Waverley Steps

A previous column, North Wales, mentioned the ambiguous relationship Wales and England have had in pop music. The same could be said of Scotland. As with the British Labour Party, Scotland has played a significant role in British pop from Lonnie Donegan through Marmalade, to the Rezillos, to K T Tunstall. However, songs with a Scottish theme in the early days of pop  floated a caricature of bonny Scotland. Like the 1958 Number One Hoots Mon, by Lord Rockingham’s X1, a group of session players. Later covered by Bad Manners, this was an instrumental  with a few vocal interjections that distil Scotland down, like a Readers Digest Condensed Classic, to these well-known Scottish conversation pieces: ‘Och aye’, ‘Hoots mon there’s a moose loose aboot the hoose’ and ‘It’s a braw, bricht moonlicht nicht’.   (To make a rather obscure but satisfying link with another column: Lord Rockingham X1’s bandleader Harry Robinson later did the string arrangement on Nick Drake’s River Man. Hoots Mon  also featured what must be one of the first examples on a pop hit of the Hammond organ, played by Cherry Wainer.) Or like Andy Stewart singing Donald Where’s Your Troosers, a UK hit twice, in 1961 and 1989. Or Jackie Dennis, touted as the UK’s Ricky Nelson, who scored a 1958 Top Ten  hit , La Dee Dah, at the age of 15, six years before another Scot, Lulu, achieved the same feat. As with the Dubliners mentioned in a previous column as looking just like Dubliners should, Jackie Dennis looked just as a Scots lad should.

Link to image
Link to Hoots, Mon

This obviously changed, though in the first beat boom in the wake of the Beatles one of the few Scottish groups to be successful in England -the Poets - dressed up like Robert Burns. However, there became something apparent  that has cropped up before: that songs about Scotland - as with Wales, or America or Australia -  can get away with a sense of nationalist pride and patriotism that songs about England cannot, or at least in the context of pop and rock music. Take the two in the links below. The first is Runrig’s rollicking version of Loch Lomond that turns into an audience sing-along,  a version of which was a UK hit in 2007. (Bill Haley and the Comets did a version called, inevitably,  Rock Lomond in 1957). It is difficult to imagine such an emotion-charged  crowd pleaser about, say Lake Windermere or Chesil Beach. 


The second is  a version of  Robert Burns’ Ae Fond Kiss by Eddi Reader of Fairground Attraction and Perfect fame. Again, I am not sure an English poet could translate into such a musical idiom  in quite the same way. A comparison might be Cleo Laine singing Shakespeare’s  Shall I Compare Thee but this remains in the genre of jazz and also lacks the nationalist resonance of Burns’ work. The differences perhaps here lie in England’s past as the coloniser of these other countries. There wasn’t here  the loss of a country or independence ` to mourn. What had been lost, instead, were the voices of ordinary people  over the centuries as the ruling culture took hold. Hence whilst the unofficial national anthem of Scotland is Flower of Scotland or Scotland the Brave and of Wales is Land of My Fathers, in England it is God Save the Queen -an institution, not a country. Yet Pop and rock has not been the best medium to find those voices.

Link to Runrig track

Link to Eddi Reader track

The capital city,Edinburgh, has been one of those places that seemed familiar before ever going there from dint of images over the years, though oddly few of these came from songs about the city itself. There perhaps isn’t  a really well-known one, though The Proclaimers did Sunshine on Leith, the portside settlement a bus ride to the North; and The Fall did Edinburgh Man, a very un-Fall like ode to Edinburgh (It’s got a tune and everything).  Instead the mental  picture of Edinburgh came from other sources.  From seeing Edinburgh Castle on TV in the New Year celebrations or on the tins of Scottish Shortbread that would get given as gifts at Christmas; the pictures on the sticks of Edinburgh rock.; or Edinburgh in countless films from Greyfriars Bobby to Journey to the Centre of the Earth to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Trainspotting (You couldn’t run down Princes Street like that now, it’s all dug up with an ill-fated tram project. You would fall over). In these expectations it didn’t disappoint. The  Castle looked just as it had been in my mind’s eye. Walking down Heriot Row where Robert Louis Stephenson lived and  had watched as a child the lamplighter working his way down the street, or going through the  big old-fashioned department store of Jenners,  you got a sense of the  genteel Edinburgh, of the town of Jean Brodie. Yet it also seemed a very European city - walking down Thistle Street with its cobbled road, lamplights, cars haphazardly parked and small cafes you could be in Paris.

The song here, Waverley Steps from 2006 by Roddy Woomble of Idlewild (harmonies by Kate Rusby), captures some of this mixture of the place. Waverley Steps are the steps coming down from Edinburgh’s main station but the precise  lyrics aren’t the most important part.  (I’m not actually sure what Kate Rusby is singing in the chorus. One theory is ‘You wont be molested’ but that can’t be right). It is the mood and tone that resonates more with my experience of Edinburgh. There is something a bit undefinable about the place, something just round the corner, just at the edge of the eye, and ,as with the photo above of a figure vanishing into early morning steam, something slightly mysterious - even when the light won't fade away.

Link to song