August 2003

Paolo Hewitt - Unpublished Article

SCOTLAND’S BEST KEPT SECRET

Five albums now, five albums of beguiling melodies, brilliant arranging, great musical twists and turns and still the world ignores Davie Scott’s music. True, the odds are stacked against the 39 year old songwriter. His band The Pearlfishers record for Marina, a German independent label. He does not live in a major city but operates from a small arts centre in East Kilbride, Scotland. His records make enough money to keep him going but not enough to allow him to go tour, place himself in the public eye.

‘I’m sure it frustrates him,’ Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub says of Scott’s inability to penetrate the public mindset, ‘but he never seems to show it. He’s always enthusiastic, always seems to be up and positive.’ Douglas Stewart, a close friend and member of the BMX Bandits, adds, ‘To me Davie is in the tradition of singer songwriters such as Carole King. You always think his next record is going to be the one. See, Davie has never gone with trends so he has never been in fashion but it also means he has never been out of fashion.’

If the indifference of the public to his captivating music mystifies his small but devoted supporters, Davie Scott himself adopts a far more philosophical attitude to the situation. ‘Look at me,’ says the 39 year old songwriter ‘I’m not going to be troubling Gareth Gates. Or Coldplay for that matter. You’ve got to be honest. Like anybody I want to have hit records but its probably unlikely that my kind of music will do that. So I think the best thing I can do is pursue a vision that is unique. And I do actually think that nobody quite makes records like we do and I do think that is a fairly honourable path to follow.’

He’s right as well. He’ll never be a pop star. He is too old, the hair too greying, the figure not quite eye catching enough. Plus, he is too easy going for an industry that demands of its participants immense drive and desire.

‘With my own records,’ he confesses, ‘I put so much into the music that sometimes I think I am a wee bit guilty of putting them out and then not bothering to do anything to sell it.’

Today, Davie Scott is attempting to rectify that situation. He has travelled to London to meet the distributors who will be working ‘Sky Meadows,’ his next and strongest album to date. The album took a year to make, recorded whenever Davie had time to spare from working as record producer or radio presenter for Radio Scotland. By common consent, this is Davie’s most cohesive album to date, a work which, like all such albums, sounds as if it had written itself.

‘Sky Meadows,’ places Davie firmly in the fading tradition of the singer-songwriter. No surprise then to discover that his influences – Paul McCartney, Carole King, Serge Gainsbourg, Burt Bacharach,Todd Rundgren, even writers such as Neil Sedaka, Richard Carpenter and Neil Diamond, have all made detours down that very same path. The person who looms largest over Davie’s work, however, is Brian Wilson.

‘I don’t think our records sound anything like the Beach Boys but Brian Wilson is still the biggest influence on them,’ Davie confesses. ‘It’s more him. It’s more what he represents in his songs. His music alone sings to the soul. He once said, you can trust a record and that is why I say his philosophy has influenced our records more than his sound. I’m not denying any musical influence but that phrase was a key one for me. You can trust a record, that phrase is always in my mind when I make a record.’

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He had grown up in Falkirk, had a happy childhood with his two brothers, his lawyer dad, his doting mum. In 1976, at twelve years of age two events took place. He heard ‘Good Vibrations,’ by the Beach Boys on one of his dad’s tapes and, in his memorable phrase, ‘got dangerously obsessed.’

He also began playing guitar and in his other memorable phrase, ‘started playing it as an illness.

In a small town, if you have talent, you get noticed. A local band, Second Nature, brought him in to play guitar on a recording. The producer of the session, Bobby Henry, heard Davie play, quickly pulled him aside. Henry already had a deal with Phonogram for his Shift label and was in the process of putting together a compilation of new indie bands. He told Davie to form a band, contribute a song. Davie put together an outfit, named them Chewy Racoon and they ended up on Phonogram. ‘It wasnae a band, it was an idea,’ he says. ‘Basically, in my mind, it was an art pop statement. The guy who signed us also signed Marilyn and the Boothill Foot Tappers. I had this art pop aesthetic and he had a slightly let’s ape Wham aesthetic. You go along with it and of course the records are horrible.’

Name like Chewy Racoon, you’re not going that far. Phonogram dropped them, Davie formed a new group. They were called Hearts and Minds. CBS (now Sony) signed them, did so in the same month they also took on Deacon Blue. The company released one Hearts and Mind single, then dropped them. Deacon Blue meanwhile scaled the charts.
‘They got going, we didnae, simple as that,’ Davie states. ’I was really disappointed. You think you’ve had two major record deals you’ll never get another one. It took me a while to figure out how to carry on.’

Davie retreated home, played music, felt sorry for himself. As he pondered his future, others kept their faith in the man. Kaz Utsonimya, Davie’s publisher at the time, stated that he would never drop him such was Davie’s potential. Even when Kaz changed jobs, he left instructions to keep up the payments to Davie Scott. It was fortuitous that he did. Davie used the money to make the first Pearlfishers album, entitled, ‘Zsa Zsa’s Garden.’ He brushes it aside, now. ‘It’s very different to all the other Pearlfishers records. It had a folksy colour about it and I don’t know how it happened. I think when you go through this thing where you try to do your best to please the industry and it doesn’t happen and you get some freedom, I think you can get perverse to an almost damaging degree. If you ever hear that record you’ll know what I mean.’

No, the first real Pearlfishers album was created in 1996. It is entitled ‘The Strange Underworld Of The Tall Poppies.’ ‘See this is where being a Macca fan comes in,’ Davie explains. ‘The Tall Poppies were meant to be an alter ego band like Sergeant Pepper. Because I had been signed to major companies, I felt we had been perceived as these
middle of the road types and I wanted to lose that tag.’ Lose that tag he did but not through hiding behind a fictional band but through writing a collection of great songs. You can spot the influences, that’s easy, but as the album unfolds you find yourself being entwined in Davie’s vision. ‘Cherry Sky’ (Davie has a thing about skies) ‘Sugar Mountain Babies,’ ‘Banana Sandwich,’ ‘Waiting On The Flood,’ ‘They Met Too Late,’ ‘Jelly Shoes,’ ‘Everyday Storms,’ ‘Away From It All,’ these are all songs filled with poise and ambition, founded in a classic pop tradition but twisted by Davie’s leftfield approach. ‘I think it was a case of stop trying to second-guess what will be successful,’ Davie recalls. ‘There was a certain point where I found the confidence and it really got me going. Forget about how many it sold, as an artist that was a major breakthrough for me. I knew it was different to anybody else’s records. I knew it was me. Everything about that record went amazing, from writing the songs right through to the playback, I was so alive. I thought to myself, Well, if I never do another record at least I won’t be looking back and saying I had ten years in the record business and it was an absolute disaster.
The relief was unbelievable.’ German label, Marina Records picked up the album. They know a lot about issuing great music to large indifference. Shack’s landmark ‘Waterpistol,’ album is one of theirs.

To follow up the work, Davie recorded ‘The Young Picnickers’ between February and October of 1998. Again, he had his style now but following up such a tremendous debut proved difficult. Halfway through recording, he returned to the demos and re-recorded them, creating a musical schism that mars the work overall. He is right, though, to point out his song ‘Stella Painted Joy’ as a key member of his canon. This epic begins with a jaunty cinema organ sound and ends with instruments crashing all over the place, an epic tale of the local libidinous young girl. ‘It’s taken me a long time to fall in love with that album although it does have the best Pearlfishers track on it – ‘Stella Painted Joy,’ - but that album had a troubled genesis. It’s an odd wee record.’

‘Across The Milky Way,’ followed, Davie again recording in East Kilbride in between his time presenting radio documentaries on film soundtracks and working with the local talent. ‘The thing about Davie,’ Douglas Stewart points out, ‘is how generous he is with his talent. Everyone here from jazz musicians to people like Norman Blake love him because he would never hesitate to help any of them.’

In 2000, Stewart and Davie began work on a true labour of love, a tribute album to their hero, Brian Wilson. Their aim was to highlight Wilson’s output since 1968, show how the man’s talent has never really abated. ‘My thing,’ Scott states, ‘is that there are a lot of myths about Brian Wilson and the most heinous of them all is the one that says he went to bed for twenty years. You feel personally hurt when other people peddle clichés about your heroes. You think wait a minute, just because these people are in the public eye let’s not make cruel remarks about their mental capacity. So the idea behind the album was to try in our own way to dignify a certain period of Brian’s work.’

The result was the excellent ‘Caroline Now,’ which found artists such as Alex Chilton, St Etienne, Norman Blake, Kle, The High Llamas and Kim Fowley, covering demos, unrecorded titles and forgotten jewels from the great man.

Through a mutual acquaintance, Davie has now met Wilson a few times, says that when he’s in the mood he’s everything you want him to be. He even heard Wilson and McCartney backstage in a dressing room singing together, stood outside the door, mouth wide open.

‘Brian has got copies of all my records,’ Davie admits, ‘but I don’t know if he has played them. Put it this way, if I was Brian Wilson I wouldnae bother listening to the Pearlfishers.’

Scott’s next album was called ‘Across The Milky Way,’ a work in which he hits his stride about halfway through, starts creating music that matches up to ‘The Strange Underworld,’ album. The work is good but more valuable in setting the ground for his new work, ‘Sky Meadows.’

Douglas Stewart is right, the album has a real cohesion to it. Its musical environment, melodic piano, unexpected instrumentation and arrangements, serving to create a unique world of warmth and disturbance, where the angels push back the clouds bit only to reveal the off beat lives of characters such as Flora Belle, Haricot Bean and Bill and My Dad The Weatherfan. Creating such spaces was always the mark of the great singer songwriter. Tim Buckley did it by forging a sensuous, earthy place for his listeners to revel in. Nick Drake delivered a stunning mystic folk vision, Tim Hardin revealed a sombre mind shot through with extreme beauty.

Davie realises his imaginary environment through utilising a series of musical genres, blending together Brill Building pop, folk guitars, even school pantomime style piano driven songs. ‘The best you can do is make something that is welcoming but unique,’ he softly states. ’That’s my aim. That’s all I can do.’

He can also do that rare thing, create an album which features more good songs than bad, a point that the rave reviews he does get, always make. He makes no bones in stating that critical approval is essential in pushing him on. ‘When you’ve had all that hassle,’ he confesses, ‘just to get some positive feedback, well it can seem enough. It definitely helps. When ‘Sky Meadows,’ was done, after the first three or four days I thought it was a pile of shite. Then you get the first reactions and people say how much they like it and you go, Yeah, of course, it’s a masterpiece.’ He laughs yet how many others will grant him that accolade? Will this album be the one to bring him into public consciousness in Britain or will his small coterie of fans, spread as far as the Philippines, still express absolute amazement on the internet that he remains an unknown in his own land?

‘I would think that when sales are down the music industry would say we need to find the next David Bowie or whoever,’ Scott muses. ‘But they just don’t seem to be coming through. I’m probably a wee bit too old to fight tooth and nail to get my face on the cover of magazines but I am a cockeyed optimist and I always think, it will happen, someone will find this, someone will find this.’

I can only hope he’s right.

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