Full Moon Rising

The Arts Journal catches up with GILLIAN FRAME and FINDLAY NAPIER of Back of the Moon as the band release their third album.

BACK OF THE MOON first made a notable impact when fiddler Gillian Frame won the inaugural Young Scots Trad Musician competition in 2001, and chose to make her prize recording with the recently formed group. The line-up was Gillian on fiddle, brothers Findlay and Hamish Napier on guitar and piano, and piper Simon McKerrall.

More recently, Simon has gone off to pursue other interests, and has been replaced by Ali Hutton from Methven in Perthshire, who appears on the group’s new CD, ‘Luminosity’. Gillian, who is from Arran, and Findlay were married this summer at Findlay’s family home in Grantown-on-Spey.
 
ARTS JOURNAL: Gillian, let’s start with the change of personnel in the band – how did that come about?

GILLIAN FRAME: Simon has been working on a PhD in piping for a while now, and basically he decided last year that he wanted to concentrate on his academic career. He wasn’t 100% sure that touring and scraping a living as a musician was what he wanted to be doing. He also wanted to focus on his solo competition piping, which he is very keen on, and he does really well at it.

AJ: It can’t be easy to replace someone who was an original part of the group.

GF: No, it was a shame, since he had been in from the start, but we understood and supported what he wanted to do. We took our time to find a new player – we weren’t just looking for a good player, but also somebody who would fit into the general dynamic of the band. This is a very close-knit band with partners and brothers, so we wanted somebody who would fit personality-wise, and we tried out a few people that summer.

AJ: And Ali Hutton emerged as the unanimous choice?

GF: It became obvious that Ali Hutton was going to be the right person. He was also more keen on singing than most of the pipers we knew, and he has added that to the band as well, which is very important given the focus that we have on songs in the group. He’s a great piper and whistle player, but he also plays bodhran, which we never had before, and also guitar, so he is able to work with Hamish and Findlay on the accompaniments as well.

FINDLAY NAPIER: The fact that he has the bodhran was something that I wasn’t necessarily that keen on at first, but he won me over very quickly, and he can work with Hamish and myself on the accompaniments as well. It’s been good having someone else making suggestions and contributing things.

It is getting harder to find really good traditional songs that haven’t been done already, and I don’t see anything wrong with mixing new songs and tunes with old ones.

AJ: Gillian, you mentioned the importance of songs there, and you have three lead singers in the group. How does the selection of material work?

GF: I’d say we tend to find songs and bring them in, and whoever brings it in generally sings it. Up to now Findlay and I have done most of the song finding, but now that Hamish has finished his degree, he has more time to come up with things. That is how it has worked up till now, but I think it is starting to change direction a bit toward developing our own songs rather than relying on finding traditional songs.

AJ: Why is that?

GF: Findlay has been getting more interested in writing his own songs. He has always written for himself anyway, but he is more confident about writing for Hamish and myself now as well. It is getting harder to find really good traditional songs that haven’t been done already, and I don’t see anything wrong with mixing new songs and tunes with old ones. That way we can write songs in a traditional style that deal with more contemporary subjects.

AJ: What’s your take on that, Findlay?

FN: Nick Turner at Watercolour Studios and I have a song on this album, and we have an album of our own coming out later in the year. My idea is that we should move to writing our own songs, and not just because you make more money that way! There is now a massive back catalogue of music available on CD, and so many of the great traditional songs have been recorded already – as Gillian said, it gets harder and harder to find really good ones that that haven’t been done all over the place.

AJ: How are you approaching that?

FN: Basically I’m trying to write songs that have a Scottish accent, if you like, but are maybe a bit more modern in their outlook, so rather than swords and horses and that kind of thing their references are more modern. For me the folk tradition comes out of telling stories, and there are still plenty of stories to tell today. We wouldn’t stop doing traditional songs completely – absolutely not. But it is harder to find songs with the impact I want them to have, so writing might be the answer. People write new tunes in the traditional style all the time, so why should songs be different?

We have been trying to focus on our own sound and what makes us different to other bands

AJ: Before we talk about the new album, it might be a good point to fill in a bit of history of the band. Gillian, how did you get started in folk music?

GF: My mum and dad were heavily involved in the Arran Folk Festival, and they both sing and play. I got interested through that, then started learning at the Feis on Arran, both playing fiddle and Gaelic singing. We’d usually go to a few festivals over the summer, and I really enjoyed that.
 
AJ: Findlay, you and Hamish have a strong family connection with music as well, don’t you? Your mother, Marie-Louise Napier, is a well known singer and harper.

FN: That’s right, and my dad sings, although he is strictly a party singer! We started playing mainly because our parents would have folk round, and you had to stand up and do your turn. Mum knew lots of traditional songs, and we did the Kingussie Music Festival a couple of times, although that just about put me off music forever! I eventually got back into it once I had come to terms with my voice breaking, and then I did loads.

AJ: And you both went through the Feis?

FN: We both did, yes, and Gillian did in Arran as well. I had piano lessons with Rosemary Kennedy, but I wasn’t really committed to that. I got into the bodhran at the Feis for a while, then I got into playing guitar, and the singing grew alongside it. I joined a local band called Damp Donkey, made up of guys I went to school with, and Duncan Farqhuar from Aviemore, who we had met through the Feis. I got into gigging through that, although I remember having to sit on a stool for the first few gigs because my legs were shaking so much.

AJ: Then you both ended up at the RSAMD in Glasgow doing the traditional music course, but at separate times?

GF: When I was in 6th year at school I applied for the course at the RSAMD, which was in its third year by then – Findlay had been in the first intake of students. That was the real kick start for me, and it was then that I started to get into singing Scots songs as well. I entered for the Young Scots Trad Musician award in its first year and won it. I had put a wee group together to go to the BBC 2 Folk Awards in London with Hamish and Simon. We got to the final, and that was fine, and after I won the Scots one it gave me a chance to do an album. I decided I wanted to do it with the band, and at that point Findlay joined to make it a quartet.
 

AJ: You sang Gaelic songs at the RSAMD, and included one on the band’s first album. Have you given up on that?

GF: When I was at the RSAMD I studied both Gaelic and Scots song, mostly with Kenna Campbell for Gaelic, so I knew I wasn’t going to get away with anything that was less than perfect! That was fine when I was getting regular lessons and having my pronunciation corrected, but I’m not confident enough to carry that on now. I’m on much solider ground with Scots songs. There are also so many really good young Gaelic singers and bands out there – we have been trying to focus on our own sound and what makes us different to other bands, and Gaelic isn’t a natural part of that for me.

AJ: Okay, let’s talk about your new album, ‘Luminosity’. Findlay, how did you go about recording this album?

FN: In the studio we tried a few different things this time with microphones and so on, just experimenting with the way we sounded. In the past we have been guilty of just accepting it as it came rather than trying to make it better. We messed around with Gillian’s fiddle sound this time, for example, and in my view it went from being good to being fantastic. Nick Turner at Watercolour is always up for that kind of thing, and I think that has been a big factor. We then had a really good recording to take to the mastering stage.

AJ: And you produced this one yourselves?

GF: We thought a lot this time about where we would record and who would produce and what the benefits might be, and eventually we decided we were getting a producer in for the wrong reasons, and would be better having a go at doing it ourselves. It has been a huge learning experience.

AJ: You recorded at Watercolour up in Ardgour, as with your previous disc, ‘Fortune’s Road’, but opted to do the final mixing and mastering in Glasgow with Paul McGeechan. Why was that?

GF: Just to get a different feel. I think the album really sparkles the way Paul has mixed it, and it gave us another experience of working with a different studio and a different person, and he was great.

AJ: And is Back of the Moon a full-time band now that Hamish has finally finished his science degree at Strathclyde?

GF: Yes, we are. We do bits and pieces of teaching and so on, but basically we are all now focused full-time on this band, and are fully committed to it. We played in Holland and Germany last year, and we will be looking to try to build on those kind of connections and take it forward.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2005

Related Link

• Back of the Moon website