MY CITY - FROM SHIPS TO CHIPS!
SINGER-SONGWRITER Findlay Napier remembers going out for a jog one day through the Necropolis. “I’d go up the hill and try to reach John Knox. I could never quite make it that far, and that became my bar to judge how fit I was getting,” he says.
“One day I made it to the top, partly because I’d seen these kids, goths, walking down the hill towards me. I thought they were going to take the mickey out of me but instead they started shouting encouraging things, and they got me up the hill.”
And this is why Findlay’s brand-new album, Glasgow, opens with a song written for them, and entitled Young Goths in the Necropolis. It begins with the peal of the Cathedral bells, recorded one Sunday morning at John Knox’s feet. The opening lines: “Up there in the graveyard where all the weirdos go/I saw you making footprints in the freshly sprinkled snow.”
Glasgow is an unusual album by an unusual songwriter. Napier showed his songwriting gifts on his 2015 debut solo album, VIP, whose subjects ranged from Hedy Lamarr to the Japanese soldier who continued to fight the Second World War until 1974. The Sunday Herald has praised his “songcraft and wit in the Difford and Tilbrook tradition” and the Irish American Times described his music as a “beautiful amalgam of Scottish soul, funk and folk”.
Napier’s magpie eye has alighted, for the new album, on many Glasgow institutions – not just the Necropolis but also the Blue Lagoon fish and chip shop at Central Station, the old Locarno dancehall on Sauchiehall Street, and the fabled Clyde shipyards. One of the most interesting songs, Wire Burners, is about homeless people who exist by collecting and selling scrap metal from construction sites.
Napier has covered other people’s songs, too, from The Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops to Emma Pollock’s Marchtown and Hamish Imlach’s Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice.
Napier, 39 next month, was born in Glasgow, in 1978, but he and his family almost immediately relocated northwards, in Grantown on Spey. As he grew older he made the occasional visit back to the city of his birth before deciding, aged 17, to live here full-time. The city has been his home now for 21 years.
“I was talking to Boo [Hewerdine, his friend, collaborator and producer] about what we should do as a follow-up to VIP,” he says. “I had lots of songs and had the idea of doing a band album, but he said, ‘It might be a good idea to do something simple that reflects what it is you do live’.