Watch Karine Polwart & Dave Milligan: The Parting Glass

Karine Polwart & Dave Milligan have revealed their video for ‘The Parting Glass’, taken from their new album ‘Still As Your Sleeping’ which is reviewed here.

We also recently interviewed Karine and Dave, in which they explained the backstory to the recording of “The Parting Glass” which came via a request from poet and novelist Margaret Atwood:

Karine Polwart: “Radio 4 got in touch. They had a request via Margaret Atwood. She was curating an edition of the Radio 4 Today programme between Christmas and New Year last year, and she had asked specifically for a new version of ‘The Parting Glass’. So, Radio 4 got in touch to ask would I fancy recording a version of that in my house for them?

“‘The Parting Glass’ was one of her husband’s favourite songs, I think it may have been played at his funeral, and he died just at the tail end of the year before. So, she wanted to have a version of that song in the programme. It was a complete honour. She’s a total legend. But I said, no, I don’t want to do that, because I was really, really tired of being a home recording engineer, and really, really tired of performing on my own, and anyway, I simply thought Margaret Atwood was worth better than me in my spare room! So, I got back to them, quite brazenly, and said I would be totally honoured to offer a version of ‘The Parting Glass’, but would they have the budget to hire, for example, Dave Milligan on the piano, and have it recorded properly in a studio.

“I think by that point the BBC had got quite dependent on people recording from home. As musicians, and I’m sure Dave will vouch for this as well, we very quickly become sound engineers, and videographers, and all manner of other things other than musicians. I was also really conscious that a whole class of people were getting cut out of their jobs; recording engineers, for example. Anyway, they came back and said, yes. So, we went into the studio and recorded ‘The Parting Glass’, and I think it was during that process that we both thought, you know what? This is quite nice! I think, your exact quote Dave was ‘maybe we should do more of this!’”

“Yeah, that’s how I remember it!” adds Dave. “That was a lovely process. It sort of felt like the first proper thing, or those two were like, the first proper couple of things, that we’d done, since the ‘apocalypse.’ That maybe fed into a little bit, you know, the sense of being nourished so fully after a drought.”

Read the full interview here.