Scottish Renaissance Man
The Brian McNeill Interview
#NK Was it that same passion that drove you to learn so many different instruments?
#BM Absolutely, yes. It's a weird thing being a multi-instrumentalist. I started off as a refugee from rock bands. I was a bad lead guitarist and a very good bass player in rock bands in the sixties and seventies. When I became a student in 1968 Glasgow, that ambition had to die a little bit.
I went the route of all the folkies got myself an electric guitar and started to bore everyone with my Dylan impersonations. Then I heard a Swarbrick album, "Rags, Reels & Airs", my life changed, I knew I had to learn the fiddle, I knew I had to do that.
I'd had a year's lessons when I was about twelve years old at school. I knew enough to actually have a go. So I did. I got fascinated. The minute that I started to go around the folk clubs, with the Battlefield Band starting to get around, we saw these other things, mandolins, banjos. Then Alan Reid came home one night with a pedal organ and we had to work out how to use that.
We went to Newcastle Folk Festival and I saw these long necked things that looked like mandolins, and was my first exposure to bouzouki and mandocello. I saw a concertina and hadn't really heard one, so I had to have one of them.
On the continent I came across these guys with instruments that had wind up handles and that got me to the hurdy-gurdy. I doubt very much if I'll ever stop learning new instruments.
The only thing that's ever stopped me…I want to have a go at harp, but in the end, I thought, no I've got enough to carry. I love it all, but I don't see the point in being a multi-instrumentalist unless you're damned good at everything.
We all know the situation where you've got a guy that can hold a lot of different instruments, but can barely get two or three chords out of them. If I'm going to get into something, I'll get into it properly.
#NK I was reading on your blog about you taking deliver of a new baritone guitar and you can sense the passion in the words.
#BM Absolutely, it's just a different instrument and such a lovely thing. I got it from the guitar maker George House. He's only 24, but both of the guitars I've had from him have changed the way I play guitar. It's important because they've given me the next bend in the road for my own musical development. They've taken me somewhere where I didn't realise I was going to go and that's fantastic.
All I've ever wanted to do is make enough cash to allow me to do what I want to do and to believe in what I do. Good instruments, the joke is good instruments keep musicians poor, but all I ever wanted to do is play good instruments, to express myself on the best instruments. It's vital to me when I get up in the morning to know that I'm going to do something that is artistic today.
#NK And one of those expressions is the way that you're proud to include politics in your music.
#BM Stand up and be counted, there's no argument with that. I think if you're going to be any kind of songwriter at all, it can't all be moon in June and how nice the flowers and the trees are. I come from a tradition where there was a protest thing going on, some kind of social justice thing going on. You have to take it seriously.
I'm not suggesting it should be the only thing that you write about and I think over the years I've learnt to leven what I write with other stuff. It's important to me that I stand up and be counted.
#NK Also it's pleasing to see the new generation of artists being keen to include political songs in their set lists. It sort of started with the Gulf War, but also other subjects, social collapse. It's probably more political now than it has been for a good few years.
#BM Some of the guys, Damien Dempsey, you get riveted by the honesty of their writing. The main thing is to never let yourself be told you're unfashionable. For a while everyone was looking down their nose at protest songs. The thing to do is, if you believe it, write it! If you can write it and you can sing it, there's not a lot wrong with that. I can't think of better places to go with your music.
#NK Where's Brian McNeill going with his music now?
#BM I'm back on the road. There's the new Brian McNeill album to come out. I recorded an album with great friends Drones & Bellows, a Danish band, which is going to revisit some old material. I've worked with tem for years and we always said we'd do an album.
If anybody's got anything interesting theu want me to do, phone me up and I'll have a go. In addition to that I've got a night of my own at Celtic Connections on the 21st of January.
I'm going to have a lot of guests on that, a lot of young people. A number of my ex-pupils from the academy, including Bodega. Also old friends like Sylia Barnes, it should be a cracking night.
We're also doing the Rambling Boys again, which is Dick Gaughan, Archie Fisher, Enoch Kent and Arlo Guthrie, which is on the 28th of January. We're also going back to an old Battlefield Band line up on the 24th of January in the ABC Cinema.
Feast Of Fiddles, I'm doing a Scandinavian tour in Feb and then start on the festivals.
Check the website, keep your eye out for the new album and the next novel. Just stay in touch I like to hear from people.
#NK Thank you
To find out more about Brian McNeill and to keep up with his activities please go to and bookmark his website http://www.brianmcneill.co.uk
Photocredits 1 Neil King 2 Simon Yorath