Sitting on the Fence: Uncovering Fence Records’ new festival

By DAVID POLLOCK
Published on Thursday 23 February 2012 00:00

Fence Records started life as a small shop in St Andrews. Now a new festival is taking the Fife label back to its roots - with KT Tunstall as the superstar main attraction. By David Pollock

I DON’T feel at home in the Eye o’ the Dug,” sang the Beta Band’s Steve Mason on his little-remembered 1998 solo EP, King Biscuit Time Sings Nelly Foggits Blues in Me and the Pharaohs. The lyric was a reference to St Andrews’ position on the dog’s head-shaped profile of Fife: “This is the town where we all come from / it’s an animal sanctuary.”

It wasn’t meant as a compliment, as Mason explained to the Fence Collective’s Johnny Lynch when he approached him to use the name for Fence’s new music festival.

“He told me it was odd because the song’s about how much he hates St Andrews,” says Lynch. “I know, I told him, that’s partly why we’re putting on this festival. There are plenty of people there who want to hear good music, who aren’t from that very rich, elitist background.”

Fence, the Anstruther/Cellardyke-based record label and festival promoter which Lynch runs with 2011 Mercury Prize nominee Kenny ‘King Creosote’ Anderson, has a love/hate relationship with St Andrews. It was where the brand started in the late 1990s, with Anderson’s Fence record shop – yet it was the arrival of Prince William to study in the town, and the subsequent influx of old money, that caused the shop to close.

At one point, says Lynch, rents on St Andrews’ main streets were higher than on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, driving out any opportunity for ventures like Fence to survive.

April’s two-day Eye o’ the Dug is partly an attempt to redress that balance now that the Royal effect has faded. Lynch describes the festival – which announced its line-up a few days ago – as a larger-scale version of Fence’s Anstruther-based Homegame festival. It’s aimed at both the town’s music-savvy students and at homegrown Fifers like Mason and Anderson, as well as people from further afield.

“The main venue at the students’ union is the biggest union venue in Scotland,” says Lynch. “It’s bigger than the QMU (in Glasgow), it holds about 1,200 folk and it looks amazing when it’s done up properly. There are posters of all the bands they’ve booked on the walls there, people like Dexy’s Midnight Runners and The Jam, and even Frank Black when I was there.”

To that list Eye o’ the Dug will add a pared-down set from Alexis and Joe of Hot Chip, as well as Fife-bred Fence friends and alumni KT Tunstall, Django Django and James Yorkston, amongst many others.

Lynch isn’t precise on all the details of the festival yet, although the list of 15 announced bands should rise to around 40, including “some familiar names”, playing to an audience of between 800 and 1000, or more if ticket sales go well: roughly three or four times the capacity of Homegame.

Again, the list of venues being used hasn’t been finalised, but Lynch is excited about hearing King Creosote and Jon Hopkins play their Mercury-nominated album Diamond Mine in full in the Younger Hall.

All of which begs the question, why cancel Homegame this year and decamp to St Andrews instead? “Well now,” laughs Lynch, “that all depends on who you ask and on what day of the week. If you asked Kenny when he was in a bit of a mood, for example, he would say there might be political reasons. We purposely put Homegame on outside the tourist season to help local businesses bring a bit of money in, but then a lot of the holiday lets and so on would start putting their prices up just for that weekend. They were ripping our fans off, basically, and they didn’t need to do that.”

While Lynch and Anderson clearly feel there’s a certain ingratitude in some quarters, Lynch also points out the support they’ve had from other areas of the local community. He names Fife Council and Lindsey Brown of the East Neuk Centre, and says Fence might even return to the village later in the year – the ongoing renovation of regular Homegame venue, the Hew Scott Hall, is another just-as-significant barrier to the festival happening this year.

But will it be back ever again? Lynch is currently living on a static caravan on the Isle of Eigg with his partner, Sarah, recording his next album as the Pictish Trail. This is where July’s second Awaygame event will be held, which he hopes will be a precursor to similar touring Fence festivals within and without Scotland, including an event co-hosted with the independent Moshi Moshi label.

“We just thought it best that Homegame take a few years off,” Lynch says. “But in saying that, who knows, it might be back next year. Or it might never happen again. There you go, there’s a headline!” If his new festival comes together as planned, maybe we won’t even miss it.

• Eye o’ the Dug is at various venues around St Andrews, 14-15 April. www.eotdfestival.com

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