think grief is spoken about enough, certainly in scotland anyway.
my father-in-law, whom i loved dearly, passed away near the start of last month. he was a man who cared deeply about his family and friends, always going out of his way to make a fuss of them. over 200 folk saw him off in kilchoan last month, testament to the man he was.
he couldn’t have made me feel more like his own son, which meant the absolute world to me.
2024 has been extremely difficult, with rare moments of joy, catharsis, and distraction in these shows. the performance has been twofold - musical, and my acting “normal”. but i am aware that i look exhausted, dishevelled, and my mind is like a sieve. i am worn out. there have been quiet, solitary moments of contemplation and tears, in car parks, motorways, and in dressing rooms.
i do not wish to appear self-centred, but it is only my own grief about which i have the right to speak on this page. rest assured my wife, our families, and i are all looking out for one another.
i want to thank Audrey, Charlotte, and Bart for their support, understanding and flexibility, making sure that these first five shows could happen, and happen to the level that their considerable talents allow. i made the decision to go ahead with the shows with them, and of course my wife, as we both know that her father would’ve wanted it that way - the man was rarely spotted cutting about the ardnamurchan peninsula in anything other than a broken chanter or kid canaveral t-shirt under his flannels.
we were lucky, as we got time at the end to spend with him and let him know how much he was loved. tell those you care about that you love them today.
sail on, john x
Grief is a strange beast indeed, and if I’m honest I don’t think I’ve full faced up to mine yet, as I have (rightly) had a duty of care to others, first and foremost.
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It beggars belief that it is now December. I’m sitting on my couch and I am trying to think about how best to round up close to an entire year. I’ll continue with the record. Chorus Of Doubt was recorded between May and September 2023 in Chem 19 with Paul Savage in the production chair again. So… last year. But it came out this year. That’s how these things work, and it can make ye quite twitchy having a whole new album when you’ve got to go through the whole pre-release process with it just “sitting” there.
Of the BC albums, I am most proud of this album as a discreet body of work, and I do sincerely mean that. I think if you stop feeling most proud of your most recent work, then something has gone seriously wrong. Hindsight allows you some self-reflection and criticism [maybe opening the first BC record with a 6-minute instrumental to distance myself from what had come before was a little bit too obstinate, but then again, maybe it wasn’t], but I am mid-campaign still and I love my latest offspring very much indeed.
The album was preceded by a listening party upstairs at The Doublet in Glasgow, which if you’ve not been before is a gorgeous place to spend an evening, with its unchanged 1960s interior.
Chorus Of Doubt came out on 5 April, and Charlotte and I played an unofficial album launch/teaser the night before at Bread and Butter in Anstruther. It’s maybe the first time I’ve played to a room full of folk where dinner has been included, and it is an excellent listening room and it was a lovely way to spend an evening. The most intimate show of the tour by an order of magnitude. It was the first of the 13 Scottish and English dates to promote the new LP in the Spring. 11 were full band. When you head out on the road with a new record it’s a bit of a relief, because it’s finally out there and you get to see people’s reaction to it at close quarters, and of course the act of performance is a joy.
I felt we were lucky playing to the crowds we did when so many shows and entire tours were being pulled around us. The way a lot of people buy tickets has changed post-pandemic, leaving it right up until the fortnight, week, or day, of the show, which has added a new dimension of stress to the whole thing. I guess folk are waiting to see if they or the artist get ill, or maybe it’s the fact that everything is more expensive these days, and gigs can maybe seem like a luxury. Or maybe more folk have become homebodies after lockdown. I dunno. This isn’t a woe is me btw, I’m just musing and have no editor. We had a great tour, but everything is getting worse and more difficult for musicians. We tour on a shoestring. Streaming has fucked music more than you probably realise. I obviously need you to listen to my music on streaming because that’s the way most of yous consume music at this moment in time, and maybe folk’ll come to a show/buy an album/t-shirt of the back of it - and promoters etc. look at the publicly displayed stats, but it’s a rigged set-up against the artist, and particularly the independent one. I’m lucky in that I’ve a loyal core fanbase (if you’re reading this screed, you probably number among them) that buy physical formats in (by today’s standards) just decent enough numbers to allow me to keep moving, and I appreciate it greatly. But the margins are getting tighter and tighter.
Streaming platforms make absolutely enormous profits at the expense of artists and there is nothing close to a fair distribution of this obscene wealth. I’m always flattered when folk assume this is my only job; I perhaps entertain the notion by not revealing anything about the rest of my life on socials, but it most certainly isn’t. 95%+ of the musicians you listen to have other work. Kate Nash has been speaking very eloquently about all the above recently. More eloquently than this, certainly, and it is exceptionally brave of her to do so as few want to rock the boat, as we are all trying to get on an ever-dwindling number of bills at a smaller number of venues and festivals.
I’m always delighted when what i do connects with people, and I am uncomfortable having such a protracted complaint about this, but the fact is that if major changes don’t happen there’s not going to be enough of an infrastructure left for me and many others to continue doing this in any meaningful way. Music will become the reserve largely of the popular pre- c.2011, and the posh (more so than it already is).
Liz Pelly wrote this year about ghost artists and how Spotify is slipping in “stock music” into their curated playlists to reduce payouts and increase their own profits. It horrendous, it’s wallpaper, and it’s possible because they’ve essentially led the charge on disconnecting listeners from actually engaging with music. You can read it here.
with apologies to Matt Bors
Everything has shifted online in a most unhelpful way since 2020 too, and it keeps getting dumber and more relentless with every month that passes. Reels, Tik Tok, and fucking endless pictures of my ageing coupon to let you know that I’m on tour or doing a show because algorithms on the major social media platforms choke the reach of posts with text in them, like, you know, tour dates and show details. Our brains are being rotted and our attention spans destroyed. I actually tried to find a “dumb phone” this year - one that only had WhatsApp, call capability and SMS. I’m sick of being confronted by my own stupid face. I’m sick of being part of this churn (but what’s the alternative, currently?). I’m sick of being confronted by meaningless vapid content - an endless carousel of gurning talking heads trying to sell you something, attain fleeting validation, satiate battered dopamine receptors with Likes, or mostly likely all of the above. It’s all so insubstantial and dispiriting, and it feels corrosive.
Tech wanks have been trying to force AI into everything and anything this year. It’s exhausting. What’s the point anymore if we’re removing the humanity from things? Seeing some high profile artists using AI slop for album covers was extremely disappointing. AI requires copyright infringement to learn. It’s a plagiarism machine. An endless search for greater convenience will be the death of us all. Don’t use ChatGPT to write that email; do it yourself, because you’ll eventually be doing yourself out of a job as dipshit CEOs and shareholders only see what costs the least.
Everything is becoming frivolous and distracting and we are genuinely now hurtling towards a true dystopia at pace.
We need a resurgence of Luddism, which was good, actually, and not the backward movement as which it frequently gets portrayed.
I’m sorry to go on, but I feel like I’m going completely mental sometimes.
Everything doesn’t have to get constantly worse forever. It really doesn’t.
Enough light-hearted fun, back to the tour.
The Scottish shows were great because after 3 albums in 4 years and 7 months, and a COVID-queasiness about going receding a little, I can see the crowds for the BC stuff growing. It’s a relief, because you put so much of yourself into something and if doesn't connect then it becomes close to impossible to continue apart from a small hometown show every now and again, and albums that are spaced far apart. And again, see difficult ticket sales. Big relief. That’s not to say all the shows were as well attended as the bigger ones. That’d be me lying and presenting a false narrative on the internet, something about which I have just bored the arse off of you complaining.
I love playing these songs with a full band. It’s intense, exciting, and loud. It’s also a genuine pleasure to be on the road with such good folk too.
We found out during soundcheck in Aberdeen that Chorus Of Doubt had charted. It’s only the second thing I’ve done that’s ended up in the charts (the first thing being the last album), and while it doesn’t make the album better, or validate it, it’s still very exciting. And you can tell your Maw you’ve scraped into the hit parade.
I managed to find a bottle of non-alcoholic Kylie Prosecco (and some real fizz for the others) on Union Street to toast the news in the Aberdeen South Premier Inn.
We had the pleasure of The Cords opening for us in Aberdeen and Dundee and not only are they great, they remind me of the all-encompassing obsession of first being in a band that’s actually out their and just doing it.
The Old Lab in Summerhall in Edinburgh is a great room to play in, and I hope that the venue as whole can be saved. It would be truly ruinous for Edinburgh if it were to disappear.
It was a genuine pleasure to play with Mammoth Penguins down through England. I have known Emma Kupa since 2010 and we were in Standard Fare and Kid Canaveral. She’s a fantastic songwriter, has an incredible voice, and is very dry. Here’s a wee pic of us cheesin at the merch desk in Oxford.
She lends her vocals to Beside Ourselves on the first BC LP. As I’m sure you know.
We stayed in a Premier Inn for a couple of nights that was in between a few tour stops. It was meant to be a luxury - staying in the same rooms for more than one night. Alas, it felt like the sort of place that has been built on a site where a terrible event has occurred in the past. Someone got dropped off by an ambulance the first night we where there, and wheeled into reception. It felt like we were seeing footage in reverse, as we stood watching agog by the van. One of the corridors smelled like great sadness and had the vibe of ‘the morning after every stag and hen do that has ever occurred’. The phone signal and wifi seemed to be pulsating in strength (from weak to very weak and back again), like a great hidden beast’s chest rising and falling with each rancid breath. A man stood breathing on my neck at the vending machine in reception, giving me advice on what I should get, at 2am. He was wearing pyjama shorts, and a blanket as a cape, and all I wanted was a bottle of water and peace.
The next night, checking in post-gig to another Premier Inn somewhere across England, the night porter tried to put Audrey in a room with a late-middle-aged couple asleep in it. They were a touch alarmed, as you would expect. I overheard them telling the waiter who was about to seat them at breakfast the next morning, and went up to explain what had happened and assured them they weren’t about to be burgled senseless. They seemed relieved.
I am not a Premier Inn-hater, by the way. Big Lenny has never let us down before.
——
June rolled around and I went to the Euros. That was some laugh. Germany: it’s good. It’s got nowt to do with music though, so mind ya bizniz. 😉 I will say that after somehow getting a ticket for Scotland v Switzerland (the least shite match), I was sat randomly close to the Legendarily-sound Lloyd Meredith of Olive Grove Records. Mad who you bump into a thousand miles from home. Also, the ticket was €30. Take note, SFA. Oh, and I went slightly viral after dropping my wallet (and driving licence) on the march through Köln, and the person who found it trying to return it to me across a variety of media.
I returned from Deutschland with my second bout of COVID, which wasn’t ideal and I had a bit of a crisis whilst recuperating. Can I still do this? Is this just it, forever? Everything hurts and COVID has fucked my lung capacity for 4 or 5 weeks.
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I stepped in as a last-minute replacement at the Lughnasadh Festival in Newport-On-Tay as I was already playing at another Festival in Dundee later that day, and I am always happy to help out the good independent promoters of this world (Big Rock in this instance) .
I was worn out and I think I was pretty shite tbh. Which is a shame. Shite is probably harsh, but below par is probably accurate. I hate being on a stage in front of folk and feeling like I’m not at my best. I’d been doing so much admin trying, to sort out the remainder of the year, and balancing work and responsibilities. I was worn out from everything that had happened up until that point, and I got in my own head a bit. It’s possible you’d only have noticed if you’d seen me before, but if you’d not seen me before you’d perhaps have been underwhelmed.
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I find out on the top deck of the 38 bus that Chorus Of Doubt has made it onto the longlist of 20 for the 2024 Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award, when Andrew from Chemikal gives me a ring. Music isnae a competition but it is very nice that the album has reached, and made an impression on, enough of the 100 nominators to make into the final 20 of almost 350 eligible albums. The result? Let’s just say I can use my “this next song is from the Scottish Album of The Year-losing album Chorus Of Doubt…” patter on stage again. rEDOLENT were indeed worthy winners, and their acceptance speech was both touching and off the wall. Very good. The best part of the ceremony at the Albert Halls in Stirling, however, was the entire crowd resoundingly booing Ticketmaster when they were read out amidst the list of partners to thank. Hope is important.
—-
But! Next up was a very nice run of shows opening for Arab Strap around Scotland in September. Charlotte and I did a few as a duo and then Bart, I, and Katie Mackie did the rest. These were a lot of fun and went a long way to shaking me out of my torpor.
October passes with more admin the likes of which would bore you tears but November brings 7 duo shows, with me and Charlotte hitting places that tours don’t always necessarily take in, to promote the (actual) newspaper EP that the label has just released. Headed up by Don’t You Think That Something Needs To Be Done? from ‘Chorus Of Doubt’, it includes three cover versions recorded by a Broken Chanter power trio of me, Charlotte, and Paul on drums. We lovingly reinterpreted The Moving On Song (Go, Move, Shift), Worker’s Song, and All You Fascists, originally by Ewan MacColl, Ed Pickford, and Woody Guthrie, respectively. The paper features articles by Bart (on how to make yr own scene), Rhea Lewis (on the empowering nature of performance and practising a craft), Rachel Thomson (on the importance of Trade Unionism), Amanda Aitken (on the power of grassroots fitba), and a glimpse into all of your futures courtesy of Mystic Red. It is intended as an antidote to despondency, with descriptions on how the dear reader can organise to make things materially better.
The tour is a lot of fun and Charlotte Printer is a very good companion for hundreds upon hundreds of country road miles - even if I did give her the fear with my knowledge of the twists and turns of the roads of Ardnamurchan at night.
We play in Durham with Emma Pollock and, while the venue is great and the staff lovely, the art exhibition in the (very cool) cellar that we had as a dressing room made it look like a classic serial killer’s ‘nutty room’.
50rpm in Coatbridge is an excellent night to be a part of, and my second time there was a pleasure again. I will spare you what happened after a very good show at Futtle in St Monan’s for fear of libel repercussions.
Montrose Folk Club at the Pavilion is another very good gig to do, although this time I managed to acquire food poisoning with an ill judged dinner at midnight. This lends driving long distances between shows and 90 minute performances a real edge - a thrilling and uncomfortable danger to it all. The fancy LED backing to the stage at Upstairs in Inverness gives up the ghost during our soundcheck. Everyone’s a critic. We play the gorgeous Las theatre in Portree the next night, before which we are greeted by a large electronic billboard with my big heid on it, as we turn the corner into Portree - the one at the top of this blog, but without Ryan Gosling standing in front of it. We round the tour off at in Resipole in Ardnamurchan at Gallery there. It is the only time we’ve had to take a break in a show due to the sheer din of a hail storm upon the roof interrupting us, and it is a nice way to finish a tour.
And that about brings you up to speed.
What’s next? I am playing the First Footin’ festival at Greyfriars Hall in Edinburgh on 1 January 2025 as part of the SAY Award showcase and the wider Edinburgh’s Hogmanay celebrations which stretch across the entire city and three days now. It’s free (first come, first served) and you’ll get 45 minutes of me and the band tearing through the hits.
Following that, it’s Celtic Connections. The biggest Broken Chanter headline show to date. I’ve not played a room this size as the main attraction since Kid Canaveral, so I’d absolutely love to see yous there if you’re within a reasonable travelling distance haha. Cottiers Theatre in the West End of Glasgow on 29 January 2025. Me and the band will be running through gems from all three albums and the recent EP. Get your tickets here, to avoid disappointment. That’s not a hollow invocation, all the previous BC Celtic Connections outings have sold out.
The next morning we’re off to Ireland for a run of shows there to take us into February and that little bit closer to Spring. Kicking off with the good folks at Subterranean Sounds in Waterford on the 30 January, the St Brigids Festival at Cleere’s Theatre in Kilkenny on 31 January, The American Bar (as a duo, and a matinee show) in Belfast on 1 February, and Mo Chara in Dundalk on 2 February, also as duo. All very exciting.
And finally, a thank you to everyone that has booked, bought a record, played us on the radio, came to see us live, told a friend about us, written about us, or supported us in some way that isn’t mentioned above. Thank you so much. Thank you to Chemikal Underground for putting their faith in me and this record, and for looking after me this past 15 months or so. Thank you to Charlotte, Bart, Audrey, Lesley, and Katie for gracing a stage with me and giving life to my songs. Thank you to Rachel Campbell for the beautiful artwork, thank you to Malcolm and Aidan for taking us away with them, and…
…thank you so much if you actually read all of that too.
All the best for 2025.
davidx
