Talking to...Uiscedwr
#N And if you haven’t got the money….
#A You have to rely on that old talent thing.
#N This was roughly where you came in Kevin, having just joined the band for the first session of the recording and a few dates before that. Did joining a band that had been to guitarists what Spinal Tap were to drummers bother you?
#K {smirks} I didn’t know until I joined, they didn’t tell me. Not at all actually. I’d not really heard any of their material until I was asked to join them. To my shame, and whatever, I’d never heard of them. It was just fantastic. I went down to Wales to see them play and we had a rehearsal that day. I ended up doing the gig it was just great. It’s right up my street the nature of the music and all that. I feel like I fit right in.
#N To put this delicately. There’s a bit of an age gap.
#K It’s not something that I notice, well I do, but not when I’m playing with the band. It’s not there with the music and it only really comes up when other people say something about it. It’s ok to ask, but it’s not something that bothers me. It’s there, its something that other people talk about, but with the band and socially, it’s not an issue.
#N It also gives the band something an exclusively young band can’t have.
#K I guess so, but I don’t even think about that. I was enthusiastic about music when I was twenty and I’m enthusiastic about it today. So nothings changed and I’m playing with fantastic musicians that are enthusiastic about music. I play with Swarb as well, but he’s just had a double lung transplant and he’s the next generation on from me even.
#A It’s the Dempsey curse. He’s gradually working his way through his fiddle players.
#K And one of them’s just put his back out. Swarb’s really enthusiastic about his music. It’s brilliant because I get to play with people that really love their music.
#N The new album seems to have made a couple of steps forward from the last one. There’s a lot more confidence to it
#A I think part of that is down to the length of time between recording it. We had more experience in the recording process. The first album was launched into before we knew what we were doing. We’ve made some mistakes on this one.
#N But that’s sort of what gives an album real life, it’s not over produced and over smooth.
#A Joe Broughton, who produces the album, was good at that sort of thing. I felt that the first album was clean and crisp, but the soul that I’d put into my playing was normalised out. I love the recording his makes of the fiddle, it’s so natural. I cringe at some of the mistakes, but it also keeps the feeling in.
#N How did you go about putting the album together, decide what was going on to it?
#K Well we’d done five tracks before we knew Anna was ill. The gap gave us a chance to balance it up.
#A One of the tracks we did, we wrote in the studio. Kev and I went down to the kitchen and started looking through songbooks whilst Cormac was recording some of his sections. Kevin found a fantastic riff, I put a melody across it. The Lyrics got written that night I we recorded it the next day.
#N When you’re in the studio do you tend to layer your tracks or record it studio live?
#K Both I think. It’s a balance against cleanness of sound and separation against that groove you can get into when you all play together. Different songs work better being recorded in different ways.
#A You can trip over each other’s sound studio live. I think it was about half and half on this album.
#N How far do you want this album to take you?
#A I want to do Cambridge Mainstage next year. I want to get gigging as much as I can. To play our music in front of people is something that I’ve missed so much. I’d love to know that people like it. I accept that some people won’t, but I really hope the majority do. It’s been a difficult project, but I’d really like it to do well. It seems like a lifetime ago since we were last here. It would be good to sell a few and get our money back and record the next one.
#N Thanks