“The sounds in my head have been more urban, more linear.” Colin MacIntyre.
Highs? Lows? Over the last couple of years Colin MacIntyre’s had ‘em all. MacIntyre, the one-time curator of Mull Historical Society, has switched the antiquity of the Western Isles for the glitz of the big city.
A quick tally of the highs would include playing inside the Scottish Parliament, the first gig ever held inside the institution. Performing on London’s Millennium Wheel – alongside Damon Albarn and the Royal Shakespeare Company – as part of Flight 5065, to raise awareness of fair trade issues pertaining to Africa. Having an unreleased song used prominently on the soundtrack to teen-spy flick Stormbreaker. Touring theatres in his native Scotland, re-orchestrating his 3-album-deep back catalogue with some of the country’s finest Celtic and classical musicians (With Strings Attached). Co-writing a treatment for a Badly Drawn Boy video (the one with the piano in the car). Soundtracking the adventures of some Beach Boys-esque penguins in the Hollywood film Surf’s Up. Hanging out with Tony Benn and asking the political legend and great socialist battler for peace to flex his inner rock-vocalist…
A quick tally of his recording output so far confirms MacIntyre, under the MHS pseudonym, has released & toured worldwide 3 critically acclaimed albums: Loss (2001), Us (2003) & This Is Hope (2004), and he has achieved 4 UK Top 40 Chart hits and 2 Top 20 UK Chart albums. Colin has also been named Scotland’s Top Creative Talent at the Glenfiddoch Spirit Of Scotland Awards.
Another high? That could be the decision to revert to his own name after 6 years writing, performing and recording under the MHS appellation. Even when he had a ‘band’ name, MacIntyre did everything himself anyway. Coming out as Colin was just a simple realigning of the stars and does not reflect any creative changes for Colin. “Now the actual MHS can have their name back” says MacIntyre. They could get back to organising informative walks around the titular island off the west coast of Scotland – whence MacIntyre hails – without fear of being asked if they were the same MHS who wrote pithy, punchy, soaring, heartfelt, narratively-deft songs about people, places, society and the inhabitants of Tobermory Zoo.
‘The first album was nearly released under my name,’ says MacIntyre, ‘but I’d already written the song Mull Historical Society, and I wanted something to hide behind.’ Maybe this is what comes of growing up on an island where the 2000 inhabitants are outnumbered by livestock and no traffic lights prevail. ‘But I don’t really need to hide any more,’ he adds.
And the struggles? They might be the journey, and the lows along the way, to make his 4th album, set up his own record label - Future Gods Recordings - find investors for said label and, Christ-on-a-laptop, write 3 novels.
‘At times it was frustrating,’ the singer/songwriter/one-man-band admits. ‘I was thinking: will this album ever be finished? I got as close as I ever felt to being a 192 operator again! But there was something great about that as well – it made me feel that this was almost like my first album again. This album has been a journey. At times I thought I was going to fall over trying to pull it all together, with what I had in my head. I wondered if it could happen. But it has been realised.”
Actually, scratch that: those lows were actually highs too. The effort was mighty but the rewards are mightier still: The Water is a great, uplifting, positive album, a torrent of bold ideas, mighty tunes and big fat guitar riffs. It oozes with venom at the vacuity of the media-driven, war warmongering Britain of today.
Even the Tobermory schoolgirls’ choir (on Pay Attention To The Human) are wearing ten league boots. Crucially, these beautifully honed songs – once again seeing MacIntyre play the majority of the album’s instrumentation - from the rollicking satire, Andy Warhol-referencing, and infectious biting pop nugget Famous For Being Famous and the ‘supermodel pop’ of opener You’re A Star, sneering ‘TV hosts write their own epitaphs’, to the zither-led, harmonium-spun and achingly voiced title track, via the suitably deranged, slashing rock’n’roll of first single/E.P., Stalker, and the Celtic melancholy of I Have Been Burned – are also beautifully homespun. Which is what comes of working in intimate recording environments over an 18-month period in West Sussex, Glasgow & London. ‘The Water’ represents MacIntyre’s most remarkable and fully realised album to date.
For his 4th album MacIntyre worked with a producer for the first time: Nick Franglen of Lemon Jelly. “It was always a great creative join between us.” MacIntyre used to do all the production himself, and the sleeve design. But this time he’s ‘out-sourced’ the latter too, to a fansite member and accomplished graphic artist Jo Burton; she sent him her alternative cover designs for his first release, 2000’s epic NME single of the year, Barcode Bypass. The results are a striking two-tone look, which draws on art-nouveau and such visual inspirations as Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’.
Working with Franglen, he says, was ‘like jumping off a creativity cliff, a leap of faith’. But it helped everything become ‘more defined… Everything’s been captured – vocally, performance, instrumentation. I don’t think I’ve been through that process before.”
More prosaically, I had a ‘nice big Les Paul, which I’d never played before, and Nick’s bag of tricks for me to explore’. Suitably inspired MacIntyre re-recorded the guitar parts on the versions of the new songs he’d been working on in the months leading up to he and Franglen’s collaboration. ‘I think it gave my sound a bit more balls, a bit more rock.’
The beginning of he and Franglen’s working relationship coincided with MacIntyre finally securing financing for his own label. His post-major label aspirations finally had lift-off. ‘The timing was just kinda magical,’ he notes, adding that things have recently got more magical still: always possessed of a devoted international fanbase, he’s had licensing queries from labels around the world, keen to ripple out The Water in their ‘territories’. Major label BMG have just secured MacIntyre for their Japanese division.
Partly as a result, MacIntyre found his creativity bursting out all over the place. He’d already written 3 unpublished novels, and during the making of The Water – literally, while he was in the studio – he wrote a 4th. ‘This thing just poured out of me, I became possessed with telling the story’ he says. Notes To An Unborn Child is about a man who believes he’s 62 and after years of living in London, goes back to the small Scottish island he comes from, “and he uncovers secrets from his past.” It has been a revelatory experience learning to find my voice on a page.” (MacIntyre’s website has a bookclub, to which both he and his fanbase contribute).
MacIntyre has also made another album this year, an acoustic set recorded in a 2-week burst in the An Tobar arts centre back home on Mull. MacIntyre wrote the songs during a 6-week summer stay in New York, just him and a toy acoustic guitar. The songs were then recorded including cello and pedal steel accompaniment. It could be the 2nd release on his label, and 2 of these acoustic versions appear on the 4-track Stalker E.P., now available for download. “I feel that my creativity has really gained power from working to a more striped-back format. It’s been a fulfilling year.”
But before all that… In terms of his ‘day job’ and The Water, all of this creative energy led to an emboldened MacIntyre reaching deep inside his personal well of soulfulness, as well as up to the stars.
Be My Saviour, with an ‘unsettling narrative’ about two people stuck in a web’, drives along at a furious pace, but not just headlessly: the song’s ‘ebb and flow’ was secured by ‘mechanical table tennis players, which were sampled in the studio’. The pell-mell but time signature-tricksy Stalker, ‘is ‘about anything from ID cards to kids filming each other on mobile phones, and technology’s affect on our personal space, and ownership of your own personal information.’ In it MacIntyre cuts a sinister persona.
A stand-out is the title track. ‘I’m really pleased with my vocal performance. It was a definite turning point.’ The vocals were recorded in Franglen’s toilet, after MacIntyre realised the sonics were perfect. ‘The song really moved me. It’s in three-time, which sounds and feels weird, unsettling. It felt almost like a sea-shanty. I used a cheese grater and car keys and cardboard boxes for percussion. It felt like a song that had come from somewhere else, maybe from a campfire with all sorts of people joining in.’ There is also an appearance from Glasgow Philharmonic Male Voice Choir.
Finally, closing number Pay Attention To The Human is an impassioned plea for peace, warning against the ‘death of a nation’. (The sleeve notes for the album include the quote ‘There never was a good war or a bad peace’ by Benjamin Franklin from 11th Sept 1783). The track features the contribution from Tony Benn. MacIntyre emailed the veteran politician’s publisher; would Mr Benn like to appear on an album? The next day Benn’s distinctively gritty voice was on the phone.
MacIntyre asked him for his thoughts on the proposition: ‘what does pay attention to the human mean to you?’
A week later, Benn emailed a poem. MacIntyre went to his west London house and recorded him. ‘I have gone from being a fan – I read Tony Benn’s diaries when I was a political student in Glasgow – and to now find myself appearing in his new volume (More Time For Politics, Diaries 2001-2007) is a great honor, and slightly surreal.” Says MacIntyre, who once penned his own poem about the great man when a student.
‘We have the power to end the world,’ intones Benn over the album’s runout grooves, ‘we have the power to save the world/the choice is ours: it is a moral choice/to work together in both peace and love/we must break free and be ourselves/there lies the hope for all the human race.’
A fitting close to The Water, an inventive and warm and human collection of songs, a powerfully positive and celebratory album.
“It feels a bit to me now like I felt before my first album 'Loss' came out - you just need the world to hear it,” comments MacIntyre.
This album sees MacIntyre put himself centre stage, and he seems all the better for it. A reinvigorated piece, his most accomplished yet, keen to put the world to rights without forgetting its roots, ‘The Water¹ is refreshingly cool and deep.
www.myspace.com/colinmacintyre
For all further press enquiries please contact Andy Prevezer on 0207 368 3500 / 07744 400583 or andy.prevezer@warnermusic.com
Some quotes are copied below from MacIntyre’s recent first gigs performing The Water. And further below Colin briefly describes each of the tracks in his own words, and picks a favorite lyric from each.
“The new songs ricochet between vivacious power pop and ballads of a drama and scope akin to U2 or The Killers. MacIntyre should prepare for greatness.” – London Evening Standard
“Tunes, tunes, tunes” – The Scotsman
“One of the U.K.'s more distinctive musicians” – Scotland on Sunday,
In Colin’s words:
1. You're A Star
‘Kings, Kings and Queens of the celebrity show, Gucci smiles for the monkeys who know….’
I chose it as the first song on the album because it feels uplifting, and the intro noises sound like a giant hippopotamus crawling from ‘the water’. It feels like a rebirth. I had this verse sequence for a while. It was written on the piano, and then the guitar took over. I imagine an army of people marching over a hill to face some better times. I suppose the song is about celebrity culture, and finding something unexpectedly good in that. It’s giving somebody stuck in horrible celebrity-for-celebrity’s-sake-land a soul makeover. I suppose there’s also something in there about people dressing themselves as products. It’s super-model pop. But it feels like a fun place to be, with a Gibson Les Paul strapped along your back for ammunition. But it doesn’t have to be about any of this, the positive message in the chorus’s is for anybody you wish. It doesn’t have to be about anything to do with celebrity. It’s about those people who are shining lights. There.
2. Be My Saviour
‘Have you always been afraid of what you and me could do to you?’
Originally I called this ‘Have You Always Been Afraid?’ Despite the fact that songs with question marks are never a good idea, I decided that it would be best going with the chorus title. All these little shifts in my creativity, both sonically and visually, towards being more direct feel instinctively right. The song is talking to somebody who is frightened to let go, to be themselves, to fail. There’s something a bit unsettling in the narrative. It could well be a story about two people stuck in a web. When I sung it in the studio I imagined I was Tim Roth’s character from ‘Pulp Fiction’ sitting across from the girl at the start/end of the movie, in the diner, goading her into being his dysfunctional muse. I was playing a part, pointing to the mic. A demo version of this track was used in the teenage spy movie ‘Stormbreaker’. That version was more flighty and had tubular bells on it and less balls. It was unfinished. Now it feels like the real deal to me. Surreally, I first performed it in the Scottish Parliament, acoustically, with cello accompaniment.
3. The Water
‘If I could get into the water, the water, the water, with you’.
It has a darkness attached. The ‘married a girl’ line was the first to come. I wondered if I was playing somebody else’s song, but sometimes that’s a good sign – it can have an aura of immediacy about it. Then I thought I’d mix it up a bit, with the alternating ‘married a boy’ line. It feels like a sea shanty mixed with a Medieval word in your ear. For the bass drum I played a cardboard box. There is the hope that the one you want will always want you. But it is desperate too. It was my first ever use of several instruments, including a zither, and a harmonium, which several of the songs actually feature. I pumped and pedaled my way through the album. By the climax near the end, the guy in the song will tear his heart out for the one he wants. He will nail his limps to her just to hold on. I cried singing it. A first.
4. I Can I Will
‘And we, can be, the king, and queen of things’.
This song came into my head as a result of going to two gigs. One part (the chorus) was in my head after seeing Arcade Fire with 200 people in Glasgow. The other (the verse melody) came to me on the tube after being at an Interpol gig at Brixton Academy in London. I immediately sung it into my mobile phone recorder. It’s really a song about devotion. It’s a statement of intent; a mission statement for 2 angels on a cloud. Maybe one day I’ll understand the ‘he knows the nights, like she knows the days’ line and see it as something bigger. My songs are often more inspired by books than other music. But going to gigs I find inspiring and energizing. Often I start hearing my own song ideas developing out of the clamor of somebody else’s. I recorded the Glasgow Philharmonic Male Voice Choir in their church for the outro section. I always imagined the ending should be grand, and fade out to a possibility that time, days, nights, are all part of the journey. It feels like the big brother, or sister, to ‘Instead’ from my first album ‘Loss’.
5. Famous For Being Famous
‘And I lie awake at night, doing press-ups with my toes’.
This song title was a line I’ve wanted to use for a while now. It ties in with the themes in ‘You’re a Star’ in some way, but is a bit more cynical, character-based. It’s a microcosm. I imagine it is Paris Hilton or such-like having a frantic discussion with her P.A. Even her toes must be in shape. It was being mixed on one of the final nights of the recording and I had a taxi waiting to take me to the station, and asked the engineer to open up the mic, and I screamed ‘Andy Warhol Said!!’ into it. I wanted it at the start of the song, which is where it ended up. I wanted a mention of Warhol, it relates to his famous ’15 minutes of fame’ comment. I have one of his big fat compilation books, and love reading and looking at it. I love finding out about his era of New York, which is where I was when I first heard the melody for the song in my head, leaving ‘Urban Outfitters’ on Avenue Of The Americas, as it happens. I like that continuity. Even if only I bloody care! ‘It’s not what you are that’s important, it’s what you think you are’. That’s another of his quotes that inspired the album. The ‘Hello’ / ‘OK’ bridge line refers to the celebrity magazines. The outro ‘Citizen Fame’ line is a reference to an earlier song I wrote, which was a b-side, and also it was the title of one of my short stories. It’s a cry for acceptance, of trying to fit in to a fake world. It’s not a world I think I crave at all.
6. Camelot Revisited
‘I saw the future, bold as sky-scapes, our love gets all that it deserves’.
I was playing around with the ‘Camelot’ word, and this song popped out, feet first. Sometimes you point a song towards words that are already formed. It was recorded with a live vocal and guitar take, which is not how I’d usually record in the studio, but here it is, warts and all. It also features the harmonium. I suppose it’s a song about fate and destiny, and all those other words that never adequately explain life as it happens and as opposed to how we’d like it to be. It’s about not messing with what works. But what do I know. I just felt it all one day. I think that’s why I kept the original ‘live’ take of the song, the spontaneity in that fitted with the capturing-the-moment nature of the lyric. While recording it, one of the instruments had to be tempo-shifted in order to get the tuning right, while that happened I coughed, the open mics picked up my voice as though I were an army of sonic elfs, or Smurfs, and so I did a track of this kind of singing in the background, with this effect on, and it gave off an almost Cocteau Twins’ ethereal texture (who I’ve recently discovered). I think this is the closest I come to poetry within my songs.
7. I Don't Have You To Ask
‘And you will find in me what you had hoped you’d finally see’.
This song is about looking at your place in the grand scheme of things, and realizing that we all come from somewhere. We all get in trouble and need to speak up for help. In my case, the song is about not having my father around in person to talk to, to be advised what I should do, to have a blanket of ‘it’s alright’ thrown over you. It’s about a realization of that and then taking it forwards and in some way imagining a future version of yourself, and what you’d like to see, and what that person might tell you. It’s quite a male song, I think. It’s the passing on of a legacy, of a way of being, and taking that on board and trying to do that thing justice. My father’s death greatly inspired my first album ‘Loss’, and I suppose I hope he would see that I’m doing my thing. The whole time I was singing it I was on the edge of tipping off somewhere. But I held on to the present.
8. I Have Been Burned
‘You floored me, to the ground. But I grew again, reborn and bound’.
This song starts with a f*cked up cello part. I suppose this song is about being shit on by someone and going back for more. But then one day the light comes. And the empowerment to move away from that. You have to tell that person that you have found this place, but inside yourself you’re not sure if you can cope alone. I wanted timpani drums in the song, for it to reach an American Cavalry sort of grandness. It was written one night when I was on my own in my home and the lights were down – all the Celtic melancholic boxes were ticked. I was watching Ricky Gervais’ ‘Extras’ programme, I hadn’t seen a lot of it, but I think it was the closing shot of the first series, and prospect of romance being lost, or found, gave me that clogged feeling in my nasal tract (another tick). Somehow I always think of it as a closing credit for a film. A car driving off. I’m never sure if there are one or two people in the car. I suppose that is the mystery. It’s fitting I suppose, that I should think of it as a closing credit, considering it was written being inspired by one. It was written in the time it took to play it.
9. Stalker
‘You will never see the darkest side of me.’
This song I think has been really captured in a way that I might not have managed on my previous albums. It has big fat Les Paul guitars on it. It is self-explanatory. The stalker could be in person or in the imagination, or working in digital. Some people have mentioned that it sounds like 3 songs in one, but in my head it always fitted. But the energy and the spirit and the swing had to be captured. I pretty much realized this song entirely in my head at once. It feels very urban. I wanted it to swagger. I love playing this live. It seems to get people’s heads bopping like sharks’ fins across the venues. I’m not sure what the outcome of the plot is. I imagine that the character stole his victim’s I.D. Somebody has to prevail in this track. People now don’t have the pleasure of the security of their personal information, and freedom of movement, that most animals do. It’s ‘1984’, again.
10. Future Gods And Past Kings
‘Preacher, why don’t you let me start a war’.
This song was initially just the verse riff. It is quite similar to ‘Stalker’ in its gestation. It was urgent and dirty in my head. The title was in some way also a tribute to the medieval theme from earlier (‘I was busy making repairs to myself, to my castle’). And also about the theme of life repeating itself. In some ways it’s environmental, as in, ‘we get what we leave behind’. It is also a snide at President Bush. I wrote the song while living in America, after watching one of his comical live addresses to the nation about the Iraq war. The propaganda was spilling from his mouth in a froth that even George Orwell could not have predicted. I remember that winter walking down a familiar stretch of highway in the American south where I was staying, there is a lighthouse at the end of it, the sun was shining, and I was listening to ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’ on headphones. I was in my own world (or theirs) and in the euphoria of the moment, the melody came out. I pulled of the headphones and realized that I was singing it. And then I’d cycle around doing the same. If I’m going to have a Breakfast Club moment then this was it. I wanted the drums to play ahead of the beat, as in ‘Atomic’ by Blondie. I pulled the riff that I stared out with into that lot, and the song was complete. In my songbook, next to this song I have the Orwell quote: ’The opinion that politics and art are separate, is in itself a political opinion’. So I must have considered that relevant.
11. Faith No. 2
‘So what’s the matter with me, what’s the matter with me? It’s you’.
‘It’s almost impossible not to be sold anymore’.
This song felt complete very quickly. It could have gone in quite an acoustic, folky, direction, but it felt right in the end for it to be electric and bright and warm. It could be my favorite track, which is why it gets two lines. It’s about desperation & pain. Trying to see hope in it. It is a returning theme in my music. There is always hope. Nothing more to say, other than during the mixing stage of the album, I sung it, then took it home. Lived with it. Realized it wasn’t the truth I was singing. I was leaving something out. I should have been leaving blood of the studio floor. I promised myself that I would this time. On this album I wanted no compromises at all creatively. As a result I’ve never worked harder. But also more freely. That’s an advert for working with a Producer for the first time I suppose. When the time was right I sung for blood. The ‘war’ reference is a theme I suppose, but it’s more about a micro war, and the frustration that there needn’t be one. Maybe one day I can say more and understand it more. For now, I’ve put my blood on the floor.
12. Pay Attention To The Human
(Featuring Tony Benn)
‘ ‘We the people’, they all say, but do they really treat us thus? Or are we units in a game they play?’
(Tony Benn)
Where do I start?! I like to be inspired, and write about things as a result of a conversation overheard, seeing somebody alone in the cinema when the lights come on, and wondering about their story, or from reading newspaper reports, or from being affected by other art forms. Sometimes I feel like a voyeur, trying to document, be inspired, by things as they happen, before they become tired, predicting them even before they happen if you’re lucky, which is why you (I) worry that the spontaneity of writing about a subject, or an emotion, might be lost by the time you get the bloody album out. But I needn’t have worried, just as long as there are politicians in power to repeat the themes. And that’s why I was inspired by Tony Benn’s comment (and now book title) about ‘leaving Westminster to devote more time to politics’. I had always admired him from afar. So did my Grandfather, back home on Mull, who had a likeness to him, and who died during the recording of my album, and about 4 weeks before I met Tony Benn in his house in London.
This song title was nearly the album title. I was thinking of the fragility of the human in the face of increased concerns about the environment, war, terrorism, celebrity obsession, and digital technology. It starts with Tobermory town clock chiming, a sound that I know well from being a kid. It chimes every hour, during the night too. The narrative is about a war correspondent talking directly through the screen to the guy on his armchair, whose son or daughter is fighting there. It is War/Reality TV. It is about shifting power and vulnerability, and attacks on innocent people. In some ways meeting Tony Benn made me think of another one of the songs on the album, ‘I Don’t Have You To Ask’, because my dad was a BBC political journalist and I wondered if he had interviewed him, but could not ask him.
I realised that what I had in my head was captured. I have to in some part thank the Producer, Lemon Jelly’s Nick Franglen, (and his white coat), for that. I realise that this song is a question. It seems like a fitting end to my journey on this album.
