Oppression and repression provide the political and personal thematic anchors on the Scottish singer-songwriter Malcolm MacWatt’s sixth full-length album Dark Harvest, one on which he’s joined by three notable collaborators.
With harmonica, circling fingerpicked guitar and bluesy traces of John Martyn, it opens with a call for greater Scottish autonomy in Strong Is The North Wind, to seek change rather than remain locked in the past, fuelled by “Those with their own vested interests”, a rallying cry to use the system to bring about change – “So come to the hustings/Come to the gatherings/Come to the polling stations in droves and make yourself known”. Digging back into time, the Peasants Revolt of 1381 provides the touchstone for the slow sway, keys, mournful fiddle and plucked notes of The Church And The Crown which, together “With sceptre and scripture they keep a man down”, the song referencing 14th century activists Wat Tyler and the radical preacher John Ball who sought to inspire the commonfolk, opening their eyes to how “the poor and weak suffer/While the nobles and bishops grow fat on their lies”. The biggest uprising in British history, the Revolt inevitably ended with rebels crushed, their leaders executed and, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, he resignedly concludes that as long as “money and greed have a power compelling/I fear the poor will be treated the same”.
Racism underpins the next two numbers. The first, with muted drums and sparse banjo intro before the musical muscle flexes, Shannon Hynes on backing vocals, the angry, bluesy Red River Woman is inspired by the mistreatment and murder of native Canadian women whose bodies wash up in the waters around Winnipeg (“Somebody’s daughter used and thrown away…you ain’t the first brown skin girl to float down here/I fear you won’t be the last…Flotsam and jetsam of flesh and bone/Failed by the system, lost to the world”), the last verse identifying the song’s victim as Tina Fontaine, a First Nations teenager who was found murdered in 2014 and whose death sparked campaigns for a national inquiry.
That’s followed with Angeline Morrison singing lead for traditional-sounding Empire In Me, which, again featuring banjo, is related in the voice of Eliza Junor, who was born in Guyana to an unnamed enslaved mother and raised in Fortrose on the Black Isle in Scotland by her Scottish father and former plantation owner Henry Junor as she speaks of the man she knew rather than the man he once was (“I never saw you with whip in your hand…I never saw you at the slave market/I never saw you as the devil incarnate… I only knew you as my own dear father”) and her ambiguous feelings (“I love my father but I hate what he’s done”). Eliza went on to become a governess in London, but, in the song, remains troubled by her heritage as Morrison sings, “So father I ask you when you look at me/Am I flesh of your flesh?/Or your property?/Can bondage and love even be reconciled? Explain to your child/As I try to live…A black British woman with the empire in me”.
Another collaborator is Nathan Bell, who plays guitars and delivers the spoken words on the banjo-backed slow march title track, which tells of how during WWII, the Scottish island of Gruinard was secretly used to test biological weapons (“Men in masks from Porton Down test bombs of mass destruction/Then they burned the sheep that died to prove the weapon worked to Winston’s satisfaction”), leaving it contaminated with deadly Anthrax spores for decades, deemed too costly to clean up. Eventually, in 1981, a group of still anonymous activists (branded terrorists at the time) calling themselves the Dark Harvest Commandos took action by placing samples of the soil at the Tory Party conference in Blackpool and at Porton Down, the island finally being restored to health in 1986; a timely reminder that “one generation’s terrorist or political prisoner is the next generation’s activist or politician”.
The final guest is Irish guitarist Pat McManus who brings electric guitar and his understanding of blues and traditional Celtic music to On The Western Plain, originally by Leadbelly but here taking its cue from the version by Rory Gallagher, the revision of the lyrics to mention Scottish drovers Scotty Philip and Jesse Chisholm (after whom the cattle trail was named) sustaining the album’s connections. Philip gets a second nod on the sepia-toned mountain music Buffalo Thunder which recounts how, born in Dallas Morayshire in 1858, he went West in a fruitless search for gold, married a half-Cheyenne girl, set up a ranch and is credited with saving the buffalo from extinction. In a nice touch, his great great nephew David Martin plays bodhran on the track.
Phil Dearing on piano, Brave David Tyrie tells of another real-life figure, a Scottish Portsmouth navy clerk openly critical of the monarchy who, in 1782, as the opening line relates, was “hung, drawn and quartered” for treason, the person in Britain to suffer such fate, the local mob digging up the body for trophies.
The focus shifts from people to birds for the mandolin-accompanied The Nightjar’s Fall From Grace, though, naturally, it’s couched in metaphor, encapsulated in the lines “the nightjar laughed and the nightjar boasted/You’ll never have a voice like mine/The nightjar sung his own high praises/He’d sing too long and loud/The other birds they all fell silent/For the nightjar drowned them out”, the old world gods punishing him (“Pride and vanity shall be your curse”) with the moral being “every voice and melody has its worth”.
The realm of nature and the way it is exploited is at the root of two further songs, whaling and North Sea drilling being the cause in In She Told Me Not To Go, where the menfolk’s women urge them to call a halt (“we will crash and burn, we don’t have long to go/Well here we are in a few more years, the seas are dead and the air’s not clear/The water isn’t safe to drink, our greed has pushed us past the brink”). Then, returning to metaphor, on the slow sway-along Heather And Honey, he laments a vanishing way of life as green tax breaks for rich landowners meaning young people cannot afford to settle where their ancestors lived and pursue sustainable jobs on the land (“I look at heather and see burning and smoke on the breeze/I see a rich land while scraping a living and that doesn’t seem right to me”) have become a modern-day form of Highland Clearances (“I fear the highlands becoming parks for a new monied clan/As people head south to the big towns and cities for jobs and a better chance”) because “who’s got the time or the money for flowers and wild honey bees?”
Another vanishing tradition is mourned in the eight-minute tempo-shifting The Last Bowman, which, Dearing on piano and Ian MacWatt on snare, is a eulogy for the archers (MacWatt is one) and the longbows that were at the heart of the nation’s rise to power only to be replaced by guns as warfare became increasingly mechanised, in turn, losing another connection to nature (“The bow is cut from living wood and seasoned by the years/The gun is cast like any tool from the cool minds of engineers/A bowman like the tree is grown but any child can pull a trigger”).
Gillian MacWatt initially provides the ceilidh fiddle-driven, propulsive stomping traditional Drowsy Maggie, the Appalachian Celtic instrumental, then gives way to a stark banjo, fiddle, guitar and piano arrangement for a lyric rooted in Scotland’s drug problem in the story of a young Maggie, her baby and boyfriend running from the violent drug gangs to whom they are in debt.
A mixed-race Scot, MacWatt closes the album with the piano ballad Semi Scotsman, as the lyrics trace his journey (“I was born where British Empire hand once gave command/Blessed with whisky in my mother’s land…I was raised where Arctic storms break on the Moray shore/I’ve worked the North Sea rigs that keep us warm/This is where my own kids were born”) in a very personal account of identity and what being Scottish means (“You don’t have to be born north of the Tweed/To know exactly where your true heart lives/The soil beneath my feet cares not for race or creed/Half my blood and all my heart I give/I’m connected to this land”), in a closing hope for the autonomy he spoke of in the opening track as “like tartan wove of many coloured threads/We’ll weave a nation strong, just and fair”. Whatever land you call your own, the sentiments that bolster this outstanding album will burn bright in the heart.
You can also catch Malcolm MacWatt at the Danny Kyle Open Stage on January 30th at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall as part of this year’s Celtic Connections.
More here: https://www.malcolmmacwatt.com/