Haar Superstar

It’s coming home time all over October. Everyone you speak to seems to be moving back to the spawning grounds to shore up, take stock and rethink. Scottish avant-folk songwriter James Yorkston is no exception, having recently returned to Fife after almost two decades in Edinburgh.

“I’m really happy about it,” Yorkston testifies. “The sky is so light and open, it’s not surrounded by buildings the whole time. Living by the sea is a constant reminder of how insignificant you are, and how mortal you are as well. I spent loads of my childhood in West Cork, and I used to love it down there because there weren’t any streetlights where I lived, and when I was in my teens the walk from the house to the pub was amazing, it was like a mile long walk, you had to carry torches and stuff, but if there weren’t cars you’d turn the torches off and look up, and the stars were just incredible.”
Yorkston’s new album When The Haar Rolls In is an uncompromising melding of ancient and modern, technology and nature. The title namechecks the pea-souper that rolls in off the North Sea, and the singer concedes that a sense of place seems a vital component for any timeless record, from The Band’s debut up to Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs.
“I don’t know those records,” Yorkston says, “but I absolutely agree with you 100%. I think to put it another way, atmosphere on a record is a really important thing. For example the Madigascan guitar player D’Gary, who I’m a huge fan of, if you listen to his first record Horombe, it’s the sort of record that you put it on and you’re imagining you’re hearing crickets in the background, but you’re not, it’s just his playing and the soul in his voice.
“Or getting with the English thing, Anne Briggs, with her unaccompanied singing, there’s nothing there which could be colouring it other than the voice, but the voice is so strong and has its own sense of place, be it in the accent or the way it’s being sung, it brings an atmosphere.”
On the new album Yorkston is aided and abetted by folk legends The Watersons, Marry Gilhooly and Olly Knight, and the record’s finest track is a version of the folk standard ‘Midnight Feast’.
“Singing with those people was just the most extraordinary thing,” he reflects. “They’ve got a music room in their house, there’s a piano and the walls are covered with old song books and things, and I had some of the Athletes with me, and it was so great to be singing with them, the reverberations around the room.
“I get so much gyp from journalists and the folk police, and I don’t consider myself a folk musician in any way at all, I think I’m a pop singer, so why I should get any negative feeling at all always takes me by surprise. But then having someone like Martin Carthy – who is at the top of the tree of English language folk – saying something like, ‘The only way you can kill a song is not to sing it, and the only way you can kill a tune is not to play it’ is a great thing for people like me who are obviously fans and hugely influenced by the tradition, but are at the same time doing their own thing.”