Queen Anne’s Revenge

14 Jun 2008 in Highland, Music

Pirates, Tortoises and Nuclear Explosions

SUE WILSON catches up with a songwriting alliance forged in Ardgour

WHAT DO Blackbeard, Charles Darwin and nuclear testing on Christmas Island have in common? All three feature among the myriad, magpie-minded inspirations at work in the songwriting partnership of Findlay Napier and Nick Turner.

The duo’s joint nom de guerre of Queen Anne’s Revenge was robbed from the pirate’s flagship, while their newly-released second album, Just One Umbrella? – launched at a sellout gig in Fort William last month – includes songs addressing both the latter topics, along with others on such diverse themes as domestic violence, drinking, obsessive love, a dying man on a ventilator, childhood nostalgia and masculine identity.

Napier – erstwhile singer-guitarist with top young folk act Back of the Moon, now fronting his own band, The Bar Room Mountaineers – and Turner, co-director of the Ardgour-based company Watercolour Music, first met a decade ago through the Songhunter project. One of Napier’s compositions had made the final cut of 20 from a Highland-wide songwriting competition, while Turner was working as sound engineer for the band convened to take the winning set-list on tour.

“Nick was one of the first people who heard me singing in my own voice,” says Napier, recalling a post-gig session in his then home town of Grantown-on-Spey. “We both really hate when singers put on an American accent, so that was one of the first things that united us.”

A few years later, Back of the Moon were at Watercolour recording their second album, Fortune’s Road. “At that point Findlay wasn’t writing for the band,” Turner says. “He thought his songs wouldn’t fit with their traditional material, and I was encouraging him to give it a go, so after that he started coming up here and we started writing together.”

The creative chemistry, it seems, was both instant and abundant. “I’ve worked with a lot of different people,” says Turner, “and there’s no way of knowing beforehand whether the process of writing together is going to be a harmonious one – but with Findlay it’s just been fantastic, the easiest thing I’ve ever done.

“There’s no hard and fast method: sometimes we’ll start out with no more than a chord sequence, or a lyric, or a story – a lot of the songs have stories behind them – and build it up from there. Other times Findlay might come in with something that’s mostly finished, and I’ll just add my tuppence-worth, or vice versa.”

As the range of subjects noted above suggests, the pair share a decided penchant for the unexpected or downright oddball as triggers for their material. “The Charles Darwin one, for instance, started with a story about him mistaking the sex of a tortoise,” says Napier. “I had the concept of writing about that like some kind of holiday romance – which is why it’s called ‘When Harry Met Charlie’- and then we finished it off with a whole load of really bad puns.

“Another song on the new album, ‘Cut Me Off’, came from seeing ‘I Love You Mandy’ spray-painted in red on a motorway flyover, which started me imagining this mad besotted guy with a restraining order out on him. A lot of our stuff does come from us having completely stupid ideas, and then running with them.”

The results, in both form and content, certainly stand out from the pack. Peppered with vivid vignettes and intriguing lyrical allusions, plus a healthy smattering of satire and polemic, Napier and Turner’s writing – previous heard on the self-titled QAR debut in 2006 – consistently evokes the wider dramatic canvas surrounding the pictures they sketch.

“I’ve always loved songs that have a bit of mystery about them, that work on your mind without spelling everything out,” Napier says. “That’s the real challenge with songwriting: you’ve only got three verses and a chorus or whatever, but those should somehow imply a much bigger story.”

Besides their richness in narrative, incident and imagery, the songs on Just One Umbrella? abound in potent pop hooks and buoyantly adventurous arrangements, mixing up styles as diverse as folk, punk, 80s pop, country and jazz, and featuring such accompanying talents as bassist Duncan Lyall, trombonist Rick Taylor, percussionist Paul Jennings, fiddler/singer Gillian Frame, and Douglas Millar on keyboards.

“The writing process doesn’t really stop until we get the band dynamic right in the studio,” says Turner, who shares guitar duties with Napier, while the latter takes charge of the vocals. “We want that first excitement of a new song, when the ideas start really sparking, to carry right through to the recording.”

Although Napier’s magnificent singing is another centrepiece of the album, Queen Anne’s Revenge is in no way conceived as a live project. The band who actually played the Fort William gig were Napier’s aforementioned Bar Room Mountaineers, performing a set drawn from Just One Umbrella?.

For while the Bar Room Mountaineers’ own debut album, due to be launched later this summer at Cambridge Folk Festival, will, somewhat confusingly, feature some of the same songs – albeit in different arrangements – Napier and Turner’s recording is aimed primarily at promoting their work to other singers.

“The fact of us being just a songwriting project is a bit tricky to get across,” Napier acknowledges. “And we’ve only made it worse by giving ourselves a name, so it sounds even more like we’re a band. But actually what we want is for other people to be singing our stuff, and hopefully for us to be writing with specific singers in mind.”

To this end, he and Turner are already looking towards a third album where their material – around half of which they’ve already written – would be performed entirely by guest singers. “That way the songs become less personal to us,” Turner says, “as well as highlighting the different ways they can be done.”

With Just One Umbrella? being recorded in the Watercolour studio, released on the Watercolour label, and with Watercolour acting as promoter for its launch gig, the project offers a capsule insight into the multifaceted nature of the business, co-owned and run by Turner and his wife, the Gaelic singer, clarsach player and award-winning broadcaster Mary Ann Kennedy.

Besides the studio – described as “a dream” by guitar legend John Renbourn – with Turner as resident engineer/producer, the current operation incorporates a BBC-compatible, ISDN-ed radio suite, TV production facilities and a complete design service. And within the next year or so, all these will be transferred to new purpose-built premises at Glenscaddle, three miles north of their present location, where the foundations have recently been completed, and where Turner hopes to build further on this range of complementary services.

“With the studio, for instance, we primarily do as-live recording,” he says. “Technically it’s more demanding than just tracking everything, but personally and professionally I find it much more enjoyable when a band are all playing together. So the new studio’s been designed specifically for that, with one big room and two smaller ones off it, all acoustically isolated, but all visible from each other.

“The plan is also that the studio can double as a live venue – it’ll hold 40 or so people; about folk-club size – where we can put on a concert, broadcast it live, and record it, so the artist gets maximum benefit from one event, which hopefully makes it more attractive for artists to come up here.”

Another ongoing area of expansion is television work, partly in view of the new Gaelic channel due to be launched this autumn. “We’ve done quite a few music productions for TV now,” Turner says. “With me and Mary Ann both having music backgrounds, as well as knowing the TV side, the artists and the producers both seem happier if we just do the whole thing.”

Recently in the can are a documentary about Gaelic singer Donnie Murdo MacLeod’s unsung role in revolutionising education in Botswana, and a series of programmes under the title Garaids (Garage), chronicling collaborations between contemporary Gaelic singers and a range of pop and world artists.

“Music-wise,” says Turner of the latter shows, “that’s really the kind of direction we want to be going in: making new things happen. That’s what Queen Anne’s Revenge is all about, and with Watercolour we want to keep doing more in the way of promoting new songwriting, maybe commissioning new music. The longer we do this, the more we find we’re interested in the genesis of things.”