NEWS: The Mike Heron-Andrew Greig joint book that has occupied many of our waking (and some sleeping) hours this last 18 months, was published April 2017 by Quercus.
RELATED EVENTS - see Forthcoming.
YOU KNOW WHAT YOU COULD BE:
Tuning in to the 1960s
BLURB This singular book offers two contrasting yet related versions of youthful music making in the 1960s. Mike Heron for the first time writes wittily and candidly of his formative years in dour, brewery-smelling Presbyterian Edinburgh. He puts us there as, armed only with a love of Buddy Holly, Fats Domino and Hungarian folk music, he plays in school cloakrooms, graduates to a Beat dance band, stumbles on a listening Folk audience, starts writing songs, tries to talk to girls, wishes he was a Beatnik while training as a reluctant indentured accountant. When asked to play with Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, the Incredible String Band are formed, and their astonishing, fearless music will become an indelible part of the latter Sixties.
Andrew Greig was a frustrated provincial schoolboy when he heard their songs, and with a school mate formed a band in their image. Undaunted by their lack of information, experience and ability, Fate & ferret improvised mediaeval outfits, populated back-country Fife with Pan, satyrs and nymphs, met the String Band, caught the fish lorry to London to hang around Joe Boyd’s Witchseason office at the heart of the Underground scene.
He finally saw the light and became a writer and occasional banjo player. Forty years later he and Mike re-met at a Dr Strangely Strange reunion to become friends and sometime stage partners.
These entwined stories will delight anyone who has loved the ISB. Moreover, these differing portraits of that hopeful, erratic yet stubborn stumble towards the life that is truly ours, will strike a chord in many more.
Unofficial remarks Yes, it is a curious book! Writing my part of it, essentially a memoir of East Neuk of Fife adolescence 1966-70, switched on by music then specifically turned on by the Incredible String Band, has been a strange and enlightening experience. That past is indeed another country, the most optimistic decade of the C20th, when we knew without thinking about it that we in some broad sense owned the water, gas, electricity, Post Office, trains, steel, and much of the housing. When we were threatened with Jobs For Life (what a luxury that now seems!). When the world or at least our part of it felt so secure we thought it was boring, and wanted MORE.
It's very distant now, yet as William Faulkner remarked 'The past isn't gone; it isn't even passed'.
It lives in us and affects and shapes the rest of our lives.
And reading Mike's memoir of Portobello youth c. 1962, the cafes, pubs, clubs of smoke-darkened, brewery-smelling, dour Presbyterian Edinburgh with these beatniks just below the surface like bulbs about to pop up and burst out in full colour - well that has been hilarious, fascinating, moving.
The title emerged from realising what the two very different memoirs (his ends mid '66, when mine starts with first hearing 'Chinese White' and 'Painting Box' played by pals at the school Folk Club, Dec '66; he become extremely prominent with the Incredible String Band while Fate & ferret remain mythically obscure) have in common.
I can't wait, though I'll have to. Hope it will resonate with you, that story of being massively turned on while being too far away and too young to have any real idea what it was all about so we had to make it up. And Mike's story is from the centre of that world. Will put up the odd photo in due time.
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OTHER NEWS
CD 'CLEAN BY RAIN'!
For a long time I've wanted to do something like this. Re-meeting the legendary Eric Plectrum (aka Brian Michie), former Fate & ferret guitarist, in the course of writing You Know What, we hatched the idea of combining a bunch of my poems with the instrumental music he had recorded some time ago.
We put this together at the CaVa Studios in Glasgow, with the generous and adept support of Brian Young. We got in another old pal, Allan Tall, to add flute to the three tracks. The mixing and adapting sessions were a revelation. I added a couple of extra tracks, taken from a very good recording made live at the Queens Hall, with Fiona Hunter (vocal, cello) and Mike Vass (vocal, tenor guitar).
Overall, it's not quite like anything. The aim was to have the spoken word up front, but not at the expense of fading down the music. We want them to co-exist, but in relation to each other. The music isn't backing for the poems, and the poems weren't written to the music - but they were recorded live to the instrumental playback, and so inevitably the voice responds to it.
I will sell it after readings. Also at a few sympathetic music and book shops. And the CD is available on Amazon, iTunes, also for streaming and download.
I
OTHER NEWS
CD 'CLEAN BY RAIN'!
For a long time I've wanted to do something like this. Re-meeting the legendary Eric Plectrum (aka Brian Michie), former Fate & ferret guitarist, in the course of writing You Know What, we hatched the idea of combining a bunch of my poems with the instrumental music he had recorded some time ago.
We put this together at the CaVa Studios in Glasgow, with the generous and adept support of Brian Young. We got in another old pal, Allan Tall, to add flute to the three tracks. The mixing and adapting sessions were a revelation. I added a couple of extra tracks, taken from a very good recording made live at the Queens Hall, with Fiona Hunter (vocal, cello) and Mike Vass (vocal, tenor guitar).
Overall, it's not quite like anything. The aim was to have the spoken word up front, but not at the expense of fading down the music. We want them to co-exist, but in relation to each other. The music isn't backing for the poems, and the poems weren't written to the music - but they were recorded live to the instrumental playback, and so inevitably the voice responds to it.
I will sell it after readings. Also at a few sympathetic music and book shops. And the CD is available on Amazon, iTunes, also for streaming and download.
I
GETTING HIGHER: The Complete Mountain Poems
Published by Birlinn, and launching in April 2011, 'Getting Higher' is a complete collection of Andrew Greig's mountain poems, and also includes outtakes, commentary, facsimile notes and marginalia, plus sketches and illustrations from James Hutcheson. An outstandingly elegant and varied production. For more information and images relating to the book, click HERE.
NB From May 12th, this will be available as a ebook (!) via Waterstones or Amazon or the LoveReading site!
NB From May 12th, this will be available as a ebook (!) via Waterstones or Amazon or the LoveReading site!
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Andrew thanks you for coming by to look at his home on the web, and he hopes you enjoy your stay.
THE SOUND OF THE WORDS
Recordings of 26 poems are on the National Poetry Archives, Some can listened to for free, and they are all on the CD reviewed below by the Observer:Books
AUDIO BOOK
Reading From His Poems
Andrew Greig
POETRYARCHIVE.ORG £12.99. 41MINS 26 POEMS
Greig is "hooked by the heart" to
Scotland - to "the big sky and its
changes" of Orkney; the old fishermen
of Anstruther with "eyebrows like grey
spray"; Stronsay, where the only sound is
"the world turning" - and to his mentor,
Norman MacCaig, as shown in "Norman's
Goodnight". Another theme is climbing in
the Himalayas, where he feels intensely
alive with a new awareness of "everything
we cannot see". Greig's mellifluous
chiming and his gentle voice highlight the
tenderness and vulnerability that infuse
these poems. Rachel Redford
LISTEN TO ANDREW READING HIS POETRY AT THE NATIONAL POETRY ARCHIVE
