He’s so excited, and he just can’t hide it. At least that is how it appears with Luke Daniels today; ahead of our interview, he emailed me at 4.40am! He does have very good reason to be buoyant ahead of the release of the Luke Daniels And The Cobhers album (reviewed here), a triumphant project created with the intention of hooking a wider audience to traditional music via a headline-attracting selection of covers by the likes of the Bee Gees and Dee-Lite. Speaking to me from his partner’s home in Ullapool, it turns out the early activity is down to an unusual sleep pattern known as the ‘second sleep.’ Apparently, this was the normal way to sleep until about a hundred years ago, so during lockdown, Luke began sleeping between 10 o’clock and midnight until about 4.30am, getting up for a couple of hours to do something, either play the guitar or send emails, then heading back to sleep again. Nevertheless, the new project really should be waking him with excitement and anticipation, so I begin by asking were tracks like ‘Staying Alive’ and ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ picked for their attention-grabbing qualities?
It’s difficult because I am really careful about using words like ‘attention-grabbing,’ in terms of the idea of using well-known, popular hits as a way of signposting wider audiences towards folk music; it could be quite fatuous and gimmicky. I personally went to great lengths to transcribe the original recordings; it’s not just the lead lines with a bit of trad backing underneath it; we’ve dissected the tracks into the middle lines, the supporting lines for the whole piece and then divvied them up amongst a folk unit. On the percussive tracks, we’ve used samples of the guitar to create backing tracks on the album, which kind of helps the things sound a bit more authentic. All these pieces exist as musical scores, with all of the parts written out. We’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that all of the detail from the original tracks is there, but it’s just being played on a folk instrument.
The Stevie Wonder track sounds like it has an electric keyboard picking out the main hook, so that’s an instrument, is it not a sample?
That was a Fender Rhodes sound on Michael’s keyboard. The Fender Rhodes on ‘Groove Is In The Heart,’ that’s a real Fender Rhodes because we recorded that in the studio back in 2019; we had access to a Fender Rhodes. The one on ‘Superstition,’ although I challenge you to try and find the difference between the two, in that context, you probably can’t hear it, is just a sample on Mike’s keyboard just for ease, really.
What I liked about that is the keyboard sound is a familiar funk reference point that underpins it, but you then progress the song into a very folk arena.
We did consider trying to annex existing folk tunes onto the riffs, but we felt like we were straying into gimmicky territory. I actually opted for the somewhat harder option, which is to compose tunes that sounded like traditional tunes but could allay themselves closely to the chord structure; rather than try to fit a square peg into a round hole, so to speak, I’ve written tunes that are tailored to the pieces. So, when we launch into what you would think of ostensibly as a folk-dance tune on top of the existing riff, it’s been written by me to fit exactly.
The Cobhers band dates back to 2019, or at least the project does….
Well, actually, the project which the Cobhers are now involved with, which is the learning materials for the local schools and the Museum of Industrial Life, that actually dates to this year, 2022. The Cobhers formed as a unit in 2019 with this idea of creating folk music that would be easily accessible to a wider audience by having these kind of caveat pieces such as ‘Staying Alive’, ‘Groove Is In The Heart’, and there’s a couple of new ones on the album. So, we recorded ‘Staying Alive’ and ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ back in 2019 and then, for obvious reasons, the project was shelved for a couple of years, we picked it up again this year. We had this extra project which enabled us to come together and work as musicians on this project but also gave us an opportunity to spend more time together and develop the rest of the music, which is what you hear on the record. Obviously, ‘Staying Alive’ and ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ doesn’t really fall into the remit of a heritage project but ‘Maggie Ramsey’ does; we just tried to get as much as we can out of any opportunities to come together and play music.
Were you trying to pick other traditional material on the album that would blend together with the more modern stuff?
There’s an overlap between the project we’re doing in North Lanarkshire, for example, ‘Carron Bridge,’ they’re all tunes from North Lanarkshire, and ‘Maggie Ramsey’ is an original tune of mine that was inspired by the folk tale. Having said that, there’s a hell of a lot of stuff on the record that has just been brought to the table by the younger musicians involved. What I’ve tried to do is really give them an opportunity to showcase their own music and musical ideas. If we can bring people into the tent by playing ‘Staying Alive’ in a way that we feel is done with integrity, with respect to the original track, that’s great but once we’ve got them there, we want them to listen to our own music. I was quite keen for Michael Biggins and Matt Tighe and the other younger musicians in the outfit to have their opportunity to showcase what they do because they’re such great players. There’s a Syrian tune at the very end of the record which really gives Michael a chance to show his concert pianist skills; there’s a beautiful Irish fiddle tune that Matt Tighe plays, which he suggested we use and as much as possible, give them a chance to play solos and shine and do their own thing.
Where does something like the tune ‘Syrian Longa’ come onto your radar? How did you find that?
I perform fairly regularly with a Syrian musician called Rihab Azar, and actually, it was Rihab who taught me that tune. We played a concert in Derry and Michael Biggins, the piano player from the Cobhers, came with us, that was when I’d written that piano part for Michael so he could play it with myself and Rihab. We enjoyed playing it so much that we thought we’d re-purpose it and changed it slightly for this record. I was really pleased with it; I think it’s a fantastic final track.
What is your connection to the North Lanarkshire area? There are a couple of pieces on the album that originate from there.
That’s where I live, that’s where I stay essentially, in Hamilton. There’s a connection with the Heritage Lottery Fund; we’ve been doing some work with local schools and the National Museum of Industrial Life in Scotland. We’re writing some music for a digital animation as part of that project which has enabled us to come together and work on the music which informed this record as well. It’s been good; it’s enabled us to get together and form the unit. Having said that, the [Luke Daniels & The Cobhers album] is a stand-alone project from the band itself.
Is that tied in with the Netflix-style learning materials for schools that I heard about?
The digital animation that we are creating is going to be chopped up into six segments, each of which will be a streamable episode of a local folk tale. So, for example, there’s a track on the album called ‘Maggie Ramsey’ who was a local witch who appeared in folk tales in North Lanarkshire. She was rumoured to have been linked to Airdrie, which is a town in North Lanarkshire, and so the music that we’ve created for ‘Maggie Ramsey’ will be like her kind of signature melody, and the Netflix-style episodes are actually a way of putting music lessons into the schools. It was something that was kickstarted via the lockdowns when we could no longer go into the schools to do our penny whistle sessions and music workshops. So, what we opted to do was create streamed musical lessons that classroom teachers could access easily. That would enable us to keep the kids that we were involved with learning their folk tunes. At this stage, we are actually working with a new crop of school children aged between ten and twelve, and we are in the process of creating these episodes that will form a narrative story. The idea as well would be that at the end of the learning journey, they’ve got a series of folk tunes that they can perform as part of a narrative story. If we retell the story of ‘Maggie Ramsey’ the witch, all of the various tunes linked to that story can be performed.
Who is taking care of the animation side of the project?
We are working with HND students at New College Lanarkshire.
Does the Cobhers project aim to attract more young people into the folk scene?
The involvement of young people is probably more to do with the education work we are doing in schools; we are creating a more accessible style of learning materials. I think that the Cobhers [modern] tracks, that’s not a repertoire that’s going to appeal to young-young people, that’s probably more likely to draw in people our own age who have no interest in folk music because obviously, they know the music. In terms of the Cobhers thing that we’re doing, those tracks are designed to pull in wider audiences of all ages; the demographic of people that would respond to [‘Staying Alive’] would probably not be young people at all; they’d probably be oldies
Would you go for anything from the 21st century, and if so, what would you pick?
You know when people say, “oh there’s no decent tracks these days”? I don’t buy into that at all; it’s just that they haven’t had a chance to become iconic yet. ‘Staying Alive’, I’m sure, was regarded as a perfectly valid hit when it came out, but at that point, it wasn’t yet ‘Staying Alive’, the iconic Bee Gees track. So, you’re asking me to predict which current hits are going to become iconic in forty years’ time, and I’m not prepared to do that [laughs]
OK, well, how about anything you like in the modern sphere?
There’s an artist called Mitski; she’s very interesting; that would be a very interesting challenge to try and transcribe one of her pieces for a traditional band, but the problem is, you couldn’t play a Mitski track and everyone instantly go “oh that’s the riff from such and such…” but of course ‘Staying Alive’, ‘Groove Is In The Heart’, you play those riffs, and everyone knows what they are and hopefully lots of people will get up, dance to it and get involved with it. When we performed at the Wickham Festival and Broadstairs, that was the case; people responded really well to those tracks. There might have been an initial [drawing in breath], you know, are we going to do something a bit gimmicky? But then it’s pretty obvious a few lines into the track that we can play our instruments, and we are trying to respectfully present what is great music.
I agree, and, as you say, for a long time, something like ‘Staying Alive’ was treated as a bit of a joke, and it took some people a number of years to just appreciate how great the Bee Gees were.
It is so wrong; the Bee Gees were absolutely amazing, amazing music, amazing musicians. It really used to piss them off, didn’t it? They used to storm off interviews and stuff; it must have been really frustrating.
Was there any frustration on your part that you weren’t seeing enough young faces among the folk crowds?
I’m always grateful for anyone that wants to come and listen to the music that I make. I think it can vary from festival to festival, I think there are some that have an older demographic, but then Cambridge always has a good amount of young people at it. I was playing at a gig on Sunday night up here at Ullapool, and maybe a third of the audience were teenagers. Admittedly it was a kind of a singer-songwriter event, and there’s probably less to do in Ullapool; it’s probably the only thing happening, but they enjoyed it, so maybe the thing is the amount of choice that young people have. In terms of Folk Radio, I think you’ve got quite a young audience; there seems to be a good mix of young people that are finding their way into folk music through online platforms such as Folk Radio. In terms of what we’ve done with the tracks we’ve picked, we’re trying to just appeal to wider audiences of all ages. The work that we’re doing with young people is to try and get them interested in playing music, which could then lead to them getting interested in folk music in general, but there’s obviously an element of musical education.
In terms of the cover versions you have picked, to throw one of your own Folk Radio quotes back at you, is it simply a case of “stuff I like, stuff I don’t like”?
Yes, stuff I like. I know ‘Staying Alive’ was always regarded with a slight, wry smile, but it’s always the track as a teenager; even though I’m not a good dancer, but for some reason, I could always dance to that track. I remember ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ really fondly from being at college; when it came out, it being so unusual because it had that kind of retro feel. A lot of people don’t realize it’s from 1990, but obviously, because of the samples they’re using, it sounds a lot earlier. You could just have a conversation with anyone, and they would go, “yeah that’s my favorite track, you should do that one.” Everything is re-created as is on the record in terms of key signatures and tempo, so if we ever do get the chance to play it with the Bee Gees live, at least we’ll be in the right key! We did try doing a version of ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, but it was just too happy, too kind of joyous. It was such a difficult thing to re-create.
You also spoke on Folk Radio in the past about how learning five or six traditional pieces can throw enough elements and brush strokes into your musical brain and lead to a brand-new composition. I’m wondering whether playing late 20th-century soul and dance hits has a similar effect on your creativity, introducing certain changes or tones.
Absolutely yes, I’ve learned a lot, and it was a great opportunity to do a deep dive on all four of the tracks. There are another four tracks actually which we didn’t record on the record. Just as an aside, the initial plan for this record was to only do covers, but the band changed tac because there were so many good ideas coming from the young people that I decided to mix it up, have a bit of covers and a bit of original music. I learned a lot from transcribing the original tracks, and there’s a lot of music in those tracks that you don’t hear on an initial listen. When you hear it on a dance floor or you hear it over the radio, you hear that riff, obviously, but that riff only works so well because of what’s going on underneath it, and if you play that riff on its own, suddenly it’s not working quite as well. Again, talking about the skill of a group like the Bee Gees, OK, it’s a brilliant thing to come up with a great riff but to come up with all of the supporting lines that really compliment it and accentuate the pushes and pulls of that riff, that’s the real skill. And that’s what I learned, the importance of including all the underlying parts as well. That’s where the work came in, to make sure they came through in the work that we do as Cobhers; although it’s on different instruments and you’re dealing with the massive challenge of not having a drum kit as well, you’re as close as possible and the things going to work in the right way.
There are a couple of your own lockdown compositions on the album; does ‘Some Will Fall’ directly reference the start of the pandemic when Boris Johnson said, “people are going to lose their loved ones before their time”?
Yes, that’s exactly right. That’s where we were; as unpalatable as the whole experience was and thinking in that way, it was obvious that we were going to lose people; the only question was how many. My own personal point of view is that it was handled badly in terms of the number of people that we lost compared to other parts of the world. The song isn’t a protest song about the way that the pandemic was handled or what the government did or didn’t do. It was just a song about the way that the world was changing, and at the point, the song was written, none of us knew that things were ever going to get back to normal again. There are pleasant things about that as well as the underlying sadness that people were falling. The beginning of the song references people walking into no man’s land in the first world war; it was almost potluck who was going to be standing at the end of that hundred-yard dash or a slow walk into the unknown, it felt like we were all walking into the unknown.
Can I also assume from the tune ‘Not In The Yeast’ that during the same period, you took up baking bread?
Oh, not personally! I was amused by the rush; there was a yeast shortage, wasn’t there? People couldn’t get yeast for love nor money; I just liked the play “not in the least” then “not in the yeast.” Also, the idea that someone could be putting stuff into the yeast that they shouldn’t be putting into the yeast. I did both those tracks during the pandemic and put them up as little Facebook videos with me playing all the instruments, including a shoe box actually, because I couldn’t get access to a drum. It was nice to record them with all the musicians and hear them finally brought to fruition. To have it produced as well by Paul Savage; brilliant stuff.
Did you use the lockdown period fairly constructively? Are there any projects from the period that will see the light of day?
I think the Cobhers is a lockdown project, and it’s now seeing the light of day. But I started a degree in computer-aided design, which is actually forming part of this project; I mentioned the digital animations and the National Museum of Industrial Live because actually, what we’re doing is creating 3D models of some of their nineteenth-century industrial machinery. Things like steam cranes, glass furnaces and blowing engines, they have all the hand-drawn plans for these machines, and we’re creating these models, which are then going to be backdrops for some of the animations.
What are your plans for the Cobhers going forward?
I would like the Cobhers to become a kind of well-known festival act. From the work that we’ve done so far, there’s every sign that that could happen. We’ve really connected with audiences; it’ll be interesting to see how we do when we play at Costa Del Folk in October. That was a concert we were supposed to do back in 2020 that has been put back and put back.
I’m looking forward to doing more work with these musicians; they’re a lot of fun to work with, they’re very positive, and they’re very talented, and I will work to create some good opportunities for them next year, I think.
Are you prepared to tease any more song titles?
We have them in the bag; the arrangements are done; we just need to rehearse them up. But I would want to bring people into the tent by doing something that’s a little bit interesting but then, once they’re there, hopefully, they’ll stay for the traditional music that we play, that we’re really passionate about.
Do you think the folk and traditional scene has fully revved up again post-pandemic?
I think it’s getting there, for sure. The musicians that have embraced the last couple of years are the ones that have just simply added feathers to their bow. I think that was the right way to do it; it’s been an opportunity, although it’s been a very difficult period, for those that have seized it as an opportunity to do different things and augment their existing careers and outputs, then it’s been a good thing.
Pre-Order Luke Daniels and The Cobhers via Bandcamp (out on 28th October): https://lukedanielsthecobhers.bandcamp.com/album/luke-daniels-the-cobhers
Luke Daniels and The Cobhers are:
Luke Daniels – melodeon, guitar and vocals
Matt Tighe – fiddle
Eleanor Dunsdon – clasarch
Scott Turnbull – guitar
Michael Biggins – piano
More here:
https://www.lukedanielsmusic.com/