MAID OF THE LOCH FREE DOWNLOAD

Chirpier news this time!

I’ve just posted up a free download of a new and unreleased track over at my main website.

This month’s free track is "Maid of The Loch (You and I and the Sky)", which I co-wrote with the lovely Sushil K Dade, Future Pilot AKA. He wrote the tune for his grandfather, who loved to visit Loch Lomond and sail on the boat up there (which is called The Maid of The Loch). A gorgeous instrumental version of the tune opens up the Future Pilot album "Tiny Waves Mighty Sea". Sushil asked several folks to write words for the piece, including also the Scots poet Alasdair Gray and the late Grant McLennan of The Go Betweens frontman. Hear more of Sushil’s work on "Secrets From The Clockhouse" (Creeping Bent, 2007). I sing with him on several tracks, including the spiritual "Shenandoah". I tour Scotland (and Gateshead!) with Sushil in May 2008 as part of a collaborative tour called BURNSONG.

I’ll be making an exclusive track available this way once a month, entirely cost-free. All you have to do is sign up to my email newsletter, so that I can notify you when new tracks appear.

10:40 AM - 8 Comments - 8 Kudos - Add Comment

JUST OUTSIDE MY DOOR: DEADLY CARGO 2

I mentioned the new Camcorder Guerrillas film "Deadly Cargo" in my last blog. Well, I just watched a preview copy and I confess I’m astonished and rather terrified by it. I thought I knew something about the issue of Britain’s nuclear weapons convoys but witnessing on film two truckloads of missiles driving up the M6 past Birmingham and Manchester in full daytime traffic defies all sense and logic, even if you think there’s a logic in such weaponry in the first place (which I don’t). I was aware, even whilst still at school, that weapons regularly truck along the motorway between Glasgow and Stirling, a mile from my parent’s home, heading north to the Royal Naval Armament Depot at Coulport on Loch Long. That’s a scary enough thought, given that the trucks carrying these weapons have been known to skid and crash. Noting tonight that they also snake along the A68 through the Scottish Borders, a mile from my own home, and a notoriously treacherous road, sends an extra chill into my bones.

I hope the UK Government’s forthcoming "register of risks" pays as much attention to the risks they create on our behalf, and needlessly, as to the faceless foreign risks our papers are more apt to be filled with.

Jings I’ve an aversion to ranting but sometimes it’s the only appropriate response.

Anyway I’l be able to post the film online for you to see for yourselves after its formal release on the 29th March.

Safe driving ...

3:39 PM - 7 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

DEADLY CARGO

Tracking the Nuclear Warhead Convoy

My song "Better Things" has been used in the new Camcorder Guerrillas documentary "Deadly Cargo", which follows the nuclear weapons convoys that travel the British roads network.

The UK premiere of the documentary will take place on Saturday the 29th of March at the Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) Rose Street Glasgow between 12.30pm - 2pm.

The film will uncover how fully assembled Trident nuclear warheads are transported on public roads in secret convoys, passing large centres of population such as Oxford, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow on their journey between AWE Burghfield in Berkshire and RNAD Coulport in western Scotland. Interviewing grassroots activists, environmental journalists and international disarmament experts as well as local authorities and fire services, about the dangers and illegalities of this deadly cargo, the Camcorder Guerillas offer an insight into an issue usually well hidden from the public. Find out how ordinary citizens in the Nukewatch network track and campaign against the convoy and its deadly cargo – and how you can help put an end to this nuclear madness.

More info from Camcorder Guerillas or Nukewatch.

11:25 AM - 8 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

TOUR IDEAS

One more wee question for you ... Though my new album launch tour starts on Tuesday I'm looking ahead to the autumn and to next year. Any ideas for great venues I've overlooked in the UK or some kind of themed tour?

Ideas I've had include naming tours related to particular kinds of venue e.g.

sacred spaces and quiet places
the village green tour (for non-city community and club venues)
out of the woods (for rural venues)
coast to coast (only coastal venues)

Anyone got any suggestions?

Also if I were to reinterpret and rearrange some of my older songs, how would you like to hear them? Intimate and classy with piano and cello? layered up with loops and electronica? Or 100% solo? Again any ideas and suggestions most welcome!

Thanks!

10:54 AM - 27 Comments - 34 Kudos - Add Comment

THIS EARTHLY SPELL

Just a wee note to say that my new CD "This Earthly Spell" is released tomorrow. Hope you find something you like there. If you do (and to be honest even if you don't) maybe you'd consider sharing your thoughts over at amazon.co.uk? I'm more interested in what you folks have to say than any journalist! Feedback of any kind appreciated. And it might help others or spark some discussion, which is always good to my mind.

Personally, I'd say it's maybe, all round, a wee bit of a thornier CD than either "Scribbled in Chalk" or "Faultlines", and, I wager, not quite as immediately accessible. Musically, it's also a sparer affair, for sure, though not as spare as my recent trad collection "Fairest Floo'er".

Anyway see what you think folks.

Happy Days. Karine x

10:47 AM - 9 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

SHEEP

Today my 9 month old son Arlo discovered sheep. Lots of them. And he finally connected that funny "bah" noise I keep making when I read to him about these strange creatures with the beings that live just down the track. I've seen many sheep in my days I should say, having grown up right next to a farm. But today was the first time in all those years that a whole field of sheep came running TOWARDS me rather than away ... and it was, for a moment, a bit like something out of a Hitchcock film. They could have kept on coming with devilish intent ...

Instead they just stared and bleated their boots off, which Arlo found hilarious. Almost as hilarous as being stroked on the cheek by a pussy willow bud but nowhere near as fascinating as the hundred or so fluttering, scraiching rooks and crows that live by our house.

Spring has arrived!

10:37 AM - 9 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

as nothing as we are

Why tell our story?

because we have nothing else to leave:
ours is the legacy of women who have fought and cried
worked and suffered
laughed and sung
and always have lived for things that today seem
obvious, granted

Why tell our story?

for our children and other people's children
for music and song to be true to their meaning
and for the words not to get lost in the wind

Why tell our story?

for humbleness, self-sacrifice
for faith in a different world never to leave us
for the conquest of one's own space
for one's own essence not to get lost in the short lived lights of a stage,
an album

Why tell our story?

for the love in our memories to become a reason to fight for the dignity of men
for their ideals
for the sense of justice that we must tend as one would tend a young rice plant

Why tell this story?

because we too,
as small as we are,
as nothing as we are,
are a root of the story of those who will come after us

and we like to think we have not been useless ...

So began one of the most moving musical performances I've ever seen in my life: the Scottish debut, at Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow, of the remarkable Coro delle Mondini di Novi di Modena - The Rice Weeders Choir of Modena. Formed originally around a group of women who lived and toiled together on the rural rice fields of northern Italy during the second world war, they sound, even still, many of them into their eighties, like they're singing for their lives, because there was a time when they truly were.

The songs they sing are not only songs of love and longing for the homes from which so many of them were forcibly separated, or swaggering songs of obvious cheek, but also partisan songs, songs of freedom, for many of the women risked their lives in those rice fields in active opposition to the fascism which consumed Italy during the 1940s. And the bonds of friendship they formed with each other in the fields transformed into some of the strongest bonds of the burgeoning Italian labour movement of the day.

Nowadays, the half a dozen or so original choir members are joined on stage by their daughters, the youngest of whom is nearly fifty years old, and they're all dressed up in shorts, shirts, shifts and sunhats, as if to go right out into the fields to weed, but for the shiny pink lycra leggings that hint at the craic they'll be having later on that night at the festival club with a great deal of whisky ...

Even without a word of Italian, none of the joy, sorrow, passion or anger of those songs was lost on the Glasgow audience.

Check out Debbie Koritsas's wonderful photos here

Hear them sing here

Before watching a wee documentary short here

And if they come within a hundred miles of where you stay, do yourself a favour and go and hear the kind of music that is guaranteed to make you want to burst out of your skin.

3:20 PM - 11 Comments - 20 Kudos - Add Comment

Flesh on the Bones

When you're born two days before Christmas you learn very young, when you believe these things actually matter, to downplay the importance of such a birthday and to cultivate a secret sense of martyrdom. There will, after all, be no birthday party at this time of year. My friends will be caught up in their own family rituals and celebrations. My mum will remember, of course. She always does. But, let's be blunt about it, there will be far fewer presents all round than might come the way of a June child. And those that do arrive will most often be birthday and Christmas presents wrapped up in one. It's just not fair ...

I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't get over this childish feeling of being hard done by until I wound up eating microwave pizza, home alone, on my 18th birthday. It was kind of crap. But it cured me of the sense that birthdays merit much attention at all.

At least it did until this thirty-seventh birthday of mine just past.

A few weeks ago I caught a brief TV interview with the Malian kora player, Toumani Diabate. More than just an exceptional musician (and a very radiant looking man), he's a griot, a traditional bard or praise singer, and held in the highest esteem in his community amongst the Bamako people. His father, Sidiki Diabate, was the first ever griot to record an album back in 1970, and since then Malian music has travelled the world. But Toumani Diabate can trace his cultural lineage a whole lot further back than that. Remarkably, he's the 71st generation, in an unbroken line, of kora playing griots. His son is the 72nd. Now if you suppose, roughly, that each generation begins 20 years after the last, then Toumani Diabate can invoke around fifteen hundred years of his own family history and retell it in his music too. I think that's amazing, and beautiful.

My great grandmother, Teresa Smith, was born on Foundry Lane in Dundee, a street that no longer exists but which once ran down by the wide River Tay where a chilly wind often whips in off the North Sea. She died the year before I was born so I know her only from monochrome photographs, in which she has a kind face framed with scraped back white hair, and from other people's memories. My mum remembers her fondly. There's a story about how she used to pawn my great grandfather's Sunday shoes to make ends meet between paydays. By the time the shoes wore out, the pawnshop had, long since, stopped checking them, so she carefully wrapped up a red brick in the shoebox and took it to the store just the same.

According to my mum, the family tittle-tattle was that Teresa came from settled Travellers. Certainly, early twentieth century Dundee, and the surrounding Angus countryside, was full of such families. And you would have been be forgiven for thinking that her eldest son, my grandfather Peter Quinn, had more than a wee dose of some kind of non pasty faced Scottish DNA in him, with his sloe black hair, striking aquiline features and skin that ripened like a berry the second it met the sun. And when my mum first heard the distinctive keen, reedy voice of renowned Traveller singer and storyteller, Sheila Stewart, she said it was just like hearing her own grandma sing.

But, of course, Traveller blood, if ever there were any in my family, would have been nothing to shout about a hundred years ago. So it's no great surprise that my own traceable ancestry on that line stops right there with Teresa. The records yield no clues. Smiths are ten a penny. And the family just doesn't seem to exist, officially, any earlier than she does. In a place that's grown to rely on what's written down rather than remembered, no one alive has anything more to say about it.

Much the same is true of the family Teresa married into during the First World War. Her husband, Bernard Quinn, might have come from Moville in Donegal but, again, nobody knows for sure and there are no remaining Irish records to trace. In my mind, he's the Samuel Beckett like old man in a photograph with Teresa, the one who didn't go to war because he'd lost most of his left arm in an industrial accident, and who, my mum recalls, felt strange ghost pains in the missing limb for the rest of his life.

I can trace other strands of my family much farther back, though never in an entirely unbroken arc. I've written before about how much it privately delights me to know that some of my probable Polwart line ancestors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were writers. Patrick Polwart was a court poet and Grisell Baillie appears as the first entry in a charming nineteenth century collection entitled "Songstresses of Scotland". It cheers me too that Bernard Quinn's brother John wrote tunes for the Red Clydeside massed marches in Glasgow in 1919 and, occasionally, I speculate that these many different familial threads might somehow have conspired to produce a twenty first century folk singer something like myself. It's not too scientific, I know, and involves a good deal of selective genetic spotlighting. After all, most families have their share of rogues, idlers and misanthropes who're shamed and conveniently forgotten. Nevertheless, it seems plausible, and comforting, to me that just as physical traits recur in families, often leapfrogging across generations, so too might personal qualities, practical aptitudes, quiet obsessions and artistry.

Still, though I have a life long interest in what's old and dead and gone, I used to find conventional genealogy oddly cold and dry. All those dates and names and distilled census facts seemed fit for a society that's obsessed with accounting, with the bare bones of people's lives rather than the living breathing flesh. Of course, any archaeologist will tell you that bones can talk, but they won't tell you that a woman such as my Granny Jenny Polwart liked the earthy smell of geraniums or apportioned herself a modest weekly ration of quality chocolates from the top kitchen drawer ("like the Queen does"). A life is in these details.

My son Arlo's Grandma, my mother in law Joella Foulds, is making turkey soup right now upstairs in the cosy kitchen of her home here on Bouldarderie Island, Cape Breton. She smells of white musk and makes delicious chocolate covered peanut brittle, which she boxes up and ships over the ocean each Christmas to her son Mattie, my husband and Arlo's dad. As for Arlo, he's hanging out with Grampa Jim, and squealing with joy at his new found ability to roll from back to front and back again, hurling the full weight of his wiry wee body with unexpected force across the multicoloured mat on the living room floor. His Great Grampa Fred Tufford, a graceful and imposing man still at 88 years old, interjects occasionally, and delightedly, from the big leather easy chair by the window. There are four generations of men and boys in this one room and this makes me glad.

Arlo was born on the 29th May this year. That's his birthday, my baby boy's birthday, and, like my mum before me, I know with great certainty now that even when he ceases to be a baby, or even a boy, I'll never forget to mark that day. Arlo has made me think again about all those kind of lonesome, vaguely disappointing childhood birthdays on which my mum fussed over me anyway. And how she still does, even though I've tried for years to discourage it. For the first time in my life, I'm ashamed to realise that a birthday, my birthday, is more than just a date marking the passing of years. And downplaying its significance isn't entirely my prerogative after all. It's the day my mum gave birth to me. And being first born it's the day my mum's life must have changed beyond all reckoning just as mine has too with Arlo. It's a ridiculously obvious observation, of course. But this thirty-seventh birthday was a big jolt. It wasn't about me this time. It was about Anne Polwart, Peter Quinn's daughter, Teresa Smith's granddaughter, my mum. And the 71 generations of mothers before her whose names are lost now, and whose stories are lost too. So, above all others, if I can do one worthwhile thing for my own son with this business of writing songs I think it will be, in the spirit of Toumani Diabate, to put flesh on the bones of my own real and imagined ancestors, and Arlo's. My next big writing project will be, with all of them in mind, a joyful and personal piece of work.

But meantime, here's to birthdays and the lives and lives before them they remember.

And Happy, Happy New Year to you all!

5:10 PM - 23 Comments - 25 Kudos - Add Comment

OXFORD, WAVENDON & SALFORD SHOWS CANCELLED

The run of bad luck on my current tour continues. Unfortunately, I had to cancel my first ever show in Oxford last night due to an emerging throat infection and failing voice but hoped that a night of good sleep would solve the situation. Instead, I've lost a whole register of my voice altogether overnight and will have to cancel tonight's shows in Wavendon Stables (tonight) and Salford Lowry (tomorrow) also.

I seem to have done nothing but apologise this month. This is my second run of cancellations due to poor health, on top of postponements by promoters also. I do hope you'll bear with me until next year. As I said in my last mail, prior to this run of shows I've only ever had to cancel one gig in all my career. I'm so, so sorry for any disappointment and, most especially, for the inconvenience caused to the many of you who will have turned up to shows cancelled at such short notice.

You will be able to get your tickets refunded. But I'm also hoping that I can re-schedule these dates for next year and that your tickets will remain valid until then. More news on that to follow this week.

Again sincere apologies from me.

4:16 PM - 21 Comments - 13 Kudos - Add Comment

PONTYPRIDD AND EXETER SHOWS CANCELLED

Karine sends her heartfelt apologies to everyone who bought tickets (and almost certainly also turned up) for her Pontypridd and Exeter shows this weekend. She was taken ill on the journey from Scotland to Wales this morning and has had to return home to bed to recover. It's only the second time in eight years that she's had to cancel a show due to illness.

She hopes to organise fresh dates for next year. Meantime please contact the venues concerned for a refund. And again humble apologies from the team here.

The cancellation of these two shows is unrelated to the postponement of shows in London, Sheffield and Newcastle last week by the promoter.

Just a bad run on luck ...

8:40 AM - 10 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment