Running in thefamily

Having a beloved musician as your parent is a tough gig when trying to make your way in the same industry. But with a new album, Kirsten Adamson has carved out her own unique identity. She tells Fiona Shepherd how she has come to connect more closely with her late father through his music >>

Although Kirsten Adamson has been playing and writing music for years, first fronting country-flavoured six-piece The Gillyflowers and latterly as a solo artist, it is only now, with the release of her second album Landing Place, that she feels she’s arrived as a songwriter. Her 2015 debut album was self-titled but not, she feels, a true reflection of her work.

‘Everyone wants to give you advice on what you should do next,’ she says, ‘and because I was feeling a bit lost, the first solo album was really me writing what I thought people wanted to hear rather than what I actually just felt. In some ways Landing Place feels like my first album. This is more me, it’s more how I write music.’

One of the most hailed songs on the album is ‘My Father’s Songs’. As her father was late Big Country frontman Stuart Adamson, there are a lot of appreciative listeners who feel a sense of ownership over his music, and she has always tread carefully around his legacy.

Lockdown changed her approach, particularly when she began to receive requests to play her dad’s songs at online gigs. She began with an unreleased song called ‘Buffalo Skinners’, mashed up with one of Big Country’s biggest hits, ‘Chance’. ‘It was all acoustic with my voice so there was no hiding anything; they could really hear the lyrics coming through.’

The response was overwhelmingly positive and Adamson went on to cover about 30 songs over the next two years, ranging across her dad’s catalogue from The Skids via Big Country to his Nashville duo The Raphaels; but not without a personal impact.

‘Going through all my dad’s music, I almost grieved the loss of him again,’ she says. ‘I was feeling so close to him and his music and, of course, I was playing to all these people; but really I was just sitting by myself in my little summerhouse out back. I was connecting to a lot of people through his music, but to me there was only one person I was connected to at that point and it was my dad. So it was a really emotional thing to do. I really felt like I got to know his story a bit more through his music.’

Adamson was only 16 when her dad passed away. ‘I thought at the time that I was OK. But when I look back on that period, and even going into my twenties when I started my first band, it was really tough for me to want to pursue music; even though I knew it was all that was in me.’

After the release of her solo debut, Adamson fell back on the seemingly safer territory of jobbing covers gigs as a way of bringing in a steady wage. But she never stopped songwriting, collaborating regularly with London-based musician Dave Burns as The Marriage and, more recently, with her fellow Edinburgh-based country troubadour Dean Owens.

‘Over lockdown I started to realise the value in myself and what I can bring to the table,’ she says. ‘“My Father’s Songs” is one of the most personal songs on Landing Place but it seems like it connects with the most people, even though it’s just my story; music is strange and wonderful that way.’

On a roll now, Adamson has another album written and ready to record, and will release a brand new single ‘Take Me As I Am’, to coincide with her Fringe appearance with The Tanagers. As she explains, that band is named after ‘a wee spiritual bird which is supposed to bring you a message from beyond to keep striving for your goals and for self-empowerment.’

Ahead of Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band’s Fringe gig, Neil Cooper reflects on the Liverpudlian’s status as an unsung songwriting genius

The eternal renaissance of Michael Head has been a wonderful thing to witness. Over a wayward 40-odd-year anti-career, the Liverpool-born songwriter has moved from the underachieving felicities of The Pale Fountains to the urban fantasias of Shack, alighting a decade ago in his current tenure helming the ever-changing Red Elastic Band. Judging by 2022 album, Dear Scott, and its 2017 predecessor, Adiós Señor Pussycat, Head seems to have finally found his time.

The Red Elastic Band’s line-up currently features a superb ensemble bringing Head’s scallydelic kitchen-sink narratives to life with guitar-led grit, laced by baroque flourishes. This should translate in their forthcoming Fringe outing into a virtuoso showcase of more recent material, interspersed with a pick-and-mix of favourites from Head’s colourful back pages.

Recently, this has seen Head rewind back to some of the best moments from The Pale Fountains and Shack, which sit seamlessly alongside songs from Dear Scott. A cover of 1960s band Love, a perennial inspiration for Head, may also feature.

As previous Edinburgh visits have shown, Head is in full possession of a renewed focus that sits alongside his impish spirit and easy bonhomie with a devoted audience. With Head finally receiving the attention he deserves as one of the finest songwriters of his or any other generation, as the man himself might say, ‘is right’.

Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band, Summerhall, 11 August, 7pm.