Interview: Meursault, Edinburgh indie band

IN A hard financial climate, Meursault are succeeding with talent and persistence.

‘There’s a guy making a film at the moment about Camus readers,” says Neil Pennycook, nursing a glass of water in a fashionable but down-to-earth bar on Leith’s Shore, just around the corner from his flat. “He’s a French guy, he’s contacted us about it, but I felt really embarrassed when he did. I’ve not read that book since I was 18 or 19, so it probably did have a profound effect on the music I wanted to make, but I’ve not really thought about it since.”

“Us” is Meursault, the leading Edinburgh indie band that Pennycook heads, and the book he’s referring to is Albert Camus’ 1942 existentialist classic and perennial favourite of sensitive young men L’Étranger, from whose lead character the band take their name. Pennycook rebuts with a laugh the suggestion that his band’s entire aesthetic is defined by a similar outsider mentality, although he insists: “I’m happy with the name, even though no bugger can spell it.”

Meursault aren’t outsiders, and are firmly established as key members of a tight-knit independent music scene in Edinburgh whose number also includes Withered Hand and Kid Canaveral, but there’s a sense of bitterly frustrated promise in their music. The band’s fantastically- named third album, Something For the Weakened, out next week, only hardens this impression. The follow-up to 2008’s Kissing With Tongues/Pissing On Bonfires and 2010’s All Creatures Will Make Merry reaffirms Pennycook’s status as a songwriter of understated skill and carefully weighted emotional impact, from the opening Thumb’s hopeful but uncertain mantra of “we will not be weakened any more,” as picked out over a fragile mandolin line, to Lament For a Teenage Millionaire’s beautiful, folksy send-off to dashed childhood dreams and lost innocence.

Although the album, recorded in cellist Pete Harvey’s studio in Perth, is a team effort as far as the composition of the music is concerned, there’s still a sense of the deeply personal in Pennycook’s lyrics, a callback to the time he started the project as a solo vehicle in his hometown, Penicuik.

“At that time I was listening to lots of singer-songwriter stuff, but more Neil Young and Tom Waits, as opposed to, you know, Jack Johnson. Then I moved onto Smog and Bonnie Prince Billy, and from there local artists like Arab Strap and Mogwai. All this has filtered into what I do at some point.”

Something For the Weakened is, he says, his most personally rewarding work: “I feel a lot happier with this than I have with things in the past. Not that I’ve been disappointed with the albums before, but this one just feels a little bit more personal, more close to home. The style of writing I’ve chosen this time means the songs are about the people in my life and things that have actually happened.”

The example he gives is Mamie, a piano ballad with a keening cello line from Harvey, which he says is dedicated to his grandmother. He won’t go into detail, but his lyrics hint at a sorrowful and deeply affecting story.

“It’s quite a personal thing, yeah,” he says. “There are loads of them in there, things which seem kind of mundane when you talk about them day to day. The stuff which happens in real life, arguments you have with yourself or your partner.

“It’s a weird one to talk about, though, I’m going to find that with these songs. The last bunch were more philosophical and metaphorical, so they were easier to talk about. They were notions, whereas these ones are close to home, and if you talk about them you start to feel like you’ve shown somebody your diary entry.”

Is he the kind of writer who carries a notebook and pen, and jots down overheard lines of conversation? “No,” he laughs, “but I wish I was. I really should.” He tries to write every day, but “with anything creative, 80 per cent of your job is trying to arrange it so you can use the other 20 per cent to write.”

Pennycook is loath to describe the healthy state of music in Edinburgh as a “scene”, pointing out that he doesn’t speak in such terms when talking to, for example, his label boss Matthew Young at Song, By Toad or Withered Hand’s Dan Willson, a long-time friend and former bandmate. Yet there is the sense that these two bands in particular have been raising their game incrementally over the past couple of years and are ready to be granted widespread attention. It’s starting to come already, in fact, as Meursault tour Europe once more this autumn and Pennycook points out that their London crowd is now as large as any they draw in the Central Belt.

“The ambition is always just to complete whatever the next thing is, though, so we’ve made this album and we’re really happy with it. In terms of long-term ambitions, you can’t have them. There is no music industry any more, we’re all just scrambling about trying to earn a living. At the back of everybody’s mind right now is the worry that they might have to stop doing it, that they might have to get a proper job and only write songs, I don’t know, between two and four on a Sunday afternoon.”

Does that ever feel like a genuine possibility for him, or can he maintain a living from music? “My girlfriend might answer wildly differently,” he laughs, “but it pays the rent and it keeps me busy. If you ever meet anyone that tells you they make money playing music, they’re either lying or they make really shit music. But if you’ve been doing it for this long, for ten years, and you can survive, the seed eventually plants in your mind that this is what you do. All your focus shifts to making music, and you find you’re unable to imagine anything else.”

• The album Something for the Weakened is released on Monday by Song, By Toad. Meursault play the Fence Awaygame on the Isle of Eigg over the weekend of 20-22 July, and Thistly Fest, Dunbar, 28 July. For more information, go to songbytoadrecords.com/artists/meursault.