INTERVIEW: KIng Creosote
The Scottish folk singer-songwriter talks about the vagaries of the music industry as he prepares to play at the Stag and Dagger festival in Leeds
IT WAS a relationship that promised much.
King Creosote, one of Scotland's finest folk musicians and singer-songwriters, and Warners, one of the largest record companies in the world.
Press coverage was good, album sales – initially, at least – were promising and gigs well attended.
So what, then, went wrong? It's a question that puzzles the King – otherwise known as Kenny Anderson – even now, 18 months after his parting of the ways with his old label.
In hindsight, he says, the writing was on the wall when control of 679, the Warners imprint that initially signed him, was handed over to Atlantic, the more hard-headed pop label that's home to Little Boots, Flo Rida and Alesha Dixon.
Still, it bemuses the 42-year-old that Bombshell, the second album he made for the major label, was ditched shortly after its lead single, Home in a Sentence, failed to dent the top 40.
"They spent a lot of money on it to make it Radio 1 and Radio 2-friendly but (the BBC] didn't take to it. It didn't appeal to the indie stations that had previously backed me either. It kind of fell between the cracks," says Anderson with evident frustration. "I found that argument ridiculous. It's just a song. I did not understand that at all, that it was a failure, that it was binned."
As he retreated back to the Fence Collective, his old friends and musical kindred spirits in Fife, it made him realise how alien the world of major labels – and their "failure to take in failures" – was. After all, he'd managed to make more than two-dozen mail-order CD-Rs before the money men came calling.
"It made me think in Fence terms how irrelevant that is. You can circumvent your lack of radio plays. (Independent radio stations] are the ones that started to approach us. They were asking us why we didn't send them stuff.
"If the music's strong enough it may take a lot longer but it will find its own audience. I don't think it's right that you could tart it up in a way to find an audience. You can't buy an audience, you've got to let music find its own audience. The Fence fanbase are right on it – that's the ones that I have to appeal to."
Now back in Crail, the scenic fishing village on the East Neuk of Scotland that he's long called home, he's concentrating once again on the things that matter.
The Fence label and website are thriving, the Homegame festival which the Collective stages every year in Anstruther has just had a record attendance of 900 people and there's talk of resurrecting their subscription-based Fencezine.
Anderson has also been back in the recording studio. Following the low-key release of Love + Hate = Hate with his former partner, Jennifer Gordon (aka HMS Ginafore), he's just released a new album on Domino, the indie label who'd distributed his early noughties albums Kenny and Beth's Musakal Boat Rides and Rocket DIY.
Appropriately it's called Flicking The Vs.
"Once I left 679 and Warners a year ago this past January I knew I had a window to get ahead, to make and write and record something for myself, really," he explains. "I had an idea that it would probably end up on Fence because it was a lot more experimental.
"It's always disappointing to be binned from a record label but at the same time I realised I was free; there had been a lot of pressure on Bombshell to deliver. With Flicking the Vs I wanted to put together some of different themes that ran through the previous albums Kenny and Beth's Musakal Boat Rides, Rocket DIY, KC Rules OK and Bombshell, as well as Love + Hate and They Flock Like Vulcans (another of his CDR releases]. Something that embraced all that and pointed forwards as well.
"There are little musical references – I used The Earlies (with whom he'd recorded KC Rules OK in 2005] and John Hopkins, who produced Bombshell. I recorded it in four different studios. The drummer from (his first band] the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra is on there too. (The track] Rims was a reference back to that.
"It was just an idea, I wondered if I could do it, if there was any way that I could stand all that together and make something that belongs in 2009. It was quite easy when I started. There was nobody looking over my shoulder. I was paying for it myself anyway. I wanted it finished before anybody heard it. Domino came to hear it when I was getting it mastered and they loved it."
Happier now in his natural realm, Anderson is back out on the road to promote Flicking the Vs. On Friday, May 22 he plays at the Stag and Dagger Festival in Leeds.
"I've just had a couple of weeks of the worst aspect of touring – budgeting, finding Travel Lodge rooms for less than 70 a night. The hardest bits are over now, it's time to go," he says. "I've got a week to get my pants cleaned and we've a couple of rehearsals in the next few days."
Of the set, he says: "I've got my accordion back on, I'm trying to make the band quieter on stage. There will be songs off Flicking the Vs but they'll be different to the record. We are looking at older songs that pre-date KC Rules OK as well. It'll be a selection of songs that I think fans might want to hear."
King Creosote will be playing at the Brudenell Club. Tickets for Stag and Dagger are available from Jumbo and Crash Records.
Check out King Creosote here
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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