Following the release of my album A Firmer Hand in August 2024, and after the promotional tours, sessions, interviews and sundry other bits and bobs had more or less dried up, my diary was given the briefest of chances to breathe. Mine is rigorously colour-coordinated, as those who know me might expect. As autumn rolled in, the tomato red I use for all the music-y stuff was replaced by sage green, the colour I reserve for socialising (and fun little errands). There had been for some time, however, a uniquely bright swatch a few pages down the line: a blob of tangerine slap bang in the middle of September. I assign orange to appointments I can’t quite work out where to put; curious, exciting, surprising things; professional, perhaps, but always with the promise of something else besides. The orange in this instance was a meeting with Jenny Niven, the director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF).
It’s true, I’m often billed as a “literary” songwriter, an adjective seemingly interchangeable in my case with “wordy”, “verbose”, or simply “self-interested”, but truth be told, book festivals have made me feel somewhat deficient in the past, bookish though I may seem. Jenny had kindly arranged the meeting to ask me whether I might like to put something special together for the festival’s 2025 programme, incorporating music, lyric, poetry and performance – a homage of sorts to a Scottish literary hero. My answer was immediate. There’s only one writer who has ever merited that kind of title for me, and his name is Ivor Cutler.
The term ‘spirit animal’, in the strictest shamanic sense, refers to a spirit which provides someone with protection, guidance, and perhaps the odd wise teaching throughout one or more phases of life. Since discovering his work as a teenager, Ivor Cutler is the only writer ever to have fit this bill for me, and has provided as much joy and inspiration as any New Romantic poet or garage-rock mystic. I decided he would serve as my twinkly-eyed spirit guide throughout the festival, uniquely positioned to blow absurdist holes in any stuffiness I might encounter. He would protect me more than any number of tweed jackets I might drape across my anxious frame.
Ivor Cutler was a poet, musician and humorist, as well as a visual artist. Born in 1923 to Jewish parents in Govan, Glasgow, at the age of 19 he began a career as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, but was soon grounded as a result of his ‘dreaminess’. He moved to London [ . . . ]
