Karine Polwart – Karine Polwart’s Scottish Songbook
Hegri – 2 August 2019
Fellow Celts Dervish having presented The Great Irish Songbook earlier this year, Karine Polwart now offers up her own selections from the repertoire. However, whereas the Dervish album comprised reinterpretations of traditional works, this, an outcrop of her 2018 live show (which featured many other songs not included here), focuses on contemporary material covering some fifty years of Scottish pop and rock.
Featuring regular collaborators Steven Polwart and Inge Thomson alongside Graeme Smillie on bass and keys, drummer Calum McIntyre and Admiral Fallow’s Louis Abbott on guitar and percussion, it’s an eclectic choice of songs, ones which she says encapsulate themes of “resilience and resistance, cries of despair and dreams of something better.”
In terms of looking at the bigger picture, she starts by taking on The Waterboys’ swellingly anthemic Whole of the Moon. Built around descending chiming keyboard notes, she deconstructs and reinvents by transforming it into a slow, semi-spoken, dreamily reflective ballad.
She then moves to a Celtic folk-rock reading of The Blue Nile’s From Rags To Riches from their seminal A Walk Across The Rooftops, originally a pulsing brooding number although the tinkling, rippling keys nod to its use of bubbling synth. The first of the overtly politically underscored numbers comes with a lightly acoustic strummed take on Deacon Blue’s Dignity from Raintown, one of the album’s more lyrically upbeat numbers in its portrait of post-industrial Scotland.
There’s a more radical reworking with Since Yesterday, Strawberry Switchblade’s bouncy account of teenage love, here reimagined as a meditative, piano-accompanied song of ageing and loss that opens with an archive snippet of her grandfather singing a traditional Irish song.
Originally recorded by Frightened Rabbit and written by the late Scott Hutchinson who took his own life last year, Swim Until You Can’t See Land takes on an ambiguously haunting resonance, another sonic epic recast as a plaintive resonator guitar strummed ballad. Talking the song and his death on Facebook, Karine said “Scott Hutchison crafted songs that bridge what’s anthemic and fragile, despairing and hopeful. They’re public documents of his mental agony. It’s an art and act of tremendous honesty and generosity, to render something beautiful from such hardship, and to reach out to others through it.”
Linked by the suicide of their lead singers, Big Country’s Chance is likewise stripped down to an electric piano backing, woodwind and Polwart’s staccato wordless breathy ‘hah haaing’ refrain, bringing into stark focus the lyrics’ underlying theme of despair, violence and feeling lost. That ‘hah hah hah’ touch spills over into the start of one of two more recent songs, electro-pop outfit Chvurches’ The Mother We Share, a similarly exuberant reading built on a rhythmical percussive arrangement.
It stands in stark contrast to the following reading of John Martyn’s Don’t Want To Know, another politically-charged number, retaining the bluesy feel but substituting skeletal drone for the percussive guitar and jazzy organ and gradually gathering to a storm as she channels the lyrics into a commentary on the dystopia of the digital age.
I have to confess to never having been a big Gerry Rafferty fan, so her piano-accompanied version of Whatever’s Written In Your Heart, reconceived as if penned by the McGarrigles comes as an unexpected delight.
The second selection from the 21st century is Biffy Clyro’s nakedly disarming song about depression, Machines, introducing an electric piano intro but otherwise retaining the original’s acoustic strum before the drums kick in midway for a more muscular climax.
It ends with another political note as Abbott takes lead before Polwart joins on interwoven pure voiced harmonies on a wheezing drone-backed, keys and strings-coloured hymnal interpretation of Ivor Cutler’s Women of the World, originally released by Polwart to coincide with International Women’s Day alongside an online essay in celebration of political activist and songwriter Mary Brooksbank.
In response to why she’s chosen to release a set of covers, Polwart has said they say something about where she’s from and that “it’s all about making the songs your own, and singing them with your own heart.” Consider the transfer of ownership complete.
Available to Pre-Order Now: Direct from Karine (Vinyl, CD, Cassette) | Amazon
Listen to another track in our latest Folk Show here.