Interview: The Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra, folk band

Published on Wednesday 9 December 2009 19:56

CULT folk favourites The Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra (pronounced like the ghost-hunting cartoon dog) are playing their first gig in over a decade next week. Sue Wilson gets the full story on their rise, fall and rise

THOUGH you'll search in vain for their cherishable name on lists of key early-Nineties Scottish bands, the enduring (and endearing) influence of the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra – who play a rare reunion gig in Stirling next week – is arguably more discernible on today's home scene than that of such high-profile contemporaries as Deacon Blue, Texas and Wet Wet Wet.

It's firstly on the basis that the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra's founder and lead singer was none other than the artist currently known as King Creosote, aka Kenny Anderson, alt.folk darling to the (relative) masses and daddy to Fife's much-loved DIY musical crew, the Fence Collective. As his first proper band, formed 20 years ago between France – where Anderson had headed to busk after university – and Scotland, the SDO not only made some excellent music and played many a euphoric live gig, but left its mark on both on the wider Scottish scene and Anderson's subsequent career path.

"Various people came and went to start with," he recalls, "and by 1989 it was pretty much all Scots – including an old school pal of mine, Andy Robinson, and my brother Een." (Robinson would later work on James Yorkston's debut album, while Een nowadays trades as fellow Fence luminary Pip Dylan. Other ex-SDO/current Fence mainstays featured in next Friday's show include Captain Geeko on drums and Uncle Beesly on bass.)

"Over the next couple of years," Anderson continues, "we'd hole up here over the winter and record a new cassette, then head off in March or April and spend the summer busking, mostly based in France, but playing all over the Continent. We called ourselves various things – the Merde d'Oiseaux Quintet was one, because we were always picking the busking spots that the pigeons favoured. Scooby Doo came up because we used to play the theme tune, and I suggested spelling it in fake Gaelic, just so it looked more unusual. Then, when we were back at the end of 1991, we decided that, instead of just doing another tape, we'd actually play some gigs. We made our debut in Dundee, as I remember, and it all kind of took off from there."

Although the SDO's folk/bluegrass sound and post-Pogues brashness might seem to align them with the wave of punkish, rootsy Central Belt acts – including Swamptrash, Wee Free Kings, Critterhill Varmints, Kith & Kin and the Humpff Family – that flourished around this time, Anderson remembers even this mini-scene as frustratingly segregated. "Our patch was more St Andrews, Dundee, Perth and further north: we ended up playing two or three nights a week in Aberdeen, but always struggled to get a gig in Glasgow or Edinburgh. This was pre-internet, of course, so it was much harder to tap into any kind of network. But for whatever reason we never really felt part of the gang."

Aberdeen was by then developing its own lively local scene, also substantially folk-based and centred on the Lemon Tree venue – whose opening gig the SDO played in 1992. "I must have booked them half a dozen times that first year – they were almost like our resident act," says Andy Shearer, the Lemon Tree's inaugural music programmer, now at Horsecross in Perth. "They were just a really great band, especially live – young, fresh, very eclectic, full of energy: a bit like the human embodiment of what we were about as a venue."

Word from the Granite City, and from even less fashionable burgs, such as Cupar, Tain and Peterhead, soon reached the ears of Glasgow folk label Klub Records. "Getting signed seemed to coincide quite nicely with where we were at as a band," Anderson says. "We'd started out doing mainly traditional folk and bluegrass stuff, plus all sorts of covers – Sinead O'Connor, Blondie, the Scooby Doo theme; anything and everything, as long as it had the right energy. But when we did that first Klub album and had to actually think about things, we were already starting to look down the songwriting route, towards more of a ballad-based sound – or at least slowing down from 180 beats per minute to maybe a hundred or so."

It's those two Lochshore albums – 1992's 39 Stephs and its 1994 follow-up, Spike's 23 Collection – that have chiefly maintained the SDO's place in a surprising number of Scottish hearts. "It often takes people a while to make the connection with King Creosote," Anderson says, "but when they do I'm quite amazed how many of them say they've still got those records. There's always been a fair bit of interest on the Fence website, too, people trying to track down the albums, or remembering their favourite gigs."

It wasn't long before the band first fell victim to their incipient success, tripped up by their own memorable moniker. Though the story that Hanna-Barbera Corp actually sued them is an exaggeration, their phonetic resemblance to the cartoon dog was indeed the stumbling block. "We had an agent in America by then, who tried to get one of our songs on the radio there, but none of the stations would touch it. So everyone was telling us we had to change our name. I thought we could just call ourselves something else when we went abroad, but everyone said that would be too confusing."

And thus the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra became the Khartoum Heroes. ("It was meant to be a pun on 'cartoon heroes', but I'm not sure it ever quite worked.") Any name-change for a band mid-ascent is a tricky move to weather, and this one – exacerbated by sundry personnel changes and Anderson's growing disillusionment with even the folky, semi-underground end of the music business – proved the beginning of the end.

"I ended up having massive fall-outs with the label, and generally got to a real crisis point," he recalls. "When I'd left university to do music, I thought I was siding with the right gang, people who were just that little bit more humane, doing something positive rather than destructive. But through the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra I realised there are all these total sharks involved, just out to grab as much money as they can and treat the bands as shoddily as possible."

And thus the end became a new beginning. After a sole Khartoum Heroes album, and now free from a record deal, Anderson revived the SDO for a year or so in 1995-6, featuring a certain KT Tunstall on backing vocals, and in the process launching his own cottage-industry business model. In 1996, the SDO's last album, A New Cat, became the first-ever release on Fence Records.

"In terms of gigs, we pretty much just played in Fife," he explains, "and in terms of the label, I just made everything I'd railed against about the record industry a total no-go area."

With the advent of the internet and today's recording technology, it's a modus operandi that looks increasingly shrewd as well as humane, another factor that makes a 20-year SDO reunion only fitting. "When I listen back to those albums, they do sound very much of their time, but there is still a real magic to some of the songs," Anderson says. "Rather than re-releasing them, though, I've got an idea of picking the best ones and recording them again now, but we'll see how this show goes first."

A surprise Christmas appearance by a certain Ms Tunstall is, Anderson says, "highly unlikely" – though he's not ruling it out altogether. "She knows she's got an open invitation, and she did turn up to Fence's Homegame festival in the summer, so you never can tell."

&#149 Fence Collective's Christmas Pop Special featuring the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra, King Creosote and Friends is at the Tolbooth, Stirling, 18 December