Eddi Reader: A toast to the lady
EMMA COWING

ONE DAY IN 2002, not long after she'd moved back to her native Glasgow, Eddi Reader found herself in Anderston, the rundown part of the city where she'd grown up. She'd been rehearsing with her old friend, the Deacon Blue bassist Ewen Vernal, and on the way home she dropped him off at his office.

"And here was this woman," Reader says with a smile. "She was organising the hell out of him and I just thought - I've got to have her, she's brilliant". The woman was Jane, now Reader's assistant, and the office where she was based was, by a twist of fate, the converted bank where almost half a century before, Reader's parents had dropped off their first-ever rent cheque.

"It just felt like a bit of a homecoming," Reader says. "That, and doing the Burns album."

Ah, the Burns album. Which is, in a roundabout way, why we're sitting here in the office that used to be a savings bank where Reader's parents deposited their rent cheques, on a wet and windy Friday afternoon.

This Sunday, Reader will perform at the Ayrshire music festival Burns an' a' That!, now in its fifth successful year. She will take the stage with Karen Matheson - the lead singer of Capercaillie - the accordion player Phil Cunningham, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. She can't wait, and is particularly excited about one Burns song she's recently discovered, which will also be on her new album, called Aye Waukin' O.

"I just found it and thought it was lovely. Normally Burns writes about characters, but in this you can really hear him in it. He's in pain and you can tell he's spent all night sitting up, maybe he's had a few whiskies and he's just dreaming about somebody. I hear him in it more than in any other song. It's like he's baring his soul a wee bit."

There's also a novelty for her in singing these songs as a woman. "I quite like seeing what it feels like in a man's shoes," she says. "It was interesting with the Burns stuff to stand and sing, 'as fair art thou, my bonnie lad,' instead of lass. It's quite empowering to be telling a boy he was beautiful rather than what it normally is - which is Burns buttering up a female."

She's a big ball of flame-haired energy, Reader. She talks eloquently, yet is easily sidetracked from the subject to tell a hilarious story about the stony-faced man she encountered during a recent gig in Australia, or what her favourite game on the PlayStation2 is (The Legend of Zelda, since you ask). But she's also incredibly focused when it comes to her music, and, having released an album of Burns songs - Eddi Reader Sings the Songs of Robert Burns, in 2003 - is credited with having made Burns accessible in a way few others have managed. Does she agree?

"Some people have told me that they didn't listen to Burns before, and there's some who've said they didn't like me before, but they got into what I do because Burns brought me to them. It's nice - there's a bit of a symbiotic relationship going on.

"I think he's served me well," she continues. "He was a ghost who came into my life and gave me a lot of gifts, there's no doubt about it. And I like to think he appreciated what I did on that record."

She wrote the album not long after her father had died. "I'd fallen in love with Scottish men again," she says. "I was reaching out for him, really, in making that album, and Burns helped me do that." If anything, it only helped fuel her enthusiasm for his writings. "Looking for Burns is actually this exciting Da Vinci Code sort of thing," she says animatedly. "Because if you start looking for him, you never find him in the places that are obvious. You find him in the welder who sits beside you in the pub and recites A Man's A Man For A' That, or in some bus driver who'll give you a verse of My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose. And they're always brilliant. If Burns heard them he'd probably be peeing himself with joy."

Born into a big, boisterous family of seven in Anderston in the 1960s, Reader's early life was punctuated by cramped tenement living, huge school classes, and little time to herself. It wasn't until she moved to the Ayrshire town of Irvine at the age of 14 - as part of the mass resettlement that took place in Glasgow following the destruction of the tenement slums - that she began to find her niche, joining a local band and revelling in the local countryside.

"I totally fell in love with it," she says. "I used to walk round Irvine harbour every weekend and across the beach. The air was just so fresh. Being brought up in the tenements in Anderston gave me my passion and my love of life, as well as my excitement about music, but moving to Ayrshire when I was 14 gave me my sentimentality and my heart."

She left home at 17 and became, as she puts it, a "vagabond", travelling around the country, busking in Glasgow, London and France, and "learning her apprenticeship" in the folk clubs and, for a while, as the singer in a circus troupe. But eventually she tired of it.

"I realised I needed to be clean. I wanted a bath, I wanted things like a telly and food that I didn't have to worry about paying for. I wanted Lurpak butter, and the occasional strawberry tart."

Fame, and presumably the occasional strawberry tart, came in the form of Fairground Attraction, the band she joined at the age of 27 which produced the No 1 Perfect (and yes, she does still sing it at gigs, and doesn't mind being asked). But the dream was over almost before it began, when band member Mark Nevin walked out during a recording session for the second album and never came back.

"I was in this situation where [we] disbanded after the first album and I didn't have control over it. I couldn't do anything, I couldn't even use the name," she says. It's obviously something that still rankles with her.

With the benefit of 20 years' hindsight, though, she puts a lot of it down to her own youthful inexperience. "I was just fumbling my way through and figuring it out as I went along," she says a little wistfully.

She pauses. "Och, it makes me what I am today. I feel like I've got a lot of wisdom and a lot to offer people who are starting out now. I'd like to do some workshops and protect somebody else from all that. A lot of the time my head was full of, 'I'm not good enough. I'm not a singer. I'm not anything special.'"

Which is why, she believes, if she were young now, she'd be making the most of every opportunity that came along, however destructive it might seem.

"If I was 17 now, I'd probably go for a Pop Idol audition. I can't see why I wouldn't. It would seem like something that was available to me, to open my mouth and make a noise and communicate my love for music. But if I'd done it then I'd probably be a bit messed up by now. I'd never have survived the criticism."

In the wake of the Fairground Attraction fiasco she has eked out a happy and steady living as a solo artist, and has released seven albums since 1991. At New Year she was awarded an MBE for her services to Scottish music.

If there is a criticism to be attached to Reader, it is that she is too soft, too sweet, that sometimes you wish she'd just let go in her music and have a good old bawl. "I can be sweet and sentimental and sometimes I think - when am I going to do an angry song?" she says. "But when I do, there's always a voice in my head saying, 'but we can fix this'. Don't get me wrong - I can be angry. You should hear me shouting at the kids to get them to school in the morning! I'm a harridan sometimes, but where music's concerned, it's been so good to me. It's been carrying me like a magic carpet through this planet - and there's nothing I can be angry about."

Not that she has any problem, mind you, with upsetting her musical minders. Right now she's cross with them for not letting her do as many gigs as she wants, instead making her wait until she has an album out and an organised tour.

"What else am I supposed to do?" she asks me exasperatedly.

"It's like telling me not to breathe, or eat chips. Why wouldn't I sing somewhere? And then you'll end up with a drunken me in a pub somewhere, singing, because that's the only place I can get an outlet. So I've been doing wee sneaky gigs and not telling the London mob." She flashes a wicked smile.

Thoroughly settled now in Glasgow with her two sons, aged 14 and 17, after many years in London, and working on a new album due to be released early next year (it'll be a mix of "Burns and my own writing," she says), Reader sounds like she couldn't be happier.

"I look back fondly at my musical career but it's only now, in my mid forties, that I really feel brave enough to do what I want," she says.

"I don't mean being bolshy, just being able to speak my truth clearly. Saying, 'do you know what, that wouldn't suit me,' or 'no, I'm not doing that'. Or demand a feather bed or a bit of Lurpak. It's kind of important."

And she flashes that wicked smile again.

• The Centenary Concert at Turnberry International Resort, featuring the RNSO with Phil Cunningham, Karen Matheson and Eddi Reader is on Sunday 28 May, at 8:30pm. See www.burnsfestival.com for details

This Sunday, Reader will perform at the Ayrshire music festival Burns an' a' That!, now in its fifth successful year. Picture: Donald MacLeod

Source: http://living.scotsman.com/music.cfm?id=772752006

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