Glasgow’s Trembling Bells and Americana giant Will Oldham share an incredible chemistry and are set to perform on the same stage

The drummer knew that they were destined to be sung by Will Oldham, the maverick, mercurial American performer best known by his stage name Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who is considered by many fans and critics to be that rarest of things – an authentic genius with a wholly original vision.

“I was conscious of the fact that he is a world-renowned songwriter and I am a neophyte,” says Neilson. “It’d be like me talking tactics with Sir Alex Ferguson and dictating how he might be able to plug his leaky defence.” Neilson, 29, is kind enough to provide this modest and amusing analogy, but in fact he himself is no slouch when it comes to songwriting. In three years, Trembling Bells have put out three terrific albums, acclaimed by everyone from Paul Weller to Stewart Lee, who praised their “poetic incantation of British identity”, and have made a case for themselves as the most interesting and exciting band in Scotland, engaging both head and heart.

Their music has its roots in late 1960s/early 70s folk rock of the sort played by Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and the Incredible String Band, but also contains elements of country, ancient balladry and acid rock. It is a witch’s brew, a psychedelic stew. The music and art of medieval Europe is a key influence, Neilson having written songs while wandering through the Burrell Collection and admiring the tapestries with their scenes of hunting and courtly love. Lavinia Blackwall, the band’s 30-year-old lead singer, studied early music for her masters degree.

“The earliest pieces written down are from AD900, and it’s fascinating to have that window into the past and to listen to something which people were hearing over 1,000 years ago,” she says. “To try to infuse our music with something so old seems like an interesting alchemy.” The Marble Downs, though it features Oldham throughout, does not sound like any kind of ersatz collaborative side-project. The band consider it their fourth record proper, and rightly so. It is their best yet. Given that Oldham e-mailed his vocals to Glasgow from across the Atlantic, he shares an extraordinary chemistry with Blackwall, his Kentucky burr rubbing rather lasciviously up against her cut-glass English soprano. If this is what they can do when separated by almost 4,000 miles, their forthcoming concerts together should be intense and rapturous.

The alliance with Oldham goes back to 2004 when Neilson was drumming on Alasdair Roberts’ No Earthly Man album, which Oldham was producing. Neilson later toured in Scotland and elsewhere with Oldham and the folk group Harem Scarem. Oldham, for his part, has a long association with this country. He has been visiting since 1982, and developed a childhood interest in Scottish folk. His debut single Ohio River Boat Song was a version of The Loch Tay Boat Song.

One of the most beguiling aspects of Neilson’s songwriting is the way he uses place names in an almost talismanic way, investing both the songs and the places themselves with a kind of magic. Trembling Bells’ debut album, Carbeth, was named after the estate near Loch Lomond on which there is a long-established community of “Hutters”, Neilson’s family among them, living in an atmosphere that is part hippy commune, part socialist summer camp. Neilson, who is from Leeds, has also included the Yorkshire town and village Otley and Goathland in his work. It is easy to imagine a listener in Tuscon, Arizona, regarding Love Is A Velvet Noose – with its references to “Beachy Head and Johnnie Walker Red” – as a musical postcard from some unimaginably exotic locale.

“I’m very interested in the way that Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman seem to engage with their native soil. They wanted to sing of the landscape. And I guess Scotland and Yorkshire, as well as Sussex and Cornwall have a very strong allure for me,” Neilson says. “These places have a monumentality in my mind. So I wanted to sing of them. I was always interested in the way that blues and country and rock did the same for places in America, but it didn’t seem like there was an equivalent in Britain outside of certain traditional songs. So it just seemed like a way to eulogise and elevate these places that have a very personal significance for me into the realm of myth and mystery.”

In tandem with this on The Marble Downs is the growing influence of classic pre-rock songwriting as perfected by Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael, an influence more detectable in the dark, elegant wit of the lyrics than in the music itself.

“While I was touring with Will Oldham we’d stop off at petrol stations and he’d buy a bunch of CDs. It’d be stuff like Bing Crosby, and I remember him introducing me to certain Frank Sinatra albums,” says Neilson. “At the time I thought he must be joking and that the music was unlistenable schmaltz with no worth. But the more I reflected on it, the more it seemed to me that there was an impregnable innocence and sentimentality to the music, which I found very courageous.

“The way the songs are constructed, and the use of language, are profoundly beautiful and penetrating and meaningful. The values seem so strong and deeply felt. It’s such an artful twist on these eternal themes of love and forsaken love. It doesn’t seem like there’s the same investment of poetry in modern songwriting, a lot of which seems very lazy.”

It is tempting to regard Trembling Bells as a band out of time. They would, I sense, rather be hanging out in the studio of William Morris, or Broadway during the jazz age, or in the 16th- century court of Gesualdo da Venosa than in the sometimes rather tawdry modern world of digital downloads and online social networking. We are fortunate indeed to have them around and making their music now.

l The Marble Downs by Trembling Bells and Bonnie “Prince” Billy is released on 9 April on Honest Jons. They play the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, on 25 April and then tour. There will be an opening of an exhibition of artwork for The Marble Downs by the artist Lucy Stein at 24 St Vincent Crescent, Glasgow on 24 April with an aftershow party at The 78, 10-14 Kelvinhaugh Street.