Culture That Made Me: Eddi Reader on Joni Mitchell, Robert Burns and Glasgow folk clubs
Eddi Reader is touring to Cork and other centres in Ireland with her 40 Years Live concert tour.
Eddi Reader, 62, grew up in Glasgow and later Irvine, a suburban town in Scotland. She is a three-time Brit Awards winner, including one she scooped for Fairground Attraction’s 1988 pop classic Perfect. In 2006, she was awarded an MBE for her work celebrating Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns. She is touring Ireland with her 40 Years Live concert tour, including Cork’s Everyman Theatre, March 24. See: www.everymancork.com.
I was about four years old when I saw the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in Glasgow. It was a rainy night, all glittery. I could hear buskers standing in the queue. I screamed when the witch turned into a witch. I was under the chair. The songs were embedded in my marrow: “I'm wishing, I’m wishing/For the one I love/To find me.” Afterwards, we went back to our tenement slum. I cried. I wouldn't take my coat off. I wanted to go back to that cinema and see it again and again. I remember my dad, with his welders’ oil all over his fingers, saying, “I promise you, hen, we'll go back, we'll go back.” I cried until I went to sleep. They never bloody did bring me back! I didn’t see it again until I was 25 and living in London.
My dad was very good at taking us to the library. It was very important to him. The book that really got me when I was a little girl was Mary Poppins, the first four books of the children series by PL Travers. I was fascinated by that woman. I used to pretend to be her jumping from the tops of the tenement closed stairs with my umbrella, falling on my knees.
I adore The Quiet Man. The film is based on a short story by Maurice Welsh. The central character is not an American. He’s an anti-Treaty guy who had to escape Ireland. He comes home and falls in love with the lassie and there’s all this trouble with her brother and her inheritance and him not wanting to re-create the civil war again. It’s to do with the trauma of Ireland’s civil war and War of Independence, exiles returning and people trying to come together again. My mother’s mother moved to Glasgow from Tralee in the early 1920s, probably to get away from the Black ’n’ Tans. The film has comedy, but I love it because it’s steeped in the history of your country.
When I was around 18, I started going to folk clubs as an alternative to the punk scene, which I found aggressive; I enjoyed it but I wasn’t angry enough. I wanted to be in a gentle environment with singing. I wasn't interested in screaming at anybody. I wanted to learn how to play acoustic guitar better. I wanted to find words that matched my feelings. In folk clubs, it seemed that anybody could go in. You didn't have to be a star. You didn't have to be fashionable or have the right haircut. People would introduce you to albums your mum and dad didn’t have. It was those guys in folk clubs who introduced me to busking.
A lot of us in our group went to France busking, spending six months in Paris. Then we went all the way down the middle of France, ending up near Nimes joining up with jugglers and fire-eaters. I used to sing my heart out. I was full of the folkie repertoire. My boyfriend at the time was great at “bottling” – what you do when you when you collect the money, the guy with the cap, like the two guys who own Spotify who are the two bottlers for the rest of the music fraternity except they do it less equitably.
I learnt strength of vocal from busking. Before singing in the street, I had a very sweet and quiet voice. I'd go for notes, but I wouldn't shout them. I didn't open up my lungs. I learnt I could only do busking when I was happy. I couldn’t make money when I wasn’t happy. If I'd a sore throat or a cold or was tired, and I tried singing a song, I’d get maybe 10 pence. But when I was joyous about it, and I felt full of energy, and it didn’t matter whether anybody threw in any pence, I always ended up with a couple of hundred quid. It was an affirmation of joy.
When I sang a song like Little Green busking – from Joni Mitchell’s Blue – I had no idea what it was really about. I could tell it was about some child. I also have a cancer moon. It spoke to me in a mothering way, the way it would if you were maybe praying and you got an answer, like as if somebody spiritual was putting their hand on your shoulder: “you know you're beautiful; you'll be alright, go for it”. It’s my favourite song on the album.
I had no interest in Robert Burns whatsoever. I thought he was for posh people who stabbed haggises and bankers and stuck-up English teachers. People that would bore you in a pub, who would recite the whole of Tam o’ Shanter and spit at you with unpronounceable words that came from the gutter of their throat. It was only when I went to folk clubs and there was musicians who played wonderful songs that I discovered were Robert Burns’ songs that I decided to investigate him further. He started to call me over. He’s the oldest of seven, so am I. His father died when he was 60, as mine did. His father worked really hard all his life looking after kids, spending every penny making sure they had decent nourishment and education, so did mine. He was born in 1759. I was born in 1959. I felt a real connection to the man.
Robert Burns’ songs are clever in the way that Bob Dylan’s songs are. John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men was taken from him: “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men…” Dylan himself said that one of his biggest inspirations was My Love is like a Red, Red Rose. Walter Scott says the lines in Ae Fond Kiss (“Had we never loved so kindly/Had we never loved so blindly/Never met – or never parted/We had never been broken-hearted”) to be the best verse about unrequited love ever written. He can knock your head to the back of the wall with a great couplet.
