diary
Stranded in a house in Perth...
Well almost. I got out in time it would seem. Last Friday night I joined another 5 writers in a remote house in Perthshire at the top of a seemingly never ending hill, to write for 4 days as part of a Scottish Mental Health Foundation project. Myself and Rod Jones of Idlewild last year set about organising a group of 8 songwriters to come together for 4 or 5 days and write some new material in time for this year’s Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival, which Rod and I have been involved with over the last couple of years.
We had in fact booked the house for the first week in January, but when Rod attempted to get there on the first day, he was met with a 4 mile long road, uphill all the way, which became impassable due to the amount of snow fall at the time. Rod eventually did get to the house, thanks to the tractor that pulled him up, but the whole thing was abandoned later that day when we all realised that we would be stranded in the house, with no access to the 24 hour T***o that we all know and secretly love. And that’s only if the rest of us could get there of course, and none of us drive 4×4’s.
It would seem history was to repeat itself, but thankfully towards the end of the week this time. I arrived on the Friday night, and spent a furiously paced 4 days writing with James Yorkston, Jill O’Sullivan of Sparrow and The Workshop, Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit, James Graham of Twilight Sad and Rod Jones. Karine Polwart, Alisdair Roberts and Jenny Reeve of Strike The Colours joined us later on but I unfortunately didn’t get a chance to write with them.
Came home on the Tuesday night feeling a little sad that I couldn’t stay on the for the last day only to wake up to snow yesterday morning and get a telephone call from Rod saying they were all stranded again. Get those 4×4’s on the phone will you?
So everyone’s safe home now and of course we lost a day’s writing but we should still have a good bunch of songs amongst us all and if we don’t, well we’ll just have to write them between now and July when we plan to go into Chem19 to record whatever we have…