Idle promise

Published on Saturday 13 January 2007 00:16

IF THINGS HAD GONE TO plan, Roddy Woomble would be living on Mull right now. "I've been wanting to move to the Highlands since I was pretty young, and this year I thought I was finally going to do it," he tells me wistfully. He has happy childhood memories of holidaying around Scotland in a camper van with his parents. "It's not like I have some need to feel connected to it, it's just somewhere there's space to think. It's so beautiful."

But it was not to be. The deal on the house he'd found with his wife Ailidh (of the Scottish band Sons and Daughters) fell through at the last minute, which is why we are now sitting among the clutter of a hastily purchased basement flat in Glasgow's West End. That said, it's hard to tell the "just moved in" clutter from the day-to-day clutter. Beside us, a picture of Walt Whitman sits on a music stand which, uselessly, collapses if you touch it. ("I like his beard," says Woomble. A pause. "I like his writing too, obviously.") On the table between us is an ancient black typewriter, a Christmas present from Ailidh. "It's a Remington Noiseless, which is a bit of a lie because there's definitely noise coming off it."

Whatever kind of clutter it is, he prefers it this way. "I've always liked having things about that you don't know where they are. I understand it better. If everything was in order I wouldn't really understand where everything was." It's a perverse kind of logic, but it works for him: "I need mess around me, that's the way I operate. I'm a scatterbrain."

And there's Roddy Woomble in a nutshell, maybe. One foot in Glasgow ("It's a place I always come back to," he says, although the last few years have also seen him touch down in Edinburgh, where Idlewild met, and New York), one foot in the remote parts of Scotland, and his head in the clouds.

This is, perhaps, how he's ended up being a key performer at this year's Celtic Connections festival, without really intending to. Scan the programme and he seems to be everywhere. Idlewild make their Celtic Connections debut on 23 January. The following day Woomble is on stage with his friend Kate Rusby. On 2 February he'll perform in John McCusker's ambitious Under One Sky project. And on 30 January he's helping to launch a new CD compilation, Ballads of the Book. This being Celtic Connections, he'll no doubt turn up elsewhere, too.

Ballads of the Book is the most enticing prospect. The album sees a long list of Scottish writers - Alasdair Gray, Ian Rankin, AL Kennedy, Louise Welsh, Laura Hird, Ali Smith and more - writing lyrics for songs by Scottish musicians - Idlewild, Sons and Daughters, Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub, King Creosote, James Yorkston and others. It was Woomble's idea, growing out of a correspondence with Edwin Morgan. "I'm just a fan," he stresses, "then out of the blue he sent some lyrics, saying he'd been working on them with the band in mind and wondering if we could do anything with them. I was really excited. To get a package of original words from one of your favourite poets... it meant a lot to me."

Then, another poet he had written to, Rody Gorman, sent some lyrics too, and Woomble saw the possibility of a bigger project. "Rody ended up writing about 16 poems. He was the first person other than Edwin to really become involved in the idea." Encouraged by his success, Woomble began e-mailing other writers, eventually asking Chemikal Underground records to take over the project.

"It's not an experiment in the sense that it was always going to work," ponders Woomble. "It's like baking a cake. If you don't care about what it tastes like, you just have fun making it." The result is quite a cake. Michel Faber's idea of a pop chorus, it turns out, is: "A body can't contain more than a body's worth of water," while Ian Rankin's contribution is to rhyme "Pittenweem" with "rock and roll dream". Elsewhere, Ali Smith and Trashcan Sinatras prove perfect collaborators, with a simple, bittersweet love song about keeping half an apple spare for a loved one who is gone.

It's Morgan and Idlewild, though, who make the most effective and affecting contribution, a song called The Weight of Years. Edited down from a "long and quite complicated" Morgan poem, what remains is a moving lament for the poet's declining health. "This body, which is now arthritic, I cannot play, can hardly even hold the instrument," sings Woomble, channelling Morgan. "Oh the soul grows heavy without the body."

"We stripped it back so it's become almost like some kind of haunting death ballad," says Woomble. "Not for Edwin," he adds quickly. "That'd be crass." But Woomble must be well aware of how it will be interpreted. It's surely not the compilation's closing song by accident.

What's also striking about this understated, unsentimental song, though, is the feeling that Woomble has grown, once again, as a songwriter. While it's credited to Idlewild, The Weight of Years feels like it belongs to last year's surprising solo departure, the folk-flavoured My Secret is My Silence, more than Idlewild's soon to be released fifth album, which Woomble calls simply "a collection of songs we came up with last year". Out in February, Make Another World is an enjoyable listen, but it doesn't really take the band anywhere new. Exploring their Celtic side further could be a bolder way forward for the band.

AND WOOMBLE IS A REST- less soul, anxious to challenge himself. Two formative influences, he says, were growing up in a small town in Ayrshire which he likens to "hiding away" and couldn't wait to escape, and failing to finish his photography degree. (He had good reason, to be fair - his band was taking off - but it continues to bother him.) "That's why you see all these books," he says, gesturing around the flat. He devours books, and is thinking of studying art history or Scottish literature. "You only start caring about school and university when you're older. You should go to university in your mid-30s, not when you're 17. Then you absorb everything."

On one of Idlewild's new songs he lambasts himself for having "wasted all the dreams in my head". A bit harsh, surely? "It's a Scottish thing, I suppose, just always thinking you're never achieving as much as you could achieve. I don't even know what achievement is. I know when I'm happy with something but that's always very fleeting, isn't it?"

One thing that has brought him happiness is his marriage to Ailidh Lennon, a relationship that blossomed when Sons and Daughters toured with Idlewild. They got married in Reno, on the spur of the moment, while Woomble was travelling the US with Lennon on tour (having just escaped a disastrous, poorly promoted Idlewild tour, "playing to no one on a Tuesday afternoon"). "We got picked up in a battered limo, and afterwards we went to a bar and drank whiskey. Reno is like Vegas in the 1970s. It's kind of perfect, but everything's falling apart. Everyone looks like they're from a Raymond Carver novel. It was quite surreal."

They certainly seem like kindred spirits. On her MySpace page, Lennon lists among her interests: "malt whisky, knitting, the sea, mountains, trees". She'd like to meet Germaine Greer, and says "cookbooks are what I'm all about just now". Having been to her home, I can reveal that these include The River Cottage and How To Be A Domestic Goddess.

Which is not very rock and roll, but then, increasingly, neither is Woomble. He celebrated his 30th birthday last August with dinner and a walk on Iona, and is still thinking about that snug cottage in the Highlands. I worry aloud that he's retreating back into that small town "hiding away", just when he seems to be stretching his legs creatively. Not at all, he says. "It's terrible criticising them, because it shaped who I am, but you go to any small town in Scotland and they have a way about them that's learned, the way anything's learned. But when you're remote there's no one about. That's what appeals to me. I'm not going back. I'm going somewhere for the first time."

• Make Another World is released on 26 February. Ballads of the Book follows in March.

• Celtic Connections: Five must-see shows

HANDS ACROSS THE WATER

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 17 January

There's a significant American presence at this year's festival, something reflected in Wednesday's large-scale opening concert, a live outing for the tsunami relief charity CD of the same name, featuring 40 acts from the UK, Ireland and the USA.

BURNS MELA

Old Fruitmarket, 28 January

Sushil K Dade, better known as Future Pilot AKA, is the man behind this head-spinning multicultural extravaganza, which features dub versions of Burns songs, readings by Alasdair Gray, an Indian/Scottish buffet and a musical line-up that throws together Sheila Chandra and tabla player Parvinder Bharat with Michael Marra and piper Iain MacInnes.

REAL WORLD

Old Fruitmarket, 31 January

The first Scottish showcase for Peter Gabriel's world music record label, and another sign that Celtic Connections wants to widen its remit further still. Skip McDonald, Joi, Daby Tourex and Sevara Nazarkhan feature in a concert that will also pay tribute to the late Martyn Bennett.

UNDER ONE SKY

Old Fruitmarket, 2 February

This is a new, large-scale piece by John McCusker, commissioned by Celtic Connections and the Cambridge Folk Festival. McCusker has quite a line-up helping him out, from singer Julie Fowlis and percussionist James Mackintosh to, most intriguingly, Blur guitarist Graham Coxon. Oh, and Roddy Woomble too.

ISOBEL CAMPBELL

ABC, 21 January

It's another live outing for Isobel Campbell's much-admired album Ballad of the Broken Seas, but with a special treat - her collaborator on the album, singer Mark Lanegan of Queens of the Stone Age, will finally join her on stage.