“Where are we again?!” A weary but visibly happy Blue Rose Code sits across the table from me and jokes about his current state of exhaustion. I’ve arranged to meet up with the singer-songwriter for coffee at a convenient stop-off point on his journey from Glasgow, where he’s been performing at Celtic Connections, back to his home in Bournemouth.
It’s clear from the outset of our conversation that Ross Wilson (AKA Blue Rose Code) has spent an extraordinary two weeks at CC. The highlight of his Glasgow adventure was the official launch gig for the brand new Blue Rose Code album ‘…And Lo! The Bird Is On The Wing’ (read the FRUK review here), where Ross and a ten piece band performed the new album end to end, in sequence, in a sold-out show at Glasgow’s Mitchell Theatre. It’s the new album that I’m keen to talk about, but first…the launch gig;
“It was amazing” Ross smiles, “A standing ovation at the end…It felt like a really special evening”. He tells me that the majority of the musicians who played at the album launch had also played on the new album. “We had Wild Lyle Watt on guitar, John Lowrie on drums, Signy Jakobsdottir on percussion, Angus Lyon on keys, Colin Steele on Trumpet, Nico Bruce on bass, Lauren MacColl on fiddle, Grame Coe and Emily Kelly (from The Jellyman’s Daughter) on cello and backing vocals and then of course we had Wrenne on backing vocals. The musicians that I have are amazing, they’re world-class musicians…it gets me going when I can hear them being able to express themselves over the foundation of my songs.”
The build-up to the album launch had included two other notable performances including a TV session for BBC Alba and a Blue Rose Code appearance as part of the sold-out Roaming Roots Revue at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall, where as well as performing on his own (including a pin-drop solo performance of his single ‘Grateful’), Ross sung a duet with Iain Morrison and appeared on-stage alongside Kris Kristofferson. “He just had this charisma” Ross explains when I ask him what the great man was like, “This kind of ineffable charm that you would expect a legend to have. We finished with everyone on stage, all of the musicians singing with him. It was one of those moments that will stay with me for the rest of my life.”
As he reflects on the last two weeks, the warmth Ross feels towards Glasgow is evident. “It’s funny because for years London was always the big gig” he explains, “but over the last two or three years, spending more and more time in Scotland, Glasgow has become the gig. There’s a total lack of pretention in Glasgow…if they like you they tell you, if they don’t like you they’re even more keen to tell you! Glasgow’s been really good to me, it felt right.”
The third Blue Rose Code album, following 2013’s ‘North Ten’ and 2014’s ‘The Ballads Of Peckham Rye’, is the product of a twelve month journey that unfortunately didn’t begin with the same degree of positivity. Despite ‘Ballads’ earning Ross his greatest critical acclaim to date (including a nomination for Scottish Album of the Year), on the back of that release Ross was at a low point both professionally and personally;
“Coming out the back of Ballads I was standing in the wreckage of a failed marriage. It wasn’t a particularly nice time for me. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do really. I looked around and what was going on and I’d spent so much time travelling and away from London and the marital home, I thought there’s probably not a lot left for me here in London. I’d spent some time living in Dorset. I had friends down there and I thought I need to go, I need to leave London. So I did. I got a little flat just outside of Bournemouth.”
Seeking distraction from his personal situation, Ross turned his attention to doing what he does best…writing music. While running on the beach and listening to music, the melodies and lyrics that would eventually become ‘And Lo! The Bird Is On The Wing’ began to form. “I had met this guy called Angus Lyon” Ross explains, “who told me he had a wee studio in the lap of South Lanarkshire. I thought I should give that a try.”
Ross’ association with Angus and in particular his Lanarkshire based studio, became the catalyst for the new album. However, the results weren’t immediate;
“I spent a lot of time recording with Angus, going through ideas, and we recorded the album essentially three times. I put down my own tracks, my guitar and my vocals for a number of songs and the idea was that would be the basis for the album. But then I went on tour with a few of the guys…and because I was working with a really high caliber of musicians…I felt by the end of that tour we were so tight that I wanted to forget about what I’d recorded and just come in and record it live. So we tried that. It didn’t work! So, I went back to the drawing board and started layering the songs again…and that’s how we arrived with what we’ve got.”
‘What we’ve got’ is a record that Ross himself is incredibly proud of and one that will no doubt be eagerly received by Blue Rose Code’s ardent base of supporters. Throughout it’s creation, Ross was determined not to repeat the mistakes that had left him with regrets about his previous releases. “If North Ten was quite a commercial sounding album” he explains, “and Ballads slightly less so …I think ‘Lo!’ is even farther to the left. I may have cut my throat commercially but it’s precisely the album that I wanted to make. I think it’s a lot darker, it’s a lot more challenging at points. But I did exactly what I wanted to do…and that’s important.”
I’ve been fortunate enough to hear the new album and I can only describe it as glorious. Whilst the familiar Blue Rose Code sound is never far away, the jazz influences that started to make their appearance in ‘Ballads of Peckham Rye’ are even more evident in this collection, something that I was keen to explore with Ross;
“It’s about being less hung up on song structure with this record” he explains, “It was definitely about the musicians that we had in…and it was also about having more time to be creative in the studio and allowing myself to be instinct driven.”
He continues; “I grew up listening to jazz. As a teenager I would get thrown out of jazz clubs…but I would go to listen to the music and I fell in love with live jazz. That’s where it’s at. It’s that sort of attitude I have towards the live performances too. When you’re touring, you’ve got to play the same songs every night, so I’ve got to stay committed to the song. To do that, I have to be allowed to change…there has to be scope for change within the performance of each song on every night. There’s a kind of jazz ethic to that.”
The journey to produce ‘And Lo! The Bird Is On The Wing’ has left Ross with not only his most fulfilling record to date, but also a growing love for the area in which it was recorded. In between performances at Celtic Connections, he would escape back down to the studio in South Lanarkshire to sit at the piano, write, and gaze out at the surrounding countryside. It’s an environment that seems to bringing out the best in his creativity. “I’ve fallen in love with the area” he exclaims, “it’s unspoiled, and I feel a spiritual pull to it…not just because of the vista and the surroundings but unbeknownst to me until a couple of years back, it’s where John Martyn set up home in the 80’s.”
The influence of John Martyn on Ross’ musical perspective is ever present. A Blue Rose Code performance of a Martyn song on the night of the album launch was a rare event, since he generally regards the artist’s work as “sacrosanct”;
“When I was in my late teens, early twenties…I never wanted to work.” he recounts, “I always had this fanciful idea that I could make a living from music. I didn’t know how I was going to do it…I was a feckless teenager. We went to see John and Danny (Thompson) play on a reunion tour called ‘The Sunshine Boys Tour’ in this theatre in Glasgow and it was one of those pivotal moments in my life because I saw the two of them together on stage and on that evening, there was a magic and a camaraderie between the two of them. On that night I thought ’that’s what I want to do’. Within six months I’d packed up and moved to London, really on the strength of the feeling that night had left me with.”
Roll forward sixteen years and Ross has built a position of musical credibility that would have been difficult to foresee back on that evening in Glasgow. Such credibility attracts a number of high profile collaborators from across the industry, such as the McCrary Sisters who performed on a number of the new album’s tracks; “At Roaming Roots, I was telling some of the American guys over from Nashville that we had the McCrary Sisters on…their jaws hit the floor!” he laughs. Another case in the point is the enthusiastic support Ross has received from Hollywood A-lister Ewan McGregor who (somewhat incredibly) makes an appearance on the new album narrating Ross’ lyrics at the end of the song ‘Glasgow Rain’.
“The most bizarre thing happened actually” Ross smiles when I ask how he ended up with Obi-Wan Kenobi doing a voiceover on his album, “I was in bed, it was about half-past midnight, and I got a tweet from one of my great songwriting heroes, Ricky Ross, telling me that Ewan McGregor was talking about my music on Instagram. I thought ‘am I tripping here…has someone fed me a mushroom quiche or something?!’ Anyway, it turns out Ewan’s uncle, Dennis Lawson…another famous actor and director…had acquired a copy of ‘Ballads Of Peckham Rye’. What I’ve found is that because I lived for fifteen years in exile, that’s informed a lot of my output and it attracts people who are Scottish that don’t live in Scotland any more. So Dennis and Ewan are examples of that. They were hooked in by the song ‘Edina’. We just got chatting…he told me that his uncle had gifted him a copy of the album and he really liked the songwriting. We just kept in touch over email. I said ‘do you fancy being involved with the record?’. He recorded the lyrics I sent him on his iPhone, sent it through and…Robert’s your Mother’s brother…there it is!”
Anyone familiar with Blue Rose Code’s music would probably recognise it as being poetically lyrical, deep and at times, complex. In conversation, the man is much the same. However I sense a notable degree of optimism in his voice compared with our last interview around twelve months ago. Of course, some scars run deep; his jaded experience of working with a record label (“that wasn’t a mistake I was prepare to make with this record”) and his well documented battle with addiction are never far from the surface. During the Roaming Roots Revue he performed a cover of Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’, the irony of which isn’t lost on him; he smiles, “Where she said ‘No, No, No’, I said ‘Yes, Yes, Yes’…twice.”
Nonetheless, the Celtic Connections performances and his ongoing creative enthusiasm for the Lanarkshire studio have ignited a spark that may see Ross back in the studio sooner rather than later…he’s already writing for the next album;
“The new record is out in March of this year…I see no reason why the next record can’t be out in March of next year” he predicts. “I’m enjoying a purple-patch of creativity at the moment”.
It seems there’s also scope for some further diversity in Ross’ work. “When I left Scotland sixteen years ago, I couldn’t care less about being Scottish” he admits, “I wasn’t interested in my cultural background. I grew up without any sort of folk influence. It was through people like Dick Gaughan, Eddi Reader and Karine Polwart that I had an entry into the folk world. I started to become interested in these songs and what they meant. It’s been part of my own personal development, my own voyage of teaching myself, educating myself about the cultural fabric of Scotland. I’ve started to collect folk songs that I might like to do my own arrangement of.”
“So that idea is looming large for me. I’m really keen to do a ‘trad’ album. I don’t know if that will be Blue Rose Code or it will be just Ross Wilson, but I’m keen to do that. I’ve been chatting to some people who are far more experienced than I am, people that can advise me around the history of the songs, maybe what I should be looking at doing, the original melodies of the songs. Spending time at Celtic Connections as well, working with Angus…I’ve learned about a whole new world of really talented world-class musicians up there…the likes of Ross Ainslie and Jarlath Henderson I’m really interested in working with. We’ll see. This is what I do, I’m a musician. I’ll just keep writing, keep recording and keep performing. I feel like this next tour is going to get in the way a bit! But it’s cool, that’s what I love doing.”
As our time together draws to and end, I ask Ross what the most positive aspect of the last year has been in producing the new album.
“Just seeing the grass roots support grow” he responds “the feedback after gigs, people singing along. All I’ve ever wanted to do is be connected to people because naturally I felt quite disconnected. I don’t know if that’s a navel-gazing, artistic thing. But people that I know, people that I love, people that I’ve spoken with…people just want to be part of something. The more I do, the more I’m surprised at people’s generosity and the more grateful I feel. Albeit I’m very tired after Celtic Connections…I’m really grateful. And that’s a great place to be.”
Interview and Photos by: Rob Bridge
Blue Rose Code – Grateful (The Quay Sessions)
An emotional farewell for Edith Bowman’s final Quay Sessions show.
…And, Lo! The Bird Is On The Wing is out now. Read our review here.
Available via Bandcamp: bluerosecode.bandcamp.com/album/and-lo-the-bird-is-on-the-wing
Also available via: Amazon
UK Album Tour
MARCH
11th – The Institute – KELVENDON
18th – The Folk House – BRISTOL
APRIL
1st – Elm House – FIFE
2nd – Corn Exchange – BIGGAR
6th – Big Comfy Bookshop – COVENTRY
10th – The Stables – MILTON KEYNES
12th – King’s Arms – MALMESBURY
14th – Mareel – SHETLAND
15th – Aith Hall – SHETLAND
23rd – St Cuthbert’s – SEAHOUSES
27th – The Musician – LEICESTER
28th – The Old Forge, Cranford
29th – Sofar Sessions, Kettering
30th – The Convent – STROUD
MAY
4th – The Drouthy Cobbler – ELGIN
6th – The Queen’s Hall (The Men From Leith) – EDINA
7th – Milngavie Folk Club – MILNGAVIE
21st – Ventnor Arts Club – ISLE OF WIGHT
29th – Under The Apple Tree Festival – OXFORDSHIRE
JUNE
3rd – Coach House Studios, Wirksworth
4th – Brew In The Bog Festival – INVERNESS
17th-19th (Date TBC) – Solas Festival – PERTHSHIRE
JULY
15th Heb Celt – ISLE OF LEWIS
This article is part of an ongoing series of photo / interview features on Folk Radio UK from Rob Bridge, a photographer, writer and film-maker specialising in folk, acoustic and Americana music. You can contact him on twitter @redwoodphotos
See All Our Photo Interviews Here