The Scotsman Sessions #222: Adrian Crowley

Welcome to the award-winning Scotsman Sessions. With performing arts activity curtailed for the foreseeable future, we are commissioning a series of short video performances from artists all around the country and releasing them on scotsman.com, with introductions from our critics. Here, Adrian Crowley performs his current single Bread And Wine, taken from his new album The Watchful Eye of the Stars

While there is much that remains uncertain for musicians, there are welcome signs of emergence from Covid hibernation – not least from esteemed Glasgow-based independent label Chemikal Underground, which has un-furloughed itself to release a new album, The Watchful Eye of the Stars, by singer/songwriter Adrian Crowley, with whom the label has a long and trusted relationship.

For his Scotsman Session, Crowley serves the musical sacrament of current single Bread And Wine from the kitchen where he wrote it “walking around in my socks picking and strumming. It may or may not be about a person with a chequered past lying low in a small coastal town before deciding where to go next. It's kind of a film script in four verses.”

Crowley has recent form with film, acting in and writing the score for Vera Graziadei’s short In The Woods with a Dead Dog, and co-directing a music film, Ascension of Larks, with Neil McCann, who made the Lost in France documentary, celebrating the alumni of Glasgow’s 90s indie scene.

“Looking back, I realise I have actually been very busy,” says Crowley. “I always seem to be working on something. I always seem to have a list. Since the first lockdown I've tried to maintain a positive perspective and also keep to a routine. Rituals have become very powerful and important and I soon saw the rewards – primarily a calm mind.”

As to forthcoming activity, Crowley hints at a collaborative EP “with someone whose work I have admired for a long time” and the anticipation of an autumn tour, including a date at Glasgow’s CCA on 28 September.

“Hopefully hugging will be legal by then,” he says. “I might have to drop the first few songs from the set and hug everyone in the audience instead.”

The Watchful Eye of Stars is released by Chemikal Underground on 30 April

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