I ASKED HOW he had gone about actually putting together the fragments of songs with the sampled sounds and beats which provide their distinctive settings.
 

“The first track I worked on used Sheila Stewart’s version of Ewan McCall’s ‘Moving On Song’, which I’ve called ‘Move’ in my version. I went to my mother’s house in Edinburgh for Christmas 2000, and I took my studio with me and set up there. The studio isn’t particularly big, and the gear is quite old now. It probably sounds impressive to people who don’t know about studio equipment, but it really isn’t very complicated.
 

“My mother left me in her house in Edinburgh to get on with it. I had some material I was already working on, but I think at that point I was pretty lost musically, to be honest. I had been slogging on Hardland, and as much as it was going somewhere, it wisnae going anywhere at the same time, and that makes it very difficult to do anything fresh.
 

“Anyway, I had a lot of sketches, and I started working from them as a way to focus my mind. That track ‘Move’ took months and months of work, and it came from the beats to start with. I really just stumbled on the recording of the song when Kristen asked about it that night.
 

“I was trying to find a way of working with traditional song in this context without turning it into something cringy, which is always a danger with this whole area of music. A lot of people think if you have a few samples you can throw it all together, but it can come out like a bad joke.
 

“I really only used one line from each verse of the song in my arrangement, from part of the tune which was high up in her voice, and is the most passionate part of the verse. She doesn’t sing a big long note like that – I looped that part of her line.
 

“That one was really the way in for me, and once I had made it, I realised that was going to be the concept of the whole album that became Grit. I decided there and then that I would use the travellers’ songs and the Gaelic songs, because they were the things I felt closest to.
 

“I went through the rest of the old records that I had looking for things that worked, and I have to say that not many of the songs really do work in this context. There were some wonderful songs that I would love to have used, but I just couldn’t find a way of putting them into that musical setting without damaging them.
 

“I think my instincts on that are good – I can usually hear straightaway whether a song is likely to work or not. I was very lucky to find Lizzie Higgins singing ‘What A Voice, What A Voice’, for example, which I used on ‘Blackbird’ on the disc, but as soon as I heard it I thought, ah, that’ll work.

“So the songs and stories came from those old vinyl records, which date from 1952 through to about 1980. The rest of it – I’ve spent so many years now collecting sounds and bits of drum loops and just noises, and I now have quite a big archive of samples.

“What I tend to do is spend a few weeks just looking for things at the start of a project, which is actually quite boring, and it’s also thievery, to be frank. I’m nicking things from all over the place. That is a grey area in music now. I know if someone used a big chunk of my music like that I might not be very happy, but I’ve no objection to somebody using a tiny fragment, and I’m always salting things away to use later.

“I also have a whole set of records of sound effects from America, which I found in a skip! There are about 40 volumes of them, and they cover everything, from animal noises to weird sci-fi effects with theramins and so on! I have a lot of records of all kinds on vinyl, and I scour junk shops looking for old records that I can use.

“I also did a recording session at Real World studios down in Wiltshire with a string ensemble, which I used instead of my own playing. I had tried overdubbing myself on fiddle at first, but it didn’t have the feel of lots of players. So it’s a mix of samples drawn from many sources and musicians playing in the studio for me.”
 

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