Alphabet of Hurricanes

After your wise, funny, critical, thoughtful and occasionally absurd advice for my press release, I thought I'd share with you what poet Simon Armitage wrote about the new record.

I know it's a bit unfair, especially as you haven't heard the album yet, although there is a free download in the offing! But hopefully you'll be as pleased as I was, as Simon is a hero of mine. It also gave me something to show my family, who still think I work at a donkey sanctuary or something, and are of the opinion that at 40 I should have a real job by now. I especially agree with the opening line - I think he captured me perfectly and with such economy.

Alphabet of Hurricanes

Tom McRae is a smart guy. I’m not just talking about the natty suit-jacket and waistcoat he’s wearing on the cover of his new album The Alphabet of Hurricanes, or the neat way he seems to be goading the dark skies by holding a knackered red brolly, like a storm-battered poppy, to the approaching tempest. I’m talking about the records he makes, and their unapologetic intelligence in a world where popular music has pawned its soul to the television schedules and the light entertainment industry. For four albums and the best part of a decade McRae has followed his own star, gone his own way, been true to those convictions laid down at the very beginning and loyal to his own distinctive brand of song-writing. He believes in language, not just words, and he trusts the silences that sometimes appear in songs – those gaps which open up between verses or even between notes, into which our imaginations pour. Yes there are touchstones: Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Dylan, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Vic Chestnutt, but they’re stepping off points rather than destinations, and what McRae shares with them is the idea of song as an art form. In fact craft might be a more appropriate word as far as McRae is concerned: the song as a kind of craft in which we might float or sail, and the craft required to construct such a vessel.
And now there’s album number five. But what is The Alphabet of Hurricanes? Well, it’s a shipping-forecast of memory, a lexicon of the soul’s meteorology, a Rosetta Stone in the shape of a heart. From Still Love You with its scratchy ukulele and thinned-out voice, like a song through a pinhole-camera, if you can imagine how that would sound. To A is For… with it’s snake-charming, side-winding, fist-strangled clarinets. To Won’t Lie which comes into town under a sombrero on a slow brown donkey with tumbleweed at its heels, and takes a seat next to the band at the back of the saloon, and starts doing its thing until everyone in the bar stops fighting and drinking and starts listening and singing and waltzing. To Summer of John Wayne with its dark piano and minor chords, which has the feel of a slowly resolving black and white photograph on a mantelpiece or an old cine film with the end of the reel ticking away. To the gospel roundelay of Told My Troubles To The River. To the dusk-lit American Spirit, a song sung from the edge of the known world as the sun halves itself in the ocean and McRae’s shipwrecked voice breaks the surface of the water. To the double-tracked Please, which evolves from a toe-tap to a knees-up to a full-blooded stomp and a plea for release, the singer telling us that he doesn’t care anymore when we know damn well that he does. To Out Of The Walls where a songs sits down at the piano while everyone else is asleep and makes its midnight confession, and madness is at the door, and moonlight is at the window, and the song goes on reverberating through the wires and the keys long after the lid has been closed and the light’s gone out and the room stands empty. To the finger-clicking, hand-clapping Me and Stetson which gets us back on our feet again, a guitar line like a mosquito buzzing around in the background, a horn section to blow your hat off, the voice jumping about in a locked trunk with a megaphone and a dictionary before the ambulance arrives. To Best Winter, simple, beautiful, spare, terse, honest, intimate, a public declaration of private matters, a particular examination of universal concerns, handing on to the unravelling storyline of Fifteen Miles Downriver which begins with the unreliable clasp of snakeskin bracelet and ends mid-ocean, middle of nowhere, back of beyond, happy to drift but with one eye on the possibility of land, plotting a course with one of the best lyrics I’ve heard in years.
These are ghost songs by one of our best living song-writers. The world needs more Tom McRae. And, as luck would have it, here it is.

Simon Armitage

HELP!

So - having signed to ace label, Cooking Vinyl... it's time to play the self-promotion game and honour their commitment to me... and my own commitment to my music. And yes, even at 40 I'm still ambitious - although frankly once you've been on Buzzcocks what's left?

And yet, and yet...I'm uncomfortable. The British music press has the attention span of a mayfly whose ritalin has just run out, and as it can't or won't write about someone for their music alone - I find myself struggling for suggestions as to how to fool journalists into actually giving me some press coverage.

How this normally works - and look away now if you're sensitive - is that you buy advertising space in a magazine or newspaper. The amount of ad space you buy corresponds to how much editorial they print (or if your song goes on the covermount cd). That's how the world works, you bribe people. But we can't afford that.

Ever wondered why album of the month is always the one with the biggest ad campaign? Ever wondered why film magazines tend to give even appalling films decent reviews? Turn the page and see whose advertising pays the wages of everyone in the building.

So for those of you who thought Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin or that the Pope is God's appointed representative on earth, sorry to disappoint you. For the rest of you, sorry for teaching you all to suck eggs. It's the way the world is, best not to complain but to get down in the trenches and try and come up with something, if it's all a stupid game, why not have fun playing it?

So, what I need - and I'm serious (even though your replies don't have to be)are suggestions for what I should put in my press release. The world's greatest living poet (Simon Armitage - not up for debate) has kindly agreed to write my potted biography, but in the absence of a drug habit (or fake one, see picture below) or dead super model in my closet - I can't think of an angle.

(one of these guys may have had a coke habit, but it sure ain't the guy in the middle)

I'm sorry Keane fans. Really. Sorry.

Apologies if I sound a trifle jaded, but this tired old dance of trying to get some press attention makes me irritable. I know just making music isn't enough, I know Leona Lewis is far, far prettier, I know Jedward are funny, I know music is slipping in its cultural significance now it's free - but surely, surely, there must be something to write about someone like me?

So, help me out - this is what I have so far.

40-yr-old singer-songwriter releases fifth album, quite good live, just passed driving test.

Jail Guitar Doors

Occasionally among the countless gigs, long journeys, delayed flights and repetitive days of bitter disappointment and frustration, there are exceptional moments which shine like gold in the river mud. Days which take you out of yourself, remind you of your good fortune and help you to treasure the things that are so often taken for granted. There isn't going to be the usual bathos or failed witticism at this point, just a rare instance of sincerity.

A few weeks ago I was invited to play a few songs for some inmates at a Young Offenders Institute in Wetherby, Yorkshire (alright, insert your captive audience gags here if you must but let's move on swiftly) as part of the Jail Guitar Doors scheme, by which prisoners and young offenders are given access to guitars, as a means of self-expression, self-respect and rehabilitation. You can read up on the scheme by clicking the link, it was set up by one of my heroes, Billy Bragg, to honour the memory of one of his, Joe Strummer.

When you're asked to do something like that, it doesn't take a second to say yes and how soon? Music means more than the X Factor and its evil twins (I mean similar shows, not the current Frankenstein's monster that is Jedward), and it has a much more vibrant place in life than the clogged I-pod or bored Guitar Hero would currently suggest.

Music is at it's most visceral and raw when it's played by people solely for their own amusement, as they come to grips with learning an instrument, or jamming alongside other people for the first time. So seeing these teenagers play their own songs, after they'd politely sat through mine and even performed their own version of How The West Was Won, (complete with additional middle 8 rap) - is easily one of the most extraordinary experiences in my life to date. It's not a good look, by the way, for a 40 yr old to be choking back the tears listening to his own song performed by a bunch of teenagers in the recreation area of a Yorkshire prison, so that's something else I've learned.

I played a few songs, we talked about songwriting, they played some recordings they'd made, questions were asked from both sides, and I was given a tour of the prison by my amazing hosts. More of them later. And for any Daily Mail readers who may have strayed here, it is a prison. The cells are small, the doors are locked and there are bars on the window. It's not a holiday camp funded by the tax payer. It exists for a reason, but Wetherby also wants to give these kids (for kids they are) a chance at something more. Music may not be the most practical of careers these days, but anything that makes you more self-aware and self-confident informs every other aspect of your life, as well as having the more immediate rewards of having made something from nothing, carved sound from silence.

Whatever it has become for me over the years, this was reaffirmation of what music is in it's most basic form. It's the perfect way to express the inexpressible. And if you think that sounds like the worst solecism, you have clearly never sung at the top of your voice or tried to wring a tune out of an instrument by sheer force of will.

I can only tell you what I got from the experience, I'm not about to speak on behalf of the inmates. I hope they got something from it. They're inside for many reasons, none of them my business, and whatever solace can be gained from playing guitar, or perspective achieved from writing a song, I hope it's theirs for the taking. But they gave me something, and they re-ignited something inside me, a pure passion just for playing, just for hearing the notes, just for feeling the strings under your fingers - no other outcome attached, no expectation, and no reward other than sound.

Thanks then to Stephen Bielby and the staff who took great care of me, and whose dedication has meant that music classes are now an every day part of life at the prison. It's people like this that you rarely read about in the press, we only get the horror stories, not the news of good people, doing good things every day to improve the lives of others. And giving young offenders a chance at something more than a life of crime may not be the most glamorous profession, but that day, with those lads felt like the most rock and roll thing I've ever done.


P.S And those of you who came to the show in Sheffield the other day, your ticket money contributed to buying 6 more guitars for the scheme. So thank you.