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Iain Morrison |
Wireless for New Sounds
Iain Morrison may not be a household name just yet. But his name is certainly familiar to one group of people: the secretaries who answer listeners’ requests for information about records played on the radio.
Ever since BBC Radio Scotland’s Iain Anderson and Celtic Connections programmes featured tracks from Morrison's Empty Beer Bottles & Peat Fire Smoke album, responses along the lines of ‘who is this guy and where can we get his CD?’ have flooded in, not just from audiences all over the UK but also from listeners logging on to web casts from as far afield as Germany, North Carolinaand Texas.
To answer the first part of that question, Morrison is from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. A singer-songwriter-bagpiper, Morrison plays guitar as well as pipes and his guitar band, Poor Old Ben, have been attracting interest from several major record labels. He cites American artists such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and Matthew Ryan as influences on his music. But it is piping, however, that has played a major role in creating his musical persona.
Beer bottles
His father, Pipe Major Iain M Morrison, is a former World Champion piper and taught Iain junior to play the pipes from the age of eleven. And while names such as Nick Drake have been mentioned to describe the attractively hushed singing style on Empty Beer Bottles & Peat Fire Smoke, there's also something of the Canntaireachd, the soft crooning that pipers have used for generations to pass music on orally, in Morrison's delivery.
Despite his obvious piping skills, Morrison wasn't the sort of boy who watches his father playing music and can't wait to get his hands on the same musical instrument.
“When my father first showed me the basics of piping, I wasn't really interested, to be honest,” he says in his musical way of speaking. “I was more interested in playing football. But he didn't force me, because he'd been forced into music himself. He played the accordion originally but his dad was keen for him to be a piper so that he could join the army. So he just left a chanter lying around the house to see if I might pick it up.”
This fatherly ploy worked. Morrison senior, by this time retired from the army, returned from a month’s teaching at a music college in Australia to find the chanter being put to good use, and Iain began to study the pipes seriously.
“My dad was quite hard on me - he was teaching a lot of my mates at school as well, and there was no favouritism or extra lessons - but he was really encouraging too. He still is. When I got to about nineteen, I'd started to win piping competitions and dad felt that I had the potential to become a gold medal winner. We even made a piping CD together at that point. But I became bored with that whole competition thing of people judging you on technique, rather on your music, and I gave up the pipes in favour of the guitar.”
Strumming
This didn't go down too well at home. He had to sneak the guitar - a foreign instrument as his father saw it - into the house and hide it in the wardrobe. One day his father heard him strumming and “he went off his head. But eventually he began to appreciate what I was doing and now he’s my number onefan.”
Iain senior actually makes a guest appearance on Empty Beer Bottles and he gave Iain junior his blessing to follow a career in music - as long as he got his degree in Theology from Glasgow University first.
“I'd started writing songs quite soon after I picked up the guitar and I formed a band in Stornoway,” Morrison picks up the story. “My uncle Roddy used to go to America with his work and he'd bring back all these albums of American bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival and lots of singer-songwriters. Then I met a guy who was writing songs and what he was doing sounded really cool, so I thought I'd try it too.”
Empty Beer Bottles was an experiment that took on a life of its own and had its singing-songwriting-bagpiping origins in the dole office, of all places. Having graduated from Glasgow in summer 2003 Morrison was signing on, hoping to become a full-time musician. A chap who worked in the dole office asked if he fancied playing with his ceilidh band.
“The first gig we played was in Lochwinnoch, just to the south west of Glasgow, and I took my pipes along because I'd just started playing them again,and people went nuts. They were asking if I had a CD and I started thinking, hey, I could make some cash at this. So I decided to make a demo that I was going to send round the Scottish folk labels and see if anyone was interested.”
Solo career
In January last year, during a break from Poor Old Ben, he set to work. With one exception, a song that he'd tried with the band but hadn't worked, the songs on Empty Beer Bottles were produced in quick succession. Working quietly at night while his wife was sleeping, Morrison came up with a song writing style that's conversational, tells a story and exudes atmosphere. ‘Quiet but big’ was the effect he was after. He found it.
The demo turned into a finished item with traditional-styled tunes played on the sweeter sounding small pipes and tin whistles sitting alongside the contemporary songs.
“It seemed quite a natural blend to me but I wondered for quite a while whether other people would see it that way,” he says. “In the end, I just decided to put it out through my website and see what happened. I didn't have a grand plan or even any money to spend on marketing, so we just sent it to radio stations and people in the media, to see how they responded. Iain Anderson, particularly, has been really encouraging and I've had e-mails from people asking where they can come and see me playing live. One woman from Germany, who had a bit of a problem with the piping tracks at first, later came back and said, “No, I get it now. If you play in London I'll fly over to see you!”
Morrison's main loyalties lie with Poor Old Ben, who are currently close to signing a major deal, but he has enough songs for another solo album and after the response to Empty Beer Bottles is minded to put out another CD soon.
“I'd thought that a solo album - if I'd thought about it at all - would be something that came along once Poor Old Ben had had a measure of success or something,” he says. “But music is all about learning and one the biggest things I've learned from the response to this album, although I've always felt this was the case, is that music doesn't have to fit into a preconceived box. The important thing is to somehow get it out to people and if it's good enough, they'll listen.”