Singer and songwriter MICHAEL MARRA describes the genesis of his song project Silence, commissioned and recorded by An Tobar in Mull.

Michael Marra

AN TOBAR commissioned me to write a new set of songs. They have made a number of these commissions and recordings on their own label, Tob Records. They did one with Mr McFalls Chamber and Karen Wimhurst, but the one I listened to quite a lot before I did my own piece was Corrina Hewats Photons In Vapour, to see how someone else had treated the commission.

If you are writing a piece for the theatre the position is straightforward, you are going with the story that someone else has written. With this one the brief was less obvious. I think the series is called Interfaces, and the brief for me was Extremes.

I went over there for two weeks in the first instance, and the day I arrived was the day the war in Iraq broke out. I didnt write anything while I was there. I felt I was on the edge of writing something big about the war.

My brief was Extremes, and here I was on this very beautiful island, and the war was going on. I couldn’t really get that out of my mind, but I ended up writing nothing at all about the war. It was very strange. It was such a big issue that it was impossible to ignore, but in the end I just couldn’t find a way in.

I came home after the two weeks, and I started thinking about the gossip I had heard on the island, and began to work up some material from that. I was struck by two things in particular. One was the fact that gossip seemed to me very necessary in a place like Mull, but the other thing that I noticed mostly through gossip was racism, and specifically anti-English feelings.

I felt that was particularly overt on Mull, and I thought I would throw that at them. It’s like the Glasgow thing — if you try to write about sectarianism at all, it is either going to have to be really great, or it is going to have be very subtle, like planting a thought. It’s not looking to confront or cause trouble, its more like saying do you realise that you are doing this?

One of the songs has a section about a cultural awareness class, which is to teach the local bairns about English culture. I’ve done it in quite a light-hearted way, but my hope is that people will maybe question their own attitudes through that.

Michael Marra's CD 'Silence' (Tob Records)

The songs are all inspired by the folk I ran into in Tobermory. I also wrote a song for a deaf girl song writer I met there, for example. I was asked for five songs initially, but I ended up doing an extra one.

I went over last year to do a song writing workshop on Tobermory, and one of the participants there was a an English guy called Ben Potter.

He was 22 and had gone back to Tobermory High School to do his Highers. He was a nice guy, and seemed very happy, so I wasn’t expecting him to come up with much, because we all know that song writers are introverted, horrible, nasty fowk like me!

He came up with song which was about a woman he had split up with, who had gone back to New Zealand. He sent it to her, and she got on a plane and came back to Tobermory, and two of them moved down to England.

By chance, I had just heard the Mackenzie album [Fama Clamosa, Macmeanmna Records, 2002] and they had featured a very old Gaelic song from Dalmally by a guy called Donald MacNicol who had asked a woman called Lilias Campbell to marry him.

She had refused, but he wrote this song, and they were married, so presumably the song had changed her  mind. I was struck by that connection across a couple of centuries and more, and made a quick wee song just to mark the way it had worked for Ben in the same way.

I have already recorded the music with Kenny Fraser on fiddle and whistles and Gordon MacLean on double bass, and I really enjoyed the sessions.

The first performance is at An Tobar, and I may use a couple of other people locally for that night only, including a harpist and some female singers if they available. Otherwise, it will be the trio, and we will do these songs, and also a number of other new songs I’ve been working on.

Michael Marra & Gordon Maclean at Highland Festival 2003

The record is called Silence, and I’m chuffed with the cover. I kept seeing people in the paper every day with hygienic masks on because of the SARS virus, and I fancied getting one of them and drawing the bit of my face you couldn’t see on it.

Tobermory couldn’t buy one, though – I think there had been a run on them! Instead I got a serviette and drew the missing bits, and taped it to my face. It’s very striking, and I’m thinking of trying to persuade Liz Lochhead to let me do one for her.

We are doing a new version of our show Flagrant Delicht soon, and we need a poster. It’s a new version of the same show, which I think is the best way to do that one. We can make a better show by using what we have and building on it — a new show entirely would need a lot of time that we don’t really have, but we will be able to freshen it up and make it more vital.

Michael Marra performs at An Tobar, Tobermory, 6 June 2003; Royal Highland Hotel, Inverness, 7 June 2003; East Grange Loft, Forres, 8 June 2003; Ballachulish Hall, Ballachulish, 9 June, Wick (tbc); Thurso (tbc).

Michael Marra spoke to Kenny Mathieson.