Step back in time. Say, go back to the early ‘80s, to 1984 to be precise. This was the year Friends Again, with a line-up including James Grant, Chris Thomson, Paul McGeechan, Neil Cunningham and Stuart Kerr, released “Trapped and Unwrapped” (Mercury). Unfortunately, this was their first and only album: soon after it Thomson formed The Bathers, Cunningham became Paul Haig’s manager and the remaining three members formed Love and Money. In the late eighties the band’s second album “Strange Kind of Love” (Mercury, 1988), produced by Gary Katz, sold pretty well, while the single “Halleluiah Man” (Mercury, 1988) became one of their most successful hits. Love and Money split up after four albums, but their death represented the birth of their front man James Grant’s solo career. He is regarded as one of Scotland's greatest songwriting talents, a statement proved true by his dark and refined debut album “Sawdust in My Veins” (Survival, 1998), followed by “My Thrawn Glory” (Vertical, 2001) and “I Shot the Albatross” (Vertical 2002), the latter is a sort of experiment, fusing the words of poets such as EE Cumings and W.H.Auden with music.

Fast forward to 2005. Nowadays Grant, who’s still living in Glasgow, prefers to leave behind the past and Love and Money and work on his future career. He has recently released a new album, “Holy Love” (Vertical, 2004), that simply melts your heart with its bittersweet songs. “I’m always happy with the records I put out,” Grant tells me on the phone on a cloudy Tuesday morning, “I don‘t really like making the same record twice. For ‘Holy Love’, I went for a kind of organic approach: I wanted to make a visceral record, something that came from the gut, and I also wanted the album to feel live, to have the feeling that the music I was listening to every time I put the album on was happening right in front of me.” Mixed and mastered by Paul McGeechan, “Holy Love” features ten songs, on all of them careful listeners will recognise two singers with very distinct and beautiful voices, Monica Queen’s (ex-Thrum) and Capercaillie’s Karen Matheson’s. Grant worked with both of them previously: Queen featured also on “I Shot the Albatross”, while his collaboration with Matheson started in 1996 when he worked on her debut solo album “The Dreaming Sea”, and since then continued on a regular basis, indeed Grant also worked on her follow up “Time To Fall”.“I met Monica when we were asked to perform on a music programme in Scotland,” Grant remembers, “we had a chat and a few beers afterwards and it just became clear there was an affinity between us. I asked Monica to sing on a specific track, ‘A Tale Best Forgotten’, on ‘I Shot the Albatross’ and she did a fantastic job. We worked quite closely together ever since. I’ve also been working a lot with Karen Matheson and Donald Shaw from Capercaillie. I don’t feel I’ve had to change the way I write to incorporate myself into Karen’s music, it has been more a happy medium for us both. Karen’s voice has got a beautiful purity to it and I tend to find easier to write for women rather than men.”

Of all the albums Grant did, he claims he can’t judge which one can be considered as his most complete, “I like them each in their own way,” he explains, “I think they’re all different, once I’ve made a record I don’t tend to sit and assess it, the next day I’m already onto the next one.” Yet amongst his solo albums, “I Shot the Albatross” strikes the listener for being an original and interesting approach to music and poetry “I’d like to think it is,” Grant states, “it’s just something that interested me and I decided to pursue it. At the time, I was doing music for a film with Donald and I ended up editing and narrating a selection of 20th century Scottish poetry. A few years before I had bought a book and some of the poems on it seemed to me very lyrical and I kind of liked the idea of fusing for example Rimbaud, Lee Dorsey and William Blake, it seemed to me kind of cheeky and irreverent, yet I thought it would put a new spin on the poetry itself and, I suppose, would also challenge people.” Grant might like challenging people with his music, but he also likes being challenged with projects such as soundtracks. In 1995 he wrote with Paul McGeechan the soundtrack for the Scottish thriller “The Near Room”, directed by David Hayman. It was such a good experience that Grant would do it again, “It was interesting, in many ways it’s easier than writing your own material because you’ve a ready made concept and you have to work around that, though it usually depends on who you’re working with,” Grant recounts, “I’ve been fortunate and most of the people I’ve worked with in film have let me express myself, but I realised that in certain instances this isn’t possible or it doesn’t really happen and I’m not so sure I’d like a project like that. I liked the people I worked with: people who want to work with me know what I’m like, if they want something else, they shouldn’t ask me. That’s the way I also view record companies, they shouldn’t sign an act if they want to change them, they should sign somebody for something they like.”

Page 1 2 >