Mull 4 London 0

Let me run a couple of facts past you. There’s a band around by the name of Mull Historical Society. Except it’s not really a band, just one person. His name’s Colin MacIntyre. And he comes from Mull, an island off the West Coast of Scotland. If you didn’t know better you’d probably imagine then that this is some obscure, abstract lo-fi project á la Babybird or Magnetic Field, The League Of Gentlemen set to music as one journalist had it. The truth, however, is a little more muddled. With the single ‘Final Arrears’ proving a huge radio favourite and the Us album set to follow suit, MacIntyre has created a musical landscape that is lush and expansive, while retaining a unique individualism at heart.

“I’d hope so,” he says. “I’ve been writing songs all my life and recording on four track for years and years. It took a long time to get to a point where it sounded like me. During the recording, I was throwing a lot of paint on a canvas, if you like, a lot of ideas into the mix. When we came to the last session, the engineer couldn’t believe how much stuff I was deleting but the more I took away the better the songs sounded, the more the melodies started to come across. It was intentional that it was a kind of less-is-more thing”.

While his island background has become a source of interest to those looking for a new twist, far more important to MacIntyre’s musical development was an extended stay in Glasgow.

“Mull has influenced me more as a person, but Glasgow has been a bigger influence on what I write about and maybe the sound of my music,” he observes. “I lived there for ten years and had a lot of office jobs that were mind numbingly boring at the time but gave me a lot of inspiration.”

The result is a very British-sounding record, drawing on the tradition of character-led songs so prevalent down the years – from the likes of the Beatles to Ian Dury, Blur and even The Streets.

“I started to write about these people I was working with,” he explains. “I still quite like themes about people who are stuck in jobs or stuck in communities. These characters or situations are more interesting to me than the big
things”.