Passion project is well played
New album is inspired by site between Barrhead and Neilston
A criminologist-turnedmusician from Barrhead has released an album inspired by an oft-overlooked landmark on the back roads between the town and Neilston.
There’s a Hugh Caldwell poem that goes like this...
“Johnnie Blue’ wis a poet, Gateside his abode,
“His well’s situated on Neilston back-road,
“An’ over its waters he cast a great spell,
“That they’d a’ be poets who drank oot the well.”
The well and Johnnie’s use of it are an obscure part of local folklore, which has it that the man whose name is synonymous with the well, was a print maker in a local dye works who washed the blue dye off himself there when passing around the turn of the 19th century.
To this day, it is still known as Johnny Blue’s Well.
One of those to have been cast under Johnny’s spell was Barrhead boy Fergus McNeill, a professor of criminology at the University of Glasgow.
As a youth, the ex-Barrhead High pupil would scarper to the well with his childhood companion to escape from the pressures of being a wee lad trapped at home in the 70s and 80s.
“My best friend John and I used to ’run away’ there whenever some small grievance against our siblings or parents triggered the need,” Fergus told the Express. “We were determined that we were ‘never, ever going back’. Our mums were so confident that we were that they used to make us packed lunches before sending us on our way!
“Eventually, they dubbed it our ‘runaway-for-a-day’ scheme.”
The well, which gave such succour to the lowly youth, has now inspired Fergus to take a career twist and explore through music questions of where and with whom we belong.
Fergus’ soon-to-be released Johnnie Blue’s Well EP came about from a prison song-writing workshop he attended in his role as a criminologist interested in rehabilitation.
“The theme of the workshop was ‘Reentry’ which is a term that criminologists use to refer to the process of returning to open society from prison,” he said. “That got me thinking of times in my own life when I had left home and returned home.
“For whatever reason, the childhood memory of running away to Johnny Blue’s Well came to my mind.”
Fergus’ music takes heavy inspiration from modern Scottish and folk songs, with smatterings of pop, indie, country and blues influences.
Speaking of the EP’s title track, he said: “The song tries to convey the mood and atmosphere of the whole journey; including the turning point, triggered by a cleg bite, to head for home and the comfort we’d find there. ‘Turning points’ are also part of the research I do; on how and why people stop offending and decide to try to settle down.
“Maybe that’s why the memory came up in the workshop.
“I guess the song also speaks to an earlier, more innocent, age when parents could be so relaxed about their children running free for the better part of a day, and with no mobile phones to keep track of us.
“I reckon we’d have been aged seven to 10 when this ‘run-away-for-a-day’ scheme developed.”
The well is situated on the verge of Springfield Road – slowly eroding, vegetation creeping over it, the tap once used by Johnny long gone.
The would-be poets now drink from the legend passed on by people like Fergus and perhaps also come under his spell.
Johnny Blue’s Well was released on Sunday on Fergus’s Bandcamp page here – https:// fergusmcneill. bandcamp.com/ – and will be available on all major streaming platforms from this Friday.
MUSICAL TRIBUTE TO LOCAL LANDMARK