Duncan Chisholm has just made Black Cuillin, his seventh solo album, primarily inspired by the stupendous landscape of the Cuillin mountain range on the Isle of Skye, which I described as “an extraordinary achievement, a complete joy and a deeply immersive experience”. I spoke to Duncan the day after his big Celtic Connections night premiering the album at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow; as mentioned in my live review, “you couldn’t fail but be absorbed by the shifting layers of impeccably played music and the pictures that it painted” and Duncan was still visibly euphoric from the reception he received. We talked about how he felt about the concert, what had gone into making it a success, various aspects of how Black Cuillin was made, and how poetry and Highland panoramas inspired his music.
I started by asking him how the concert launching his new album Black Cuillin had been for him.
It was truly a special night. As I said last night, I’ve had many special nights at Celtic Connections, but although I’ve been on that stage many times, it was the first time it was me and my show at the Glasgow Concert Hall. It’s always special playing there; it’s a very warm atmosphere, and it felt like a very partisan crowd, so I was far more comfortable being on stage than I would have been somewhere else. I’ve played big Festivals with Wolfstone and with my own band, but that was the biggest night of my solo career. I felt honoured to be on that stage, but I also felt that I wanted to prove something. There’s always apprehension with a concert like that. You worry if everything is going to be alright, but we were fully prepared for it; we’d rehearsed well. I tend to be a person for whom it’s all about attention to detail, so we’d worked a lot with the lighting engineer, the sound engineer, and the whole crew. That meant I was confident going into it. I really wanted to put on a great show, and I was absolutely delighted with how it turned out.
I asked Duncan about how he had prepared for a show on such a scale that included him plus eight musicians and an eight-piece string section.
I thought about the concert for months after Donald Shaw booked me for it. There were about six or seven different set lists; I’d say to the guys, this is the definite set list, and the next one would be, this is the definite one. What I tend to do is sit at home and just play it through in my head, imagining how it’s going to flow, and the way it flowed last night was exactly the way I imagined it.
I think getting the sound right was vitally important with the show because Black Cuillin itself is an epic-sounding album, and we wanted to have that with the performance. It’s really important to have the sound exact for solo fiddle and for fiddle and guitar because you need all those little intricacies. For me, a concert performance is just like putting an album together; it’s about the dynamic builds and little nuances that make all the difference. There was a very acoustic set in the show that had four tunes that goes from solo fiddle to fiddle and piano, to solo piano, then fiddle and guitar. It lasted for about 10 minutes, and within that, there’s a dynamic shift here and there, and I think it’s really important to get those micro units of dynamics and then overall try to hit the peaks and troughs at the right time.
Poetry clearly plays an important role in Duncan’s music. He describes in the sleeve notes to Black Cuillin that reading poet Sorley MacLean’s eve of World War 2 poem An Cuilithionn / The Cuillin was the start of the project. It’s also from MacLean’s poem Shores that his 1997 Redpoint album took its name; and at last year’s Celtic Connections, and reprised again this year at the opening 30th-anniversary concert, he celebrated the work of poet George Mackay Brown with ‘Beyond the Swelkie’. I asked what the connection is for him between poetry and music.
It’s a connection that is very important to me. It’s about getting inspiration from beautiful things. Poetry in itself throws up images. It’s a visual image that I have first in my head for any project that I take on, whether that be musical or multi-media. That’s been the case with my music since I was very young. My fiddle teacher, who was an old man when he taught me – his name was Donald Riddell – was a great historian of the music, so he would teach you a tune, and he would tell you where it was written, who it was written by, why it was written, and all those things would paint a picture in your mind. I learnt to always associate tunes with pictures. Poetry throws up pictures in my head.
The Sorley MacLean Cuillin poem is incredible, very deep, very heavy, not something you could read in one go – it’s over 100 pages long – you need to take it bit by bit. For me, though, it was more about the back story, which is described in the notes in the edition that I have. Sorley MacLean used to climb the Cuillin all the time; whenever he had the chance, he would be out in the hills by himself. The image I have is of him gaining solace from being out there in the mountains back in 1930s when he was a young man. It has a resonance for me, the mountains are always there, and thinking of him there, him knowing the landscape so intimately, and coming up with this poem threw up a whole load of pictures for me. The poem was written in 1939 and at a time before people knew what Stalin was all about. The Spanish Civil War had just happened, and MacLean was a committed communist. He saw the mountains as symbols of purity, a redemption in the dark world, and they represented to him the international revolutionary movement, which was obviously anti-fascist.
The Black Cuillin album was written throughout lockdown. We had planned to travel to Skye to spend time there and understand that landscape. Because of lockdown, we ended up writing a lot of the music from pictures. There’s an amazing book by Gordon Stainforth called The Cuilllin. He’s a climber and a brilliant photographer, so the book has all these incredible images that we were able to use. Myself, Ross and Hamish had this discussion about what we wanted this album to be. Ultimately we decided it needed to be about freedom lost, for the music to take you on a journey and tell you a story but also to celebrate the sense of what we had lost with lockdown. So, in 1939 you had Sorley MacLean writing the poem in a darkening Europe, and last year we wrote the album at a dark time in everyone’s lives. It was really important to us that the album brimmed with optimism. That was also reflected in the beautiful piece of art that I chose for the album cover, which was painted by Jeremy Rossiter called ‘Dawn Breaking Over the Cuillin’ It’s got the dark presence of the Cuillin, but it also shows optimism with the bright colours glowing from behind the ridge. I’d love for people to listen to it and hear that. Maybe I think too deeply; after all, it’s an instrumental album.
Duncan’s music has been rooted in the landscape of the Highlands – with The Strathglass Trilogy, Sandwood, the #TuneWithAView videos in the pandemic, and now Black Cuillin. I asked him why that landscape was so important to him.
I live there, so I see it every day, and every day I count my blessings that I was born there. Landscape works for me like a painter picking a certain style. It has so much to offer: changing perspectives, light and weather. The Black Cuillin ridge is a terrifying place to be if you’re in bad weather, but it can be an incredibly beautiful place. So it can throw up lots of different emotions. What interests me is how I feel when I’m in these places. How do you represent the Black Cuillin? What you have to do is look inside first, and ask yourself: what do I feel when I’m looking up at that mountain from below? I feel both small and in awe. You try and represent musically how you feel, and then you make the connection with other people because they feel and sense it too. It’s the varying human emotions that everyone will feel in that landscape.
I’m very interested in, at some point, changing direction to look at something else, maybe just for one album. It will always be visual for me, though. I have worked in documentary before, and we’ve talked within the team about finding an opportunity to have a crack at a film – Donald has worked in film before – and I’d love to see what we could do with it. It would be interesting at some point to step back from Landscape.
How does that love of the Highlands landscape translate into writing tunes and making albums?
All those things – poems, landscape – add to the creativity. If you bring all these things into a nexus and you hold them, think about them, ponder on them, and all of sudden, weeks down the line, an idea comes. You realise – right, that will fit there. Every album that I’ve done, I’ve had a narrative, a journey in my head. Sandwood was a journey through a year from one spot in Sandwood Bay. The Strathglass Trilogy involved different journeys in that, in my mind, all helped to make a bigger narrative. Black Cuillin was built from in the same way, starting off with a journey up to the ridge and over a day and a night and into the next morning. That kind of process helps in getting something that’s cohesive and makes sense, and it’s a long process. Using the analogy of a painting, the tunes are the pencil sketches. I’ve got lots of recordings of Black Cuillin from when I’ve just sat at home and played through the tunes in their embryonic stages, in order. You create this skeletal form of the tune, and then you start adding things and sculpting things away.
The tunes on Black Cuillin were written collaboratively by Duncan with Ross Ainslie and Hamish Napier. I asked how that partnership had worked, what went into crafting the music, and how they managed working under the restrictions necessitated by the pandemic.
It’s interesting because we work differently. Myself and Hamish, when we worked on Sandwood, would start with a little motif, and then we’d spend hours and days, sometimes weeks and months, looking at melody and how it would all work and fit together. Ross just comes in and says how about this, and he’s got six bars straight away. He’s very fluid and has a very natural sense of melody, whereas myself and Hamish will get into the nuts and bolts of it and try lots of different things with a tune until we’re happy with it.
We had to work together over zoom; sometimes, myself and Ross would work together, sometimes the three of us, and sometimes myself and Hamish. One thing that we realised, as other people did in their jobs, was that we could make using with Zoom actually work, given we were in different places during lockdown. The only thing we couldn’t do was play together because of the time lag on the Zoom call – there would obviously have been an energy if we had all been in the same room together – but we still got it written. It was a long process. We started at the beginning of 2020, just after Celtic Connections, and we didn’t get the final tune finished until 18 months later.
Once the tunes were written, how did the recording process work?
We recorded it at GloWorm studios in Glasgow, starting in March last year. We had to cancel a couple of session because of COVID and finished recording in June. I had planned to release it earlier, but I had a busy ten weeks in the summer doing gigs and festivals. It felt like a long time when we came back to do the final overdubs and mixing in September, but in actual fact, that break was great to have because we came back with fresh ears and could take a step back after the earlier intense period of recording.
It was a fascinating process. We built a team, bringing people like Donald Shaw and Ross Hamilton, as well as Ross Ainslie and Hamish. When you’re working together in the studio, you have to a working relationship where you take the skeletal form, and then it starts going in different directions. We decided everything as a team. I didn’t need to throw in the trump card – they trust me, and I trust them, importantly, Donald and Ross (Hamilton), who co-produced the album with me. Ross Hamilton has worked more on producing pop records, and his production and engineering skills really added a lot, and it was the same with Sandwood.
I asked Duncan specifically about the strings on the album, which sound so fully integrated into the sound, and how well that was recreated on stage the night before.
You can’t take on a project like the Black Cuillin and not make it epic sounding. It needed to have a wide cinematic feel. You only get one chance at it, so it has to be right. We couldn’t have done it with just fiddle and guitar, it has to have that massive filmic quality to it, and it was a big challenge to do that. You look at a palette of sound – we are going to have electric guitar, and we want it to sound like Dave Gilmour, but we also have uilleann pipes and strings. If you know ahead of time how you want it to sound, it’s then not about saying, ’we just need to add strings’. From another angle, classical orchestras trying to sound traditional don’t usually work. Of course, I don’t understand classical music, but I do understand what string parts sound good in terms of adding weight and colour. It is how the traditional scene is adapting, with sounds from jazz or classical music being used to add another texture or shade. It’s not about saying I’m going to do a fusion thing here because it’s a cool thing to do. I want it to be part of the sound that I’m creating.
We had Greg Lawson on board to put the string arrangements together, which was absolutely fantastic. That was a very exciting day when the strings got recorded. It was a 17-piece ensemble. It was complex because I gave Greg all the chord parts and melodies and what we needed to have a lot of material that we could then break down. So sometimes, we’d use the cello parts only, or we’d use just the high violin line. That in itself was another long process of looking into those string arrangements and working out what worked best. I think it was a bit of a shock to Greg when he eventually heard the album because we’d taken a lot of his parts out. I spoke to him recently about maybe doing another version of the album with just fiddle and string arrangements.
Most of the string players on stage at the concert last night are course, traditional musicians, but they’re incredibly technically gifted, and they’ve all studied music. Having that understanding of both forms is great and means they can play just what is needed.
It may have been a little too early to ask about future plans, given quite how exultant Duncan was after the concert, but I asked anyway.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next. It was a very special evening, and I’d love to do it again, but it’s not that easy. I really want to get out and tour it as much as possible. I do have a scaled-down version of last night’s concert that I’m hoping to do a few festivals this summer.
Every opportunity I get to record it’s about trying to get the narrative right, get the story right, and then get the tunes and production right. What makes me proud about all the albums that I’ve made is that I go into it saying to myself that this one has to be better than the previous one. It was a challenge after Sandwood because I thought that was the best one I’d ever made, and before that, Affric. I do feel that I achieved that with Black Cuillin, and that throws up a whole new challenge, but every new project gets more and more exciting for me.
Website: https://www.duncanchisholm.com