By Anna Battista
David is fond of his studio in East Kilbride, "When I'm doing album projects or album productions, I tend to take the artists to the recording studio at the East Kilbride Arts Centre because it's so comfortable and it's a lovely place to work. Sometimes as a producer, your job is just to make a cup of tea and create a nice atmosphere, it's not about saying, 'you do this and you do that'. My favourite pieces of equipment in the East Kilbride studio are microphones, I have a big variety of them. As a producer, the great tools are definitely microphones and amps. I always spent on microphones any money I had. I think the best recording studio in Scotland is Castlesound in Edinburgh, I think it has the best sound and that's the place I would choose to record anything if budget wasn't a problem. Lots of artists used it, from REM, to the Blue Nile to Orange Juice. The equipment there is great, the rooms are properly designed and the atmosphere is very good." There's another thing David works on at the East Kilbride Arts Centre and that's composition workshops with primary school kids, "I just love that," he says, "Kids are amazing: they teach you so many things. I was doing a little workshop with a group of kids the other day, and this kid asked me, 'Davy, is music love?' and I told her, 'yes, darling, it is love!'"David is at present thinking about his many future projects, one of them is a proper new album by The Pearlfishers, "I've done five Pearlfishers records in six or seven years plus 'Caroline Now!', plus I produced around thirty albums. So, yes, I'm going to do another record, but now I don't have much time for it," he reveals, "maybe next year. At the moment I'm writing the lyrics for a special project: the cello player Wendy Weatherby is doing a sort of musical interpretation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's book Cloud Howe, for Glasgow's Celtic Connections. I already worked with her on Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song last year. The show is due at the end of January, but I'm still working on the lyrics for the piece. Besides, Douglas and I have got a couple of projects on the pipeline which we're not 100% sure about just now. Another thing I'm working on is a Radio CD for Radio Scotland: I already did a CD of classic Scottish albums which featured among the others Teenage Fanclub's 'Bandwagonesque' and Orange Juice's 'You Can't Hide Your Love Forever'. Hopefully, I'll be able to do a second series as well so that I can include bands such as Belle & Sebastian. I've also just recorded the script for a BBC Christmas programme on musicals, which will be broadcast on Christmas Day." I ask David if among his future plans there is also completing the 'writings' section on his website which contains the first part of his account of his childhood musical influences and inspirations, "I was actually going to take that off, because I put it on line on a whim," he claims, "I worry about websites, because some of them are just an ego trip. There are sites by bands and artists where there are diaries and people tell you what they have been reading or which film they went to see. I just don't care about this sort of things. That piece was the unedited version of the beginning of a book about music. Indeed, one day I'd like to write a book about such topic, I've already written some children's poems and turned some of them into songs. On the 2003 Pearlfishers' album 'Sky Meadows', the title track and the song called 'Swan Dreams' were actually started out as part of a book of poems for children I've been working on." David says he doesn't feel confident in writing prose or poems as much as he feels confident in doing music, but one of his greatest inspiration is actually a writer, rather than a musician, Italo Calvino, "I like a lot of Calvino: Difficult Loves and The Baron in the Trees are fabulous books, but the Italian Folk Tales are my favourite book, I just love the way he tells them," he says, "I think there is a series of albums in that and I have recorded a couple of songs myself inspired by some stories in that book. I also recorded three songs with primary school kids in East Kilbride, we did "The Chicken Laundress", "The Seven Lambs Heads" and "Shining Fish" with the children narrating them, singing and playing instruments, they are really fantastic recordings. I honestly think somebody should release them because they are amazing, you could do a series of them. On 'A Sunflower at Christmas' there is a track called 'The Snow Lamb', and the backing for it was originally the backing for a narration of "Dauntless Little John" which is the opening story in Calvino's Italian Folk Tales. The story in the track 'The Snow Lamb' is very Calvino-like. Calvino is somebody who inspires me in more ways than one, it's not just that I love his books, I actually find them greatly inspiring and having a direct influence on my work. In my opinion Calvino builds up a world that is real and imagined at the same time, and that to me is also what songs can do better than any other art form."In Marcovaldo or the Season in the City Italo Calvino writes, "There is no time of the year kinder and nicer for the world of industry and trade than Christmas and the weeks before Christmas," and he's, of course, right. Yet, perhaps, with such sweet music as The Pearlfishers' "A Sunflower at Christmas", the festive season might turn into a nicer period, made of memories, sweet moments and happiness.