Highland cowboy

For a man who makes such peaceful, studied music, James Yorkston certainly can talk. Sat upstairs in the surprisingly spacious dressing rooms of Whelan’s (and after we have recovered from the slightly bizarre sight of Poptone’s Alan McGee doing his own fly posting), Yorkston is something of a chatterbox, not in a vague rambling way but in a fairly intense, serious manner. A simple enquiry into his background leads to an uninterrupted 15-minute monologue, from his dissatisfaction with the never-ending band circuit – “I felt like a fraud, too old to be playing music I considered pish in front of audiences ten years younger than me” – to his leap into the world of the solo artist – “I left with the intention of giving until I was 30, just doing exactly what I wanted to do musically and see what happened”.

A chance meeting and a night on the beer with the head of Domino Records later and Yorkston finds his debut album Moving Up Country released on a label more associated with alternative Americana than the Scotsman’s brand of original acoustic folk. Scratch a little deeper, however, and the similarities are there. Recorded in a remote cottage in the Scottish borders, Moving Up Country has a kind of free flowing spirit evident in the best of US lo-fi. Just with different instruments.

“A lot of my best ideas come on the hoof. Sometimes you just want to try a clarinet on a track. I can’t play the clarinet for fuck’s sake, so if I was paying £400 a day for a studio, I’d probably do it on a piano instead. So maybe it was low stress as well as lo-fi.”

A regular visitor to Ireland as a child and now as a musician, Yorkston draws much of his inspiration from this country.

“Ireland’s got a hell of a lot to do with it. I consider County Cork to be my second home. I’ve always associated folk music with romanticism and childhood memories”. With gigs ranging from clubs like Whelan’s to support slots with David Gray and all points in between, Yorkston’s Irish love affair not only looks like being reciprocated but also lasting for more than the foreseeable future.