When asked by a Scottish newspaper if she had ever collaborated with any famous musicians, KT Tunstall cautiously offered the name, Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue and then laughed. Why did she laugh? Well, I can’t say for sure, but I guess it’s because sweet Katie was guarding against the cynical and derisory response she expected such a confession to collect. And perhaps she even quietly hoped to score some kudos off the back of her ever so slightly disingenuous contempt. It reminded me of all the times I used to make similar guarded boasts about having once shaken the hand of Gary Barlow. I was proud, chuffed and thoroughly ashamed – all at the same time. But then, this was after Gary was one of the most famous and well-respected songwriters of his generation. Sometime between his Netherlands-only release, ‘Are You Ready Now’? and his not so popularly acknowledged work with Donny Osmond. As you can guess, it was some years before he reformed Take That and did the best work of his career – and became several times more famous and more credible than he had ever been before. But hopefully you get my point: credibility is a fickle-beast and counts for diddlysquat, especially amongst those who have a genuine love of music or amongst those who can truly play. That Ricky Ross and his 25-year partner, Lorraine McKintosh gave the UK such high-calibre, platinum hits as ‘Real Gone Kid’, ‘Chocolate Girl’, ‘Wages Day’ and ‘Fergus Sings The Blues’ at a time when our sharpest critical wits were creaming themselves over Tiffany and Belinda Carlisle – obviously counts for nothing – and so they’ve spent the intervening years knocking off tunes for James Blunt and Ronan Keating and turning up in the occasional Scottish soap. It’s not right, it’s not fair – but that’s just how things go. That’s entertainment. Fly post it on every lamppost and in every telephone box in Britain: ‘Lost: One Mojo. Return to one not very careful owner.’
But all that’s about to change as September sees the release of ‘The Great Lakes’ which is arguably the pair’s strongest and most ‘meaningful’ release since ‘Raintown’ back in 1987. And there’s also a subtle connection, if not congruence, between the two. Whilst the band’s debut provided stirring, compositional clout to the struggles of everyday urban life and to the dreams of something better, ‘The Great Lakes’ represents the eventual freedom and escape that rests on the horizon, rising up like the lofty peaks of the mighty Trossachs on Strathclyde’s northernmost extreme. It’s the perfect ‘bookend’ album: beautiful, symmetrical and very, very simple indeed. So simple in fact, that the couple (and on this record it really is a couple) enlist the help of only a handful of guest musicians: drummer Steven Nistor (Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse), bass player Daryl Johnson (Emmylou Harris, the Neville Brothers) and Doug Pettibone on pedal steel and banjo. The result is a body of work as deep as the loch on the banks of Lomond and as smooth and as graceful as the birds that feed off them. I remarked, somewhat glibly, on the band’s Myspace page, that the album sounded a little like Willie Nelson slugging it out with Roy Orbison and The Righteous Brothers, and I don’t feel I could really better that comparison. It’s an album full of tunes. Big, fat proper tunes, that is, tunes that would sound just as compelling being played on bean cans around a campfire as they do with all the meshings of harmonies and pedal steel flourishes that support them on the album. So yes, it’s a folky, cowboy affair, but such a comment fails to account for the rich, gospel and late-fifties vein that also runs through it. In fact the album owes as much to the likes of Phil Spector, PP Arnold, Chip Taylor and Nashville’s Monument Studios (‘The World Is Not My Home’, ‘ All My Trust I Place In You’) as it does to the likes of Patsy Cline (‘Passing Place’) and Maria Mckee (‘This World Is Not My Home’).
No unnecessary chords, no complicated changes – just good old-fashioned tunes done in the good old-fashioned way. It’s not what Katie did, it’s not what Katie likes – it’s what you like – so ignore your preconceptions and dig into your pocket and buy it.
share this:
