Propergander 8.psd

“It was a bit daunting
for me to sing it with Neill,”
“Being inside a major label is not good for your
mental health,” she says in the chummy manner of
one passing cooking recipes to her neighbour over
the garden wall. “People are always around you
saying ‘it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen…oh it
didn’t happen!’ It’s all about throwing money at this
and that and it really makes you look inward and
view your music as a product because you have to
go through all these marketing ideas about how you
can change and how the market is changing. The
whole time I was there I was thinking it was
ridiculous you had to go through this for music. It’s
commercialism at its most concentrated and if you
go inside the machine it whips you into a frenzy of
feeling inadequate.
“It was a licensing deal and I handed them the
finished record and they would either put it out or
not put it out but they put out three records. I
think it changed me musically because I was in the
environment of thinking about where things were
going. I had a terrible time emotionally and
mentally but I’m proud of the records. I had stage
fright for six years, I had agoraphobia, I was in all
sorts. I was a wreck. I used to faint on stage, throw
up, had the shakes, everything. Now I look forward
to going on tour.”
Not that it was all bad. “They were good to me. I
earned money from them and the publishers which
has meant I’ve been able to put out my own records
ever since. So thank you very much…and goodbye.”
Post-major record deal, life for Kathryn Williams has
been good. She’s now the adoring mother of a twoyear-old
son Louis, she no longer gets stage fright
(she believes the two things are related – “when I
was pregnant I felt invincible”) and she’s teamed up
with guitarist/singer/producer Neill MacColl and is
making the best music of her life. That’s the
consensus of opinion anyway about her and
MacColl’s first album together Two, rammed with
beautiful melodies, heartfelt lyrics, spare
arrangements and the sort of intimacy usually only
found in the snug of bars after hours.
“It’s the realisation of a dream for me,” says MacColl.
“I’ve been working for such a long time as a guitarist
and side man and put my own thing on hold while
the kids grew up and it’s great now to be doing this
with Kathryn. Her whole method of working is that
it’s got to happen immediately or it doesn’t happen.
There’s no wasted space.”
Williams and MacColl met at the Daughters Of
Albion show at Cork Opera House put together by
Kate St John in 2005. Kath sang a Vashti Bunyan
song Winter Is Blue (“when I introduced it I called
her Vashti Onion as a joke, which was a bit
embarrassing when she heard a recording of it”) and
Neill played guitar in the house band. They hit it off
immediately and, with plenty of downtime to share
ideas, talked vaguely of putting a project together.
When the show transferred to London’s Barbican the
following year, Kath came up with the slightly
impudent idea of performing First Time Ever I Saw
Your Face, the iconic love song reputedly written in
20 minutes by Neill’s father Ewan MacColl in London
and taught over the phone to Neill’s mum Peggy
Seeger who sang it at a gig in San Francisco the
same night.
“It was a bit daunting for me to sing it with Neill,”
laughs Kathryn, not sounding remotely daunted. “I
thought it would be nice to do it because every time
you hear the song it’s always really histrionic and
ridiculous. I was really pregnant at the time – it was
about two weeks before I had Louis – so I was
thinking about the baby when I sang it.”
Neill MacColl, familiar with hearing First Time
emoted within an inch of its life – one E. Presley
springs to mind – was bowled over by Kathryn’s
interpretation. “She whispers it in your ear like a
lover rather than shouting it in a gale, Heathcliff
style.” It is also, he reminds you gleefully, the only
time it has been sung to the accompaniment of a
musical saw!
When they played it at the Barbican it was so
successful that Kathryn and Neill pursued the vague
promise they’d made in Cork to try and do more
work together. Kath sent him a CD of ideas for
songs, Neill went up to Newcastle to stay with
Kathryn and her husband to work on them. A couple
of hours in Kath’s garage-cum-studio and they knew
it they were working on an album together. All the
demos Kath had originally sent Neill were ultimately
jettisoned – “it was kind of folkie, sea shanty type
stuff” – but such was the musical chemistry between
they wrote 22 songs together in six days.
“It was alchemy really,” says Kath. “I write stuff down
in books all the time and we used those for the
basis of the lyrics. Neill would play some stuff on
guitar and it would form between us. Whereas I can
hold my guitar in front of me and know maybe
seven or eight chords, Neill can really play the guitar
and make a chord progress. Which makes it really
interesting when you’re writing songs. I don’t really
know anything about music and I’ll sing a melody
and it goes somewhere, but Neill knows exactly how
to get it there. We talked quite a lot about the story
of the songs so we were both completely in the
same frame of mind when it came to putting them
together.”
She certainly credits Neill with saving the gorgeous
single Come With Me Darling from an early grave.
“We’d just had dinner and quite a few glasses of
wine so we were hammered and went in to do
some stuff for an hour. I started to do it but I felt
stupid singing the word darling and I was all for
giving up with it but Neill said no, it’s fine, so we
carried on. If he hadn’t said that, the song would
never have been written.”
After years of being a sidekick to the likes of David
Gray, Boo Hewerdine (in The Bible) and Eddie
Reader’s band, Neill credits Kathryn with giving him
the confidence to step into the front line and start
singing again. His first gigging experiences were
playing guitar behind his parents Ewan MacColl and
Peggy Seeger (“it was good training, my dad sang so
idiosyncratically that anyone who could accompany
him could accompany anybody”) but rejected his
folk pedigree to embrace other music. “I tried for a
while with my own band but I didn’t enjoy it
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