Daydu

Ive been playing guitar of one sort or another for as long as I can remember. Although Im also a songwriter, I love the acoustic guitar as a solo instrument, the depth of tone, the dynamics at your fingertips and the challenges it throws at you in getting those sounds in your head out there. Like all self written albums, this is both personal and 'of the time' to me. Here are some of the stories behind the tracks on Daydu: Perdurabos Express - As a huge Jimmy Page fan, I always wondered what he would have sounded like if he'd really gone his own way and followed his own acoustic roots. This is the kind of thing I'd like to think he'd have written - dramatic, larger than life and exotic sounding. The name comes from a former tenant of one of Jimmys Homes on the shores of Loch Ness, an infamous magician with the magical pseudonym of Frater Perdurabo - he was an interesting character too but thats another story... Daydu - This piece started as a couple of ideas I came up with over a couple of nights. I liked it, and remember playing it to my three year old son one morning sitting on his bedroom floor while he was distracted with action figures. I told him this was a new tune and asked him what he thought we should call it. Without hesitation he turned and said, "Daydu, Daddy - call it Daydu." and then turned back to his game. So it's been that ever since: Daydu, our own invented word for an unexpected, happy moment. Bazaraga -This piece magically wrote itself. One night I'd been driving myself nuts recording Prora Dogs - which is a tricky piece in a weird tuning - when I hit the wall and just had to play something else, anything that was different. I started playing the first thing that came to mind - and this was it. Luckily I had the recorder nearby or I never would have remembered it. I have a poor quality live recording of Davey Graham playing in a club where he's doing a standard folk piece - then he takes a turn and goes for it big style. You can hear the tension as he quite obviously starts making it up as he goes along. Bazaraga reminds me of Davey's mindset when he did that - that 'let's see where it takes us' musical mentality caught in the spur of the moment. You probably can't tell as it's turned down a bit in the mix, but I burst the skin on my bodhran recording this... Redrose -This track came from a photograph and a mood. I had mixed feelings the day I closed the door for the last time on the house where my parents lived and my brother and I grew up, so I took some photographs to remind me of the occasion. It seemed a good idea at the time, even though not all my memories of the place were good. When I looked back through them, all the shots looked dull and lifeless - flat both in subject and colour. Except one, a close up of a single red rose from the front garden - the flower that just happened to have been my Mum's favourite. This is one of the two tracks on this CD where all you hear is purely one single guitar. Prora Dogs (A Groundhog Jig) - The Prora Stone is a small, upright standing stone traditionally said to mark the spot where the last wild boar in East Lothian was slain. It's in the garden of a farmhouse now (though you can still see it from the road) but used to stand in nearby field until the farmer decided to dig it up and move it out his way. No one knows when it was originally put up, by who or how on earth anyone knew they had caught the last boar in the county - but that's tradition for you. It's off the beaten track down our way but we often pass it when we're going to one of the local garden centres. Apparently I tell the kids this same story about this stone every time we pass it by, hence the groundhog element... Nightlight - I've always had an over active imagination. When I was young I used to scare the hell out of myself by dreaming up monsters I was sure lurked behind the furniture in my room. To this day I still remember them all. Thankfully my son wasn't as bad with night terrors as I was but there did come a day when he decided he wasn't overly fond of the dark. Then, as happens in parenthood, I found myself sent back in time to that same place my parents were when they were trying to deal with my own fears. That was very much in my head around the time I was working on this. Musically it's at odds with what might be lurking under the bed - light and optimistic sounding, its a kind of Chet Atkins/Les Paul romp in open C6 tuning. And if you sing this to yourself in any dark or scary place it's guaranteed to keep scary monsters at bay. Well, most of them, maybe. Lyra Dreaming - My little daughter is a beautiful and spirited young lass, always pushing us in some way, always running, playing, laughing and dispensing chaos. But we had a tough time with her before she was born. We always knew we were having a girl so we decided on a name we liked pretty quickly. We were told there were 'concerns' though - and to make things worse she used to scare the hell out of us by kicking furiously in the womb then going still for ages. We worried a lot back then, but I had a feeling she was going to be fine. I used to tell my wife not to worry about her antics, that it was only Lyra dreaming. And during that time I wrote this for her. By the time I got round to recording this, Lyra was three. You can hear her in the final seconds of the song telling me to get my ass in gear and finish recording the CD. The Shoal -This piece is really the odd one out. I wrote it right at the end of my 'Young Gorgie Surf Team' album project and it came together very quickly. I was playing the neck pickup of my guitar through a modelling amp and I found a beautiful, fluid preset delay sound that made me want to write something to suit it. It soon found a name and I was very pleased with how unusual and different it was - but it was too unusual to make the final selection with the Surf Team. It's haunted me ever since though and now I think it's found a home here. Low Winter Sun, Parts 1(Blueshift) and 2 (Four Figures in Snow) - This was inspired by a photograph I took in the snow one December morning. I was taking the kids to our nursery, which sits to the left of a large, open park. The sun was bright and just above the tree line over the park which was covered in thick snow. There was a family making their way through the snow across the field at the time and it looked heavy going. It was a stunning image, sadly my phone didn't do it justice. For one thing, the entire scene came out in a weird blue hue because of the refraction of light through the snow - but nonetheless it was a moment that stayed with me. This piece features a very old accordion that's been in our family for years. It originally belonged to my Grandad, who bought it as a replacement for his original accordion - which perished on board the first HMS Ark Royal aircraft carrier when it was sunk by a German U-boat in 1941. In Amber - Everyone finds their own ways of dealing with the painful stuff life throws at you. Music has always helped me, though for some reason I always seem to want to write upbeat, happy music whenever I'm in a bad place. I was writing this when something awful happened in our lives - but I can't help thinking the music sounds a lot different to how I felt at the time. The title comes from an idea in a book I'm very fond of. In this book an old man who is haunted by atrocities he saw in WWII is abducted by time travelling folk and taken on a random journey through his own life. When they visit times when friends and loved ones die, the time travellers find his sadness puzzling. After all, everyone is still alive and well in the moments they lived in - and those moments will always exist, locked in time, like insects frozen in amber. The book is called Slaughterhouse Five, written by a very brave man called Kurt Vonnegut. So it goes...